Dec
16
Calling all Eileen Myles fans…
Send blank email to badmirror@orbooks.com and see what happens! (Don’t worry: it’s free.)
Do it!
(via emilygould)
Posts tagged eileen myles
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.
Nov
3
i understood community. going to the place and standing around. aiming for connection to bodies, language and the future. i could be an artist. i had the tools. it wasn’t politics. not that i knew. it was nothing. it was boredom, turned electric. music from cars. it was watching. watching the scene.
Nov
2
Style Like Eileen Myles
My girlfriend got me an Eileen Myles t-shirt at this Sister Spit event in Oakland, it’s black with big purple letters reading “YOU’VE GOT THE STYLE EILEEN MYLES.” I wore it for the first time in Palm Springs to a Dinah Shore White Party which is a party where everyone wears white. And Dinah Shore is this gross annual lesbian “weekend” for girls who want to fingerfuck in swimming pools, oil wrestle in wet t-shirts, drink their faces off and scream at each other in public. All the lesbian websites send reps to Dinah Shore so we were there like a bunch of pasty nerds at a football game, and I was there in my black pants and black Eileen Myles t-shirt at The White Party and then suddenly everything turned black and then I wasn’t anywhere anymore. I was carried and I could hear things, like my friends saying I’d only had one drink and that my face was blue. Some minutes later in the hotel room as the EMTs were attaching things to me and announcing my alarming blood pressure I apparently garbled “it’s over,” to my friend Sarah. “It’s all over, Sarah. This is it.” Ha! She told me I’d said it a few times: “This is it, it’s all over. It’s all over. This is the end.”
