Overview

“Whatever his subject―favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O’Hara―the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings . . . His great and singular appeal is this fealty to his own desire and imagination . . . Figuring it out, after all, is a life sentence."" ––Parul Sehgal, The New York Times “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.” 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. Wayne 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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9781593765958

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Reviews

Praise for Figure It Out The A.V. Club, 1 of 5 New Books to Read This Month One of Lambda Literary's Most Anticipated Books of the Month Whatever his subject--favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O'Hara--the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings . . . Ditch your inner chaperone, he implores. Breach the cordon sanitaire in your mind . . . His great and singular appeal is this fealty to his own desire and imagination . . . He crushes on evasion and ambiguity, but his own prose has always been distinguished by its tautness and agility . . . There is a feeling of watching a writer so allergic to cliche now interrogating his own moves, annotating his own cliches with diligent, affectionate exasperation. Figuring it out, after all, is a life sentence. --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times 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 . . . There's fun and games and erudition throughout. --Publishers Weekly This kind of prose could be overly chaotic in the hands of a lesser writer, but Koestenbaum has a knack for mostly keeping things together with sincerity, surprises, and wit. --Kirkus Reviews Wayne Koestenbaum's nonfiction blends deftly-written prose with precise observations about life and art. Figure It Out is his latest collection of nonfiction--totaling 26 pieces covering the breadth of his interests. It's a welcome summation of a wide-ranging writer's work. --Vol. 1 Brooklyn There's a specific kind of derangement that I'm after these days, and it can reliably be found in the work of Wayne Koestenbaum; it's a delirious openness, a willingness to go to those heights rarely reached--and then keep going. Such is the case with his new collection of essays, which all hinge on the idea of the unexpected 'collision, ' and then become perfectly unhinged from there, leading to meditations on everything from punctuation to poetic blow jobs to the word 'penis.' A pure delight. --Refinery29, One of the Best New Books to Read This Month Pervy and diverting. -New York magazine's Approval Matrix Highbrow/Brilliant Regardless of genre or medium or even subject, to know this avant-garde artist is to love him--for the intensity of his studies, the nuance of his self-reflections, the exactitude of his articulations. --Megan Volpert, PopMatters No matter the focus, Koestenbaum proceeds with an agile, sidling insouciance . . . It is his unswerving commitment to his own taste and instinct that allows him so much insight into the works of others who are equally committed to their affinities and practices. What he beautifully observes about poet Adrienne Rich might just as well be said of him: 'Rich was a natural historian with an ear for the music that politics makes in the body.' --Booklist Whenever I need to hit the reset button on my expectations, Koestenbaum is my touchstone . . . The quality of Koestenbaum's attention and his ability to delight and surprise is unmatched by any writers I have read. His senses of play and inquiry are often my guiding lights, and Figure It Out offers great benchmarks and springboards for anybody feeling a little rigid about or stuck in a certain way of thinking. --Megan Volpert, The Rumpus 'Imagine, then, an ecology of language, ' Wayne Koestenbaum writes. He creates one of magical abundance here. Instincts and insights flourish, as do ideas and sensations. He speculates, he cogitates, he provokes and delights. He's a scamp, he's a seer, and he's a virtuoso. --Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Whatever his subject--favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O'Hara--the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings . . . Ditch your inner chaperone, he implores. Breach the cordon sanitaire in your mind . . . His great and singular appeal is this fealty to his own desire and imagination . . . He crushes on evasion and ambiguity, but his own prose has always been distinguished by its tautness and agility . . . There is a feeling of watching a writer so allergic to cliche now interrogating his own moves, annotating his own cliches with diligent, affectionate exasperation. Figuring it out, after all, is a life sentence. --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times A book of essays that audit a series of extremely indulgent, largely beautiful, mostly dissociated objects of fascination . . . Koestenbaum has installed himself in a pantheon of loopily scrupulous authors like Susan Sontag, Michel de Montaigne and Maggie Nelson--writers who take their knuckles around the heart of a passing subject and tenderly squeeze them of their juices. --Mina Tavokali, The Washington Post Pervy and diverting. -New York magazine's Approval Matrix Highbrow/Brilliant As fun a book of criticism as you're likely to find . . . Few critics are so playful, so irreverent, and so refreshing. --Colin Groundwater, GQ Tasting a word, inhaling a disagreement, melting syntax--these are skills you can learn from Wayne. He has mastered the combination of category and kind, and can instantly widen a particulate filter . . . Maybe you don't know what you're most interested in, not yet. Curiosity is the match under Koestenbaum's year-round yule log. Words as yeasty, generative seeds. Fulsome tunnels. Perfervid bun traps. Let's go! --Sasha Frere-Jones, Bookforum Every passage is a carnival of confident poses and wry transgression, blending scholarly diction and voluptuary seediness . . . Koestenbaum's work often seems so unchained, so free, that it feels like it was written joyfully, without a trace of strain. --Zachary Fine, Art in America Koestenbaum's essays actively analyze and move like investigations, encouraging readers to follow along like Watson to Holmes . . . The essays are engaging, and it becomes an adventure to follow Koestenbaum's playful and occasionally raunchy train of thought. --Alex Tunney, Lambda Literary Koestenbaum's writing, like his interests, is diffuse and gymnastic. Cutting a silhouette around white space with his longtime preoccupations of art, desire, form, famous people dead and alive, the work in Figure It Out embodies Lukacs's definition of the essay itself as 'an autonomous and integral giving-of-form to an autonomous and complete life.' It is in the non-pause that Koestenbaum draws a portrait of a consciousness, free and at its most utterly alive. --Tracy O'Neill, BOMB, Editor's Choice Whether in field-defining works of queer theory or hypnotic rushes of 'trance writing, ' Koestenbaum's polymorphous approach allies giddy curiosity with technical precision. Published by Soft Skull Press, his latest essay collection Figure It Out demonstrates all that is urgent and addictive about Koestenbaum's writing with essays on futility, celebrity, porn, squeegees and the virtues of disorientation. --Guy Mackinnon-Little, TANK magazine These essays are a celebration of a hunch pursued, a line taken of course, or perhaps, a line that's not even a line at all . . . There's a feeling that, for Koestenbaum, this is as fun as it is serious, and neither of those things invalidate the other. --Lucy Holt, Cleveland Review of Books There's a specific kind of derangement that I'm after these days, and it can reliably be found in the work of Wayne Koestenbaum; it's a delirious openness, a willingness to go to those heights rarely reached--and then keep going. Such is the case with his new collection of essays, which all hinge on the idea of the unexpected 'collision, ' and then become perfectly unhinged from there, leading to meditations on everything from punctuation to poetic blow jobs to the word 'penis.' A pure delight. --Refinery29 Regardless of genre or medium or even subject, to know this avant-garde artist is to love him--for the intensity of his studies, the nuance of his self-reflections, the exactitude of his articulations. --Megan Volpert, PopMatters Whenever I need to hit the reset button on my expectations, Koestenbaum is my touchstone . . . The quality of Koestenbaum's attention and his ability to delight and surprise is unmatched by any writers I have read. His senses of play and inquiry are often my guiding lights, and Figure It Out offers great benchmarks and springboards for anybody feeling a little rigid about or stuck in a certain way of thinking. --Megan Volpert, The Rumpus 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 . . . There's fun and games and erudition throughout. --Publishers Weekly This kind of prose could be overly chaotic in the hands of a lesser writer, but Koestenbaum has a knack for mostly keeping things together with sincerity, surprises, and wit. --Kirkus Reviews No matter the focus, Koestenbaum proceeds with an agile, sidling insouciance . . . It is his unswerving commitment to his own taste and instinct that allows him so much insight into the works of others who are equally committed to their affinities and practices. What he beautifully observes about poet Adrienne Rich might just as well be said of him: 'Rich was a natural historian with an ear for the music that politics makes in the body.' --Booklist

Praise for Circus; or, Moira Orfei in Aigues Mortes If Debussy and Robert Walser had collaborated on an opera, it would sound like this. --John Ashbery This Soft Skull reissue of Wayne Koestenbaum's 2004 debut novel (now with an introduction by Rachel Kushner!) is the perfect book for summer: It's fever-hot, lurid to the extreme, and filled with the kind of lunatic linguistic acrobatics that leave you gasping for air. --NYLON [Koestenbaum] rarely writes fiction, but when he does, it is exquisitely unhinged, a little more so than the rest of his more typically aphoristic prose . . . Narrative continuity and formal completion aren't exactly his bedfellows, which is why Circus, a novel, stands out among the rest of his oeuvre . . . Composed as a series of notebooks authored by the narrator, Circus logs the highs and lows of Theo Mangrove's small-town life and histrionic musical aspirations. His accounts are detailed, raw, and sexually explicit; as Theo's HIV positive body gradually deteriorates, he ruminates obsessively over a classical repertoire that he may or may not perform. --Mirene Arsanios, Guernica Wayne Koestenbaum's poetry is as well revered as his cult-classic work of cultural criticism The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. But his novels are the place to find his brilliant mind on fire in a prose style that is as challenging as it is uproarious. His recently reissued novel, Circus: or, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, is a rich treat of incantatory prose focusing on fame, decadence, classical music and an Italian circus star. --Ira Silverberg, Document Journal The gem of a book might have lan-guished - not unlike the nar-ra-tor in his tiny upstate New York town--had Soft Skull Press decid-ed not to reis-sue it. --Matt Mullen, The Face Written in the style of a surreal fever dream, Wayne Koestenbaum's first novel records in brilliant poetic vernacular the swan song of Theo Mangrove, a dissipated concert pianist and debauched sexual adventurer obsessed with Italian circus star Moira Orfei. Elucidated across twenty-five notebooks, Theo's desire to perform with Orfei for a final entertainment extravaganza in the southern French village of Aigues-Mortes (the town of dead water ) is both dazzlingly seductive and undisguisedly unhinged . . . Koestenbaum, a cultural critic and poet, experiments with the deranged aesthetics of literary artifice practiced by such luminary predecessors as Baudelaire, Nerval, Artaud, Rimbaud, and Huysmans to tantalizing effect. The story of Koestenbaum's freaks of nature is delivered in willfully, at times hilariously debauched deadpan and makes for irresistibly twisted magic. How could a reader not delight in the fiercely rendered hallucination of it all? --Bookforum The mad genius of Pale Fire with the florid outlaw sexuality of Jean Genet --Kirkus Reviews A mordant, exquisite ode to 'the authentic and paralyzing distance between us.' Insignificance is transformed into magnificence, inspiration is disfiguring, and desire is desecration: rapture becomes indistinguishable from rapture. I especially love how the book takes the stargazing of The Queen's Throat and Jackie Under Skin and poeticizes it, dramatizes it, darkens it, mortalizes it. A deep aesthetic and intellectual pleasure, Wayne Koestenbaum's first novel is one of my absolutely favorite works of his (than which, in my lexicon, there's scarcely higher praise). --David Shields Wayne Koestenbaum, a writer of mature and accountable linguistic genius, has . . . taken up the fabulist form and mastered it absolutely . . . in every way a match for its most illustrious precedent, the hallucination recorded in Nabokov's Pale Fire. Here is the authentic magic from the wellspring of the magical: delusion transformed into revelation. A triumph. --James McCourt Praise for Wayne Koestenbaum Wayne Koestenbaum is one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today. His alarmingly focused attention to detail goes beyond lunacy into hilarious and brilliant clarity. --John Waters I'll go wherever putto, poet, painter and--little did you know--lounge crooner and ivory tinkler Wayne Koestenbaum wants to take me. --Rachel Kushner [Wayne Koestenbaum] is a figure of this time, but he also is a writer and thinker for all time. His career streaks above this genre-obsessed, professionalized-writer moment, and corresponds instead to the history of the polymath, the public intellectual, the drifter, the infinite conversationalist. --Maggie Nelson Like an impossible love child from a late-night, drunken three-way between Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag, Wayne Koestenbaum inherited all their stylistic wonder and laser-beam smarts, but with the added point-blank jolt of sex. --Bruce Hainley, Bidoun [T]here's always a sense in Koestenbaum's writing that indulgence and risk are countered by extreme care at the level of the line or sentence. . . . If you haven't noticed by now: Here is one of the most flirtatious writers around. --Brian Dillon, Artforum What Koestenbaum has achieved, perhaps better than any other contemporary poet, is linguistic fecundity combined with hyper-fastidiousness. Words seem to fall out of his mind and through his pen at breakneck speed without undermining the deeper aesthetic experience. . . The psyche is dangerous terrain, and Koestenbaum is, among all his other accolades, an exceptionally brave explorer. --Cody Delistraty, Poetry Foundation For a quarter century, since the publication of the seminal queer theory text The Queen's Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum has been one of our leading gay cultural critics. Alongside his parallel careers in poetry and the visual arts, Koestenbaum has been responsible for some of the most penetrating and haunting literature on queer identity, subcultures, and fixations. --Out Magazine Koestenbaum's reflexivity is uncanny and gathers pathos from the very task of writing, which for him is tantamount to assembling a self. As Foucault put it, being gay 'is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual, but to try to define and develop a way of life.' --Felix Bernstein, Bookforum Wayne's work--his poems, his essays, his criticism--obliterates any vestigial divide we might hold on to between play and thought. It revels in and broadcasts the risks and joys (the risky joys and joyful risks) inherent in both. --Stefania Heim, Boston Review [Wayne Koestenbaum's] writing is pungent, replete, intoxicating, infectious. I read it and I want to make it my own, to steal his precision and lyricism and immaculate means of evoking the spectacularly specific. --Anne Helen Petersen, The Hairpin There's anxiety in Koestenbaum's work. There's wonder here, too, and the combination of the two give me a critic that I not only want to read but a critic I want to get to know. It's human to worry, and writing about these worries is a perfect bonding agent. Bookslut This scholar of excess is off the cuff, over the top, and always on the money! --Elaine Equi Impassioned insight . . . By turns comic and elegaic, respectful and blasphemous...little or nothing escapes [Koestenbaum's] gaze. Newsday Whether referencing La Boheme, Donald Winnicott, bondage gear, Brooke Shields, or a haunting dream of massaging a baby, Koestenbaum's work entices in all its sui generis, subconscious musing. --Publishers Weekly

Author Information

Wayne Koestenbaum’s 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. A new edition of his first novel, Circus; Or, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, was published in 2019. He is a distinguished professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. His website is waynekoestenbaum.com.

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