Tao Lin provides Book Notes for his new poetry collection Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Here, he introduces his Book Notes choices:
I wrote Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy while on tour with my band “Spanish Rilo Kiley” in Taiwan and Japan. I played drums and my friend played keyboard and “sang.” Taiwan has a 24-hour mall and we lived there for four days. I slept inside a circular display of clothing. Just kidding, our band has not toured Taiwan or Japan. Taiwan has places where people pay money to sit indoors fishing from a small concrete “pond” and then grill the fish that they catch and eat it while still fishing. People do this “for something to do” like people in America might take walks inside shopping malls or go on deep sea fishing trips. Some of these places in Taiwan have giant shrimp instead of fish. Some of the places do not use bait or reel, you hold a pole and move it around until the hook goes into a fish’s scales then you “pull,” or “yank,” the fish out of the water. I have done this before, when I was ten or eleven. It was like a video game. I wouldn’t do it today.
I feel good when I look at an album or book and see that someone was selective about what to include. I think this means I “value excellence” or something. But I don’t feel bad when I see that someone has “put a lot of shit” together into a book or album. I think it’s “funny.” “Either way is okay with me somehow.” I just put an entire sentence inside quote marks and it was not a quotation. When I start using quotation marks for single words or phrases I feel the urge to put everything in quotation marks. I think it’s because I become aware that the words and ideas already “exist” as possibilities and therefore I am, sort of, “quoting” no matter what I type—the sentences are not really “mine.” This might be “Zen” of me. It felt good to put an entire sentence in quotation marks. I felt calm and detached. I edited Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy in a lot of places including in my bedroom in Florida. I remember editing it in Florida. I “laid out” every page on the floor in order, separated into four sections, and thought about it for three weeks or something, staring at it from different angles moving pages around and writing things on it. I listened to “emotional and sincere yet quiet, catchy, pleasant, and unobtrusive” music during this period of editing, I think it was mostly Rilo Kiley and Neva Dinova (songs off their split with Bright Eyes). I tried to be very selective in what I put into Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.
At some point in my life I want to publish a book where I “just put all my shit into it” in a random order. People will probably like that because it will include my “screwing around” stories and poems and people like my “screwing around” things according to what I have read on the internet. Taiwan seems to me like “someone just put all their shit into it.” Japan seems to me like the “selective” version of Taiwan. I have been to both places and like them both.
I don’t know what to type about Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. I tried to type some things about it but then typed those other things.
Look out for a 3:AM/Tao Lin “exclusive” very, very soon. Meantime, Tao is having a book-launch party for Cognitive-Behavorial Therapy, and y’all are invited.
Further: Cognitive-Behavorial Therapy, the website, with special features including a promotional video and every page edited ‘half-assedly’ into haikus
First posted: Saturday, May 10th, 2008.
