BLOGGING THE HUNGER GAMES, pt. 6: Avox Populi

This chapter begins awkwardly and boringly:

The Training Center has a tower designed exclusively for the tributes and their teams. This will be our home until the actual games begin. Each district has an entire floor. You simply step onto an elevator and press the number of your district. Easy enough to remember.

Yes, please tell us more about the elevators! (You could have AT LEAST made a joke about how THIS building has no 13th floor for a DIFFERENT reason, Katniss.) And it doesn't get much better from there, wandering to a kind of nebulous and boring reveal. Not to give away the store but: essentially Panem takes some of its political dissidents, cuts out their tongues, and makes them... work in luxury hotels. When the evil government central to your plot treats political prisoners better than most current nations it's hard to feel much of anything. Avoxes have JOBS, you know?

Chapter 6

Effie Trinket is all excited about the splash our heroes made at the opening ceremonies and is talking Katniss up about their chances:

“Everyone has their reservations, naturally. You being from the coal district. But I said, and this was very clever of me, I said, 'Well, if you put enough pressure on coal it turns to pearls!'”

That's a pretty good rendering of the kind of thing a person like Effie Trinket would say, and the incorrectness of the statement is a decent Sopranos-style gag. But Katniss goes on to explain precisely where pearls come from, the fact that Effie Trinket was thinking of diamonds, and that it's actually graphite, not coal, that can be pressed into diamonds, and in the process kind of ruins all the fun. You're supposed to murder OTHER TEENAGERS, not jokes!

Katniss gets to her fancy quarters and describes the high-tech amenities: a shower with hundreds of automatic settings, a window you can manipulate for different views, a bed that fucks you in several positions (well, on that last one I'm reading between the lines). She can order any food she wants, so she walks “around the room eating goose liver and puffy bread” until she gets called down to dinner. Faced with unlimited room-service options, I can't imagine goose liver would be my first choice. Have you ever even HAD a pulled-pork sandwich, Katniss?

Then she goes to dinner where Cinna and his partner Portia are waiting along with Peeta, Effie, and Haymitch. Our narrator is served wine and tries it for the first time in her life. Sadly, she gives up on it halfway through her glass, disliking the “foggy” feeling in her brain. What? How could you not like that feeling!? It's SUCH A GOOD FEELING, especially when you're dancing! Maybe you just need to power through this drink and have a second one, Kat. Let me make you a cocktail or something, maybe? Anyway a server comes to the table and when Katniss claims to recognize her, the rest of the people at the table are horrified. Haymitch explains, after the girl flees, that she's an Avox, a criminal who had her tongue cut out. He suggests that it's unlikely she'd know her, and it's clear that knowing her would be kind of an issue (friends of the communists got blacklisted too). Katniss starts to remember some long-forgotten trauma while Peeta covers her ass, claiming that the girl is a “dead ringer” for someone they went to school with.

They eat a cake (which was set on fire before serving, like a damn Flaming Moe) and Haymitch brings up the hand-holding in the parade, calling it “the perfect touch of rebellion.” Coincidentally that's my band's name, but anyway Katniss realizes that the other tributes barely acknowledged each other. “Presenting ourselves not as adversaries but as friends has distinguished us as much as the fiery costumes,” Katniss tells us.

Peeta walks Katniss back to her room and indicates he wants to know how she knows the tongueless girl. Katniss wants to talk about it, but also worries that confessing will allow Peeta to have another advantage over her (shut up, Katniss). They head to the roof of the training center where the wind will prevent any surveillance and Katniss explains that one day while she and Gale were hunting they saw the Avox and a boy fleeing through the woods. A hovercraft showed up (a hovercraft showed up? There are HOVERCRAFTS!? YESSS) to capture the girl and kill the boy, but not before the girl cried for help and Katniss didn't move from her hiding place.

Never mind that her inaction probably saved her life and that there was certainly very little she could do to fight a damn hovercraft and that for all she knows the girl was a murderer—Katniss feels guilty (though not guilty enough to even remember the whole event at first). She goes back to her room and the Avox is picking up her fire suit clothes off the floor (with oven mitts, I assume). Way to double down, tongueless girl (“You couldn't save me from capture AND you can't use a hamper?”-Tongueless Girl). Katniss rather unfairly compares the way she watched the girl get captured that day to the way people watch the Hunger Games, and muses that the Avox will probably enjoy watching her die.

Stray Notes & Questions

• This chapter doesn't really have a central event, but the running motif is voice, and the power(s) of speech. Effie blathers on in the elevator, Katniss notes that all you need to do is whisper into a microphone to order food, Katniss obsesses over the cry for help from the girl that was one of the last sounds she ever made. Peeta speaks very carefully at the dinner table and every time he says something that could be construed as anti-government. He takes Katniss to the roof to avoid being overheard. Katniss, we know, has never been very good at holding her tongue.
• "Vox" is Latin for "voice," so "avox" is "without a voice." Clever (enough)! I'm glad Latin survived the collapse of Western Civilization.
  
• So something's going on with Cinna, right? The only other character I can think of with his name is Cinna in Julius Caesar, and THAT Cinna was a conspirator who overthrew the government and recruited Brutus for same. JUST SAYING.

BLOGGING THE HUNGER GAMES, pt. 5: Panem's Next Top Model

Last time Katniss's paranoia about Peeta reached ridiculous new levels, and our heroes reached the Capitol city. Today we travel very quickly with them through the opening ceremonies of the Hunger Games. I mean, seriously, there is so little detail! In a way, that's a good thing: Katniss is familiar with the ceremonies and the people and is kind of bored with it, so when the President gives a speech she can't be bothered to tell us what he says. But we would kind of like to know what he says! Or what stuff looks like! Suzanne Collins is building up Katniss as a character at the expense of building up Panem as a tangible, believable world.

My Twilight bonafides aside, I am generally speaking a novice in the world of current YA fiction. This wave is all sci-fi and fantasy, and when I was a YA myself all the books were about kids our age surviving in the wilderness. Hatchet, My Side Of The Mountain—we loved that survivalist shit! Until the Branch Davidians. But the point is you can picture a kid on a raft in a river pretty easily. I never really thought about the difficulty of writing huge set pieces until recently, and what I've been coming back to is the Quidditch World Cup. That's the best example of this kind of thing being done right that I can think of. JK Rowling has a huge leg-up in that her main character isn't world-weary and hardened; Harry is all “I love magic, gee willikers!” for the first four books. But Suzanne Collins could have found a way to split the difference—Katniss just kind of staring at the floor and dismissing shit while Peeta genuflects out loud? I'm just spitballing here. Maybe she'll get to filling in the details of the world we're in later. In the meantime, there's this.

Chapter 5

Katniss is in the “Remake Center” getting a full body wax. You read that right, they're removing all of her body hair. All of it? ALLLLL OF IT. So apparently that hasn't gone out of fashion a few hundred years from now. Sorry ladies. Katniss doesn't like it, she says her skin feels “sore and tingling and intensely vulnerable.” That sounds kind of hot to me, but whatever.

“You're doing very well,” says some guy named Flavius.

“Some Guy Named Flavius” is my new band-name. Flavius and the others in the room are not Katniss's stylists, as it turns out—they're just interns or something. And here we get an idea of what Capitol residents look like. Ever heard of the Mermaid Parade on Coney Island? Take that and multiply it by a gay pride parade and then divide it by a purple Teletubby: Flavius has orange hair and purple lipstick, Octavia has dyed her skin green, and Venia has “aqua hair and gold tattoos above her eyebrows.” They also have a highly affected manner of speech where they barely move their mouths and the end of their sentences go up like they're asking a question. Is that what mumblecore is?

They leave Katniss totally naked in the middle of a room and Cinna, her stylist, arrives. She says she was expecting someone “flamboyant,” but he is in a simple black shirt and pants with “close-cropped” brown hair. She was expecting mid-90's gay and got mid-aughts gay, in other words. Cinna tells her to put a robe on and they have lunch; he presses a button on a table and it appears. Katniss eyes at her fancy meal and wonders how much work it would take to prepare it herself. Get ready to feel guilty:

What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button?

This is why Mark Zuckerberg kills all of his own meat. Trader Joe's has, somewhat ironically, spiritually disconnected me from the earth! Anyway I'm liking this class consciousness stuff that keeps popping up, and I'm interested to see where it goes. Cinna watches Katniss looking at the food and says, “How despicable we must seem to you.” Well, yeah. In Panem the rich profit from the literal death of poor people, there isn't even the kind of abstract distance we have here where a factory worker's labor contributes to the inflated salary of an executive who gives money to a politician who starts a war for the executive's friends and the factory worker's son gets drafted and the factory worker dies of a heart attack at 55. It's a much more direct line, and I think the dispicability of Panem's upper class is not in dispute at all. Not that Cinna mounts a defense of The Hunger Games, yet, but his sentence suggests that Katniss isn't seeing the big picture. I think she's seeing it just fine, Cinna.

Also, it's a little weird that Katniss has all these intense, vague moments with Cinna since I can't possibly imagine how he'll be involved in the story later. She assumes he got stuck with District 12 because he's a new employee. He says he requested it specifically. She notices that his manner of speech is mostly free of Capitol affectations. OK, what of it? It doesn't add up to much because pretty soon the only important thing is the fire suit.

Katniss tells us that every year the tributes are outfitted in costumes based on the industry of their respective districts. Coming from the coal city, D12 is kinda screwed because mining outfits are deeply unsexy. So past stylists have generally throw a mining helmet over a skimpy outfit a la a slut with some bunny ears on Halloween. Yes! My favorite. Sometimes it's even better: we're told that one year contestants were naked except for strategically placed coal dust. I get how that would work for a girl—it would sort of be like Ashley Greene's bathing suit. But for Peeta what's the deal? Would he tuck it back like a coal-dusted Buffalo Bill? Would they paint it like two pieces of coal and a log?

So Katniss dreads whatever kind of bondage-gear she'll but dressed in, but it turns out (again) that Cinna is different. He (and his partner assigned to Peeta) puts our heroes in black jumpsuits and then gives them a cape that is later ignited with synthetic fire. So Katniss and Peeta appear to be burning like lumps of coal. Unattractive as this sounds, it's apparently breathtaking—we get a very brief description of a parade/opening ceremony in which people go crazy for the kids from D12, throwing roses and shouting “Katniss! We love you baby!” or whatever. And Katniss sees herself stuntin' on the jumbotrons and indeed finds it hard to be humble. She starts blowing kisses to the crowd.

I can hear my name being called from all sides. Everyone wants my kisses.

The other thing is Katniss and Peeta are holding hands, per Cinna's instructions. Katniss holds on tight and worries she'll fall off the chariot, and Peeta later confesses to feeling the same way. SYMBOLIC.

I can't help feeling strange about the way Cinna has linked us together. It's not really fair to present us as a team and then lock is into the arena to kill each other.

Right! That's what I have been SAYING! They pull away from the crowds and into the “Training Center” and Peeta and Katniss have the aforementioned “I was so nervous but you were great,” “No, I was so nervous but you were great” conversation. And right on schedule, Katniss realizes this semi-romantic interaction was actually deadly subterfuge. Peeta is only trying to get her panties off so he can CHOKE HER TO DEATH WITH THEM!

Because two can play at this game, I stand on tiptoe and kiss his cheek. Right on the bruise.

These two are headed for one hell of a hatefuck, am I right?

Stray Notes & Questions

• Talk to me about the themes you are seeing so far, five chapters in. We've got threads about government and corruption, class warfare, parental issues. In this chapter we even get a brief foray into reality television.
• We don't hear what the fighters from most of the other districts are wearing, but it's fun to imagine. Maybe District 6's industry is information technology and they just put microchips over their nipples!
• How do you think the waxing scene will be depicted in the film version of this? Will they do it for real, like Steve Carell in The 40 Year Old Virgin?
• What if Cinna's last name is Bonne? I will laugh forever.
• Katniss & Peeta: Which one is Kanye and which one is Jay-Z? Discuss.

BLOGGING THE HUNGER GAMES, pt. 4: I Didn't Come Here To Make Nice

Last time Katniss and Peeta, our young killers-to-be, boarded a train to the Capitol. We learned that drunken fuckup Haymitch is to be their coach at the Hunger Games, which is pretty bad news. This guy is not coach material. Bleary eyes, defective hearts CAN lose, you know?

It's a little weird that there are coaches. After all, Katniss and Peeta are like teammates only insofar as they hail from the same place. They'll still have to kill each other sooner or later, right? That is not how most team sports work. Granted, cricket could happen like that and I would have no idea, but the team sports I know about don't work that way.

Chapter 4

Haymitch is face down in his own vomit, which is a gross enough image without getting into the gory details. But Suzanne Collins gets into the gory details anyway, describing the “slippery vile stuff” in excruciating detail. I mean, we don't hear about the individual food particles in there or anything, but Haymitch gets up and accidentally wipes vomit all over his face and you know, we get it, I'll spare you. Peeta takes Haymitch to his room to clean him up and Katniss wonders what his game is. Dammit Katniss, will you never trust your fellow humans?

Oh, maybe she will! Katniss realizes that she's being ridiculous and Peeta is just a nice guy. But her reaction to that realization is unexpected:

Kind people have a way of working their way inside me and rooting there.

For most girls it's the tough guys with the leather jackets and the gruff exterior that do that, right ladies?Anyway:

And I can't let Peeta do this. Not where we're going.

Where we're going we don't need niceties! Katniss runs back to her room and throws the cookies Peeta's dad gave her out the window, swearing to have nothing to do with that nice jerk Peeta. BUT BUT BUT OH NO: the cookies land in a patch of dandelions (damn!) which causes Katniss to again remember Peeta's original gesture of kindness. Wow, if you told me there was a kind of weed that could cause vivid flashbacks I never would have guessed it was dandelions!

We get a little more detail about how 11-year-old Katniss learned to provide for her family after her father's death, picking up right where we left off: The sight of the dandelion in the schoolyard that day caused her to remember the edible plants her father had once cataloged in a recipe book (Yeah, you read that right: the sight of dandelions from the train window triggers a memory in which the sight of dandelions in a school yard triggered another memory. DANDELIONCEPTION!) and after a few successful gathering sessions Katniss tried her hand at hunting, as her father had also left her a bow.* Pretty soon she was old enough to start collecting grain rations in exchange for entering herself in the Hunger Games, but her family needed more than just food so Katniss gradually learned to barter as well (as her father had left her a green visor and a knack for haggling**). It's a nice little story of too-young girl learning to survive on her own—pulling herself up by her bootstraps and then trading those bootstraps for some soap.

*Boy, Katniss's dad sure did leave lots of stuff in place in the event of his death in a freak mine accident, huh? Let me guess: he's still alive! He IS Peeta Mellark! He's hiding in Effie Trinket's wig! Haymitch is puking him out in small quantities!
**I thought about haggling skills being passed on genetically and then grossed myself out with the image of a sperm trying to talk his way into an egg. “C'mon, roll the dice on me, baby!”

As Katniss got better and better at providing for her family, her mother slowly returned from the abyss. Prim was thrilled, but Katniss says her mother's initial inaction had caused a rift between them that was never repaired. Back in the present, all of this reminiscing causes Katniss to sit in her private car and stress about her family for a while before drifting numbly into sleep. The next morning she goes to breakfast with Peeta and Haymitch and we get a better sense of the deprived life kids in District 12 lead when Katniss looks at an unfamiliar “rich brown cup.”

“They call it hot chocolate,” says Peeta. “It's good.”
I take a sip of the hot, sweet, creamy liquid and a shudder runs through me.

Do you REALLY want some hot chocolate right now? Me too. It's a nice little maneuver on Suzanne Collins's part, because it appeals viscerally to younger readers and nostalgically to the older ones. (Maybe it's just from looking at Tumblr a lot but I feel like nostalgia is being over-exploited lately. I say that as someone who is mostly immune to nostalgia; my adulthood is way better than my childhood ever was and I still get trapped for 20 minutes on Tumblr sites that are just cover art for videogames from the 90s.) Anyway Katniss swallows all of the hot creamy liquid (you are welcome) and then references the fact that Haymitch is supposed to be giving them tips. And Haymitch laughs it off. So Peeta angrily knocks his glass out of his hand, and in response Haymitch punches him in the face. Then Haymitch reaches for his bottle of booze, so Katniss stabs a knife into the table next to his hand.

Whoa, shit just got REAL! And then suddenly Drunky McVomitface starts dishing out the real advice. He tells Peeta not to ice the bruise on his face—that way he'll look tough. He assess the physical condition of our heroes and declares them “a pair of fighters” for once. And he makes a deal with them that is hard not to hear in like, Tommy Lee Jones's voice: “You don't interfere with my drinking, and I'll stay sober enough to help you.” Katniss and Peeta figure it's better than nothing, but um, is it? Look at the inverse of his statement: “If you stop me from drinking, I'm going to get really drunk.” But whatever, we have our uneasy Spaghetti Western compromise now and I'm happy with it. Haymitch's only advice for the moment is to obey their stylists when they get to the Capitol. Hold up, they have stylists? What kind of sissy battle to the death is this shit?!

The train passes through a tunnel on the way into the Capitol and Katniss has a minor panic attack—turns out she doesn't like being underground. What if the Hunger Games take place in a bunch of caves this year? Oh shit oh shit oh shit! When they emerge from the other side of the tunnel, Katniss and Peeta are struck by the “magnificence” of the Capitol. Katniss says the TV cameras have never done it justice, which is ironic because she so fleetingly describes the place that we, the readers, can't picture it at all! We hear that it's really colorful and people have weird hair and painted faces. So I'm just picturing this:
People in the streets stare eagerly at the train, and Katniss walks away from the window in disgust. But Peeta hangs out and waves to the Capitol denizens, telling Katniss, “Who knows? Maybe some of them are rich.” This statement causes Katniss to somewhat ridiculously trace back over every gesture Peeta has made so far, suddenly seeing it with new, paranoid eyes:

I have misjudged him. I think of his actions since the reaping began. The friendly squeeze of my hand. His father showing up with the cookies and promising to feed Prim...did Peeta put him up to that?

Of course! How could she not have seen the dastardly intent behind that handshake? Of course! Peeta would definitely use his last moments with his parents to plot against her for no reason! It all makes perfect sense! Hahahaha no it doesn't! Shut up, Katniss!

Stray Notes & Links

• Speaking of dandelions: Cat Marnell is a highly compelling writer and former Lucky editor who now blogs at XOJane on her favorite beauty products, vices and psychological issues. Her piece on Amy Winehouse was great, and a few days ago she wrote "How To Make Your Whole World Smell Like A Dandelion (Plus: Not Being A Pillhead Anymore Is Confusing)" which is about a profound experience involving the image of a dandelion and is certainly worth a read. If more beauty blogs had such searing, bracing, funny honesty, I'd read a lot of beauty blogs! But as it is I just read the one.
• WTF with Marc Maron is a podcast you must have heard about by now—everyone is obsessed with it! And for good reason! One of this week's episodes features an hour long interview with Parks & Recreation's Aubrey Plaza, who is great, and you should listen to it. How does it relate to The Hunger Games? Well, THG is about traumatic experiences in a girl's late adolescence, and Aubrey Plaza had a stroke when she was 20!
• You guys listen to Watch The Throne yet? What do you think? Without even knowing what happens next (thanks for being cautious about spoilers in the comments, BTW) I can tell you I'm going to name an upcoming post “No Church In The Wild.” That's just something that's for sure going to happen.
• So you're kind of on your own in the comments, I guess. Go crazy!

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BLOGGING THE HUNGER GAMES, pt. 3: Sweet And Tender Hooligan

Last time our narrator Katniss Everdeen and a dude named Peeta Mellark were selected as the “tributes” from their home district for that national Hunger Games tournament. “Tribute” is intended to have all those sacrificial connotations, by the way; the government of Panem essentially demands that two kids from every town get killed once a year. Which seems unreasonable, right? I mean one kid, sure. But two? You're getting greedy, Panem.

Then again, Panem doesn't seem to be fighting any wars right now and how many kids from our nation's cities die every year in Iraq and Afghanistan? Where's the real dystopia? Whoa, did I just blow your mind?

Chapter 3

After a song and the reading of a few more oaths or whatever (you know how these ceremonies do) Katniss and Peeta are spirited from the stage and Katniss is held in a room where loved ones come to say goodbye. Peeta may be in the same situation or he may be Effie Trinket's sex slave now—who's to say? Mrs. Everdeen and Prim show up and Katniss urgently feeds them instructions as to how they'll get by without her. It reads at first like “this is how you'll get by while I'm away” but slowly it dawns on us that Katniss is planning on being dead soon. She tells us that kids from other, wealthier districts train their whole lives for the games—they're all 'roided out and have bachelor's degrees in knife play or whatever. So even though living in The Seam probably sucks, there's an admirable purity to the place (a point reinforced by some of Katniss's visitors in this chapter). Being poor keeps them from plotting how to make themselves extra-deadly and evil. Which is a pretty much an essential truth about socioeconomic brackets—inner city neighborhoods might be violent but the kids who grow up in rich neighborhoods go on to wreak more havoc. I'm just dropping truth bombs left and right today!

(In college I took a poetry workshop in which I wrote a poem called “Preamble.” It was a pretty corny but totally earnest plea for the working man, and my professor fucking hated it. She actually stood up on her desk like it was a soapbox and yelled “Rich people are bad! Poor people are good!” to make fun of me in front of my mortified classmates.)

Katniss has a cathartic moment where she screams at her mother that she can't “leave” again, can't mentally check out and leave Prim to die. Her mother's odd excuse is that she didn't have the right medicines to fix herself then, and she does now. That's totally not reassuring at all, but they leave and Mr. Mellark, Peeta's dad, comes in next. Katniss is kind of like “Did you get the wrong room?” because she only sort of knows him, but he hands her a package of cookies and tells her he will look after Prim and then they sit in comforting silence for a few moments. Katniss is happy to realize that though people “deal with” her, they really love and will protect Prim.

OK but our girl is being pretty hard on herself, right? She's acting like she's an unpopular citizen ten minutes after everybody stood silently and made a wordless gesture of thanks and appreciation at her. I mean I think people like me, and no one has ever given ME a wordless gesture of thanks and appreciation, you know? But her feeling totally syncs up with the idea we have of Katniss as a person: she's tough and rational but only because she's deliberately sublimated her human side. She wasn't born a hardass, it doesn't fit naturally, but she's making it work. And being a beloved member of the community doesn't really jive with her realpolitik views, so she doesn't see it.

Her next visitor is Madge, and OK, I can't shake the image of the warehouse worker from The Office but this Madge is the Mayor's daughter and I'm assuming she doesn't look like Madge from The Office. She begs Katniss to wear her gold pin, which is of a bird and oh, it's on the cover of the book, so I'm sure that pin won't be important or anything later. Moving on! Gale turns up next and in case you forgot that there is nothing romantic between them Katniss reminds us in literally the first sentence of his section:

Finally, Gale is here and maybe there is nothing romantic between us, but when he opens his arms I don't hesitate to go into them.

So is this happening because Katniss is in denial about her feelings for Gale too? What I'm hoping is that ISN'T the case and rather Suzanne Collins is doing this to push back against the potential Twilight-ification of her work. (“This isn't romance, it's hard sci-fi!”-Roman Collins) To further underscore that this (maybe) ain't your daddy's YA (huh?) Katniss and Gale talk strategy while mentioning the environs of Hunger Games past. I guess every time they switch it up, like levels in Mortal Kombat. Gale insists that she'll be able to make a bow because firewood has been available in the arena since a botched year in which contestants were dropped into an arctic landscape and just fucking froze to death.

You could hardly see them [at night] because they were just huddled in balls and had no wood for fires.

It's funny in a kind of bleak way, everybody being disappointed that they can't see a bunch of kids dying, talking shit about the Hunger Games on Twitter like it's an award show. “Hey do you guys remember the year that Soy Bomb guy jumped into the Hunger Games?” It's also kind of funny to imagine a bunch of government employees prepping the battlefield each year. “Hey Tom, should we put some spikes on this rock?” “Shit yeah, hey what if we dig a moat?” Anyway Gale's visiting time is up and he gets dragged from the room mid-sentence: “Katniss, remember I—” Remember I what? Remember I love you? Remember I have no romantic feelings for you? Which is it?!

Peeta and Katniss are ushered to a train, past hordes of paparazzi yelling “Katniss! Look this way honey! Can we see the back of the dress Katniss? Can we get Katnis for In-Style?” Our narrator observes that Peeta has been crying and wonders if he's doing some kind of reverse-psychology strategy for the fight, trying to look weak on purpose. I'm thinking it's more like he really WAS Effie Trinket's sex slave for a few hours back there (“It's tradition,” she'd whisper in his ear). But seriously what's with Katniss always assuming everything is a battle strategy? Pretty soon they end up on a train eating dinner and I half expected her to be like, “I notice Peeta is just pushing his peas around on the plate. Could he be making a map?”

Katniss is taken to a private car where she showers and puts on new clothes. She remembers Madge's pin and looks at it, recognizing the bird as a mockingjay. What's a mockingjay, you say? Katniss gives us a little history: During the rebellion, Panem bred birds called jabberjays, which could hear and repeat back whole conversations. When the rebels figured it out, they fed the birds false information. So the government gave up on the plan and released the birds into the wild where they fucked a bunch of mockingbirds and lo, a new type of bird that couldn't replicate speech but COULD replicate music and melody was born. Katniss's father was very fond of them and liked to sing to them, and having the pin on feels like “having a piece of” her father with her. Jeez Katniss the man was blown to bits in an explosion, try to be a little more sensitive!

At dinner Effie Trinket compliments Peeta and Katniss on their table manners, which prompts Katniss to immediately abandon her table manners; I like this girl. Then they watch video of Reapings across the country. Katniss is disturbed by the selection of a girl who reminds her of Prim. So she'll probably die, right? As our heroes laugh at Haymitch's drunken antics earlier in the day, Effie Trinket notes that he is essentially their coach in the Games, which is something we haven't heard before. Her fleeting mentions of sponsorship and the “presentation of any gifts” are intriguing—there is more to this than just dropping some kids in a place and saying “fight!” I guess—but then fucking Haymitch shows up again and vomits all over the floor and the chapter ends. If this is her idea of comic relief, Suzanne Collins needs to reconsider the need for comic relief. Whoa, as I wrote that my cat just threw up.

Stray notes & Questions

• Contrast Katniss, just forty fucking pages in, with Bella Swan after thousands of pages. I have an incomplete but vivid sense of Katniss as a person that doesn't feel constructed in a cheap, contrived way. It's kind of amazing. I used to defend Bella Swan/Cullen against accusations of being an ill-defined cipher, but that was before Breaking Dawn (though the problems start in Eclipse) when all sense of her faded away in the service of relentless, meaningless plot machinations. Of course that could happen here, too.
• TWSS Alert: Katniss and Gale are talking about whether or not she'll be able to make a bow, and Katniss says, “I don't even know if there'll be wood.” Don't worry baby, just give me ten minutes.
• Geography lesson: Katniss tells us the Capitol is in what was once known as the Rocky Mountains, District 12 is along the Appalachians. Why are the cities built along mountain chains instead of the coast? Is that where the coast is now? Also: I'm pretty sure Katniss is just confused and she's from the Ozarks. Also: Haymitch is Teardrop and Effie Trinket clearly does meth. “My Life Is Winter's Bone”-Katniss Everdeen

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Look At Your Life, Look At Your Teen Choice Awards

Either Hollywood is totally transparent and every motivation is totally clear or it is totally impenetrable and all we are seeing is the fourth or fifth layer of smoke and mirrors they are throwing in front of us. This can be true of politics too, and interpersonal relationships, even. With no way of knowing for sure what you're really seeing, you essentially have to pick an illusion. Your version of the truth.
Which isn't to say people who are listening to Watch The Throne right now in order to hear the secret Illuminati messages aren't crazy--those people are totally crazy. You should keep Occum's Razor in mind when you are designing your version of the truth. But when Taylor Swift excitedly holds Ashley Greene's hand and Ashley looks game in a kind of passive way, it's either because Taylor Swift really cares about the Teen Choice Awards or because she wants to look like she cares about the Teen Choice Awards (and because Ashley Greene genuinely doesn't care but is a nice person or because she wants to look like she doesn't care and is nice or maybe just because she took a bunch of beta-blockers in the limo).

It's tempting to ignore the urge to set up a kind of bedrock principle of Truth when you talk about celebrities. The act of observing something changes it; the Teen Choice Awards happen in anything but a vacuum. You can't shave your pubic hair with Occum's Razor, you know? It's fun to suggest that their traumatic experiences with Joe Jonas have led Ashley Greene, Taylor Swift and Demi Lovato to enter into an emotionally respectful polyamorus relationship together, but that (probably) didn't happen last night. Ashley Greene is a kind of boring and average nice person thrust into a weird set of circumstances; Taylor Swift is a teenager exploiting and being exploited by her tangled and ridiculous teenage emotions. Again: probably.

Because even Taylor Swift is eerily capable of handling a red carpet. The Teen Choice Awards were held at the Gibson Theater in LA last night, the same place where I stood on the red carpet a few months ago and held awkward interviews with whoever the harried publicists threw at me. I watched the live feed from several cameras last night and had Vietnam-like flashbacks at my computer, watching reporters jockey for position and listening to photographers and producers shouting "Ashley! Ashley! Can you look over here Ashley? Can I get Ashley for In-Style? Jesus Christ, can I get Ashley?" People like Zooey Deschanel stood in the midst of all that commotion and struck calculatingly seductive poses. In the pictures she looks fine, I'm sure, but in the context of that whole tableau it was indescribably off-putting and terrifying.

But for every moment that makes Hollywood look like an incomprehensible illusion factory there are human ones, too. On live camera three Joel McHale complained about the heat, couldn't figure out which camera he was supposed to be talking to and then apologized profusely for getting in the way of someone's shot of Nikki Reed. He told reporters he felt bad that they had to stand out there for so long (which is exactly what five or six people on the other side of the barricade told me in June). Right before the show started the live cameras finally found Ashley Greene, who was standing at the barricades by the doors signing autographs and telling everyone it was nice to meet them. "I'm pulling Ashley right now," someone could be heard saying. Ashley glanced over her shoulder at the voice, turned back to the fan she was talking to and said, "It's okay."

Coverage of the TCAs via 247Greene: Part 1, Part 2