"a rare sort of book"

Perplexing and mystifying, frenetic and endlessly engaging, The Orange Eats Creeps is a rare sort of book, the kind that's hard to compare. Many see the influence of Burroughs, which is fair, I think, because she takes that cut-up technique and pushes it as far as it can go, to awesome effect. It has that same kind of wild energy, that frenetic and ecstatic prose that completely swallows the reader and gets her/him lost within, but never caring.

The prose is such a pleasure, constantly surprising, constantly reinventing. It's a book that teaches you how to read it by pushing you in the deep end. To be honest, what happens, I'd be hard-pressed to tell you in clear detail. It certainly deserves a second read, maybe a third, but, I imagine, it's one of those great books that gets better with each read, rather than tired. First read is for the ride, and all subsequent reads are for understanding where you start, which direction you're heading, and how you get there.

My favorite book of 2010: A true original.

The Most Perfect Thing I've Ever Read: Richard Grossman's The Book of Lazarus

This novel is a puzzle or maybe a labyrinth as much as it is a scrapbook of the dead.

I had always dreamt of a book that can be read in any order, and this is that book. I'd recommend reading it from beginning to end, but I'm certain it can be read in any order, by simply flicking to a new section and beginning, then on to another and another until all is read.

It's a novel that defies easy categorization and is likely considered a difficult read by many, with its enigmatic poetry and aphorisms and its singular perfect contribution to literature: a seventy page sentence fragment that is surreal, beautiful, and wholly consuming. It, in my mind, is the most perfect thing I've ever read.

The novel is tied together by a noirish novella that gives, in simple terms, the plot, though the plot is incidental to the greater work. Very much something where the novel is infinitely more than the sum of its somewhat disparate, albeit connected, parts.

Grossman has captured so much in this by giving so little, or, rather, by being particular with what he gives. He has taken the narrative apart, thrown bits in different directions to float where they will, and in this process of deconstructing, he has filled it, created so much that could never have been there before. Fleeting scraps of the dead bundled together to make something like life.

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)

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?