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Across My Big Brass Bed
I failed rather conclusively to write a short description of Across My Big Brass Bed when
it was first published in 2014, and am failing now as well. It seems to me to be “perfectly
indescribable.” Which is in fact part of what I set out to accomplish, but I see that my
failure to be knowledgeable and persuasive about my own work is going to be a
hindrance now too, as the novel in a new edition has just been published. I and the
publisher want the thing purchased and read, but publicity is a tar-pit in which greater
animals than I have perished.
Descriptions, as we have come to know them, depend on convention just as much as the
novels themselves (as we have come to know them) do. In the absence of infantile
“hooks” (as reviewers have come to know and depend on them), here are a few words
describing what I wanted to accomplish.
I wanted first of all, at the source, only to explore why Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay”
had so moved me when I heard it on my little red transistor radio, lying in bed one night
in 1969. Certainly it was the music itself, Pete Drake’s pedal steel guitar, Dylan’s strange
voice—lower and smoother than in previous hits but still a mind-blowing departure from
other singers I liked, The Walker Brothers, The Classics IV, Johnny Rivers—and the
profoundest of the old country rhythms. But I was also thirteen, right? I got an erection.
We go to bed at night, as babies, as little children, expecting to wake up in the same
world and in the same bodies, the same selves, that we mysteriously left when we fell
asleep. And, for what seems like forever, we do. Then one day, having done nothing but
go to sleep and wake up and go to sleep and wake up, we find ourselves profoundly
changed—so much so that we can very easily fall prey to despair over the brief pointless
torture that life suddenly seems to be. Some lucky few wake up simply older and wiser
and stiffer in the joints, weaker in the lungs and limbs, but some wake up, as Dostoevsky
put it; as 'sick men, wicked men'.
I am certainly one of the latter, and have tried in this novel, to do two things: to suggest
how swiftly and seamlessly, how instantly and wholly, the transformations overwhelm
us, or at least overwhelmed me; and to record an account of my transformation that
doesn't declare me innocent of all wrongdoing or attempt to expiate admitted evil—or
even, as in my literary models (Augustine, Rousseau, Dostoevsky et al), to simply
confess, repent, and be forgiven, but to show how it happened sans the conventions that
make it all seem natural and entertaining, but in the end false and lifeless.
That is to say, I have attempted to write a true and living book that is emphatically and
proudly a fiction—not a memoir.
c\s editor
None of us (us?) enjoys this part of offering up a book in this manner--the encapsulation, the blurb, the review, the hook, snag, wrassle, takedown, blip, grenade we fall on to save our friend...So I made Mr. Amdahl do it himself. I won't apologize. I'm sorry.
Rick Harsch
it was first published in 2014, and am failing now as well. It seems to me to be “perfectly
indescribable.” Which is in fact part of what I set out to accomplish, but I see that my
failure to be knowledgeable and persuasive about my own work is going to be a
hindrance now too, as the novel in a new edition has just been published. I and the
publisher want the thing purchased and read, but publicity is a tar-pit in which greater
animals than I have perished.
Descriptions, as we have come to know them, depend on convention just as much as the
novels themselves (as we have come to know them) do. In the absence of infantile
“hooks” (as reviewers have come to know and depend on them), here are a few words
describing what I wanted to accomplish.
I wanted first of all, at the source, only to explore why Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay”
had so moved me when I heard it on my little red transistor radio, lying in bed one night
in 1969. Certainly it was the music itself, Pete Drake’s pedal steel guitar, Dylan’s strange
voice—lower and smoother than in previous hits but still a mind-blowing departure from
other singers I liked, The Walker Brothers, The Classics IV, Johnny Rivers—and the
profoundest of the old country rhythms. But I was also thirteen, right? I got an erection.
We go to bed at night, as babies, as little children, expecting to wake up in the same
world and in the same bodies, the same selves, that we mysteriously left when we fell
asleep. And, for what seems like forever, we do. Then one day, having done nothing but
go to sleep and wake up and go to sleep and wake up, we find ourselves profoundly
changed—so much so that we can very easily fall prey to despair over the brief pointless
torture that life suddenly seems to be. Some lucky few wake up simply older and wiser
and stiffer in the joints, weaker in the lungs and limbs, but some wake up, as Dostoevsky
put it; as 'sick men, wicked men'.
I am certainly one of the latter, and have tried in this novel, to do two things: to suggest
how swiftly and seamlessly, how instantly and wholly, the transformations overwhelm
us, or at least overwhelmed me; and to record an account of my transformation that
doesn't declare me innocent of all wrongdoing or attempt to expiate admitted evil—or
even, as in my literary models (Augustine, Rousseau, Dostoevsky et al), to simply
confess, repent, and be forgiven, but to show how it happened sans the conventions that
make it all seem natural and entertaining, but in the end false and lifeless.
That is to say, I have attempted to write a true and living book that is emphatically and
proudly a fiction—not a memoir.
c\s editor
None of us (us?) enjoys this part of offering up a book in this manner--the encapsulation, the blurb, the review, the hook, snag, wrassle, takedown, blip, grenade we fall on to save our friend...So I made Mr. Amdahl do it himself. I won't apologize. I'm sorry.
Rick Harsch
Paperback
First published January 21, 2014
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52 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 11, 2023
This'll put you through the ringer all right. But you'll come through, battered and bruised, but gleaming. Review to come.
December 25, 2024
Hmmm…
If I were to blurb this gentleman, it would go like this:
“Across My Big Brass Bed - An Intellectual Autobiography in Twenty-four Hours takes place in an America beginning in/around the Kennedy assassination and with that, going forward, is a memoir of sorts yielding a Proustian introspection women should pay attention to in the same way men should pay attention to Ferrante.”
I don’t want to believe the Norman Mailer comparison, but it pretty much is. Chronically wanting to put his dick in or around every woman around him. Only difference, up to a certain point I feel, is in the narrators teenage life. With that being said, underground man tropes aside(?), the sentences blow Mailer out of the water.
What you will get outside of the fuckboy’s plea are existential wall of text prose, car races, pole vaulting, janitorial cleansing, flute playing, and so much more.
Shut up and drive. And do drugs.
Will be reading more Amdahl soon and happens to be the only book I enjoyed in the month of December.
If I were to blurb this gentleman, it would go like this:
“Across My Big Brass Bed - An Intellectual Autobiography in Twenty-four Hours takes place in an America beginning in/around the Kennedy assassination and with that, going forward, is a memoir of sorts yielding a Proustian introspection women should pay attention to in the same way men should pay attention to Ferrante.”
I don’t want to believe the Norman Mailer comparison, but it pretty much is. Chronically wanting to put his dick in or around every woman around him. Only difference, up to a certain point I feel, is in the narrators teenage life. With that being said, underground man tropes aside(?), the sentences blow Mailer out of the water.
What you will get outside of the fuckboy’s plea are existential wall of text prose, car races, pole vaulting, janitorial cleansing, flute playing, and so much more.
Shut up and drive. And do drugs.
Will be reading more Amdahl soon and happens to be the only book I enjoyed in the month of December.
May 11, 2025
The last one hundred pages were compelling, but I lost sight of why things were happening and at times what was happening. In the final fifty or sixty pages, characters from the beginning returned more frequently, and that heightened the unity of the novel and gave me greater grasp on the book. It is possibly my personal circumstances, and nothing to do with the book, that made it more challenging toward the end. This novel has a lot from Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota--Dinkytown gets more than one mention--as well as other regions. Subjects include classical music, motorbike racing, 1960s culture, the Vietnam War, and much more. I highly recommend you check out Gary Amdahl's Across My Big Brass Bed and other titles from Corona\Samizdat Press.
March 24, 2023
Amdahl is a master wordsmith, and each page, a painting of a man’s progress through existence. This is one hell of a read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews