I’ll leave you with one more quote from Tao Lin’s Bookslut interview. What do the Loch Ness Monster and Sasquatch have to do with Chelsea? Do we control our hearts? How is the human body anthropomorphized here? What does that suggest about our main character?Ģ. In order to avoid stepping on Nuria’s toes, I’m going to limit myself to two guiding question clusters to keep in mind going forward:ġ. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on the humor operating in this story, because I think it heightens what is, in all honesty, a very tragic situation, and accentuates the emotional charge of Tao Lin’s prose.įor our discussion next Tuesday the 26th, I have the following people listed for our six roles: I don’t think that’s what’s happening in “Sasquatch,” however. In much of his work the despondency of the characters and the prose that evokes them generate ironic humor in contrast to dialogue, or the chaos of random events. But humor should not be taken as a generic category. One thing that must be indicated, and that is made clear by the above quote, is that the role of humor is really pivotal for Tao Lin, in all his writing (and quotable statements). Perhaps this only muddies the waters for a deeper understanding of the story perhaps not. I think I showed the crippling loneliness of the main character in a clear, easy to understand, yet not too melodramatic and not too life-affirming but still with the effects of something that is refreshingly life-affirming, but in a way that is long-term rather than short term, in that story. I’m proud of my story, “Sasquatch,” that is in Bed. In the Bookslut interview that I mentioned earlier, the author had this to say about “Sasquatch”: I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this. Or perhaps I should reach for the salt shaker. Perhaps the vulnerability and loneliness that radiate throughout this story is just Tao Lin, writer/human, with no game to play. Which is to say, it is something like high art. This is a sad story, movingly rendered in poetic bursts of visceral imagery that, to me at least, strike deep inner chords that sound truer than most words. The question then becomes: How much salt should we take with this story? Its author deserves a heaping spoonful, no doubt however, “Sasquatch” seems, to me at least, to bypass the theatrical affectations that so many critics and readers point to when they encounter Tao Lin’s work for the first time, and which, in my opinion, seems to dominate, at times, and to their detriment, the reception of some of his other pieces. I would not hesitate to call him, as many have, among the most important and influential authors writing in English today. Ana has generously provided us with several excellent examples of Tao Lin staging just this type of textual performance I highly encourage you all to peruse them, especially the May 2007 interview with Bookslut.īut as polarizing and perplexing as Tao Lin the writer/personality may be, his work speaks for itself. In the age of DIY (Do It Yourself) literature, where everyone is virtually everywhere, the avatar you perpetuate through “real” media is your own best publicist/publicity. This, I would argue, is a natural condition of the (very profitable) phenomenon that Tao Lin has engineered, and has had engineered, in the generation his ever-evolving, almost exclusively virtual “brand”: his character (or caricature?), disseminated predominately through surrealistic interviews on obscure but authentically “independent” (this is a term that demands definition here) online literary websites/journals, has become as much of a stylistic creation as his prose and thematic content. In reality (perhaps a strange term to use in this context), your reading for this month’s session of the Reading Circle consists of two texts: Tao Lin’s story and Tao Lin himself. As the parenthetical reference indicates, this can be applied to people as well as to things. The expression means to resist believing entirely in the immediate appearance of some outward or superficial truth, and instead to delay judgment until proper reflection can take place. There is an idiomatic expression in English that might be of use to us as we think through Tao Lin’s “Sasquatch”: to take (someone or something) with a grain of salt. November Reading Circle Story: Tao Lin’s “Sasquatch”ĭetails November session Reading Circle 2013
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