i dunno treezy comparing his appreciation for TAO LIN to orwell's appreciation for dostoyevsky sorta called for clarification
― reggie (qualmsley), Saturday, 13 July 2013 17:09 (ten years ago) link
let's return to the part where Henry James is distant
― first I think it's time I kick a little verse! (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 13 July 2013 17:24 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Treeship, Saturday, 13 July 2013 18:19 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Treeship, Saturday, 13 July 2013 18:26 (ten years ago) link
Yeah but why do you like it
― ^do not heed if you rate me (wins), Saturday, 13 July 2013 18:28 (ten years ago) link
I think you owe us an explanation of why you think he's a good writer
― ^do not heed if you rate me (wins), Saturday, 13 July 2013 18:29 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Treeship, Saturday, 13 July 2013 18:33 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Treeship, Saturday, 13 July 2013 18:34 (ten years ago) link
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
― reggie (qualmsley), Saturday, 13 July 2013 19:00 (ten years ago) link
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
― waterface, Saturday, 13 July 2013 19:22 (ten years ago) link
everybody should stop using the word hipster
― twerking for obvious reasons (contenderizer), Saturday, 13 July 2013 20:59 (ten years ago) link
except me cuz i'm mad judicious
i would wear that on a shirt
― BIG HOOS aka the denigrated boogeyman (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Sunday, 14 July 2013 22:23 (ten years ago) link
The word hipster is not without its uses. Or maybe... it is.
― Treeship, Monday, 15 July 2013 01:35 (ten years ago) link
wait, jonathan franzen said the n-word??
― i also enjoy in line skateing (spazzmatazz), Monday, 15 July 2013 19:34 (ten years ago) link
yeah, when he was being interviewed on deakin's right wing radio show.
― Treeship, Monday, 15 July 2013 19:39 (ten years ago) link
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.
― waterface, Monday, 15 July 2013 19:42 (ten years ago) link
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
― reggie (qualmsley), Monday, 15 July 2013 20:43 (ten years ago) link
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-e9ybWTlWFME/T7FMeDoXR7I/AAAAAAAAAE0/zg1C-2ALH2U/s1600/arrested_development_report_card.png
― Treeship, Monday, 15 July 2013 20:45 (ten years ago) link
if it's rated bluth people whose parents paid for college/housing would like it?
― reggie (qualmsley), Monday, 15 July 2013 20:59 (ten years ago) link
THAT POST MAKES WATERFACE FEEEL. . . C-
― waterface, Monday, 15 July 2013 21:00 (ten years ago) link
i went to a school that didn't have a grade system
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Tuesday, 16 July 2013 03:37 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Treeship, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 03:39 (ten years ago) link
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
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Tuesday, 16 July 2013 03:39 (ten years ago) link
my high school had both grades and comments, and i think it was good to have had the comments.
― Treeship, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 03:41 (ten years ago) link
richard yates is sad sad
― i also enjoy in line skateing (spazzmatazz), Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:27 (ten years ago) link
It is. It's sort of hilarious too though in its fucked upness, especially the arguments between df's mother and hjo.
― Treeship, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 02:04 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Treeship, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 02:06 (ten years ago) link
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.
― fields of salmon, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 02:39 (ten years ago) link
"is it, um, a studio apartment?"
― i also enjoy in line skateing (spazzmatazz), Thursday, 18 July 2013 21:38 (ten years ago) link
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.
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Sunday, 21 July 2013 02:18 (ten years ago) link
The Unconsoled is fucking dismal!
― albvivertine, Sunday, 21 July 2013 02:57 (ten years ago) link
i look back on it fondly, but the reading experience was an ordeal
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Sunday, 21 July 2013 03:00 (ten years ago) link
Hmm maybe I could reread it, it's been at least 20 years
― albvivertine, Sunday, 21 July 2013 03:02 (ten years ago) link
or nearly that ;)
tbh, i can't imagine rereading it
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Sunday, 21 July 2013 03:07 (ten years ago) link
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...
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Sunday, 21 July 2013 03:13 (ten years ago) link
You made that up,
― fields of salmon, Sunday, 21 July 2013 11:33 (ten years ago) link
lol, but no!
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Sunday, 21 July 2013 13:03 (ten years ago) link
Comparing it to The Unconsoled really makes me want to read this.
― Plasmon, Sunday, 21 July 2013 15:35 (ten years ago) link
i should read that. one for the list.
― Treeship, Sunday, 21 July 2013 15:43 (ten years ago) link
they're alike only in that both describe the confines of a solipsistic bubble. in the unconsoled, the protagonist's desperate internal state is mirrored by his ever-shifting nightmare environment. taipei's paul, otoh, wallows in depressive self-absorption.
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Sunday, 21 July 2013 15:51 (ten years ago) link
Man I've been wanting to read the Unconsoled for, like, five years now.
― Drugs A. Money, Sunday, 21 July 2013 17:22 (ten years ago) link
i'm jealous of the version of myself in the alternate reality where the internet does not exist who has read all the books he planned to read
― Treeship, Sunday, 21 July 2013 17:48 (ten years ago) link
http://www.bearparade.com/hikikomori/
epistolary fiction thing by tao lin and ellen kennedy (the alleged model for dakota fanning in richard yates). the premise is that the two correspondents are depressed and never leave their bedrooms and write to each other about their surreal experiences.
― Treeship, Monday, 22 July 2013 19:00 (ten years ago) link
so it's about ILX
― undescended listicle (Hurting 2), Monday, 22 July 2013 19:01 (ten years ago) link
That is horrible, I just threw up all over my keybard, thanks a lot Barfship
― waterface, Monday, 22 July 2013 19:03 (ten years ago) link
;-)
― Treeship, Monday, 22 July 2013 19:03 (ten years ago) link
man, I just looked up this ellen kennedy person's poetry, and one thing I can at least say for her is that her writing is worse than tao lin's
― undescended listicle (Hurting 2), Monday, 22 July 2013 19:07 (ten years ago) link