Mostly Hypothetical Mountains

by Josh Tillman

Written in the midst of the recordings of Father John Misty's first LP album "Fear Fun," Mostly Hypothetical Mountains is an experimental novella by Josh Tillman. Never published and accessible only in the album's broadsheets and via online blog, it is a “non-linear, multi-format, adventure-satire attempting to dismantle the infrastructure of ownership, as told by several quasi-fictional unreliable narrators."

Genres: Fiction

LP Liner Notes

First published April 30, 2012

Reviews

[Devon DeRaad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review of mostly hypothetical mountains:
Chapter 1: self indulgent, littered with obstruse language. Some interesting social commentary, but difficult to make meaning of the overall story, and the language makes it hard to read.
Chapter 2: intensely personal, somewhat glib, but still revealing and cutting. Smart, well written, and fun to read.
Chapter 3: psychedelic. Good. “Success is sanctified by scarcity” is profound. He recognizes the suburban hellscape for what it is.
Chapter 4: funny and good, and ties all four chapters together nicely. Suddenly I am optimistic that this will be a cool, coherent story.
Chapter 5: the story is beginning to make sense. The flashbacks are coherent. I think it just really threw me when the first few chapters relied so heavily on surrealism and abstract metaphor because FJM is such a gifted literal songwriter. The protagonist’s soul searching journey, peppered with religious-school flashbacks sounds eerily similar to the upbringing described by J Tillman in interviews. I am officially enthralled and ready to embark on this journey.
Chapter 6: whimsical and hilarious. I truly want to know if Johnny is based on a real teacher, and I truly hope he is. This could be published as a standalone short story worth reading. Catches the perfect tone of mocking without self righteous indignation, and sticks the dismount beautifully.
Chapter 7: the more I read, the more I think that J Tillman is extremely self aware and that my snap judgment of the first chapter was deeply misguided. Super high quality meta critique of the American military industrial complex and the treatment of manpower as disposable. I’m officially convinced that J Tillman is playing 4-dimensional chess and this novel is brilliant.
Chapter 8: “We’re all strippers”
Chapter 9: “Satan’s deeply confusing bedside manner”
Chapter 10: more good cultural critique of consumerism and convenience culture. Mocks those who constantly talk about wanting amazing experiences but never put in any work toward them. Makes you ask yourself if every experience was instantly available to you, would all experiences cease to be special?
11: I love the rainforest themed restaurant
12: I like the constant gift shop references. I had never considered how out of place and strange gift shops are. But as soon as you consider the idea objectively, the absurdity of the entire construct is revealed. Also I feel like this chapter describes an awe-inspiring psilocybin trip.
13: “not un-wounded” is a really strong phrase. In only three words you recognize that something that should be no worry, has actually created a deep hurt, and that the the anger is only masking a deep personal pain.
14: “deeply personal, thinly veiled memoirs masquerading as non-linear satirical narratives” Sir.
14b: billboards that generate solar and wind power is actually genius. I’m sure J Tillman didn’t invent the idea, but it’s still really good. I feel like you really need to be on mushrooms to get this chapter.
15: the use of the word “themed” is a solid satire on postmodern commodification culture. Nothing is actually real, everything is a facsimile of a real experience designed to extract as much money as possible from you with the least investment, leaving you with a lifelong string of hollow, un-real experiences.
16: “right by the hungry man” has to be a critique of the incredible technological advances and revenue generating techniques that have proliferated in our society, while people still go hungry. No matter how good our technology gets, people will still be hungry because that’s how we want society set up. Thinking about hunger in the future makes me realize that now is the future and hunger has not gone away.
17: this shit is so meta it’s ridiculous. “His recent capitalist misadventures had been a limp attempt at reconnecting with the world, but it seems he couldn’t even get that right” me too Satan, me too.
18: this is bleak.
19: “playing is what you do when you forget about dying”.
20: “because being off course teaches us how to be more on course” I really thought this was deep but the more I read it, I think it’s supposed to be faux deep and actually the fact that the energy healer says it is intended to make her more ridiculous. “As ashamed as anyone living in the sweet spot of human history, and ultimately complicit with more heinous crimes…due to the.. relative ease with which a laughable percentile of the wealth and technology abundant in the landscaped campuses of civilization (could ease the world’s ills)” this one hit me hard. The uselessness of our guilt and even our gratefulness. We don’t fix anything, because we are so busy feeling guilty and that act is in itself enough to allow us to continue telling ourselves that we are good people, while not acting to change the world order that has given us undue amounts of resources while systematically excluding others.
21: this was a really enjoyable story. I come away with a sense of a technicolor world that can only exist inside of the mind of someone who has done a large amount of soul searching, and managed to animate all of their own demons. It strikes the right tone, simultaneously intellectual, absurdist, irreverent, and never so glib as to be unforgivable. I found the narrative empowering, and the idea that all of our personal demons can be deeply examined, and mockingly reduced to an absurdist technicolor Hell, comforting.

[Maggie Schedl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine a pastry chef making a signature dessert. Perfect rounds of crepe pancakes are layered one after the other with huge dollops of buttercream spread in between. Crepe, cream, crepe, cream, crepe, cream, and so on. What one gets at the end is a impressive tower that is mostly cream and little crepe. That is all to say, Tillman lays the metaphorical book/plot/satire-themed cream on thick. Reading MHM, then, is to take a shiny fresh pie slicer and give yourself a good triangle chunk of that dessert, then to go to you brain and slice an equally sized wedge of grey matter, and then to swap the two. Wrap up the rest of the dessert in Reef Co. brand Thoughts and Desires Preserving Sea(otter)ran Wrap and place in the fridge for use at a later date. In all honesty, how does one review a book that they spent unknown hours printing out, trimming, sewing, and binding? Because that is what my brain incapable of reading long things on the internet made my body do. Too bad I needed my hands for that. I suppose any real person editor would balk at the weight of the pages soaked and dripping with irony, and maybe it could have used some linearity and consistency in the consistently inconsistently aesthetically unreliable narrators. However, after reading I am left with the same smile on my face I get after consuming a Vonnegut or Wilde work. It is a truly new perspective on our metaphysically wretched existence. Tillman once said in an interview that we are all strippers, there is probably some festering philosophy simmering inside that idea. *Mockingly laughs to mask literal hysteria* there is too much to unpack in this novel, and that I find a good thing because I could likely reread it many times and still feel like it is new. Especially as my Reality-Themed life becomes more absurd. I would not be surprised to see a Hell Classic opening up down the street. It feels good to be a bed bug, right?

[Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

The metaphysical concepts at large were well lubricated in a crypto-comedic-cholesterol agent that allowed them to pass through my arteries and into my heart. After of course a succession of sexually suggestion jerking motions to jam the damned ideas in there.

[Andrew Shutes · Rating 3 out of 5]

As fascinating and page-turning as it is confusing, Josh Tillman’s psychedelically nuanced, frustratingly abstract, consistently amusing, justifiably cynical, and morbidly satirical novel is one I think a lot more people should read. Not just because it’s good, but so somebody can help me make sense of the thing.

[Milly]

"Deeply personal, thinly veiled memoirs masquerading as
non-linear satirical narratives”

[S · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novella serves as the poster child for why you should not try acid

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

a deeply personal, thinly veiled memoir masquerading as non-linear satirical narratives

[Jon Heinze · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes I laugh and sometimes I’m smart.

[Colton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I clearly have not done enough psychedelics for this to make a shred of sense.