the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

i enjoyed reading tao lin essentially because it reminded me of depraved msn messenger chats i had throughout high school. i think it's obvious why an entire literary genre based on the premise would suffer diminishing returns...

"I don't what it is about Tao Lin that makes me want to keep reading him but there's something there."

There's a certain lack of guile in it that however uninteresting the writing, I never get the sense that the author is uninterested, which is pretty rare I think in self-conscious lit, but not so rare in MSN chats.

The comment threads on his blog circa 2008 should haunt some of the writers who posted there...

i think i finally get Tao Lin. he's like an experiment/prank on cultural consumerism. people will trudge through incredibly boring, technically poor writing for the sake of reinforcing a particular kind-of social status. i'd like to imagine him reading these comments and snickering to himself.

That's not it at all.

~technically poor writing~

poor tao lin, there's just something about him that gets me at my worst. what a nerdy foible to have. i'd like to strike my last comment.

you can't. the internet is an unbreakable stone tablet.

i can totally understand how someone would be repelled by tao lin though. he kind of invites that response, and there is a real bitterness to the way he engages -- or doesn't -- with critics by saying stuff like "there is no good or bad in art", which is just a way for him to cauterize discussions and continue to write novels without coming down one way or the other on whether or not it -- or anything -- is a valuable pursuit. it's kind of like, an adolescent perversion of zen, the way he thinks, and it is unnerving how many people are imitating, right down to (it seems) his drug use. the only reason i have any time for him is that i love each of his novels, which in addition to being funny and moving are compassionate and not bitter at all.

also i know you were being facetious spectrum, but it should be mentioned that the last thing tao lin is doing is cultural commentary or satire. he is a very traditional novelist in that the only thing he wants to do, really, is represent private experience in ways that are tough to communicate through other media. this is true even of the earlier, surreal stuff, and richard yates which has a gimmicky title and character names. the latter novel is simply about growing to find you have truly hurt a person you thought you were close to, but never really understood well at all.

this fuckin guy

https://twitter.com/tao_lin/status/455842609869496320/photo/1

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BlN6cEMCIAAin0P.png

Yeah. Reading Taipei, it's obvious he has no ear. The sentences are modular. They're built from parts based on what information they give, with virtually no consideration of style and prosody.

dude probably never took a poetry class

that's the most embarrassing thing i've read by him.

Thread titles like this're a terrible idea

ftr i think his writing implies a highly refined awareness of meter. taipei's awkward, unbalanced sentences are perfect for the kind of experience they describe. i even think they're beautiful, but i am opening myself up to zings by continuing to defend lin after he made this statement about writing never being musical because it lacks timbre and pitch.

I'm just wondering which wu-tang song he was thinking about and not knowing which song he meant kind of proves his point in a way.

Richard Yates is still good. Infuriating, but good. I like how he incorporates scenes of ultra-contemporary living without smirking or self-consciousness or DeLillo-style censure, and without trying too hard to aestheticize the contemporaneity.

It's to Tao Lin's credit that he can write with such objectivity about the shitty behavior in his recent past. Even though the events are fictionalized, I think he's fair to everyone involved; I don't get the impression that he makes anything up, or flatters himself, or makes fun of anyone. And the story is an uncommon one, so just telling it honestly makes it worthwhile to me.

The opacity of the narration almost hides some of the workings of the plot, such as when HJO is reading Disturbing the Peace, and how that triggers (or furthers?) his preoccupation with mental health and his distrust of mental health professionals. At least that's how I remember it. I still think that Tao Lin is stylistically tone deaf, but beyond that his craft is admirable.

http://glasgowreviewofbooks.com/2014/04/03/this-is-alt-lit-anomie-in-the-age-of-social-networks/

But what is its goal? One commenter to Kiesling’s piece suggests that “Tao is attempting to expose […] Internet-reliant culture and nihilism.” Maybe so, but “expose” suggests an enlightenment, a philosopher-adventurer breaking the chains that bind us (and that us only applies if you identify as a doped-up internet-obsessed millennial hipster, which by the way I do) to our digital and chemical mania. Lin likes the chains; he aesthetically and philosophically embraces them. Kiesling complains that Lin doesn’t pathologise his protagonist’s drug use; she fails to realise that this drug use is not for pathologising. It’s an aesthetic – drugs and internet FTW. It takes another “codger,” Stan Persky in the Los Angeles Review of Books, to hit the suitably affectless nail on the head: “Lin’s book is your standard once-a-generation report on youth anomie.” Persky may prefer the “previous report” – Douglas Coupland’s Generation X – because “the content of the anomie [ is] more interesting,” but I want to know about the content of our anomie. Here, Lin’s crossover-hit reportage will only get us so far; we had better go underground to the scene he helped create, wilfully chaining ourselves before the shadows that flicker in the cave called alt lit. To this end I’ll be investigating the anomic content of three products of the alt lit “community,” each more “alt” than the last (in form at least): Mira Gonzalez’s poetry book i will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together, Steve Roggenbuck’s free pdf IF YOU DONT LOVE THE MOON YOUR AN ASSHOLE, and the open-submissions Tumblr blog Internet Poetry, edited by Michael Hessel-Mial.

Anomie is the default mode of existence in Gonzalez’s collection, the title alone of which suggests a formula for “mutual dependence” broken beyond repair. The poet has a flair for titles, with another giving a succinct diagnosis of the problem: “I feel more lonely when I am with people than I do when I am alone looking at the internet.” She is most visible when, as Durkheim puts it, “not clearly visible.” As Gonzalez elsewhere recognises, this constitutes a “semi-humorous paradox” (another great title) to which one can only respond with “stimuli of a certain intensity”:

would you put some coffee ground on your tongue

and then put your tongue in my hand

in my dream I watched you masturbate

while floating 5 inches above you

I was invisible until I kissed your mouth

will you let me do that tomorrow afternoon

I will text you

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/when-i-moved-online.html?_r=0
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/19010/1/tao-lin-predicts-the-future-maybe

haha he's so wet

i forgot about this guy

i have a lot of trouble putting a finger on what exactly it is about tao lin's writing that puts me off. i read taipei, and i felt like there were some well written sentences (both style and content -wise) and he has some good thoughts but by and large i thought it was pretty devoid of value. i get the existential emptiness of the decadence of well off youth in the big city, but it really doesn't resonate with me on any level. i worry that the only artistic representations of 'my generation' (vomit) are the products of folks in lin's milieu - drug guzzling, tragically hip youths who are unable to form emotional attachments because of an endemic and permanent disaffection with whomever they're currently involved. this isn't my experience or the experience of anyone i know. his book reminds me of this horrible movement in advertising/marketing to brand youth to labels ("my generation is blowing up right now because LEVIS"). like all that matters is the appearance of depth and meaning.

apologies about this post - i'm not sure if it makes any sense. i have difficulty putting to words

tao lin seems to me the equivalent of john gruber on the apple thread:

-I don't have any particular problem with his writing but...
-I don't know why he's popular
-I don't know why people hate him (the explanations people give don't make a lot of sense)
-It shouldn't be difficult to write better, if he's that bad
-People also find the alternatives terrible

The only explanation that makes sense is that they've both chosen to write in a specific genre that is intrinsically both hateworthy and attention-getting, and the actual person involved is sort of an irrelevant circumstance.

in contrast, jj abrams actually has some kind of agency in the hate directed towards him.

Tao Lin is really good at writing about people who want to connect with others but can't, or otherwise flee from opportunities to do so either through drugs, the internet, or antisocial behavior. I don't think the protagonist in Taipei thinks he'll find "depth and meaning" by retreating into himself (as he did in hs) or escaping himself (through drugs). He's just looking for some sense of emotional security and the banality of this desire, which for him is all-consuming, is what makes the book so bleak. I disagree with the idea that his characters are tragically hip or are experiencing a form of anomie that is specific to urbanites or the privileged.

5 Dreams/Nightmares I Had In 2013
by Tao Lin

http://thoughtcatalog.com/tao-lin/2014/07/5-dreamsnightmares-i-had-in-2013/

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-20/reviews/nobodys-protest-novel/

Good article I think but long and behind a paywall. I have a copy of the issue but haven't finished it yet.

lol someone sent me that and their login and i just, i still haven't even opened a tab

It's not as if there aren't grounds on which to criticize Lin's work, but before I leave this place, it really must be said that to recycle, when reviewing the first great male Aisan author of American descent, relentlessly and without even the slightest consideration, the same slurs typically aimed at Asian males by white Americans to deface and devalue them socially -- this comes off as a desperate and disorganized, even downright illiterate attempt to erase not just his greatness as an artist, but all the struggle to be human he's invested in his art -- invested there and only there, because there was nowhere in this culture he could take it but the art of words, faceless as he is. Abstractions though you are, you still hold all the power, and so I'm asking anyway: Tell me, if you know, you white American reviewers, section leaders, incurious overseers -- how the fuck can you do so much to create a monster, then try to take away all he has left -- his status as unique?

^ taken from the n+1 article

i figured out why I don't like Lin so much: he shows us the ugliness of modern living, that we all know is there, and just leaves it at that. it's like if someone walked into a room, farted in your face, and then peaced out. there's nothing interesting about that unless you're a masochist or something. now i understand why i want to punch this guy in the back of the head.

i thought this article was interesting because tao lin has made a point, it seems, of not addressing his asian identity in his books, or interrogating how that might have related to the alienation and hostility he describes feeling from his peers growing up in suburban florida. also, in his first novel, having characters murder jhumpa lahiri seemed like a symbolic attack on the idea that rediscovering one's ethnic roots was a necessary path for self-discovery for second generation immigrants in america. and yet, i do think race plays a role in his books up to and including taipei, partly by its conspicuous absence, as if bringing it into the picture would fatally weigh down his already overloaded analyses of social interactions, and also in these other ways that frank guan describes. i know i am sort of alone on these boards in thinking tao lin a major author, but if you are interested in him at all i don't think this article should be missed.

yeah, i'm being unfair to him again. i don't know what gets me about this guy! maybe he reminds me of someone i used to know.

i figured out why I don't like Lin so much: he shows us the ugliness of modern living, that we all know is there, and just leaves it at that. it's like if someone walked into a room, farted in your face, and then peaced out. there's nothing interesting about that unless you're a masochist or something. now i understand why i want to punch this guy in the back of the head.

― Spectrum, Wednesday, August 13, 2014 7:31 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't know, i think just showing it makes me feel better, less alone

i don't know, i guess i can relate to what he writes, and it makes me angry for some reason. i rag on him for x, y, or z, but i've lived a pretty similar x, y, and z at different points in my life. maybe he just touches a nerve with me with that.

he is unrelenting, it's true. this article discusses the ways in which tao lin is a "monster" in terms of the smug, passive aggressive way he interacts with critics and fans, but also describes how these things, ultimately, and intentionally or not, are in the service of an asethetic end that feels urgent.

n.b. i've only interacted with tao lin once but he seemed like a lovely guy to me

that was just on twitter though

i know i am sort of alone on these boards in thinking tao lin a major author

nah me too but i don't like to admit it so much

As he spoke I noticed, what had often struck me before in his conversations with my grandmother's sisters, that whenever he spoke of serious matters, whenever he used an expression which seemed to imply a definite opinion upon some important subject, he would take care to isolate, to sterilise it by using a special intonation, mechanical and ironic, as though he had put the phrase or word between inverted commas, and was anxious to disclaim any personal responsibility for it; as who should say "the 'hierarchy,' don't you know, as silly people call it." But then, if it was so absurd, why did he say the 'hierarchy'? A moment later he went on: "Her acting will give you as noble an inspiration as any masterpiece of art in the world, as—oh, I don't know—" and he began to laugh, "shall we say the Queens of Chartres?" Until then I had supposed that his horror of having to give a serious opinion was something Parisian and refined, in contrast to the provincial dogmatism of my grandmother's sisters; and I had imagined also that it was characteristic of the mental attitude towards life of the circle in which Swann moved, where, by a natural reaction from the 'lyrical' enthusiasms of earlier generations, an excessive importance was given to small and precise facts, formerly regarded as vulgar, and anything in the nature of 'phrase-making' was banned. But now I found myself slightly shocked by this attitude which Swann invariably adopted when face to face with generalities. He appeared unwilling to risk even having an opinion, and to be at his ease only when he could furnish, with meticulous accuracy, some precise but unimportant detail. But in so doing he did not take into account that even here he was giving an opinion, holding a brief (as they say) for something, that the accuracy of his details had an importance of its own. I thought again of the dinner that night, when I had been so unhappy because Mamma would not be coming up to my room, and when he had dismissed the balls given by the Princesse de Léon as being of no importance. And yet it was to just that sort of amusement that he was devoting his life. For what other kind of existence did he reserve the duties of saying in all seriousness what he thought about things, of formulating judgments which he would not put between inverted commas; and when would he cease to give himself up to occupations of which at the same time he made out that they were absurd?

No shit wow

It's a bit like DFW, but wrung of all wit and playfulness.

YOU'RE like DFW wrung of all wit and playfulness

The most promising elderly American writer is... Aimless?

haha er are people reacting to my quote because my quote is not tao lin

Misunderstandings can arise when you fail to attribute quotes.

i think the balls given by the princesse de léon should've tipped you off.

balls tripped by TAO of LIN

Swann Lin

if only proust could have lived long enough to learn about wit and playfulness from dfw

my claim is that t.l. is sort of like swann in love if it were written by swann, i guess, and also that that's a strength