Tao Lin’s Buffer
Over at The Asian American Literary Review Vaman Tyrone X has written an essay about/review of Tao Lin’s recent books: Bed, Shoplifting from American Apparel, and Richard Yates. I enjoyed reading this essay partially because of this point below concerning Lin’s online activity and his writing, which I hadn’t really thought about before in this way. I think, before, I’d always read other critics conflate the two rather than separate them? Anyhow, see what you think.
He wrote an entire (and earnest) essay about Yates’ oeuvre four years before RY was published.[10] Is it really okay to begrudge Lin the right to name his novel after an under-appreciated literary figure that clearly has meant something to him? Or maybe it’s just a more admirable enterprise to protect a now-canonical realist author from Lin’s digital-fame grubbing? The subtext to every sub-positive response to Lin’s work and accompanying personal brand seems to be twofold: (1) “I could write that. I know how to not pile on subordinate clauses too” and (2) “I could become as famous as him if strangers bought shares in my future novels, enabling me to sit, consume kale, and coin acronyms on Twitter.”[11] Fortunately, Lin’s fiction can exist apart from such criticisms because the Lin-ean frame—the megabytes of service he has performed deconstructing ‘Tao Lin,’[12] his style, and his infamy-inducing act[13]—acts as a helpful buffer, [emphasis mine -RC] letting Haley and Dakota wander safely in a traditional realist space without a self-consciously perspiratory narrator forcing them to confront the faults of their maker.
Have a read if you’re so inclined, and I hope all of you are having a lovely day. Take a break from the computer if you can and go for a walk sometime? It’s 60 degrees or so and sunny in Houston and I’m going to take my last class outside, I think.
Predatory by Glenn Shaheen
Well, the dog needs bossing, also the baseball practice (batting balls) and the plumber on the copper pipes (he looks like a man who enjoys a good banging) and the general lack of cheese, shredded. Suddenly there is a rash of either lost cell phones beneath couch cushions or fleeing blackbirds on wing and car doors slamming all around our block and I think to myself this is it, they are coming to take me away. I hold my breath waiting for my garage door to rattle open, loose teeth of nuts and bolts falling, wondering how I am going to get at my toothbrush now that my illicit lover has locked herself into the bathroom (they do this, eventually). But then the government truck farts and rumbles off, there must have been another opportunity at the Walmart across the road. I want to be arrested so that I can read books of poetry, right through from the beginning to the end.
Example, Predatory, by Glenn Shaheen. (It had another more melodramatic title, Shaheen told me, but I forget the exact. It was a beery evening. [I think])
This book is paranoid. Or maybe just ill that way with perception.
All night, a howl
outside the window. All night an animal
is sick.
(Feral Cats)
I’ve missed you.
1. There have been a hundred things that I’ve wanted to tell you in the time since I last wrote here. 2. I have a new job. 3. I was sick for a week. 4. I was busy playing text adventures with strangers and friends. 5. I was reading. 6. Here is a list of what I’ve read since AWP, mostly over lunch: Amazing Adult Fantasy by A D Jameson, Motorman by David Ohle, Theater State by Jack Boettcher, RASL 3 by Jeff Smith, Adventure Time issues 1 & 2 by Ryan North and pals, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting, The Next Right Thing by Dan Barden, My Only Wife by Jac Jemc, some of Matt Bell’s Cataclysm Baby, some of Humboldt’s Gift. 7. If you would like to say something about one of these books then I would like to hear it. I have enjoyed them all a lot. (Well, I had my issues with RASL.) (I am trying to withhold judgment on RASL.) 8. I wanted to tell you about Brian Oliu’s Level End, which is stranded at my in-laws’ home because of a Paypal snafu, and which has an actual Gold Edition, supplies limited, with video, audio, glorious NES-style art, etc. 9. My friend Carrie Murphy has a book coming too. It is made of fun, pretty, sticky, weird, nervy, sexy poems; some of them I have known and loved for a long time. 10. My wife and I saw H. Jon Benjamin and David Cross from a distance at a bar during the Mission Creek festival. (We were selling magazines and toy snakes. We were eating chicken salad and fish sandwiches.) My wife couldn’t stop smiling. We have spent a lot of time listening to H. Jon Benjamin’s voice. 11. When you come to this blog do you sometimes feel stressed out and angry about how much time everyone else is finding to read? Sometimes I feel that way when I come here. 12. And sometimes I am glad. 13. I’ve been playing lots of Dark Souls. We could talk about that too. So far there is nothing in it as strange as the best parts of the first game. Unlike the rest of the world, it seems, I am a little disappointed. 14. There is nothing more humbling in its arbitrariness than truly good news. 15. Soon I will write here about the handful of design mistakes that every press, yours probably included, is making. 16. Sometimes waiting to hear back about a book I am submitting feels like waiting to find out if I am dead or alive.
Book + Beer: Tom Wolfe and St. Sebastiaan Belgian Ale
The rain stopped. At that point the guy (knobby head like an asteroid) from the repair shop comes out to tell me that my baby-baby scooter (sweet ride, ODI grips, Kelsey throttle, a desperation of chrome) needs another ninety-four bucks’ worth of repairs, even though they just got finished fixing it, or saying they fixed it, and he says what do you want to do? And I say I don’t want to do anything, Mr. ASS (teroid), you owe me a scooter I can drive away from this crime scene after the last two hundred bucks I spent here, and he says it’s not their fault, it’s a piece-of-shit scooter that hasn’t been properly maintained, and I say hey, I am not paying another cent for repairs that don’t repair, and he says okay, fine, they’ll junk it, and I say okay, fine, junk it then, it’s junk now anyway since you guys mangled it, and he stomps off, so there I am, up a creek and scooterless. So anyway I call my brother, sit down, and finish reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Get in my brother’s car (a brown turd Kia) and he hands me a beer and sees the pink/yellow/retina-detachment bus of a book cover and prowls the title and says, “Is that the kind of shit people who drive scooters read?”
The bottle is ceramic. It has an oatmeal look. I thought, “Oatmeal.” Oatmeal is an OK word to have conked in your kettle while drinking Belgium ale. Has a slight bottled taste to it and that makes some sense. The finish was bitter. I like bitter finishes, I do. I like gas station coffee and going to bed after a big, crazy fight. I find it comforting. One time I took my car for a tire change and afterwards I felt taller. I’m not kidding. I felt taller. My car was purring along. Then about eight minutes later I crashed into a deer committing suicide on highway 69, Indiana. This deer just leapt into its moment. I wanted to take the poor doe home for dinner but they said I’d have to contact the local game ranger and get a special permit and who wants to deal with yet another guy in uniform? Ah, bitter finish, this slouched gray bag of bones, I felt, as I watched my thunked car towed away into the cornshine. There are some peppery notes, too.
What my brother really meant was, “You should have already read that book, like when you were 20.”
sentences I liked from Tim Kinsella’s book
“From textured freckling, like sand had been thrown at her when her thick skin was wet once and stuck, her blanched blue eyes burst.”
“Against Beau’s head to the floor Will pushed.”
“There might be someone older than her who had spent more cumulative hours, but no one had ever spent as high of a percentage of their time pretending to sleep.”
“The multiverse, she thought, infinite dimensions.”
“Clinical lighting heightened by contrast the blue outside, the space cavernous, so sparse with shoppers.”
“The light fell where it did and stayed where it fell and did not dispense in any functional way and who could help but think, seeing this lighting strategy in action for the first time, What kind of place have I agree to surrender all of my younger self’s hopes for my future self to?”
“Once the thick pee started, the stories and him were made totally separate by it.”
“Only troubled does anything point back at itself.”
“Always did surprise him, the plans he made, like dares to himself, You really gonna? You got the nerve? When it came time to execute those plans, he was still just trying to surprise himself even when seeing a plan through.”
“I am aware I am a type, the type who at every opportunity has rejected any decision that would make one more of a type.”
“Despising it in others, it was still sometimes all he ever wanted, silliness.”
“‘Jesus, Ronnie, your daughter is a bitch-daughter.'”
On Gender & Violence, inspired by Meghan Lamb’s “Girl”
After reading, and then listening to the recording of, Meghan Lamb’s gut-punching whirlwind “Girl” in the newest issue of the always excellent > kill author, I feel compelled to respond.
What is going on with that piece? It’s so absolutely mesmerizing, so uncomfortably pleasurable, so sick and disgusting and lyrically beautiful, so caustic and terrifying, so violent and raw.
In part, I think the appeal for me comes from the shock of becoming the text.
…IMMA ROAST ON YOUR TITTIES LIKE THEY WAS A ROAST LIKE THEM GOOEY GROSS UDDERS OF YOURS WAS A ROAST IMMA BROAST YOUR SHIT BITCH IMMA BROAST YOUR DITCH BITCH…
That voice echoes other voices I have become or other voices that have become me in the past, and when it gets inside it resonates in a particular way that simultaneously evokes both uncomfortable and pleasurable sensations.
Do you recall that scene in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart between Bobby Peru and Lula Fortune in the motel room?
Blurbs I’d Like to See
“This book threw me to the floor, naked and racist, desperately gasping for air. A work that could truly only have come from [author’s name]’s extended pregnancy.” – Harper’s
“Bubbling with humility.” – The Independent
“<;-)” – Cynthia Ozick
“The Justin Taylor of the fixed gear scooter generation. Joshua Cohen for your gay Jewish nephew. Just because you don’t get it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. The codes of these satin pages will bleed you dry with their suggestive, yet ultimately fustian, message. Not to be missed by any fans of Bearbaiting: 2100.” – Paul Auster’s great-great-granddaughter
“If films are the new books, this book is an old film. [Author’s name] tucks you silently into bed and turns out the light on charity.” – New York Times
“[A blurb by a hotdog].” – a hotdog at Gray’s Papaya (6th Ave/8th St. location)
“My girlfriend loved your TV show when you used to have one.” – The Guardian
“Like fingernails across the chalkboard of a Brooklyn coffee-shop. Like music played on a broken giraffe’s carcass. [Author’s name] has given us a gift more permanent than HIV/AIDS, more lasting than the Lincoln assassination, and your kids will be talking about it long after you’ve become the bigot.” – Muareen Corrigan (for NPR)
“An invalid wakes at dawn with a banana-clip necklace. This novel won’t tell you the answer to any age old question, but it may find you choking on a half eaten bagel on the city bus.” – Frank Peretti
“If Nabokov, Updike, Lish, and Baker suffered from psoriasis, [author’s name] can be said to have eczema.” – The Millions
“I was left with a tacit boner.” – Erik Stinson
I am enthusiastic about boredom
My friend Maya told me about this guy who tried to hit on her by making fun of her weight and then kicking her under the table.
I said, ‘That’s an interesting strategy, I always wondered if a strategy like that would work.’
Then I thought about my own strategy, which generally involves waiting for something to happen and not forcing things on the other person.
I felt like my strategy was fucking stupid and just as terrible as that other guy’s. READ MORE >