Figure It Out
by
34/99
Critics
12/99
Readers
n/a
Scholars
15/99
Rating
52/99
Volume
12/99
Rating
13/99
Volume
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About This Book
"Toward 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." 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 passenger's leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for stranger; Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend's stinky feet. Koestenbaum dreams about a hand job from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg's squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to readers: "Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina." "Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed." "Find 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." Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play.
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Reviews
"The polish has been sacrificed for a kind of intimacy, of interrupting the writer at his desk, midsentence ..."
"Like all reflective objects though, the act of essaying has a twoness about it."
"Prone to enthusiasms, he can verge on hyperbole, and a few pieces are slight, leaning too close to self-help, a perilous direction for an author so exquisitely self-absorbed."
"The author offers sly ruminations on punctuation and style with sidebar examples from a wide array of artists and writers ..."
"Spiraling in structure and dizzyingly varied in theme, the essays are peppered with reveries and fantasies, suggesting a kind of ramble through Koestenbaum's consciousness ..."
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