this collection of essays, interviews, and blog posts joins acker's bodies of work and delany's about writing, as well as all of the Narrativity essays, this group of texts i'll return to again and again, they erupt with inspiration. blah. this book has a halo. the past month of waking up with coffee and fruit and a few pages from The Importance of Being Iceland has given me great joy. i find my mouth forming religious words whenever i speak of this book. overstatement but really eileen myles ha...

Finally! I finished this after years of its sitting on my shelf. That's not at all to say it isn't intriguing and spectacular; it absolutely is. I just finally decided it was okay to skim some of the pieces that were about art. Those that were about art but also not about art (about queerness or travel or mortality or bodies) I read more closely. My favorite was the introductory piece about Iceland. I love Eileen Myles.

Reading this had its ups and downs. The ups, essays about art but not about art, an interview with Daniel Day Lewis, and a handful of her mid 2000s blog posts, grabbed me. The downs, all of the "Art Essays," went over my head. Eileen Myles is unapologetic. Her personality cuts through her writing. At times it's abrasive, but for the most part it's charming. 4 out of 5. Also, the cover is beautiful :~)

Eileen Myles is fast becoming one of my favourite people ever."Sometimes I stayed in for days and days, and what renewed me was the precise dimensions of the buildings I lived in, in New York, first one in Soho, then another in the East Village, both very cheap. After having grown up in the suburbs with one set of noisy neighbors who intrigued me and the years of loudness and then silence in my house I now was the overjoyed witness to urban immigrancy up close. Howls of my neighbor's procession

As my two week long summer creative writing course came to an end, my professor James Yeh cleared his throat and expressed his immortal faith in us as creatives. Yeh related his appreciative attitude towards our work by reading a passage from The Importance of Being Iceland. Stiffly looking at his students he began, “I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your wo...

"the death of new england" is probably one of the greatest essays ever to be written

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

For some reason every time I open this book I read something that was exactly what I needed to hear at that specific moment in time.

First 5 sections are so great. Last 2 are not so great. But i cant manage to put down a book before I’ve finished it completely and that’s only my fault.

The first essay entitled "Iceland" hooked me. Eileen Myles made me laugh a lot and like many other readers, feel inspired to write. I would have gotten more out of this book if I took the time to look up every artist/piece of art mentioned, but I think it is a testament to Myles' talent as a writer that I found striking sentences and paragraphs in essays about topics I had very little knowledge of as well as the more common writers/places/things/art. I loved all of the parts about poetry- what i...

"There's a place of many operations occurring in language, sometimes it's about stepping out of the machine, flying overhead. Sometimes it's about lying down and playing possum. There's no single way to catch the existence of words. Except that language is some kind of living myth we made up and somebody one at a time has to show us that." 196

Always coming back to this book when I feel lonely or displaced.

The book came to our house because of the word "Iceland" in its title. I expected something else. More Iceland I guess. Instead there's this Gertrude Stein style writing with lack of punctuation about people I have never heard of. It does include some bright moments, though, especially towards the end. Otherwise, reading it felt a little bit like hard work.

This book is so broad, and made me care about artists I didn't know, and maybe still don't really know, which was surprising. The whole collection feels like a peek inside Eileen Myles' mind; strongly associative and very, very sharp. It seemed to lose momentum a bit in the last section of short blog posts. Hearing Eileen read helped my reading of this book so much - i thought it was meant to be slower, but when read in the same rattly, frenetic way, it made so much more sense. Closer to a 3.75....

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.

this book is so fat with love.

This book is definitely entertaining to read, but also smart and perceptive. Myles' travel writing and poetics essays especially shine. The art essays can lack helpful descriptive material. I found myself reading it out loud to anyone who happened to be around me.

Okay. So I hate to say it. I *knew* I was about to read a book of essays. But SO MUCH of this went over my head that it wasn’t enjoyable. And I typically love Myles’ work. Like absolutely love her poetry and later writing. Inferno is bomb. Not Me & Sorry Tree influenced a lot of the material I ended up teaching @ CU Boulder. She came to one of my undergrad poetry workshops and it changed my life. But I had such a hard time reading this. I also falsely expected that many of the essays would centr...

Enjoyed learning that Churchs were early considered turf in Iceland, not resonant so the singing occured only in the throat and chest because something had to vibrate but not the building. All churchgoers where singing the same hym but not the same notes. No organ tone set the pitch so they would find it instead among themselves. The Organ was introduced on the 30's.

Picked this up on a whim, mainly because I've always been infatuated with Iceland. (Even though I went in understanding not much of it was actually about Iceland). This was my first exposure to Myles, and I wish it hadn't been honestly. I enjoyed many of the pieces, but always felt a little outside. I'm a cis white dude with only very tangential connections to the art world, so no surprise honestly that I felt disconnected from the majority of the subject matter, but there were a number of thing...