Excerpts from Books in the Forthcoming "For Geniuses" Series

Hair Styling for Geniuses by Gabriel Blackwell

To cut is to conventionalize—cowardly, especially for the curly-headed—though some exceptional cases (both in fecundity of follicle and greatness of gray matter) may realize a certain measure of relief by reducing the dead weight curling their already-taxed necks earthward. La mode is, in any case, de trop. Better to bull on through with whatever mop your particular genome has provided. Think of the top of your head (or rather, don't—you don't have the time) as its caudal analogues, the ends of fingers and toes. Unworthy of hebdomadary attention, still, for safety's sake, requiring maintenance. Consider the bowl cut... Some have found tinfoil helpful in reducing radio interference, but the editors suggest exchanging or supplementing this around-the-house chapeau for something more formal when in company... Occasional laving is all that need be done by way of renovation, though some have skipped this step to uncertain degrees of success: after all, time spent at lather, rinse, repeat is time better spent any other wise, n'est-ce pas? Unfortunately, foregoing massage, refreshment, and hygiene can lead to dread, tangle, and confusion—one hundred strokes are advised, at least as an interruption or interstice to more important labors. Think of it as time in the bath (combine the two!). Eureka! Don't forget your towel.

Texting for Geniuses by Matthew Pitt

Unit text message data retrieval and transmission, or "texting," marries the windfall technology of cellular devices with the meditative nature of the epistolary mode. Yet it may also be deemed the poetics of phone communication: a distillation of observed images and dialogue, or summation of plans enacted and divulged. Through texting, the transitory units of event, substance, and light that we often fail to accurately capture and chronicle while spooling and unspooling to and from workaday functions and tasks can be instantly conveyed, in a disarming, highly-compressed, and even functionally "cheeky" style. Thus, in a sense, each "txt" sent embraces our data-deluged world while disaffirming it...

Yoga for Geniuses by Catherine Brown

1) Consider the ignominy of toes. Not just your own toes, as disgruntled and piggish as they may be, and not just the toes of your friends and relations, but toes qua Toes, their very Toeishness. When you are confident that you are entirely schooled in toes' limitations, the smallness of their stature in particular relation to the enormity and importance of their responsibilities, vis a vis standing, walking, dancing, driving your car, and, yes, yoga, then you may move on to step two, breathing.

2) Breathing. The very humdrum weight of it, the essential incessant uncompromising ask of it, even while you are asleep or unconscious, is burdensome, no? As renouncers, as those who have made much, through the decades, of renouncing salt-fat-sugar-cigarettes-alcohol-sex-sunlight-feathers-laughter and other indulgences, we would so like, so appreciate, the opportunity to renounce this, this one last thing, too. But we cannot. So be it, and on to step three.

3) The Drishti. Still breathing, and with mindfulness of our toes' amazing commitments to our standing postures, we consider the drishti, the focal point for each pose. From the depths of your navel to the farthest Himalaya, the drishti is your first-class ticket to the highest planes or plains of existence. Without the drishti, downward dog is nothing more than hanging out on all fours, and triangle is simply a place to hang the wet laundry. The drishti requires focus, concentration and obedience to a higher force, all things at which, as a genius, you excel. Now, go.

Aretha Franklin's Voice, circa 1968, for Geniuses by Robert Stapleton

To be a bird in the tree of Aretha's voice, fly away from the city, away from the audio scramble, away from the congested dysfunction and industrial incisions into the delicate balance of air, space, and wind, that gorgeous channel that grants grace and movement and thrust if not for the shit on the windshield of the city. Fly away from your family, the nieces and nephews, extended cousins, crazy Aunt Millie with her horse laugh and gift subscriptions to The Word, fly away from all of them sitting on the wire, that long string of sit, the sanctity of rest, give that up for now. Flap and fly and soar and swoop past the suburbs and the tracks and plastic model fast food boxes. Sail beyond the pocket farms and John Henry resting on his deck, whispering, without even realizing it, Martha's name, her songs, her memories. Don't stop. Coast past the prairies, the cattle, the spinning wheat, let out a song if you want, though it's not as imperative as finding the zephyr, the gentle of the clouds, the whimsy of blue, the promise beyond the quilted meadows. Glide. Valleys, mountains, lakes, move away from them all, listen for the whispers in your arch, the twitch of your tail, the sirening of your saddle and fly like a motherfucker.
Approach the ocean, sail above the seagulls, white trash fowl anyway, drive away from the hint of humans in the water, the stench and smack of their vessels, move move move till there's no one, no thing, no music or sound, no swell in the water's current, sail until you see it, right there in the middle of the water, a giant arbor, a thousand branches, its visage, architecture, and history, all immaculate conception, perfect grace, the present and nothing else. Wing your way down. Hover in. Claw, branch. Sit. Breathe.

Fishing for Geniuses by Bryan Furuness

Cast your line into the water.  Don't bother to bait the hook. Leave it as naked as your contempt for the world. The fish will probably bite it anyway, the Philistines.
Let your boat bob in the water like a half-empty cup while you think of Philistines, the original ones, the actual Philistines. Think of the boy and his whirling sling. Think of other boys slinging nets into the ocean. Think of Peter and Andrew, those fishers of men. Think of men you know, the ones who have no interest in knowing themselves, those Philistines.  Think of yourself, unfathomable you, the midnight depths of you, into which you can disappear, as cleanly as a hook, emerging empty-handed and hungry, to wonder when exactly you lost sight of shore.

Facebook Stati for Geniuses by Robin Black

In crafting an individual "status" on Facebook there are myriad labyrinthine definitional pitfalls of which you would do well to be aware. To begin, though the traditional ostensible purpose of one's "status" is to inform one's "friends" of one's current state of being at a particular time—one's existential coordinates, if you will—the addition in recent years of the question, What's On Your Mind?, a prompt of sorts, hovering, grey, like some only semi-realized apparition, in the box in which one is poised to do exactly that, has muddied the proverbial waters considerably. For, as is doubtless clear to you—far clearer than this quandary—there is no mere world of difference between the product of the consideration of one's state of being and the product of knowing then disclosing one's contemporaneous thoughts, but rather a difference as vast as the limits of the infinite allow. And so one must, prefatory even to setting cursor to box, examine—and newly reexamine each time—one's own view of the relationship between thought and being, which process of course can result in one of only three stati, the first being an answer to the posed prompt: "...has the relationship between cognition and existence on his or her mind;" the second, for the traditionalists among us, being: "...is contemplative;" and the third, a bit dodgy but forgivable as such on the basis of a certain ironic wit containing therein a scathing critique of the form, being: "...thinks therefore is."