Slicing Your Face Off with a KFC Spork, or A Cemetery Wind
Tao Lin’s "Upset" and “Love is a Thing on Sale for More Money than There Exists”
Sometimes all it takes is that first paragraph. You read it and know there’s no going back. See Tao Lin’s stories, one of which, “Upset,” entered my mailbox yesterday in the latest issue of NOON. The first paragraph:
Before bed, Li emailed his friend Danon, “Do you ever find yourself secretly thinking of leaving your relationship?” In the morning, he read Danon’s reply. Danon had fantasized about leaving his girlfriend “a lot,” but, after concluding that he had “dark, fucked thoughts about literally everything,” among other realizations and efforts, “almost not at all anymore.” (43)
Jane Alison, in Meander, Spiral, Explode, says that Lin’s vision is “low-resolution,” with the “texture of a cartoon or emoji.” I can think of no better way to describe it. What strikes me about the opening to “Upset” is what is left out. We are given no access to Li’s mind as he sends that jarring email. Instead, we jump-cut to the next morning, where the essentials of Danon’s reply are refracted through choppy air quotes. A prof. of mine once called this style of quoting “Fox News Quoting”—a cherry-picking that distorts the quote to suit the writer’s argument. Something about that kind of quoting in this kind of scenario makes me laugh. And that is only the beginning of the bizarre and unsettling world Tao Lin throws us into.
Another opening paragraph, from “Love is a Thing on Sale for More Money than There Exists,” collected in Lin’s 2007 collection, Bed:
This was the month that people began to suspect that terrorists had infiltrated Middle America, set up underground tunnels in the rural areas, like gophers. During any moment, it was feared, a terrorist might tunnel up into your house and replace your dog with something that resembled your dog but was actually a bomb. This was a new era in terrorism. The terrorists were now quicker, wittier, and more streetwise. They spoke the vernacular, and claimed to be philosophically sound. They would whisper into the wind something mordant and culturally damning about McDonald’s, Jesus, and America, and then, if they wanted to, they would slice your face off with a KFC Spork. (9)
Like “Upset,” “Love is a Thing on Sale” details a crumbling relationship — with parents, with a lover — in a flat dry angsty prose, littered with awesomely gross similes (i.e. “the sky was a bleeding-mushroom gray”). I’m excited to be discovering the weird world of Tao Lin for the first time and hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.
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