Once we get rolling, embedded with brother in this ball of word-strings, once our eyes gloss over these themes & variations of themes that might be familiar to us that are already brothers, we discover more in this new book of mud than meets the eye. Not only do the brothers nail themselves & fish heads to the telephone pole in the back of their backyard, but they nail their mother. The brothers discover a new species of fish, though in their world there is only one word for fish. They meet a man, Man, that teaches them to fish. They create a new form of mud that has never been seen before. In another story they burn mud. In another of these new tales they follow a river upstream, backwards, back to the source. In another they gather all the rope & bits of string they can possibly find & tie it to this girl, Girl. They don't just tie it to a girl, these are the words brother would use to say this: «Here, then, us brothers, we made us a loop in the rope and we looped it over the top of Girl: we knotted it tight, not not too tight, up around Girl's belly. Girl's belly button, let me tell you this, it is a hole with its own story to tell, but tell it, I won't.» Then they lower Girl down into a bottomless hole in the river & ten thousand years later they pull her up. This is a story of brother's i read on an island that is also famous as the place where certain real people that call themselves aquanauts broke the world record for spending the longest time underwater without coming up. But unlike the brothers in the book of mud, these aquanauts did this by bringing the comforts of land underwater, which isn't really the same. This is how the mud brothers learn to live under water: