{"title":"Brooks Roddan","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"golf-is-ruining-my-life","title":"Golf is Ruining My Life","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eGolf is Ruining My Life\u003c\/em\u003e is a book of reckonings, meant to be both playful and serious, told by a golfer who has a love\/hate relationship with the game. Part Dada Art book, part sociology, part intellectual adventure with a sidekick, part personal confession. Does the narrator hate golf? No, he loves golf but he sometimes dislikes the people who play it, including himself, and questions all the time he's spent playing it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA tour de force 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 day inside the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFrom an early reader of 'Golf is Ruining My Life\u003c\/strong\u003e'—\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou have created something special!!!\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt will now reside on my golf shelf with\u003cbr\u003eWho's Your Caddy, (Rick Reilly)\u003cbr\u003eGolf in the Kingdom, (Michael Murphy),\u003cbr\u003eGolf and the Art of War (Don Wade)\u003cbr\u003eGolf for Enlightenment (Deepak Chopra)\u003cbr\u003eThe Greatest Game Ever Played (Mark Frost)\u003cbr\u003eThe Inner Game of Golf (Tim Gallway)\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e— Thomas Raher, San Francisco\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBrooks Roddan\u003c\/strong\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"5.0 out of 5 stars An endearing, poetic look golf and life. This charming tale is about how nuanced our lives really are, if you are open to it, the way this book's narrator is. Everyday our mind reacts to the same activities in different ways. It sees things it didn't see before, or it dwells on things it previously ignored. Sometimes it fusses, fumes or worries, at other times it's full of delight and wonder. It's almost as though our mind is a writer, constantly looking for new material for a story or poem or a new philosophical angle on what life is really all about. Sometimes this a beautiful experience, at other times, it's downright absurd, which is why it make sense that the author ends us using the famous absurdist and Dada artist Kurt Schwitters as his mental caddie to navigate him down the weird and wonderful course of this game called life.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eSnappy Girl\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Just wanted to tell you I have been reading GOLF Is Ruining My Life slowly over the last few days and it is astonishing. In every best of ways.. consider this reader blown away.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eDan DeVries\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Lechery, Anarchy, Delirium, Bourgeois Inertia, Flagrant Hypocrisy, Primitive Injustice, An Order of Organized Crime in Fact\" - \u003cstrong\u003eAntonin Artaud\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"This is a uniquely intriguing book, at some points insightful, at other points funny and entertaining, and often thought-provoking. I am savoring it at a slow pace.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eTom Trabin\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"love this narrative style of yours—I swear it feels very distinctive, all your own. It bubbles along quietly about poetry and art and then some delicious thing turns up, like in a Jacques Tati movie. You are the Mr. Hulot of the links.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eElias Crim\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c!----\u003e","brand":"IF SF PUBLISHING","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48947008143677,"sku":"9781733386470","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781733386470ita.jpg?v=1718308180"},{"product_id":"mare-island","title":"Mare Island","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhat would it be like to discover your very own ghost town? To stumble upon the place by accident and feel it grow more and more mysterious with every step you take? The buildings, still standing tall with their importance, abandoned, every window broken; heavy equipment in chains, rusting in plain sight; weeds taking over the premises; the feeling that everyone's just left yesterday or the day before.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt's this chance encounter with Mare Island, the first naval base the US opened on the Pacific Ocean, once the shipbuilding capital of the western world, home and workplace to over 50,000 people but shuttered by an act of Congress on April Fools' Day, 1996, that leads the writer to make up stories about what he's seeing, and to ask himself questions about his own life that he wouldn't have otherwise asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMARE ISLAND\u003c\/em\u003e is part documentary in words and pictures of a place the writer calls, \"the Stonehenge of the American empire,\" and part self-portrait, an extremely personal encounter with the past, present, and a possible future.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEstablished in 1854, Mare Island Naval Shipyard was the first US Navy base on the Pacific Ocean. 514 ships were built at Mare Island and thousands of other vessels overhauled in dry dock during its colorful heyday. Once considered America's military shipbuilding capital, Mare Island was registered as a California Historical Landmark in 1960, and parts of the base were declared a National Historic Landmark District in 1975.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBrooks Roddan\u003c\/strong\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRoddan's written fiction under the pen name Thomas Fuller, his first novel \u003cem\u003eMonsieur\u003c\/em\u003e \u003cem\u003eAmbivalence \u003c\/em\u003e(2013) winning an Award in the Fiction Category at the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, following that novel with \u003cem\u003eThe Classical World, A Novel of Ideas \u003c\/em\u003e(2018).\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis first book of non-fiction \u003cem\u003eMare Island\u003c\/em\u003e was published in 2016 under his legal name, selling out its original printing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eGolf Is Ruining My Life\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Bombing along the highway at the north edge of San Francisco Bay, as we moderns are wont to do, the turnoff to Mare Island passes in a blink, and most of us don't think twice. But Brooks Roddan takes the exit—and finds himself in a sprawling, ghostly monument to the American Empire. Slow down now and walk with him on this provocative meditation on power, impermanence, and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eJAY HARRIS\u003c\/strong\u003e, Former Publisher of \u003cem\u003eMother Jones\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Mare Island by Brooks Roddan is gem of a book, reminiscent of the chapbooks published in the heyday of City Lights Bookstore during the Beat Era in San Francisco. Combining stunning black and white photography, personal reflections and insightful writing and history, Mare Island paints the picture of both the decay of a once-important naval base in Vallejo, California, as well as it's renewal as a mixed use development that will serve the future needs of Northern California. This is a fun, thoughtful and exquisite depiction of the old and the new, decay and rebirth, and a poetic writing style that charms the reader. Bravo.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eSAM SINGER\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Another exquisite book from IFSF Publishing and author Brooks Roddan. A small book, silky cover, flaps around a rich terracotta color, elegant layout of photos and text... I love the short fragments of thought about empire, the vast ruins of a shipyard that saw the first atom bomb shipped off, a ghostly landscape of war-mongering, heroism and death. The text is personal, understated, made of Pascalian paradoxes, political poetics, intriguing bits of stories about time, memory, and the ambivalence of understanding. 'I'd never seen a ruin so human.' The author's images are their own haunted tale, as powerful as the writing.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eRENATE STENDHAL\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c!----\u003e","brand":"IF SF PUBLISHING","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49148094742845,"sku":"9780985977368","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9780985977368ita.jpg?v=1721664374"}],"url":"https:\/\/itascabooks.com\/collections\/brooks-roddan.oembed","provider":"Itasca Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}