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.
― cardamon, Friday, 12 July 2013 15:41 (ten years ago) link
it's the poetry of daily life, like if you had a red wheel barrow in your yard and wrote about that.
― Spectrum, Friday, 12 July 2013 15:42 (ten years ago) link
Yeah William Carlos Williams is another writer no-one has any business criticising ever
― cardamon, Friday, 12 July 2013 15:45 (ten years ago) link
Untouchable
Yeah ok whatever
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 15:45 (ten years ago) link
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.
― cardamon, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:14 (ten years ago) link
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.
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:15 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:26 (ten years ago) link
no one said that Tweeshit
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:28 (ten years ago) link
tree also made some credible arguments about the uses to which lin puts his prose style
― twerking for obvious reasons (contenderizer), Friday, 12 July 2013 16:29 (ten years ago) link
People said stuff like that waterface.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:30 (ten years ago) link
I'm on zing so i am not going to find examples, but there was an implication that nothing about lin's style is original and peoplemaking claims about that are overlooking other authors who have already done the same thing.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:31 (ten years ago) link
i don't think the excerpts i read were bad. or written badly. they were interesting. they were more thoughtful than i thought they would be. the stuff about the kid's childhood.
what was the name of that British woman who wrote those mundane diaries of her life? she got some critical acclaim. i think she died recently. kinda want to read those sometime.
― scott seward, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:36 (ten years ago) link
People just said that there was nothing experimental about Tao Lin, not "you must not have read Beckett, LOL U LOSER."
Different strokes
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:37 (ten years ago) link
which reminds me of this classic. funny stuff.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1026/1026-h/1026-h.htm
― scott seward, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:37 (ten years ago) link
Treeship, I'm responding to various pieces of Tao Lin hype and Tao Lin writing which I've been absorbing for a few months. Some of what you said might be a part of that, but I wasn't trying to single you out, hope it didn't look that way. As ever, there's nothing wrong with people liking a thing, but sometimes people put forward arguments for a why a thing should be liked that are open to question
― cardamon, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:49 (ten years ago) link
Fair enough, its just that on this particular thread i was the one who brought up the buddhist thing and who consistently was questioning what people meant by "good" writing so thats why i was defensive.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:51 (ten years ago) link
i'm not sure i understand what you guys are describing as "affectless." i don't necessarily think this style in unaffected at all, & it's maybe naive to consider the conspicuous 'artlessness' of this style to be the absence of affect. it's a pose like any other. it's not one i find particularly endearing or interesting, tho.
on the other hand, if you mean "affectless" as in, having a blunted emotional affect, then yes i think that's right. dude sounds clinically depressed.
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Friday, 12 July 2013 16:55 (ten years ago) link
I mean the latter. Clearly his style is very intentional which is why its so distinctive (well.. before it started getting ripped off.)
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:57 (ten years ago) link
o cool writing without emotions sounds "great"
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 17:02 (ten years ago) link
You really are a comic genius, huh?
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 17:05 (ten years ago) link
That's what Mom tells me
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 17:06 (ten years ago) link
sweet
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 17:07 (ten years ago) link
*Shreds a sweet guitar solo*
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 17:07 (ten years ago) link
nonsarcastic lol
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 17:08 (ten years ago) link
Two months into freshman year he had committed to not speaking in almost all situations. He felt ashamed and nervous around anyone who’d known him when he was popular and unself-conscious. When he heard laughter, before he could think or feel anything, his heart would already be beating like he’d sprinted twenty yards. As the beating slowly normalized he’d think of how his heart, unlike him, was safely contained, away from the world, behind bone and inside skin, held by muscles and arteries in its place, carefully off-center, as if to artfully assert itself as source and creator, having grown the chest to hide in and to muffle and absorb—and, later, after innovating the brain and face and limbs, to convert into productive behavior—its uncontrollable, indefensible, unexplainable, embarrassing squeezing of itself. To avoid awkwardness, and in respect of his apparent aversion to speaking, Paul’s classmates stopped including him in conversations. The rare times he spoke—in classes where no one knew him, or when, without knowing why, for one to forty minutes, he’d become aggressively confident and spontaneous as he’d been in elementary/middle school, about which his friends poignantly would always seem genuinely excited—he’d feel “out of character,” indicating he’d completed a transformation and was now, in a humorlessly surreal way, exactly what he didn’t want to be and wished he wasn’t.
See to GOWF* right here, this sounds like bad DFW.
Good Ol' Watrr Face
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 17:12 (ten years ago) link
he had committed to not speaking in almost all situations
grammar
― cardamon, Friday, 12 July 2013 19:44 (ten years ago) link
what about that phrase is grammatically incorrect?
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 19:46 (ten years ago) link
― cardamon, Friday, July 12, 2013 11:41 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
lol dude, Tao Lin was not on the cover of Time Magazine, he was on the cover of an issue of The Strangler that was a spoof on the Time cover with Franzen
― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), Friday, 12 July 2013 19:49 (ten years ago) link
if TAO LIN is our thomas de quincey, who are his wordsworth and coleridge?
― reggie (qualmsley), Friday, 12 July 2013 19:50 (ten years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhKpaTOG4yg
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 19:51 (ten years ago) link
This guy is both
Kidding!
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 19:53 (ten years ago) link
so much dependsupon
a red wheelbarrow
glazed with rainwater
beside the whitechickens.
because the farmerneeds it
to carry all theeggs
you stupid fucks.
― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), Friday, 12 July 2013 19:55 (ten years ago) link
parents paying forNYC
housing glazed withdrugs
and yes tuition too
― reggie (qualmsley), Friday, 12 July 2013 19:57 (ten years ago) link
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – You Stupid Fucks
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 19:59 (ten years ago) link
this is just to say
I have smoked the buds that were in the cig case
― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), Friday, 12 July 2013 20:00 (ten years ago) link
you should have entered that red wheelbarrow "remix" poem in the poetry context, hurting
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 20:06 (ten years ago) link
i think that's the whole point. we are all Tao Lin.
laying on my Ikea mattresslooking for new shirts on my iPadthe delivery man buzzes my doorfor the Chinese food I ordered an hour ago
― Spectrum, Friday, 12 July 2013 20:07 (ten years ago) link
sitting on the top of the stairsbecause the internet doesn't reach my room anymore, otherwise i would probably be on my ikea mattress,feel "sick and tired" of "defending tao lin"spectrum's comment reminded me to heat up chinese foodleft over from last night. singapore rice noodles.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 20:13 (ten years ago) link
site new answerssite new answersi should do some work nowsite new answersfart
― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), Friday, 12 July 2013 20:14 (ten years ago) link
sitting at homei my underwearswatching wheel of fortunereading ilxvanna is so hotneed a snickers
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 20:15 (ten years ago) link
hurting stole my joke
I think that captured something about our generation's predicamentis this still part of my poem?I am not sure.
― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), Friday, 12 July 2013 20:15 (ten years ago) link
once i get a full time jobi am never coming back to this websiteyou stupid fucks
jk
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 20:15 (ten years ago) link
you are the poem
― waterface, Friday, July 12, 2013 4:15 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
stole? motherfucker I preemptively shocked and awed your joke.
― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), Friday, 12 July 2013 20:16 (ten years ago) link
a guy on the internet said I stole his jokeI said that I didn'tfart
treeshiptreebutttreeshiptreebutttreeshiptreebutt
― ty based gay dead computer god (zachlyon), Friday, 12 July 2013 20:17 (ten years ago) link
not a bad "strategy" i thoughtscratched my bellybuttonconsidered what ilx would be like without "tweeshit"
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 20:17 (ten years ago) link