Canteen: The State of Creation

(From our Hot Authors project, forthcoming in Issue Seven.)

Tao Lin, photographed by Brea Souders

Canteen Asks: What’s the Hottest Thing You’ve Ever Read?

MY FAVORITE SEXUAL moment in literature—or maybe most memorable, because it seems to be what I keep thinking of, and what keeps returning to my thoughts, as I look at my bookshelf, remembering books I’ve read—is maybe all of Joe Matt’s SPENT, which, based on my memory, is one scene of a male character masturbating, alone in his room, to meticulously edited videotapes, of which he has a large collection, while thinking things about existence and his life and sex (and other things). It’s memorable, to me, I think, because I feel like masturbation is a strange, complicated, affecting thing—whose strangeness, in its harmlessness and universality and solitariness, feels almost inherently literary—that seems to be definitely a part of my life, and the lives of people I know, but I haven’t read many books that describe it in detail.

Tao Lin is the author of six books of fiction and poetry, most recently the novel Richard Yates. He is also the founder and editor of Muumuu House, a literary press.

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