the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

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.