Virtual Preview Book Launch: Figure It Out by Wayne Koestenbaum in conversation with David Velasco

Virtual Preview Book Launch: Figure It Out by Wayne Koestenbaum in conversation with David Velasco

Monday May 04, 2020
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm

POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY 11201



RSVP required.
Please fill out the form here if you plan on attending.

PLEASE NOTE: Submitting an RSVP for this event DOES NOT guarantee entrance. This is a free-access event — entrance will be on a first-come, first-served basis. All events are hosted via Zoom. Click to register if you are interested to join, and you’ll get a reminder when it’s time to log in.


Please purchase a book here so that we can keep doing these free events!

 

About the 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. 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.

 

 

 

About The Author.

Wayne Koestenbaum_Photo Credit Ebru Yildiz

Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet, critic, and artist. 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 IconMy 1980s and Other EssaysHumiliationHotel TheoryThe 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About The Moderator.

David Velasco

David Velasco is the editor-in-chief of Artforum.

RSVP

Bookings are closed for this event.