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Importance of Being Iceland, The: Travel Essays on Art

$45.00

Importance of Being Iceland, The: Travel Essays on Art

SKU: 9781584350668 Category: Product ID: 11189

Description

Temporarily out of stock

Title: Importance of Being Iceland, The: Travel Essays on Art
Author: MYLES EILEEN
Format: PAPERBACK
Imprint: SEMIOTEXT(E)
Price: $45.00
Publishing status: Active

oet and post-punk heroine Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Like Baudelaire’s gentleman stroller, Myles travels the city—wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit—seeing it with a poet’s eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The Importance of Being Iceland make a lush document of her—and our—lives in these contemporary crowds.

Framed by Myles’s account of her travels in Iceland, these essays posit inbetweenness as the most vital position from which to perceive culture as a whole, and a fluidity in national identity as the best model for writing and thinking about art and culture. The essays include fresh takes on Thoreau’s Cape Cod walk, working class speech, James Schulyer and Björk, queer Russia and Robert Smithson; how-tos on writing an avant-garde poem and driving a battered Japanese car that resembles a menopausal body; and opinions on such widely ranging subjects as filmmaker Sadie Benning, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets, and flossing.

”Myles’s unique writings on art and culture manage to stay right on target while simultaneously misbehaving. Come to think of it, that’s not so far from the spirit of Oscar Wilde summoned by her book’s title.”
– Village Voice, September1, 2009

”If The Importance of Being Iceland reinforces something Myles’s fans already know, it’s that she’s always writing. Alongside her prolific output of fiction (Cool for You) and poetry (Sorry, Tree), Myles has been drafting essays and reviews and participating in interviews—work in which she challenges herself (and implores readers) to study the overlap between the physical and the intellectual, the personal and the political.”
– Bookforum, October 8, 2009

The Importance of Being Iceland is noted on the “Best of 2009” list in Time Out New York, January 2010. ”The poet and former presidential candidate writes about everything here – from travel, art and poetry to celebrities and politics. And hers is an always-interesting point of view.”

ISBN: 9781584350668