Customer Reviews

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

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i think a lot about this book and tao lin's other books

the first time i read this i was so excited i read it all in one sitting

it is hard for me normally to read more than three poems in one sitting

i normally stand up and do something else

there are a lot of poems that have multiple parts to it like in the books BAD BAD by chelsey minnis or ANGLE OF YAW by ben lerner but different because of the hampsters and sadness and other things

the poem 'are you okay?' made me so sad that i had to stop reading and lie down on the couch and think for a minute

my friend asked me if this book is funny like his other book of poety and i said 'no, no it is never funny. i didn't laugh once while reading it' and i did not realize that was true until i said it even though i lied a little

some parts are actually very funny, but not funny in a way that makes me laugh out loud, but just makes me smile and feel 'consoled'

i just opened the book and looked at 'ugly fish poem, part one' and read this sentence: "and i have swum fast; any speed that exists i have swum at that speed"

that makes me laugh i don't know why

this book made me sad a lot and i don't think i will look at it as much as 'you are a little bit happier than i am' but that is okay, because that book made me excited about life and stuff in ways that few things ever have, i don't know

I've been on a bit of a Tao Lin "rampage" these days--a dear friend recently recommended his stuff and it seems like I just can't get enough. The rebellious, questioning soul inside me is always suspicious of generalizations, but I get a sort of "intuitive feel" that in this coming generation of young people, there is both some kind of widespread desire for something more (both materially and spiritually), and with that maybe a forthcoming cultural awakening of some kind. Who knows?

What I do know from my own life and participation in the lives of others (both professional and personal)...dissatisfaction with every imaginable interpersonal relationships are so prevalent, and in my therapy sessions I usually wind up focusing more on the person's relationship with themselves, which seems to be useful sometimes. How can we truly know what another thinks? We can only monitor and aim to control the "ruckus" inside our own minds. With presenting problems like anxiety or depression the focus is almost totally on "the Self", but relationships add a whole bunch of dimensions of complexity that become about Self and Other.....1 + 1= infinity in that arena I think.

To me it's so clear how different the Tao Lin who wrote this book is from the Tao Lin who wrote "You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am." Some of these poems (I'm certainly no poet nor do I know anything about poetic "structure" so I like reading each line almost as a series of zen-like aphorisms) are funny, but in a quieter, more resigned, almost absurd way where the poems in "You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am" felt like they contained much more sarcasm and antagonism (really disappointment) for/in the world (understandably so). The poems in this book feel on the verge of something "infinite" to me.....the paradox of both accepting reality and wanting something more from others, from the universe, though only able to control one's own thoughts....and somehow in documenting these sometimes insightful, sometimes unexpectedly hilarious observations, the reader acts as witness to the "distance" Lin so often mentions, and in that I feel a kind of closeness is created between two strangers.

I bought this book at a Barnes & Noble in 2007, a few days after reading "Bed" and looking at Tao Lin's blog. My dad and I sat in the parking lot looking at/reading what we bought. The book is pink and feels `sleek' and I had a weird feeling that it might contain sexual things I would want to `guard' from my dad's vision, while also knowing that it probably wouldn't contain sexual things. I have referenced the first poem, "i will learn how to love a person and then i will teach you and then we will know," in 3 `mission statement'-like papers (a poetry class, an ethics class, and contemporary philosophy). I read it aloud at the beginning of a poetry workshop I was `leading' once and the members of the workshop, mostly older jobless women who wanted to write mystery novels, looked at me confusedly at the end.

I think I enjoy "CBT" so much because it feels like the extremely well documented thoughts of a person observing himself in the world and struggling to determine what it means to exist in an arbitrary-seeming universe while simultaneously having feelings and preferences that seem necessary to write down. I like that there were lines that felt like non-sequiturs. It makes sense to me that a person who feels and thinks these kinds of things about existence would pay attention to non-sequitur thoughts, because they seem to have a neutral value/happen spontaneously, and are maybe `grounding' or `important' to write down because of that. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is, from my experience, a process of analyzing what things I think/do are `irrational' and what are `helpful' and trying to encourage `helpful' patterns of thinking to aid behavior. Seems like this book is a physical attempt at something like that. A lot of the poems have lines featuring a non-specific, vaguely romantic-seeming "you" (i.e. "the secret of life is that i miss you, and this describes life"). I like that. It made me feel like the person writing the book wanted to connect with other people.

I felt sad and lonely before I read this book. After I read the last page, I felt happy. This book effectively helps me overcome feelings of sadness, despair, loneliness, alienation, and boredom. I think this book will be helpful to many people.

Good job, Tao.

yesterday morning/afternoon i re-read "cognitive-behavioral therapy" in my backyard and forgot about the sun and now i am really red all over, but that's okay, because as the sun burned me it felt really hot and good and the book caused me to have thoughts about the sun being a star and the speed of light and the passing of time and my body in space and the origin of the universe and stuff like that.

reading it this time made me notice new things, or maybe they were things i had read but forgotten so much that it felt like i was noticing them for the first time (the book influenced me to think that, i think, and other thoughts like that). the first time i read it, i mostly got the sense that "here is a person who doesn't know why they exist or why anything exists but they are observing patterns and deciding the universe is arbitrary but mysteriously functional, that is like what this person thinks their existence is like too, the universe and this person are always changing because choices keep appearing in front of them and something mysterious and functional in this person makes them want to make choices in the same way the universe 'decided' to start working, because of that this person wants to inflict the least amount of pain/suffering on others because others seem to have caused pain/suffering in this person, this person wants more from the universe because it seems like the nature of the universe was easy for them to figure out, but this person actually isn't sure of anything, really."

i feel like it would've taken me significantly longer to write what i just wrote after reading "cognitive-behavioral therapy" the first time. maybe i liked it more now or maybe i am older or smarter or maybe more confused and i have no idea what i'm talking about. the most interesting thing about this book to me is that it seems like there are 8 major aspects "churning" throughout it, sort of like an expanding, self-generating motor for a self-generated book (which references itself as a book). i might not be making sense right now. here is what i think happens in the book (not always in this order):

1. tao lin is in a body controlled by his thoughts, he is in a body in relation to other bodies, he can control his thoughts and his body with substances and has preferences for round/wet/shiny things
2. tao lin is writing down his thoughts (which sometimes include things about his relationship, feeling bad, non-sequiturs, [other])
3. tao lin is entertaining himself by writing his thoughts as if they were a narrative where he is a hamster interacting with homeless hamsters and an ugly fish witnessing violence in the sea
4. tao lin is writing a philosophical treatise and not saying "i" as much
5. tao lin is writing about his thoughts again, but now since he has written down all of these other things and experienced the accumulation of everything in his life which caused him to think these things and want to write in the first place, the most interesting thing to be aware of is that he is a person writing a poem because earlier he decided "i'm going to write a poem now" (and as this happens, presumably other thoughts are already forming in his brain on a purely experiential level and therefore not yet "ready" to articulate, but they are probably geared towards achieving the next level of awareness/"meta"-ness/"thing to focus on"/"thing to make life more interesting")
6. tao lin doesn't know why he's doing any of this
7. tao lin knows exactly why he's doing all of this
8. tao lin wants to remain calm

i had the most fun reading "cognitive-behavioral therapy" this time. now i feel like this is the most fun to read of any of tao lin's books. it provided me with both a constant stream of interesting thoughts (which seem satisfying to be able to hold in a physical collection, like i feel anxious thinking about what it would be like if all of these interesting things just flashed and disappeared in someone's brain and were never written down) and produced interesting thoughts in me. sometimes i felt moved and like if i were reciting a poem to my mom i would probably have to pause to "collect myself." i also probably made insane faces sometimes. sometimes i laughed out loud. here is a part where i laughed out loud (in the poem "room night"):

"a kind of emptiness existed in the center of my bagel; really
it was just the hole that's in the middle
of all bagels; 'i need to go read my blog
to find out what my politics are'"

the funniest part to me was the line break after "really"...that's the part where i laughed...

Dream on, dude! A little of this stuff could be construed as a symptom; too much and it threatens to become the disease. But Ugly Fish #1 and Giant Poem #13 hit the spot; they alone would justify this slim volume. So there's hope, Tao Lin. But Brooklyn's lovely - you should really get out more

NB When I want a bit of negativity to spice up my life - there's really nothing like it - I tend to favour the dour Frank Kuppner: despair you can relate to!! Be the first outside Scotland to discover him - apart from me that is

PS Another reviewer has complained about a surfeit of hamsters in Giant Poem. This doesn't trouble me, and I quite like the Taco Bell motif (we know for whom it tolls); Jambo Juice also has a certain je ne sais quoi - though Evander Holyfield, to these English ears, lacks resonance; maybe that's his function?

It's funny and you will laugh if you like unconventional humor but it does drone on...just as being psychoanalyzed gets boring this will, too...

Tao Lin's poetry is an absurdist invitation to depression. "Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy" is a largely free verse (there are intermittent bursts of rhyme and meter, making it more difficult to pigeonhole) documentation of Lin's seemingly depressed psyche. Frequently employing repeated images such as hamsters with numerous emotional afflictions, and headbutts as methods of social intercourse, the book is highly disjointed, an effect that heighten's Lin's existential, nihilistic yet smug poetic self-loathing.

Although appreciating originality, I did not have great affectation for Lin's writing style and homage to E. E. Cummings. No capitalization or punctuation may work in a short poem like "i know at all times that in four hours i will feel completely different"[sic] (pp. 54-55), but not on a gigantically long and rambling monstrosity as is found on pp. 84-101, which not only bears no title or coherence, but also admits "i forgot what this poem was about"[sic] on p. 90. This is probably closer to the truth than Lin would like to admit.

I loved some of Lin's odd phrasings and think he has great talent and a bright literary future. This volume left me wanting more. Angst-filled hamsters may very well be great subject matter for a collection of poetry, but this volume comes across more as a collection of personal hangups scribbled in unedited form in a conscious attempt to subvert every formal poetic methodology known to western literature.

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This is a Tao Lin approved video with gmail chat 'dings' from Tao himself.