The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art

You know when someone would be hot, except that they think they are even hotter than they are, and it sort of cancels it out? Eileen Myles feels like that to me. Like she would be totally charming except that it is always all, look at me being charming, which completely kills the charm. It made me mad when she talked about tramping mud in that library in Iceland. Like, haha, you are telling a cute self-deprecating story about yourself but also wipe your damn feet.

Eileen Myles - the Importance of Being Iceland.

Rated it 4 stars. My reasons are probably different to yours. I wanted, no, LONGED to give it 5 or 6 stars, so swayed was I by other people's reviews (Artforum, Bruce Hainley, Semiotext(e) etc. etc.). Somehow Myles doesn't quite strike me as the next Gertrude Stein nor Djuna Barnes - close in a lot of ways but not quite. Eileen begins sentences with "Cause". That's short for "Because". That's an American thing I guess but it irks me in writing. It might sound right in hip hop and rap, and Daria episodes. My niece says it. It's cool. I'm old fashioned apparently, to be bothered by incorrect grammar, though that's a lie. My grammar can be appalling in emails, when I'm tired, and when I don't show more care. It's all about context I suppose. This book is prose, a series of articles, thoughts, & blogs. It's not song lyrics, rap, hip hop or poetry where it wouldn't bother me - a lot of it is close to stream of consciousness writing...so I probably should allow it, but still it bothered me.

I haven't heard Eileen aurally or read anything else she's written. She could be hypnotising, she could have other things to say that fly the same path as Gertrude or higher and deeper but I don't know that yet, though guess she might with her involvement with Sister Spit. On confirming that point though will have to take a raincheck. I guess this is where utube comes in handy, but I'm rating the book not her public speaking.

My rating of 4 stars was not for her grammar. I bought the book in the hope that it would take me new places, and open up my brain from the numb I've been feeling. It did. In different ways though than what I had imagined. You know that feeling you get when you discover a new (to you) writer who blows you away, you kind of fall in love with them and you have to get hold of everything that they ever wrote. I don't feel like that about Myles. Yet. Maybe if I read more. What she did for me was turn on all the go lights for me. Go lights inbetween the thoughts in my brain and the power of speech and the pressure of my fingers on the keyboard to get those feelings and words in font. Any kind of font. My numbness had reduced me to lists. Things to do and shopping lists. I think Eileen has done some kind of internal microsurgery on my brain. Yeah I know that sounds weird. For it was not anything specific that she wrote that precipated this..... Not the content but the FLOW. Does that make sense? I know it sounds suspiciously new ageish and old hippyish. I was blocked and couldn't write - could hardly put a sentence together for such a LONG time, and now I feel I can. No I don't think it's a miracle, she's not Jesus but something about the way she writes did affect me. Sure other things in my life have changed recently but "The Importance of Being Iceland" certainly was the fulcrum that made it happen - for me.

The content on the other hand is all new to me mostly. Reviews of artists and writers, poets, performance artists, her travels with Sister Spit, Russia, Iceland (there wasn't enough of Iceland or Bjork - I did want more Russia, more Iceland, so in that I was slightly disappointed) and her general impressions of things, her writing, how she writes, and some of the gist of her lectures, places and people all of which inspired me to go find out about - since I've been living in some kind of limbo hibernation (not of my choosing) for so long. It gave me the feeling of being given a "let out of jail card", the world has all this stuff going on in it that I wasn't aware of and Myles has given us a taste of it. Naturally in America a lot of the people mentioned might be common knowledge but unknown where I sit stifling in the Antipodean outback, especially when I was wearing blinkers...

It's a book I will go back to, for inspiration and open any chapter, it doesn't matter, because while it's linear in time, it's not a novel and in a sense that is why it's hard to review. Her blogs featured go up to 2006 and for many familiar with Myles that is probably too dated. For me right now it's not. Cause (ha) I have to catch up.

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30/12/2010-Arrived today! Thank you Book Depository for making it arrive on my birthday!..

Just bought it from the Book Depository UK. Cheaper than anywhere and free shipping to Australia. Hope it arrives before the New Year. In the meantime I can wait it out with my new harmless & mind numbing obsession - watching people buy books on the BD live. show less