Emily Books

Mar 19

Ruth and I made a list of the attributes we look for in an Emily Book. A book doesn’t have to have all of these attributes, of course. But all our books have some. We didn’t try to determine why this is what we want from a book. I am okay with not knowing that.

After we made the list we went through it a few times with different books in mind — Inferno, Making Scenes, and Sempre Susan. You can see the initials by the attributes: I, SS, and MS. Inferno has the most.

alcohol

AIDS

heroin

80s

90s

70s

lesbian

sexual awakening

weird sexual awakening

abused, but not victim-y

drugs in general

East Village/NYC

San Francisco

tawdry glamour

poverty

sex, described non-erotically

body horror

academia

mental illness

addiction

non-redemptive story arc

unlikeable protagonist

passes Bechdel test

passes Bechdel test with flying colors

would fail the opposite of the Bechdel test

“new narrative”/blogginess

charged female friendship/mentorship

(bonus: with fucked-up power dynamics)

not giving a fuck

giving a fuck exactly 50% of the time

not giving a fuck about femininity

performative artistic identity

Künstlerroman

sex work

funny

identity issues

formally inventive/messy

impressionistic

performative/collaborative

(there are some other ones but they were all trying to mean something similar but hard to define about “impervious to structural conventions”)

Dec 16

Calling all Eileen Myles fans…

thingsiatethatilove:

orbooks:

Send blank email to badmirror@orbooks.com and see what happens! (Don’t worry: it’s free.)

Do it!

(via emilygould)

Dec 4

Eileen Myles reading last Monday at the Emily Books launch at Housing Works

(photo via Alice)

Nov 18

“Since I got here I mostly worked in bars, which was not so good for one reason, which was that I was a drunk. But I always liked the belonging that came with work. A space towards which I was inclined, a real physical space, not the one in my mind.”

—- Eileen Myles, Inferno

BUY THE BOOK HERE

Nov 15

“When I finally moved into an apartment in the East Village where I lived for the rest of my life there was already a whole pile of stapled books on the floor. I didn’t even know to call them books yet but they were. They had light cardboard covers with bad drawings on them, stapled together. The windows of this apartment were filled with sumac trees and it was marvelous. Those books were waiting for me in there like a gift.”

— Eileen Myles, Inferno

BUY IT HERE

Nov 14

Just fyi we are not the first book club to tackle Inferno (a poet’s novel): The Autostraddle book club covered this same territory a year ago. Here are their Discussion Questions. Maybe they will come in handy tonight?

“1. Is this a novel? Or an autobiography? Or a memoir? Does it matter?

2. Was it weird how honest she was about real people/events? Good? Bad?

3. Can we talk about what I am calling “the vagina chapter.” You know the part I’m talking about. I wanted to talk about it here but I didn’t know how. I trust that you will.

4. Did you, like, know about Eileen Myles before this? If so, has anything changed in your feelings about/for her? If not, what are your thoughts?

5. Did you feel a little bit insane after reading this book? I did, it’s ok.”

Nov 13

Book club meeting tomorrow night!

I’m bringing homemade cookies, just sayin’. You only have to bring yourself.

Nov 11

Standing in the Goods

Inferno and the Myth of the American Working-Class Artist

by Sady Doyle

“I could go for about a month without working. That was the amount of debt I could float.” — “Eileen Myles,” the narrator of Inferno (a poet’s novel)

Portraits of bohemian poverty are a dime a dozen. Describing your crappy apartment, elaborately painful relationships and the earlier, cuter stages of alcoholism is a way to show that one is suffering for one’s art and is therefore good at both. As Eileen Myles puts it, even just a few years of poverty can get “the dirt of authenticity” under the nails of comfortably middle-class artists. But Myles’s relationship to money isn’t a pose, or a bid for admiration. Money, for her, is a continual undercurrent of concern.