Bjarki, not Bjarki : on floorboards, love, and irreconcilable differences / Matthew J. C. Clark.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Clark, Matthew J. C., 1982- author.

Contributor:

University of Iowa Press, publisher.

Rosengarten Family Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Clark, Matthew J. C., 1982-.

Clark, Matthew J. C.

Authors, American--21st century--Biography.

Authors, American.

Genre:

Biographies

Essays

Essays.

Physical Description:

163 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, [2023]

Summary:

"Clark tells the story of his attempts to write a magazine-style essay about Bjarki Thor Gunnarsson, a climate change denier and conspiracy theorizer who also happens to manufacture the widest, purest, most metaphorical pine boards around. Set mostly in rural Maine, Bjarki, Not Bjarki combines personal narrative, immersive journalism, and environmental rumination, all told in a distinctive essayistic voice. While Clark considers the motley theatre of rural masculinity, North American colonization, woodpeckers, gift cards, crab rangoon, and bald eagles, the new pine floor in his newly renovated home buckles. He and his wife separate. He puts on a mask, goes to Florida, and does not cry. Upon Clark's return, Bjarki's famous boards seem only to exist in his mind. The book asks: How do we make sense of the world and of ourselves, especially when the floor beneath us is so unstable, when nothing is quite what we had hoped it would be?"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Manatee (afterward)

Canfield

Shavings (the little log cabin)

Shavings (the magazine-style essay) (January 31, 2017)

Rangoon

Shavings (split (afterward))

M. Americana

Shavings (monster)

Irreconcilable differences

Shavings (whose fault?) Rangoon II (eggplant)

Blue stain

Spongiology

Shavings (the thirty-seventh view)

3:04 in the afternoon

Shavings (real America (afterward))

Shavings (lovejoy)

Shavings (laccaria)

Shavings (rangoon III (unrealization)).

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Rosengarten Family Fund.

Other Format:

Online version: Clark, Matthew J. C., 1982- Bjarki, not Bjarki

ISBN:

9781609389352

1609389352

OCLC:

1385507880