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)).
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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.