May 14: Book Discussion with Wayne Koestenbaum
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Wayne Koestenbaum will discuss his new publication, Figure it Out: Essays (Soft Skull Press, 2020) at 6pm ET on May 14.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Thursday, May 14 at 6pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.
Figure it Out: Essays by Wayne Koestenbaum (Published by Soft Skull)
In his new nonfiction collection Figure it Out: Essays, 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 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.
Photo by Ebru Yildiz.
Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer. His books include The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon; My 1980s and Other Essays; Humiliation; Hotel Theory; The Pink Trance Notebooks; and Camp Marmalade. He lives in New York City, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center. His website is waynekoestenbaum.com.