β Scribed by Wayne Koestenbaum
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
βToward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together . . . By collision I also mean metaphor and metonymy: operations of slide and slip and transfuse.β
In his new nonfiction collection, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passengerβs leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for stranger; Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friendβs stinky feet. Koestenbaum dreams about a hand job from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenbergβs squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to readers: βBuy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina.β βDescribe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed.β βFind in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness . . . Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history.β Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play.
Criticism
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