Bear Parade (3): “Something Other Than School or Sleep” (Tao Lin)

Bear Parade round three.

From the short-story collection by Tao Lin titled:

“Richie” is the first story of the collection. It begins thus:

“Thursday night they kidnap me, my mom, and my dad. They put garbage bags over our heads and push us outside. Inside the garbage bag I think about my American History teacher. I think about what he said to me. He said, Richie, you better speak up, you better talk in class, be more confident. I think about what I do every day. How I slept the entire Summer vacation. I think about how much more I will sleep in my life. I think how I don’t like anything. How I don’t have anything. I think that something might be happening finally. Something other than school or sleep.”

The line “Something other than school or sleep” strikes me.

As a twenty-odd-years-old college student, my life pretty much = school and sleep. A little part-time employment, too. But mostly school and sleep. That is what my existence is. I wish for the feeling “Something might be happening finally.” But for a very long time not much has happened.

Like the eponymous character Richie, in school I’ve been told, “You better speak up, you better talk in class, be more confident.” ‘Participation grades’ are the bane of my GPA. Like Richie, “I don’t like anything.” For a long time I couldn’t pick a major because the way to pick a major is you first ask yourself “What do I like? What are my interests?’ and if you can’t answer those questions because you don’t like anything then you have nothing on which to base your decision.

I mean obviously I like some things. Hyperbole.

Tao Lin has been described as “the Kafka of the iPhone generation.” Maybe it’s a glib description.

But there is something very Kafkaesque about his prose.

I don’t know how to describe “Kafkaesque” exactly. It’s something like ‘the characters experience insurmountable existential conflicts, and it’s hysterically funny’ (w/ “hysterically” meant in the ‘hysteria’ sense, not just the ‘very funny’ sense).

E.g., Richie being kidnapped by a group of high schoolers is funny. Richie not liking anything and waiting for something to finally be happening is existential-y.

Tao Lin gets a lot of buzz online, both good and bad. He’s been accused of being gimmicky for doing things like ‘selling shares’ of his second novel online and ‘whoring himself’ on the internet by posting /commenting / etc. a lot online. Regardless of his gimmickery, I think it’s undeniable that at least sometimes his writing is well-crafted. “Richie” is well-crafted. It’s up to you whether “Richie” is good / bad / enjoyable / unenjoyable, but I think it’s almost like objectively true that “Richie” is well-crafted, or something, if “well-crafted” is defined “employing a tight, logical structure and consistent style.”

I just reread that sentence and thought ‘What?’

From the very first line, “Richie” builds action. The kidnappers are there on line one. Then things keep moving. The story doesn’t pussyfoot around. It builds on itself. I think that’s what I mean by ‘well-crafted’—the story builds on itself. Like if you put a bunch of bricks and cement on an empty lot and then the bricks magically became animate and started stacking themselves and spreading cement on themselves until they were a six-story office building—reading “Richie” is like that, is like watching bricks magically stack themselves.

By paragraph two Richie, his mom, and his dad are in “some kind of underground base.” The kidnappers realize they’ve made a mistake:

“The kidnappers walk in front of us. One of them says, There’s been a mistake. He says, We meant to kidnap only two of you but we kidnapped all three of you. He says, We need to release one of you. He says, After we release one of you, that one, whoever it is, will be sent a ransom note.”

Which is hilarious. And it adds conflict / movement to the story. The story is not pussyfooting around. It keeps building.

“My mom says, Richie, what’s happening, what’s wrong?”

A week passes. They’re moved to another location. A “cage” w/ a bathroom and kitchen. This setting is funny. Paying attention to setting, w/ little details like the kitchen, is good craft. A lot of writers would just say “cage”; they wouldn’t include the kitchen.

‘Tao Lin includes the kitchen’ is a good way to describe him.

The dad calculates how much money he is worth a day–“$7,000”–and decides he should be freed. He feels he’s worth more than Richie and the mom. His reasoning is absurd. Instead of deciding he should be free because of some humanistic reason, he decides he should be free because he’s worth money. That’s Kafkaesque: facing an insurmountable problem—like proving your ‘worth’—by appealing to some sort of hysterical mathematical overrationalization.

The dad punches the high-schooler kidnappers and escapes. The story keeps moving.

The story keeps moving in a way you might be taught in a college creative writing class. Step by step. One thing leading into another leading into another leading into. Like one day your creative writing teacher would talk about ‘craft’ a lot, and you would glean that ‘craft’ has something to do with a tight structure and consistent style and ‘building things on themselves.’

(What I want to say / argue in general w/ this blog post, I just decided, is: Regardless of whether you like Tao Lin, he almost unarguably has ‘style’ and has the ability to produce a ‘well-crafted, builds-on-itself story.’ And that in itself is impressive. Because a lot of contemporary writers aren’t as detailed.

Why I’m trying to say this is: Tao Lin has A LOT of ‘haters,’ [e.g. see http://htmlgiant.com/craft-notes/tao-lin-on-the-future-of-the-novel/ the first two comments of which say “tao lin is a jackass” and “his work is a barnacle on the whale of literature”] and I don’t think the haters understand why they hate Tao Lin. Their hate, I opine, has nothing to do with Tao Lin’s being a ‘bad writer.’ It has more to do with his style being decidedly different. Meaning their hate is simply a matter of taste. But what people don’t seem to realize is his ability to develop a style so strong that it induces such serious responses—even if that style is something most people dislike and their responses are mostly antipathetic—is impressive itself [“impressive” literally means, like, to just affect someone deeply, and it doesn’t have to have positive connotations necessarily maybe—think of, like, impressing upon a memory-foam mattress] and shows some sort of…talent (?)…or something.

I 100% realize that telling people the ‘real reason’ they dislike something is presumptuous as hell.

I stand by what I’m saying.

Because I feel like it has some sort of larger and more important implications. Like, attempting to understand why you really are for or against {some piece of art} without appealing to shitty circular ‘X is bad because it’s bad’ arguments seems important, in general. Like, my argument for Tao Lin is he’s good because he’s a stylist and exhibits craft, and that eo ipso impresses me, as it shows he sorta ‘knows what he’s doing’ when he writes.

I just reread all that and stared at my computer’s monitor for like 5 seconds and then thought ‘What?’ and ‘Seems like all I’m saying is taste in art is subjective. But with more words.’)

The dad is gone. Richie and his mom are still in the cage:

“Two weeks pass. The kidnappers begin to let me and my mom out for up to five hours a day. My mom is not so angry anymore. But sometimes she is angry. She sits there and her face gets very tense. Her brows angle. When she is sleeping her face gets like she’s fighting a war. But sometimes she hugs me. She smiles. She asks how my life is. I say, Good. I say, Fine. But now she asks me again. She says, Richie, tell me about yourself. I look at her. I say, I don’t know. I say, I’m okay. She comes to me. She hugs me. She says, Richie, please, tell me how you really are, what your life is like. I stare at the ground.”

What’s wrong here exactly?

The inability to discern what’s wrong exactly is Kafkaesque.

Or maybe existential-y. Like, ‘being’ itself is what’s wrong. Or something. What?

Anyway, it’s something I’ve felt pretty much my entire school-and-sleep-filled life: That ‘never-quite-right’-ness of everything. That yearning for “something other than school or sleep / other than {thing(s) occupying the majority of your life}.” And I know I’m not the only one.

“I say, I don’t know what is wrong with me. I say, It gets worse every day. My neck shakes a little. I say, I don’t know. My face twitches. She unhugs me and looks at me. I look at the ground. She hugs me. She says, Richie. She cries. I think, I shouldn’t have said anything. I think, What can she do about this? Sorry, I think.”

The kidnappers decide to release Richie and his mom. They make a “contract” for them to sign. The contract stipulates that they won’t call the police. The story is almost over. When your reading it on bearparade.com, you can see that bottom of the webpage is approaching—your scrollbar is running low on space. The whole story has been building up to this moment. I’ve always been a fan of endings. I think they make or break stories. What are Richie and his mom going to do? Sign the contract? Will they call the police?

No.

“[The kidnapper] says, Hey, do you want to leave or not? He says, Richie, hey, Richie’s mom, you two want to go back to the world or not?”

And it ends just like that.

And I think it’s perfect.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome seems relevant to the ending.

[I’m not suggesting you medicalize the ending. Fiction is metaphor.

Imagine feeling Stockholm Syndrome not towards kidnappers but towards a ‘never-quite-right’-y world.

If you can imagine that, you can understand Kafka(esque) and “Richie” and Tao Lin and maybe me.])

—
@barkmuckner