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| $21.00 CDN 296 pp. ISBN 978-1-926617-08-4 |
Description: Literary Fiction, Fabulist Satire
Make the most of your inner monkey...
Hair is sprouting in unspeakable places and you can no longer carry a tune, but if
you're a surrealistic artiste with an addiction to Freudian mythology and guilt-free
sex, turning into a monkey has its upsides.
____Nick Motbot may be evolving as a novelist, but his friends aren't too sure
about his DNA — at least, not since Gargantuan Enterprises started experimenting
with it. And once they figure out what's hap-pening to him, they decide to set
things right. MARVELLOUS HAIRY is a satirical novel about a group of friends
sticking it to the man the only way they know how, with equal parts grain alcohol
and applied Chaos Theory.
Excerpt:
____Notes from Nick's journal:
____Lizardday 36, Loveplanet, moonermastruck
A wise man once wrote: "Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind." And
thank the stars that it be so, for I could see that her eyes saw not my pudgy
middle, but my middle eye, the flashing knowledge that I have of the subconscious
world and true art. I saw, it as though by lightning. Strobes and flickers of a shape
that lashes out at me with tendrils of love and pain — a deep sea creature with
arms both toxic and tender.
____A great day, and even better for all that it was a lizardday, normally so
mundane and about my basic needs. But those have been met. Seedy paid the full
price, the agreed price, and the physiology lab paid more than they agreed, and
now there is time to do nothing but write. Oh, that and visit the glass penis for my
next spinal injection.
____I'm worried that Rob worked for them. It can't be good for his soul. He has a
strong soul. The strongest of all of us, I sense, though all he projects is
indifference and cynicism.
____He put us in the cab together, when he knew that we would never do it
ourselves. And I did not stay, horrible creature that I am, but it was not time.
There was a fantastic beating in my heart and I listened to it, I touched it from
outside my dreams and Max's dreadful brews and I knew that it was not time. It
was right to come back here, to be with you Titania, and to catch the lightning in
keystrokes.
____When I close out this file, I'm going to return to the opus and write, wright,
right all night!
____Erma will wait for me, moon goddess or not; her name from the god of
travellers, messengers and writers. My own goddess to help me write. But when
she sees me next, I shall have one more step in the journey to my story. I'll finish
it, I will, and then we can understand what it means to delve into the monkey-
recess of our minds, to feel the desires of our inner lizards, and to see past them
both to the primordial soup, to the creative impulse that animates us all, beast and
human. All without the broth that Max loves so much, the hallucinogens that were
the impetus for all the religions, the cause of so much pain in our world.
____While I scrawl on the notion of pain, the protuberance on my tail bone grows,
swollen and angry, and now there are bristly hairs too. It is scratchy in my
trousers, but now, in the tepid bathwater, it's cool and almost pleasurable.
____If it's a reaction, perhaps the Gargantuan doctors will let me know. Otherwise,
I'll be forced to talk with Maxlizard.
____Rob thinks of him as Dr. Tundra. But he is Maxlizard, Maxilard. Mazard... death
on all fours, that one.
Make the most of your inner monkey...
Hair is sprouting in unspeakable places and you can no longer carry a tune, but if
you're a surrealistic artiste with an addiction to Freudian mythology and guilt-free
sex, turning into a monkey has its upsides.
____Nick Motbot may be evolving as a novelist, but his friends aren't too sure
about his DNA — at least, not since Gargantuan Enterprises started experimenting
with it. And once they figure out what's hap-pening to him, they decide to set
things right. MARVELLOUS HAIRY is a satirical novel about a group of friends
sticking it to the man the only way they know how, with equal parts grain alcohol
and applied Chaos Theory.
Excerpt:
____Notes from Nick's journal:
____Lizardday 36, Loveplanet, moonermastruck
A wise man once wrote: "Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind." And
thank the stars that it be so, for I could see that her eyes saw not my pudgy
middle, but my middle eye, the flashing knowledge that I have of the subconscious
world and true art. I saw, it as though by lightning. Strobes and flickers of a shape
that lashes out at me with tendrils of love and pain — a deep sea creature with
arms both toxic and tender.
____A great day, and even better for all that it was a lizardday, normally so
mundane and about my basic needs. But those have been met. Seedy paid the full
price, the agreed price, and the physiology lab paid more than they agreed, and
now there is time to do nothing but write. Oh, that and visit the glass penis for my
next spinal injection.
____I'm worried that Rob worked for them. It can't be good for his soul. He has a
strong soul. The strongest of all of us, I sense, though all he projects is
indifference and cynicism.
____He put us in the cab together, when he knew that we would never do it
ourselves. And I did not stay, horrible creature that I am, but it was not time.
There was a fantastic beating in my heart and I listened to it, I touched it from
outside my dreams and Max's dreadful brews and I knew that it was not time. It
was right to come back here, to be with you Titania, and to catch the lightning in
keystrokes.
____When I close out this file, I'm going to return to the opus and write, wright,
right all night!
____Erma will wait for me, moon goddess or not; her name from the god of
travellers, messengers and writers. My own goddess to help me write. But when
she sees me next, I shall have one more step in the journey to my story. I'll finish
it, I will, and then we can understand what it means to delve into the monkey-
recess of our minds, to feel the desires of our inner lizards, and to see past them
both to the primordial soup, to the creative impulse that animates us all, beast and
human. All without the broth that Max loves so much, the hallucinogens that were
the impetus for all the religions, the cause of so much pain in our world.
____While I scrawl on the notion of pain, the protuberance on my tail bone grows,
swollen and angry, and now there are bristly hairs too. It is scratchy in my
trousers, but now, in the tepid bathwater, it's cool and almost pleasurable.
____If it's a reaction, perhaps the Gargantuan doctors will let me know. Otherwise,
I'll be forced to talk with Maxlizard.
____Rob thinks of him as Dr. Tundra. But he is Maxlizard, Maxilard. Mazard... death
on all fours, that one.
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Interview (partial):
Describe MARVELLOUS HAIRY:
Part literary fun-ride, part fabulist satire, and part slapstick comedy, MARVELLOUS HAIRY is about the power of friendship and love,
the evils of power, and the dangers of letting corrupt CEOs run our world.
And most importantly, it's about how we have to get in touch with our fun-loving inner monkeys.
The book is about a man being turned into a monkey, but it is told by one of his friends. Why?
The book is about the narrator, Rob Goodman, and the group of friends, as much as it is about Nick Motbott, the surrealistic writer,
so I chose to let him tell the story. In many ways, he is the leader of their group and the chief prankster.
He's also the only one who is able to tell the whole story, too, because of his connections with the Ghosts.
Yes, why are there ghosts in this story too? Are they real?
Well, as Christopher Moore says in his latest book, Fool, "There's always a bloody ghost." I don't want to spoil the story, but there is
some question about whether Rob is making up the ghosts or not. The antagonist, Ted Shute, certainly thinks the ghost of his old
business partner (whom he murdered) is real. He spends a lot of time shouting at him, anyway.
At the same time, there's some scientific-sounding stuff about resequencing Nick's DNA — do you think that's possible?
It is being done as we speak; where do you think genetically modified food comes from? Humans have been playing with genetics for
millennia, but now we are starting to get some direct power over it.
But why do they turn him into a monkey?
Well, he's not actually a monkey. They're trying to regress a few of his genes to the common ancestor of all the primates. To see if it's
possible. If they're successful, Shute plans to see if they can accelerate evolution, so that humans can have new abilities.
Do you think that's possible?
We already do it in some ways. I'm answering this question using a computer, which is starting to act as my extended memory.
Eventually I believe humans will be able to directly change our genetic makeup to achieve similar effects.
The question is: who will control it? And will it be good for is?
So how does this related to Chaos Theory and fractals?
Chaos theory is all about trying to make seemingly random things — like the weather — actually predictable. In dynamic systems, the
outcome is highly sensitive to initial conditions. Until the advent of the computer, such predictions were impossible, but now chaos
theory is used in a number of fields, such as meteorology and ecology. A fractal is a geometric representation of this idea — a rough
shape that if you break it down into smaller parts, each smaller part is a tiny version of the whole. Nick and Helena talk about it
because Nick is worried that Shute is trying to control the weather with a new satellite, and in that conversation, they discuss the
"butterfly effect" — a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can result in a tornado in Texas.
Essentially, it's about how the smallest things can make big differences. This is true in life, in love, and in megalomaniacs trying to
create weather-control satellites and turn surrealistic novelists into monkey-men.
How does this fit with all the Freudian imagery?
You could say that human nature is Chaos Theory in action — what we do is a dynamic mix of emotion and thought, instinct and
morality, all tied together and set in motion by our conditioning — or you could look at it in another way: Perhaps our brains do have
these various layers as outlined in Dr. Tundra's Cult of the Claw, which is a stripped down, humorous and somewhat juvenile version
of the Freudian mythology of the Id, ego, and super-ego. The super-ego is the human part of our brains, the higher ideals of society.
The ID is the baser part of our brains — the lizard part that is interested in instant self-gratification. The ego is the part of the brain —
the monkey part of our brains — that wants to satisfy the urges of our ID, yet keep us out of jail. There is one other part to the brain,
not included in Freud's ideas, the fish part of our brains — that's the involuntary part that keeps our lungs breathing, our hearts
pumping. And the juvenile part of their Cult is that it is possible to strip down to these parts of the brain using alcohol (or other
drugs), or even better, using the power of our dreams and imagination. You will also notice they form the five "fractals" of the play, er,
book.
Describe MARVELLOUS HAIRY:
Part literary fun-ride, part fabulist satire, and part slapstick comedy, MARVELLOUS HAIRY is about the power of friendship and love,
the evils of power, and the dangers of letting corrupt CEOs run our world.
And most importantly, it's about how we have to get in touch with our fun-loving inner monkeys.
The book is about a man being turned into a monkey, but it is told by one of his friends. Why?
The book is about the narrator, Rob Goodman, and the group of friends, as much as it is about Nick Motbott, the surrealistic writer,
so I chose to let him tell the story. In many ways, he is the leader of their group and the chief prankster.
He's also the only one who is able to tell the whole story, too, because of his connections with the Ghosts.
Yes, why are there ghosts in this story too? Are they real?
Well, as Christopher Moore says in his latest book, Fool, "There's always a bloody ghost." I don't want to spoil the story, but there is
some question about whether Rob is making up the ghosts or not. The antagonist, Ted Shute, certainly thinks the ghost of his old
business partner (whom he murdered) is real. He spends a lot of time shouting at him, anyway.
At the same time, there's some scientific-sounding stuff about resequencing Nick's DNA — do you think that's possible?
It is being done as we speak; where do you think genetically modified food comes from? Humans have been playing with genetics for
millennia, but now we are starting to get some direct power over it.
But why do they turn him into a monkey?
Well, he's not actually a monkey. They're trying to regress a few of his genes to the common ancestor of all the primates. To see if it's
possible. If they're successful, Shute plans to see if they can accelerate evolution, so that humans can have new abilities.
Do you think that's possible?
We already do it in some ways. I'm answering this question using a computer, which is starting to act as my extended memory.
Eventually I believe humans will be able to directly change our genetic makeup to achieve similar effects.
The question is: who will control it? And will it be good for is?
So how does this related to Chaos Theory and fractals?
Chaos theory is all about trying to make seemingly random things — like the weather — actually predictable. In dynamic systems, the
outcome is highly sensitive to initial conditions. Until the advent of the computer, such predictions were impossible, but now chaos
theory is used in a number of fields, such as meteorology and ecology. A fractal is a geometric representation of this idea — a rough
shape that if you break it down into smaller parts, each smaller part is a tiny version of the whole. Nick and Helena talk about it
because Nick is worried that Shute is trying to control the weather with a new satellite, and in that conversation, they discuss the
"butterfly effect" — a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can result in a tornado in Texas.
Essentially, it's about how the smallest things can make big differences. This is true in life, in love, and in megalomaniacs trying to
create weather-control satellites and turn surrealistic novelists into monkey-men.
How does this fit with all the Freudian imagery?
You could say that human nature is Chaos Theory in action — what we do is a dynamic mix of emotion and thought, instinct and
morality, all tied together and set in motion by our conditioning — or you could look at it in another way: Perhaps our brains do have
these various layers as outlined in Dr. Tundra's Cult of the Claw, which is a stripped down, humorous and somewhat juvenile version
of the Freudian mythology of the Id, ego, and super-ego. The super-ego is the human part of our brains, the higher ideals of society.
The ID is the baser part of our brains — the lizard part that is interested in instant self-gratification. The ego is the part of the brain —
the monkey part of our brains — that wants to satisfy the urges of our ID, yet keep us out of jail. There is one other part to the brain,
not included in Freud's ideas, the fish part of our brains — that's the involuntary part that keeps our lungs breathing, our hearts
pumping. And the juvenile part of their Cult is that it is possible to strip down to these parts of the brain using alcohol (or other
drugs), or even better, using the power of our dreams and imagination. You will also notice they form the five "fractals" of the play, er,
book.
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| $16.80 |