The Night It Happens the Moon Is Murderously Bright

It’s a slim collection of just six stories (two of flash length), but Claudia Smith’s new book, Quarry Light, from Magic Helicopter Press, is dense and deep and brilliantly written. It is a book to read slowly, to let sink in to one’s heart and mind, and to ponder long after reading.

I’ve been a fan of Smith’s work for many years, having workshopped with her in Kim Chinquee’s Hot Pants group and having read her chapbooks, The Sky is a Well and Other Shorts (Rose Metal Press, 2007) and Put Your Head in My Lap (Future Tense Books, 2009).

The stories in Quarry Light display Smith’s lovely prose and use of specific detail as well as her gift for keenly portraying the lives of young girls and women. Particularly in her evocation of childhood, one feels as if these memories and details remain as clear and tangible and compelling to Smith as the present day. This serves the stories and the reader both.

The opening story, “Catgirl,” is one that Smith notes in her acknowledgements as “taking [her] writing into a new direction.” Written for the anthology Lone Star Noir, the story is indeed deeper and darker than anything I’d previously read of hers. Yet, it opens with the sort of winsome image familiar to fans of her stories:

The girls are waiting for the ferry, dangling their legs out the side of the van, popsicle juice dripping down their chins. Four girls: Trina, Tricia, Grace, and Allie.

From there, Smith builds her story, brick by brick, detail by detail, going deeper into the lives of the girls, taking the reader along on this weekend trip to the beach with Tricia and Trina’s divorced mother. The story is juxtaposed with a children’s rhyme/song the girls sing throughout, Miss Mary Mack. As the story takes a darker turn, so do the stanzas of the song.

On display here and in all the stories of this collection is Smith’s masterful storytelling, her ability to build tension, set a tone of foreboding, to draw the reader ever forward, to make the heart beat a little faster. Things grow increasingly off-kilter as Smith introduces a new character here, an ominous detail there, weaving past and present and even the future with subtlety and control.

The reader begins to know the girls are not safe even if they are unaware of any danger and at one point, they laugh and sing:

She cannot cry, cry, cry

That’s why she begs begs begs

She begs to die, die, die.

The story takes its inevitable turn and Smith punctuates it with one perfect sentence:

The night it happens the moon is murderously bright.

The imagery of the last two paragraphs of this story is among the most haunting and devastating I’ve ever read.

Always in Smith’s stories we see how deeply she understands, and uses, the past as an illumination of the present. Stories can sometimes get bogged down in this way but Smith makes both past and present so alive, so compelling, that the shifts in time feel seamless and right.

In the story, “As If Someone Had Polished the Air” an intelligent and imaginative child befriends first a rat, then small girl she discovers living in her closet. Her father is rarely around and her mother is troubled, alcoholic. Smith makes the child’s fear and loneliness palpable:

That night Agatha felt sick. Her mother had been dead drunk; she wouldn’t remember what she’d said or done. Her mother, she now know, was kind of a loon. In the dark, the flowers on her walls were scary. They looked as though they might grow right into the room and strangle the dolls, the furniture, her.

In “Lucy,” the longest story in the collection, a young woman returns from her grandmother’s funeral to find a dog left in her yard, a dog she takes in and cares for. Throughout, the prose is clean, precise, and evocative, always hitting the mark, as here where the woman recalls a chance encounter on a bus trip:

New Mexico in darkness was bare mountains looming outside the bus window like a giant’s bones, giving their conversation a solemnity and proportion she appreciated. She was weepy without being drunk.

“Lucy” is another story where past events, heartaches, and losses impinge on the present. In this way, Smith draws us in to her characters and makes them unforgettable.

There is a gothic feel to Quarry Light, inhabited as it is by ghosts and rats, imperiled and abused children and dysfunctional mothers. Gothic, with a strong, beating heart. Claudia Smith mines the depths of sadness and loss and human frailty with bravery and compassion. These stories will leave their mark.

The Destruction and Violence of Identity and Identification

It’s probably not true that I met Jordaan Mason by Google image searching “two headed boy.” But that’s how I remember it. This was back when I was in high school, for shivermouth’s sake. Jordaan was pretty much my age and he was doing a record label called Oh! Map. They put out haunting twitches, hopeful folk, scream cream. Then I remember driving up California foothill Black Bart madrone and straw-colored highways to Nevada City to see Jordaan and his friends play music in a theatre that smelled like silver dollars. Jordaan and his friends hugged each other and knew how to play the saw. It was maybe the first time I ever wore my favorite cowboy shirt in public.

Years later, in October of 2007, I made a to-do list that included “clip your toenails” and “buy chips and shit for Jordaan’s show.” Jordaan showed up in an essay I wrote for Nervebut they cut most of him out, even though he made the essay sadder and more nuanced and less huckstery. He is always doing that kind of shit to the world. Like one time he told me he wrote a novel, and I was like, “Oh? Can I read it?” And lo and behold: The Skin Team is that novel, here with us now maybe three years after I first read it, and it is as good at itself as Jordaan is good at every room I’ve ever known him to sing his way through.

The Skin Team concerns the interloopings and intercouplings and mind habits and drastic measures of three people. Two boys, one girl, all young. Plus there’s a Power Company, but that catches on fire. The Skin Team is one of the most honest books about sex I’ve ever read. There are horses and maps and light-bulb vomit and tag teams. This is a thick book rioting all over itself with skin and shaking its head at science and stomping/sobbing pretty much every time the world tells it to shush. What I’ve been telling people is that it’s like if Dennis Cooper rewrote The Virgin Suicides. What Dennis Cooper says is that “it’s about as beautiful as fiction can ever be” and “you would never suspect how difficult it is to write even fairly about such things, much less with Jordaan Mason’s radiant emotional grace and super-deft detailing and flawless style.”

This isn’t just a novel I published because I’ve known Jordaan for like ten years; it’s more like the only reason I’ve been friends with some random dude in Canada for ten years is because he has one of the truest throats. Jordaan is double-talented, what a jerk. Playing his high school songs on my high school radio show or adult-putting his adult book out in the world are two things I’ve done because of the same feeling. Which is this feeling: Jordaan Mason is hollering so much real-talk through this all around fucknut dark that he makes our crooked faces feel not so apart.

Here’s some talking I did with him:

Mike Young: You’ve been working on The Skin Team for a long time. This book has traveled with you through a lot of crazy singing-saw time on the road as a musician and now into your homey plaid domestic life as a filmmaker/student/husband. Can you completely ignore my oversimplification of your life and tell us about The Skin Team‘s genesis and process?

Jordaan Mason: I started writing what is now The Skin Team around the time that I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was in my first year of university, but I was traveling a lot, playing music, and my ability to focus on school was diminishing. During that time I went through a series of medications until I found the right balance or whatever. One of the medications I was taking early on made me feel really detached from everything and that detachment was a big part of where the text originated from: trying to describe this complete separation of my body from everything around it and from itself. And trying to figure out how or even if this had any effect on my sense of identity, how does having this illness inform it, how do we get named and categorized through these intangible things through medical discourse. This detachment from my sense of self turned into these three characters who then stuck around in my head even after I sorted the medication stuff out. I kept picking at them, gradually, wondering why they had taken up residence in me. I wrote as a way of trying to figure them out even if they refused to be figured out, even if they didn’t want to be categorized.

I dropped out of university before entering my third year. I wasn’t in the right head space for academic thinking and was much more interested in traveling and playing music, in losing myself in creating things for a while, and so I did. I devoted a lot of my time when I wasn’t traveling to this text until it grew into what seemed to be something like a novel. It took about two years of writing until that’s what I realized I had been writing. But just as it was starting to really come together, I lost the majority of the book in a thunderstorm computer crash. I was left with a document of hieroglyphics and symbols and sentence fragments. I also had a very early draft on paper that was about twenty pages long. I had to start over (and also learn to back things up).

During this time I was living at a house/art space called The Oxford Hotel and I was working on a record called Divorce Lawyers I Shaved My Head with my then-band, The Horse Museum. When it was nearly finished, I took a break from touring to save up some money so we could release the album and worked a shitty telemarketing job. I rewrote most of the book during my time there. In between phone calls, I would write. I would then come home and work with what I’d been able to jot down between calls, expand it. After two months or so, I was back to a working draft of the book’s narrative. I spent the next year editing and working on structure until it became essentially what it is now. And then I went back to school.

MY: The Skin Team has three main characters and a lot of heft placed on the idea of threedom. Even the cover image was sewn in three parts: the cover fabric, the spine fabric, and the back fabric, which—hey, look at that—has three boxes on it. These three fabrics overlap and shove together in interesting and even somewhat violent ways, just like your three main characters. Can you introduce those three main characters to us?

JM: Since the novel is largely about the destruction and violence of identity and identification, the characters in the book are generally nameless and devoid of physical description. Their identities are fluid and bleed into one another but they still stand alone as separate entities through the structure of the book. The characters are:

1. A boy who has a series of physical ailments which doctors cannot detect, including but not limited to the feeling that he is swallowing fire in his sleep and that he is being magnetically drawn to True North. He begins to believe that his illness is caused by the distribution of energy through electric wires which spread throughout his town and, in turn, through him, and the genesis of that energy is the Power Company Building. He has varying sexual experiences with both of the other characters. His sections are called “The Power is Out, Sing.”

2. A girl who is called Sarah (despite the fact that this is not really her name). After the death of her mother, she spends most of her time with horses in the stables and sneaks out of the house at night to be with boys at the Power Company Building. She still believes in singing but does not want to admit it. Her section is called “Of Moving Water, Erosion, and Other Alterations.”

3. Another boy who is slightly older, who spends most nights wandering the woods, who builds up conspiracies in his head, who thinks often of fire and destruction. He acts as a kind of guide to the others; the voice of unreason. His section is called “Of Thermal Energy, Continuous Operation, and the Efficient Use of Land.”

MY: This is the portion of the interview where I pretend to be really dumb and use the word “stuff” a lot. For example: I began falling in love with this book after meeting my way around the three characters we just talked about, but what really drove my heart into my knees was what I’m going to call “all the science stuff.” So what’s the deal with all the science stuff (Continuous Operation, Thermal Energy, True North) in the book?

JM: Science is the realm of naming, so I had to wrestle with that in this text. I wanted to destroy the logic of science, to unname things and start over. So while I was writing I started reading science textbooks instead of poetry and discovered that they aren’t that really that different somehow. I tried to write science textbooks but it sort of came out backwards. I ended up writing the kind of science textbooks that make sense to people like me who think that science textbooks don’t really make any sense. Science is the kind of the thing where if you explain it to me that this is the reason why the earth is tilted on an axis it’s like, yes, rationally I understand that, but also really why is the earth tilted on an axis? It’s like when you’re a kid and you ask adults questions and they give you the answer but you keep asking why. The characters in this book keep asking why.

So all this science stuff really started to infect the world of the book. Fragments of language and concepts from the textbooks I was reading turned into characters. They grew bodies and they spoke out and took up space on the page. They interacted with these three people I had been trying to figure out. And the science stuff kind of makes it feel like sometimes the book is really grounded in a kind of real-logic of the real-world but then it refutes itself, it asks why again, and it does so from its own mouth, with its own language. I basically almost failed all my science classes in high school, so there you have it.

MY: Where/who does the “map is not the territory” stuff come from and what does that stuff have to do with anything?

JM: My partner and now-husband Jason introduced me to the work of Alfred Korzybski, who wrote the dictum “the map is not the territory.” It came up because I was trying to explain my book to him, all this stuff about Map North versus True North versus the body versus our identities etc. etc., and he was like, “You should read about structural differential.” He had taken this class that his professor jokingly called Science and Unsanity and he gave me all of his notes. I read them and got really lost in those ideas. They were basically the theory-version of everything I had been writing, this denial of identity, this distantiation between spoken or written language and what we really mean. It was basically the only science-related stuff that I read during the writing process that actually made sense to me and it became really integral to the project.

MY: Poker and the game of tag going on in the woods with color-named teams and horse racing—what’s the deal with games and stuff in this book?

JM: Games are a big part of the language of children, and I wanted to puncture the text with reminders that these characters aren’t actually adults yet. I’m particularly drawn to how games all have their own language, their own structure of rules. And they’re so ingrained that we forget that the fun we are having is actually being regimented and controlled, that we’ve been out in the woods playing tag for hours even though it wouldn’t really matter if we got caught. I’m also just a big games person.

MY: You and I both have a lot of affinity for Leonard Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers, which he has called more of a sunstroke than a novel. I feel a little Beautiful Losers in your book too, and I don’t just mean Leonard Cohen via the “the room just filled up with mosquitos / they heard that my body was free” allusion. What are your feelings about Beautiful Losers a) as a writer, b) as a lilac tree, and c) as a Canadian?

JM: a) I think in terms of writing articulately/inarticulately about the body, Beautiful Losers is the book that really has stuck with me most. It’s scattered occasionally but I admire how much he tries to pack in. It’s insanely ambitious and really gets my gut. I knew pretty immediately that I was in the wrong creative writing program when I brought in Beautiful Losers to read aloud in class as an example of “good prose” and everyone else brought in very straight-forward realist stuff. My professor later called me out on trying to provoke the class by reading something so “shocking.” This should reveal a little bit more about why I dropped out of university the first time around.

b) Beautiful Losers is a book that’s told in fragments that all come together even when it doesn’t feel like they are going to. It works so well on both the small-scale sentence level and as a larger project. I feel like I’m still returning to this book and still learning so much from it. It grows larger in my heart with each re-read; I pluck it from the shelf often.

c) My super-anglo-basic-French-skills have helped me to understand all of the untranslated French portions of the book, which is a very Canadian thing, I guess. There’s a lot of Canada in that book even though he wrote in Greece and even though he doesn’t really write about Canada in the way that most Canadian writers generally write about Canada. My book doesn’t mention Canada once by name but I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.

MY: I know you’re someone who invests a ton of energy and love toward your friends and collaboration with them. You helped run The Oxford Hotel, a now legendary old house show spot in Toronto. And, in fact, I met you at an awesome theatre in Nevada City, CA in 2003 where you were playing music with a whole menagerie of friends. Plus I think America wouldn’t let you bring your accordion over the border because we’re dumbs. What does collaboration mean for/to you?

JM: Collaboration has always been important to me but it has become even more-so with time. I played music alone for a number of years but it was always within a community so it never felt like I was doing it alone-alone. Touring and meeting people and sharing spaces and opening The Oxford Hotel eventually led to The Horse Museum, a band that I was in from 2007-2010. Even though I technically wrote those songs they were completely transformed when my friends started to play them with me. That was really a community project, a lot of people were involved in bringing that together. We all really inspired one another and it was during that time that I was also writing the book. Everyone was going through a lot of heavy shit and we were all there for one another through it. I had to talk out these ideas and I had a lot of support and time and energy from my peers. Writing a novel is a pretty solitary thing I guess, but again, it didn’t feel like I was doing it alone-alone. Those years were tough, too. I wouldn’t have made it through without those people.

We Are All Blocking Doors for You Modern-Day Illusionists: A Review of Jordan Stempleman's No, Not Today

With his new collection, No, Not Today, fresh from Magic Helicopter Press, a dateless diary of days both elided and repeated, Jordan Stempleman has offered proof that he is magical.

I experienced a significant portion of these poems for the first time while sitting at the kitchen table eating cereal in my parents’ house during the small hours of the morning. The latter half, with pita at midday. Each poem rang out to me loud and clear, conversational and tangy.

Personally, I’m more disposed to poems that feel like they’re addressed to someone. I’m the type of person who spends a lot of time alone, so when a poem makes me want to shout it out to someone, it’s always a good sign. These poems caught me up, clicked me into orator mode, drove me to read them aloud to the cat, the turtle (who ate the cat, slowly), to my younger brother.

But the magic, the magic. Stempleman’s poems strive to get off the page and into your life. Exhortative, colloquial little things, they want to get up and walk around your living room. Thursday wants to sleep in your son’s bed. Saturday asks if you’ve got any spare condoms, while Wednesday raids your medicine cabinet and hijacks your Ritalin.

But who are they talking to, besides us? For me, these poems seem like they’re addressed to a close friend or lover. Or, if we take them upon ourselves, maybe someone with whom you’ve already gone too far, to the point where they’ve ceased being a lover; someone who you’ve fucked, and then backpedaled. Someone who’s been intimate, like you know a little more than you’ll let on, and to whom you feel all right offering advice. Vicariousness is a strangely powerful thing. We could all be narrators.

On an early Friday, in the once-couple of p. 12, the narrator broods:

Perennial, bad romanticism.
Well, it depends
on who calls who babe.
You wrapped the robot all wrong.
I’m starting to get infected again.

It’s trouble in the second person, wounded domesticity, something interior that’s fallen apart. The next day, they’re in need of a pharmacy. Who’s open late on a Saturday?

This narrator is one who interrupts herself frequently — interjections, for emphasis, to spur the moment, “wait a moment,” “who’s kidding,” “I’ll say it again” — a person trying to impart this wisdom on the reader, but who’s having an extraordinarily difficult time focusing on what he’s saying.

I think I’ve narrowed down where the magic comes from. It’s all about the slippage, the shifts where the normal suddenly transposes with something else, something strange or fantastic or simply unexpected. The interjections foster the shifts, they say, “Hey, I’m talking to you, now let me take you away.”

To elucidate, I’d like to share the first part of a Tuesday with you, from p. 49:

Let alone the beach with its history
of never going too far out, suggests
what attracts us to this land of so much for ordering in
sandwiches for the receptions of our lives, is, on the one hand,
we are never idle because we can lie our way back,

If we peer in really close at this, we might find that it’s constructed of phrases that aren’t content to stay by themselves, little expressions that butt up against one another — a thought comes along and takes the preceding one over, like the Calvin clones that can’t get a word in edgewise because they’re all interrupting themselves. But each subsequent piece doesn’t just take over, it builds off of those around it, weaving them together to form rafts of words and phrases that float out into space.

This, the moment you realize the lazy waves are taking you, the moment you start lying — this is the slippage I’m talking about, the moments of pure magic: in others, it’s the moment the split halves of the head become an instrument, the insects become human-sized, the city becomes a girl, the typing hands become a bird with a stone tied to its leg, when the cat puts on the sweatpants. When you realize the second person is you.

From another Sunday, another favorite, a little piece of magic from p. 64:

Perhaps it’s difficult to understand we’re probably safe
before anything happens. As it is written, even the earliest biplanes
fell through the air, a sky unwanting to be fixed.

For the sky that rejected those planes, that pushed them downwards and into the ocean, the sky that was content to hang uninterrupted over our heads, keeping us safe just by virtue of being there — the poems in No, Not Today are also addressed to us, for me, and for you.

We Think It Is One Thing but It Changes to Another

As I carried this book around with me, reading, I heard from multiple passersby, “Gross, is that someone throwing up?” to which I replied, “No, I think it is just a kid bobbing for apples.” Their responses then were usually calm, mostly understanding, with maybe even a restatement like we are all guilty of: “Oh. I thought it was someone puking.”

This to me is reading Jason Bredle’s Smiles of the Unstoppable — we think it is one thing but it changes to another, and then another, until we start to see that evolution is the thing that Bredle is chasing down with his use of words.

from “The Song Banana”:

“Sometimes I love the song banana and sometimes the song banana
makes me completely crazy
is what I wrote on a postcard, placed in my pocket
and walked to Happy Foods
wondering what might happen
on one of those days
I’d been feeling especially lost.”

Bredle uses both line breaks as well as word choice to negate what comes before, to change objects from one line to the next, to stay ahead of the reader by steps and steps. Smiles of the Unstoppable is a mountain of these, all well-crafted and burbling, so while this effect could be awful in the wrong hands, it is fantastically resonant here. Bredle, in his third collection of poems, has an understanding of how this evolution affects us as we read — knowledge that this practice of ever-changing keeps us forward, makes us want, keeps us stooping curiously close the page.

from “Kitchen Stadium at Twilight”:

“Man, that dude looks exactly like Scott.
I mean, freakishly tall yet also short with crazy non-crazy hair
falling all over his shoulders which aren’t shoulders
but instead comets.”

Add a soft mixture of culture and lit prowess and urban-dictionary slang to this always negating, always changing, always evolving style of poetry, and Bredle has me officially on his side. I am won over by his palette, by the color of his shapes, by the accumulation of his techniques and the words within them. And I’m not even sure if it was a battle, though there is some delicious fight in Smiles of the Unstoppable, a bite and phrases to chew.

from “Poem”:

“So far we’ve been focusing on here and now,
yet not focused on here and now but there and yesterday—
a red kitchen, ceramic roosters,
gravel driveway,
basketball hoop and fence separating us from the woods.
I remember these things fondly,
but how will I remember here and now
when they become there and yesterday?”

I feel like Jason Bredle is fucking with us, just a little bit, and I kind of like it.

Oh No Everything is Wet Now is a rebellion against the standardisation of literature.

Making space for literature is a challenge. Aside from finding the physical spaces required to store your ever-mounting collection of books, it can also be a challenge to create the mental space required to really relax and enjoy a book. This issue is only exacerbated online. In virtual space, literature really has to fight for your attention. Often, it can feel like the reader is privileging a story or poem by choosing it over an infinity of others. Some have concluded that conventional literature does not function in a web browser: the distractions are too great.

I wish to propose that the problem is not necessarily the literature, but the spaces we create for it.

The majority of virtual space is ordered in series of familiar patterns. Nearly every English language webpage follows the structure of a traditional book, where one reads from left to right and top to bottom. The web page commonly asks you to scroll up and down, but hardly ever side to side. This remains true even in cases where webpages have little to no text. There is an assumed freedom in knowing that a blog entry can never be too long, an issue can never be too filled. Virtual spaces are seemingly infinite.

Due to this expanse, much web-based information is presented as comprehensively categorised and fragmented. On many websites, one topic or article can be spread across plural webpages. It is increasingly rare to find two distinct articles occupying one virtual space.

In this online architecture, there is no navigational freedom. Interaction is guided and ordered.

However, there can be space for resistance. In an attempt to demonstrate this, we can look to Ana C. and Richard Chiem’s Oh No Everything is Wet Now (Magic Helicopter Press, 2011).

Ana and Richard are both young, highly successful writers. Both edit journals -- Ana: New Wave Vomit; Richard: Vertebrae -- and both have forthcoming debut books -- Ana: Baby Babe (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2012); Richard: You Private Person (Scrambler Books, 2012). They are well liked within the online community, but (as yet) relatively unknown outside of it.

Oh No Everything is Wet Now is their first collaborative project. The e-book is introduced as a novella (a historically disruptive form) despite being a collection of flash fiction and poetry. Magic Helicopter’s home page encourages us to both "follow" and "unfollow" the lines. These dichotomies in definition and suggestion help to shape the unorthodox approach required to encounter the novella.

Oh No Everything is Wet Now opposes all established conventions on the ordering of virtual space. Magic Helicopter Press has created an environment that demands exploration. The novella has consciously chosen to refuse the ease of expositional space, demanding that we engage with the book. Rather than deter the reader, the disorientation generates a curiosity.

I believe that the architecture behind this virtual space can expose some missed opportunities in online literature. Rather than continually attempting to emulate printed journals, Oh No Everything is Wet Now demonstrates how to seize the potential afforded to us by the Internet.

There is no correct way to read this "book". All of its content is presented to us at once. The webpage consciously affirms the decision to waste virtual space, using empty expanses that have been designed to inconvenience us. These areas must be navigated through to reach the literature. Rather than have their content reveal itself, Ana and Richard demand that it must be sought out. This is unheard of in traditional web architecture.

Our simulated journey around the webpage is reflected in the novella’s content, much of which is made up of YouTube videos. The clips show the novella’s authors on an ambling, playful journey of their own. The videos hide loading bars, which is surprisingly unnerving. One quickly gathers that these videos are not to be consumed, they occupy a permanent position is the make up of this virtual space; they are immediately relevant to the rest of the web page. The variation in their sizing suggests a knowing playfulness in the sophisticated architecture, drawing further attention to how presentation informs content.

Setting can broadly split the videos: interior/exterior. The internal clips see one, or both authors sitting still, reading in flat monotone. However, when Ana and Richard take us outside, they become enthused and playful.

By creating a distinction between the private and public sphere, the authors draw attention to flawed assumptions over online literature. The mobility of a book is no longer unrivalled. Wifi internet and affordable laptops have placed the computer in a central and uniting position between the working and social, private and public, interior and exterior.

Ana and Richard play on these disruptions by inverting classical standards. It is the interior, private Ana and Richard who present themselves very seriously: these are artists, responsible for addressing the viewer / reader on the other side of the screen. We become aware of looking in on them, putting us in the role of voyeur. In one section, this is reflexively acknowledged, as Richard is shown watching MDMA Films’ Bebe Zeva whilst narrating the experience.

However, the exterior, public, Ana and Richard act childishly. Their literature becomes a lived experience, a more plausible collaboration. It is a game that we are invited to become complicit in.

In his HTML Giant review, Matthew Simmons refers to the page as a collage (another technique that has been classically connected to the concept of resistance). His observation is acute. Within this architecture, content is frequently layered over other content. Some areas are packed tightly together whilst other spaces sit barren. The most sophisticated collage technique though, is Ana and Richard’s embrace of multi-media. It is here that Oh No Everything is Wet Now breaks most definitively from literature’s traditional, discrete language of virtual space.

Texts within the e-book are presented as screenshots of a word processor. Rather than making the text seem inadequate in comparison to video, this non-professional presentation lets the text seem raw and anonymous when compared to the videos. Their inclusion compounds our new awareness of being influenced by methods of presentation. By establishing a dialog between videos and texts, Ana and Richard create a resistance that suggests the accompanying words are barely an alternative, thus liberating literature from both the page and word processor.

Oh No Everything is Wet Now is a rebellion against the standardisation of literature. The collaborative relationship between Ana and Richard drives the novella, without managing to be expositional. We learn nothing of these two central figures. Instead, we join them on an absent procession.

If resistance is not possible through interaction, we may strive towards it in our creation of content. Oh No Everything is Wet Now demonstrates how the Internet affords us the tools for innovation in modern literature. It is down to us how we use them.

You Are the Fireworks Not the Goodbyes

Here they come. Boom boom, splatters of light. Grills, slushies, flip-flops. June's gone, and that means we have to say goodbye to Today & Tomorrow's month as a featured book on The Lit Pub. Don't worry! T&T's time at The Lit Pub isn't over forever, but before we get into all that, a few huge thanks:

Foremost, thank you to Molly Gaudry and Chris Newgent for inviting Magic Helicopter in the first place. The Lit Pub is proving itself to be everything envisioned for it: an open and welcoming place to discuss new independent books and share our own stories, a smart and friendly place to talk about how we relate to what we read. In short, a real reading community. Kudos to Molly and Chris for all their hard work, and to the many folks working under The Lit Pub umbrella to make this place so awesome. Special extra fist bump to Molly, who is crazy dedicated and ambitious, not to mention ridiculously generous, smart, talented, and all those good things. I honestly can't think of anyone else in the indie lit community who could've coordinated this project as well as she has (certainly not me!), or who could've pursued such impressive goals in such a real way. Molly is the real deal, y'all.

And big duhs of thanks to Ofelia Hunt for writing such a hypnotic and provocative and terrific novel. And what's more, for lending her time to participate in this discussion and answer questions and tell us what the deal with the thin man is. Ofelia is a huge talent, and T&T is only the first battalion. I can't wait to see what comes next from the big plastic aisles of Hunt's mind.

I think a big part of the reason this launch month has worked so well has been the ample participation of the authors: Ofelia, Ethel Rohan, and Lidia Yuknavitch. For them, what a great chance to have so many people curious and passionately discussing your work. And for us, how cool that The Lit Pub gives the authors a chance to engage so directly with readers.

We've talked a lot about a lot of different things with T&T this month: authorial identity, violence, consumerism, families, grandfathers, unreliable narrators, robots, lies, and (of course) Bill Murray. T&T isn't all that easy a book to break down into segments and submit for discussion. What I love about it is how unique a beast it is, a uniqueness that makes it hard to come up with ways to spur the kind of emotional personal discussion that's gone on so well for The Chronology of Water and Cut Through the Bone. But I've been constantly delighted by the insight and energy of the discussions we do have, and I'm especially grateful to guest posters Amber Nelson, Dave K, and Tao Lin for pushing the conversation in new directions when I ran out of things to say. As Chris mentioned in his farewell post, The Lit Pub feels like a throwback to college in the best ways; not lit class so much as the awesome discussions we would have with friends after class. When we went back to our tuna can apartments or weird-ass hippie cafes and got into the real nitty-gritty about the words we loved and cared about.

So thanks, finally, to all you smart and witty and enthusiastic readers for making The Lit Pub what it is. I've been stoked to share Today & Tomorrow with you, and I hope you stick around, as we'll continue to have a page here, and I invite anybody to contact me about making a guest post in the future, hosting a new discussion, etc. If you've been enjoying the discussion but haven't had the chance to read the book yet, don't worry: it will stay available in The Lit Pub's Community Bookstore. I'll also try to keep everybody here abreast of T&T developments: new reviews, interviews, readings, etc. For example, if you haven't seen it yet, check out Ofelia's Largehearted Boy Book Notes, where she talks about the book and some of its musical inspiration, including shoutouts to Judy Garland, Modest Mouse, Cat Power, and more.

We'll be making way in July for a new featured publisher and book, but we'll still be here, eager to hang out with this awesome community of readers. Happy fireworks, everybody. Thanks for a great June!

If you're in San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle, make sure to catch Ofelia at one of her upcoming readings. Like this Thursday, July 7th, at Adobe Books in San Francisco. That's right, the real Ofelia. See if she really looks like Bill Murray. Then let us know.

A Resolution Higher than "Real Life"

I tried writing about why I liked Today & Tomorrow and began to feel, to some degree, like I was writing something that, if I continued working on it until I felt completely satisfied, would eventually be either Today & Tomorrow verbatim or another novel "inspired" by Today & Tomorrow. Instead I made a gif that tries to convey how Today & Tomorrow influences me—increasingly, with each sentence of it that I read or reread—to think and feel about things. The gif would be more accurate if it seemed brighter, cleaner, more interesting, more "modern," more consistent in style/presentation and if it were in a resolution that seemed higher than "real life," I feel.

Here are some parts of Today & Tomorrow I especially liked:

Parking-lots and driveways are theoretically the same thing. Could one transport you to the other? (page 43)

Aaron falls heavily onto the wide sofa. His torso falls at a different speed than his arms, his head, and each part of Aaron's falling at different speeds. The sofa slides a little and hits the wall. Aaron's narrow fatless head flops over the sofa-top and his wide fat body sinks into the sofa until the sofa springs back and holds Aaron's body in place. (52)

"It's like this. Everything that's alive dies and so it's no big deal to kill a thing because it's natural. People don't kill things directly and so think killing's evil. It's not. Every person should kill something—start in elementary school. If I were President, I'd mandate that each kindergartner slaughter a live chicken the first day of school, then every year thereafter, first day of school, students would slaughter a larger animal [...]." (80)

We were sitting in Grandfather's Cadillac. There was sun. I was small and my toes were small and I watched my toes and wiggled my toes and felt the smallness of them. They seemed like tiny independent ants, beetles maybe. With the right pressure, would my toes pop? (187)

If I designed my own people, I'd make all human-angles sharp, knife-like—chins, elbows, knees, noses, fingers, all would end in  points. People would embrace one another carefully, at substantial risk to their health and well-being. (191)

There are one-million Wal-Marts. Which one could he mean? Everywhere could be Wal-Mart. Are Wal-Mart and Aaron the same? I feel nervous and imagine conveyors of cartons moving slowly into Wal-Mart. Forklifts, each driven by Aaron. (192)

"How would you design people?" I ask Merna. "If you designed people?" Merna doesn't answer. We're in the hallway and there are many doors and walls and light-fixtures are thin gray forms that move slowly at the edge of my eyes, but not really the edge because my eyes have no edge. We're standing in front of a closed door and Merna's hand's on the doorknob. "I'd make people sharp," I say. "I'd make people very small, efficient so that each moment was perfect. Everyone in points. People would be ant-sized, always useful in some way. So small it would be difficult to destroy things, or even to change them. People wouldn't be people. They'd be something else." (199)

I watch the boy's face and it still smiles but the smile has become confused, strange. I want to wear this smile. I move my mouth experimentally but there's no mirror and I feel nervous and hideous and self-aware. (203)

"[I] lean against the window which is cold and smooth. But not really smooth, I think. There are miniature imperfections, cracks or carters, fissures, and especially faces and skin and glass, and glass's a liquid and skin, faces are liquids also, everything is liquid, and all liquids move uncontrollably, reshape and reform themselves, and really every molecule or atom or smaller than that even, every electron or gluon, every vibrating string, is alone and random, operating only in its best interest which is unpredictable and everything's the same and people are just a trillion-billion-billion pieces of something else." (223)

I try to remember but I don't know how to remember or even how to try to remember. (227)