Reading: No One Is Talking About This

North Vancouver City Library Adult book club January book

Excerpts

A hundred years ago you would have been mining coal and had fourteen children all named Jane,” she often marveled, as she watched a man stab a finger at his wife in front of the Keurig display. “Two hundred years ago, you might have been in a coffee shop in Göttingen, shaking the daily paper, hashing out the questions of the day—and I would be shaking out sheets from the windows, not knowing how to read.” But didn’t tyranny always feel like the hand of the way things were?
the world pressing closer and closer, the spiderweb of human connection grown so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk, and the day still not opening to her. What did it mean that she was allowed to see this?
She looked at his profile and saw him as the blazing endpoint of a civilization: ships on the Atlantic, the seasickness of ancestors over a churning green, the fact that he looked just like his son, whose pictures he sometimes posted. And if someone doesn’t, she thought, how will we preserve it for the future—how it felt, to be a man around the turn of the century posting increasing amounts of his balls online?
White people, who had the political educations of potatoes—lumpy, unseasoned, and biased toward the Irish—were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.
The only thing that bound us together was this belief: that in every other country they eat unspeakable food; worship gods more see-through than glass; string together only the most meaningless syllables, like goo-goo- goo-goo-goo-goo-goo; are warlike but not noble; do not help the dead cross in the proper boats; do not send the correct incense up to the wide blue nostrils; crawl with whatever crawls; do not love their children, not the way we do; bare the most tempting body parts and cover the most mundane; cup their penises to protect them from supernatural forces; their poetry is piss; they do not respect the moon; slice the little faces of our familiars into the stewpot.
It should not be true that, walking the wet streets of international cities, she should suddenly detect the warm, the unmistakable, the broken-to- release-the-vast-steam-of-human-souls, the smell of Subway bread. That she should know it so instantly, that she should stop in her tracks, that she and her husband should turn to each other joyously and sing in harmony the words EAT FRESH. No, it should not be true that modern life made us each a franchise owner of a Subway location of the mind.
Why did rich people believe they worked harder? Her theory was that it was because they identified with the pile of money itself. And gathering interest, multiplying hotly, climbing its own slopes like a fever, heightening its silver, its gold, its green—what was that but work? When you thought about it that way, they never slept, but stayed wide-eyed as numerals 365 days a year, every last digit of them busy, awake in the clinking, the shuffle, the rustle, while eagles with pure platinum feathers swooped above them to create a wind. When you thought about it that way, of course they deserved it all, and looked with rightful contempt at the coppery disgraces all around them: those two cents that refused to even rub themselves together.
Hoarding ammo must be just like hoarding wealth, she thought, and saw again the heap in the vault, the free spreading wings of the money eagle. If your body was a pile of ammo, how could it ever be brought down? If it was already buried, how could it die?
The difference between her and her sister could be attributed to the fact that she came of age in the nineties, during the heyday of plaid and heroin, while her sister came of age in the 2000s, during the heyday of thongs and cocaine. That was when everything got a little chihuahua and started starring in its own show. That was when we saw the whole world’s waxed pussy getting out of a car, and said, more.
When she was a child, the thing she feared most—besides pooping little eggs—was having the hiccups for fifty-five years, like the cursed man she had read about in her water-damaged Guinness Book. But when she came of age she realized that everything about life was having the hiccups for fifty-five years. Waking up, hic, standing in the steaming headspace of the shower, hic, hearing her own name called from the other room and feeling that faint electric volt of who I am, hic, hic, hic. No amount of sugar-eating or being scared would help.
The future of intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information. But when she looked at the smoking landscape of fathers laid out by cable news, it seemed no longer a question of intelligence or ignorance, but one of infection. Someone, a long time ago, looked at the big gray wriggle of American fathers and saw them as what they were: just weak enough, the mass host that would carry the living message.
She had once shared a stage with a man who stood and laughed in the voice of his great-grandfather for five full minutes, even to the point of falling backward and rolling on the floor as he cackled; he had explained earlier that his ancestors were always with him when he performed. When he finished, she smoothed the daisies on her dress and walked up to the microphone and said, blinking against the personal spotlight, “I cannot even tell you how much my ancestors are not up with me here right now.” But then, almost as a serious laugh, a strength entered her voice and she stood like a tree with a spirit in it, and she opened a portal where her mouth was and spoke better than she ever had before, and as she rushed like blood back and forth in the real artery she saw that ancestors weren’t just behind, they were the ones who were to come.
Was the baby American? If she was, was it because this was the dust that had raised her particles, was it because she was impossibly ambitious in a land of impossible ambition, or was it because this was the country that had so steadfastly refused to care for her?

Background on Internet Culture

https://medium.com/swlh/a-brief-history-of-internet-culture-and-how-everything-became-absurd-6af862e71c94

As Internet culture evolved across platforms and categories, it became a tool to undermine institutions of ideology, advertising, government, and society as a whole. It wasn’t just for entertainment or news. It became a universal language connecting people from all over the world.
As traditional institutions have faltered and technological integration has advanced, everything has revolutionized. The entertainment industry, political spectrum, pop culture, access to information, and all of reality as we know it has streamlined into an endless click hungry feed on our devices. We view life through this microscope now, making what used to be a week’s worth of news only an hour’s worth.
If public social media sites and blogs were where the average person went, anonymous based forums and sites were where the nerds went. In the late 1990’s more niche comedy websites and forums such as Something Awful (1999) and Homestar Runner (2000) began popping up. These sites harbored various internet phenomena, making them an early destination for image macros, text-based formatted jokes, and various viral content
This emergence of both public and anonymous social media platforms tapped into the human psyche in a way never observed before in history and we began noticing it right away.
The more niche something is, the more cool it’s perceived to be and special it really is, which is why so much of popular online culture is derived from those deeper online communities.
There’s something to be said about how “now” is always the craziest time in history. Each year the world gets smaller and problems get more complex. As these sociological and psychological changes began impacting the masses, mostly being young people, there needed to be new adaptations to process the chaos. There was no education or research in place to help assimilate anyone into these newly integrated worlds between digital and human.
Many young people, especially young girls, have become so tethered to their identities on Instagram that it’s begun showing severe mental health repercussions. It’s easy to get caught in a cycle of comparing and competing for attention via vanity, since the platform is completely based on visual aesthetic.
Each year the world gets smaller and problems get more complex
Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as a means to explain how information spreads throughout culture. Internet memes are a subset of this concept.

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

NVCL Book Club Reading Guide

About the book

“A book that asks: Is there life after the internet?
“As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms “the portal,” where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats—from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness—begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal’s void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. “Are we in hell?” the people of the portal ask themselves. “Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?”
“Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: “Something has gone wrong,” and “How soon can you get here?” As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.
“Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature” [publisher].

About the author

Patricia Lockwood is the author of the novel No One Is Talking About This, a 2021 Booker Prize finalist and one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2021, and the memoir Priestdaddy, one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2017, as well as the poetry collections Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor [publisher].

Interviews and articles

The Guardian: “Patricia Lockwood: ‘That’s what’s so attractive about the internet: you can exist there as a spirit in the void’” (January 30, 2021)

Esquire: “Patricia Lockwood on the Internet of Nothings” (February 6, 2021)

Hazlitt: “‘It Was Like Playing Around with the Blood of the Alphabet Itself’: An Interview with Patricia Lockwood” (February 17, 2021)

NPR: “In ‘No One Is Talking About This,’ Patricia Lockwood Enters An Internet Portal” (February 17, 2021; audio and transcript)

Medium: “A Brief History of Internet Culture and How Everything Became Absurd” (March 9, 2019); an article that might help provide some context to the book’s themes of social media and ‘Internet Culture’

Discussion Questions

What do you think is the significance of the book’s title? Why do you think it’s called No One Is Talking About This? What do you think an alternate title could be?

We don’t talk much about family member’s with disabilities or life-threatening genetic diseases
The title is significant because we’re so busy with the absurdity of the internet. We seldom talk about these deeper issues and being based on in reality and in the physical humans we love
Lost, or Brain Hurt are other titles that fit
Being present as major issue in our society
Too easy to walk around with head in the phone and not acknowledge the true communication and connection like her sister with the baby
We can escape to social media. And not have to interact or really go deep with people.

2. What was your initial reaction after reading the first couple pages? Was it what you expected?

Internal process
Cyber culture
Observations and criticisms of effects of internet
Absurdity of modern culture in the internet experience
Really drawing on a lot of the aspects of the internet that are messy
Story began to emerge

3. How would you describe the world that Lockwood depicts in part 1 of the book? How did you make sense of it?

Makes more sense after Part 2. Without the context of Part 2, then it felt disjointed bits and pieces of the internet experience.
Makes the reader reflect on whether we want to be part of a society like this. Disconcerting.

4. What was your reaction to part 2 of the novel? Was it a different reaction from part 1? What are your thoughts on the direction that Lockwood took in the second half?

When things really get into focus
After the fragmented and kaleidoscope of Part 1, it came together in being human
In both parts, still short passages because that is how we’ve accustomed to how we communicate with each other.
Part 1 felt like a distinct contrast to create a grim and claustrophobic feeling of internet (a little bit of everything all the time). Part 2 opened into the humanness of family and connection. Though tragic, part 2 hit the reality of emotion and bringing back to connection and the human spirit. It was real and characters full expressed. Contrast with the portal in Part 1 – are all “avatars” with no real feeling and depth.

5. Do you think that the main character changes throughout the novel? If yes, how so? And why?

Affected by the nonsense of the internet in the beginning. In the second half there is a purity unfold as she relates with the problems with her niece and what her sister must be going through.
Protagonist versus the portal, and there is a shift in how she relates to it. The last image in the story is she loses her phone and doesn’t care. Big shift from how she was codependent before.

6. Why do you think that the main character doesn’t have a name? What effect does this have on the story and your understanding of the character?

Protagonist not named
The way individuals interact with virtual communities and space
Similar to have we interact in the internet. Made up names, anonymity.
She almost becomes a universal character
Nameless protagonist could represent all of us, all of us caught up in the web of the internet. Representative of all of us who have been lost and afloat in the internet.

7. Is there a particular character – other than the narrator – who stood out to you the most? How come? What was their role in the story?

The baby – the struggles and the short life.
The sister. Empathizing with how difficult it must be to continue on and savour the life even knowing that it would come to an end. Choosing life and seeing the preciousness in life even though it would be different to a human with regular development. The difficulty of making these decisions and living with the love you do have to give.

8. How would you describe Lockwood’s writing style? What do you think she’s trying to accomplish with it? Have you read any other books with a comparable style?

Shorter phrases. Like how we communicate in the modern age with tweets and texts. Spilling over to the style of bite sized thoughts in the book. It’s written almost like a flow of different posts like you would read scrolling through social media.

9. Lockwood makes many observations about ‘Internet culture’ and life during this digital age. Did any of them resonate with you? What do you think is the general point she’s trying to make with this book?

Warning – what is happening to the collective society right now and how we are getting wound up in the “portal”.
How easy it is to get wrapped up and not see the forest through the trees.

10. A Vanity Fair review said “The feeling one gets from reading No One Is Talking About This is that Lockwood has paid attention more closely than perhaps any other human on earth to what it’s like to be alive right now.” What is your reaction to this quote? What do you think Lockwood is trying to say about being “alive”?

Life is precious and comes not in the mish mash of internet culture and daily happenings
Physiologically we are alive, yet our mental capacity is being atrophied
What is it to be alive?
The baby was a life that helped ground them all in reality.
Based on her real experience with her sister, brother-in-law and niece.
They all recognize the innocence, purity not tainted by the internet.
The focus is drawn away from the screens and to the life that is there in front of them
Everybody is developing up until we don’t. That is being alive. Like the baby was always developing.

11. Do you think that you need to be active on social media to understand and appreciate the book?

Need some sort of exposure, otherwise the first half of book is too abstract and can be confusing. Lots of reference to different aspects of internet culture.

12. What is your impression and opinion of social media and how it has influenced society? Did it change after reading this book?

Had a critical approach to social media, so opinions didn’t change much, as many of us are skeptical about the way internet culture impacts us.

Social media can be a real black hole and feel like a real rabbit hole

13. The book addresses the difficulty of writing about the Internet, and how “everyone’s already getting it wrong.” How do you think people will react to this book in the future? Do you think future generations will understand it?

Would be worth going back in 10 years and seeing how things would change
How will the future of the media revolves
Interested to see Gen Z and their perspective

14. In one sentence, how would you describe No One Is Talking About This to someone who hasn’t read it? (For example, an Esquire article said that it’s “a portrait of being trapped inside the web of viral nonsense and juicy clickbait.”)

Was like a kaleidoscope of internet that comes into focus with a real human and emotional experience