the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

Not to reactivate an old clusterfuck (lol), but Lin is incredibly attentive to form, especially in Taipei, which feels and sounds unlike anything else. The main character is apathetic to the point of being almost suicidal but it's a mistake to extend that sensibility to Lin's attitude toward his own writing. Imo.

Obviously the tweet reading thing is different and can be called lazy, sure.

xxp OTM

They were funny tweets and everything

I am going to read the new inquiry piece but my kneejerk reaction is that labeling Lins' narrators detachment and lack of cathexis as "aspergers" is missing the point.

The autism spectrum encompasses a very wide spectrum of conditions. Even a good mind like Baren-Cohen(mindblindness quoted in the article) who is a professor of autism cannot box them in like the writer of that article has tried to.

cardamon you were there last night? idk how i feel about ilx melding w/ the real world like that

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ogmor, it was practically a mini ilx meetup

hmm, the thought that i might inadvertently know an ilxor irl is distressing.

If it helps, I've mentally associated your ilx handle with a tall, bearded, friendly northern irish dude

if it helps, i always thought you were an actual troll, from some kind of scandinavian country, like, ethnically troll

Ethnically droll

i feel sorry to disappoint you, but i'm curious about ppl's mental pictures of other ilxors

how was it?

to quote a text i received during the night "like a victorian freakshow, everyone chuckling and clapping at the mentally disabled prancing about onstage" apparently

i must have been downstairs for that bit.

wow

such literatrue

The part of that text that implies an audience being much more into a performance style than any of the actual content, I'd agree with

TNI piece, re non-neurotypicals: "They can speak more freely, see more clearly, and love more truly than we can. They lack the part of us that holds us back."

this is a terrible thing to say in my opinion

There's also a trend whereby people rendered emotionally dysfunctional through substance abuse come to see themselves as on the autism spectrum.

"Oh man, that MDMA made me totes autistic last night"

Also see relationship between hipsterism and self-diagnosed autism spectrum. "My artisanal hand-crafted typewriter ribbon shop isn't doing so well. Why?"

TNI piece, re non-neurotypicals: "They can speak more freely, see more clearly, and love more truly than we can. They lack the part of us that holds us back."

this is a terrible thing to say in my opinion

Whichever vacuous arsewipe wrote that clearly knows less than nothing about autism. Fucking hell. But it isn't much worse than some of the general shittiness you read on ILX about autism.

http://logger.believermag.com/post/60186486815/michael-w-clune-my-experience-with-addiction

Sid Meier’s Civilization

i feel like i've wasted my life, i feel like i've wasted something bigger, i feel like i've wasted a minute or two dreaming of something other

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/how-to-be-considerate-on-the-internet/

i like the way he writes but the subject matter is so nothing. i was trying not to dislike the book because if i convince myself i might like it i will finish it. treeship's posts have convinced me this book is not for me because he is a young person and i am not.

i can finish it though. i am 46% done.

aw that was the opposite of my intention

my college advisor who is like 75 i think claimed to really like my review and i was worried she was going to actually try to read the book and be like "wtf is this" and then cut off contact with me.

I'm right about where you are, harbl, also an old. I am liking it more and more as I go. I suppose I should say I am "liking" it. At the very least I'm glad I'm reading it.

i'm 28 btw. i'm just telling myself i'm not part of this kind of books.

well i'll be 29 in 2 weeks. gulp.

28 isn't old ffs

- a 28yo

Oh yeah no you're not old, I'm talking past 40. 28 is how old many of the characters in Taipei are!

it's barely older than me

40 isn't old either. leonard cohen is 79 i think and he says that he has only experienced the "outer reaches" of old age so far, and is hesitant to say that he truly knows what it feels like to be "old."

ya I've said this a few times but ilx has a really really stupid conception of age (everyone under 30 a "kid", everyone over 28 "old"); I thought at first it was a lack of perspective but now I just think it's an inability to basic fucking arithmetic

*to do

yeah i guess i'm just stupid

treeship will understand when he is my age, though

i did end up kind of liking this. i'm 88% done now. it got good between 46% and 66%

i bought this book cos of riveting ilxor discussion and i have not read it yet but i have used it to kill a fly that was bothering me for like 2 days

Tao would approve.

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.

― scott seward, Wednesday, July 10, 2013 12:55 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark

this has to be the most depressing book ever written.

OK just finished Taipei, really liked it!

I've also just finished Taipei. The first 50 or so pages were great and it really felt like Lin was trying to detach himself from the intentionally detached style of Bed or Richard Yates, with all those page long descriptions of emotions etc...then it kind of becomes Lin-by-rote. On a prose level I was still interested - whoever upthread, possibly Scott, mentioned it seeming trancelike which is something I a) agree with and b) really like about it - but I don't know how much more I can take about people livetweeting the X Men movie and listing drugs they've taken. A tiny part of me is jealous that I don't have that lifestyle despite having a nominally similar lifestyle to the characters he writes about.

A year ago now I wrote the VICE piece on alt lit being the worst thing ever (http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/alt-lit-is-the-worst-thing-to-happen-to-literature) which, in that world, was a weirdly big deal (and likely the only thing I'll ever write that people actually respond to critically) and I still stand by it. I don't what it is about Tao Lin that makes me want to keep reading him but there's something there.

for some reason my reaction when i saw this revived was a fear he'd killed himself