#rachelbell

[adamgnade]

More of the stuff you can find at my shop during my holiday sale. Priority shipping and gift wrapping available. www.adamgnade.com

[wearepioneerspress]

Stuff by Rachel Bell, Becky DiGiglio, Justin Pearson, and Tessa Pechenik. Available at http://www.pioneerspress.com/

[scwagner]

Lucius and Rachel

[helloamerica]

We're doing giveaways every day this week.

Here's Monday's: buy a copy of Gary Bunting's essential book on tape, Northern Sketches, and you'll get a copy of Rachel Bell's novella Loving the Ocean Won't Keep It From Killing You.

Hit our store www.helloamerica.bandcamp.com You can also get it from www.adamgnade.com/shop

An earlier incarnation of this label was an imprint of Pioneers Press and Rachel's book was the first one we published.

[wearepioneerspress]

On sale. Only $10! https://pioneerspress.com/products/loving-the-ocean-wont-keep-it-from-killing-you

[wearepioneerspress]

Ebook by Rachel Bell. Available at our site, https://pioneerspress.com/collections/everything/products/hate-sleeping-alone-bonus-track-e-book/

[wearepioneerspress]

Out now! Loving the Ocean Won't Keep it from Killing You by Rachel Bell. Available on Hello America, an imprint Adam Glnade is curating for us. Get the book at http://www.pioneerspress.com/

[crsdrw]

Review: welcome to your new life with you being happy by rachel bell

I sometimes wonder what would happen if everyone under 30 went on strike. Stopped doing anything for anyone but themselves and their peers.  

That’s what this book is like, at first glance self-absorbed but ultimately stunning in its refusal to be used and in its insistence of itself.

Bell’s work is, in other words, some great daydream of Emerson's Transcendentalism. Her voice is that of the Transparent Eyeball, manifested now. Her voice, I mean, is proud and clear. It is “absorbent”. It takes in everything, every pain and pleasure and plain detail of life. Back in the day Emerson wanted to ask a question:

 “to what end is nature?”

And this is Rachel Bell’s answer. It is a slim fold of paper, with a cardstock cover. Mine is yellow. On the front is a photo of Rachel from 8th Grade. The title is italicized. The work is honest and inventive. It is a piece of performance art, direct, practically alive, challenging the space between the creator and the audience. It is beautiful and simple. Unpretentious, and unapologetic. It is “Alt-Lit” in a way, in that it is personal and brief, in that it is sincere and barrierless in its collage of life-slices. Take this excerpt:

             “On Halloween 2014 I dressed up as the Virgin Mary and went to a party. I started two chants on the dance floor: ‘Squad! Squad! Squad!’ and ‘I’m a piece of shit! I’m a piece of shit!’ When I was leaving I changed my tampon in an alley.”

            and this one too

            “We are laying in my bed and your eyebrows fit in my            mouth.            I slurp up both of them, two idyllic noodles in the soup of            freckles on your face”

 Combined they show the gamut Bell is running, and the delightful mix of bright language play (eyebrows as ‘idyllic noodles’ in this latter bit) and upfront truth (everything in the former, but also (I assume) the ‘your eyebrows fit in my mouth’ line). Again in the former, Bell also indicates a contemporary awareness of time, and presents the recent past frozen in a sort of exactitude. A state we have come to expect from our never-before-seen ability to capture the present as it happens, not in hindsight or with reflection, but with undressed immediacy, immediacy that does not end.

Each piece of the book reads like it exists now and always both wholly on its own, and as some indivisible piece of a larger system. And the skill with which Bell delivers this sentiment inclines the reader to celebrate both aspects without trying to give precedence to either. Her lack of reticence is inspiring and graceful in this regard, as she balances the challenge of communicating with the weight of self-awareness and 21st century irony, by barreling on with a voice speaking of all it sees, feels, and experiences.

It begs my reference to Emerson, and to the great project of American poetic spirituality at large, by digging into life and holding up in the light what mundanity we may all be overlooking. It does all of this with a youthful tenacity and exuberance that just can’t help but be passed onto the reader.   

And yet much like my earlier comment, the youthfulness of this book could be polarizing. It feels like it is written for a certain audience, and it will ultimately work best for that audience. At the same time though, the challenges of the work are a testimony to its power and the fact that as readers people should always seek out something to push their boundaries.

“Alt-Lit” has grown in appeal to certain demographic, and work like Rachel’s seems to strike most dearly at the heart of educated “social”-media saturated creatives. This work is both not for the working class, or the academic. It is for a new class that has formed in between, a class heavy with student debt, saddled with underemployment, and generally self-motivated. A class that has seen the failures of traditional institutions, and outgrown the ironic critiques of those institutions. The first group of humans to grow up with the internet.  

When older people call me a “millennial” and think it means something or that they can expect something from me, I will from here on out wish that they could read this book. They really should read this book. You should really read this book either way.