Figure it out : essays / Wayne Koestenbaum.

I. Do You Want to Touch It? -- My New Glasses -- Of Smells -- Game of Pearls -- Corpse Pose -- Beauty Parlor at Hotel Dada -- II. No More Tasks -- Figure It Out -- Odd Secrets of the Line -- Making Marks -- "My" Masculinity Remix -- The Porn Punctum -- The Task of the Translator -- III. Punctuation -- On Futility, Holes, and Herv�e Guibert -- Riding the Escalator with Eve -- Adrienne Rich's Musical Ethics -- I Don't Understand Shakespeare's Sonnet #154 -- My Brief Apprenticeship with John Barth -- Twelve Assignments -- IV. Six Stars -- Celebrity's Secret Ameliorations -- An Evening of Screen Tests -- Rauschenberg's Squeegee -- Eighteen Lunchtime Assignments -- Little Elegy.

""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"-- Provided by publisher.