the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

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.

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.

no one said that Tweeshit

tree also made some credible arguments about the uses to which lin puts his prose style

People said stuff like that waterface.

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.

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.

People just said that there was nothing experimental about Tao Lin, not "you must not have read Beckett, LOL U LOSER."

Different strokes

which reminds me of this classic. funny stuff.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1026/1026-h/1026-h.htm

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

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.

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.

I mean the latter. Clearly his style is very intentional which is why its so distinctive (well.. before it started getting ripped off.)

o cool writing without emotions sounds "great"

You really are a comic genius, huh?

That's what Mom tells me

sweet

*Shreds a sweet guitar solo*

nonsarcastic lol

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

he had committed to not speaking in almost all situations

grammar

what about that phrase is grammatically incorrect?

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, 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

if TAO LIN is our thomas de quincey, who are his wordsworth and coleridge?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhKpaTOG4yg

This guy is both

Kidding!

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

because the farmer
needs it

to carry all the
eggs

you stupid
fucks.

so much depends
upon

parents paying for
NYC

housing glazed with
drugs

and yes tuition
too

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
You Stupid Fucks

this is just to say

I have smoked
the buds
that were in
the cig case

you should have entered that red wheelbarrow "remix" poem in the poetry context, hurting

i think that's the whole point. we are all Tao Lin.

laying on my Ikea mattress
looking for new shirts on my iPad
the delivery man buzzes my door
for the Chinese food I ordered an hour ago

sitting on the top of the stairs
because 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 food
left over from last night.
singapore rice noodles.

site new answers
site new answers
i should do some work now
site new answers
fart

sitting at home
i my underwears
watching wheel of fortune
reading ilx
vanna is so hot
need a snickers

hurting stole my joke

I think that captured something about our generation's predicament
is this still part of my poem?
I am not sure.

once i get a full time job
i am never coming back to this website
you stupid fucks

jk

you are the poem

hurting stole my joke

― waterface, Friday, July 12, 2013 4:15 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

stole? motherfucker I preemptively shocked and awed your joke.

a guy on the internet said I stole his joke
I said that I didn't
fart

treeship
treebutt
treeship
treebutt
treeship
treebutt

not a bad "strategy" i thought
scratched my bellybutton
considered what ilx would be like without "tweeshit"

sometimes i wonder what it would be like to be a website

waterface:
your hostility toward me
seems excessive
and unwarranted
and "insane"

Treeships your idea of hostility
is kind of crazy
i was merely responding
to your joke about quitting ilx

sweet
makes sense
"tweeshit" sounds like a hostile nickname
i was bullied as a child
i think some of the stuff you say is funny
and loled when you compared me to malcolm gladwell once

i also reminded you
that you are the poem

if you can't laugh at tweeshit
what can you laugh at