A tour de force wiz-bang of a book by a well-seasoned poet-golfer who struggles between agony and ecstasy while playing a gentleman's game.
Golf is the most perplexing sport in the world, a game where questions far outnumber answers. You're decent one day and deplorable the next? Is there a mind and body connection, or is this just another myth? Brooks Roddan enters this bizarre, contrary kingdom accompanied by his sidekick Jack and a weird collection of strange playing partners, his love of golf constantly being challenged, finally discovering a glimmer of hope in an accidental encounter at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with the world-famous Dada artist Kurt Schwitters who reveals the complete absurdity of a game he never played.
A tour de force wiz-bang of a book by a well-seasoned poet-golfer who struggles between agony and ecstasy while playing a gentleman's game. It's great fun to watch the narrator 'go inside the ropes' between hope and despair, joy and misery, memory and real-time events, traversing the course, rubbing up against the quirky and always contrary ways of his golfer friends with his sidekick Jack, while becoming familiar with the world-class Dadaist Kurt Schwitters on a rainy dayinside the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
"Lechery, Anarchy, Delirium, Bourgeois Inertia, Flagrant Hypocrisy, Primitive Injustice, An Order of Organized Crime in Fact"--Antonin Artaud
"A book of meditative reckonings, both playful and serious, told by a poet-golfer who has a love/hate relationship with the game. Chock full of photos and memorabilia, Part Dada art book, part social criticism, part physical and intellectual adventure with a trusty sidekick named Jack, part personal confession. Does the narrator hate golf? No, he loves the game but sometimes dislikes the people who play it, including himself. As the narrator himself puts it, "Nobody understands my struggle, it's as if I am walking in a circle that I've made with my own hands and can't find a way out. This book has wings--it's going to fly off the shelves. --Thomas Fuller
"I love golf but there's something about golf and golfers that's really disturbing.I'm not sure what it is but I'm going to get to the bottom of it, even if it takes the rest of my life."-- Brooks Roddan
Literary Nonfiction. Art.
Brooks Roddan lives and works in San Francisco where he writes every day, enjoys making small-scale paintings and collage, and operates IF SF Publishing, leaving town as often as possible to his cabin in upstate Wyoming where nothing is expected of him. He's published a 12 books and chapbooks of poetry, including The Second Dream (Momentum Press 1986), The Light of the Light (Blue Earth Press, 1987), and The Frog Club (Readymade Books, 1992, and The Story My iPhone Told Me (2020). Roddan's written fiction under the pen name Thomas Fuller, his first novel Monsieur Ambivalence (2013) winning an Award in the Fiction Category at the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, following that novel with THE CLASSICAL WORLD, A NOVEL OF IDEAS (2018). His first book of non-fiction Mare Island was published in 2016 under his legal name, selling out its original printing. GOLF IS RUINING MY LIFE, a semi- autobiographical series of meditations on his love-hate relationship with the game, is Roddan's second foray into the nether-regions of non-fiction.
