the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

how has there not been a thread on this guy yet? TAIPEI is brilliant.

I make an "indifferent face" about Tao Lin.

Taipei is great. Here's my review http://www.tottenvillereview.com/vontinuing-ahead-tao-lins-taipei/

i like it; brilliant is a bit far, ill go as far as 'clever' or 'well-observered'. if anything, hes evolving a hearty drug tolerance

i think it was all here: HIPSTER RUNOFF BLOG OF THE MOMENT

i'm a little curious about Tai Pei but i don't think reading it would be good for my state of mind.

guys I am tao lin and I don't even know who tao lin is

― dayo, Thursday, July 7, 2011 11:31 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

who is tao lin

― dayo, Thursday, July 7, 2011 11:31 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He's the Allen Ginsberg of his generation--really good at PR, not so great at writing.

reading taipei he struck me as similar to warhol

I've seen poems of his before and not been wowed, but I just read a very negative review of Taipei that made it sound pretty good

i don't think there has ever been a particular lack of attention for tao lin

my personal favorite by him might still be eeee eee eeeee which, while not as mature an artistic achievement as the work he's done in the past few years up to and including taipei, is hilarious and at times touching and also sort of charmingly iconoclastic, in a suburban teen punk kind of way. the playful imaginitive flights in that book -- there's a part where the president of the usa (never identified, but bush i guess) crashes this literary party and is a jerk to people who admit to never reading fernando pessoa -- are juxtaposed with these very realistic, very well-rendered descriptions of adolescence, loneliness, and depression.

i was trying to push past my kneejerk distaste for this dude and the whole gross relentless self-promotion thing that you young people do that i find so displeasing and gross so i bought this book and i sat down to read it and are you fucking kidding me

gross

wait it's bad?

so bad

but it's a trap, right, if you bitch about dude's shitty precious repetitive prose b/c it's ironic or whatever. bret easton ellis blurb v telling. i would have just walked away until i saw that the ny times, arbiter of good taste for all america, jump on board. people need to know the truth

ugh

suck it young person

look: his writing has different aims than most "literary" prose. it is aiming to achieve an effect of deadness, which is the best way to represent the kind of experience he is writing about. some people identify strongly -- often too strongly -- with his writing because the world he describes is very familiar to them. you can like it or not like it, but his success is not the product of some hype machine. this book is not a con.

also, i am 83 years old.

JT Leroy

JT Leroy is no joke perpetrated by anyone, he's BRILLIANT.

http://www.themillions.com/2013/06/modern-life-is-rubbish-tao-lins-taipei.html

idk, i mean, the hype and also his band of sycophants annoy me too, but not enough for me to not like his work. he writes humanely and honestly about unglamorous characters and also he is very funny.

that review actually makes a great case for the book because it clearly made a major impression on the reviewer. it mirrored aspects of our culture she doesn't like, and which she hadn't encountered before in literature, and that's why she interpreted it as hostile, not dismissible. it reminded me of jung's review of ulysses.

that review actually makes a great case for the book because it clearly made a major impression on the reviewer

c'mon now

The excerpts in the review sound like they were written by Carles.

yea mooks. her response wasn't "this sucks" but "literature shouldn't be like this!" this doesn't mean it's good, but it means it's interesting at least. i think it's good as well as interesting.

the writing is really boring. do most ppl read it straight through? i love naked lunch but i don't think i've ever read it straight through. there are still sections i find that i never read before and it's a delight. maybe it's like that but instead of it being a delight it's soul crushingly mundane.

if i take a shit on your face, it is likely to make a strong impression. as a reviewer you may choose to view my shitting on your face through a variety of perspectives from de sade to foucault to the farrelly brothers. none of this necessarily makes my shitting on your face a work of art

tao lin may or may not be a good writer, but his ability to make reviewers hate his work is not a sign of greatness

or even interestingness

xp to mordy. i read it in like, one day, and then i read it again. the writing is tonally flat, but often really beautiful, especially during the more digressive, metaphorical passages. also, it might be tough -- because it is so dry yet convoluted -- for readers new to his work. i really loved his other books already though, especially eeee eee eeeee which he published when he was 23. maybe you had to have been severely depressed in high school to get it.

that review actually makes a great case for the book

This is the negative review I referred to above that made me want to read it! I thought the excerpts sounded good.

xp to mookie, fair enough but that's not really what i said. it wasn't just a "strong impression" -- her reaction was similar to what you get when people encounter things they find threatening, or truly new. she even says something like it seems like he "hates language"... like, lin's prose style clearly constitutes a modernist "attack" on literary language in some way, as it is not sufficient to his purposes, and the reviewer picks up on that even though she resists the direction of his experimentation. so i think her review makes the book sound interesting even though it is a negative review.

maybe you had to have been severely depressed in high school to get it.

the new genre fiction; squares needn't bother

god forbid someone connects with an author's autobiographical account of his social anxiety and relationship with his parents.

i think people have an incorrect impression of what this book is like. it's bleak, and written in a flat tone, and about drugs, and "hip" in that young people like it, but it is actually very earnest and moving and sad. lin's sensibility is nothing like bret easton ellis's. it's not cynical or satirical at all.

weve had this exact argument in some other thread already right?

i don't remember. before my time maybe.

"like carles" is a compliment, right?

also BEE can be "actually very earnest and moving and sad" and i don't see how cynical and satirical mean anything about not being earnest or moving or sad.

i've probably read like 10 paragraphs total of this guys work but i liked it and i support him in principle

fair enough, s. clover. carles is actually a good example of a satirical writer who often allows true desperation to peek through in his work, especially regarding "carles'" fragile self-concept, and his insecurity with his "alt" identity.

maybe i should have just said that taipei is different than like, less than zero. the characters aren't cool and indifferent at all -- not even in how they present themselves. they are insecure and earnest, for the most part. when tao lin or his fictional analogues advocate numbness or detachment as a mindset, it is pretty transparently a coping mechanism for the pain that comes from attachment to the world, as in, the characters themselves think of it that way. there is a strong buddhist strain in his work, which goes along with the absurdism.

basically, i think tao lin is a very empathetic novelist, attuned to the difficulty of life in the world, and he doesn't have scorn for any of his characters, and i don't think this is necessarily a thing people associate with him when they make a big deal of his youth, or drug use, or "numbness", etc.

i liked 'richard yates' the novel by tao lin, i had some ideas about that i've posted to ilx before, i think its very hard to feel things in novels by tao lin

oh ok the thread where we argued about the merits of tao lin is linked upthread this is a post i'm very proud of from that thread:

henri lebesgue and jonbenét ramsey take a weekend vacation in charleston. they go swimming in the hotel pool and eat brunch and go to a party her college roommate is throwing. they also spend a lot of time driving around and arguing about sex or television or something. its called 'the null set'.

― ((( (Lamp), Thursday, July 7, 2011 11:51 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i need to find more things to do in the evenings

this is a pretty good article about the role of "detachment" in lin's aesthetic. http://htmlgiant.com/author-spotlight/buddhism-and-shoplifting-a-few-notes-on-tao-lins-early-prose-style/ xposts i guess

i think people have an incorrect impression of what this book is like. it's bleak, and written in a flat tone, and about drugs, and "hip" in that young people like it, but it is actually very earnest and moving and sad. lin's sensibility is nothing like bret easton ellis's. it's not cynical or satirical at all.

― Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the (Treeship), Monday, July 1, 2013 11:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the problem might be that you're comparing him to B.E.E. when "bleak, flat but actually very earnest and moving and sad" sometimes feels like the only book anyone ever writes anymore

“Would I be crazy to say that sometimes the style and the strategies involved in Shoplifting from American Apparel strike me as trying to look at Buddhism as a prose style?” (KCRW interview). Lin replies that this is indeed accurate and he believes that his “detachment is more …trying to advocate to himself a way of living life that is kind of pre-language – just like kind of experiencing things directly, whereas most people view the detachment in this book as him just being numb.”...Shoplifting doesn’t portray characters who are free from suffering nor ones who accept it; it portrays characters who mask suffering with detachment. I think it’s important to point out, however, that I believe it is the failures of Shoplifting from American Apparel that make it such a strong/interesting book; specifically, its failures in attempting a kind of Buddhist detachment through both prose style and characterization.

sorry, the quoted text is from the htmlgiant article i liked above.

xp interesting. i don't think lin's fiction is like most contemporary fiction i read, in that he imposes lots of contraints on himself, whether it be the concrete realist style of shoplifting or the convoluted, infinitely regressive style of taipei, which is hyperattuned to its representational limitations. in terms of most (literary) fiction being both bleak and sad, it's hard for me to imagine a work of realist fiction seeming honest and not being sad at least in parts. genre fiction isn't always bleak. i am biased toward sad literature though, probably. there has to be at least a tragic undercurrent for me to be interested, usually.

i wrote a multiparagraph reinforcement of a few of the ideas i liked from your review and then deleted them when i got to the part where you get baited in the comment section.

He's the Allen Ginsberg of his generation--really good at PR, not so great at writing.

from what i've read of this dude i really doubt he has a 'kaddish' let alone a 'supermarket in california' in him.

i guess my feelings toward tao lin are closer to treeship's than anyone else here. i think if you read any amount of contemporary literary fiction, like serious or frivolous print journals or things mentioned on htmlgiant, tao lin reads like a satire of a lot of it and at the same time a sincere reworking of a lot of the themes and forms of alt-lit or writing as writing is done by people under 30 in 2013, if that makes sense. there are a lot of people trying to write to describe the experience he writes about and most of that writing is fucking garbage. i'm not sure how to say this in a way that doesn't sound really obvious but the thing with, like, taipei or richard yates is not just appreciating it as solely as a piece of literature but looking at what it does beyond just being a piece of literature, it becomes more interesting for its reception and interpretations and what it means against the backdrop of contemporary literature and culture.... that's why i appreciate tao lin the character curated by the actual tao lin-- i like that he's obnoxious and provocative in a dull cuntish internet celebrity way.

how has there not been a thread on this guy yet? TAIPEI is brilliant.

― i also enjoy in line skateing (spazzmatazz), Thursday, June 20, 2013 1:44 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark

http://i.imgur.com/xRbrTaU.gif

give me a list of better writers

that might take a while

I read this in two days. Previously considered Tao Lin a bit of a stunt, but I bought his books anyway if I saw them used for eight to ten dollars and I defended him when friends said he was crap.

But this... This really is good. I guess... I guess I wanted it to be more like Savage Detectives and slowly start to scare me through the eventually overwhelming accretion of failure or madness or futility or something. I guess the closest to that in Taipei is eventual introduction of heroin (the drugs do slowly get harder) but, I guess, it doesn't really make me feel doomed or redeemed or anything.

Anyone care to unpack Tei Pei / Type A?

Bad spelling aside... I'm with fields of salmon - have read everything of lin's for the sake of I don't know with an impression of i don't know. taipei really is something else, though. he's referred to fernando pessoa a lot lately and i'm halfway through 'the book of disquiet' and there's something similar at work. it could be self-fulfilling though as i read 'richard yates' cause he was name-checking lydia davis' 'the end of the story' at the time which is an all-timer for me.

as of 18 pages in (why did they wait two weeks to release this in the uk, what the hell is the point of that) this is a really total and remarkable step forward for his aesthetic whilst also totally lacking the kind of fundamental reorientation that's going to win over haters

look: his writing has different aims than most "literary" prose.

Lin's all right some of the time & I'm interested by what I hear about Taipei but this ^^^ sort of claim is like the ur-copout. "you can't judge it on the grounds of literature!" cool then don't publish it and we'll be square

taipei has the most 'literary' prose he's written

there are sentences with, like, metaphors and shit, expressed in syntactically complex sentences, sometimes featuring parenthetical clauses

no one has yet been described as having "a ___ facial expression"

I have no real interest in reading anything by Tao Lin but I'm not sure why. I did read a column he wrote for the Stranger about his impressions of Seattle which made me giggle. I think part of my prejudice is that I don't know why anybody would write novels in 2013.

high standards

Nuvvels r gr8 thats why

tbf we have no evidence as of yet he has written a novel in 2013, maybe he has moved on to a more paradigmatically new-millenium form like 'IF' or 'weird twitter' or 'being ke$ha'

nuvvieworld: a novel

WHERE IS A SERIOUS WRITER, WHO REALLY AIMS "LITERARY"

http://cdn.imposemagazine.com/__data/franzen-has-itimei-tao-has-ithe-strangeri.jpg

They used all their MDMA in Calvin's basement while eating cake, ham, salad, cookies--the first time Paul had eaten food for comfort while on MDMA--then went upstairs to Calvin's room, where Calvin and Maggie drank beer, which Paul and Erin, who had eaten only a little food, declined. Paul began recording, at some point, with his MacBook. "Isn't it a thing?" he said after ingesting Codeine and Flexeril. "That people warn against? Combining drugs."
"Yeah," said Calvin, and laughed.
"I don't think that's true," said Erin shyly.
"I'm on like eight things now," said Paul.
Calvin asked if Erin wanted to smoke marijuana and she asked if Paul would be okay with that and Paul said yes, thinking he didn't like that she had asked. While Erin and Calvin smoked in the bathroom, with the door closed so Calvin's parents wouldn't smell it, Paul and Maggie created a GIF of a baseball cap moving around on their heads. Maggie, when Paul said he wanted to smoke marijuana, said he shouldn't becuase of his lung collapse history. Paul began coughing nonstop after smoking and repeatedly said his chest burned and fell, half deliberately, to the floor, grinning in a stereotypically marijuana-induced manner, he could feel, as he tried, with his MacBook, to find information on the internet about his situation.
"I feel like I'm unsarcastically viewing this as a major ordeal," said Calvin.
"I'm just trying to Google 'burned lung,' I'm not doing anything to indicate what you said," said Paul in an agitated voice while grinning. "I'm just idly looking up 'burned lung' variations on the internet."
"I was also viewing this as major until Paul just said that," said Erin.

idgi it's like hipster fanfic?

No

i feel like i'm unsarcastically viewing this as a major ordeal

Every generation gets the mailer it deserves

as of 18 pages in (why did they wait two weeks to release this in the uk, what the hell is the point of that) this is a really total and remarkable step forward for his aesthetic whilst also totally lacking the kind of fundamental reorientation that's going to win over haters

i ended up thinking that 'tie pay' was not as good a novel to read/think about as 'richard yates'. it was boring but not hypnotically so, it was grating but offered no release. i think his writing should be as ugly as possible, in order to better cocoon you in [indecipherable] [incomprehensible]. words arent wounds theyre abrasions or something.

i will get back to you after i finish it, i may also reread 'richard yates'

idgi it's like hipster fanfic?

― Mordy , Sunday, 7 July 2013 19:33 (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i mean, this is at least a little bit right

"that's not writing, it's reblogging"

p good tao lin diss

p good evaluation of tao lin diss

kerouac is kinda dire

Always seemed to be the voice of the Aspergered.

Good job disparaging people with aspergers that was really necessary and added to the discussion,

Sorry, didn't mean it to be disparaging (wrote it hastily, sorry - didn't mean to offend)), but that's the sense I've had often from his blog and writings.

(And not meaning it critic of his writing--if anything, it's maybe the most interesting thing about it.)

That's cool Eazy thanks for clearing that up. people use that term often as an insult, with the implication that "good" writing is tonally varied and engages the reader like a charismatic speaker would.

Also xp aero, what i meant by "literary" in quotes was a set of rigid criteria critics fall back on for what constitutes good writing. Taipei is written in a style that doesn't feel like "good" realist prose fiction - it's syntactically strange, flat, sometimes boring, and always seems aware of its limitations - because it is an experimental novel. It's highly literary bc it is concerned with form but not "literary" in the sense that to some critics it seems unrefined.

it's only 256 pages; I don't really have the time to read novels that aren't at least 700 pages long these days.

What is experimental about this novel

i have hard times with tao lin*. wanted to like richard yates, but got perilously bored halfway through and quit. dunno what he has to offer, other than being young and seemingly of his moment.

* novel title

you obtain much hard one

i looked at richard yates in a bookstore and thought it was a funny idea but i knew i would never read it. kinda conceptual in that way. like an art joke. which i appreciated and then put back on the shelf. i had a hard time reading dennis cooper in the 80's. i liked the concept, but i would get bored after awhile.

xp because he is experimenting with a way of writing that is different from what he's done before, and different from other things I've read by other authors as well. "experimental" doesn't mean good, but i think tao's experiments help him to achieve his goals, and are successful on their own terms if not those of each one of his critics. although tbf, this book is being praised very highly for the most part, it's just that its detractors can be pretty fierce, but then again that is helping it too.

throw in a few more quote marks and you've got hipster runoff

i also had a problem reading john rechy when i was younger. i could never finish a book. grove press put out so much flat stuff.

because he is experimenting with a way of writing that is different from what he's done before, and different from other things I've read by other authors as well.

In what way is his prose experimental, though?

because it violates received ideas about what good writing looks like, i.e. he explains things exhaustively instead of "showing" them, he pursues precision in his descriptions of his characters' thought patterns to the point of awkwardness and a loss of clarity, metaphors are not used to illustrate clearly graspable concepts but just as an approximating language to describe states of feeling, metaphysical impressions, that evade real description and in this way every metaphor in the book is a failed metaphor... idk, read my review or better yet the millions review. that reviewer hated it but she said that it seemed "hostile" to language, and it's true: tao lin is writing against the grain of convention, in a manner that on first blush seems antithetical to all ideas of eloquence, beauty, whatever but as other critics have noted his flat, convoluted style produces its own kind of lyricism for patient readers.

again, it's not finnegans wake but experimental doesn't mean totally new and radical just that he is doing interesting things with form.

You could say all that stuff about tons of books, though. Don't see how it's experimental.

so it's tumblr beckett, then? xp

Tons of books are experimental. It's not a rare distinction. It's a term to differentiate books that are messing around with form to achieve unusual effects from "realist" fiction, which hews more closely to conventions. Ben Lerners leaving the atocha station is not an experimental novel because it is written in a style that feels familiar and is supposed to, even though 1.) it's great and 2.) on the level of content it is concerned with questions about literary form, like the characters have conversations about that kind of thing.

Tumblr Beckett is pretty accurate, especially for the earlier stuff. This is more like Tumblr Proust, but with a Beckettian detachment to it.

So how is any of that experimental

So how is any of that experimental

tree's answered that pretty clearly, i think. experimental writing "messes around with form" to achieve effects other than those typically generated by more conventionally structured fiction. tao lin is deliberately "writing against the grain of convention, in a manner that on first blush seems antithetical to all ideas of eloquence, beauty, whatever but ...[which] produces its own kind of lyricism for patient readers."

that all seems pretty straightforward, even if you don't accept the proposed definition and characterization.

It reads like jibberish

I just don't see how this dude is going to save my generation.

Not having read a thing this dude's written, I think the question is coming more from the standpoint of "How is an extended exercise in already-explored literary styles an experiment?" because the impression I'm getting is that dude is doing stuff other venerated authors like Becket and Proust did years ago, only about boring modern young people.

and in a boring modern young manner. see? experiment ho!

what did you call me

Dude is doing stuff lots of other writers have written only he uses "scare quotes" to pull "meaning" out of his sentences. It's a pretty silly "trick."

why are modern young people boring?

i mean, i don't care for tao lin, but i'll grant for the sake of argument that he passes some low-bar experimentalism test

thye're not boring they just dont read so claims abt new shit are usually wrong

lol DJP

tao lin is a blogger not a writer

thye're not boring they just dont read so claims abt new shit are usually wrong

Exactly

Books about people doing drugs are usually boring

feel like Alice Munro missed her chance to write a story about kids in Saskatchewan tweaking and eating cake, ham, salad in Calvin's basement.

looking at Richard Yates it kinda just looked like a joke. the way he repeated the names haley joel osment and dakota fanning 40000 times in the course of the novel. a funny joke though! but it does seem more like a conceptual thing than a thing i would want to read. so, experimental, in a sense. the repeating thing. could drive you nuts to read the whole thing.

xp: I liked that post more when I thought it said "twerking and eating cake"

And everyone in line in the bathroom
Trying to get a line in the bathroom
We all so turned up here
Getting turned up, yeah, yeah

-Tao Lin

Much of the criticism leveled at Lin would apply equally to Beckett, Hemingway, Camus, and any minimalist or writer concerned with ennui. So maybe it's the critics who say Tao Lin is "too detached" and "hates language" who need to read more and not the people responding to those critics who say, essentially, "it's not trying to do what you seem to think fiction is supposed to do."

treeshit

i don't understand the comparison between lin + beckett, hemingway or camus tbh. they all seem to be doing very different things in very different ways.

and it does remind me of dennis cooper in a way. cuzza the drugs and deadpan kids and boredom and yeah after awhile you go zzzzzz....and YET i still respect dennis cooper. and john rechy too. and genet too come to think of it. another gay writer i have trouble reading after about 30 or 40 pages cuz i get numbed. i have no idea if this guy is gay. but that deadpan thing...wait, is genet deadpan? see, i never got far enough into his books...think its just the grove press connection. i wanted to read all those books when i was a kid cuz they were "transgressive" and shocking but mostly i fell asleep. burroughs definitely made me fall asleep. de sade. all the biggies. selby i could hang with cuzza the breathless thing. carried you along. and james purdy could do deadpan, transgressive, AND experimental, but i was drawn to him more cuzza his baroque flourishes. i think i need baroque furniture to sit on if i'm going somewhere heavy. minimalism just makes me not care. i will check out taipei if i see it in a store though. it does sound kinda interesting.

camus wrote the stranger tao lin was on the cover of the stranger beckett is a stranger to someone who doesnt know him hemingway shot himself in the head

I don't like Taipei on the ground that it's the first novel to write about loneliness or anything extreme like that, i just think it handles its subject manner in a way that is effective, memorable, and yes distinctive in the sense that what he's doing -while it echoes many other authors- is it's own thing, and i wouldn't mistake his writing for anyone else's.

It's cool not to like it. I'm just clarifying my position. Also goddam this PA system test at the train station it 's the most annoying thing i've ever experienced.

beckett too. i can't read him. makes me feel like a zombie. those longass novels. stein too. i really should give genet another shot. right? people love him. or they used to.

read the first half of watt

one thing camus, hemingway + beckett do that i don't see in lin is write really beautiful prose

treeship started off well in this thread but is digging himself into a deeper hole. i feel like i have totally different taste to scott seward but he's giving a good account of himself.

Wait who said Tao Lin hates language

some reviewer. dead end tbh

mordy what if i said robbe-grillet instead

scott, Becket's early novels are like early, funny Woody Allen

based on the one dennis cooper i have read dennis cooper is also a really good comparison. one of the pull quotes on taipei exhumes rudolph wurlitzer , which is a name i never expected to see used as a term of praise

alfred that is such a fucking lie

Lol Murphy is so bleak

when is carles coming out with a "novel"?

going a little OT, this is my fave piece ever about beckett:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/488027

i would enjoy reading that if it were possible for someone to possibly mail me a pdf

camus wrote the stranger tao lin was on the cover of the stranger beckett is a stranger to someone who doesnt know him hemingway shot himself in the head

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, July 8, 2013 11:47 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

and they were drinking from a fountain that was pouring like an avalanche coming down the mountain

I would like one too

lol I like wurlitzer

i have a pdf copy on my hard drive. webmail me yr email addy and i'll send it.

Lol Murphy is so bleak

― Treeship

which is what makes it so damn funny

wurlitzer's okay but i never bothered finishing either of the ones i read, i just think "this guy is like the new rudy wurlitzer!" is just ...

tao lin is kinda like beckett narrowed and turned inwards

tao lin's writing did take on a pretty interesting quality when he started writing in ascii and translating it back into english

tao lin is kind of like the opposite of hemingway

mainly tao lin is kind of like only being able to remember adjectives by consciously striving for them. meanwhile 'is that all there is' plays on a permanent loop in your head

one thing camus, hemingway + beckett do that i don't see in lin is write really beautiful prose

otm, though that does tend to support treeship's point. if we accept that writing in a deliberately deadened, empty, faux-blogpost manner is a worthwhile experiment. i mean, i suppose it could be, if the end result were interesting...

i bought 6 books by harry mathews a couple months ago and i swear i'm gonna read them cuz i think i need that kind of inspiration in my life right now. i'm not afeared of "difficult". just so you know. though tedious different than difficult.

where does one start w/beckett

tlooth is the best harry mathews

but, imo, just read roussel's locus solus

mathews short shit and poetry is good sometimes though, country cooking in central france is great

nabisco used to rep for cigarettes, the more "mature" and soap opera-y mathews, but I could never get into it

Murphy and Watt, crut

idk but why not something short like krapp's last tape

nabisco used to rep for cigarettes, the more "mature" and soap opera-y mathews, but I could never get into it

actual lolz

alfred, you ever read this guy? insanely labyrinthian stuff and this book has tons of film stuff in it too:

http://books.google.com/books?id=jor0nug4FSAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

crut the 'trilogy' is the best work but also not a trilogy, the prose from 'murphy' onwards all reflects in and back on itself

there are four novellas frequently published together or in the collected short works, 'first love', 'the expelled' and er two others. those do a good job of establishing the style of the longer prose work (i think better to jump right in with 'molloy' or 'malone dies' than start w/ murphy or watt) though they feel not self-complete. but if reading them doesn't make you want to read more then maybe you don't want to read more.

if you like reading plays (ehhh) 'endgame' is the funniest

"Dante and the Lobster" yo

there are books that I just cannot read cigarettes is one of them

this beautiful prose thing is bugging me but like, if you honestly believe 'beautiful prose' is a non-problematic concept that needs no examining then you're probably not smart enough to read books

no one here reads books its ok

i know i don't read books much either tbh

just look at words and pictures

unreading

oh god, everything needs examining. i'm sure there's for it. i still find the phrase and concept useful in everyday conversation.

beautiful prose = perfect pop music

unread lunch

i got really bad at reading fiction over the last couple years. i'm maybe averaging 1-3 fiction books a year. i got a little burnt out.

alfred i don't know if this is what you're getting at but you know how people will use 'perfect pop music' to refer to, like, teenage fanclub or something

no one there reads books either

alfred i don't know if this is what you're getting at but you know how people will use 'perfect pop music' to refer to, like, teenage fanclub or something

oh yeah. I meant that I'm suspicious of both terms.

what's the problem - that beauty is in the eye of the beholder? do we really need to interrogate this particular aesthetic cliche?

xpost

rudolph wurlitzer , which is a name i never expected to see used as a term of praise

― i better not get any (thomp), Monday, July 8, 2013 3:53 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wrote 2 or 3 great screenplays, 1 or 2 halfway dece novels, there are much more undeserving names to be wielded as praiseblurbs, imho

In re "beautiful prose," Camus is my default answer for favorite writer, but I have seen his prose characterized as wooden. Which I can understand, because he had his own deliberate flatness.

I haven't read Tao Lin and all this discussion makes me not sure whether I want to, but stylistic flatness is not an automatic disqualifier for great writing. All in how you use it.

Nevertheless, many continued hoping that the epidemic would soon die out and they and their families be spared. Thus they felt under no obligation to make any change in their habits as yet. Plague was for them an unwelcome visitant, bound to take its leave one day as unexpectedly as it had come. Alarmed, but far from desperate, they hadn't yet reached the phase when plague would seem to them the very tissue of their existence; when they forgot the lives that until now it had been given them to lead. In short, they were waiting for the turn of events.

camus can be a little prosaic but it has a sense of insight + urgency that makes it more than just affectless or wooden imo.

i think this is beautiful prose:

In it Mathieu Marais, the chronicler, laments his lot; he says he has been cast into hell to languish without succor and without hope. Well, Mathieu Marais was blind! Never more intensely than today had he, Father Paneloux, felt the immanence of divine succor and Christian hope granted to all alike. He hoped against hope that, despite all the
horrors of these dark days, despite the groans of men and women in agony, our fellow citizens would offer up to heaven that one prayer which is truly Christian, a prayer of love. And God would see to the rest.

"Wooden" is a sign of ineptness, no? He's putting words in the wrong places. Even with my schoolboy French I can never accuse Camus of woodenness.

camus is a page-turner!

alfred, you ever read this guy? insanely labyrinthian stuff and this book has tons of film stuff in it too:

http://books.google.com/books?id=jor0nug4FSAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

― scott seward,

I haven't! Looks good though.

-- i'm not sure 'x, y, and z write beautiful prose and a doesn't' is saying anything more meaningful than 'i like sentences by x y and z, considered in isolation, and not any by a'
-- a fun thing is to read the descriptions of being high and partying in ny in 'taipei' and then go and see if you can still take the descriptions of being high and partying in paris in 'the sun also rises' seriously

anyway i'm going to go and finish taipei i think

seems weird to build an argument about the the aesthetic merits of an author's prose around works in translation

xps, but to be clear, I love Camus' writing! I just know people who don't, and I can understand it turning people off.

scott, Becket's early novels are like early, funny Woody Allen

― first I think it's time I kick a little verse! (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, July 8, 2013 11:52 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

any in particular you would recommend?

I can't be arsed with a writer who writes like he has thrown the towel in.

good one

original

You forgot to put "thrown the towel in" in quotes xp

Scott - Murphy's fun and clever and doesn't have lots and lots of pages detailing haemophiliac family lines for the sake of one impossibility (a thing I don't personally mind).

Guess I should read Tao Lin, but I suspect it would intensify feelings of weariness that i don't need intensifying right now.

haha that's pretty much exactly how i feel about it. i picked it up at the bookstore the other day, read a paragraph and lold in recognition, then put it down thinking 'i really don't need this right now.'

*i am drunk*

i re-read the whole thing today while waiting to be called for jury duty. this time i was struck by how paul's dissatisfaction with life leads him to accept some post-humanist, terrence mckenna type ideas about the singularity and the "computer at the end of the universe" that is just (to paul) a cosmic oneness and renders everything in our immediate experience irrelevant. to evade the burden of himself, he tries to seem himself as part of a larger system -- which makes sense -- but since he feels disconnected from other people this larger system is necessarily impersonal and cosmic. ironically, mysticism is just another kind of narcissism, and a cover for being careless with his time, his health, etc.... things in, as he says, "concrete reality." i thought this was a very convincing way to describe depression, and how by seeking out ways of thinking that seem to offer consolation we can just end up pulling ourselves further and further from our actual lives, which are always in a process of expiring and easy to miss. not that the book sees "living in the moment" as a kind of ideal to strive for -- it seems impossible, a fantasy, according to the novel, focused as it is on the way our experience of the world is always both actively and passively mediated -- but still, it is tragic that we are always missing out on life, as it is happening. paul doesn't think of his time with erin in taipei as positive until he watches video footage of that time months later. so it is through memory (finally i am getting to my point) that we lend meaning to our experience; our life is never lived until it is lived again. against this backdrop -- the idea of the vital importance of memory to experience -- the stuff about paul half-willingly disengaging himself from his own memories, which he describes as becoming harder to access with his increasing drug use takes on a much darker quality. it's not for nothing that near the very end of the book paul describes himself as feeling frightened by the degree to which he, at that point, felt he could understand the suicidal impulse, which had previously seemed abstract to him.

there is a lot of talk about tao lin being a generational writer, concerned with the internet, etc. but i think his real talent, now as always, has been his ability to write about depression, and the ways in which it distorts our understanding of the world. this book is great -- as opposed to his other novels being merely good -- because he seems to intuit, here, that "distortion" is always relative. drugs, depression, whatever, do change how we see the world, but not in a way that necessarily makes it less natural or accurate. what is a normal way of thinking anyway? how do we get back to it?

also there are some legitimately funny moments here. the whole hipster panel section is pretty good, also just the extremely flat style is often pushed to the point of self-parody, especially when describing sex and drugs, in a way that i think is intentional. also, just the matter of fact way paul explains to erin, without blaming himself really, that he speaks in a disrespectful tone to his mother because he has just always done that is lol, in a kind of kafkaesque way, as you are aware that this particular absurdity is also a kind of cruelty. paul's lack of boundaries -- giving heroin to high school students, for one -- is also kind of funny, but in a cheaper way.

i just read two long excerpts online - on vice and some other place - and they were kinda trance-like in a not unpleasant way. i could take 200 pages maybe. if it were a brick of a book like that i don't think i could do it.

meanwhile, i've been reading the same sci-fi trilogy for what seems like years now and their are PAGES of people thinking about rocks and lichen - not even talking about rocks and lichen just thinking about them - and i gotta tell you, i kinda breezed through those excerpts. kind of a breath of fresh air. literally months of my life devoted to geology. and i don't understand, like, 75% of it. Tapei would be a vacation at this point.

"there"

there i did the quote thing.

what sci-trilogy is this? and yea, you would breeze through taipei in a few days at most. it is kind of dreamlike, in that it is unstructured and rambling and, simple as the plot is, it is hard to keep track of what has happened in what order. this is intentional, i think, as a big part of the book is how paul is, due to apathy and ennui and drugs, half-willing losing touch with his memories and by extension his identity. this confusing, trancelike element of the book is not altogether unpleasant though.

you know another one where its kinda agony and you are hanging your head saying oh god its too real life is too real! is joseph heller's Something Happened. its like just wallow in it. that book is rough. i'll betcha lots of people start that book with good intentions and then just crawl away in defeat.

"it is kind of dreamlike, in that it is unstructured and rambling and, simple as the plot is, it is hard to keep track of what has happened in what order. this is intentional, i think, as a big part of the book is how paul is, due to apathy and ennui and drugs, half-willing losing touch with his memories and by extension his identity. this confusing, trancelike element of the book is not altogether unpleasant though."

this whole thing sounds a lot like Something Happened.

this one. been hard for me. i'm okay when i'm reading, its just when i put it down i really have to motivate myself to pick it up again. i know i'm in for some heavy weather talk for awhile.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cK2inJvMz_w/TgOFsdp3RrI/AAAAAAAAQv4/J9ZDJ4BaH7s/s1600/red+green+blue+mars.jpg

i've been cheating on kim stanley robinson too. seeing some other sci-fi writers on the side for a quick exciting short story or two. i have needs!

xp i'll look into the heller book. i bailed on catch-22 a few times in high school so am not familiar with heller, really. i have positive feelings toward him because he was friends with kurt vonnegut.

in terms of tao lin's works, this is his bleakest, i think, because it flirts with cosmic nihilism (even though its basically humanistic, in the end) but richard yates is far more devastating. the non-sequitir character names and other whimsical things sort of lull you into a comfortable sense of distance but then in the second half it basically stabs you in the face with "oh god its too real life is too real". that book doesn't delve into the characters' thoughts really, but mostly focuses on how "haley joel osment's" neuroses manifest themselves in passive aggressive, controlling behavior which you do get a glimpse of with paul in taipei. the real tough thing is the cracks in the text where you see glimpses of the "real" dakota fanning, and the extent of her suffering which is not a thing that haley joel osment usually allows himself/the reader to see. that novel is a masterpiece of suburban desperation -- not merely alienation or discontent -- and the title "richard yates" is anything but a non-sequitir. it's possible that that book will be the one tao lin is ultimately remembered for.

i like how even the titles and covers of those kim stanley robinson books look boring. i'm sure they're good but he/she really doesn't seem to be meeting the reader halfway lol

i have positive feelings toward him because he was friends with kurt vonnegut.

lol

i like how even the titles and covers of those kim stanley robinson books look boring.

lol i know spaceships are no drug-addled suicidal ennui but scott's trying to improve himself, not just be entertained

i bailed on something happened two or three times in high school cuz i was in high school and what was that gonna mean to me. LOVED catch-22 tho. started wearing a bomber jacket. god. i mean i still wear it but i've grown into it now. maybe.

...it is through memory (finally i am getting to my point) that we lend meaning to our experience; our life is never lived until it is lived again. ...the idea of the vital importance of memory to experience...

...he seems to intuit, here, that "distortion" is always relative. drugs, depression, whatever, do change how we see the world, but not in a way that necessarily makes it less natural or accurate. what is a normal way of thinking anyway? how do we get back to it?

...also there are some legitimately funny moments here. ...the extremely flat style is often pushed to the point of self-parody, especially when describing sex and drugs... the matter of fact way paul explains to erin, without blaming himself really, that he speaks in a disrespectful tone to his mother because he has just always done that is lol, in a kind of kafkaesque way, as you are aware that this particular absurdity is also a kind of cruelty.

― Treeship, Tuesday, July 9, 2013 8:58 PM (Yesterday)

okay, you've convinced me to give the dude another shot. at least i won't be reading it for months.

Can I just say one thing

just one thing, I promise. . .

LOVED catch-22 tho. started wearing a bomber jacket. god. i mean i still wear it but i've grown into it now. maybe.

― """""""""""""stalin""""""""""" (difficult listening hour), Wednesday, July 10, 2013 8:50 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

uhh pretty sure i also started wearing a military type jacket in high school because of catch-22

Hey guys, one thing

Just one thing, ready?

*farts*

i was at sea level in hawaii so the sleeping-in-vichy-haylofts jacket was p much the most absurd affectation ever

'something happened' is better than catch-22. bleakest office novel ever

i get a call center vibe from TAO LIN

guys tbh there is really no excuse for reading anything else if you could be reading catch-22 instead

heller is a baller

beckett too. i can't read him. makes me feel like a zombie. those longass novels. stein too. i really should give genet another shot. right? people love him. or they used to.

― scott seward, Monday, 8 July 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Mercier and Camier is v funny, and short - Beckett sorta disowned it didn't he? Its my favourite though.

Genet also wished he burnt one of his novels. I'll probably get round to reading them in sequence someday. Really dslike how he's seens as "transgressive", just sells him short.

check out good as gold, tree.

"TL: So I sit there, and maybe move to my sofa and maybe package things slowly, or clean my room. This lasts until 6 or 7 pm. Then at some point I’ll usually have thought either “fuck it” or “it’s worth it” and ingest a little Xanax, then like 10 minutes later, after I’ve left my room, and am on my way to Bobst library, some Adderall.

I eat the Xanax first, because it makes things taste better. Then I take the 6 train from Astor place and I go to 8th street organic avenue. There I usually buy a chocolate mousse, a coconut yogurt parfait, a green juice, which I usually immediately chug. Then I bring it into the park and sit there eating while reading, recently, White Out by Michael Clune off my iPhone.

At some point I go into Bobst Library. I usually ingest more Adderall, I complete some work, I leave around 10 pm maybe. On the way home I buy groceries like cilantro, coconut water, different kinds of fruit. At home I usually, by now, feel for the first time “awake.” It’s like 11 pm. I put my stuff away, I sometimes write a to-do list.

TL: So it’s around midnight, or 1 a.m., and I’ll ingest like a larger amount of Adderall, excited to do work all night. But Adderall takes 30 minutes to begin working and I guess I have developed a routine that includes masturbating during that 30 min. period. Then I’ll shower and begin working, usually answering emails and email questions.

That continues throughout the night, and then I’ll sometimes masturbate more, sometimes I’ll take more Adderall or Xanax. And I’ll be eating the fruit and usually 1 smoothie throughout the night. Then it’ll be like 10 am and I’ll feel kind of calm, and I’ll ingest Xanax usually and go to the post office and maybe the library. Then like around 6 pm return to my apartment.

TL: At this point, about half the time I’ll use more Adderall and stay up another night. I frequently order from Bareburger via Seamless. Lately I’ve been pretty healthy. I’ve eaten only raw organic vegan stuff for maybe 5 days. So if I stay up a third night, it’s the same, more Adderall, my work gets more incoherent, but I feel calm and fine, then in the morning I’ll relax a little, usually go outside for sunlight, and I don’t think I’ve stayed up for a third night more than 2 or 3 times. Then I sleep for around 12 hours and wake up surprisingly not feeling fucked up.

CD: Why did you start taking Adderall and Xanax? I read somewhere it was because you got this book deal for Taipei.

TL: At first out of curiosity. And because Adderall is a stimulant, and I like the effect tea and coffee has on me, so naturally I wanted to try a stronger version of that.

CD: How much Adderall do you take?

TL: I take like a grim amount now. I remember when one cup of green tea would make me feel like insanely good. Then when 10 mg of Adderall seemed “insane” to me. But probably the peak for me was like 160 mg Adderall over 8 hour periods. I don’t go overboard on Xanax. Maybe on average like 1.5 mg/day. Which in the past would seem insane to a degree to me. It just keeps getting worse."

http://sundayroutine.com/home/2013/7/7/tao-lin

he's eating raw organic vegan stuff so i'm sure he'll be fine

lol I immediately thought of KSR's Mars trilogy as soon as scott mentioned the thinkin bout rocks n lichen thing

I never got around to the third book myself. first is all-time awesome.

adderall and xanax are pernicious drugs.

they seem to fit so organically into your routine, and to enhance your life on a moment to moment basis, that it's hard to realize the extent to which they are fucking with you. weirdly though, despite mordy's sarcasm, i think things would be a lot worse for tao lin if he wasn't eating a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables.

anyway, i wish the dude the best because he is a great writer and i want to see what kinds of things he will be doing in his 30s, 40s, and 50s.

this passage about paul's relationship with his mother in high school -- his instinct to blame her for his unhappiness because he couldn't help but resent her unconditional love and support -- is probably easy to mock but i think it is a brilliant, harrowing, and relatable account of just how fucked up your thinking can become as an adolescent. bratty teenagers are pretty universally reviled, so i think it is important to be able to remember, from time to time, just how unbearable their lives actually are, and the kind of un-repressable confusion that leads them to "act out." this kind of empathy is necessary for me in my current job.

In Paul’s sophomore or junior year he began to believe the only solution to his anxiety, low self-esteem, view of himself as unattractive, etc. would be for his mother to begin disciplining him on her own volition, without his prompting, as an unpredictable—and, maybe, to counter the previous fourteen or fifteen years of “overprotectiveness,” unfair—entity, convincingly not unconditionally supportive. His mother would need to create rules and punishments exceeding Paul’s expectations, to a degree that Paul would no longer feel in control. To do this, Paul believed, his mother would need to anticipate and preempt anything he might have considered, factoring in that—because Paul was thinking about this almost every day, and between the two of them was the source of this belief—he probably already expected, or had imagined, any rule or punishment she would be willing to instate or inflict, therefore she would need to consider rules and punishments that she would not think of herself as willing to instate or inflict. Paul tried to convey this in crying, shouting fights with his mother lasting up to four hours, sometimes five days a week. There was an inherent desperation to these fights, in that each time Paul, in frustration, told his mother how she could have punished him, in whatever previous situation, to make him feel not in control—to, he believed, help solve his social and psychological problems—it became complicatedly more difficult, in Paul’s view, for his mother to successfully preempt his expectations the next time. Paul cried and shouted more than his mother, who only shouted maybe once or twice. Paul would scream if his mother was downstairs while he was upstairs, in his room, where some nights he would throw his electric pencil sharpener and textbooks—and, once, a six-inch cymbal—at his walls, creating holes, resulting in punishments, but never exceeding what, by imagining their possibilities, he’d already rendered unsurprising, predictable. The intensity of these fights maybe contributed to Paul’s lungs collapsing spontaneously three times his senior year, when he was absent forty-seven days and in hospitals for around four weeks.

One night, standing in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom, when his father was on a months-long business trip, crying while shouting at his mother, who was supine in bed, in the dark, Paul heard her softly and steadily crying, with her blanket up to her chin in a way that seemed child-like. Paul stopped shouting and stood sobbing quietly, dimly aware, as his face twitched and trembled, that he felt intensely embarrassed of himself from the perspective of any person, except his mother, he had ever met. He said he didn’t know what he was talking about, or what he should do, that he was sorry and didn’t want to complain or blame other people anymore, and felt an ambiguous relief, to have reached the end of a thing without resolution and, having tried hard, feeling allowed—and ready—to resign. He didn’t stop blaming his mother, after that, but gradually they fought less—and, after each fight, when he would revert to his belief about discipline, he would apologize and reiterate he didn’t want to blame anyone or complain—and, by the last month of senior year, had mostly stopped fighting.

i like bareburger a lot

me too. i like their different varieties of ketchup.

yeah i'm gonna try the bison burger and the crocodile burger and maybe the antelope burger too one day

i've had the bison burger before and, i think, the elk burger if that exists and i'm not imagining it. i wasn't a fan of alligator when i ate it once in college (someone was barbecuing it randomly) but crocodile might be different.

treeship i think your open-faced sincerity on these boards is a good match for tao lin's unapologetic candidness

thanks. we should meet for open faced antelope burgers at some point.

160 mg of adderall a day isn't overdoing it but if you're taking that much you've built up a good tolerance with xanax to take the edge off. but when you get to that point, it must have lost most of its magic.

how are they pernicious, tree?

where i come from the combo would be morphine+methylphenidate in nose or iv

dylannn is one of my favorite ilxors

xp i took about 100mg or more of dexedrine or adderall (i would change my mind about which i liked better) per day in college and i think it was a negative thing to be doing. it made it more difficult to sleep and caused me to be stressed out without realizing it and that led to an overall deterioration of my physical and mental health. i started taking it for normal reasons -- to concentrate, because i had been diagnosed with "ADD" -- but eventually i just always wanted to be on it all the time or else i felt foggy and unintelligent. among its other negative effects, it made me less creative and also more rigid in the way i would evaluate things, like judgmental of myself and others, which is the opposite of how i generally am... so the accumulated effect of that habit just made me feel like a really different person. i also think it was a contributing factor in having a severe depressive episode at the end of college, but i had had those before -- though less severe -- so i don't know to what extent i can blame adderall/dexedrine.

i've seen people become really dependent on xanax. personally, i like it but i can see how if i had access to it it would be another thing i would want to take all the time and i feel that would be bad.

treeship do you like cocaine

i've never done it. there have been addicts in my family so i have always been wary of it. probably i would like it at first as i did like adderall/dexedrine (which i was prescribed) each time i would take it and just didn't like the accumulated effect of having it be a part of my life.

also i drink an insane amount of coffee, especially since i don't take dexedrine anymore.

last question promise have you ever taken lsd or eaten mushrooms?

no. those are the drugs i have declined most often at college. i stayed away from them because i have had really strong, horrible hallucinogenic experiences on strong strains of marijuana. or this happened twice, with one time being particularly nightmarish. that was in copenhagen so i'm not sure if maybe i had some weird stuff. so i guess i am afraid of that happening.

also, now that i am thinking of it 100mg might have been an exaggeration. i think with dexedrine you take less than adderall but i don't remember what the dosage of those pills were. it doesn't matter, i guess.

do you like hallucinogens dylannn? what is your favorite class of drugs?

also, another treeship drug fact: i think my lack of enthusiasm for drugs might have contributed to the dissolution of my last relationship but i don't know.

better than the opposite

maybe. there were other things going on though so i can't really say. shouldn't have brought that up because i don't want to talk about it.

Other messages have been posted since you last looked... Please review and if you want to change your message, do so before posting.
maybe. there were other things going on though so i can't really say. shouldn't have brought that up because i don't want to talk about it.

― Treeship, Thursday, July 11, 2013 5:08 AM (19 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i want to hear that story, tree

sorry

sorry dylann. you should answer my question.

you want a brief snapshot or more indepth

whatever you want. in-depth if its' not too much trouble.

treeship have you ever seen valiums

"seen"?

actually, i don't think so. i googled them and they have a V in the middle, which doesn't look familiar.

this thread isn't about me though, it's about tao lin. and also about dylannn sharing his drug preferences because he still hasn't done that.

i dont think ive seen actual 'valium' since i was in high school idk, i was wondering if they even make it anymore

xp - i think talking about whether or not people still take valium is fine for this thread

i think people still take it but xanax might have usurped its popularity.

highlights of drug use

* first drug i ever got high on-- and i mentioned it on ilx recently-- was dextromethorphan-containing robitussin cough syrup. dissociative in the same family as ketamine or pcp or mxe. they all have their own distinct flavour but similar, similar, and i think dxm might be the chillest variation. took a bit of work to master drinking robitussin extra strength. turned off lights in my room and listened to art bell on am radio out of the rockies, all the way from colorado. started seeing things, sensation of floating out of my body.

* found a qp at least of typical late 90s homegrown big bud, red hairs not very crystally, in my dad's closet along with naked polaroids of my parents dated to the mid 80s, an ammunition box of sex toys, and tons of vhs porn. i borrowed some papers off the dresser while i was in there, rolled a joint, watched letterman, smoked, could see my thoughts moving as if on an urban traffic grid with stoplights directing etc.

* bought 5 grams of mushrooms. 10th grade? ate them in the dark. had a sudden feeling of flying out the window into some fire-lit tribal drum circle, completely lost touch with reality, slowly came to and realized no difference in visuals with eyes open or closed, had no idea where i was. slowly came down and grooved on the hairs on my legs flowing like waves. kept eating mushrooms, lower doses. during this time went to first year of university and took ecstasy alone in my room, friends online hooked me up with doses of amt and 2cb and a few other things. had fun. during this time, getting high became an important hobby. smoked quite a bit of weed.

* bought a tab of lsd. watched some movie on my laptop. felt nothing. five hours in hit with wave of buzzing paranoia, a feeling like mentally looking in the mirror impossible to describe, like i was contemplating myself in the third person accompanied by horrible rush of anxiety. this feeling lasted for several weeks and was only tamed with paxil and clonazepam. during this time i also took prescription painkillers pretty frequently and tried morphine and did my first skinny rail of powder. if you dig back to ten years ago, read some of my ilx posts, i was kinda fucked up, definitely on some untreated mental illness shit. had panic attacks. hallucinated. self-destructive. once got robbed after i got set up by this broad that was taking me to buy pills, first time i ever had a gun pulled on me.

* while in china for the first time so... 2005? i went to a club and the table was covered in white powder, thought it was coke. someone scraped me up a fat line and i snorted it. wasn't coke. it was ketamine. best experience i ever had. stopped taking paxil + clonazepam combo and had limited withdrawal effects. took ketamine regularly. dancing on k is pure euphoria like driving a supersmooth giant robot from a floating twenty feet above the earth pov. felt mentally healthier.

* despite fears about my fragile mental health, still had the urge to get high. when i moved back to van, i started smoking weed again, very carefully, and found out it was probably safe. smoked good weed everyday. got put in touch with a delivery service. made a decent amount of coin resaling the weed i got and finding drugs for people i knew. did cocaine once or twice a week with work people, usually in a booth at boston pizza while watching the canucks or in a casino bathroom while my friends were playing baccarat. once got arrested shoplifting a ritter sport marzipan from a sobey's in richmond while i had a couple grams in my pocket i was holding onto for someone. police came. no problem. also had several fratboy friends at ubc who i did shrooms with a few times, very low doses. while catering a shitty luau party at that boat house or whatever in stanley park, after carving up the whole roast pig, some bros in hawaiian shirts offered me "molly," knew what it was, enjoyed it.

* slightly dark period. broke up with my girlfriend. got fucked up on purpose everyday. never went to sleep by natural means. dropped out of school. took lsd again successfully. first short story i ever published i wrote the day after, but no real connection because i was fairly sober for most of the editing and rewriting. went to china again, smoked hash fairly often but it was weak and perfect for my mental state. got happier. tried methamphetamine for the first time, hoping it was real north korean product. came back to canada. smoke weed fairly often. use as creative tool and lifestyle accessory and to chill out.

xpost i think lorazepam for lesser issues and clorazepam for greater issues have quietly replaced valium (diazepam) but i'm not a pharmacist

usually in a booth at boston pizza while watching the canucks or in a casino bathroom while my friends were playing baccarat

huh

i have a rx for clorazepam but i usually sell it because i dont need it as much as i need money

i'm going to pick up taipei based on treeship's account, but damn this thing sounds so utterly depressing. i hope the protagonist kills himself in the end as an act of mercy for the human race.

one weird overlap between tao lin fans and tedious drug talk fans

does the narrator think about student loans when he's on drugs?

He doesn't have student loan debt i don't think.

from what I remember reading his parents paid for his degree at NYU and bought him an apartment in the city

if i had lots of money i would probably do tons of drugs. i love drugs. but i never have money for drugs AND records. one of them had to go. plus, i gotta get up in the morning...

dylannn's drugs version of Brewster's Millions has taught you nothing then

i dated a girl who was a trust-fund druggo and briefly brushed up with that world. it's fucking depressing. maybe i'm just getting flashbacks with this.

When ppl say stuff like that I feel like lex a couple of years ago being baffled at weeknnd fans talking about how depressing parties are

Idk maybe trust fund druggos are doing it really wrong but drvqs are great

the voice of young america has parents to put him/her through nyu and pay for an apartment in the city and drug abuse? that represents so many young americans. high five

i love drugs. they're the best. sometimes i wish someone would give me some cocaine. i used to love that stuff. snorted my weight in coke in high school. haven't done it since my stripper girlfriend brought some home in the early 90's. she got it as a tip. i love that smell. i don't know anyone who does it though. or they aren't telling me if they do. hallucinogens i could probably get around here, but i wouldn't do that anywhere near my kids. my kids would have to be safely in another state. or i would have to be. i love pain pills and opiates. would swallow any of that anyone has handy. never wanted to do heroin once i found out that if you do it enough you don't get high anymore you just do it to maintain and not get sick. which seems like a drag. i like getting high. i don't really do anything much anymore though. sad to say. don't even drink really. smoke pot occasionally. i actually just broke down and bought some pot. only smoke at night though. no big deal. netflix. i don't really like doing drugs with other people. just like to watch t.v. i'm a boring drug lover. don't really have much interest in club/internet/designer drugs that make you feel like you are dead and in a hole and all that. i'm too old for that shit. ecstacy is fun though. would do. all drugs are fun if you don't do them too much. i took way too much valium/xanax in high school - my dad had an endless supply - and it really did a number on me. i was already depressed, so, i was just adding insult to injury. should have just stuck to the acid and the coke and the booze. the fun stuff.

oh, but anyway, most drug novels are kinda bad. there are exceptions of course. jesus' son. requiem for a dream. to name two.

Has any author ever represented all young Americans

as long as they represent the richest young americans i'm all for it

"Has any author ever represented all young Americans"

judy blume? maurice sendak? richard scarry?

I dont think his parents send him money in this book but they seem to have paid for his college. That makes him as privileged as i am, i guess. My dad also lives in a major asian capital too but im not ethnically asian. If i write a novel i'll make sure to not send you a copy.

I sort of hate drugs to an extent i am embarassed about. They've only ever made things worse for me.

literature and culture serve a class function since we don't have an outright aristocracy here, so it's not a shock we mostly just get novels by and about rich kids farting around for a couple hundred pages. doesn't mean there isn't any value there ... somewhere... but it's a little wearying when there aren't any relatable voices in a medium you love.

You need to have a good deal of free time to write a novel so that's a factor. Although, maybe not because the writers of the past seemed busy. Clarice Lispector was in law school and working full time as a journalist when she wrote near to the wild heart

I don't think you need a ton of free time, you just need passion + enthusiasm

so it's not a shock we mostly just get novels by and about rich kids farting around for a couple hundred pages. doesn't mean there isn't any value there ... somewhere... but it's a little wearying when there aren't any relatable voices in a medium you love.

This is some bullshit!

What part? Privileged ppl are overrepresented in literature, pretty clearly.

Novels by and about rich kids farting around. Not true and believe me if there's one thing I know, it's farting.

i was lucky to grow up in a grittier era

http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/6622437-M.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AMBLVX9NnzM/TgfuY8BXxaI/AAAAAAAAAUE/gZh2K-wmIYE/s320/nittygritty.jpg

http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n13/n69840.jpg

"Real and Tough"

- bret easton ellis

treeship if you write a novel i would read it. i don't hate privileged people. i question their monopoly on greatness that's all

tao lin is the face of white privilege

or asian-american privilege

tao lin is an anchor baby

tao lin's parents are convicted felons

tao lin is a miscegenist and child pornographer glorified by the leftwing media

tao lin is marijuana

lol dylannn

those whose parents pay for their $200,000 NYU tuitions and expensive NYC housing and medicine cabinets, right on

life is so depressing!

yep makes you wonder where they got all that money.

tommy wiseau?

http://www.theliftedbrow.com/12-poems-by-tao-lin/

Pyrazolam, which as the name suggests is structurally very closely related to alprazolam, is like a mild xanax in that it doesn't have much of a benzo buzz, yet its anxiolytic properties are as strong, or if anything, stronger. If you're actually wanting something functional, rather than a euphoric high, I'd say they're the best benzo ever, both for dealing with ordinary anxiety-producing situations, and for cancelling out the bad effects of come-downs. They're currently legal to buy online in U.K. £45 for 250.

[Being wary of analogue provisions in the Misuse of Drugs Act, 1971, I double-checked by calling my local county police force (using non-emergency "101") to ask if it was ok for me to possess these; they said they'd check with the national police drugs agency then get back to me in 15 minutes, when I was informeed - yes, "we can confirm it's not a controlled drug". Feels so much safer buying something like this when you know that conversation will have been recorded..]

i was walking on the street behind nyu’s library
it was cloudy, i was thinking about a girl
my heart felt like a non-organic potato
with root things starting to grow out of it

important highlight from a vice interview of early this year

PART VI: HATE

What are five things you think about when you think of love?
Like stream of consciousness?

Yeah.
Fish. The shape of a heart. A halo. Hate. For some reason: a fish flopping around.

What about hate? Five things.
HTMLGIANT’s comment sections. Hamilton... I get the VICE guy confused with the Gawker guy...

Nolan?
Yeah. Hamilton Nolan. The other Gawker guy too. What's his name? There's another shit-talker on Gawker.

They all are.
Yeah. So—Gawker.

Max Reed or something?
Something like that.

occupy taipei

haha if i wanted reasons to like lin less

max reed

that's the title of his next book: Max Reed

about an uninspired young sax player burdened with high expectations

Alt-jazz

I'm sitting on my macbook

I open gmail

I click on the emails

I read the emails

I click on facebook

Oh my god like why do people keep posting feelgood images to facebook?

I go and make some instant noodles

I spill some of the noodle powder on the worktop

The noodles aren't very filling

I go back to my laptop

I click on gmail

I look at my emails again

I've got a notification on facebook

Apparently someone's invited me to an event?

^ THIS is how we live now. THIS is great literature.

I think it communicates something really essential, you know? Like about a contemporary lack of empathy? But perhaps you need to have been depressed when you were a teenager. I mean you can't really say anything negative about this because although it's serious literature - not for squares who like the Da Vinci Code and Twilight - it's not 'literary', right, because when I say 'literary' in quotes like that it has a definite meaning and isn't just a vague conversation-stopper.

It's not serious literature

What I'm saying is he's on the cover of Time magazine and being published as literature and talked about as literature but that doesn't mean it's okay to ask if he's actually a good writer, yeah? Have some fucking decorum guys. And what with him being Asian, well clearly you can justify his writing style because it's Buddhist, because no-one of Asian descent who claims to be a Buddhist is also a total bullshitter, nu-uh, not ever.

it's the poetry of daily life, like if you had a red wheel barrow in your yard and wrote about that.

Yeah William Carlos Williams is another writer no-one has any business criticising ever

Untouchable

Yeah ok whatever

More seriously, now that I've got my flippant reaction out of the way:

Compare Tao Lin's best prose with J.G. Ballard's best prose. It becomes clear that there are at least two types of 'affectless' or 'dead' writing.

Tao Lin's writing might be 'affectless' as opposed to, say, 'flowery', but it doesn't actually come across as numbed or traumatised in the way that Ballard's does. I don't bring this as evidence that one is better than the other, I'm just pointing out an important stylistic distinction. Calling Tao Lin's prose 'affectless writing' is rather like calling a contemporary brick-box shopping mall 'minimalist architecture', that is, true, but only in a technical sense.

Compare Tao Lin's writing with J.G. Ballard's writing. It becomes clear that there are at least two ways of writing about 'how we live now'.

It's true, if you create a checklist of things you commonly encounter (your email inbox, your laptop, your trainers, your flat, the food you eat, the sort of people you associate with, the sort of job you do) then other people who commonly encounter those things may read that piece and feel as though how they live is being recorded. But merely putting a list of things together does not mean that the recording of life is accurate, in the same way that an observational comedian is not necessarily an observant comedian.

Further, suppose I am someone whose life, in its quotidian detail, corresponds fairly closely with that described in, say, a novel by Tao Lin; just that he has made a recording of things he and I commonly encounter does not permit me to say that he has captured 'How we live now', because there is an entire world containing many millions of entirely different lives to the one I live and the one he records. Who is this 'we'?

There are plenty of writers as bad as Tao Lin, in opposite directions: there are people who write very, very 'affected' prose, and there are people who wouldn't think that concrete details of everyday life were something you might want to write about. But avoiding one type of bad isn't something to be praised for and doesn't outweigh some other bad you fall into. Just because I've never knocked down a popular young American author with my black classic Ford doesn't mean that I'm in the right if I spit on him in the street.

and there are people who wouldn't think that concrete details of everyday life were something you might want to write about.

Every piece of "successful" fiction has concrete details, that's what makes fiction fiction.

That's cool, and it's fine if you don't like it, but i think i've said more sophisticated things about why i like tao lin's writing than just "it's affectless and about daily life." I do think there is something about the particular awkwardness, or superficial "badness" of taipei's prose (which isnt similar to those poems linked above, really) that pulls you out of the text, and makes the stones of digitally mediated life "stonier", to borrow an idiom from shklovsky. I never attacked people who said they didnt like tao lin, only those who said, like, "you must not have read beckett if you like this" or whatever.

no one said that Tweeshit

tree also made some credible arguments about the uses to which lin puts his prose style

People said stuff like that waterface.

I'm on zing so i am not going to find examples, but there was an implication that nothing about lin's style is original and peoplemaking claims about that are overlooking other authors who have already done the same thing.

i don't think the excerpts i read were bad. or written badly. they were interesting. they were more thoughtful than i thought they would be. the stuff about the kid's childhood.

what was the name of that British woman who wrote those mundane diaries of her life? she got some critical acclaim. i think she died recently. kinda want to read those sometime.

People just said that there was nothing experimental about Tao Lin, not "you must not have read Beckett, LOL U LOSER."

Different strokes

which reminds me of this classic. funny stuff.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1026/1026-h/1026-h.htm

Treeship, I'm responding to various pieces of Tao Lin hype and Tao Lin writing which I've been absorbing for a few months. Some of what you said might be a part of that, but I wasn't trying to single you out, hope it didn't look that way. As ever, there's nothing wrong with people liking a thing, but sometimes people put forward arguments for a why a thing should be liked that are open to question

Fair enough, its just that on this particular thread i was the one who brought up the buddhist thing and who consistently was questioning what people meant by "good" writing so thats why i was defensive.

i'm not sure i understand what you guys are describing as "affectless." i don't necessarily think this style in unaffected at all, & it's maybe naive to consider the conspicuous 'artlessness' of this style to be the absence of affect. it's a pose like any other. it's not one i find particularly endearing or interesting, tho.

on the other hand, if you mean "affectless" as in, having a blunted emotional affect, then yes i think that's right. dude sounds clinically depressed.

I mean the latter. Clearly his style is very intentional which is why its so distinctive (well.. before it started getting ripped off.)

o cool writing without emotions sounds "great"

You really are a comic genius, huh?

That's what Mom tells me

sweet

*Shreds a sweet guitar solo*

nonsarcastic lol

Two months into freshman year he had committed to not speaking in almost all situations. He felt ashamed and nervous around anyone who’d known him when he was popular and unself-conscious. When he heard laughter, before he could think or feel anything, his heart would already be beating like he’d sprinted twenty yards. As the beating slowly normalized he’d think of how his heart, unlike him, was safely contained, away from the world, behind bone and inside skin, held by muscles and arteries in its place, carefully off-center, as if to artfully assert itself as source and creator, having grown the chest to hide in and to muffle and absorb—and, later, after innovating the brain and face and limbs, to convert into productive behavior—its uncontrollable, indefensible, unexplainable, embarrassing squeezing of itself. To avoid awkwardness, and in respect of his apparent aversion to speaking, Paul’s classmates stopped including him in conversations. The rare times he spoke—in classes where no one knew him, or when, without knowing why, for one to forty minutes, he’d become aggressively confident and spontaneous as he’d been in elementary/middle school, about which his friends poignantly would always seem genuinely excited—he’d feel “out of character,” indicating he’d completed a transformation and was now, in a humorlessly surreal way, exactly what he didn’t want to be and wished he wasn’t.

See to GOWF* right here, this sounds like bad DFW.

Good Ol' Watrr Face

he had committed to not speaking in almost all situations

grammar

what about that phrase is grammatically incorrect?

What I'm saying is he's on the cover of Time magazine and being published as literature and talked about as literature but that doesn't mean it's okay to ask if he's actually a good writer, yeah? Have some fucking decorum guys. And what with him being Asian, well clearly you can justify his writing style because it's Buddhist, because no-one of Asian descent who claims to be a Buddhist is also a total bullshitter, nu-uh, not ever.

― cardamon, Friday, July 12, 2013 11:41 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol dude, Tao Lin was not on the cover of Time Magazine, he was on the cover of an issue of The Strangler that was a spoof on the Time cover with Franzen

if TAO LIN is our thomas de quincey, who are his wordsworth and coleridge?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhKpaTOG4yg

This guy is both

Kidding!

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

because the farmer
needs it

to carry all the
eggs

you stupid
fucks.

so much depends
upon

parents paying for
NYC

housing glazed with
drugs

and yes tuition
too

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
You Stupid Fucks

this is just to say

I have smoked
the buds
that were in
the cig case

you should have entered that red wheelbarrow "remix" poem in the poetry context, hurting

i think that's the whole point. we are all Tao Lin.

laying on my Ikea mattress
looking for new shirts on my iPad
the delivery man buzzes my door
for the Chinese food I ordered an hour ago

sitting on the top of the stairs
because the internet doesn't reach my room anymore,
otherwise i would probably be on my ikea mattress,
feel "sick and tired" of "defending tao lin"
spectrum's comment reminded me to heat up chinese food
left over from last night.
singapore rice noodles.

site new answers
site new answers
i should do some work now
site new answers
fart

sitting at home
i my underwears
watching wheel of fortune
reading ilx
vanna is so hot
need a snickers

hurting stole my joke

I think that captured something about our generation's predicament
is this still part of my poem?
I am not sure.

once i get a full time job
i am never coming back to this website
you stupid fucks

jk

you are the poem

hurting stole my joke

― waterface, Friday, July 12, 2013 4:15 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

stole? motherfucker I preemptively shocked and awed your joke.

a guy on the internet said I stole his joke
I said that I didn't
fart

treeship
treebutt
treeship
treebutt
treeship
treebutt

not a bad "strategy" i thought
scratched my bellybutton
considered what ilx would be like without "tweeshit"

sometimes i wonder what it would be like to be a website

waterface:
your hostility toward me
seems excessive
and unwarranted
and "insane"

Treeships your idea of hostility
is kind of crazy
i was merely responding
to your joke about quitting ilx

sweet
makes sense
"tweeshit" sounds like a hostile nickname
i was bullied as a child
i think some of the stuff you say is funny
and loled when you compared me to malcolm gladwell once

i also reminded you
that you are the poem

if you can't laugh at tweeshit
what can you laugh at

sometimes i wonder what it would be like to be a website

if you don't write this poem, tao lin will. he's probably reading this thread right now.

there is a ninety-five percent chance
he is reading this thread right now
because
he reads all of his press
and shit
and tweeted to me once when i mentioned him
to clarify something

tao lin is reading every thread
right now

guys

hey guys

hey TAO LIN can i borrow some money i want to go to NYU

i like how in taipei
"paul" lives in williamsburg
off the graham street stop
because my friend lives there
and i am there all the time
and all of the public spaces
where
in the novel
they did drugs
were places i have been

Treeship
are you
"drugs?"

i used to live there
too,
treeship

i am going to move
somewhere like that,
probably not super close to the L
because that shit
is expensive

waterface:
i don't do drugs
anymore,
really

no Treeship
what I meant was
you seem to be all of the places
Tao Lin was doing drugs
so i was thinking
"Maybe Treeship is drugs."

maybe we can summon him to appear like the chrisagis brothers.

we must make an offering to him. we'll need insense, a plate of research chemicals, and an Apple product. with our collective dissatisfaction over 21st century urban life combined, I think we can do it.

taoooooooooooo
taoooooooooooo
taooooooooooooooooooooooooo

waterface,
shit
wait
hm
no,
i remembered:
i am not drugs
i am a human being,
who is male,
and born in the state of new york
in 1989,
according to my passport
and drugs
don't have passports

spectrum:
tweet a link to this thread
to tao lin
and he will probably make an account
and show up.
i don't want to do that though,
because he will act in his characteristic, schticky manner
and i will look insane
to other ilxors
for arguing that "this guy" is a great novelist,
which is something i believe anyway
and won't back down from
on the strength of taipei and
richard yates

are either of those novels as good as 'a game of thrones'?

hahahaha

these fake tao lin poems
all end wrong
my asshole itches

i have never read game of thrones
because i don't read fantasy, usually,
or haven't since i took an entire seminar
on the lord of the rings
in high school
so i can't comment on that.
however,
regardless,
i am going to say
yes
xp

fwiw I like this excerpt:
http://www.vice.com/read/an-excerpt-from-tao-lins-taipei

no it's just that i started taking photos of the floor, looking at the floor through my phone and zooming in on the carpet, which was kinda filthy and hadn't been vacuumed since last year probably, and you could still see where the stain where the fish tank had broken had spilled smelly algae fishwater everywhere and it didn't dry for a week and the whole place stan. that was the day when my brother went to the hospital again, but i was thinking about tao lin and how i never even read anything he wrote except for maybe a couple poems on a blog that was linked off a message board that i post on sometimes when i'm bored at work. it was weird to think about how i have been on this board so long, since i was in NYU actually, like tao lin actually, even though i left new york after college and still have friends there but don't think i want to live there again but then i started a lazy approximation of his writing style and posted it on the board and refreshed the page a few times waiting to see what people thought, if it was funny or what

it's funny but not "funny"

it has a breathless quality

remove bookmark
from this
thread

"Never trust a writer who whiles away their time reading bout themselves, while throwing one off". Some wise fucker once said that to me.

tao lin has a tattoo that says
"fuck america,"
allegedly.

http://www.taolin.info/2009/07/i-desecrated-my-body-to-promote-my.html

the comments on that vice excerpt tho

Andrew Goldspink Smith · Keele University
Looks set to be an important book.
Reply · Like · Follow Post · May 29 at 2:03pm

"i desecrated my body" wow edgy tattoo man but "whatever"

i just think its weird for him not to mention that james joyce had the exact same tattoo

ok this guy

i just paged through hsi tumblr and lol forever

ok, i'm done talking about tao lin on the internet till his next book. later.

Goodbye Waterface

“I won,” said Chelsea’s dad, and went to give Chelsea a high-five, but missed, as they were standing too close.

“My fault,” he said. “That was my fault.”

“Oh,” Chelsea said.

And he stepped back a little and tried again, but Chelsea, distracted now by something—maybe the plant in the far corner, standing and waiting like a person in a dream; or maybe the green shoe or some other thing that was out there and longing, to be looked at, and taken—wasn’t ready, and their hands, his then hers, passed through the air in a kind of wave, a little goodbye.

Goodbye TreeShips
Though I never knew you at all
You had the grace to hold yourself
While those around you crawled
They crawled out of the woodwork
And they whispered into your brain
They set you on the treadmill
And they made you change your name

And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in
And I would have liked to have known you
But I was just a kid
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did

Loneliness was tough
The toughest role you ever played
Hollywood created a superstar
And pain was the price you paid
Even when you died
Oh the press still hounded you
All the papers had to say
Was that Treeships was found in the nude

And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in
And I would have liked to have known you
But I was just a kid
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did

Goodbye Tweeships
Though I never knew you at all
You had the grace to hold yourself
While those around you crawled

Goodye Treesjits
From the young man in the 22nd row
Who sees you as something more than sexual
More than just Tao Lin's publicist

And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in
And I would have liked to have known you
But I was just a kid
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did

And I would have liked to have known you
But I was just a kid
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did
You Stupid Fucks

much love to the young man in the 22nd row who sees me as something more than sexual.

this thread got me curious about the alt lit writer who went to my college and wrote an alt lit book which included a bunch of imagined sex scenes with friends of mine and he super-excitedly met alt lit superstar tao lin at a muumuu house reading and apparently he's pretty popular in the alt lit world now and did some thing with kitty pryde idk

i don't think becoming popular in this (very small) world involves much more than the right kind of self-promotion and i do think in 30 years lit scholars will revere it almost like the fucking beats if only because lit scholars need to cling to some evolution of lit (esp. young tortured male lit) that goes further than boring grad school novels/poetry and this is movement with the best branding

which is to say waaah waaah waaah i will never be as popular as these people

Pretty sad to have a go at someone who genuinely gets excited about about a writer you don't like, Waterface.

In that manner. I meant to say.

none of the fake tao lin poetry on this thread reads v much like tao lin poetry

i agree with that.

Pretty sad to have a go at someone who genuinely gets excited about about a writer you don't like, Waterface.

― Damo Suzuki's Parrot, Friday, July 12, 2013 11:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Treeship's a big boy and he handeld himself fine.

Part of the problem for
me is that
outside of my ilx 'life' I
go to a lot of readings and try
to support new writing in my
city as much as I can and

so many people
no but so many people
but seriously like all of them

try to 'do' the banal, the awkward,
the cute, in their stories and novels -
not like this fake 'tao lin poem'
that doesn't even resemble a tao lin poem
but very close to taipei

and it is boring crushingly boring
and one watches them building a profile
rising from being 'english students'
through the stages until they become
'published novellists'

and the thing is
i know this sounds inherently smug

but FFS they could read a book occasionally
you know bit of joseph conrad henry james
i dunno i'm not prescriptive
but it's very obvious they don't really like
words
books
novels stories poems stuff like that

they're basically reading-orientated
kind of operating in an interzone between
stand up and fiction
when it's not funny they have the 'it's fiction' excuse
when it's not well written they have the 'it's comedy' excuse

none of this is made explicit
it's all implied in the general atmosphere

and you go out for a cigarette halfway through
glaring at the ground because it's that boring

by reading-orientated i mean
them doing performances all the time
i don't mean they orient themselves around reading

obvs. But

it's like why the fuck would you portion
off a time and a place for a literary reading
a poetry reading a reading from a novel

why would you do that, right
and all turn up in their retro clothes
and all talking about how they're all writers

but then absolutely refuse to be anything other
than smug and ironic and undercut
anything literary anything you know like
oh i don't know
and references to some band they like
or some band they don't like

ffs

i get that. i wonder if it has to do with the marginality of literature to our culture. like, marginal people with boring lives are the ones drawn to writing, and their experience is impoverished so there writing is also. the infinite subtlety of social interactions in henry james' day, when living as an expat meant something, and people had real faith in the validity of their experiences... i don't know, this just seems different from my life, which isn't as interesting as that, and i assume many writers my age feel the same way.

Treeship

o
t
m

and for the record i would not
not ever consider this sort of thing
i'm typing now 'a poem'

but don't even get me started on the 'poetry'
i hear from these people

one thing i like about taipei is that it represents an extreme, and self-aware version of the kind of hipster despair that characterizes so many "literary" people in our country -- the sort of absurdity that comes from being a person who frantically tries to collect cultural capital in an era when this isn't valued anymore. at the end of my review i say that the extreme vacuity of paul's experience -- his lack of conviction in anything -- at the end, whatever tao lin's intention, reveals itself to be fundamentally unlivable. so like, i think taipei is a masterpiece basically because it is able to capture a certain kind of experience i relate to profoundly but i also think that it feels like the end of...something.

maybe that is just my autobiographical projection though: getting older, vaguely wanting more out of life.

like, it is telling that paul gravitates toward post-humanism: "the computer at the end of the universe... that will render everything irrelevant." i relate to a lot of things about tao lin: his sense of humor, his radical empathy for people whose lives, whatever their level of privilege, suffer greatly, and in an undignified way, and also his self-identification as a marginal sort of person, who cannot take seriously anything in the culture, really, especially on a political level and including various forms of "counterculture", but also can't not take things seriously because he is earnest and empathetic. and so, in this bind, where there is no subject position he feels immediately comfortable inhabiting, paul "absconds" almost, or allows himself to approach this point, from the whole idea of being a human being, invested in human life. and at the end of taipei he catches himself doing this and it scares him (the part about finding he understands the impulse toward "double suicides"). basically at the end of taipei i felt an overwhelming sense that 1.) this is how a certain subset of people live now and 2.) something about this has to change. and that's how i end my review.

ok, i'm done talking about tao lin on the internet till his next book. later.

― Treeship, Friday, July 12, 2013 10:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

i want to engage with cardamon now though, who is saying things that are very interesting to me

one thing i like about taipei is that it represents an extreme, and self-aware version of the kind of hipster despair that characterizes so many "literary" people in our country -- the sort of absurdity that comes from being a person who frantically tries to collect cultural capital in an era when this isn't valued anymore. at the end of my review i say that the extreme vacuity of paul's experience -- his lack of conviction in anything -- at the end, whatever tao lin's intention, reveals itself to be fundamentally unlivable. so like, i think taipei is a masterpiece basically because it is able to capture a certain kind of experience i relate to profoundly but i also think that it feels like the end of...something.

I hear all this.

And it's not even that a writer as distant as Henry James is hard to 'relate to'. I went to see Frederic Raphael talk about his favourite poems (some by Cavafy, Seferis, one by Lorca, T.E. Hume, one that a little girl had written and hidden in her shoe in Buchenwald). And the old silver fox sat there, eloquent, raised-eyebrows, a little combative, extremely cultured. Someone tried to ask him about Stanley Kubrick, but he waved the question away, saying 'But I don't want to talk about movies tonight, guys, I want to talk about poetry tonight'.

I spied from my seat some of the young writers I referenced upthread, in their young writer's uniforms, surrounded by a sea of people in their fifties and sixties, looking bored. Afterwards they were mugging and being ironic about it. And I suppose they were within their rights to be bored if they really wanted to be.

But equally, I thought, they could all just fuck off, because if I can relate to their inability to relate, but still get over my lazy boredom/bored laziness/lazy boringness, which is extreme in my case, and engage (with either a zippy writer from the not-so-long-ago 70s-80s, or with Henry James for that matter) then surely anyone can.

I dislike Zadie Smith mainly for her Dickensian rhythms and richness and sentiment, but I would point to her as someone worth reading just for the pleasure of seeing someone obstinately bothering to create something (a plot, characters, humane concern, witty observations) and I think I basically see Tao Lin and co as people who can't be bothered. Which I can't help but see in light of their privilege, self-promotion and so on. Mine is a silly but slightly justified jealousy for a success which is probably not as secure as it looks.

a writer as distant as Henry James

lol

not loling at u cardamon of course that was the correct phrase in this context, but, yknow, revealing

cardamon you are killing it here fyi

Another traumatic experience I once had was when I went to a reading of competition-winning stories in a room under a bar in one of the fashionable suburbs of where I live.

Now many, many years ago in pop-cultural terms, a singer-songwriter from that same suburb had become famous. And many other singer-songwriters had copied that singer-songwriter to the extent of wearing matching beards and hats. It was definitely a thing, and it was something you might notice if you spent much time in that suburb.

A guest writer, of quite some 'renown', specially invited, got up and gave a tortuous, half-hour long story based around a scenario where all these singer-songwriters were attuned to a kind of hive mind and the hero, who was bored of them, had to knock off the singer-songwriter's iconic hat in order to stop the plague. The audience chuckled.

I sat there fuming, enraged that all the possibilities inherent in 'a short story' had been reduced to a suburb-specific injoke and that this was being treated as 'important'. There was no attempt at judicious phrasing, no attempt at plot as such, just a piece of extremely thin material - the conceit of this guy and his hat - stretched out for thirty minutes.

Renowned guest writer, famous singer-songwriter and suburb shall all remain anonymous.

But this is the omnipresent kind of thing in the culture that makes it hard to like Tao Lin, for me - my patience and energies as a reader turn out to be finite and it's hard to be bothered with someone who seems like someone who can't be bothered.

I'm tapping all this out because I don't think I'm entirely alone in all this.

this is a+ material in why you don't like young writer types in yr city but i'm kind of waiting for the point where it turns into a penetrating crit of taipei, a book i still have not finished

wait lol are you from portland because

i think it's obvious he bothers quite a bit. taipei is very deliberate and constructed. it's not this affectless ironic posture at all

i totally agree with cardamon about most alt lit writing, but i think that tao lin's writing is different, somehow. like, everything that you say you want from literature, which is also what people/i want out of life -- a sense of connection to and interest in the outside world to the extent that you can take joy in storytelling -- figure negatively in lin's work by their profound absence. taipei is about a person who is basically traveling through a waste land -- a world he feels profoundly disconnected to, to the extent that he half-intentionally decides to allow drugs to eat away at his memories -- and most of his thoughts are oriented toward "consoling" himself. the book's form embodies, at one level, wink-nod hipster ambivalence where it seems taboo to care about anything but at the same time all of the characters are suffering immensely, and i think it is this disconnect that makes the book so memorable and troubling. the characters are superficial, they don't care about things, and they don't feel connected to anything, and they are privileged so they can do whatever they want, and yet they find reality extremely oppressive.

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Oh My God

he book's form embodies, at one level, wink-nod hipster ambivalence where it seems taboo to care about anything but at the same time all of the characters are suffering immensely, and i think it is this disconnect that makes the book so memorable and troubling. the characters are superficial, they don't care about things, and they don't feel connected to anything, and they are privileged so they can do whatever they want, and yet they find reality extremely oppressive.

isn't this basically less than zero

kind of but it's more "twee" than less than zero. like, the characters are apathetic but not cold to the suffering of others. they retreat, sheepishly, from the harshness of life in the world. tao lin likes to use the adjective "meekly".

although, that doesn't mean lin's protagonists are nice people. both paul and haley joel osment -- but especially the latter -- can be cruelly passive aggressive.

also the drug use and sex is not aestheticized in a way that makes it seem cool or glamorous at all. and while anti-glamor is its own kind of glamor -- the glamor of "authenticity", of a renunciation of commercial aesthetics -- i think this is a notable difference from the way bret easton ellis would portray sex and drugs. however, i've never read less than zero so my ideas about the differences between taipei and this book are probably less than worthless.

i think you would dig eeee eee eeeee aerosmith. that is an earlier, less cynical novel, and lin writes convincingly, and empathetically about life in suburban florida, where teenage inhabitants often confuse their dissatisfaction with the present conditions of their lives for existential despair about the human condition, and vice versa. i have a real affection for that book because the voice it is written in is unmistakably that of a very young person (lin was 23 when it was published.)

you guys got a little zany in here...

hahaha I dig this thread. It might be too good...

having finished it i am more cautiously pro than i was when i started it, i would say it is like an 8/10 novel maybe

i don't know if i agree that it's "less cynical" than 'eeeee ee eee' -- i think the way that that book is constructed with an event of emotional heft to retroactively justify some of its tone is actually p cynical?

one thing i do feel is that while lin-the-writer seemed to be covering the life-events of 'sam' in 'shoplifting' and 'haley joel osmont' in 'richard yates' with a level of irony, a narratorial distance, an awareness that these events demonstrated that these characters were pretty shitty people, 'taipei' is more normally autobiographical in that it seems more to want to demonstrate and make you empathize with paul's emotional causes for his actions, if not to make you think paul is a good person. whereas the earlier two often omit the interior stuff that would normally do the work of presenting a character's actions as justified at least in that character's own psyche

when i say 'irony' in the above i don't mean irony as in the kind of glibness and refusal-to-commit that people reduce him to and then dismiss as in a lot of the posts upthread (writing a parody of a writer and then pointing out how bad the parody is is a not-great mode of criticism unless your parody is really, really good) -- i am going to say 'flaubertian' in a vague sort of hand-waving way, since i have not read either these books or flaubert since 2010 or so -- and besides this irony isn't the tonic in 'taipei' the way it is in the earlier stuff. it's been replaced by something deeper but probably unhealthier.

it's probably a decade since i read any bret easton ellis but i have described lin as being 'like a bret easton ellis that was actually good' on a couple occasions -- also (and this is for people who are better at doing the american scene to unpack than i am probably) it seems like bee's being an LA person who spent formative years at a NE liberal arts school vs lin's being a suburban florida kid who went to NYU and stayed there thereafter might be pretty operative in their worldviews

heh also i totally appreciate treeship in this thread but

the infinite subtlety of social interactions in henry james' day, when living as an expat meant something, and people had real faith in the validity of their experiences

haha dude

oh, i think eeee eee eeeee is less cynical than taipei. it's very empathetic in its portrayal of that teenage girl, ellen i think her name was, and in general i think it is a far less radical, more relatable depiction of lonely, alienated people than taipei, which depicts the mental experience of a person in the outer reaches of depression, who at times isn't even sure he wants to be human anymore. maybe "cynical" isn't the word: eeee eee eeeee is superficially glib, but there is a pretty clear humane core, and while that is still true of taipei it seems, at times, that it is withering away. of course, by the end of the book with paul's "revelation" it becomes clear that tao lin/paul, in the end, doesn't want to pursue that direction any further... paul is in the novel's final line "surprised to hear himself say he was happy to be alive."

i didn't think this was a cheap moment, personally, i think it is in keeping with tao lin's whole "project". he is at heart a kind of old fashioned novelist -- his main concern, in each of his books, in my view, has been to depict private suffering in a way that doesn't cheapen it, and he has used different devices throughout his career to do this. maybe is lin allowed himself to push taipei further, and allow paul to settle comfortably into his alienation as he fantasizes about doing in taipei very early on in the book, it would be a more radical achievement, but i wouldn't like it as much. the book, in reality, never does more than skirt the abyss because paul's sense of absurd humor anchors him, most of the time, to a more recognizable, relatable kind of consciousness. he is never really as alone as he feels.

part of the "magic" of novels, or certain kinds of novels, is that it allows people to see how their strangest, darkest, most paranoid moments -- when they feel the most isolated -- are things other people have also experienced, and are in fact part of a kind of shared experience. the fact that lots of people can relate to and appreciate kafka is an inspiring thing, really. george orwell said this about dostoevsky: that finding he could relate to raskolnikov, a fucked up antisocial murderer, actually had the effect of making the world seem smaller and less hostile. like, this recognition that even the worst people are people after all... that even if you find yourself thinking that you are the worst person, you are still a person.... this is what orwell found valuable in dostoevsky, and i think a similar thing is at least part of what i find valuable about tao lin.

why do you find that valuable about TAO LIN and not a billion other young authors?

cf. my review and my other posts on this thread.

sorry i don't mean to be glib, but i really shouldn't write more about tao lin on ilx. i don't think people want me to do that.

i do. don't let occasional mockery and sense that you're taking an unpopular position get you down.

contenderizer otm, if you can get a reaction out of people you're prob doing something right

he's great at self-promotion apparently. as far as writing goes what i've seen of TAO LIN doesn't hold a candle to what dylann's been up to in his hotel job thread imho

xxp yes. i liked your comments treeship, made me think twice about checking out tao lin, which is a first.

i meant to write "less cynical than 'taipei'". oops

Yeah I have enjoyed treezy's contributions to this thread but I also think he was right to respond glibly to that dumb question above

i dunno treezy comparing his appreciation for TAO LIN to orwell's appreciation for dostoyevsky sorta called for clarification

let's return to the part where Henry James is distant

xp reggie

the way it connects to the orwell-dostoevsky thing is that i think paul's experience is about a person who slowly recognizes that, lonely as he is, he is not really alone because even his darkest, strangest, moments of despair are a part of his experience of being human, which is what orwell felt when he read dostoevsky.

the book pushes hipster apathy -- a sense of not being able to take things seriously, but at a historical moment when not taking things seriously has lost its subversive charge -- to metaphysical dimensions: paul flirts imaginatively, throughout the novel, with allowing his identity, his memories, all his connections to the world disintegrate. but at the end of the book he kind of comes back down to earth. he hallucinates that he has died and has been sealed into his own imagination, and will have to rebuild the universe from scratch with himself as the starting point, and he realizes... by overhearing himself say a bunch of things (lol harold bloom) -- that this isn't what he wants. disconnected as he feels from society he is, in fact, essentially of it and not a rootless subjectivity. being "happy to be alive" isn't just being happy to exist... the word "alive" implies more than that, in this context. it has something to do with wanting to embrace being a part of the world, i think, but at the end of the novel it isn't clear how paul is going to do that.

Yeah but why do you like it

I think you owe us an explanation of why you think he's a good writer

xp to myself. this sounds melodramatic but that scene at the end. paul keeps saying "i guess i'm just going to have to deal with it" about being sealed inside his mind forever. i think that's another thing you get from the last section: that paul's absurd humor, his ability to detach himself from what he is experiencing, is a thing that has throughout the novel tied him to a humanistic (vague word i know) mode of experiencing reality, and all his intimations of being fundamentally alienated were bullshit, basically. hipsters can pretend they don't care but it's impossible to *actually* live carelessly in a fundamental sense. i want to say something about heidegger here but it's been a long time since i've read heidegger.

lol wins

wait, that last long comment was botched. i meant to say that the last section, as i described it, seems melodramatic, but is actually pretty funny.

thanks everyone for being patient with me as i worked through my ideas about this book which i liked a lot

treeship i don't think you owe anyone an explanation about anything plus i sense more substance in your posts than in anything i've read by TAO LIN so it was puzzling to me why you'd be so taken with the dude. and you've cleared that up, so thanks

Yeah I mean I know I clown you a lot but your last few posts have been easy to understand, I get why you dig the guy.

kind of wish you would stop using the word hipster tho

everybody should stop using the word hipster

except me cuz i'm mad judicious

i would wear that on a shirt

The word hipster is not without its uses. Or maybe... it is.

wait, jonathan franzen said the n-word??

yeah, when he was being interviewed on deakin's right wing radio show.

Franzan's a sweet thoughtful dude, I don't think he would use bad language. Would like to see what he thinks of Tao, would be interesting. He is well read and stuff.

maybe like with movies we need a ratings system for novels, but based on social class instead of age. not sure if it should be by letter or number or color or some other arbitrary index

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-e9ybWTlWFME/T7FMeDoXR7I/AAAAAAAAAE0/zg1C-2ALH2U/s1600/arrested_development_report_card.png

if it's rated bluth people whose parents paid for college/housing would like it?

THAT POST MAKES WATERFACE FEEEL. . . C-

i went to a school that didn't have a grade system

you're lucky. i don't think i believe in grades, except maybe for college or something. even then: for me, they are stressful and anti-motivational.

every semester each of your teachers would write about how you did and all these comments as they were called would all get sent home in a packet

my high school had both grades and comments, and i think it was good to have had the comments.

richard yates is sad sad

It is. It's sort of hilarious too though in its fucked upness, especially the arguments between df's mother and hjo.

The deal with that book, i think, is that the reader slowly realizes that dakota fanning is 16 and all that entails. She is not the sarcastic twentysomething haley joel osment imagines her to be.

What I would say now, two weeks after reading Taipei (it took me two evenings to read it) is that, as gripping as I find tales of young people using drugs, it hasn't left me with much. Maybe it's because whatever insight Tao Lin can offer you is better if you're 12 or 72 years old, but not 25-35.

Last summer about this time I read The Savage Detectives with the same kind of feverish summery heat reading. But that was a book that really left me something. It lasted after I closed the pages. I still think about it here and there and it scares me. Taipei doesn't scare me, it doesn't comfort me, it doesn't really do much of anything once it's done.

"is it, um, a studio apartment?"

this is nice:

After blearily looking at the internet a little, then peeing and brushing his teeth and washing his face, he lay in darkness on his mattress, finally allowing the simple insistence of the opioid, like an unending chord progression with a consistently unexpected and pleasing manner of postponing resolution, to accumulate and expand, until his brain and heart and the rest of him were contained within the same songlike beating -- of another, larger, protective heart -- inside of which, temporarily safe from the outside world, he would shrink into the lunar city of himself and feel and remember strange and forgotten things, mostly from his childhood.

taipei reminds me, as much as anything else, of kazuo ishiguro's the unconsoled. it's true to the what it describes, but what it describes is a single, unvarying moment, that moment sustained well past the point where traditional narrative would demand development or divergence. a key difference between the two novels is that where the unconsoled energizes its eternal now by hanging constantly on a cliffhanger note of desperate incompletion, taipei mires itself in a listless bog of alienation and routine.

i'm finding the experience of reading this almost aggressively unpleasant, but not because it's a "bad novel". i dislike it because i feel helplessly trapped in it, suffocated, and that's clearly the point. whether or not it's a point worth making at this length remains to be seen.

The Unconsoled is fucking dismal!

i look back on it fondly, but the reading experience was an ordeal

Hmm maybe I could reread it, it's been at least 20 years

or nearly that ;)

tbh, i can't imagine rereading it

In Montreal, three days later, beneath a uniformly cloudy expanse which glowed with the same intensity and asbestos-y texture everywhere, seeming less like a sky than the cloud-colored surface of a cold, hollowed-out sun, close enough to obstruct its own curvature, Paul walked slowly and aimlessly, sometimes standing in place...

You made that up,

lol, but no!

Comparing it to The Unconsoled really makes me want to read this.