RS: Welcome to this month’s bonus episode of Rite Gud. For this edition of the book club, we’re taking a look at Catherine Dunn’s novel, Geek Love. Joining me is producer Matt Keeley and librar– Thank you.

Matt: ha ha Ha

RS: Yes. Off to a good start. And librarian, Eric Horwitz.

Eric: Yo!

RS: Thank you both for coming on. We’re all [00:01:00] very excited to talk about this one, and I think the reason we started, we decided on this, is because, Eric, you were very disappointed with the cover.

Eric: Yeah, so, you know, on the cover of the issue, I got, uh, Severian is wearing, like, he’s supposed to be wearing a Fulligen cloak, which is pure black, but instead, you could really tell with the new sun in the background. Wait, are we not doing Gene Wolfe?

RS: No.

Eric: No. Oh, I read the wrong book. I’m sorry, we gotta

RS: Oh, Yeah, leave.

Eric: I thought we were doing Book of the New Sun. Alright, I’m out.

RS: Shortest episode.

Eric: No, just joking. Uh, yeah,

RS: The joke didn’t land. Go do another ten push ups.

Eric: Okay, here we go. Yeah, Ray

RS: So, for the record, I did in fact force Eric to do some pushups before we started

Eric: forced me bullied me. Bullied me into push ups.

RS: Yeah, yeah. It’s good, though. It’s good.

Eric: People are gonna wonder how did they do this over, like, the internet to do it. They just bullied me. They said, get rid of your Sonic the Hedgehog plushies off the floor. And get on the floor and start doing and I did it! I

RS: We [00:02:00] cyberbullied him successfully. It works.

Eric: It worked, but now I’m feeling real pumped.

I feel like that has to be all of your guests have to do that.

RS: Yeah, I think I’m gonna start making guests do this.

Eric: It really sets the tone. Uh, who, um, uh, who wants to talk about Covergate?

RS: Covergate.

Matt: ha

RS: I mean, mostly we’re annoyed because the cover that,

The edition that I got from the library, the very

Matt: famous edition, yeah

RS: famous edition just sucks and doesn’t get across what it is. It’s um, it’s just an orange cover with the words Geek Love and the font is kind of funny.

Eric: for the longest time, I would see this book at the library, or at a bookstore, or even people talking about it, right? And I, my eyes would look at the cover and see

Geek Love, and it’s sort of orange, and it’s got the blue, and it looks a little funny, and it looks like wires a little bit. And I think, this is a book about, like, uh, Silicon Valley nerds, and it’s gonna be My eyes would just glaze over, completely glaze over. I’d go, I just don’t care. This is [00:03:00] classic judging a book by its cover, but it’s true.

I would just be completely disinterested. Later I find out it’s about, it’s like a freaky, magical, realist, grotesque, where there’s a bunch of carnival, uh, freaks, their words, not mine, all having sex with each other. And I say, well, that sounds amazing. And I see the original covers and they all look like really, really good.

And, uh, yeah, this is, you know, We said we have to read this right away.

RS: Yeah, yeah, so we want to stress that the type of geek in this, it’s not computer geek, it’s like circus geek, like the thing that happens to you if you fuck up at the end of Nightmare Alley. It’s that kind of geek, and this is a book which we highly recommend you absolutely should read it, and we are going to spoil it, so maybe you should read it before you listen to this episode, because holy fuck, this book is a ride. But it’s a There’s so much!

Matt: yeah, like, yeah, and then it was like a major plot point, but there were so many other things

RS: There’s so much in this

book!

Eric: a lot. It’s, it’s, there’s a bunch of [00:04:00] stuff.

Matt: Um,

Eric: That’s

Matt: by the way, am, am I the only one of us who has, who had read the book before?

RS: I had never read it before. This was my first go through.

Matt: Okay, cause yeah, I, I had the same thing that Eric was talking about. Cause I grew up in Seattle and I’m still here.

The author Catherine Dunn is from Portland. And so, and Portland and Seattle are always kind of joined at the hip, you know, or, or at the waist, as it were, her, her,

RS: Uh huh.

Eric: Which one’s Iphy and which one’s Ollie? Oh wait, Ify and Ellie, excuse me.

Matt: think,

I think Seattle is Elly and Portland is Iphy.

Eric: Yeah. Portland is the submissive.

Matt: But, but yeah, I was like, it would be big in the news. Like I was like a weird kid and I would

More or less read the newspaper cover to cover, just

RS: Oh, you were a weird kid?

Matt: I know, shocking, right?

Eric: Hold on, let me just drink some of this seltzer I have here, do you mind saying that again with the mouth full?

Matt: Heh heh. I was a weird [00:05:00] kid. Heh heh heh

heh. Heh But I would read, like, the, uh, the book pages, even though they, I was a kid, and they were all adult books that I probably wasn’t really ready for.

But they would go really hard on Geek Love, and I just assumed You know, because it’s, you know, Seattle slash Portland. It was just boring. Microsofties in

love

and the, the cover, which I, you know, like you said, it’s, it’s just the orange with the funky font on there. The thing that we didn’t really mention is that it’s like a very neon day glow orange. it’s so it very much looks like a 90s issue of Wired. Or Mondo 2000, or something like that. Which, uh, ask your parents. Uh, ha

ha

Eric: the font of the geek. Love is like very, very skinny. And I, you know, I’m not gonna get into why they chose that right now, but like, it looks, I mean, the effect is, it looks like [00:06:00] computer wiring to, to me anyway.

So I’d look at that and I think I’m gonna be reading some like hagiography about, you know, uh, and this is, I wouldn’t be thinking it consciously just in the back of my head, the, the spongy like, id of my, am I gonna read this or am I not, brain just goes, eh, I can skip this.

Matt: I, I know, my, my, my reaction for the longest time was like,

I already read Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs. It sucked. Why would I read this? And, but, but the funny thing is, is like, one of my good friends, uh, Janet Bruselbach, who actually did the, uh, Rite Gud logo that you see every, every day when you look at us.

Every day!

RS: you look at this podcast.

Matt: Yes. If you don’t, you’re a bad fan.

Eric: fan.

Matt: But, uh, she, she, she was like, this is one of my favorite books. And she sent it to me, and I was like, well, okay, if I don’t see Janet liking Microsurfs 2 or whatever I had in my mind. [00:07:00] So I was a little bit curious and I opened the book and I’m like,

Oh shit, it’s that kind of geek.

Okay, cool.

RS: so for the record, the premise of this book, it’s about a showbiz couple, the Binewskis, Al and Crystal Lil, who fall in love and through a combination of taking drugs and radioactive material, produce a bunch of children that all have something very unusual. about them. There’s Arturo, who basically has flippers for hands and feet, Arturo the aqua boy.

Iphigenia and Electra, Iphi who are a pair of conjoined twins. There’s the novel’s viewpoint character and narrator, Olympia, who’s albino, hunchbacked, and a dwarf. And then there’s the baby, uh, Fortunato. Known as The Chick, who looks completely normal, but in fact has [00:08:00] telekinesis and can move objects with his mind.

Eric: We’re like 7 minutes in, 8 minutes in, and we’ve only managed to talk about the cover. There’s so much to discuss.

RS: There’s so much. This book This book is a lot.

Eric: There’s so much.

RS: There’s a lot in this fucking book. I don’t even know I’m sure we’re gonna get through We’re gonna talk like three hours and people are gonna be like, Why didn’t you also mention this thing?! It’s like, cause there’s too much! There’s so much book in this book!

Eric: Why didn’t you talk about the guy who like had to shoot them because they were perfectly lined up. Just much.

Matt: Yes.

Eric: Alright.

RS: What about the maggot man?

Matt: ha ha.

Eric: Oh God. The maggot man. I think my brain at that point was like, I can’t handle another guy.

RS: There’s, there’s so many weird little guys. This is a book of just fucked up little guys.

Matt: Yeah, then you even get like, you know, the human or the pin kid or the fly roper who were just kind of cameos

Eric: Yeah, they were just hanging out.

RS: I, I love the running gag that all the human oddity, the pincushion guy and the, all of the geeks are like [00:09:00] Princeton, Yale, Harvard boys who are just slumming for a summer. That’s an incredible running gag.

Eric: They’re just fancy lads who are just here to, but because they’re not born into it, they’re not a Binewski. They’re the Binewskis are born and bred for like the carnival freak life.

RS: Also, the whole thing that all of their female employees have to be redheads, you

have to dye your hair,

Eric: everybody has a different answer as to why.

RS: No one’s sure why, and they’re just collectively referred to as the redheads.

Eric: And they only explain it like halfway through the book. So for the first half of the book, they’re like, “we got a couple redheads to break down the, uh, the tent and, uh, you know, scoop the elephants and tigers.”

RS: What? What?

Eric: like, who are the redhead?

I still don’t know what a, what a a simp twister is.

Midway rides

Okay. A simp twister. But then they call, they call Artie a simp at one point. But that doesn’t mean what we think. Right.

Matt: They’re basic like when she calls him a simp a sim, she’s calling him a a norm

Eric: Oh. And that’s the worst thing to call

RS: The worst thing you could be.

Matt: [00:10:00] Yeah, yeah. Yeah, cuz like the simps are the people who come to spend their money. One of the things I was a little, I find interesting is they don’t really mention, like, a blow off, which is when, uh,

In a, In

a freak show, it’s the thing where you pay extra to see, like, uh, you might, I don’t know, you have, like, a, A freak, and you get to see their living quarters, or something like that.

Eric: But they kind of do do that. They don’t call it anything but like,

Matt: Right,

Eric: You can pay extra to have sex with the conjoined twins

Matt: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but a blow off would usually be, you know, actually part of the show, not, not a, something that the

twins.

You know,

slip you a note for. It’s, but it, yeah, they’re, like, that’s, kind of the thing with the Freak Show, is it’s all these, everything kind of, like nickel and

dime the simps.

And I think that’s even one of the things with the simp

twisters

that they even kind of make a joke about is shaking their money out. I think both figuratively as in, [00:11:00] here’s another thing to spend your money on. But also literally because a lot of them, you know, whip you around and turn you upside down and, and I imagine like a fair amount of change falls out of some of those pockets.

Eric: a good idea, just to twist those simps. Oh gosh, maybe we should have I, I had a, um, uh, I had a friend who dated somebody who worked for the, uh, the Coney Island, well, it used to be called the Coney Island Freak Show, and then the Woke Mafia got to it.

RS: Boo!

Eric: And now it’s called the Coney Island Sideshow, but, uh, he was their, like, tattooed and pierced man, and he’d, like, have giant piercings that he could put stuff through.

And I should have asked this person questions and stuff, like, how did you get to that and what, you know, what that’s like. But, I didn’t, cause, uh, I’m a, I’m a bad guest. Sorry about that.

Okay, so, this book, uh, the structure of it is, there’s something I like to call the Margaret Atwood plot, and I call it that because of the three Margaret Atwoods I’ve read, they all do the same thing, which is, there’s a character, [00:12:00] a narrator, who is reflecting back on the events of the story, of the wild and crazy events of the story, And this tragedy that happened, and he regrets it, but it’s decades after the fact, and it’s too late to change anything.

And also, this person is not necessarily an unreliable narrator, but a narrator who you come to realize is deeply complicit in the tragedy itself.

RS: so like

Eric: Oryx

and Crake is a good example of that. Um, and the examples of The Blind Assassin and, um, of course, uh, the, you know, the famous dystopia one, what’s that called?

Matt: Handmaid’s

RS: Handmaid’s Tale?

Eric: They’re not necessarily complicit, but they are infuriatingly passive throughout the whole thing, right? And then, you know, Part of the narrative is like me telling you this story in the quote unquote Present decades after the fact is part of my revenge or part of my justice or whatever. And I feel like this book definitely has the same structure because it’s Oly and Oly’s a grown up in Portland And she’s just got this [00:13:00] ordinary 30 something life as a hunchbacked, you know bald Portland person she’s doing her own thing, I don’t know if we were ready to talk about Miranda yet, but, uh, she every once in a while runs to her closet and pulls out all the old flyers for the Binewskis Traveling Circus, and then it cuts back to, here’s the story.

RS: Yeah, well let’s talk about Miranda. Fuck it. Now’s as good a time as any.

We

need to talk about Miranda. So Miranda is, is a, uh, a hot babe who’s studying medical illustration and ends up getting involved with Oly because Oly would be interesting to sketch. But Miranda is unusual because she has a little tail, and unbeknownst to Miranda, she is secretly Oly’s daughter, born of a virgin birth with her own brother, Arturo the Aquaboy.

Eric: Arturo the Aquaboy, isn’t that a contradiction of terms? Maybe, maybe we’ll get to that, because there’s a lot to go through.

RS: There’s, there’s [00:14:00] so much We will not get to everything to everything in this podcast.

Eric: Miranda does, uh, gets a little side money doing a burlesque act with, uh, other, like, freaks in Portland, and, um,

RS: Quote unquote freaks. I feel like we should probably mention off the bat, because it does happen kind of early in the novel, there is a depiction of queerness in this novel that is very of its time. And I would not call it hateful, but it is certainly not what we would consider, like, cool today.

But it is very much in line with how people talked about transness,

back in the 80s, and unfortunately, they,

Eric: Or even

RS: the club kind of, or

Eric: just people with difficult, people with disabilities, right?

Like it’s not, but in this, this novel, I mean, I say the word freak because this novel has a, like within the mythology of the novel and also, I [00:15:00] guess, presumably the real life of that universe in the eighties and early, you know, mid 20th century America or whatever. There is a category of person freak, and like, that is how they would call themselves, and that’s how other people thought of that, and it’s a whole, it’s like this category of otherness that I think this novel is very interested in exalting, which is not necessarily, it would not fly today.

The closest, the most famous thing that I can think of that is like that would be, uh, that people can think about is, uh, Rocky Horror, where, like, These two norms that go into a haunted house and look at all these crazy shit. There’s a sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania There’s a you know, there’s a tap dancing butler.

I don’t know. Look at all this stuff. There’s a zombie. There’s a sex zombie, you know yeah meatloaf is frozen like this is you know And the whole point of the the quote unquote freaks are to like be contrasted against these contemptible Nixonian norms

RS: Right.

Eric: [00:16:00] Yeah

RS: Right. Um. And I do think it is kind of worth noting. In the carnival circuit, in the sideshow circuit, one of your sort of, you had your stock characters, you’d have conjoined twins, you might have like some, an alligator boy or a monkey girl or something, and

Matt: Dogface boy,

RS: a super fat woman, there’d be a really fat lady or a really fat guy, and very often you would have what they refer to as the half man, half woman.

Eric: Mumpo, the giant baby?

RS: Yeah, the giant, the beastly baby they have in this book, there’s Mumpo, we got it. But, but in general, like, that was kind of how society lumped people together, and we’re not necessarily, obviously we’re not gonna say like, Yeah, that’s fine. But that is, in the context of this book, in this cultural context, kind of how it’s being seen.

So we’re just, you

know,

this is our little disclaimer

Eric: here. I wonder if we should, yeah. Define terms right now. Like this was a contract or something. Like by freak we are referring to the [00:17:00] category of person that this book is very much interested in. The societally constructed category of person that this book is interested in a analyzing.

RS: Yeah, I think that sounds fine.

Eric: Mhm.

Alright, we got all so so don’t yell at us, don’t cancel us,

RS: we are preparing for, There.

there, the, the long callout thread,

Eric: It won’t happen now, It’s

has a problem with, uh, with this, please email, uh, Matt and Ray at, uh, let’s see their email addresses.

Please. Yeah.

Matt: ritegud@kittysneezes.Com,

yeah, yeah,

RS: yell at us, that’s where it is, alright,

Eric: but no,

Miranda has been, you know, this is in the future timeline, the future timeline. Miranda has been going to these, burlesque acts where there’s something wrong with you. That’s the whole idea.

So she’s got a tail. One of them, it turns out, is transgender. One of them is, uh, has something or other. And, um. Oli, who, Oli is, uh, Olympia?

RS: yeah,

Eric: Olympia, [00:18:00] who is sort of the narrator character, who is a, uh, sort of a hunchback. Who’s like a bald hunchback. I always got the impression that she, she has such soccer ball energy, cause the whole novel she’s getting her ass kicked. And she’s

RS: yeah.

Eric: just gets back up and goes right back to what she’s having her

to do.

RS: carried around, yelled

at.

Eric: yelled at, But Oly has been stalking Miranda for years and years and years, because of course she’s her daughter, right? And that’s, this isn’t a spoiler, this is like right there.

She’s like, that’s my daughter I’m stalking. And she doesn’t know. But, uh, Oly has been following her and has such a weird Oh gosh, such a weird like sense of emotions when she sees that her daughter is embracing the quote unquote freakness and dancing around with the tail out. Are we ready for this one quote that like, I think it’s the, it’s like the thesis of the book.

RS: Okay.

Eric: Can we do it right now or?

Matt: Hit me!

Eric: Wait a minute, I wrote this down because I was like, oh, this is what the point of the book is. So at one point she follows her, his daughter into this burlesque act, and uh, people in the [00:19:00] audience See that this, sort of, is she, why does she wear dark glasses? Is she blind? Is there something wrong with

Matt: uh, she’s albino.

Eric: She’s albino, she’s a hunchback, she’s totally bald. At one point, they see her in the audience and some awful person picks her up and takes her wig off. She goes, hey look, it’s another one! Ha ha ha! They all start laughing at her, and then the music starts, and they insist she starts dancing.

This is Oly, who’s, you know, uh, and she gets into it instantly. Here we go. Uh, “The twisting of my hump feels good against the warm air. The sweat of my bald head runs down to my bald eyes. And stings with brightness in the spirit of the waggling hump. Moves over the stage and catches red pants, hairy bellies.

And all while I stamp on my buttonless blouse, slide on the tangled electric elastic harness. Open my near blind eyes so wide they can see that there’s true pink there. The raw albino eye in the lashless sockets, and it’s so good.” And then here’s the line that I have highlighted. “How proud I am, dancing in the air full of eyes rubbing at me uncovered.

Unable to look away because of what I am. Those poor hoptoads behind [00:20:00] me are silent. I’ve conquered them. They thought to use and shame me, but I won out by nature. Because a true freak cannot be made, a true freak is born.” And she, she like owns it. That’s like the whole point of that is like, you wanted to shame me.

You can’t shame me. I am, I master you because of who I am.

Matt: Yeah, because, I mean, the putting her on stage at first, this is, like, really early in the novel, and you just go, “oh my god, this is awful, this is awful, this is awful,” because you, you tend to identify with your protagonist, and you don’t really know the lay of the land yet,

RS: I mean, this is a woman who’s having her clothing torn off

of her by a

Eric: Torn off of her and thrust up on stage

RS: It’s not a good

Eric: is not a good time.

This is not a good time. But then she just out and goes like, I have, this is, you have no idea what I’ve been through. I have been, like, I was a, I was a carny person. This is, you think, you people

Matt: fuck you, this is what I always wanted.

Eric: Yeah.

RS: Yeah, I mean in some ways it’s like she never really [00:21:00] got to be the main person on the stage with her family. She was always outshadowed by, er, overshadowed by her brothers and sisters. So, for her it’s kind of like, hell yeah,

finally.

Eric: kept calling her a norm.

RS: Right, which, what the fuck is with the Binewskis? Where they, they have like, a hunchbacked, alopecia, albino dwarf. And they’re like, “yeah, we can’t, we, this is too normal, we can’t do anything with you.”

Matt: boring.

Eric: Wait, we’re, we’re still in the, uh, we’re still in the prologue though, right? Because she still has to get sketched by Miranda. So Miranda invites her to her apartment and she says I’m going to draw you. And, uh, there’s a pretty, it’s, it’s cool. It’s such a cool scene where it’s like, I’m gonna draw the per this, I want to draw this naked hunchback dwarf albino.

Matt: As you do.

Eric: Yeah, as you do. And she talks about her own tail and like, oh, there’s a woman who wants to pay me to cut it off. And there’s another line that I highlighted. I we’re too early [00:22:00] for me to read out another line here, but like, it, it caught

RS: read it. just read it,

dude.

Eric: Just read it. Okay.

But like, just read it. I Am I getting way off topic? I’m sorry.

RS: That’s okay.

Eric: Okay. She’s just, so as she’s, like, the amount of, like, love and hatred and resentment and, fierce passion as she hears about this, this young woman, this teenager talk about cutting off her tail, right?

And, uh, Oly is sitting there going, like, you have no idea what that tail represents. You have no idea the 300 pages of book that led up to that tail, and, like, you’re just talking about, oh, yeah, maybe I’ll cut it off, maybe I won’t, whatever, and, later she gets home. And she’s throwing a tantrum in her little closet of a home, Oly.

And she’s “pacing and grinding my teeth. Throwing my wig on the floor and stamping, Why does she make me so angry? My rage terrifies me. I’m a monster. I would rip her to shreds. I would swing her by her round pink heels and snap her long body. Until that bright, hairy head smashed against the walls. Falling on my knees, shaking, tangling my hands to keep them [00:23:00] from breaking something.

Sudden gratitude for the nuns,” the nuns who raised, uh, Miranda, cause they, she gave her to a, an orphanage, right, from nuns. “Sudden gratitude for the nuns, realizing that she’d stayed with me all the years of her growing up, I would have murdered her. That arrogant, imbecile bitch, my baby, my beautiful Miranda.”

It’s such a good paragraph! Fuck! yeah.

Mm hmm. So,

RS: So, I think that brings us to a major running, I don’t know if you want to call it motif or theme or whatever throughout this book, which is Really, really warped love. Just, there are so many different permutations of love in this book and they’re all incredibly horrifying.

Eric: Yeah.

RS: It’s great.

Eric: People who do not know how to express their love for each other and, um, I mean, it almost steps from the central act of what Al and Lil did, but we’re, we’re not there yet.

RS: Yeah.

Eric: Or are we? Are we?

RS: We’re everywhere.

Matt: Yeah, I I I figure, you know.

RS: I wrote an outline, we’re not following it. Yeah.

Eric: I’m totally ignoring your outline.

Do you want to keep

RS: [00:24:00] No, I Ignore the outline, we don’t give a shit.

Eric: Oh, okay. I feel like I’ve hijacked things, I’m so sorry. Uh, so she starts to read the Binewski posters and then the meat of the novel begins. Flashback, harp sound, doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. And it’s the Binewskis, and Al and Lil are two carnival people.

And they’re norms, right? That’s the other thing that’s very weird about the norms vs. freak culture is Al and Lil aren’t

Matt: Yeah, they’re both norms.

Eric: they’re carnies, right? They’re certainly experienced in, the con artistry and show business ways, but They’re not like Well, anyway, so they say we’re gonna have this wandering show and we’re gonna produce our own quote unquote freaks by feeding Lil, like, just weird random stuff.

Uh, like Pills, and arsenic, and insecticides, radiation, anything to have her produce, uh, kids with deformations, so that we can, uh, show them off. And, uh, do we want to talk about those? We already went through, sort of, the main cast, but

RS: I [00:25:00] would like to talk a little bit about the names they’re given, which is so interesting, because they have these very dramatic names,

Matt: Yeah, very old world kinda

RS: Except for the baby named Mumpo.

Matt: yes, that’s what I love, is it’s like you have, you know, Iphigenia and Electra and Fortunato and Olympia and Arturo and Mumpo.

Eric: Is it wonder if that’s a statement on just the family’s already fallen apart, but,

RS: or, or just the, the quality here, like Mumpo is just this beast thing, and the others are like kind of interesting and smart and sensitive, and Mumpo is just

Matt: Just a

RS: horrible thing.

Eric: This big fat baby,

RS: Just this fuckin this beastly baby here. But the, uh, Iphigenia and Electra, these are, these are names from the Oresteia, the, this Greek.

This series of, uh, Greek tragedies. And they were sisters. They were daughters of Agamemnon, the king. And according to the, the story, um, Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia to, to the gods so that he could win the Trojan [00:26:00] War. So he, he did that and, you know, killed his daughter. And won in war and came back with his concubine, um, Cassandra in tow and his wife, uh, Clytemnestra.

I’m probably mispronouncing this. Wasn’t really thrilled with that. That was the last straw, I think, for her. Like, okay, you killed her daughter, and now you’re bringing back your side piece, and you’re just gonna, just, just bringing her home with you. Just doing that. That’s fine. So she and her lover killed Agamemnon and Cassandra, and ruled for a while.

Except their, uh, Agamemnon and, um, Clytemnestra’s surviving daughter, Electra. Who was Very, you know, it’s sort of like a gender swapped Hamlet thing. Like, “you’re not my real dad!” Kind of situation. “Fuck you, stepdad.” eventually got her brother Orestes to kill them both in revenge. And then, in the next play, there’s sort of a Law and Order episode where the goddess Athena reveals herself to be a total [00:27:00] pick me?

I don’t know. But anyway, so that’s kind of the, you know, these Greek sisters. Iphy is very, a lot more, like, placid, and Ellie is a lot more fierce, and just a lot more, a lot stronger, ” fuck you dad” energy. And she’s very right, and things would have turned out better if they had listened to Ellie when she said that they should, you know, yeet Arturo off

the end of a rollercoaster.

She was right.

Eric: is the oldest, and he’s uh, I always pictured him, I couldn’t, I had a tough time picturing him in my head. I know he has flippers, but for some reason I pictured him as just like a huge worm, you know? Like no arms, no legs, just swimming around. He’s the aqua boy, so they’d put him in a tank. And he becomes kind of the protagonist in a lot of ways,

RS: he he has a cult. He creates a massive, massive cult.

Eric: I mean, the drama of the book all happens cause of his, you know,

RS: Because of his bullshit

Eric: His steer pike like, you know, disturbance of this, uh, carny utopia.

RS: Yeah, yeah, he’s [00:28:00] he’s he’s such a– I’m wondering why Arturo if that’s a reference to something or if it’s just this sense of like

 

Matt: Yeah, yeah, let’s just

RS: Okay, okay, we’re recording. We’re back in it. So, um, there was a little cat related interruption. Harley decided to contribute to the podcast by jumping onto my computer and hitting the power button during a recording. So, um, we’re back.

Eric: And we love that. We, I love it that Harley is, I was saying, Harley’s getting smarter.

Like, not just meowing in the middle of it, but industrial sabotage.

RS: Yeah.

Someone on the Hugo Blob paid him to do that. They offered him treats if he just fucks up

Eric: The hell were we talking about? It’s like over an hour into this I think

RS: don’t know where I am now. I don’t know my own name anymore.[00:29:00]

Matt: We were about to talk about, Um, the Fortunato’s name, I

think.

RS: Yes,

Fortunato. I thought that his name was, um, You know, the cask of Amontillado, this dude who just gets walled in and is just fucking left to die alone in the dark.

Matt: Yeah.

RS: That’s what I was guessing it was from.

Eric: So there’s this long scene where, they’re all kids, and they’re all playing, and Fortunato, or Chick, is born, and he’s normal looking.

And they’re like, they’re crying because he’s normal looking. They make a big scene about how this is the opposite of what most newborn parents are like, where it’s like, thank god he’s You know, doesn’t have anything wrong with him, but they’re like, “Oh, he doesn’t have anything wrong with him!

Oh no!” And they’re, like, gonna abandon him. They’re gonna put him in a basket and put him at a firehouse or something. Or, like, a diner or a laundromat.

Station.

Gas station. And then he, turns out that he’s psychic and can use his psychic powers to, like, make things float and stuff.

RS: and, what’s so extraordinary is that Al can’t think of anything big to do with that. Aside

Aside from like, oh, let’s go [00:30:00] gambling. Like, motherfucker.

Eric: And they’re enabling in their passivity. There’s so much there to talk about, but

RS: They’re the most just insanely awful parents. They’re

Eric: They’re just awful parents.

But we don’t, we only get it secondhand. We only get like, they’re almost there as like a presence, but they’re not active in the story at all. They set this whole thing up, like these blind watchmakers and then they just, let it all happen because, they’re getting ca, I don’t know.

Matt: Yeah, that’s like one of the, the, the things, I think we were kind of talking about in the Discord about, like,

the sheer horribleness of both Al and Lil. For, for me, like, uh, Lil really gets under my skin because my grandmother had

dementia.

And I know it’s, like, kind of a My Problem deal, but, like

She was like very, very smart.

Like my grandmother, I mean, was very, very smart and did a lot of really cool things. But then as the dementia kicked in, she got more and more like Donna Reed. Everything is okay. and

just, maddening and so [00:31:00] frustrating. and like,

There was a thing where she inadvertently killed my parents dog by

feeding him chocolate.

She would just, She would just be like, “Oh, do do do do do, I’m feedin da dog, do” and she’d unwrap chocolates and and then my mom caught her and she’s like, “what are you fucking doing?” You know?

RS: Yeah.

Matt: So I, that, like, Lil gets under my skin with that kind of stuff because I would get so frustrated with my grandma, even though I know it wasn’t her fault. And I think, well, Lil near the end is not her fault, Lil in the beginning. Totally.

RS: Mm.

Matt: and, I mean, Al is just a dipshit.

Eric: well, he’s just a dumb, he’s like a dumb carny and he can only think of small time the way, you know, Trump becomes president and we know he’s a crook, but he doesn’t do, uh, Blofeld level crook malevolence.

He does things like, I’m gonna sell the China for, you know, like. He doesn’t have the creative mind in order to be Arturo [00:32:00] levels of evil, which is kinda what we’re getting at with Alan. Lil is very rapidly the, uh, the

Matt: takes over because Al is such a dipshit. Arty’s a master manipulator. But Al could be manipulated by, I think, like,

Eric: he’s such a small time thinker.

Matt: Exactly. Yeah, he, he

All Artie has to do is, like, kind of make it, make Al think it’s his idea, even if it doesn’t make

sense.

Eric: like already, like very rapidly. And it’s kind of subtle how fast it is, but then it’s like, oh no, this is Artie’s show now.

This isn’t Alan Lil are just on the side, sulking.

RS: Yeah.

Eric: yeah. But, uh, Al like the, the last proactive thing he does in the novel is he takes Chick out to different like casinos and stuff. Says like, use your psychic powers to freeze the, the slot or to pickpocket people.

That’s it.

Matt: Mm hmm.

RS: Yeah, and it’s to pickpocket people, not even to just free say, freeze the roulette wheel or something. Which would be a little subtler. [00:33:00]

Matt: Yeah, like, he

eventually does that, but I mean, but yeah, even then it’s like

Eric: but of course it was Artie who put a stop to that too. Artie’s the one who

made phone calls to, like, people to say, to, like, the casino. Or, who do you, who do you call up?

RS: he hired some goons.

Matt: geeks.

Eric: Oh yeah, he hires some, he hires some Harvard geeks.

Matt: Yeah.

Eric: good Cambridge,

RS: I love that that’s a running gag.

Eric: were all, I, I only noticed that until you mentioned that right now. They were all

RS: so fucking funny.

Eric: Cambridge men. They’re like, I went to Eaton and now I bite the heads off chickens.

RS: It’s such a good running gag.

just the idea of, of someone who’s not really a freak slumming it for their gap year, basically. Like, you were the opposite of a society’s outcast. You went to Yale Law.

Matt: Yeah.

RS: What are you doing here?

Eric: So, Artie has this geek supremacist ideology. He de develops it in it’s, or this like, quote unquote freak supremacism is kind of his whole thing.

And it’s stems from like Al and Lil imparting these values [00:34:00] on them, but it also stems from this their own lived experiences where it’s like they– and it’s again It’s the thesis of the book really which is like we’re not disfigured it’s the normies who are disfigured. We’re special and we’re better than you are for ourselves and like eventually everything in the book revolves around this from Oly’s relationship to Miranda far in the future to the point of Artie’s cult Is that, like, it is better to be like this than it is– And then there’s even a line later on where, uh, some reporter is asking Oly about, like, if you could get paid to be normal, would you?

Which, of course, is gonna wind up being a relevant plot point in the future with Miss Lick, who we haven’t even gotten to, Jesus. But There’s so much to talk about with Ms.

RS: There’s so much.

I could talk

about Miss Lick for a long time. I feel like I could fix Miss Lick.

Eric: Uh, Oly has a line that’s like, it’s no, because like all you normal people have to tell each other a part of your clothes.

Like, it’s awful. We’re better than you are. I don’t know.

RS: And it’s such a mix as to how much of that is [00:35:00] genuine, and how much of that is cope, and how much of that is, Okay, if you actually do believe this, here’s how far it can go.

Eric: Right,

RS: Where you’re willing to mutilate people and kill people to make this happen.

Eric: Is this disfigure–? But I think that the thing that catalyzes the sort of freak supremacist ideology, Like, I’m calling it that because that’s kind of what it winds up being, right?

Matt: Pretty much,

Eric: Pretty much, yeah. Not to be too X-Men about it, but it, but, uh, but there’s a gunman, this, this, there’s a pretty interesting chapter about this, through the perspective of this deranged normal man who like just calmly decides to pull out his gun and shoot at the kids

Matt: because

they were all lined up.

If he had done it right, it would have gone through all of them. Got them.

Eric: a good line right there. It’s people ask him like, why did you do it? And he said, well, they were all lined up. Of course I did. Like, they were perfectly in a row. And I’m such a fuck up, I missed. How could– My dad would kill me right now for missing.

RS: Right. He missed too, he even missed when [00:36:00] he shot himself.

Eric: he’s such a fuck up.

RS: He really sucks at this.

Eric: But there is a there’s a scene where Artie is like, you know, he’s helpless. He’s just flippers and writhing on the ground with blood. And there’s a look on his eye of like And, uh, Oly sees is the look in his eye, and I think that’s when it catalyzes for him.

Like, I’m going to, I’m gonna work at being a horrible dictator because I have to do this. I don’t know, that’s how I read it.

RS: Yeah.

Eric: Artie’s helpless. He’s a master manipulator and a horrible villain, but he’s like, he has no arms or legs. He has to be sponge bathed and wheeled around.

RS: He cannot even wash his own balls.

Eric: There’s long loving scenes of ball washing.

Matt: One of Oly’s beloved chores until the Chick couldn’t, you know, magic away. His, his ball ball mold

Eric: the implication that Chicks like magic because that before, these are all plausible deformation and so more, I don’t, what is I, I want to be culturally sensitive here.

How would I, how [00:37:00] would I describe defor

Conditions?

RS: I don’t, I don’t know.

Eric: They’re, they’re conditions are all within the realms of possibility, but Chick Chick’s, magic powers are like implied to be godlike, right? I mean, the things that he can wind up doing in this small time, ways in which the carnival utilizes it is a joke.

Matt: Yeah. He even

RS: Chick is a heartbreaking character,

Matt: Oh God.

Yeah.

But I mean, even Artie’s little cult is still

kind of small timing Chick

Eric: Oh, 100%. Like it’s using this, these powers that are like, oh my God. If he can do that, then imagine what else he can do. But the things he winds up doing is, well, we’ll get to that.

RS: Yeah.

he just ends up doing weird surgeries mostly, and cleaning up someone’s testicle mold, and

Eric: So everyone is too passive to stand up to Artie. There’s a line that’s, Al and Lil are delusional. Um. There’s, uh, Chick is, like, inherently sweet and will always just do as he’s told because he’s a sweet little boy.

RS: And he has terrible, low self esteem, he just [00:38:00] feels like I’m

not good

enough because I’m too normal.

Eric: Oh, and he’s an, I mean, sorry to use this horrible word, but he is an empath. He can feel people’s emotions,

RS: Oh yeah, yeah.

heh heh.

Eric: he just, from birth, he can’t, and then the one good mothering thing that Lil keeps saying is like, He needs to have a normal childhood, he needs to play, and she’s right!

She’s, he’s fucked up in the head because everyone’s using Chick for their own skeezy money making schemes.

Matt: And, but yeah,

when, when they acquiesce to Lil’s obvious and only good demand that he plays, it’s like, it’s all performative. He, he plays right outside her, loudly pushing tricks around. So, he can go, I’m playing, I’m playing. Are you happy now?

Instead of actually, you know, playing.

RS: Yeah, Lil was very big on keeping up appearances of good family and good motherhood, rather than actually doing much. The scene, like, I found Oly’s passivity through the book so infuriating, but [00:39:00] when it gets to this moment where Lil, I think, is making, blackberry jam or something, and she’s saying, like, Oh, we didn’t get as much as we usually would, and part of the reason they didn’t is because Ellie can’t gather blackberries anymore because she’s been lobotomized,

and she’s just sort of flopping around.

And finally,

finally, after, like, all of this insanity, fucking

Oly

says to her, like, Mom, why are you trying to act like everything’s okay? Things are very much not okay. And Lil just smacks the shit out of her. And it’s like, oh yeah, okay. I can, that’s why, that’s why she’s, that’s why Oly’s

like

that.

That makes sense to

me now.

Eric: the whole time, right? She’s probably

RS: I, probably. I that Oly has had to sleep in a cupboard her entire

life.

Eric: Like, this

Matt: Yeah. Under the

Eric: I’m the family soccer ball.

RS: Yeah.

Eric: yeah, everybody, there’s like a, a hierarchy of like how much crowds you can draw, right? And Oly’s at the bottom because Oly is, you know, uh, not, doesn’t have any good stage presence. [00:40:00] And

Artie,

RS: the juice. She’s got no riz.

Eric: is all, riz all juice in a complete sociopath and empty on the inside. So he can draw amazing crowds. But he’s also consciously aware that like he has no arms or legs and can be outstaged. So he tried to like, smother, shaken the cradle.

Matt: Yeah,

And it’s implied that he did that with, uh, was it Lorna, the lizard girl,

RS: they had like a lizard baby.

Matt: yeah. And wasn’t there one other baby that he probably smothered, or,

Eric: oh yeah there’s a whole bunch of babies he killed

I well, well, I know like, I mean, some of them were miscarriage, like we’re talking about the babies in the jars in the shoot,

Matt: which is,

a, a, a, an attraction of all of the, the failed Binewskis. And they’re just fetuses and babies in formaldehyde.

Eric: Just murdered by

RS: Just murdered by Artie. God, that minute, that moment when Mumpo’s born, and Artie’s like [00:41:00] sizing him up. Mumpo sizing up Artie just like immediately, like we’re gonna fucking fight.

declaring a fucking blood feud against a baby is really something

Matt: And

that also goes to show how evil Artie is. Mumpo

is, you know, basically just a gaping maw that only wants to eat. And even he is like, I don’t think Mumpo has any real cognitive function beyond eating and even he is like,

” Fuck this dude.”

Eric: Yeah,

RS: is 100% artie’s. Artie is the reason this baby was born. Artie, like inflicted the bagman upon the

twins.

Eric: we’re gonna, okay, wait, wait, wait, wait,

RS: so, there’s so much. There’s so much,

Eric: There’s um, a part where, Okay, so, the relationships are like, Everybody kinda is afraid of Artie, except,

RS: except Ellie.

Eric: it’s Ellie.

So Ellie, Ellie knows better. So

RS: Ellie fuckin rocks. Ellie’s so so cool.

Eric: And then [00:42:00] Oly says something interesting about herself. She says, I’m like Ellie and Iphy, because Iphy doesn’t know who Artie is, Iphy doesn’t know Artie’s a monster and loves Artie, Ellie knows Artie is a monster and hates him.

I know. Then Oly says, I know that Artie’s a monster. I know Artie better than anyone, and yet I still love him. And like that’s. Very interesting to me, anyway.

RS: Yeah. Oh, and we should probably mention, Artie is very likely based on, oh god, what was his name, Grady Stiles Jr., the, the, uh, so called lobster boy, who was part of this Carnival Showbiz family, cause, uh, they had these hand and foot deformities that ran in the family, so he had severe deformities of his hands and feet, so he couldn’t walk, but he used a wheelchair, but he was, like, surprisingly swole in the rest of his body from being able to drag himself along with the muscles that he did have. And he would, like, choke out his wife with his lobster claws, and he

was, like,

a huge piece of shit.

So,

so when he had, like, one [00:43:00] normal daughter who fell in love, Gary murdered the guy, his daughter’s fiancé. But they didn’t put him in prison, or,

Matt: and

he admitted to it. He was like, yeah, I fucking killed that dude.

RS: Yeah, but they couldn’t put him in prison because there wasn’t a prison that could accommodate someone with that disability.

So they just kind of let him out on probation and he became even worse. Until his wife, paid a guy to kill him.

Matt: Yeah,

Yeah, and unfortunately that the dude who killed him got a life sentence

RS: bullshit.

Matt: I know, it’s, it’s, to me it’s like the same thing with that, um, Gypsy Lee Ran, or Gypsy Rose Blanchard, or

RS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. This is like the most justifiable case of homicide

Matt: Yeah, yeah, cause like, isn’t it her boyfriend who actually did it? Like, in jail for, for life, or at least for absurd length of time, and I’m like, I think that there’s kind of the, uh,

There, there, there should be like a Indiana wants me kind of law, which is like a song by, uh, R Dean Taylor about a guy who’s on the run, [00:44:00] and one of the lines is like, “If a man ever needed dying, he did,” for about the dude that the narrator killed, and Dude, if a dude ever needed dying, it’s fucking Grady

Stiles.

RS: sack of shit, just a horrible human being.

Matt: Yeah.

RS: So there’s gotta be some inspiration there, and then of course the twins, I think inspired by the Hilton sisters, who were a pair of conjoined twins who were quite poorly treated when they were young and badly exploited by their step parents or something like

that.

Eric: Incidentally speaking of huge pieces of shit, but, uh, this book was, uh, Uh, Johnny Depp, like, loved this book and

wanted to be He was like, I wanna play Arturo, that’s the

role, like,

RS: Oh my god!

Eric: And he, uh, eventually he was pressuring Gary, uh, Terry Gilliam to Do it, and he was like, Terry Gilliam, you gotta do this, you gotta do this.

And it was scooped by Tim Burton, and Tim Burton had, throughout the 90s, And was seriously considered making a Tim Burton Geek Love, But still has the rights to this day.

RS: Oh, holy shi No, 90’s Tim Burton [00:45:00] would rock this, current Tim Burton

Matt: I don’t know, I think even I think even good era Tim Burton, I don’t think he would be, like, the right fit.

RS: Maybe not nasty enough?

Matt: Yeah, he’s

not nasty enough. He would be kinda cutesy, where Gilliam would go full on.

Well, you’ve seen Tideland, right?

RS: Yeah, Gilliam would be mean and nasty enough to

Matt: Yeah,

Eric: I mean Tim Burton wound

Matt: up doing Dumbo

I know. Tim Burton is so sad. It’s like, he was so good until he wasn’t, then he was so fucking

terrible.

Eric: There’s an alternate universe where Tim Burton, um, well, I, there’s a, I have a couple alternate universes. One is where Tim Burton got hit in the head by a coconut and decided not to do Disney stuff. But then, um, one where Michael Bay got hit in the head by a coconut.

RS: Oh!

Eric: I’m of the opinion that Michael Bay at one point had chops.

RS: He did do the “I would do anything for love” Meatloaf video and it’s pretty great.

Eric: Like many people, he just crawled up his own ass and stayed there.

RS: [00:46:00] Yeah.

Eric: Anyway, what were we talking about?

RS: I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know where

I am. Geek gee.

Eric: Geek Love. So the,

RS: talking about Arturo. We could talk about Arturism, maybe? I don’t know.

Eric: Yeah.

Matt: yeah.

Eric: yeah. Oh, okay. So wait, he, yeah, he starts a cult.

RS: He starts a cult, Arturism, with P. I. P. Which stands for, what is it?

Matt: uh, peace,

RS: Isolation, Purity.

Matt: yeah, yeah,

RS: Where you chop people’s bits off.

Matt: yeah, yeah, basically, and it’s, like, really funny, because, like, when I was in college, I wrote a quote unquote comedy sketch about this, but this was, like, long before I’d read Geek Love, where it was, like, a, a dude who would cut himself off at every joint to get, quote unquote, closer to God,

Eric: Well,

RS: Huh.

Eric: that’s, the Brotherhood of Mutilation, right? That’s, um, the Brian Evanson short story.

Matt: oh, I haven’t read that either. because

Eric: If any, oh, you got, you both would love it. It’s very good, uh, the, he, uh, so Brian Evanson, wrote this, uh, it’s like a noir called The Brotherhood of Mutilation, and it is excellent, [00:47:00] but it’s the plot which is, every time I chop off a bit of myself I get closer to sort of, the absence that is God, right?

Yeah. But it’s also written in a noir style, but then he expanded it out into a full novel. So he wrote like a second half, like the first half ends on a cliffhanger and the first half is its own short story. And then he wrote like another half to it and he published the whole thing as like Last Days or something, Last Rites.

I’ll have to

RS: Ooh,

Eric: But it’s not very good unfortunately.

RS: Oh.

Eric: the short story.

RS: Yeah, I mean there is that thing a, a bit, a lot of a cult is the joy of losing yourself. And in this one, it’s very much like a literal, physical thing. And, and something that struck me that’s so real, like as in as crazy as this book is, a lot of the emotional and relationship dynamics as I’m, as I’m reading it, I’m going like, yeah, I buy it.

That, that his first

Eric: whole time because it’s the emotions that happen, the people involved are vividly real and the emotions they have, the love that they have for [00:48:00] each other, the like. Weird hatreds, the weird little petty jealousies, the way they express it are like, I have felt that before. And the book would fall apart.

It would just be cheap exploitation without it.

RS: Yeah, that, it felt so compelling to me that his first, I don’t know if you want to call her a disciple, was a fat woman wanting to lose parts of herself. Just that intense self hatred and the wanting to be smaller and wanting to be smaller, no matter how cruel it was. I saw that documentary about, I think, the Bikram Yoga guy, the, not that, well, there were more than one yoga guy who turned out to be a huge, uh, predator, but this wildly popular yoga guru who turned out to be basically a serial rapist, and they’re interviewing his former followers, and one of his former followers was a very insecure gay man who had started off being, like, over 300 pounds and had become very thin doing this yoga, and he’s going, like, I know he was cruel, I know he did terrible things, I know the guru basically bullied me, [00:49:00] relentlessly psychologically terrorized me, but I’m thin now! And, like, that legitimatelyand he’s saying this, crying the entire time, like, I know he’s done horrible things, but the horrible things he’s done resulted in me being a thin

person. Yeah,

and he’s saying it unironically. He’s not just saying like, Teehee!

like, I know, but he helped me lose the weight!

And it’s like, Man! Goddamn!

Matt: Eric’s being busted.

RS: I think that’s on my end,

actually.

Eric: No it’s a uh an ambulance just passed here. I live in Gotham City actually

RS: Oh god, okay. I live not that far from a hospital too, though, so. I’m like used to ambulances. heh

Eric: I’m posting too good.

RS: Yeah, you’re too good at it,

Eric,

Eric: I’m being arrested for talking about people with conditions and also transgender people and referring to them using the broad societal category as freak.

RS: Yeah, that’s true. That is a

crime

Eric: now.

It is. Uh, no, [00:50:00] it’s, the

Matt: Up yours woke

moralists

Eric: the the woke moralists

RS: ha! Speaking of lobster boys who are total pieces of shit

If it turned out, if it turned out like Jordan Peterson had a tail like “I had a tail this whole time.”

RS: Do you think if Jordan Peterson told his followers to cut off bits of themselves they would? I feel like Joe Rogan could get his people to do

it.

Eric: You know, as I was saying to you before, I, as an, uh, grown man with ADHD, I’m, you know, I know, I know the

RS: Yeah, you’re the most oppressed kind of person there

is.

Eric: hmm. I’m, I’m the most oppressed, uh, category of people. A, a, a male feminist. We male feminists are

RS: You’re, you’re the A on the LGBTQA flag,

A standing for

ally,

which the

ones who suffer the most.

Eric: Thank you. Thank you. It’s about time. Um, oh god. If anyone has a problem with the stuff we’re saying, please email KittySneezes.

Matt: R-I-T-E-G-U D@kittyneezes.com.

RS: this dot

Eric: Please bother Matt and Ray [00:51:00] for the stuff I’m saying.

RS: Oh my god.

Eric: So, we’re, I think we’re all, we’re just exhausted with how much this book is. Wait, okay, so, There’s so, there’s so

RS: an hour with one cat interruption.

Eric: Arturo, Arturo started a cult, Arturo starts a cult, oh, um, I was gonna talk about the Russian cult that existed in real life, the castration cult in Russia.

Oh, hell yeah. Cause that’s a real thing, so the Brotherhood of Mutilation by Reverend Evanson was based off of a real thing, and I guess this stuff too, which is this actual existing cult in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, where, uh, people would castrate themselves, what were they called? Russia, I’m gonna look this up, wait a

minute, Russian

uh, the Skoptsy. The Skoptsy. S K O P T S Y. Oh. Uh, a spiritual Christianity movement, kind of like their own evangelical movement. And they would chop off bits of themselves, and the big thing was they would chop off, like, Skoptsy were just these, like, eunuchs who would go around Russian cities and be like, Yeah, I did this because I’m getting closer to God [00:52:00] by chopping my dick off, chopping my, my hands off, you know.

RS: yeah. Like you do.

Eric: Yeah. Um, and there’s a, I think a passage, and I, uh, huge Eric L., I apologize, but I, uh, did not write down the passage where they described the, like, what it is that they’re getting out of this. But you kind of brought it into it, because it is meaningful that the first woman who goes up, the first, his first disciple is, like, a big woman, right?

And he, like, says to her some pretty good advice, which is, like, that is who you are, right? Like, exult in it. It’s a shame that it led to then, like, also, and also join the Arty cult, where you try to make yourself more like me and chop your limbs off, but Yeah, you start off with your toes, I think. Oh,

Matt: Right

Eric: this weird doctor, he managed to He managed to, like, what’s

RS: Yes! Doctor P!

Matt: Yeah, Doc p is ugh

RS: Holy shit, Doc P. What a creep. What a great character.

Matt: I know. I know. It’s like I I [00:53:00] she’s one of the few people I think deserves what she

gets In this

novel.

Eric: There’s these rare, creepy moments where they’re like, yeah, it turns out, uh, she faked her whole background,

She has, we actually don’t know what her real name is, but she’s a great surgeon.

RS: Yes, that she was doing surgery on herself, just for shits and giggles. That’s what surprises me is that we don’t, like, find her real background. We don’t ever find that out. And that we don’t ever find out what’s up with the Arturian rest homes. I really for sure thought that there was gonna be a big revelation.

Like, yeah, they’re making you into dog food.

Eric: yeah, so once you have reached enlightenment, and like, chopped off everything that there is to chop off, and you’re just like the torso from Monty Python, right? Did they also

RS: much, yeah.

Eric: and stuff, or is

RS: Yeah.

Matt: I think Yeah, I think eyes and stuff is kept, but I know there was a thing about chopping off, like, breasts and genitals. And then, of course,

the

schism over whether or not the final step is

lobotomization.

Eric: Oh yeah, [00:54:00] that’s, there was a huge question there. Um, but they wind up going to the Artur Rest homes, and I can’t believe that they were spending that, you know, cheap ass carny, Artie was paying a lot for a nice rest home.

These places were, they were making them into dog

Matt: Oh yeah, like Even, even on rereading the book, I was like, oh yeah, this is going to turn out where they’re, you know, feeding them to horse cats or whatever. And then it never comes and it’s just sort of, although there is the thing at the end when once everything blows up, Horst, you know, in terms of winding down the businesses, closes the rest homes and files for bankruptcy.

So, they are still kind of fucked.

Eric: Yeah. And they’re just, yeah, they’re just torsos now. And um

Matt: You may or may not be lobotomized. Horst is the big cat owner. Is there any complexity to Horst at all? Or is he just a nice guy who loves big cats?

I, I tend to think that, you know, like.

Eric: he’s just a big, carny, I pictured him, he has the handlebar mustache and the, like, stripes.

RS: Yeah, I don’t see [00:55:00] Horst as a particularly deep character.

Eric: there’s nothing to say about Horst. God, there’s somebody in this book who doesn’t have, like, an hour’s worth of stuff to talk about.

Matt: Ha

RS: Yeah,

we’re not, we’re not gonna cover everybody. That’s impossible. We’re not, the cats won’t allow it.

Eric: There’s the

Matt: ha.

Eric: who, you know.

Matt: Yeah, uh, Norval Sanderson. I, I like him.

RS: Such an interesting character, that he’s like interrogating this but going along with it too.

Matt: yeah, like, Artie knows that he’s, like, in a, he’s lying to him, but he keeps him around anyway because Artie wants someone to talk to. Um.

RS: that was a cat

Matt: Ha

Eric: Oh. You’re, you’re just, like, fending off the cat? You’ve

got, like, a

RS: I am. He

keeps, like, heading toward the computer to probably step on the power button again.

Eric: rub catnip all over the cords of your computer?

RS: He’s just an asshole!

He’s just an

asshole!

Eric: and he’s gonna do it.

RS: He knows!

he knows how to get my attention!

Matt: yeah, he knows that Ray freaks out when he hits that button, so. [00:56:00] Ha

Eric: it’s so funny. Dr. Phyllis. Yeah.

So she, that’s another person who, uh, so she’s

Matt: Yeah,

Eric: these surgeries on people. She’s his like creature somehow. What does he have over? She’s just getting a lot of money out of it.

Matt: I, yeah, I, I, I, yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s like just another, you know, well, I think initially it’s another like fuck you to Al because Al considers himself the, Citizen Doctor of the Freak Show, or the

the the Carnival,

but

Eric: Yeah, I

RS: Yeah, I

love that old timey thing.

Matt: Yeah,

yeah.

Eric: cool. I mean, Al and Lil are pieces of shit, but there’s a sense of, like, they are real, true to the bone, old timey carnies, right? They have, they

RS: 100%.

Eric: outside, they wander around, you know.

Matt: Yeah, like, like Lil’s whole thing originally was that she was beautiful, but she was also a

geek And [00:57:00] would bite the heads off chickens.

Eric: Right, and like, beautiful people aren’t supposed to be geeks, but

RS: Right. Right.

She came from, like, a good family or something, too,

Matt: Yeah, she was like an upper class Bostonian.

Eric: She was another Harvard geek. They’re all Harvard geeks.

Matt: Yeah.

RS: Or wait, she’s a girl So maybe Sarah Lawrence.

Matt: Sarah Lawrence or Amherst er.

RS: Vassar.

Eric: Maybe that’s where they got all of them from. It’s just these are, these, like all Lil’s fucking extended family are like

RS: Yeah.

Eric: you know? And they’re like, Hey, I can get your kid an internship at my, uh, you know, and it’s, he’s geeking

Matt: Yeah.

RS: you want a gap year that you’re definitely not gonna forget?

Eric: these blue blooded Connecticut, like, New England patriarchs and their kids are geeking, George W. Bush was there, geeking.

RS: that, yeah. bet he’d be pretty good at it.

Matt: Yeah.

Eric: good at it.

RS: Not Jeb, though. Jeb did not the juice

Eric: would [00:58:00] ask people to clap for him.

RS: Yeah. it’d be upsetting.

Eric: Okay. So he gets Dr. Phyllis to chop off people’s limbs for this cult, and then they give the limbs to different carnival members in order to pickle or to use for their dung fly act. There’s so many carnies with, you know.

RS: Yeah, so, the The, yeah, the main ones are Horst gets the big stuff for his cat.

Matt: And Norval, the reporter slash, uh, maggot salesman, uses the, uh, the

fingers

RS: and

toes, the little bits. Cause the cats would choke on them.

Matt: yeah, and, and maggots don’t need

that much, but,

and this is one of those things I’ve never, I don’t know if I quite have an answer to, but every so often Norval will try to steal a

thigh.

And, it’s like, I’ve always, I, I don’t know, I I don’t quite get what he’s doing with the thighs, and I’m not sure if we’re supposed to

know

why he wants the thighs occasionally, Because it seems like it’d be way too much meat for

[00:59:00] even a shitload of maggots, you know?

Eric: You know, if I get Artie’s attention, this, and Oly in particular is like, you know, Artie lets me spongebathe him, you know, but then like people want little bits, like I can have, you know, if I have the thigh bone, then that means I’m better.

Matt: Mmm.

Eric: have this and this, this and this wrong with me, then that means I’m better and I’m less, cause they make fun of each other, they call each other normies, they call each other like, basic, there’s this whole thing where Artie tells Chick to like, Make him stuff.

Not with his hands, but with his powers, because if he does anything with his hands, well that’s also to Chick becomes a vegetarian because he, he feel, we haven’t talked about chick’s, powers. Jesus.

RS: God.

Yeah, Chick feels the things he’s doing.

Eric: So Chick

Matt: Yeah.

Eric: the meat and feels the death because he’s God.

He’s like Jesus, you know?

Matt: Yeah, it kind of reminds me of the comic series Chew, about the dude who can

Uh, he can eat anything and see its entire lifeline, so he basically only eats beans because they are are the only things [01:00:00] that don’t trigger that for him. Because if he eats like a steak, he sees the cow living and getting slaughtered and da da da.

And I guess even with like plants, it’ll be, you

know,

he’ll,

See the factory farming, but also like, I don’t know,

if

someone gets killed in the field the carrot will

see it,

you know, or whatever.

but

same deal.

Eric: At one point, Oly asks, uh, Chick, like, Hey, how do your powers work? And he said, like, this was really cool.

Like, I’m normally anti world building, but this is just, it’s just enough, just a taste to make you go, I, this actually asks more questions than it answers, which is, he says, Well, you know how, like, when water flows? You can like make a canal or you can redirect it or you can like damn one part up. Like everything wants to move, everything wants to move everywhere.

So I just change the environment around so that moves in that direction the way it wants to. And you go, oh, that makes sense. What

RS: Oh, it’s great that they just give you a little bit of [01:01:00] it

into it that

makes sense because you can’t explain that. It’s not real.

And entropy of it.

How would he explain

this?

Matt: Yeah.

Like, like how, how would you explain green to a colorblind

Eric: The, the idea, like the matter and entropy want to flow everywhere, and I just change around the rivets around it. But then it turns out he can do it with such subtlety and such power. He can like from, from like yards away and he can like, draw semen out from somebody and imp artificially impregnate another person.

He winds up being the anesthesiologist, right? He can, like, take your pain away because he’s Jesus. And then surgeon. Yeah, well, he eventually replaces Dr. Phyllis, um, via

Matt: the

schism where the lobotomy schism, like Artie just has, has, uh, doc P completely. Chopped up and, and lobotomized. Then shipped off to one of the,

quote unquote homes.

Eric: So wait, what Wind winds up happening? It happens when [01:02:00] Ellie and Iphy ’cause they’re resentful of Artie or they want more money or they just want some independence, but they wind up, Ellie winds up prostituting if, or excuse me, sex working. You know what I’m saying? I’m

sorry. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. I’m stepping, I’m sticking my foot in it really.

But she winds up, like, selling their shared body to, uh,

Matt: Norms to fuck ’em.

Eric: And Iphy doesn’t want to do it, and Ellie does want to do it, but Ellie’s more dominant, so Iphy just goes along with it.

Matt: And it does seem that like, uh, Iphy does come around, but still.

RS: I mean, a lot of Ellie’s thing, too, is like, Arturo wants to, is in love with Iphy, and like, Ellie’s trying to put men in between them, you know, she really tries to get Iffy together with like, a normal guy who really does seem to love

her,

but Iffy’s horrified by him because,

like,

She believes that him loving her would make him

kind

of a

gross, fetishist person

just by the act of loving

this really heartbreaking little bit of insight.

Eric: sorry, I interrupted.

Um, [01:03:00] Ollie experiences the same thing when she dates the, what is it, who is it?

Matt: humpback.

Except that,

Eric: has a humpback. And he goes to Harvard

Matt: evil, yeah.

But, but the thing is, is that like, he doesn’t actually see her as.

Like she thinks they’re

together.

He thinks they’re not

Eric: but they both are in love with, uh, Artie. ’cause Artie has Iphy and Oly, both are in love with Artie because he’s got, you know, some kind of magnetic personality or whatever, um, uh, Ellie wants to put things in between them, so she winds up, like, selling their body to do that.

Um, and Artie gets wind of this and lobotomizes Ellie.

Matt: Well,

first he sends the bagman to rape them, but

Eric: wait, yeah, I forgot about that! Jesus!

RS: And the bag man, by the way, the bag man, remember the crazy guy who shot them because they were lined up?

Eric: comes back, he’s the bag man now.

RS: him back into their lives.

Eric: So he shot himself but he missed because [01:04:00] he’s

RS: Because he just kind of sucks as a person.

Eric: so he’s just like the elephant man who can’t even talk and he has a bag over his head and he comes back and joins Artie’s cult because he’s, you know, that’s of course what you do.

Right. And he’s, now he’s like, fuckin goon enforcer.

RS: Just stalking the twins around the entire

time.

so

Eric: get married to the bag man now.

RS: That, the most, one of the most horrifying parts of the book is that Crystal Lil, and Al are fine with

it.

The twins are like, “we really do not want this. At all.” And, and, Lil is just like, “I’m gonna be a grandma!”

Matt: Yeah. And Al’s just like, yeah. We’re gonna get more fucked up kids, this rocks!

RS: He’s so happy. That they’re just, these girls are just being, like, kept in a cage, basically.

Matt: Yeah. And

RS: And the only thing, the only thing that Al’s really, sorry, the only thing that Al’s really upset about is that they can’t perform so they’re not bringing in money.

fucking, god

Matt: yeah. And, and, [01:05:00] and then you have like the thing where it’s like,

where. Once, they decide to lobotomize Ellie, Like,

Chick does it, but his whole thing is, you

know,

“Well, I don’t like you anymore,

Artie” And Artie’s just like,

“Kay. Heh heh” Yeah. Yeah.

Eric: We’re talking have they already lobotomized Dr. Phyllis?

Dr. Phyllis tried to have like a coup in the cult. And then, there was a counter coup. There was a counter reformation. And, um, Chick just takes over all, Phyllis is now totally lobotomized, and Chick takes over the,

RS: Wait, was this the lobotomy before Dr. P? Or was this the first lobotomy?

Eric: Oh, I

Matt: you’re right, you’re right, you’re right. The,

that’s what gives was the first lobotomy.

Yes,

RS: Because, like, that’s kind of where they get the idea from,

Matt: Yeah, because Artie officially, initially wants to just chop off,

you

know Actually, he even

says that

he doesn’t

care

which, just chop off one of the

twins

Eric: yeah, [01:06:00] chop off one of the twins.

I don’t care which, and turns out you can’t do it. So he’s like, just lobotomize one of them. And then there’s these long scenes where like Iphy who is, you know, is just walking around with this corpse attached to her, this

Matt: Yeah.

Eric: and it’s horrible. It’s horrible. And she’s also pregnant with this, baby that was forced upon her.

She winds up shooting the bagman, but it’s too late.

RS: Well, didn’t I thought

Matt: Or, Chris, yeah, like,

um, Ellie was

about to, but, but, but Like,

uh, faltered at the last minute, and I think

kind of threw the gun or something, and then Crystal Lil saw the gun,

saw the bagman, and was like, Ah, I must do something about this for once in my

life.

RS: Yeah, the one

good

Eric: if you’re,

RS: she made.

Eric: getting, oh, sorry. If we’re getting confused, it’s because so much happens.

RS: There’s so much in this

fucking

book.

There’s so

Eric: So much. Here’s the thing. This book would, I think would really fall apart if there wasn’t that really that human element, because I’m thinking like [01:07:00] this could have easily been a very, very bad book.

RS: Yeah. just a stupid, trashy book, but it, like, the way these characters act and feel about each other, as

bizarre and dysfunctional as it

is,

does feel very real. Like, Oly passivity and complicity with what’s going on with the family does feel very real for the way a kid raised in an abusive,

dysfunctional

family would

act.

Matt: Yeah. cranked up a little more.

And she’s also a dwarf.

RS: Yeah.

Eric: So wait a minute. Uh, we, we gotta get through all of this. So, uh, Ellie

RS: all of it.

Eric: Iphy,

Jesus Christ Iphy. And we, you know, we gotta do it. I’m sorry.

We’re, we’re so far into it. Iffy. And Ellie, so Ellie is lobotomized, uh, they’re carrying this, the bag man’s, you know, unwanted baby.

I, Artie has locked them in their trailer to keep them from getting an abortion. Uh. They give birth to [01:08:00] Mumpo

RS: Mumpo.

Eric: And I like the idea that Mumpo isn’t even that fat like he was he was really big But I like the idea that he’s not even that fat a baby. Think that would be a really funny joke. He’s like, yeah, he’s okay, I

Matt: Yeah. Although there’s like that whole thing where everyone thinks that, uh, the twins are having twins themselves and it’s

just

RS: It’s just one enormous child.

One heckin

Eric: Effie, wait, hold on, Jesus. Um, oh, Chick. So Chick is, like, has been accepting people’s pain for so long, Jesus like. And, like, he’s now a preteen, but he’s still, like, got some kind of arrested development. And he’s just totally emotionally dead inside, right?

RS: Right.

But the one thing

the one thing that he does love is like, babies? Like, after, he helps deliver Mumpo, because it would be impossible for them to give birth to this thing without him. He also, at, um, at the jealous Oly’s request, grabs a sperm out of Arturo’s ballsack and inserts it into Oly. [01:09:00] So that she will have his baby, and it’s a baby that’s the baby Miranda.

That is how That is

how Miranda happens, and

Eric: And you make a good point, like, Mumpo was

RS: Yeah.

Eric: like, was born out of hate, and, uh, and Miranda was a virgin birth.

RS: Yeah, born out of love, question mark? A really fucked up, horrible love, but still a kind of love?

Matt: And I, and I also think too that I mean, it’s a little interesting that, You know,

You have the

twins plus a norm. I mean, the bag man’s a shitty norm, but he’s a

norm.

And you get like a grotesque freak baby. But

you get,

you know, Artie plus Oly equals the beautiful Miranda

who just has a tiny

Eric: But then also, like, it’s about, there’s a big question as to, like, what is freakishness, right? Like, what is this category, right?

The bag man turns himself into, like, first of all, the norms, Oh my god, wait, there’s another quote at the beginning, hold on. Uh, I did this down, but Artie talks about this, where he’s [01:10:00] like, uh, Do you, where he’s asking Artie, this is like back when they were kids, back when they were still innocent and things were still okay, right?

They were just kids playing and Artie’s reading scary stories and, uh, Oly asks him if he gets scared, and she says, uh, he says, “These books were written by Norms to scare Norms, and do you know what the monsters and demons and rancid spirits are? It’s us, that’s what. It’s you and me. We are the things that come to the Norms at nightmares.

The thing that lurks in the bell tower and bites the throats out the choir boys, that’s you. Oly. And the thing in the closet that makes the babies scream in the dark before it sucks their last breath, that’s me.” And, like That’s kind of like they’re proud of it, right? And it’s a question of like do I accept myself as a monster or like as this category, right?

Matt: hmm.

Eric: So like the bag man has it’s like the bag man has one Just like that’s the whole point behind the cult of disfiguration Like we are turning ourselves into this and the bag man shoots his face off, right? Accidentally, but then he’s like now I know I [01:11:00] belong right? I belong with this group of people I once hated I don’t know.

RS: Yeah,

and I and I think, like Artie bringing him in kinda solidifies how sometimes in these little outcast groups and subcultures That are hated by mainstream society, it’s very easy for these kinds of toxic relationships and hierarchies to form, because you know, you can’t go to the normal world for help, because the normal world wants to kill you, so you are stuck here, and when you have that kind of self hatred, you’re being told you’re a monster, you’re a monster, you’re a monster, maybe you accept, like, I guess I am, and that can kind of feel liberating, but also, it can lead to you being a real fucking piece of shit, so like, Having the bagman in, it’s saying, You need the bagman for Arturism to exist.

You

need

that

kind of

external violence and hatred for this

internal

dysfunction and

this

internal,

like, poisonous hierarchy to carry

on.

Matt: Mm hmm.

Eric: Of these, you know, safe spaces that are set up, right, are, [01:12:00] have a toxic person in it, right? have fallen apart because keeps going on and on and on. Yeah.

You try to set up a, a, you try to set up something, you know, separate and safe for people, and they’re, that’s, someone in there discovers that they can use it for their own, I don’t know, I, I had a friend who had to leave their, like, their, L-G-B-T-Q, friendly household. ’cause one of them was like a sex pest like,

RS: Hmm.

Eric: But that’s what this reminds me of is it’s like, oh, we’re all, we’re all persecuted, we’re all persecuted. So now I get to persecute. It’s wild. Anyway.

RS: Yeah.

Eric: Um,

Henny: [Mic bleed]

Eric: oh, . There he go. That funny. There he is.

RS: That’s, Henny. That’s, she’s she’s a hungry baby.

Eric: Okay. Yeah.

RS: It’s a different meow quality, you can probably hear it. Hers Yeah.

Eric: We’re all, we’re all exhausted but we gotta get through this. Um,

RS: yeah, okay.

Eric: and Ify, What, what triggers them to, What triggers Ify [01:13:00] to

Matt: Oh, Ellie basically, yeah. Ellie

RS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh,

Matt: Because

RS: his face? Uh, Chick has been bringing Ellie back, like, slightly, slightly healing her brain, and finally Ellie’s first, like, clear headed, coherent thought is, I’m gonna kill this fucking baby.

Eric: Yeah,

Matt: she stabs him in two. And I love the line of, uh, there’s a thing where, uh, in the, when Oly sees the aftermath, there’s, uh, Uh, Ellie has stabbed Mumpo

and

uh, Iphy and

Iphy’s fought back and killed

Ellie, so everyone’s dead. But then

there’s a reference

to the, uh, “pile of

Mumpo.” And I just love that phrase.

I mean, it’s a horrible thing ’cause it’s this like, you know,

it’s a, you know,

slashed up baby, but it’s still, it’s a pile of Mumpo.

RS: I, I love that Arturo is described as getting along on the ground by humping. He’s just humping along, that [01:14:00] is the verb used to describe the way he moves without his wheelchair, which, yeah, I mean, what else is it gonna be? He’s a torso, he can’t really walk.

Eric: It’s good, it’s grotesque, and even if it wasn’t intended, like, it probably wasn’t intended to be sexual at all, but like, it has, it has that connotation.

So it feels like he’s this like, Horny maggot,

RS: Just humping the earth, just walking around. And the fact that he has, that he’s like jacked as a result, which like, yeah, I guess if you’re using your torso all the time to get

Eric: he’s Just humping the earth,

and everybody has, to do what he says. right? It’s such a

creepy detail that he like works out constantly. He does like neck muscles and he’s just beefy.

RS: Yeah,

the extremely, the way that is incredibly unsettling from the beginning, the way Oly describes his muscles, just this really like, “oh, his incredible muscles,”

Like, that, okay Ollie, that’s a little, that’s, alright, that, that’s a weird way to talk about your brother there.

Eric: I got another quote here. Um, sorry. I, I, I [01:15:00] bookmarked this book a lot, but this is like, why, what is it that Oly is So the whole time Oly isn’t just passive of Artie’s shenanigans.

She’s enabling it, right? She’s her, his. she’s just in love with him. She’s later, she’s like, I am in love with him, I want his baby, right? And she has a line here, Dear daughter, she’s talking to Miranda, right? “Dear daughter, I won’t try to call my feeling for Artie love. Call it focus. My focus on Artie was an ailment, non communicable, and even to me all these years later, incomprehensible.

Now I despise myself, but even so I remember in hot floods the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible and beautiful and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded and smothered anyone he needed.

But his needing and the hurt it caused me were the most life I ever had.” God, you know, I’ve had relationships like that. That’s what I think makes the book good is because like, oh, that, you know, [01:16:00] you’re describing these very real feelings.

RS: Yeah, it’s so, it’s so brutal, like, even as you’re reading

this

complete insanity. You’re going like, Yeah, okay, that kinda,

that’s that.

yeah, I have an auntie like that. Or something like, Oh, yeah, alright, I know that guy.

Eric: Um, sorry, someone’s ringing at my bell here. I dunno. People just keep ringing at my bell. We gotta get through this. The, uh, if he and Oly, Iphy stabs Ellie coup, smothered Mumpo, Jesus Christ. I feel like I’m having a stroke.

Iphy stabs Ellie, because her, her conjoined twin who grew up back to smother Mumpo, and then, uh, that kills both of them because they share the same body.

And, uh, Uh, Chick cannot handle it emotionally, and he finally snaps. Poor Chick, who is Jesus! That’s the whole point behind Chick, right? He has Jesus powers, he can absorb your sins, he can absorb your pain. He’s perfectly empathetic, and he cannot handle all this evil. And [01:17:00] he, uh, spontaneously combusts.

RS: And he just burns everything. He burns Al, good,

of the Arturans,

Eric: Arturo. blows up. Arturo

Matt: Oh, yes.

Eric: Becomes a fish fry. You know, R. I. P. R. I. P.

Bozo.

RS: sous vide!

Eric: Um, and that’s the end of, I mean, the, you know, It was around the time where, Iphy was dragging around Ellie’s, you know, Lobotomized corpse and is pregnant with this, With her attacker’s, you know, baby, and That’s when Um, Crystal Lil was picking blackberries with them and going everything’s just fine, fine, fine.

And when Oly goes, our family is fucked up and we’re falling apart, that’s when she slaps her, you

Matt: Mm-Hmm.

Eric: Anyway, but finally it’s

RS: been there, been there.

Eric: carnival is done, it’s been blown to smithereens, there’s nothing left.

Uh, Crystal Lil is still alive, but is completely out of commission.

Matt: Yeah, it broke her. She, like, there’s this great slash horrifying [01:18:00] bit,

where they find her mad madly humping Al’s charred corpse and

saying that they can start

again.

Eric: god, Jesus. I forgot about that.

Matt: Yeah.

RS: yeah, Jesus.

Eric: Okay, flash forward to the future. Miranda goes, I just got offered a huge payment to cut off my tail, and, uh, Ollie is seething in her seat because of everything, everything we just said for the past couple of hours is embodied in that tail. That’s the last thing of this whole Binewski drama. And we haven’t even discussed Ms.

Lick at all.

RS: I love Miss Lick. fix her, she could fix me.

Eric: So in the future timeline,

RS: Miss Lick, come on, I’ll do your surgeries.

Eric: To somebody else, I feel like I

haven’t been speaking

RS: cup, that’s too big a cup. That’s heavy.

Eric: Have I

Matt: ha

Eric: much? I’m sorry. It’s, you

RS: fuckin shrink em. Miss Lick, hit me up. We I will I will spot you at the gym.

fix her, is all I’m saying.

Eric: Yeah, I’ll let someone else talk about Ms. Lick if you want . I, I’ve [01:19:00] been talking way too much. Sorry.

RS: that’s, no, it’s fine, I Miss Lick,

God. an incredible character.

What is her deal? I don’t know. I mean, again, we do have to bring this up. Someone in our Discord brought this up, that

this

is potentially a somewhat problematic portrayal of a very strongly lesbian coded character.

book is of its time.

Matt: Yeah, in the book, she explicitly says that she has no interest in sex, so you might say, you know, I jokingly refer to it as, problematic ace representation, but

Eric: but

Matt: she’s not really ace, it’s, it’s, it’s very much of, like, and I think you were talking about this, Rae, like the, uh, the eight, seventies and eighties perception of,

Any woman who didn’t want sex is like frigid and You know, or a lesbian, but she couldn’t talk about the lesbianism, and it’s, it’s a big mess of queer that’s probably not [01:20:00] the best handled, except that you get that kind of, well, it was the time pass kind of, sort

RS: Except I love her,

Matt: You want that too, that too.

RS: We

could, I would cook for her so she wouldn’t have to eat her little TV dinners by herself.

We could do supersets together at the gym so we can like, use two pieces of equipment without really hogging anything for a while, it’s okay because there’s two of us.

Just

alternate, it’d be cool.

We could, I’m just saying. Hm. just saying.

Matt: Ha

RS: I could fix her, is all I’m

Matt: ha. ha. Hm. she’s a strong, muscly woman. Yes, Yes, exactly! She works out a lot, she swims constantly, and her schtick is that she wants to, what does she want to do? She wants to fix pretty girls?

Yeah,

RS: I mean, well, in some things she’s like, making unusual girls normal. So in some cases it’s like, surgeries that get rid of congenital deformities, like the tail. And in others it’s like, you’re too hot, I’m gonna make you real [01:21:00] fat. that

you

focus

on important things instead of being– She’s like,

an

anti bimbofication

Matt: Yes, Yes, she is turning into the, the sweater girl reading a book

Eric: it’s . very much coded as like she gets off. I, and I don’t know if I read this wrong, but it’s coded like I get off on this and I’m like targeting pretty young women.

RS: Oh, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of gender thin– Just very, very interesting, this big, masculine, unhappy, lonely woman is devoted to cutting away or burning away the femininity of younger women, like

Matt: yes,

RS: Alright.

there’s there’s a lot going on there. There’s there’s some gender in this book.

Matt: yes.

Eric: Jesus, to like, I have

Matt: Yeah, cause, yeah, she’ll, like, I think her first one is the, the pretty girl that she, uh, surgically acids her face, right?

Is that the first one, I think?

RS: There’s something like that. I know there’s a lot of like, there’s cutting tits

Matt: Yeah, yeah, cutting tits [01:22:00] off is a big thing. And, and the, like, disfigurement. There’s the women that she fucks with the thyroids of so they get really,

really, fat,

Except that, uh, one of them is a former athlete because I guess she didn’t really think

about tailoring her disfigurements, I guess.

RS: Henny is being, Henny does

have to wait, I’m sorry

Eric: Oh, she’s the heiress to a, a trade dinner, like A TV, trade dinner fortune, something. So she pays

RS: And that’s all she eats, which is incredible.

Matt: yeah,

RS: Her sodium’s too high!

She should know better!

Eric: Uh, Ray did you, you thought that there was something to it that she has like a TV trade dinner, like is

RS: I was wondering if it’s the symbolism of conformity and uniformity, because TV dinners, it’s this uniformity of food, and everything’s in their little separate slots in the tray, and also that it’s a very lonely thing.

Matt: Oh, she also has the same one every night [01:23:00] too.

RS: Right.

and also that she’s, it’s like, the thing, you know, it is shorthand for sad, lonely person food, too, like eating a TV dinner by yourself on a tray while watching television is a sign that your life’s not going great.

Matt: Except that she’s watching surgery. Yeah.

Eric: so she’s going to pay Miranda a million dollars to chop off her tail. Oly says, I am going to give my life to keep this from happening.

RS: Does not ask Miranda if that’s what she wants, by the way,

Does not bother to ask! It could have been fine, Miranda could have been totally happy with

Matt: Uh, and that’s the impression that you get Is that she always kinda low key hated the tale. And now it’s kinda useful, but I mean Eh.

Eric: we also get this bit about how the nuns who raised Miranda Oly gave explicit instructions like, all your funding will go away if you remove the tail. The tale is important to me, Oly, and it represents this whole Binewski tradition.

RS: Yeah, so, there’s not a real sense of Of Like,

body, of, of, body autonomy here [01:24:00] either.

Oly’s never really asking Miranda, Do you really want

this?

Matt: Mm hmm.

RS: And I find it interesting, because I had like a, well, going into a little bit of personal

I had like a weird congenital deformity on my face that my parents would not let me get rid of until my 20s.

Which was not really, basically like an extra nostril almost, right dead in the center of my face, that I was not allowed to surgically remove Until my early 20s, so that was really good for my like, sense of self esteem And I was so fucking happy to get it taken out. It was like a really quick outpatient procedure. I still have a tiny scar, if you ever meet me,

Matt: Ha

RS: but, I don’t know, I’m bringing so much of my own stuff in there that, to my mother, like, the idea of it getting removed was so frightening and scary and there could be a real problem. And it’s like, well, I don’t, I don’t particularly want to look this weird. I, I know you want to celebrate difference and what’s, what’s,

But I would like to have a face that’s a normal face, please.

Matt: Mm

RS: So,

Eric: was it a question of like, you’re too [01:25:00] young to know, like if this is what you want? Or was it a question of, I mean, I’m sorry for that. I’m, you know,

RS: I don’t, I, I, I, I kind of think it was a weird control thing, to be honest.

Eric: I’m sorry to,

RS: There was some some weird shit, I, I, I’m not sure if I should bring that up or if I should cut it out,

but it’s just

like, so much of this book is hitting personal in these really weird ways.

Matt: Mm-Hmm.

RS: That’s what I read into this, it’s like, here’s a girl who has this feature that doesn’t bother her that much, but she doesn’t particularly like it, and it’s kind of annoying.

And mom’s like, “No, you don’t know what this represents!” But on the other hand, it’s like, “Yeah, but, I It’s on me.

And I

don’t

really want it on me, and you’re making it about this weird principle thing where This is a physical reality that I have to deal with, and I don’t particularly enjoy it.”

Eric: And also, like, the tradition that, like, you love, and that this represents, maybe it’s better that it’s dead.

Matt: Yeah.

yeah. With the Binewskis, it’s like,

yeah, let this shit show die

I mean, I get [01:26:00] why Oly doesn’t think that, but I mean, you know, as an outside observer, it’s like Jesus Christ. Just know

every part of this

Eric: well, speaking of let it Die, there’s a great scene where Oly, uh, manufacturers fucking mustard gas to assassinate Ms.

Lick to keep

her from this in

RS: which I still am trying to figure out what this footbath thing is. Why, why is it a hallway of footbath?

Eric: Yeah, they, they go to some kind of deluxe gym where they have a footbath. I don’t know what that is. Maybe it was a thing. If you are, go to a gym with a footbath, please write into KittySneezes.

Sure. It’s

RS: rich person who’s very, very swole, write to me.

to me personally.

Matt: ha But the footbath has chlorine

Eric: in it, and because it has chlor

RS: for

normal, normal reasons.

Eric: The, uh, the footbath has chlorine in it and, uh, uh, Oly figures that she can pour in some ammonia and trap Miss Lick in the room and kill her.

And Yeah. and, uh, it happens and she, Oly [01:27:00] also kills herself in the process and, um, all the letters are left behind for Miranda to find out this horrifying family history. The end.

RS: The relationship between Oly and Miss Lick is so fascinating though, cause like, to get close to her, Oly has to befriend her. And that’s really the only friend she’s ever had in her

life.

Legitimately the only and like Oly’s really her only friend. She’s this profoundly lonely unhappy woman and there are these moments where they’re together.

We’re like, yeah, Miss Lick is this huge domineering person. But at the same time she’s cradling Oly and like teaching her how to swim. And it’s like

a

kind

of sweet in this weird way, and they’re at the pool together, and these kids are staring at Oly, and Oly’s like lovin it, she’s reveling it, she’s like showing off her hump, she’s having a great time, and Miss Lick’s basically chasing them away, like “don’t fucking stare,”

she really is trying to be a good friend, and it’s

just,

You know, even

though Miss Lick is this fucking weirdo, you kind of feel bad for her in this way, cause it’s like, she is being nice to, to, to Oly in a way that like, literally no [01:28:00] one else in her life has ever been this nice to her.

Matt: I know, like, like, Miss Lick is one of the few, like, genuinely likable characters

Eric: Despite being, you know, like, a

RS: A fucking

Matt: Psycho. Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s the thing. It’s like, even with

all of her shit.

You still kinda like her because she’s nice to Oly For

the only person in the book?

RS: That’s probably why Oly could kill her, like, if she was mean to Oly, Oly would probably be like, “I love you.”

Matt: yes.

Eric: you.

I wanna say like Oly, you can have a friend and a daughter and a relationship where you don’t hit each other and you don’t have to sleep in a cupboard like

Matt: Well, at this point I think she gets to sleep in a cupboard.

RS: yeah.

Eric: Um,

RS: Miss Lick would make her a very nice cupboard. She’d, like, probably, she’d, she’d, she’d be like, “Look, I’m making you an actual room, but I’ll put a cupboard in it if that’s what you want I’ll get, like, a really nice one. With, like, good cushions and shit.” She’d, she’d, like, design it at the height of [01:29:00] 80s interior decorating, so it would probably be a weird color combination, like red and black or something.

Eric: Ray, I barreled through your, uh, your outline, like, the way Artie took over the fucking carnival. I’m sorry about that.

No,

RS: that’s okay. I, I, I did not work hard on this outline at

our, at all.

Eric: My brain feels like it’s on fire trying to, like, there’s just a lot to talk about.

There’s too much, and we’re gonna forget something, and someone’s still gonna be like, “Why did you

RS: forget Why didn’t you men, why didn’t you mention that

she’s,

she does a radio station?”

didn’t you mention

has a radio stat yeah, she does

Eric: There’s a bunch of characters we haven’t even mentioned.

Matt: yeah, yeah.

Eric: Was this book good?

Matt: God,

yes.

RS: Yes! God damn!

Eric: I really like this book, but,

RS: What a fuckin book, man.

Matt: and there’s so

many

like,

RS: a ride.

Matt: yeah, and there’s so many good, subtle things like one of the things that I love that I did not catch on my first reading is how [01:30:00] every, or like a lot of things are described as green, especially things that aren’t really normally green. Like I think she calls a, uh, A sunset green, or a sunrise maybe, I

don’t remember which. and

and it’s both, it’s this like really neat trick that

both gives the novel this kind of sickly, grotesque air.

But,

it’s also just because

Olly’s got green glasses. Ha

ha

Eric: Oh yeah!

RS: mean, symbolism in that the way she looks at the world is is colored. Uh huh.

Matt: Yeah.

Eric: huh. Yeah. It’s, seeing everything through

like

RS: seeing everything through rose, it’s it’s seeing everything through, like, the weird green filter.

Matt: Ha ha ha.

RS: That says that everyth something is slightly wrong and unreal. She’s, she sees the world, I guess it looks like the parts at the beginning of the Matrix when Neo is [01:31:00] still in the Matrix.

Matt: Yeah.

Eric: Everything is in a fisheye lens for her. yeah. Or maybe that’s Arty with the fisheye lens.

RS: Oh, gosh.

Matt: yeah. Um, one thing I kind of want to talk about too, a little bit, and I, I, you know, is that there was this weird sort

of

I don’t know, seeming like freak show interest around this time. Like,

uh.

Geek Love came out in 89, I think, which is about the same, I think the, the Residents did an album called Freak Show, which is about the dissidence of a freak show that was actually based on the memories of the Residents, uh, as children going to actual freak shows.

And, uh, that was, came out about the same time. And one of the things that, that, I think you kind of

Get a little bit in the novel, but not really that the residents really hit on and one of the supplemental things for the album [01:32:00] is

that

people talk about

how it’s good that we don’t have

freak shows anymore

because it’s kind of fucked

up to stare at people with,

problems and,

conditions and stuff like that.

and, you know,

gawk at them. But as the Residents

said, The only

difference is now the freaks still get stared

1. They just don’t get paid for it.

Eric: Right, cause like I was saying about the Coney Island Sideshow, Like, it’s not

Matt: Right.

Eric: but

Matt: Yeah, and and I,

RS: Right, we just have TLC

now.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, now, now we still have those to some extent, like, uh, The Jim Rose sideshow, uh, Jim Rose

sideshow,

Which, I, I just found out that he’s also from Seattle, or from the Pacific

Northwest,

And he even cited Geek Love as like his inspiration, but like,

Pretty much all of his sideshow, and I think

the same thing for the, um, Coney Island one, is that,

they’re almost all geek acts, [01:33:00] except for, like, there’s, uh,

uh,

Jim Rose has a couple of, like, tattooed

men.

But, like, they’re all geek acts. They’re all, the human woodblock where they, you know, hammer nails in the nose, or,

Other things that basically, anyone can do, they just don’t because it’s fucked

up.

And I mean, I’m not, I don’t want to like, dismiss it all like,

Oh, well there’s no skill involved, because there is a lot of skill.

And, you know, some of the stuff is, like,

Does take a lot of learning and training and stuff,

but.

Eric: I mean, half

of the, I mean, if the book, The difference between Arty and Oly is Arty can command a crowd and Oly can’t, right? Like, they say something about, oh, you’re Your, uh, deformities are, are not interesting, but that’s, I think that’s just Cope.

I think that, like, Oly could have been an Arty, but Oly just didn’t have the, didn’t have the, the, the charisma.

Matt: Mm

Eric: Matt, what you were saying reminded me of, uh, two things. It reminded me of, like, so, we had said at the beginning, like, Freak is a socially constructed category, right? [01:34:00] But it’s socially constructed partially, you know, outside in, but partially also from the inside, right?

Like, this is a category that protects us. This is a category that allows us to market ourselves and get paid for it, right? And it kind of reminds me of the creation of like, I mean, excuse me, please, but like homosexuality is a societally constructed, LGBTQ is a societally constructed category, and it’s like a process of othering, but then if we claim this category and become a group of people, then that protects us somewhat.

And the question is, is like, if we, if we assimilate too much, there’s even questions around there, and it’s a big question of like, like we were saying about the Coney Island or the other freak shows, excuse me, but like, what is lost in the process of our assimilation? , right? We still have these problems, but now we just don’t get paid for it.

Matt: Yeah.

Eric: Um, and something very similar is true of sex work. I feel like there’s a lot of, uh, a lot of sex workers are like, look, I mean this is bad, but at least we’re in charge of the money [01:35:00] or we’re in charge of our own. Yeah. Yeah. That’s how you get pimps.

Matt: you get pimps.

Eric: at the

Yeah, that’s how you get pimps.

RS: Though at the same time, that that idealization

of

difference become, Okay, is this a

celebration or is this a fetishization?

those are very two different things and being fetishized is, doesn’t feel great. It doesn’t feel fun. It’s not really something that’s coming from a

place of respect or

love.

Eric: Until Miss Lick? That was her

RS: Until Miss Lick? That was her only real friend!

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. within these idealized, you know, oh, this is a safe space world, there are predators, like Arty.

Eric: Like, no, you are not safe. Arty, you know, is just as bad, if not worse.

RS: [01:36:00] Yeah. And, and when you get so deep into it

of

being the anti assimilationist, you might

like,

as I, I think as Oly does, You end up

trying to save quote unquote someone’s uniqueness in a

way

that

they might not want it saved. Like we don’t know Miranda’s just got a little tail, but maybe it’s uncomfortable.

Maybe it like makes it

harder

to

clean after you take a shit. I don’t know like maybe she’s sick. Maybe it’s harder to buy pants and she’s sick of wearing this

fucking

You know, it’s it’s

not,

what she actually wants becomes this huge like contest of

Mindsets,

and

what’s your worldview, and what’s your ideology, instead of just being able to

just sort of

be a person making decisions about your own body

according

to what you prefer and according to what you would make

you

happy.

Eric: Don’t they go into that too? Like it’s, uh, it’s hard for me to, shit, I,

RS: I don’t remember. They might! There’s just so much in this book that would not stand out. There’s so much more [01:37:00] insanity.

Matt: Yeah, I don’t remember it, but I mean, that

doesn’t

mean anything, cause, you know,

I’m probably forgetting stuff

right now when I just finished the book a

Eric: a week ago.

We haven’t really gotten into Catherine Dunne’s personal life, I think she had been through a lot as a person before she started writing

RS: Oh!

Matt: don’t know Yeah, skimmed the Wikipedia page.

Yeah, I know that she was like born in Kansas and then moved to like Portland as a kid. And that’s about

it.

Eric: I couldn’t get into that because I will tell you by the time I finished It’s

RS: It’s

so much

book.

It’s like five books worth of book

Matt: Yes, yes.

Eric: book.

RS: So tired. We’ve been talking for two and a half hours

Matt: Yeah,

I,

RS: off recording.

Matt: yeah, I, I think this might be the longest Book Club

RS: Yeah. Which is great,

Matt: Oh yeah,

RS: [01:38:00] it totally deserves it,

this book.

Matt: you’re, you’re getting your three

three bucks worth.

RS: You’re getting your Three dollars.

we’re

going off with a bang. Oh, maybe I, I, I’ll just tell you now because we are announcing it. Um, we’re gonna take a little month off just because I’m fucking exhausted of doing this every month and freeze the Patreon. So, we, we are leaving people with a considerable episode before we take a little month long hiatus.

Cause I need a fucking break from this shit

Eric: Yeah, listen to half of this and then listen to the another half of the next episode

Matt: Yeah, uh, for what it’s worth, the, the feed, the normal feed will have a, uh, we’re going to pull one of the book club episodes out from behind the paywall just so there’s something there. But since you’re already, the Patreon for a month so we’re not charging people for nothing.

yes, because, you know, I mean, if, if you’re listening to this, you’re, you’ve already heard the one that we’re going to put out of the paywall because that’s kind of the whole so.

we’re not gonna,

we’re not gonna double

charge

you

for stuff you’ve [01:39:00] already got.

Eric: If you still want to pay, uh, you know, struggling artists, uh, you can always send those three dollars to me. I’ll, uh, post my Venmo up on the– No, I’m just

Matt: heh.

RS: Yes. So, that’s good, though. We are leaving people

with a substantial episode before the

break.

Matt: Yes. Heheheheheheheheh.

RS: Because after reading this novel, I do need a break for about a month.

Matt: Heheheheheheheheh. Woo.

RS: Rest in peace, Miss Lick.

Eric: buddy. Rest in peace,

RS: She would have made an incredible workout buddy.

Matt: Rest in peace, Miss Lick. Rest in piss, Artie. Yeah,

Eric: Rest in peace Horst. I like a guy who likes cats. Were

RS: Everybody was a very big enabler.

Matt: Yeah.

RS: Uh, rest in piss. Crystal Lil is still alive at the end of the book, but she’s terrible.

Matt: Yeah.

RS: Fuckin hate her.

She’s garbage.

Okay, I feel like we’re

collapsing.

So why don’t we, [01:40:00] why don’t we wind it down? Um, cause we’re, we’re out of juice. We’re, we’re juiced out. We’re like Ellie at the end of the book. So, uh, before we go, uh, what are some things you’d like to promote. I will start with

Matt.

Matt: basically this site called KittySneezes, uh, kittysneezes.

com. Uh, one thing that, uh, we’re trying to, uh, or I’m trying to, uh, kind of expand it a little bit. So hopefully there will be some more stuff coming from other folk, uh. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll play it by ear. Um, if you’re interested in publishing stuff, set me up, but you’re already on the discord.

So, you know that I’ve been like saying that for a while. So

whatever.

I’m tired.

RS: Yeah. Okay,

Eric, promote yourself.

Eric: Uh, I write sometimes, um, I’d like to do it more, um, I, uh, you know, I, uh Please, uh, go to ethorwitz.com, [01:41:00] uh, to see my stuff. Or, uh, I don’t know, call up your representative and tell them to fund libraries. Libraries are good.

RS: Yes,

a

library is where I got this book from.

Well, thank you both so much for coming on, for reading this book, and for talking for approximately A fortnight about this book.

thank you all

Matt: I

RS: we, yeah, Yeah, read this book. I know I say that about almost every

book we

do

on

the book club, but god, really, really fucking read this book.

The chat, our discord was

like, hopping.

is probably It has probably made people talk more than any other book we’ve covered

because

there’s

so fucking much.

Matt: Yes. Yeah, I mean,

RS: We are vibrating in the Discord about this

Matt: yeah, we’ve been going for two hours and there, and you might think that we’ve picked the book dry, but we haven’t. There will be still so much for you to discover if you somehow have listened to this without reading the [01:42:00] book, which I don’t recommend, but at this point well, you’re fucked, so.

Eric: Yeah.

RS: Regret your choices.

do not

regret the choice to subscribe to our podcast. We appreciate it. It helps us buy cat food for these little fuckers who are looking at me like they’re gonna murder me because dinner is 33 minutes late. Thank you all so much for subscribing. Until next time, keep reading and keep writing good.