Description
‘Inside a Gleaming Feeling’ is an excellently/appropriately titled collection of essays by Craig Pollard. The book contains essays about American hardcore, Migos, Uncreative Writing, online aesthetics. The book inspires questions like “how can a book be so dense with ideas and yet so brisk?” or “how does Pollard take all these things so seriously and yet the book does not feel sober?” or “How does he even know about so many things?” It is a wonderful thing to read about Nation of Ulysses, a band I have cared about for half my life, and have Pollard refract Raoul Vaneigem, Audre Lorde, Ian MacKaye, and Maggie Nelson through ‘Birth of the Ulysses Aesthetic’ without it ever once feeling ridiculous. Or to follow his circling around the crystalline perfection of the song “Versace,” his admiration crisp and inescapable, and to feel no distance between Pollard and the song, no scholarly audits here. In his introduction to the book, Pollard mentions that he often feels like his writing has no clear home, it works out of an academic context but doesn’t feel at ease there. This scans for me – I don’t think a Hito Steyerl reference would fly on the Passion of the Weiss and likewise I feel my teeth grinding into powder when I think about grad students addressing the joyousness of Animal Collective. But all of this works for Pollard. In some sense, this placelessness is the most successful part of ‘Inside a Gleaming Feeling’ because it ensured that Pollard made a generous, welcoming book, for ideas and readers alike. This is what I imagine is the ‘Gleaming Feeling’ as glib as that sounds.
4 3/4 inches x 7 inches, 148 pages, perfect bound
Published by The Grass is Green in the Fields For You, Glasgow
