"Burning Books" In Portland

Kal Cobalt

Portland, Oregon is home to a thriving community of well-connected burners, and so it comes as no surprise that Jessica Bruder's reading at the legendary Powell's City of Books was well-attended. As the largest independent bookstore in the country, Powell's is no stranger to popular readings, and yet the staff found themselves adding more chairs to the reading space not once but twice to accommodate the crowd.

Bruder lived in New York when she first heard of Burning Man, joking that "we get stuff eventually out there." Burning Man struck her as "a wonderful disaster -- what an awful idea," but she was also fascinated by the idea of so many people "making their imagination tangible out in the desert."

As Bruder attended more and more burns, she accrued the usual assortment of stories from the playa. Experienced burners hid mannequins away in their trucks to give gate searchers looking for stowaways a laugh. Others settled in rowdy theme camps but also set up tents in the individual camper area to "sally forth to their country home and chill out" when it all got a bit much. "I've had years where I wished I could take my sleeping bag, cut some armholes in it, and have that be my evening attire," Bruder said of the sometimes brutally cold nights. "I have a friend who did that, actually." One year, Bruder worked on the Serpent Mother, a giant interactive art installation with a 168-foot skeleton. Burners could trigger embedded flamethrowers with the push of a button or control the hydraulically-powered serpent head with a joystick. "One of the things I loved about it was that it seemed really really impossible," Bruder explained. "Even to the people building it."

Bruder has used the tenets of Burning Man not only as the subject matter of Burning Book but also in the formation of the book itself. Last year, Bruder took the first draft to Burning Man and threw it on the fire -- "Burning Man-uscript," she joked. This year, she planned to bring a first edition to the flames. This symbiosis of book and subject is carried through into the organization of the book itself: "I felt that I had to kill the Man straight off so that I could move the text past him," Bruder explained, "so that's what I did" -- the book begins straight off with the burning of the Man. The book is a smorgasbord of photographs, images of Burning Man "relics," and text, as chaotically orderly and viscerally entertaining as the event itself. Even Bruder's presentation at Powell's retained the multisensory aspects of a burn: photographs from the book were presented as a slideshow as Bruder read from the text.

Last October, Bruder moved from New York to Portland. "Here, I feel like I can take a bit of foreknowledge [of Burning Man] for granted," she notes. A show-of-hands poll of the reading's audience indicated that roughly a third were veteran Burners, with another third comprised of virgins planning to attend this year. The Q&A generally leaned toward the practical, with an exchange of tips on how to avoid playa foot (Dr. Bronner's was a popular solution) and how to get hooked in to the Portland burner community.

Burning Book seems to portray Burning Man's community as accurately as possible given the restrictions of its media. For someone like myself -- unlikely to make it to Burning Man until 2008 or 2009 -- it's a welcome and tantalizing taste of what the full experience, in all its inexplicable insanity, must be like. Near the end of the Q&A session, Bruder was asked to sum up Burning Man in a sentence for those who were unfamiliar. Smiling, Bruder replied, "I had 44,000 words."

For details on Bruder's work, visit the website -- "it's got more pics/layouts/book tour dates/bedlam than you can shake a flaming stick at," says Bruder.

Photo of Jessica Bruder by Kal Cobalt.