a revealing passage in Across My Big Brass Bed, mid-novel....

I could simply have learned how to play “Lay Lady Lay” and left it at that.  But no:  I was lofty aloof weird weird weird.  A snob who thought motorcycle racing and classical music demonstrated some astonishing cultural reach that only a superior, yes, that was the word, a superior person could apprehend.  Orpheus.  Marlon Brando.  Christ.  Me:  I could not believe I even glimpsed these delusions, much less embraced them.  And yet….  And yet I was a sexual prodigy!  There was probably no woman I could not seduce!  A daredevil who played the flute!  A Christian ascetic and a reckless playboy!  I could do it.  I could in fact pull it off.  If anyone one were truly capable of such a show, it were me.  Lightning strokes of transformation:  I felt it in my bones, my loins, my pounding heart.  But to parade it?  To confess it, so early on?  Nightmare would surely ensue. My soul would be burned at the stake.

A VIEW OF THE NOVEL ON TUMBLR

http://garyamdahl.tumblr.com/

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LITERARY BIOGRAPHY--THE GREATEST HITS

Gary Byrdelle Amdahl was born in Jackson, Minnesota, on August 4th, 1956. He was raised and lived in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, spent several years in upstate New York and Connecticut, with a brief turn in Raleigh, North Carolina, and now lives in Redlands, California.

His plays, produced in the Twin Cities in the 1980s on professional stages with Equity actors, include “Going Down,” “Fall Down Go Boom,” “Dead Hand,” “Tonight's the Night,” “Muzzle Flash,” “The Border,” “Hawaii,” “Getting the Hell Out of Dodge,” and “Night, Mystery, Secresie, and Sleep.” He was awarded two Jerome Fellowships at The Playwright's Lab in Minneapolis, and was a participant in Midwest Playlabs.

His stories, essays, poetry (original, translated, and even set to music), book and theater reviews, and literary features articles and interviews have appeared in Agni, A Public Space, The Massachusetts Review, The Gettysburg Review, Fiction, The Quarterly, Santa Monica Review, Third Bed, Minnetonka Review, New York Times Book Review, The Nation, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, The Hungry Mind Review, and many other monthlies, weeklies, and dailies. He was awarded a Pushcart Prize and appeared in the PP anthology.

His books are: Across My Big Brass Bed (2014, Artistically Declined Press) The Intimidator Still Lives in Our Hearts (2013, Artistically Declined Press), I Am Death (2008, Milkweed Editions), Visigoth (2006, Milkweed Editions, winner of ME National Fiction Prize), and, with Leslie Brody, A Motel of the Mind (2001, Philos Press).

With Intimidator, Artistically Declined Press has begun The Amdahl Library Project, which will see six more books published, one each January until 2019. Much of this work has been previously published in the magazines listed above; The Amdahl Library Project will see these books published in complete, unabridged, uniform editions.

 

THE COVER!

READING FROM THE INTIMIDATOR STILL LIVES IN OUR HEARTS at the University of Redlands, September 2013

Hello everybody.

 

I have a novel coming out on the 24th of January, from Artistically Declined Press.  It's called ACROSS MY BIG BRASS BED.  Some of you may know the first section of it (there are four sections, 100pp. apiece), as it was published by Sven Birkerts, Bill Pierce, and Billy Giraldi in Agni in 2009.

 

That is about all I can say in terms of publicity.

 

There is of course The Greatest Blurb of All Time, from Barry Hannah...comparing me to, wait for it, Camus, but while I certainly can't get enough of that, I am sure you can.

 

Nevertheless I am going to try whatever may be honorably tried, in the hope of busting a personal record:  VISIGOTH sold 3000 copies, I AM DEATH sold 900, and THE INTIMIDATOR STILL LIVES IN OUR HEARTS, by far the best book of the three, sold 72.  ACROSS MY BIG BRASS BED is better still, and far less conventional.  That is not to say it is bizarre or eccentric--but whatever it is.t does not conform to banal expectations.  Perhaps you have to be a Navy SEAL-type commando of reading to handle, I don't know....  We are expecting, in any case. to sell approximately zero copies.

 

And what do you know, from out of the blue arrives a video of a reading I did at the University of Redlands earlier this fall.  It's comprised of bits from the title story of the INTIMIDATOR collection, the funny bits, the bookseller-in-Los Angeles bits, with all the movie stars and weirdos.

 

Brings out the performer in me that I shoulda been all along, I guess.  Any rate, I'm thinking that if I can be seen causing a relatively large audience (150) culled from the prime demographic (young persons) to guffaw, I may be seen as an author whose work may be safely purchased and enjoyed, in serene moderation, without having to take a class in Me Studies.

 

Take a look if you've got a few minutes.  Pass it around it if you like it.  And please, if you have ideas about marketing and publicity for a weary old amateur, lemme know?  (And oh yes, thousand pardons to the magnificent persons with whom I sold books in those days, at Dutton's in Brentwood:  you not only lived the story, you have heard me crank it up far too many times.)

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKBWplSNpIc&feature=em-upload_owner

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kw34XHtKpM

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVFEAyYmS4E

 

 

 

Gary Amdahl: The Intimidator Still Lives In Our Hearts (part one)

Gary Amdahl: The Intimidator Still Lives In Our Hearts (part two)

Gary Amdahl: The Intimidator Still Lives In Our Hearts (part three: Q&A)