Some Thoughts on Tao Lin and you are a little bit happier than i am

1. Someone gave me their copy of this book, and I've just read it. I'm usually two years behind on most things being published, so it arrived right on time.

2. First off, the book might give you cancer. The black dye used for the largely black cover apparently has the power to permeate membranes without leaving trace of this permeation. The manila envelope it arrived in had a black blotting of ink the exact shape and size of the book on the outside and I thought, "oh it got wet and the dye leached off."

But when I opened the envelope, the inside of the envelope had no black color on it!

Weird!

3. The black and yellow wasp colors of the cover are aggressively visual. Also, this combination appears on some street signs.

4. Some blogger wrote about Tao Lin that the literary works may be ancillary to the drama and spectacle of Tao Lin himself.

I don't know.

5. The black of the cover shows fingerprints and what look like signs of constant chemical change in various places. This bothers me, and I want to place the book in shadow where the black will look composed and not molested. It's like one of those stainless steel fridges that people think are so cool until the proud new owners realize they will soon become nothing more than babsitters to this appliance, constantly rushing to it to erase the inevitable fingerprints and maintain the cool pristine 21st century Terminator look of their appliance.

Possibly these people wear gloves around the house.

In truth, those fridges look like Holocaust ovens.

I'm glad I went with cheap white.

I refuse to wear gloves to handle Tao Lin's book.

5. Tao Lin may be a trickster spirit. He seems to have much in common with the trickster spirits in Japanese myths. Often, these are women who changes into foxes then back again. One of Tao Lin's driving forces seems to be to defy expectation of what Tao Lin is. He delights in making the wrong gesture....hoping that you will know that he knows that's the wrong gesture. Not that there are wrong gestures.

But there are.

5a. I found much of what Wikipedia had to say about "Trickster" very interesting and relevant to Tao Lin. I think he is a trickster spirit come among us....read this...

"In mythology, and in the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a god, goddess, spirit, man, woman, or anthropomorphic animal who plays tricks or otherwise disobeys normal rules and norms of behavior.

While the trickster crosses various cultural traditions, there are significant differences between tricksters in the traditions of many Indigenous peoples and those in the Euro-American tradition:

"Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth".[1]

Native tricksters should not be confused with the Euro-American fictional picaro. One of the most important distinctions is that "we can see in the Native American trickster an openness to life's multiplicity and paradoxes largely missing in the modern Euro-American moral tradition.

And this part of the article (which has great illustrations, including a Fox trickster..check it out at Wikipedia) I found very interesting and relevant:


   Mythology

The trickster deity breaks the rules of the gods or nature, sometimes maliciously (for example, Loki) but usually, albeit unintentionally, with ultimately positive effects. Often, the rule-breaking takes the form of tricks (eg. Eris) or thievery. Tricksters can be cunning or foolish or both; they are often funny even when considered sacred or performing important cultural tasks. An example of this is the sacred Heyoka, whose role is to play tricks and games and by doing so raises awareness and acts as an equalizer.

In many cultures, (as may be seen in Greek, Norse, or Slavic folktales, along with Native American/First Nations lore), the trickster and the culture hero are often combined. To illustrate: Prometheus, in Greek mythology, stole fire from the gods to give to humans. He is more of a culture hero than a trickster. In many Native American and First Nations mythologies, the coyote (Southwestern United States) or raven (Pacific Northwest, coastal British Columbia, Alaska and Russian Far East) stole fire from the gods (stars, moon, and/or sun) and are more tricksters than culture heroes. This is primarily because of other stories involving these spirits: Prometheus was a Titan, whereas the Coyote spirit and Raven spirit are usually seen as jokesters and pranksters.

Frequently the Trickster figure exhibits gender and form variability, changing gender roles and engaging in same-sex practices. Such figures appear in Native American and First Nations mythologies, where they are said to have a two-spirit nature. Loki, the Norse trickster, also exhibits gender variability, in one case even becoming pregnant; interestingly, he shares the ability to change genders with Odin, the chief Norse deity who also possesses many characteristics of the Trickster. In the case of Loki's pregnancy, he was forced by the Gods to stop a giant from erecting a wall for them before 7 days passed; he solved the problem by transforming into a mare and drawing the giant's magical horse away from its work. He returned some time later with a child he had given birth to--the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, who served as Odin's steed.

In some cultures, there are dualistic myths, featuring two demiurges creating the world, or two culture heroes arranging the world — in a complementary manner. Dualistic cosmologies are present in all inhabited continents[3] and show great diversity: they may feature culture heroes, but also demiurges (exemplifying dualistic cosmogony in the latter case), or other beings; the two heroes may compete or collaborate; they may be conceived as neutral or contrasted as good versus evil; be of the same importance or distinguished as powerful versus weak; be brothers (even twins) or be not relatives at all.[4]

Coyote is a very particular form of Trickster Spirit, and I include this for possible interest but the next two subsections are the really interesting ones that seem to have a special relevance to the persona(e) Tao Lin is crafting...


   Coyote

The Coyote mythlore is one of the most popular among Native American cultures. Coyote is a ubiquitous being and can be categorized in many types. In creation myths, Coyote appears as the Creator himself; but he may at the same time be the messenger, the culture hero, the trickster, the fool. He has also the ability of the transformer: in some stories he is a handsome young man; in others he is an animal; yet others present him as just a power, a sacred one. According to Crow (and other Plains) tradition, Old Man Coyote impersonates the Creator, "Old Man Coyote took up a handful of mud and out of it made people".[5] His creative power is also spread onto words, "Old Man Coyote named buffalo, deer, elk, antelopes, and bear. And all these came into being". In such myths Coyote-Creator is never mentioned as an animal; more, he can meet his animal counterpart, the coyote: they address each other as "elder brother" and "younger brother", and walk and talk together. According to A. Hultkranz, the impersonation of Coyote as Creator is a result of a taboo, a mythic substitute to the religious notion of the Great Spirit whose name was too dangerous and/or sacred to use apart from a special ceremony.

In Chelan myths, Coyote belongs to the animal people but he is at the same time "a power just like the Creator, the head of all the creatures". Yet his being 'just like the Creator' does not really mean being 'the Creator': it is not seldom that Coyote-Just-Like-Creator is subject to the Creator, Great Chief Above, who can punish him, send him away, take powers away from him, etc. In the Pacific Northwest tradition, Coyote is mostly mentioned as a messenger, or minor power, "Coyote was sent to the camp of the chief of the Cold Wind tribe to deliver a challenge; Coyote traveled around to tell all the people in both tribes about the contest." As such, Coyote "was cruelly treated, and his work was never done."

As the culture hero, Coyote appears in various mythic traditions. His major heroic attributes are transformation, traveling, high deeds, power. He is engaged in changing the ways of rivers, standing of mountains, creating new landscapes and getting sacred things for people. Of mention is the tradition of Coyote fighting against monsters. According to Wasco tradition, Coyote was the hero to fight and kill Thunderbird, the killer of people, but he could do that not because of his personal power, but due to the help of the Spirit Chief; Coyote was trying his best, he was fighting hard, and he had to have fasted ten days before the fight, so advised by Spirit Chief 8. In many Wasco myths, Coyote rivals the Raven (Crow) about the same ordeal: in some stories, Multnomah Falls came to be by Coyote's efforts; in others, it is done by Raven.

More often than not Coyote is a trickster, but he is always different. In some stories, he is a noble trickster, "Coyote takes water from the Frog people... because it is not right that one people have all the water." In others, he is mean, "Coyote determined to bring harm to Duck. He took Duck's wife and children, whom he treated badly."


   Archetype

Further information: List of modern day tricksters

The Trickster is an example of a Jungian archetype. In modern literature the trickster survives as a character archetype, not necessarily supernatural or divine, sometimes no more than a stock character.

In later folklore, the trickster is incarnated as a clever, mischievous man or creature, who tries to survive the dangers and challenges of the world using trickery and deceit as a defense. For example many typical fairy tales have the King who wants to find the best groom for his daughter by ordering several trials. No brave and valiant prince or knight manages to win them, until a poor and simple peasant comes. With the help of his wits and cleverness, instead of fighting, he evades or fools monsters and villains and dangers with unorthodox manners. Therefore the most unlikely candidate passes the trials and receives the reward. More modern and obvious examples of that type are Bugs Bunny and The Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) (see list).

The trickster is an enduring archetype that crosses many cultures and appears in a wide variety of popular media. For a modern humanist study of the trickster archetypes and their effects on society and its evolution, see Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde.


  The trickster's literary role in dismantling oppressive systems

Modern African American literary criticism has turned the trickster figure into one example of how it is possible to overcome a system of oppression from within. For years, African American literature was discounted by the greater community of American literary criticism while its authors were still obligated to use the language and the rhetoric of the very system that relegated African Americans and other minorities to the ostracized position of the cultural “other.” The central question became one of how to overcome this system when the only words available were created and defined by the oppressors. As Audre Lorde explained, the problem was that “the master’s tools [would] never dismantle the master’s house.”[6]

In his writings of the late 1980s, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents the concept of Signifyin(g). Wound up in this theory is the idea that the “master’s house” can be “dismantled” using his “tools” if the tools are used in a new or unconventional way. To demonstrate this process, Gates cites the interactions found in African American narrative poetry between the trickster, the “Signifying Monkey”, and his oppressor, the Lion.[7] According to Gates, the “Signifying Monkey” is the “New World figuration” and “functional equivalent” of the Esu trickster figure of African Yoruba mythology.[8] The Lion functions as the authoritative figure in his classical role of “King of the Jungle.”[9] He is the one who commands the Signifying Monkey’s movements. Yet the Monkey is able to outwit the Lion continually in these narratives through his usage of figurative language. According to Gates, “[T]he Signifying Monkey is able to signify upon the Lion because the Lion does not understand the Monkey’s discourse…The monkey speaks figuratively, in a symbolic code; the lion interprets or reads literally and suffers the consequences of his folly…”[10] In this way, the Monkey uses the same language as the Lion, but he uses it on a level that the Lion cannot comprehend. This usually leads to the Lion’s “trounc[ing]” at the hands of a third-party, the Elephant.[11] The net effect of all of this is “the reversal of [the Lion’s] status as the King of the Jungle.”[12] In this way, the “master’s house” is dismantled when his own tools are turned against him by the trickster Monkey.

Following in this tradition, critics since Gates have come to assert that another popular African American folk trickster, Brer Rabbit, uses clever language to perform the same kind of rebellious societal deconstruction as the Signifying Monkey. Brer Rabbit is the “creative way that the slave community responded to the oppressor’s failure to address them as human beings created in the image of God.”[13] The figurative representative of this slave community, Brer Rabbit is the hero with a “fragile body but a deceptively strong mind” that allows him to “create [his] own symbols in defiance of the perverted logic of the oppressor.”[14] By twisting language to create these symbols, Brer Rabbit not only was the “personification of the ethic of self-preservation” for the slave community, but also “an alternative response to their oppressor’s false doctrine of anthropology.”[15] Through his language of trickery, Brer Rabbit outwits his oppressors, deconstructing, in small ways, the hierarchy of subjugation to which his weak body forces him to physically conform.

Before Gates, there was some precedent for the analysis of African American folk heroes as destructive agents of an oppressive hierarchical system. In the 1920s and 1930s, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound engaged in an epistolary correspondence.[16] Both writers signed the letters with pseudonyms adopted from the Uncle Remus tales; Eliot was “Possum;” Pound was “Tar Baby.” Pound and Eliot wrote in the same “African slave” dialect of the tales. Pound, writing later of the series of letters, distinguished the language from “the Queen’s English, the language of public propriety.”[17] This rebellion against proper language came as part of “collaboration” between Pound and Eliot “against the London literary establishment and the language that it used.”[18] Although Pound and Eliot were not attempting to overthrow an establishment as expansive as the one oppressing the African American slave community, they were actively trying to establish for themselves a new kind of literary freedom. In their usage of the Uncle Remus trickster figures’ names and dialects, they display an early understanding of the way in which cleverly manipulated language can dismantle a restrictive hierarchy.

African American literary criticism and folktales are not the only place in the American literary tradition that tricksters are to be found combating subjugation from within an oppressive system. In When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote, the argument is posited that the Brer Rabbit stories were derived from a mixture of African and Native American mythology, thus attributing part of the credit for the formation of the tales and wiles of Brer Rabbit to “Indian captivity narratives” and the rabbit trickster found in Cherokee mythology.[19] In arguing for a merged “African-Native American folklore,” the idea is forwarded that certain shared “cultural affinities” between African Americans and Native Americans allowed both groups “through the trickster tales…survive[d] European American cultural and political domination.”[20]

Kudos to the author(s) of this entry on Trickster Spirits. Although, I must admit I wanted to vomit just a bit when I got to the part about Eliot and Pound's appropriation of that "African slave dialect." I don't interpret Eliot's and Pound's use of this dialect the same way the idealistic author of that passage does. I see in it a darker nastiness, typical of the prejudices they have evinced elsewhere in their writing.

I'm sure they were hooting like adolescent monkeys as they read each other's blackface productions.

But those dead (oh-so-white) horses have been flogged enough elsewhere that I don't find it profitable to waste my energy and tire my arm here. Although it might be fun.

Creepy old fucks.


6. I Googled "Tao Lin is a genius" and this came up: "Tao Lin is a genius of self-promotion." It said other things, but I forget what the other things were.


7. Someone said Tao Lin is like Mayakovsky. Yes. I can see that. He likes to declaim in this book of poems and there is the ironic and ridiculous self-aggrandizement we find in much of Mayakovsky. Many of these poems are dramatic monologues which are funny. Sometimes they are funny. There is a strong performative bias built into many of those poems because Tao is a born performer.

This is a man who dressed up in a bear suit to read his poems.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

We all do what we have to do.

8. Girls seem to like Tao Lin a lot. He has a photo on Goodreads where he looks like Brancusi's "Sleeping Muse" sculpture. Someone left a comment saying something like "I am glad I got to see you read, but I am sorry you look nothing like your photo." That comment creeped me out and stayed with me.

If he is getting stalkers like this, he must be moving units though.

9. If a book of poetry has more than ten pages of really good poetry in it, I consider that book a success.

This book has a few more pages than that of good poetry in it, I think.

Tao is currently a relativist and doesn't like it when people make statements like that.

I learned that from his blog, Reader of Depressing Books, which has amused me and stolen quite a few hours from my employer.

Here is an example of a good poem:

   if i get hit a little by a truck tonight i'm okay with that

in a hospital the painkillers help your mood
at night you feel like a five-year-old
i don't want to be in love or win the national book award
i say, 'just let me live in a hospital for free with a lung problem'
you say, 'be careful what you wish for'
i say, 'um, why should i be careful what i wish for if i'll be happy
   if i get what i want?'
you say, 'it's hard to tell if you're being sarcastic'
i say, ' a conversation like this would never happen in a hospital'


Logic like that is unassailable.

This reminds me of Quentin Crisp being asked when he was a small child what he wanted to be when he grew up.

"An invalid" was his way toooo honest response.

I suppose one could argue whether that's a poem or a short story. I almost tend to lean towards the latter.

10. Tao Lin is very much a careerist. I don't think he feels very bad about that, and probably you shouldn't either.

11. There are a lot of bad poems and bad lines in here, as in every poetry collection. Some examples of bad lines would include this:

"i am in the middle of some stupid world and where my brain is is
instead a huge, wet heart

and where my organs are are instead hearts
and my bones are all hearts too"

or

"i am fucked existentially
i am fucked existentially
i am fucked existentially"

(repeat oh i don't know about 108 times)

or

"you are shorter than i am
you laugh louder
you laugh more
you make the face of a hamster and ask me what i think
you build a fort in your room
and i tear it down by accident"

12. The pseudo-naif role in poetry has been done very well by Tomaz Salamun and others. Tao Lin seems to admire a lot of poetry written in pseudo-naif personae.

This can be like a Sudafed buzz.

13. It is very sad that innocence can only be impersonated after a certain point. But maybe it is a ritual all the same to impersonate it. Maybe it is a reverence. Maybe it is tragedy. I don't know.

14. Here is another good poem from this collection:

   i honestly do not know who this poem is directed at but i still somehow wrote it with conviction

your philosophy of life is that drugs are cool
you are so nihilistic that you don't care about the environment
your worldview is that violence, offending people, and killing animals are
   the best
your belief system is that tonight you are going to get fucked up
you are an asshole to other people because of the human condition,
   existentialism, and your high IQ
you would rather punch someone in the face and kill them than have them
   think you might be gay
your greatest accomplishment in life is that you are not a homosexual

A little too sincere, too heartfelt?

I find it hilarious and successful.

The last line is unforgettable.

Lin often combines ethics and humor, possibly conflates ethics and humor sometimes. Meltdowns work occasionally in a collection.

15. There is a strong resonance of the beatnik energy and freedom in this collection. Like many of the more popular Beats, he tends to stick to the vernacular and anathematize the "literary." He has a lot more than that in common with the Beats, I suppose.

16. One quibble I would have with the poems is that because of the performative nature of the poems and the fact that he often writes "zinger" lines, many of the poems tend to lose appeal rapidly on repeat readings. You don't want your poem to be too much like a jack-in-the-box.

This is where I could lament the scarcity of "negative capability" in the poems....you know, that "fill in the blank" quality of poetic beauty...that poem that is a shape-shifter and changes each time you read it.

A poem that has negative capability to a higher degree, and stands out for it, is the longish "poem to end my head off."

This poem is qualitatively different from most of the other poems in the collection.

When it is reread it changes coloration, tenor, voices....well, you get the idea...

17. Here are other poems I thought were good in this collection:

"i want to start a band"

"i hate the world and i'm not immature"

"things you have emailed me" (although i guess this is found poetry or co-authored)

"book reviewers always praise books as 'life affirming' because the more humans there are on earth the better"

and the two closing pieces are very good but i definitely read them as short fiction..."February" and "At that Leftover Crack Concert Two Years Before I Met You."

18. Others have talked at length about how Tao Lin (and other net authors) represent a sea change in the way literature is connecting with its audience, and yes they're right. Very right. So I won't say that here.

It's hard to compare mailing poems off and having a mag come out as 300 copies (with your contributor's copy mailed back a few months later) with a blog that has the hummingbird metabolism of a reality t.v. show.

They are just different animals.

19. I am reading Tao Lin's first novel now but I stalled. It came and I read half of it in about an hour then put it next to my bathtub and haven't got back to it.

Now it's been like ten days or something.

So I'm not sure I will remember everything that happened so far.

We'll see.

20. I keep getting distracted by the window and shit that seems to be happening in it.

21. That hawk could use Jenny Craig. He's practically breaking the goddamn branch now.

22. Everyday he just comes and perches down at the end of the telephone wire and looks at all the pigeons on the wire with him like an all you can gorge buffet.

And they don't even fly away.

They just perch there with him.

Lunch.

22a. Nature is horribly imbalanced sometimes, but I keep watching.