Overview

"Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and assignments that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, 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 handjob 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 from ""one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today"" (John Waters)."

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9781662040856

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Wayne Koestenbaum is a distinguished professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. His twenty books include Camp Marmalade, Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Humiliation, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen's Throat, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. For more information, visit waynekoestenbaum.com. Pete Cross earned his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and has been narrating audiobooks since 2015. He received an Audie nomination for 2016's A Time to Die. In 2017, he garnered both an Earphones Award and a Parent's Choice Award for his narration of Openly Straight. An Ohio native, he spent eight years in Los Angeles where he coached actors, was lucky enough to work with French director Quentin Dupieux, and despised the traffic.

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