Golf is Ruining My Life, Roddan's New Book is Equal Parts Art Book, Social Criticism, and Personal Confession of One Man's Struggle with the Game
San Francisco, Ca-Q: Did the legendary Dada artist Kurt Schwitters ever play golf?
A: No, but he would have loved the game!
On a rainy day in San Francisco, the narrator of this hybrid tale decides not to play golf in his regular Wednesday game and instead visits The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. What follows is a tour-de-force series of meditations, where he 'goes inside the ropes' of this confounding game, hovering between hope and despair, joy and misery, memory and real-time events, traversing often perversely mystifying terrain with the quirky and always contrary ways of his golfing friends alongside his trusty sidekick Jack, while also encountering the life-changing art of the legendary Dadaist, Kurt Schwitters.
"It's a book of reckonings", says author Brooks Roddan, "playful and serious, told by a poet- golfer who has a love/hate relationship with the game. I had as much fun writing it as I have playing golf."
Does the narrator hate golf? No, he loves the game but sometimes dislikes the people who play it, including himself. Roddan shares a line
or two from the book, ones he thinks sets the tone: "Nobody understands my struggle! It's as if I'm walking in a circle that I've made with my own hands and can't find a way out."
Chock full of photos and golf memorabilia, designed by Thomas Ingalls, an avid golfer who art directed the legendary Shivas Irons Quarterly, the book is both a verbal and visual chronicle of great respect and some pointed disdain for the game.
"Golf's turned me into a person I'd never had been had I never played," the narrator of the book says. Roddan says, "Golf is ruining my life, but it won't ruin yours. I promise."