Review of Tao Lin's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

This isn't really a review. Because I know the person.

I just read the complete book while taking an oatmeal bath.

So I'll just talk about the book:

The Language:

It has this nice rhythm.

It is kind of like the last notes of a really dramatic song. Like when the guitarist slams down hard on the last two notes and lets the last note ring out, and the song just fades away.

That is how most of the lines are.

They don't really run into other.

They kind of fade into an enormous distance away from you.

here are some examples:

"now i am really alone"

"a kind of meat eating liberal"

he never ends a sentence with "ed" words.

There is no "walked" or "choked" or "fucked" at the end. Never uses a strong loud sound to end a sentence. Reminds me of B or C sharp minor root fifth. Very C sharp minor root fifth.

it reminds me of Pablo Neruda, Cognitive has that softness to it. But Tao takes it even farther by using even softer words.

It is like he went for a book completely without guttural sounds. I think the most guttural word he uses is "appendage" and "shithead"

What the poetry is about:

I like this book because it reads like a person that lays down for at least some part of the day. That just sits in bed or in a chair and stares, sometimes with their eyes closes, sometimes with their eyes open.

It has a lot about veganism and corporations.

Tao talks about responsibility, about how if does something that symbolizes he thinks everyone should do it. The same principles Sartre talks about in existentialism is a humanism.

Tao goes all the way with this: no meat, no killing of any animals, not even soap that involves animals. The man loves animals, he goes so far to debase or reduce himself to a hamster as a personae. Or maybe he is identifying the hamster has his totem. That through his choosing to identify with nature, he is going back to some primitive time, to a primitive value system.

Some are common hipster values. But he takes them further than the average hipster. The man cares about amoeba, it reminds me of what a student asked Diogenes and Tao noticed and wrote about, "But aren't you overdoing it a little?"

Maybe he is:

But somebody has to, or there wouldn't be a point of reference for normal people to compare themselves.

The way I think about it is like this: Tao doesn't put it into the context of history or huge anthropological or sociological theories on humans. He says, "I'm doing what I feel I must do, to feel okay. This is the way I can feel okay." Now he says everything is arbitrary. But at the same time if he says it directly or not, he says to the person doing something perhaps in his view is acting irrationally based off of abstractions, "I know and recognize your view is just as good or bad as mine because the universe is arbitrary, but do you actually feel okay with what you are doing?"

A Great Silence:

Tao Lin is master of mythology and creating universal lines.

The man has been on the internet for several years now, written several books, written a massive amount on his blog. But no one really knows anything about him. No one knows how his father or mother treated him. We know he talks to his mother. He gives empirical descriptions of it. But nothing in depth. He gives a massive amount of sentences on his emotions. But nothing directly to what caused the emotions. He never discusses his neighborhood, what high school was like, never gives the little details. If he does it is in a mocking tone of voice, in a kind of "look at me, I'm human, isn't this absurd" tone of voice.

It is like he has turned himself into literature. That through the internet and never letting anyone get close to him. He showed up from Florida and made a version of himself. He built a man then showed it to everyone.

His universal writing is appealing because it is easy to place one self into the lines. To make those sentences yours. He never goes into a sociological situation where the audience must be mere spectator or as a student. A line like, "An angry hamster looks exactly like an unangry hamster because the anger is within." The line has no context, no reference to class or culture or position in life. A person can go into that line and let it become theirs.

Tao has two things he does well, he can create a universal picture in a way that the audience can drift into it and find their own emotions there. And he does things that make people think, "Why did he feel the need to do that, but I'm glad he did."

The chapters being in some fucked up manner, the arrangement of the poem, calling a long poem "giant poem." Drawing all those pictures. Why would someone do that? Why would someone make sure their entire poetry book excluded all guttural sounds, or maybe the whole germanic influence upon the english language. Perhaps he is a psychotic control freak who feels completely powerless to control his surroundings so he is focusing all his energy on something he can control like the words in his books and on eating things that he specifies because the modern world has reduced humans into less than humans, not even high ranking animals, but low shitty pets that have no control but over two things, their food consumption and their art.

Of course this is from another psychotic control freak's point of view.