the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

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.

tl;dr, the malaise depicted in taipei was something that was socially relevant. it was about living a life without expectations, adrift from the social norms that used to give at least a gloss of meaning to experience (his parents were on a different continent, he was only a "writer" by default, seeming to have no serious passion for his creative work, etc.) i think the "solution" he is trying to move toward -- you know, 'rejecting society,' freeing one's mind with psychedelics -- is false and dangerous. despair curdling into paranoia.

i mean, i am going to read the book, but i don't think terrence mckenna has the answers, and i think his eagerness to spread stuff like 9/11 conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine stuff, is evidence of a mind that is just kind of railing against the world in all directions.

as an artist, he isn't required to propose a "way out" of the "dead end" of his novel, but he is kind of trying to do that, and in a way that doesn't seem super hopeful.

I don't know about that... he's just living & eating in a more healthy way. Whether it's as socially relevant is immaterial to me. I'd rather him stay alive and maybe write more mediocre work than keep burrowing into pills and hard drugs and becoming Bret Easton Ellis. I don't know how you can find what he's doing "dangerous" or especially "false" - what's your opinion of Terrence McKenna? I don't think he has all the answers either but he wasn't a charlatan. Tao seems happier now, and not really "pushy" w/r/t/ how other people should be.

what he is doing isn't actually dangerous. but i don't think organic foods and psychedelics are enough to break through the knot of meaninglessness that has always been his subject. i think that would require some sort of ethical orientation toward the world based on responsibility (what "existentialism" said, which his original title said he moved "beyond"), not the liberation of consciousness through drugs.

i don't have answers either i just am skeptical of new age "free your mind" stuff, especially when it has to do with conspiracies

I would argue against spreading anti-vax beliefs and other pseudoscience is in fact dangerous

xp also i don't want him to keep doing drugs for the sake of "authenticity." i, boringly, hate all drugs.

err: argue against....being not dangerous

no, you're right. i think 9/11 conspiracy stuff is "dangerous" too in the vague sense that it's putting more nonsense and confusion into the public sphere. but i don't think tao lin has a following -- he's becoming like one of these new age contrarians.

anti-vax stuff is easily one of the most dangerous conspiracy theories in existence. 9/11 nonsense is comparatively harmless unless you're stuck talking to one of those ppl at a party or something.

i don't think it does much good for the civic health of society tho

that's true, but but i sort of see it as coming from a different place than anti-vax conspiracies. tbh i've always felt it was kind of an inevitable response to bush and cheney's mendacious use of their own 9/11 conspiracy theory (that saddam was involved) to start a war. it's misguided but i don't really hear truther talk much anymore, except on twitter (where you can find p much every kind of talk going on at all times).

I disagree about 9/11 conspiracy theories. 1) it's a form of coping, people trying to 'figure out' something beyond comprehension, and 2) im not a truther but do you believe 100% of the official story? finding mohammad atta's passport on the **street**!! but not the plane's black box?? one example... mostly harmless, unlike anti-vax or pizzagate. to say 9/11 discussion is bad for civic health of society is completely wrong imo, and scares me. it's a valid topic of discussion. why that and not JFK? or pick yr poison...

jfk and 9/11 conspiracy theories are both significant drains on the US GDP imo

smart people could be doing much better things with their time, like inventing whatever the pretzel version of the epi-baguette is

Insane hyperbole, I mean come on... Xbox is a drain on the GDP.

i don't like that argument. i support unprofitable activities if they are personally enriching.

right. like 9/11 speculation

flappy i really just mean the "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" crowd, or the ppl who think that the towers were vaporized from space or something. i think there are most likely legitimate issues w/ the 9/11 commission report (the example you note does sound strange to me, and i've read accounts of cheney's actions that day that seem weird) but the noise of the truthers has sort of made it difficult to look at w/o looking like an idiot, which has probably discouraged serious ppl from paying attention. which is a problem!

jfk is a different story tho, fuck the warren commission and everything else allen dulles ever got his evil mitts on.

Right, also we're getting to the point where kids born after 9/11 are making jet fuel can't melt steel beams jokes & arguments. I have friends that were just barely too young to have any memory of the day, which is insane to me. So the silliness of the meme blots out serious consideration. Noise of the truthers is not hard to block out, although I agree bringing it up in casual conversation is fucking stupid. it's weird, JFK hasn't been memed in the same way, that's the only conspiracy theory that's acceptable to believe in the mainstream in America.

Not weird at all. When JFK was shot, there was no internet, and no meme culture/meme communication.

https://media.giphy.com/media/UH6KH5JebAb5e/200.gif

What does that have to do with it being acceptable to question the warren report? there are plenty of other contemporary conspiracy theories that are not widely accepted or known

Just saying I'm p sure 9/11 will be the same re: most people questioning the official story

Guys wtf I left you alone for hours where is the goddamn pretzel baguette hybrid that’s going to disrupt my lunch forever

will my aunt in law someday eschew david "avocado" wolfe memes in favor of tao lin memes?

I just finished Trip, it was really good. Definitely my favorite book of his and probably his best work. I like that it was non-fiction and functioned almost as a companion piece/semi-sequel to Taipei, as that book (like almost all of his work) is very thinly veiled autobiography/memoir. I appreciated the fact that it's not a judgmental book, there's no anti-vaxxer stuff in it, and it's not gloomy or soul-crushing. One can find and access happiness without going off the grid and living in the woods or the jungle drinking ayahuasca. I think it works best as a book about addiction and recovery, and I found the whole journey and particularly the ending very moving. Probably won't sway anyone that doesn't like him or his writing, but who knows. It's certainly the most unfettered and least pretentious of his books by a long shot.

Attn: flappy bird. I take back the stuff I said before. The drug book is good.

It’s not making me into a terrence mckenna supporter but as a work of nonfiction literature—part memoir, part biography, part speculative philosophy book but structured according to his own journey back from nihilism— it’s very good. Every formal choice comes from a place of authenticity, just like taipei

yeah I loved how the book is really about recovery. glad you got around to it and stuck with it.

have read everything of his but could not go to bat for him until Trip. thankfully he's become a writer beyond his disaffected early style. it's a beautiful, sincere book. related; anyone reading Liveblog by megan o'boyle?

Didn't know it was finally out. Will check out asap

I wonder how pissed/sad he is when he sees Virgil Abloh “doing” “scare quotes” as an “aesthetic.”