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)

Robots, the Scientific Method, and Dying

Sorry for the radio silence, everybody. Today we have a special five-part guest post from Amber Nelson that takes a scientific approach to T&T, and manages along the way to connect the novel to Susan Sontag and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Definitely a must read!

T&T: Robots, the Scientific Method, & Dying

1. Ask a Question

In season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we are introduced to a new villain: Adam. Adam is a scientifically engineered monster—part man, and part bits of various monsters—a modern-day Frankenstein's monster. When he wakes, he kills his creator and goes out into the world. In the world he meets a boy. He asks the boy "What am I?" and the boy says, "A monster." And he asks "What are you?" and the boy says "I'm a boy."

In Today & Tomorrow, we are without a mystical guardian endowed with the strength and speed to slay all the monsters. Instead, we have an unnamed narrator on her birthday. A curious girl. Throughout the novel, we frequently flashback to certain memories.

"I'm a taxidermist." He turned away. "I know what taxidermy is."

"You should stuff people," I said.

"What?"

"You should kill people and stuff them and put them in life-like poses in their homes. Like a serial killer. You could murder and stuff whole families and arrange them carefully in their homes. You know, life-size dioramas--like playing Monopoly or eating a home-cooked meal—meat-loaf, or fish-sticks—or arguing about what TV shows to watch. You could be famous, the taxidermurder."

"Why would I want that?"

"Why does anyone want anything?" I picked up my audio-tour head-phones and placed them on the taxidermist's head. (70)

Our narrator asks a simple question. Why does anyone want anything. As human beings, we don't need much—water, shelter, food, etc. And yet we want so much. But to ask the question also admits to lack—she doesn't understand her humanbeingness. People do want things. Even our narrator mediates her experiences and observations around desire. Early on in the book, she admires Julia, the pretty WalMart cashier's, arms. "I want to remove Julia's arms and place them on my body and wear them like I'm Julia and like Julia's arms are my arms." (7)

And somehow, despite her living in the world going to McDonalds and AM/PM and drinking coffee, she is apart from the world.

[Merna, the sister, says] "Tell her about your work. Are you in school? We don't know anything about you. Be a person. Send an email. A card, with pictures. Anything."

"What do you mean? Be a person? What could you possibly mean? I'm not a person? What am I?" (155)

2. Observe

Mother was a behavioral-psychologist. She worked at a university research facility with other psychologists and a thousand white mice and mazes and little white sound-proof rooms. She often told me about the white soundproof-rooms. "We keep the mice in there," she'd say. "I wish I had a room like that. I'd take you with me to the soundproof-room… and stay there until all you can hear is your body-sounds, like your heart and lungs, your pumping blood, your lungs holding air like a machine, you know?" (76)

Several times throughout the novel there is reference to the human as robot, the body as machine, our narrator comparing various body parts to machines or robot parts. That, coupled with her violent fantasies and lies, her awkwardness in social situations, diverting attention away from feelings or talking about feelings, I can't help but be reminded of The Sarah-Connor Chronicles. In this (really atrocious) television show based on the Terminator, Summer Glau (of Firefly fame) plays Cameron, a newer version of the Terminator model sent back by old John Connor to protect young John Connor from the evil Skynet and their evil robots. But Cameron, while she looks human, is often awkwardly not. She has to fake it to get by in a human world and without attracting unwanted attention. Because she lacks  a true understanding of human emotions and human social interactions, she makes several amusing guffaws. And yet, it's in those amusing guffaws that the character does manage to express some kind of feeling, some kind of struggle. She tries to appear more human, and she tries to understand these human feelings. At one point, there is even a reference to her being "in love" with John Connor (and he with her).

Our narrator is not actually a robot (so far as we know). But she does seem, in her interactions with other people, conspicuously uncomfortable, awkward, wrong.  And in being this way, she makes other people uncomfortable.

So she's left with that question "Am I not a person?"

She has family: sister, stepmom/grandmother, grandfather, memories of an absent mother and father and sister. She also has two "lovers." One lover, Erik/Todd, calls her "so fucking hot" and mentions her tits. She has desires, like going to Lisbon, holding up an AM/PM, Julia's arms. She has memory. She lies.

3. Construct a Hypothesis

"It's good. You're a good person," Merna says. "You can be a person." (155)

Being a human can simply mean being a homo sapien—a sack of skin, bones, organs and viscera. Being a good person often has more to do with how you deal with conflict, struggle.

“Well.” Grandfather watches television for a little while. “I think it’s comforting to know that things have an end, small scale, lives etc…, and also large scale, world, universe. It’s good to know that things end completely.” (83)

Her grandfather is sick. He's dying. Imminently. And while this may be a comfort to him, how does somebody who questions whether they are a person try to understand what it means to die—something with which people who are comfortable in their personhood struggle to come to terms?

It's our narrator's birthday. "On birthdays I always feel closer to death," Merna says. (152)

4. Experiment

It's clear, throughout the novel, that our narrator is a liar. But that does not mean there is no truth in the narrative. As Susan Sontag says in Regarding the Pain of Others, "Memory has altered the image, according to memory’s needs." And memory is one of the most direct ways that our narrator's particular...eccentricities... are revealed in their true form: as complexities.

I was eight. A car had hit the raccoon, bisected it. The little raccoon-legs still shivered and pulled forwardly as though, through raccoon-persistence, it could drag its bleeding half-body to the field beyond the road. I thought I should hurry home, half-raccoon slung over my shoulder, place it in Mother's hands or Merna's--hand it to Grandfather maybe, beg him to repair the raccoon, to reassemble it with superglue, rivets, a rivet gun, to get the power-drill from the garage, to drill clean holes through which we could reconnect the raccoon with rope or string, steel wire, something, to sew the raccoon-pieces into one perfect whole, maybe, to resurrect it. I poked the half-raccoon with a stick, flipped it, inspected its fleshy holes and jagged misshapen bones, its little pink muscle-tears and everywhere the thick black blood. I understood that death was normal, boring, particularly for raccoons, and imagined my body bisected, just as the raccoon was, little arms twitching forwardly, a girl in a pink corduroy jumper slowly poking me with a stick, transfixed as a half-lung oozed from my open abdomen. I heard a little gasp. It was Anastasia and Anastasia was small with long brown pigtails, her white crepe dress crinkled near the sleeves and around the lacy hem. Anastasia's mouth was open, her eyes little black dots. "I found it," I said. "It's our new pet." I poked the half-raccoon again. "Come look. It's a mutant raccoon. Look at it's funny waving legs. Look here, what should we name her?" Anastasia stood next to me, hands clasped before her. "We should operate," I said. "We'll call it Flossy, make an experiment. Play with the raccoon-muscles and the lungs and heart and stuff. Remove the lungs, collect lungs, petrify them, put them in formaldehyde, keep lungs, and livers maybe, hearts, petrified in jars on your bookshelf. You'd like that, wouldn't you? the formaldehyde-smell. We could make our own shelves for them. We could eat them. Or take the lungs, sew them together. An experiment, so we can discover things about lungs."  (133)

It's a long excerpt, I know, but important. While her tone is almost cavalier, apathetic, it is not. As Sontag says, "The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration." Our narrator isn't the kid shooting squirrels and torturing cats. Here, we glimpse our narrator as a little girl facing death for the first time, grappling with what it means to die. She wants to study death to understand.

Let's go back to Adam, from Buffy. After the little boy calls him a monster, Adam ends up slaughtering the little boy. He cuts him open and hangs him from a tree, investigating the boy's insides, trying to understand what makes something human.

Our narrator doesn't actually cut anybody up. But we do see this attempt to understand through her rich fantasy life.

...instead I imagine slaughtering a small white kitten, a dozen white kittens, carefully cutting small kitten-pieces and placing the kitten-pieces in a large silver bowl, a billion kitten-pieces from a million kittens. Worldwide suffering must be like that, incremental and ongoing.  (88)

It's not a simple desire for violence. It's the less simple desire for understanding. It's observing something, gathering data and constructing a hypothesis.

"Merna's hand touches my shoulder and we're touching slowly and tenderly. Strange and human, I think. Strangely, I think. "Human," I say." (181)

5. Analyze Data

In the end, Today & Tomorrow is a book about understanding, a book that asks questions in an attempt to understand what it means to be human, and so also what it means to live and to die.

"Artistic expression and stuff. I wanted to show the 'innate ephemerality’ of the human-body as object.'" (142)

She is a person. She feels. She has fantasies. She eats. She sleeps. She can be injured.

But in the end, she is changed. She maybe learned something.

The body doesn't move and the room temperature doesn't change. There's no sound and I don't think or want anything. I watch the digital-clock. I slowly lie next to Grandfather. I look at the body. I close my eyes. (252)

The Grandfather Is the One Who Said the Thing About the Water Buffalo on the Back of the Book

For me, one of the highlights of the pre-Highland Ice Arena parts of T&T, where we spend a lot of time in the narrator's house, is meeting and getting to spend a lot of time with the Grandfather. Many readers I've talked to have cited the Grandfather as one of their favorite parts of the book. Whimsical, manic, and perhaps the one character who thoroughly eludes the narrator's cloak of perception, in part because we suspect it's the grandfather who taught that cloak. The boyfriends' personalities are subsumed by the narrator's perception of them in an interesting way, but the Grandfather is Grandfather. He bakes blueberry pies, he encourages anarchism, he doesn't mess around.

In his review of Today & Tomorrow, J.A. Tyler suggests we should pair the narrator's Bill Murray obsession with Grandfather. Which Bill Murray is Grandfather, though? I think it's a cross between The Life Aquatic Bill Murray and a grandfatherly version of Bill Murray from the bowling movie where Bill Murray's toupee is in his face a lot. Not Broken Flowers Bill Murray. Plus Grandfather doesn't have that hipster eff-it-all suave one tends to associate with Bill. He's like if Doc Brown drove his time machine into all of Bill Murray's roles and started making a mess.

When I was thinking about what exciting pull quote to put on the back of the book, I emailed Ofelia and asked her what her favorite Grandfather monologues were. Even though the book is clearly about the trip through the narrator's head, somehow the Grandfather is the most quotable. Maybe from the way he talks and embellishes we can see where the narrator gets "it," but what Grandfather ends up saying is miles away from everybody else, including the narrator, and those miles seem headed for the moon. Ofelia said her favorite grandfather monologues were as follows:

1. Power windows (beginning of ch. 47)

“Use your power-windows,” Grandfather said. “Make the buzzing sound.” He was laughing. “Buzz,” he said. “Buzz buzz buzz.”

2. Death (beginning of ch. 18)

"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. Rabbits, cats, mountain-goats, all the way up to senior year and a healthy goddamn bovine. This would take some planning and maybe you just have one fucking cow per home-room. I don’t know, but America would be a better place if there was more killing and a more comprehensive understanding of death.”

3. Pies (beginning of ch. 35)

“Pie was invented by a Roman or something, Cato the Elder. Write that down.” Grandfather was laughing. “Cato found that the best way to pacify Roman populations was to drug them with pies. His pie was more of a tart with honey and goat-cheese, probably—there are several surviving recipes, but who’s to say which is the right one—anyway, he added, I don’t know, hemlock or something, strychnine, tricked the would-be rioters, the probable evil-doers, into eating these pie-tart-things with hemlock, had to be hemlock because that was how Romans liked to poison people, and every day Cato’d send out a cart for the dead, poisoned, would-be rioters, and sometimes two carts, horse-drawn carts, or donkeys maybe, and he’d have his men gather the bodies and dump them in the river, or if the weather was inclement, pile them up and burn them, in a big pyre, ridding Rome of evil-doers and simultaneously warming nearby homes. He was very innovative.”

So yep, the Grandfather is one of my favorite parts of the book. I believe that movement through a book, what we read for, is something that each book reinvents for itself. The question isn't always "what's gonna happen next?" One of the biggest pleasures I take in T&T is reading to see what the Grandfather will say next. He's hilarious and tender.

What do you guys think? Do you have a favorite kooky old person in your life? Do you want to float any theories about T&T's Grandfather? Do you want to post a URL of your favorite Bill Murray picture?

Deep Body Yawns

In the early chapters of T&T, as we joyride along with our narrator and her boyfriends, slashing dresses into triangles and harassing AM/PM clerks, bickering with Aaron (“You can be my assistant, you know, assist me.”) and Erik/Todd (“Have you ever been to Wal-Mart? Do you know how big it is, how full? I organized fucking everything.”), we eventually end up at a house, which the narrator promises they’re going to rob (“Home-invasion”) but which turns out to be her old house where her grandparents live. We also learn, through the narrator’s wandering memories, about her sisters and her family. For today’s blog post, I want to talk about families. Here’s a passage from the end of Chapter 7 where the narrator remembers about an old family trip:

I think about the rusty minivan, about backseats and Anastasia and Merna and the seatbelts and crisscrossing the seatbelts and the knees, exposed knees in the summer, bumping together, and the wind from the window-crack and the very warm very yellow sunlight through the window and the relaxing just before with sleepy eyes and deep body-yawns in late afternoon. We drove through the Rockies to Montana when I was ten or twelve. Mother at the wheel, Father sleeping quietly in the front passenger-seat. Merna read to Anastasia from teen-magazines—manicures, dating, how to tease your bangs, how to be beautiful. I let my head flop to the side and sat very still and made my eyes flutter then close and stopped my breathing and waited for my sisters to shake me.

“Don’t,” Anastasia said.

“She’s dead.” Merna pushed me. “She’s really dead now. People just die like that sometimes. The speed’s too much for their brains.” I didn’t react, but remained very still, allowing Merna’s pushes to move me slackly until I flopped over Anastasia’s lap.

“See, she’s dead,” Merna said. “Anastasia, you killed her.”

“Stop,” Anastasia said.

Later we pulled into a gas-station and I hid behind the backseat, beneath our backpacks and tents and travel gear. I made myself still and quiet and relaxed and smelled the tent and sleeping bags, the cooler, the stuffed backpacks that smelled of mold and mildew and dirt. I wanted then to smell that way, to lie quietly in the unmoving wetness of those smells. This is probably what death smells like, I thought. Nobody’ll ever find me here, I thought. I waited for Merna to uncover me, for Mother or Father to search me out, to remove carefully the sleeping bags, tents, backpacks, to stack them outside in the parking-lot, and to find me curled up and sleepy and cold. For Anastasia to say quietly, “Stop,” and to cry then in Merna’s lap. I could hug them, could sprawl my body over their bodies, could wait passively to be moved from one somewhere to another. The tents did not move. The sleeping bags remained still. I woke there later, beneath the tent, beneath the sleeping bags, the backpacks. I was cold and wet, hearing only the rough vibration of the van over concrete.

In a family (even a small family) it’s hard to find the space to be alone, and especially harder to find a place to nestle into where we can be still. This passage reminds me of two things, and I’m not sure how related they are, but I think they relate in some weird way to do with a relationship to giving ourselves up, giving ourselves over: 1) When I was very young, my family would sit out in the living-room while my mother read to all of us. Often I would pretend to fall asleep so my father could carry me to bed. He knew I was pretending, and he made a big production of the carrying in a fun way. 2) A friend of mine organizes his bookshelves by alphabet and color, and it’s hypnotizing how perfect it is. It makes me either want to slide myself in the right slot or knock everything down, mess it all up.

Chapters in T&T rollick along with their chaos, but they often end on achingly beautiful depictions of precarious setups or feelings, the idea of trying to capture things where they landed. I’m interested in what we might have to say about the way Hunt ends chapters, and I’m interested in what we might have to say about families. Because I think these too are related in some weird way I can’t quite put my finger on. T&T’s narrator seems to cocoon herself between her two boyfriends the way she used to cocoon herself between her two sisters, and she often finds herself trying and failing to linger at moments where she can surrender to what she’s surrounded by: curled up, sleepy, waiting “passively to be moved from one somewhere to another.” Do we keep ourselves surrounded by the structures we grew up with? How do we ever find room to be alone with our families? With their memories? With our obligations to the people we love?

Stride Mechanics and Broken Toys

Thanks everybody for your thoughtful discussion about violence! As we continue to dig into Today & Tomorrow and start to meet some of the novel's key players -- Erik/Todd the Wal-Mart cashier, Aaron the eerie new guy, Merna, the memory of Anastasia -- I'd like to call to your attention a couple new interviews with Ofelia that've gone up in the last couple days.

Over at the literary magazine Monkeybicycle, J. A. Tyler talks to Ofelia about Bill Murray, violence, and coming of age. Here's something interesting Ofelia says about the novel's relationship to growing up:

I was 28 years old when I started T&T, and I’m now 32 years old. I might be regressing. I graduated from college four years late. And there’s something odd about approaching and entering your 30s. When my mother was 30 she had three children, was immersed in the work/eat/sleep routine. The language of violence is interesting and it surrounds us (television, movies, newspapers). “I want to stab that mofo in the face,” is funny. I remember a former coworker saying that about a demanding customer, while miming a stabbing motion. Also, as I wrote and edited T&T I remember being very concerned/interested in the separation of body and thought, the separation of any body part from any other, and the compartmentalization of the mind. Violence, real and imagined, seemed one way to write about this. Bodies are so mechanical. Parts fail and are replaced. I like to run long trail races occasionally and the racers become very focused on ‘refueling’ and  ‘stride mechanics’ and the possible failure of their parts (a foot, a tendon, the iliotibial band). Perhaps ‘coming of age’ is a step toward subjective understanding of one's own body, and move toward greater mental compartmentalization. One learns to become many people as needed, for work, friends, lovers, partners, the internet, to subsume/suppress the parts that do and don’t fit current roles.

* * *

Then, over at the lit blog We Who Are About to Die, Noah Cicero talks to Ofelia about influences, the process of writing, concrete truth, and consumerism:

NC: Do you believe that consumerist culture makes people into non-humans? I get that from the book, everyone is turned into a non-human, they have been turned into something, what, no one can really say, but the primitive instincts are gone from the humans in your book

OH: Consumerist culture makes me feel robotic and alien. I have trouble existing in large masses of people, at shopping malls, Wal-Mart, Target -- I become nervous, awkward, clumsy. Television commercials make me bitter and sarcastic. I feel weird when media outlets discuss professional athletes, actresses, and politicians as ‘commodities.’ I find it strange that the polite language for couples to refer to one another is ‘my partner.’ Our day to day language is overrun by business metaphors. ‘Business’ is the standard for excellence in most of American life. Speed and efficiency or something. Lack of waste or excess (not that ‘business’ generally lives up to these standards). I sometimes feel like people often rely on objects outside of themselves to accomplish goals, and are never deterred when those objects don’t perform as expected. I have nightmares of broken toys from my early childhood, how I felt when the toys disappointed me.

* * *

Both these interviews are very insightful, and I suggest checking both of them out in full. Meanwhile, what do you think of Ofelia's answers? Do we become more compartmentalized as we age? Do television commercials make you feel sarcastic? Do you find your everyday language overrun by business metaphors? Do you have nightmares of broken toys from your early childhood?

And -- taking a cue from Chris's discussion of Cut Through the Bone -- are there things you find yourself wanting to ask Ofelia that no one's asked yet?

Violence and Kittens

Tornadoes are gone, Megabus drivers are friendly, and here we are in America with NPR and ESPN and Powerpoints and naked deck lounging and kittens. Let's talk about the first chapter of Today & Tomorrow, which introduces us to the hypnotic narrative voice we've been talking about.

J.A. Tyler, in a review of T&T over at Monkeybicycle talks about birthdays and violence:

Today & Tomorrow begins with the narrator’s twentieth birthday, an occasion for excitement and yet laced fear, focusing on how we attempt to let go of our youth, how we try to embrace our aging, a journey that the book violently pulls us through like an uncontrolled body over coral reefs, a juxtaposition of beauty and limb-scarring.

In the first chapter we're introduced to this youth and violence that Tyler is talking about. We listen to the narrator imagine her neighbor catching her naked, and we get clued into her tangential daydreaming propulsion. We learn that she hasn't spoken to her sister, Merna, in four years. We drift back in time to a kitchen with Merna, where the narrator admires Merna's kitten (“Your kitten’s so pretty I could just pull her eyes out and roll them along the kitchen floor”) and watches Merna dry dishes. And the narrator can't seem to settle on whether she likes the kitchen or not. On one hand, she can imagine "days of lovely waiting in the kitchen, drying dishes, stacking them in cupboards, lining cupboard-shelves with rose-scented shelf-paper." On the other hand, she sees some sort of violence in the way Merna dries, and she doesn't like it:

"The plates were white and clean with the tiniest bubbles of water huddling away from her rag and my sister was merciless as she carefully wiped every part of every plate and obliterated each tiny perfect bubble and slowly set each plate in its proper stack in the cupboard next to the refrigerator. I hated her plates then, her bubble-obliterating rag, her stupid silly kitten."

At the end of the chapter, after we've been lulled by the voice, we are startlingly introduced to this narrator's brutality and wobbly sense of reality:

"I cocked the kitten. The kitten was heavy. The kitten was cocked and I flung it and it moved slowly, sprawl-legged toward the window and the window shivered in anticipation and Merna and I gasped and there was a loud sound I can’t describe but was both wonderful and terrible and the kitten bounced and moved slowly toward the sink, its tiny legs stretched out oddly, at angles, as though disconnected from its round furry body."

One funny thing about T&T is we never learn the narrator's name, but we unmistakably experience the world through her. Even when we're aghast and want to pull back, she's our only way in. One thing that seems true is that everybody needs to tell their story, and another thing that seems true is that the more stories we hear the less the world is apt to swallow us with its strangeness, its distances and indifference. Right away, from the strange phrasing of the "sun’s sunlight’s" to the "little bits of dust moving and interacting with other dust-bits," to the "tiniest bubbles of water huddling away" from Merna's dishrag, and finally to the kitten's "tiny legs stretched out oddly, at angles," we meet a narrator obsessed with the intricate holding together that goes on.

It might be a cliche to throw out the idea that violence reminds us of fragility, and that an obsession with violence is really an obsession with testing, a fascination with finding breaking points. One thing about cute things is that they are often defined by the damage we could do to them (e.g. "you're so cute I could eat you up!"), and one of the things I find so fascinating about T&T is the way this unnamed narrator navigates her own desire to be both fragile and terrible.

Do I "relate" to this? Do I "relate" to the violence? I'm not sure I know what that really means, but I know I feel something. I know—right away from the first chapter—that this book is going to open me up to the world in a way I don't usually—you know, for safety's everyday sake—allow myself. It's funny to remember—even when we're talking here—that we read by ourselves, and it's interesting to picture yourself nestling into your eyes and holding the book and reading about kitten tossing on the train, in a park, where somebody might glance and see Bill Murray's face on the cover but have no real idea the kind of re-wiring you're privately allowing yourself to experience.

So what do you think of this violence in T&T? What did you feel when you read how the kitten came apart? Did you find yourself alienated by the description, did you find yourself re-calibrating? Has reading ever really shocked you? Isn't shock more about framing than body count? Why is a kitten "cute?" Why do I think "hypnotizing" is such a good word to describe T&T? Does T&T remind you of Kathy Acker? Do you want to see a really terrifying clip from Ofelia Hunt's favorite movie (warning, strange and R-rated)? What does it mean to be "de-sensitized?" Is sensitivity a matter of realization? To be surprised by what we're capable of sensing? Those lovely different bubbles and the wonderful and terrible sound of the pop.