Super Flat Times
Having devoured all the George Saunders works I could get my hands on, I’ve moved on to Matt Derby’s Super Flat Times: Stories. I haven’t gotten very far yet, but he gets a gold star for delirious passages like these:
At the center my colleagues and I taught people different techniques of coaching food, getting the best performance out of a meal. This type of eating was called “Eating,” and it involved an intricate set of stances that are illegal now. Our goal, stressed in the grueling two-hour instruction tape, was to teach people how to work in the table, the whole room. It was a lifestyle. “When you think about eating,” the trainer on the tape said, strolling past a series of staggered food murals, “think about the part of yourself that has to leave to make room for the food coming in. Where does it go? That is the central question. That is when we turn eating into Eating.”
…
I stood behind her, arms crossed over her abdomen, pressing my palms upward just below her ribs, demonstrating rapid breath technique. I only came up to her shoulders, which made positions such as Filtering the Pool and Attending the Korean Audio Science Museum more challenging than they should have been. Gradually, though, her body yielded to my embrace.
…
“What — are you?” she said, pointing to my body. It was difficult, in those first days, to understand everything she said — what came out of her was more like a set of breathy, musical notes, whole mouthfuls of them. Pretty, though. I am sure she had the same trouble with my own spittled, mawkish bursts of language. We relied heavily on clothes, sketches, and the arrangement of objects in the room to convey meaning.
Like Lem at his most satirical, he just piles on absurd premises, one after the other, until you’re simply forced to accept the whole teetering, improbable mess. Incidentally, the promotional site is appropriately disorienting—be sure to check out the DVD-style “deleted scenes”.