Figure It Out
Page 1
Praise for Figure It Out
“Does contemporary American literature offer any greater pleasure than the polymorphous brilliance of Wayne Koestenbaum? These essays are extraordinary.”
—GARTH GREENWELL, author of Cleanness
“‘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
Praise for Wayne Koestenbaum
“[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
“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
“Koestenbaum is an exuberant critic, enraptured poet, intoxicated historian . . . Of course it is one thing, as a writer, to aspire to or even practice impure forms and an ecstatic style—quite another to take seriously the ethical field onto which they open. In the end, for all the wildly admirable qualities of his writing. I think the essential contribution of Koestenbaum’s diverse project is to reassert what Walter Benjamin called ‘the fullness of concentrated positivity’ (a phrase of which Sontag approved) in the face of the fleeting attractions of polemic, dispute and snark. There is assuredly a politics to this, an urge to keep all possibilities in play, and to keep play alive as a possibility, in a time of anxiety and retrenchment. I can hardly think of a writer who is so exacting about his own enthusiasms, so diligent in his pursuit of joy, so principled in the defence of pleasure.”
—BRIAN DILLON, Frieze
“Nouns! Nouns blue, humid—and rare! I’ve never thought about them more, nor felt that darkling word crawl up my pant leg as I do now when I read the irrepressible Koestenbaum. The guy is not without genius, mischief or gonads. When the lurid steam clears, his bedewed lines coruscate amidst hot shadows that leap with a kind of pink spermy glee. Hilarious, gorgeous, intellectually playful, fairy-light . . . all in ways I’ve NEVER encountered before! Utterly thrilling!”
—GUY MADDIN
“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
“There’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.”
—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
“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 elegiac, respectful and blasphemous . . . Little or nothing escapes [Koestenbaum’s] gaze.”
—Newsday
“Whether referencing La Bohème, 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
ALSO BY WAYNE KOESTENBAUM
Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration
Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems
The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire
Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender
Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon
The Milk of Inquiry
Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics
Andy Warhol
Model Homes
Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films
Hotel Theory
Humiliation
The Anatomy of Harpo Marx
Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background
My 1980s & Other Essays
The Pink Trance Notebooks
Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations
Camp Marmalade
Circus; or, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes
Copyright © 2020 by Wayne Koestenbaum
All rights reserved
First Soft Skull edition: 2020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Koestenbaum, Wayne, author.
Title: Figure it out : essays / Wayne Koestenbaum.
Description: First Soft Skull edition. | New York : Soft Skull Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019042322 | ISBN 9781593765958 (paperback) | ISBN 9781593765965 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3561.O349 A6 2020 | DDC 814/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042322
Cover design & Soft Skull art direction by salu.io
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
Published by Soft Skull Press
1140 Broadway, Suite 704
New York, NY 10001
www.softskull.com
Soft Skull titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West
Phone: 866-400-5351
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
for Lisa S. Rubinstein and Steven Marchetti
CONTENT
S
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 Hervé 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
Acknowledgments
I
DO YOU WANT TO TOUCH IT?
On the New York subway, a fellow passenger’s leather bracelet caught my eye. The bracelet, two inches wide, advertised not a specific sexual predilection but a general advocacy of extreme taste. He wore several bracelets; the others, more slender than the leather one, grouped themselves on either side of the primary band. Over his shoulder hung a canvas bag bearing the word Alpha, in a spacious font—an aerated font, susceptible to unsolicited infusions. I was wearing a blue coat; I call it my Picasso jacket, not because Picasso ever wore such a jacket, or because the jacket resembles one of his paintings, but because I need to discover a name for every desirable object that surrounds me. When I first owned the blue jacket, I didn’t necessarily find it desirable, but I enshrouded it with desirability by granting it a name—the Picasso jacket—it didn’t deserve. Picasso was a portly man; we’ve all seen pictures of him topless. Imagine his chest—its width, its arrogance, its suggestion of primacy and sway. Perhaps you find chests like Picasso’s desirable. My chest doesn’t resemble Picasso’s, though perhaps mine is a finer specimen; mine is less weather-beaten, less flabby, less hairy. I will never be able to achieve, in art or letters, what Picasso achieved. (Who among us can?) But my chest is not to be held accountable for the paucity of my gifts. My chest, like a rook in a chess game, has a valuable neutrality of demeanor, a lack of psychological attributes. The rook is not an individual; the rook is a reminder of larger issues—or perhaps a remainder from battles and tempests that occurred long ago.
On the subway, I engaged in a staring contest with the man wearing a leather bracelet and holding an “Alpha” bag. I won. At a certain point, as our train neared 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue, he broke off eye contact with me.
An hour later, in a design showroom where I was offering prizes to winners of a contest, a competition rewarding supplicants who could meld the practicalities of industrial design with the floridities and nebulosities of landscape painting, I saw again the man with the leather bracelet. Our eyes met; he looked away. I took the plunge, walked up to him, and asked him the significance of the word Alpha on his bag. He told me its meaning, but I’m not at liberty to reveal it to you; if I gave you more information about the company he represents, a firm whose name contains the word Alpha, you could google it, and find his name—he is the operation’s leader—and doubtless find his picture, as well. Seeing his picture, you would understand why he arrested my sight on the subway; you would know more about the nature of my desire than I wish to betray. You would understand that the leather bracelet was not the main reason I was staring at him. You would understand that my allusion to the leather bracelet was a displacement.
The stranger with the “Alpha” bag was a visitor from South America; he spoke Portuguese and Spanish, but no English, so I spoke Italian to him. In error, I said prossimo, which means, in Italian, “next,” but I’d meant to say “earlier,” or whatever Italian word means “earlier.” At the moment I don’t know what Italian word means “earlier,” and I don’t want to interrupt the process of composition by consulting an English–Italian dictionary. My devotion to the writing trance’s inviolability is a throwback to an earlier moment in the history of taste; trying to narrate this simple episode to you, I find myself in the grip of an aesthetic style that, if I were a mature writer, I would have outgrown. Obscenity resides in using methods that history has declared obsolete. A full century after Cubism made fracture possible, why am I trying to reproduce this afternoon’s reality in sequential sentences, rather than presenting to you an asyntactic, askew distillation of the events, filtered through a presiding consciousness? Why is the consciousness overseeing the narration of this fable so lacking in discernment?
After the awards ceremony for the supplicants who’d attempted to weld together the arts of industrial design and landscape painting had ended, and long after my enigmatic acquaintance from the subway had left the showroom and I had said goodbye to the supplicants, both those who had received awards and those who had not (I gave especial praise, in my formal remarks to the assembled audience, to those supplicants who had not won a prize, because I always prefer the losers to the winners), I saw, on the elevator ride down to the lobby, a young man with a dense beard. We were the only passengers. I don’t usually speak to strangers in an elevator, but an impulse of transparency and boldness overtook me, and I turned to the stranger and said, “Your beard is sensational.” He said, “Thank you.” I decided to express my admiration for his beard in a more detailed and effusive fashion. I praised his beard’s density. I used the word thorough. I might have said, “Your beard is very thorough.” The beard left nothing out; it lacked ellipses. He said, “Do you want to touch it?” I reached out and felt his beard: rough, dimensional, forthright, it was mostly brown in color, though an underlying redness struggled to break free and achieve dominance. The moment of palpation lasted only five or ten seconds. As we exited the elevator, I asked his name. “Ezra,” he said, shaking my hand. I told him my name. I didn’t tell him that I’d written my undergraduate thesis on Ezra Pound. I wondered, afterward, whether Ezra is usually a Jewish name. I wondered whether the Ezra in the elevator was Jewish. I wondered if my galvanized reaction to his beard stemmed from my intuitive sense of his Jewishness. I wonder now, as I write this allegory, why I considered Jewishness to be a bedrock matter, lending coherence to all attributes of the person, including the thickness and thoroughness of the beard.
I considered the day a festival of rich encounters. Neither encounter—with the man on the subway or the man on the elevator—would likely bear fruit in further conversation or friendship. Ezra and the man from Alpha, I will probably never see you again. And yet you are firmly lodged in my system of magical references. If I said that you symbolize for me the suggestiveness of accidental encounters, I would be saying nothing precise, for the word suggestive has no meaning without an indication of what is being suggested. Perhaps, however, my subject here is simply suggestibility—the capacity to receive suggestions. No hypnotist has stronger sway over me than a stranger; even the notion “stranger,” however, is a mesmerizing fiction, thick with ideology, dense with assumptions about lands, borderlands, and the firm divisibility of the known from the unknown. The German word for stranger, Fremde, reminds me of Frieda Kahlo, of a ghostly Frieda generations ago in my family tree, of Sylvia Plath’s daughter (Frieda Hughes), and of unfriendedness, as if the English word friend had been mingled with alien consonants, in a game involving rope, a game in which the hands of the competitors inevitably suffered rope burn; “friend,” within a consonantal rope-game, becomes Fremde. I suppose that this essay, this fiction, is an allegory about different countries coexisting. It isn’t traditionally a writer’s business to decode her own parable. But I like to clean up after myself. If I make a mess, I take out a whisk broom, a sponge, or a mop. The mop I’m dragging across
my prose’s floor, at the moment, is the allegory mop. I need to mop up the messy particles I’ve spilled on the floor, and be sure that I leave the surface as shiny and blank as I found it.
(2017)
MY NEW GLASSES
I went to Alain Mikli to buy new glasses, and I came away with glasses by his son Jeremy Tarian. Heir vibe, obedient-patriarchal-descent vibe, suffuses my new frames. From the outside, they seem pure black/blue. Take them off my head, however, and look more closely: they’re pocked, variegated with transparent slivers. Schismatic pockets interrupt the monochrome. I’m wearing interrupted glasses: coitus interruptus. Man glasses, Mafia glasses, Aristotle Onassis glasses: the marbled chunk I’ve stuck on my face gets peppered and made tingly by striations that take away the blue/black area’s self-certainty.
Art curators wear glasses like mine. Once I had a brief crush on a curator from Western Europe. I’d seen his picture in Artforum. I thought, “He could be in an Alain Resnais movie.” (Not Night and Fog.) Decided I needed to “conquer” him. So I sent him a book of mine, intimately inscribed. The inscription mentioned Theodor Adorno. This curator wore boxy dark frames and had sexy thick eyebrows some people would consider unattractive. (My eyebrows are faint, nearly invisible.)
The curator with a unibrow never wrote to thank me for sending the Adorno-inscribed book. I no longer have a crush on him. But now my glasses resemble his unibrow, the unibrow that refused to cross the street to say hello or admit blood brotherhood. I can be blood brothers with my glasses instead.
One of the most exciting fashion transformations in the last half-century has been the passage from nerd to chic: call it the transvaluation of nerd. Nerd—if transported Star Trek–style into another decade—becomes alluring, like a boner. Nerd remakes boner and gives us the best of the boner, without its mean edge. (Nerd is a softened identity, like butter left out to temper.) My glasses are boner glasses, the kind of skinny penis that doesn’t frighten a first-timer.