Tao Lin went to NYU, although thanks to staggering unpaid library fines, he never got a diploma. He is the author of the poetry collection, you are a little bit happier than i am (Action Books, 2006), a chapbook of short fiction, today the sky is blue and white with bright blue spots and a small pale moon and I will destroy our relationship today (Bear Parade, 2006,) a story collection, Bed (Melville House, 2007), and a novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee (Melville House, 2007), as well as a bunch of other work which you can learn about on his blog, reader of depressing books.

My friend and collaborator Elisa Gabbert introduced me to Tao’s work in June of 2006, and in January of 2007, Tao was nice enough to participate in this enormous email interview in which he discusses why abstractions are to be resisted, why privacy causes pain and suffering, why hamsters are funny (their heads are their bodies!) and why he’ll probably never get around to enrolling in an MFA program because that would require the filling out of forms.

KR: How is your first name pronounced? And what does your whole name mean?

TL: It is pronounced like “Cow” but a T instead of a C. My whole name is “Tao Lin.” I don’t know what it means. “Tao” has many meanings but I’ve never studied it. I know that Taoism, or at least one person associated with Taoism, said that if your wife just died you should still be happy and play in a bathtub, because you have the choice to either be happy and play in a bathtub or to be sad and lay facedown in bed, and it is better to be happy. I’ve always felt like my name is not good. I feel almost disgusted by it. I think this means I don’t like myself. But actually I think most of the time I do like myself. But I think if you looked at my entire life I have disliked myself for many more years than I have liked myself, so probably that explains why looking at my name gives me discomfort and why the name is not a good name to me.

KR: Of what does a typical day in the life of Tao Lin consist?

TL: I’m currently in Florida at my parents’ house unemployed. I’m here for one month. I wake up between 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. I shower, do push-ups, check my email, drink a smoothie. I answer emails, look at my blog, read other blogs, or work on poetry for one or two hours. At 4 p.m. I drive to pick up my dad from work and bring him home. From 6 p.m. to around 4 a.m. I go to Whole Foods, read, work on poetry or my novel, gmail chat, drink smoothies, make food and eat it, read things online, play drums, or, like, learn to ride a bike. I bought a bike for $60 tonight and am going to learn how to ride it, I never learned. Mostly I just edit my poetry. Recently I’ve been editing my poetry like six hours a day. I’m working on a new poetry-collection called Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. I’m editing it as an entire book now, and trying to put it in an order that will make it seem like a tight, thematically-focused, small, nice, embarrassed, emotional book.

KR: How much time per day do you think you spend on the Internet? How often do you check your e-mail? How much time do you spend updating your blog?

TL: Whenever I am editing my poetry at the computer or working on my novel I have gmail open, so that I can answer e-mail immediately. I probably spend 10 hours a day on the Internet, so I check my e-mail for ten hours a day, I guess. I don’t spend much time on my blog anymore. I feel like I’ve written about everything there is to write about in terms of rhetoric, or non-fiction, which is what the blog is. I’ve blogged about things like success vs. selflessness, art vs. politics, art being sold for cash, art plus business, editors vs. writers, the meaninglessness of the universe, the arbitrary nature of the universe vs. book reviewers who use value words like “best” or “important,” Jean Rhys, Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore. Now when someone attacks me for something I said I just send them the link to the appropriate blog post. I refer people to my blog. I would refer myself also. A lot of things I start articulating and then I think, “I already articulated this better on my blog,” then I go do something else.

KR: How did you become a writer? Was it something you always knew you wanted to pursue? Did it run in your family? Where did your creativity have its genesis?

TL: I only started reading late in high school. I didn’t know what to do and was very depressed and alone and I wanted to read something that confirmed the world was a piece of shit. I think I read Chuck Palahniuk first, then Kurt Vonnegut. Then I didn’t read much again until college, when I took a creative writing course and a teacher said I was good, or something like that. Then I started writing more seriously. Then I became very obsessed with writing and read a lot of books about writing and spent a lot of time reading book reviews from the library’s database. I read a lot of books about writing, like John Gardner’s book, Rust L. Hill’s book, and I read many author interviews. I read a lot and only thought about writing and only wrote for about two years. My family doesn’t write creatively. My dad is an inventor and physicist. As a child I played neighborhood baseball, basketball, football, then computer games, drums, and, like, collected pogs, coins, and baseball cards.

KR: Why do many of your author bios say you live in New York City when that is not true?

TL: I lived in New York City ages 17 to 22. I’m 23 now. When you submit something it takes them like half a year to publish it, or more than a year for print publications, so that explains it. Or sometimes I just put New York City so people there will solicit me for readings. I’m about 3 hours away from New York City, so I can go there.

KR: I thought you lived in Florida, but maybe that’s just temporary? Where do you live now, and how long have you been there, and how long will you stay? Where would you like to live and why?

TL: I live in Pennsylvania. I moved to Pennsylvania when I was 23 and I’m still 23. I will stay until March or April or May or June or July 2007, then I will probably move back to New York City, because they have many vegan restaurants, bookstores, readings I can attend, independent movie theatres, and health food stores, and because my friend will move there also and I want to be with her.

KR: Sometimes, in the poems “you published a one-page comic where someone freaks out while eating breakfast” and “you are somewhere in florida right now,” for instance, you write about “florida,” but for the most part your work seems to be set in generic landscapes where there really is, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, no there there. How important is place to your work?

TL: Place is not “important” at all. I feel angry when people look at Kafka and say something like, “Kafka illuminates Prague in the way Joyce illuminated Dublin.” Everyone in Prague was not a deadpan, severely depressed, morbid, socially anxious, detached, disillusioned, lonely human being, animal, or insect with an absurd sense of humor and a deep, calm, and self-conscious acceptance of the horrors of existence. Even if everyone in Prague was what I just described it would still be a generalization to say something like, “Kafka got Prague spot-on,” because the critic didn’t do a case-study on every person in Prague, and also because people from like France probably visit Prague and aren’t all severely depressed, detached organisms. If Kafka lived in Disney World in 2045 at Disney’s new East Timor location the same critic would say, “Kafka illuminates East Timor’s new Disney Location in the way Joyce illuminated Dublin.”

To me the critic that says that is saying, “I’m an expert on East Timor’s new Disney Location, and Kafka is as good as me, he knows as much about East Timor as I do. I’m really good and smart. I will tell you what is also good and smart.”

This is similar to the critic who says, “This book is the best, most important book of the decade,” without defining a context and a goal for the abstract, value words “best” and “important.” They define the word “best” as “me.” They are saying, “I am the best, and I like this book, therefore this book is the best, and very important.” I think many book reviewers do that, probably like 90 percent.

KR: How important is truth? What is “truth” in literature anyway?

TL: “Truth” is an abstraction, so before you can use it in a sentence meaningfully you have to define it within a goal and a context. For some reason many people do not understand this. To understand this, you just have to understand that “All people are different.” “One person’s ‘best’ is not another person’s ‘best’” is a sentence in which you can replace “best” with any abstraction. I think many writers do not understand this, that “All people are different.” Not all people occupy the same space at the same time, therefore “All people are different,” therefore all abstractions are meaningless unless defined with a context and a goal—for example, a context could be “all humans in Lousiana” and a goal could be “to get John Updike to visit Lousiana.”

KR: Speaking of literary truth and autobiography, former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser wrote in an essay called “Lying for the Sake of Making Poems,” “Perhaps I am hopelessly old-fashioned. Perhaps I should accept the possibility that what the poet says happened really didn't happen at all, but I'm going to have to make a painful adjustment in the way I read poetry and honor poets. I grew up believing a lyric poet was a person who wrote down his or her observations, taken from life.” Is Kooser play-acting the simple-minded rube here, or does he have a point?

TL: I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever read a major prize-winning poet that speaks and thinks in concrete specifics, so maybe he is being serious. Is he just saying, “Lying is bad,” or something? If he is, he should for clarity have just said, “I think people should do what they say, and if they change their philosophy on something they should tell people before they do anything concrete.”

KR: Many of the things you write about seem like Things That Actually Happened To You, but are they? How much does the “real you” differ from the speakers of your poems and the protagonists of your stories?

TL: I think everything in you are a little bit happier than i am happened to me, except the parts that are impossible due to the laws of the universe, parts which happened in my head. In Bed about half the stories happened to me, but only parts of them—for those stories I was just trying to write things that I felt would achieve the same effects as some of the authors I liked to read did, not just write what happened to me. In the novel Eeeee Eee Eeeee probably 10 percent really happened to me. In Today the Sky… the story “Should” is all true, the story “Drive” is all true, and half the story “Driveway” is true, and maybe some small parts of a few of the other ones. But they were also written to achieve an effect, so I didn’t just write everything that happened, I deleted parts and arranged it in the service of the effect, which was that after I read it I would feel very empty and in that emptiness very calm, which is a good feeling if you usually feel insane or angry or frustrated or severely depressed.

KR: Do you ever worry, with your multiple books and blogs, about privacy? How much is the Tao that gets published the actual Tao?

TL: I think privacy causes more pain and suffering in the world. A person who doesn’t want more pain and suffering in the world also I think would not want privacy. I sometimes have urges to post on my blog my e-mail password and other passwords. Just think about what would happen without privacy. You wouldn’t own anything. People would see your actions and immediately you would suffer the consequences. You would become a monk or a homeless person. Monks and homeless people are good, they don’t cause pain and suffering, maybe.

Ownership causes more pain and suffering in the world. Privacy creates ownership. Privacy is bad. Privacy also makes it more difficult to link actions back to the person, therefore making it easier for a person to divert the consequences of their actions onto someone else. For example, if I kill a person and then hide in a giant hooded cloak and then go home and hide the knife in the privacy of my mansion behind metal gates, probably someone else eventually will be arrested and wrongly convicted of murder. The consequences were diverted because of privacy. Another example is if I talk shit in the privacy of my room about Salman Rushdie. Salman Rushdie will not know I talked shit about him, therefore I will suffer no consequences for my actions. If Salman Rushdie was in the room I would probably be forced to have a discussion with him and we’d be friends, instead of me just hating him irrationally. The same with the war in Iraq, I guess. I think information should be available at all times and never hidden if one is serious about reducing pain and suffering in the world.

KR: In the poem “spring break” in your book you are a little bit happier than i am, you write “i wait around for my writing professor/who will help me publish this book, who will tell me i'm self-indulgent/who i will agree with and then feel sort of hollow and good/but who doesn't show up.” Do you feel that your work is self-indulgent, and if so, why do you persist in indulging yourself?

TL: “Self-indulgent” is an abstraction. You’d have to define it with a context and a goal, in life, before I could answer without further distorting reality or imposing myself, like an omnipotent God, onto every other brain in the universe. You could ask me, “Do you think your poem ‘4 a.m.’ causes your brain to think more about one person than other persons and therefore causes behavior that causes other people to feel sadness that they would otherwise not feel?” and I could think about that, using such proven concepts as “cause and effect” and “observation,” but otherwise I can’t answer that question, because it is like saying, “Do you feel that your work is jpofeajfe, and if so, why do you persist in jpofeajfe yourself?”

KR: Can you say a little bit about your educational history—where you did your undergraduate work and what your degree is in? Who have you studied with and how have they influenced you?

TL: I went to New York University and majored in journalism. I didn’t know what I was going to major in and I never thought that it would make a difference what I majored in, so after three years in college I looked at what classes I had taken and the only major I could achieve, based on how much time I had left, was journalism. If I had one or two more classes of psychology I could have a degree now in psychology also, which people would cite in articles about my writing, that my psychological insight can be traced back to my degree in psychology from prestigious New York University. I don’t think it makes any difference what degree you get unless you seriously want to participate in society and become a professional. I never paid my massive library fines, so I never got my diploma, so actually I don’t officially have a degree in anything.

KR: You haven't got an MFA, correct? Why not? Do you think you will ever get one, or are they unnecessary?

TL: I don’t have an MFA. When I graduated from New York University I had finished my story collection Bed and had a literary agent, so I was focused on that. I remember trying to apply to University of Wisconsin at Madison’s MFA program, to be in Lorrie Moore’s class possibly, but then saw on the computer screen that I had to fill out a form. The form wanted me to do a lot of things like get recommendations and things like that, and I gave up. I don’t think I’ll ever get an MFA. I would like to teach though. I would like to pass out stories and poems that I like and have everyone read them and if someone starts using terms, saying things like, “This is very postmodern,” I think I would like to question them a lot until they admitted they don’t know what they are talking about.

KR: You write both prose and poetry, and often in your work, they sound like one another. What is the difference to you between prose and poetry? Do you prefer one to the other?

TL: That’s like saying, “What is the difference to you between Asians and black people?” It really is. I don’t want to answer a question like that because it distorts reality and creates divisions and groups where none, without preconception, exist, and perpetuates that kind of thinking, which in other situations become, “What is the difference to you between Asians and black people?” If you said, “What is the difference to you between using line breaks and not using line breaks,” it would be like saying, “What is the difference to you between a person who has straight hair and a person who has curly hair?” “Line breaks” and “Straight hair” are concrete, “Asians” and “Prose” are abstract things.

I think if a person is able to discern between “Concrete” and “Abstract” then they are able to “think for themselves.” I think I’m only ever going to answer certain questions with the lecture I just gave, because I think it would really make a difference in the world and reduce pain and suffering, to try to get people to think concretely so that they are able to look at a situation without preconceptions and make decisions on their own. That is also what I think allows a person to write something that is interesting, or even just “it seems like a human not a robot wrote that” to me, if they are able to look at and write about situations without preconceptions or “received ideas.”

KR: Both your poetry and your prose share a detached and tossed-off quality, almost as though you just put the words on the page as they came to you and never looked back. But I wonder: what is your composition process actually like?

TL: Many of the poems in you are a little bit happier than i am were written quickly and not edited that much, because I was writing them specifically to be read, because I had a few readings for Opium Magazine and each time I wanted to read new things (it was the same people pretty much who attended) and I also wanted to read things that wouldn’t make me feel like a pretentious shithead. I didn’t want anyone in the audience to think, “What the fuck are you talking about?” When I began working on you are a little bit happier than i am as a book, I had all those poems I wrote specifically to be read, so then I wrote things that would go with those in tone and “execution,” so as to make it seem like a “real book” rather than a collection of everything I had written. I spent a lot of time putting the book in order, getting the order right, and writing new poems to fit in places where I felt it needed a certain feeling.

The stories in Bed I edited in agony. I spent like four to six hours a day for one month exclusively working on each story initially to create a “first” draft, and then further edited each story occasionally over the next six months or so, as they were rejected by magazines. Then when each story was accepted by a magazine I usually edited more and sent that draft to the magazine, saying it was a “newer, better draft,” then the magazine usually gave more editing suggestions and I edited more, then when Melville House accepted the collection I edited it more and sent the manuscript to them, then a few months later they gave me their editing suggestions, and I edited more. The literary agent I had also gave me editing suggestions, which I agonized over for about two weeks. Now when I think about Bed I see myself standing on the train with a worried face, walking around with a worried face, laying in bed at night with a worried face, or like staring with a worried face at someone’s mouth that is talking to me, because I was constantly worried about an inconsistency or a “problem” or a bad ending or a sentence that was bad or an adjective that wasn’t “right” in whatever story. Sometimes I felt uncontrollable despair due to whatever editing thing I was worried about, which if you looked at me you would just think I was a normal person standing there, but on the inside was despair. I wanted each story to have themes on the language-level, like you can look at the word choice in each story and see that each word actually was chosen to enhance the final effect. It was agonizing.

The novel Eeeee Eee Eeeee I also edited very much. When I wrote it I worked on it every day like four to six hours a day, and printed it out and thought about it constantly. Each day I would start at the beginning, make edits, and go from there, reading each sentence and analyzing the effect it was having on me. I remember working very hard on a lot of parts that I ended up deleting. The novel had many sections where I said things like, “People listened to NPR that year,” and I deleted all those, like fifteen pages or something. I think I probably wrote at least 60,000 words that were edited and publishable and the novel now is 28,500 words. Now when I think about Eeeee Eee Eeee I… I don’t know. I just feel a little agony.

Still, the stories and novel aren’t “masterpieces,” probably. I mean after you read what I just typed about editing you’ll probably think, “Those must be the greatest stories ever written.” They aren’t. Probably because much of the time editing I would actually be making the stories too contrived or in some way “not as good,” and sometimes editing it would be arbitrary, like I would look at a sentence and think, “I guess I’ll delete that,” or I’d have dictionary.com open to the thesaurus and be like, “I guess I’ll use this synonym.” Or I’d be in a good mood and start adding things, which I would later delete.

KR: Relatedly, how important is revision to your work? Do you have a revision process and of what does it consist?

TL: I edit on the computer screen. I also edit by printing it out and editing it with a pen. The process is when I first write something that I feel good about I think, “This is very good,” but concurrently also think, “Tomorrow you will think most of this is shit, then you will delete the shit, then you will write more things and think that it is very good, then the next day you will think most of the previous day’s writing is shit, then you will delete… and that will happen for many days, so calm down and be patient.”

KR: In the poem “book reviewers always praise books as 'life-affirming' because the more humans there are on earth the better,” you write, “and i deleted this line/and i deleted this line, too, in revisions/and i deleted this line that was talking about god…” and so forth. A great deal of your work is self-referential—why do you like to call so much attention to the poem as a created thing, a made object, and to yourself as the creator?

TL: Sometimes I like to call attention for variety. I don’t always call attention. Sometimes I want to be completely open and honest when I am writing, and not take a position like I am God and the reader is a sheep, so if I’m sitting there typing, staring at the computer screen, that is part of the experience of my life, and I don’t want to block that out, in part because I don’t want to block anything out and in part because it is interesting and funny that I’m staring at the computer screen, which is glowing, so I will include that occasionally.

KR: In the story “Mistake,” you write from the perspective of a man with a wife named Janet and two kids, Thomas and Ryan. And yet you still sound like Tao, which is to say, the story is told in exactly the same tone and voice as all of your other writing. Why do you do this? Is it intentional, or is that the only voice you're able to write in?

TL: I don’t like to write in different voices. I don’t want to “impress” the reader with my skill, my consummate skill. When I write I don’t ever think anymore, “What voice am I going to use? What tone am I going to use? What style should I use?” I used to do that when I first began writing. Now I don’t think about style or voice at all. I think in terms of, “Is this what I want to read? Is this exactly what I want to read?” I write what I want to read. At each moment in time, though it may change in different moments, I have an ideal, the ideal story or poem or novel that I want to read, and that is what I try to write. I want to read things that someone wrote foremost to console themselves in a way that does not block out or distract from any information; not to console others or to make others laugh or to distract themselves or others. When someone is alone, in a room, writing to console themselves, they don’t have “fun,” they don’t try to “impress” the reader, and they don’t “pose” in any way. They are just alone, trying to do something.

KR: Your dialogue in your prose in particular is absurd and funny. I like the dialogue in the short story "Go to the Beach" especially. Do you ever write plays?

TL: I haven’t written any plays. I like dialogue. I think dialogue is funny. My favorite dialogue is by Joy Williams or maybe in Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie.

KR: Certain concrete nouns tend to turn up in your poems a lot. For instance “the nobel prize” and “hamsters.” How do you decide on these words? Are they conscious choices or do they just crop up? And do you repeat and manipulate them to create motifs?

TL: The Nobel Prize is funny and “rich” in its implications. When I write “the Nobel Prize” within the context of you are a little bit happier than i am, the reader automatically thinks or perhaps “senses” that I’m being sarcastic, ironic, iconoclastic, rebellious, anti-authority, self-conscious, critical of prizes, critical of politics in art, critical of people critical of prizes, etc., I think. I don’t know. It just makes me appear smarter, or something, but also it is funny. Hamsters are funny. Their heads are their bodies. Some things are just funny and more meaningful than other things, though it is different for everyone. For example, a banana is more nutritious and exciting than a piece of white bread.

I have motifs in Bed, the story collection. I don’t think there were motifs in you are a little bit happier than i am except perhaps the use of “you.”

KR: Both your short stories and your poems tend to rely heavily on repetition. What effect does repetition help you achieve, structurally and in terms of content?

TL: It achieves the effect of being easier to read. I don’t know. I don’t think there is much repetition in the stories or poems. If there is I don’t think I meant it. Oh, in one poem I repeat “i am fucked existentially” many times. I thought it would be funny and accurate to do that.

KR: “Immaturity” is another motif that seems to run through your work, along with “embarrassment”—what's the source of this anxiety?  Do you feel like the work you are producing now is mature? Or do you ever wonder if maybe some of this might be juvenilia, or if you might one day be embarrassed of it?

TL: “Mature” is an abstraction. I don’t worry that my work is not “Mature,” just like I don’t worry that my work is not “Glorious” or “Etiological” or something. That’s like someone coming up to me and saying, “You’re not arearjaelrkejr,” and then I start worrying about that. 

I’m embarrassed of a lot of things I’ve written. That is okay. I don’t worry about that. If I did something concrete and it exists I shouldn’t try to block that out, but let it inform and influence my future actions.

KR: Why is it so hard to be an adult, and how do you know when you finally are one?

TL: Being an “Adult” is meaningless. “Punching someone in the face” or “Lying to someone” or, like, “Walking by a homeless man without giving him or her money, but talking shit about him” or “Eating an animal” are real, concrete things with actual consequences having to do with pain and suffering. It’s really meaningless and negative and nihilistic to stand around talking about “Being an adult.” Yes, nihilistic. It denies that living, suffering animals exist, because it focuses one’s attention on an abstraction—“Adult”—that has no feelings and feels no pain. The concept of “Adult” is not like a cow. It can’t feel pain, there is no reason to be focused on the concept of “Adult,” unless you are a kind of nihilist, or something. I only say “nihilistic” because people who talk about things like “How to be an adult” usually are the same people who talk about being positive and valuing life, not because I think nihilism is immature or not true or “bad.”  

KR: Also, because of its apparent nonchalance, your work tends to give the impression that what you are doing is easily imitatable (though I suspect it isn't). But do you worry about imitators? And where will you go with your work from here?

TL: I don’t know why anyone would worry about imitators, except that they want to be the best, and the greatest, and create a legacy, and maybe live forever through their work. If someone wants to be the best, most respected, greatest writer then I guess they would worry about imitators. Those are all abstractions. Respect, best, greatest.

KR: For someone who was born in 1983, you've certainly published a lot of work: a poetry e-book, a chapbook of short fiction, a poetry collection, a short story collection and a novel so far, right? Not to mention your extensively updated blog, reader of depressing books. How did you come to be so prolific? And do you ever worry about being too prolific? Do you have a lot of work that is unpublished or do you publish most of what you write?

TL: I have a lot of unpublished work. I have a 100,000 word novel that won’t be published, like five twenty-page stories, and like fifty not yet published poems. I think it’s absurd to worry about being too prolific, but I admit I have worried about that pretty often. People do absurd things even if they know it is absurd, which is bad, maybe.

How did I get so prolific? I don’t know. I think about writing when I wake up, I think about writing constantly. But look at people who are martial arts masters or music prodigies. They practice like 10 hours a day and structure their entire lives around martial arts or piano or whatever. Not many writers do that, I don’t think. Philip Roth supposedly writes eight hours a day, I heard from someone, but that is nothing compared to like Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee probably worked on martial arts and his body twelve hours a day. I write like four or five hours a day. If someone wrote and studied writing twelve hours a day every day they could easily write like a poetry collection, a story collection, a novel, and an essay collection every year, and have them be very good.

KR: You have another poem called “i honestly do not know who this poem is directed at but I still somehow wrote it with conviction.” I have this friend who is convinced that the key to writing a passionate and therefore good poem is to write it as an address to someone, aka, “in the apostrophic mode.” What do you think of that specifically, and what generally to you makes for a good poem?

TL: I like when a poem is specifically for one person. Yes, I think most of what I write now is like that. When I think back on how I was when I first started writing and wrote a 100,000 word novel, I think I was writing not for one person but just to be really good, generally. I’ve changed. Now I write just to make myself feel better or like one other person feel better. I don’t think being famous, winning the Nobel Prize, or having $10 million will affect how I feel alone at night in bed, or alone with someone at night in bed. I don’t know what I’m talking about.

I don’t know what makes a good poem to me. I like Ellen Kennedy, Matthew Rohrer, Michael Earl Craig, and Ben Lerner’s poetry. I guess I do know what makes a good poem to me. I think it has to have little or no clichés or idioms (unless used sarcastically), no ‘punch-lines,’ and elements of all or most of the following: having been written as if to console oneself, self-consciousness, non-sequiturs, standard formatting, line breaks where you naturally pause, sarcasm or irony, and a tone like you can tell the author does not want power and would support weak things over powerful things, and some other things.

KR: And speaking of “goodness,” for me, one of the central tensions of reading your work is constantly wondering to myself is this going to be good? It's a source of suspense in the work, like: "is this going to end up being worthwhile? When will the development occur that will justify its existence or make it identifiably a poem or a story? Do you ever wonder these things as you’re writing? And how do you decide when what you've written is a poem? How is a poem different than a blog post?

TL: I don’t know how a poem is different than a blog post. I post a lot of poems on my blog. I don’t think it matters. There are words, and you read the words, and it has an effect on you. I don’t know how to answer questions where someone asks me to define abstractions.

This is why most discussions on writing, most introductions to books, and most writing classes are interminable to me. And most interviews I think also. Most of the time is spent trying to define abstractions in a way that denies that all people are different. People will sit there arguing for two hours something like, “What’s the difference between a prose poem and a normal poem?” Someone who has won awards will have defined the “prose poem” in some interview or essay somewhere and sounded authoritative about it, so eventually someone will quote that person, then if someone in the class is able to think clearly and without received ideas or preconceptions maybe that person will say something and finally the class will agree that there is no real definition, it is different for all people what a “prose poem” is. Still, the next week in class the same discussion will happen except for like “short-stories” and “novellas” or like “flash fiction.”

If you go to a poetry blog and see more than twenty comments for a post it means they’re arguing about the definition of specific abstractions. If someone uses the word “Poetics” in their argument the comments will increase by ten. 

KR: Your poems seem, on the surface, to contain a startling lack of ambition; I think this is part of what makes your writing so perversely compelling. Do you try to create that sense in the work? Are you ambitious and would you say your work is?

TL: I don’t know. I don’t want to think in terms of abstractions.

KR: Do banalities eventually add up to interests?

TL: I don’t know. That is a very short, scary question to me. I feel like I could say anything and adequately answer that question.

KR: What literary magazines do you like to read? What blogs?

TL: I like Noon Magazine and Bear Parade for literary magazines. I think that is a complete list.

I read blogs by people whose writings I like. I read other blogs, but mostly just to find out information, not because I’m really interested in what the author of that blog is thinking. Like, I read Bookslut and other blogs, but just for the information. I used to read Bookslut for the writing also. Michael Schaub is really funny and I liked to read his writing. He used to write for the Bookslut blog.

KR: You collaborate with your friends, especially Ellen Kennedy. How do these collaborations come about and what does the collaborative process entail?

TL: For the books we have written so far for our press, Ass Hi Books, I write a chapter and then Ellen writes a chapter. We alternate. One of us comes up with the idea for the book usually while talking or chatting on gmail. We write it on blogs. Then Ellen draws art for it and we post it on the site in jpgs.

We are also writing a novel called Hikikomori. I write a chapter then Ellen writes a chapter for that also. Hikikomori will be published as a real book sometime.

KR: The tone of your poems to me is sort of funny-sad. Like, while I was reading your books you are a little bit happier than i am and today the sky is blue and white with bright blue spots and a small pale moon and I will destroy our relationship today back to back, I kept laughing, but then when I was done I spent the whole rest of the day walking around feeling sort of depressed. Did you mean to do that? What’s the secret in how you do that?

TL: Yes, I want the books to be funny and sad. To a severely depressed person after reading the book they should feel better, I hope, because to a severely depressed person or someone who can’t lie about anything, including the meaninglessness of the universe, the stories should make them feel very empty and arbitrary, like they factually aren’t worth more than a rock or an elephant or a cloud or something, which would make them feel better. To a happy person I guess it would make them feel depressed, since then they would have to think about things they previously were able to block out, like limited-time, death, loneliness, the poverty and sadness and hopelessness of others, etc. The secret is, I don’t know.

KR: In your story “The Walking Wall,” you write: “The wall was our bathroom wall. It had wallpaper with little staplers on it that made me sad.” You're very good at capturing sad little details. That's not really a question, I guess.

TL: I don’t know. Thank you.

KR: Do your poems then become a filter through which you actually experience the world? Do you feel sometimes like “I am going to write a poem about this” as something is happening to you?

TL: Yes. I do do that. I don’t know what that does to my life. If I’m acting like an asshole and I think, “I’m going to write about this later,” I’ll probably try to be nicer, which is good, maybe.

KR: Because your work is funny, and because sometimes funny work is not taken seriously, do you ever worry about not being taken seriously or that your writing will be dismissed?

TL: No. Dismissed by who? I don’t know what difference that makes if I’m dismissed.

KR: You seem to write a fair amount about doing things and then regretting them. How important is regret to you?

TL: Regret is very important to me. I don’t know. I feel like I could have said anything about regret, like, “Regret is the great equalizer.” I don’t know how to answer this question.

KR: Many of your stories feel real—like they're banal enough to be real—but they are also so mannered, so studied that they also feel almost like a parody of banality—what's up with that?

TL: I think it’s funny. I think life is boring pretty much. You sit there, you stand up, you go to the bathroom, you wash your hands, you lay on the bed, you stand up. You walk somewhere. You walk, you look in the refrigerator. I don’t think that’s a parody, it’s just how it is in reality. A lot of the time the truth seems like satire or parody or even “wrong,” just because in contrast to most things that are written, which are distorted and usually written from the perspective of an abstraction (like society, or whatever), they seem new and startling.

KR: How do you see your work evolving from this point? Where will you go from here? What's your next project and will it be a departure of some kind, or more of the same?

TL: My next novel uses simpler sentences and smaller words. My next poetry book has longer words and is more pretentious. Ellen and I will publish Hikikomori, a novel about Japanese people who shut themselves in their rooms for more than five years, leaving only at 3 a.m. to go to the convenience store for supplies.

KR: Your poems deal with idleness and boredom a lot—where does this preoccupation originate?

TL: From feeling alienated from my peers as a child and young adult.

KR: And how do you write about boredom without committing the affective fallacy of actually just being boring?

TL: Writing about boredom has no connection with being boring. That is like saying, “How do you write about fish without turning into a fish?”

KR: According to the Situationist slogan, “Boredom is always counter-revolutionary.” Do you ever feel politically or poetically irresponsible for writing about boredom and boring things all the time? Or are you drawing attention to boredom in order to make it more intolerable and therefore to make us more aware of it?

TL: That is a really meaningless statement you quoted. I don’t know what “irresponsible” means. You would have to define it before I could answer.

“Politics” is one of the most interminable words I can think of. If someone wants to reduce pain and suffering in the world I can give you practical, concrete advice. Don’t eat meat or dairy, don’t eat food that is not organic, and spend your money only at independent venues.

I don’t know what the point of making people more aware of boredom would be. People can be bored if they are killing people or if they are laying facedown on their bed. I don’t know.

KR: In your poem “promise i'll vote for you,” you write “i want my TV to be two-way.” How do you feel about TV really? Do you watch it or avoid it? Does it inform your writing? Also, you write a lot about the internet and email—how do you feel about how people of our generation are online almost all the time? How does this inform your poetry? How does it affect society?

TL: I wanted to delete that poem but my publisher said it was good. I think it’s immature, pretentious, and fake. If I wanted to make that poem less fake and immature and pretentious I should have added something in the poem about how I was just writing it to seem “Politically-aware,” or something. I don’t like that poem.

I don’t watch TV. People are online a lot, I don’t know what the effect of that is. It informs my poetry the same as anything else. No one ever asks me how it informs my poetry that I drink smoothies every day, and that more people are drinking smoothies. It’s become a cliché to ask how technology is affecting people. Probably just because there is a lot of money in technology, and so magazines started writing articles about it, rather than, say, smoothies.  

KR: In your story “Tapei, Taiwan,” you write about zombies, specifically zombies that "would live quiet, solitary lives. They would have college degrees. They would brush their teeth twice a day with whitening toothpaste, and eat red pepper salads." I sort of love zombies and one of my past interview subjects, Kelly Link, also wrote about them. What, to you, is the appeal of zombies? Why write about them?

TL: I only wrote about zombies once. Oh, wait, twice. Once in “Mistake.” I think zombies are funny. They only have one facial expression, they don’t have emotions, they move very slowly, and if they fall down they don’t make any noises, they just stand up and keep moving. They are just funny.

KR: Foods and beverages appear fairly often in your writings, especially cereal and orange juice and grapes. Why?

TL: People eat a lot. A lot of people structure their days around food. A lot of people only get their pleasure in life from eating. I want to write even more about food. Like, “Tom was hungry. He went to the kitchen, put water in a pot. He put pasta in the pot. He stood at the counter eating a chocolate bar. He started to make popcorn. He put the pasta in a bowl. He put tomato sauce on the pasta. He opened a package of roasted watermelon seeds. He ate some popcorn. He drank orange juice. He made a bowl of cereal and brought it to the computer room. He looked for energy drinks on ebay. He ordered a case of energy drinks. He finished his popcorn. He went to the kitchen and stood eating pasta. He drank water.”

KR: I can't seem to stop asking my interview subjects about food and cooking. So: do you cook? And could you please share a favorite recipe with the readers of Redivider?

TL: Yes I cook. I like to cut an organic tomato and some of an organic onion. I put coconut oil in a pan. I heat it a little. I put the tomato and onion pieces in the pan. I move it around. I put pepper and some salt on it. I put it in a bowl. I put some organic brown rice in the bowl. I put some organic olive oil on the brown rice. I eat the bowl of food.

KR: Thanks. Is there anything about which I haven’t asked you that you’d like to add?

TL: I would like to recommend some books. The Task of This Translator by Todd Hasak-Lowy, A Green Light by Matthew Rohrer, The Human War by Noah Cicero, and Honored Guest by Joy Williams. Also Herzog on Herzog by Werner Herzog.