The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art

by Eileen Myles

Poet 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 Bjork, 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.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Art, Travel, Poetry, Queer, Memoir

365 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2009

About the author

Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades.

Reviews

[Velvetink · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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.

********************************************************************************************************
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.

[Liza · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Paulina · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 of boyfriends, the band practicing downstairs, the syncopated groans of our plumbing. And later, birds, years and years of them as I lived next door to a cemetery, and someone smoked upstairs on the fire escape and chatted softly with someone else and the toilet flushed. All these sounds were riveted in my heart for moments and years and years and they became the emblems of my freedom, sameness and silence. A distant dog." 155

"I don't mind today, but the everyday makes me barf." 163

"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 work, I hope there's mystery and poetry in your life - not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again." 180

"... and no one really minds women fucking women and men fucking men, and if we would just do it quietly like heterosexuals do, then everything would be okay. And then you turn on the teevee and there's a cute romance, and then you change the channel and there's a show about a young girl coming of age and liking a boy, and then you watch another show about Seinfeld having a naked woman cleaning his apartment, and its really funny and of course you're bombarded with images of heterosexuality all day long, the man in the deli flirts with me, he just assumes I'm straight, and all the women in the clothes catalogues are eventually in a canoe with a man, if you're successful eventually you have to find a mate, it's just part of being human, to not stand alone, to put one next to the other one, and everybody applauds." 183

"I just want to be frank about what you will be really living through.
You'll be living through flossing. Years of it, both in the mirror and away from it, both with girlfriends and alone. Girlfriends will be really excited that you floss your teeth, because they should and they think it's really inspiring that you do that and they will ask you if they can do it with you because it's easier that way, bumping their hips and thighs against you while you keep peering at yourself under the shitty bathroom light. They will even talk glowingly over drinks with their friends about the really diligent way you have of flossing and then the little brushes and even how you rinse and you'll look at their friends who look kind of weirded out and you'll be thinking you're just making me sound really old. I mean why do you think I floss my teeth for like fifteen minutes every night. My father lost his teeth at forty and then he died at 44. Before I decided I also wanted to live I was utterly convinced that I would never lose my teeth and I have had tooth loosening and tooth loss dreams all my life, so in my twenties when I had never gone to therapy I decided that I would always privilege the dentist over the therapist and that I was really getting a two in one service when I went to the dentist but still when I drank I would often pass out before I could floss. Then I stopped drinking. I found myself in my thirties leaning into the mirror one night cleaning away and I thought: fuck, is this what I lived for - to floss." 251

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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

[S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is so fat with love.

[nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

READING VLOG

halfway through the book, i realized that i like the way they think, but i don't like the way they write. in interviews, in poetry readings, there's a voice, a presence that is required in consumption of their work, but their writing, alone, is better kept in their private diaries.

to call these essays would be too generous. ideas go in one direction and become something else entirely. with a friend over coffee, this, i wouldn't mind at all, but in a format like this, it left me empty. you see, Eileen has incredible observations, perfect adj+subj combos, but nothing else. maybe a few paragraphs after these sporadic strokes of brilliance are met with a beautiful open passage that runs free, free enough that everything expands and hits the heart, much like this:

"this is my exhortation, my recipe for the lesbian brain. you're living in it. you're reading it here. bodies and books, all our gestures, large boring gatherings and small strange meetings, sexual encounters, splashes of light across our faces and bodies in apartments, art on the wall, tapes on the screens, words out loud. these are the elements, ingredients, a recipe for the lesbian brain, the sky overhead, the endless night and the food we eat, the way we dress, everything that shows, a radiant secrecy, the whole aching collection, the gamut of us. it's the living upside of our notorious invisibility. our virtual intelligence as we put it out. the indestructible ghetto."

but these come far and few in between. we do get incredible glances at Alex Katz, slander on David Sedaris, and much love for Jenny Holzer. even a talk with Daniel Day Lewis! there's a lot to love here when roaming through Eileen's brain. but the collection itself feels unedited, many ideas left dry and deflated with very little meat unless you're a mega-Myles fan.

[nis]

skipped all the art bits (most of the book) cuz who cares; liked the bits about iceland and moody introspection. their poetic ways flow really nicely.

Note: i tried both legal and illicit ways of getting an ebook of this and the only place on god’s green web to have it was The Internet Archive so big up to them

[Grant Kalasky · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 :~)

[Amy Cadwallader · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Em · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[CH · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bourgeois

[Jenn Malzone · Rating 5 out of 5]

teeeeveeeeeee

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 has with this collection brought me back to writing more than anything, well, since i read the aforementioned triumvirate of books.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Lia Lowenthal]

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

[Ángel Labarthe del Solar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Was hoping for something bigger. Wanna-be Judith Butler vibes, pretentious, obnoxious. Not for me. Got bored right away but somehow made it through… bummer!

[Reviews Mueller · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 work, I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life- not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again”. After thanks were said and hugs were given I instantly wrote down the name of the novel he was holding in his hand. Once I acquired the book my relationship with The Importance of Being Iceland became one that is not contained by passing glances walking down a street. It became intimate and cherished.
Myles is a feminist, a poet, a human being that uses they/them pronouns. Myles writing stimulates the readers emotions and pushes the reader to care, to try. One realization that I had whilst reading this collection of essays is all of the emotions that Eileen went through would have been invincible to the masses had the words been written. Myles writes because they need to, just as I needed to understand what they may have endured.
Myles is an extremely motivated individual to help the reader understand what their tuesday may have been like, without harboring the experience to a mundane concept. Myles urges the reader to look at the world with fresh perspective daily and to look at one's surroundings. Myles begins the collection of essays by involving the reader with their experience of Iceland, the people inside, the feelings attached to comparison of art, and the urge to return. Reading this section made me hungry for travel outside of the country. Myles also addresses corruption and how even one of the most beautiful countries can be affected by strong arm companies. The thoughts, feelings, and emotions that Myles experiences pumps themes throughout the collection of essays as a heart would.
The dialect contained in The Importance of Being Iceland is animated and free thinking. The reader often feels uncanny similarities between the dilemma or situation and reality of life, as if Myles is speaking directly to them towards their issues. The short sentences come through as thoughts and are enticing to the reader. The writing style Myles lives through reflects self respect and integrity towards themselves. Myles real time narritive keeps the reader engaged and always attentive to the next thought that may come into our mind.
Myles addresses self destructive behavior and self care in “Live Through That?!” (2008). Myles reflects in the action of watching a loved one die in front of you, “My father didn’t mean to make me watch him die. It just happened”. This perspective is hard to live inside of but it is the compassionate way to live. Myles teaches us why flossing is in their daily routine, “Because I face my face, myself”. When reading this passage I asked myself the last time I flossed and how it may make me feel if I established this in my routine. Myles describes, “uncannily at some point during this ritual I begin to feel better. It’s like washing my car and I never wash my car. It’s the most intimate expression of care I know”. This sentence shows why it is important to face yourself and look into the reflection of your reality.
Many have had the relationship that is nurtured by personal issues and finding coping mechanisms as well as ways to understand situations further. Myles describes the interaction they had with a therapist that ultimately suggested Myles may be transsexual. Myles reflects, “ I had amazing moments with him. I remember the morning, honey coloured, the room got mellow and deep when he asked me Eileen can you tell me any time in your life when you did feel safe”. This question is necessary and real to both the reader and for Myles personal growth. This interaction was something the reader was able to experience that only patients and therapist normally witness. Myles describes their last session, “When I ended therapy he cried, which didn’t seem normal. It cost me four thousand dollars”. This made me believe that the therapist was too getting something out of the sessions just like the reader was getting something valuable out of reading this essay, just as Myles is able to heal through writing.
In closing, The Importance of Being Iceland is a book one should read if they need a reawakening of what it is to be human. To have thoughts and to act on some. To travel and listen to other perspectives and views. This collection of essays is so much more than just that. It is a collection of decades from someone who recorded them. It is inspiration to travel and see a world unbeknownst to yourself.

[Ynna · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 it is, how to write it, what it's not. My favorite essay was "How To Write an Avant-Garde Poem." This edition also has a very aesthetically pleasing cover and is the perfect size/weight.

Prints of Words

The very soul of poetry is the list. Conceivably every poet is making an abridged list of all creation, filling in a little over here, not mentioning what will only bog you down. The best poetry keeps moving at all costs.

How To Write an Avant-Garde Poem

No thought was too grand to commingle with the street, if someone came by and offered to take me to breakfast. The pint of interruption, I learned, was the body. That if I kept thinking too long, the poem would get buried in decisions, it would lose its precious access to breath. Down the stairs the legs would go, and I imagined us, my companion, as stars in a movie, an independent one, and we'd eat food and I'd go home, filled with new thoughts, and my accounting would continue, or begin, fresh.

Universal Cycle

See a poem is a tiny institution. I just write lots and lots of them, and it gives me a way to be in the world. It's actually a very worldly job, there really isn't a wrong place to be, a poet kind of goes with anything, any kind of decor, indoor, out. Presidents like to have poets next to them, we're sort of like a speaking wreath, the kind of poet you pick tells the kind of president you are, the hell of dating or marrying a poet is that certainly we will write about you, so if you don't want to be seen, don't date a poet, anyone should know that.

[Sam Van · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 centralize on Iceland. Lol. For another time.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 things that resonated. I'd love to read more of her poetry and other work though because I enjoyed her voice.

[Anneli · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[nis]

skipped all the art bits (most of the book) cuz who cares; liked the bits about iceland and moody introspection. their poetic ways flow really nicely.

Note: i tried both legal and illicit ways of getting an ebook of this and the only place on god’s green web to have it was The Internet Archive so big up to them

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a poet, Eileen Myles’ way of writing about art is refreshing. I found myself sometimes looking up the artists referenced in these pieces because Myles often doesn’t describe what the art itself looks like, but rather the crowd at the gallery or the oblique cultural context in which the work was made. It makes me want to write about art differently myself.

[Amy Doeun · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am in love with Iceland. I read as much about Iceland as I can. From the title of this book I thought I would adore it. But it is definitely not about Iceland, or even much about travel. Maybe if it was not so completely contrary to my expectations based on the title I would have liked it.

[Zach Werbalowsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

myles nvr falters or atleast nawt yet, the highs are high here and there are no lows as much as sometimes i skipped something cause like i haven't read that poet or i havent seen that art and i find it dull to hear something described with no visual even if written fantastically.

[Adrian Manzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having a peek into the mind of Eileen on contemporary art, travel, and current society in spaces and cities I have personal perspectives on was such a pleasure. Myles writes with such honestly and a mild scorn that I can’t help but relate to.

[lia 🐩 · Rating 3 out of 5]

está bien y está ligero, no sé por qué me costó tanto, siento como que lo estaba arrastrando, supongo porque lo relacioné con el trabajo!!! y con que me urgía terminarlo para poder leer el de constance debré….

[Jamie Tommins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eileen Myles is peerless

[Chaserrrr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eileen forever.