the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

Treeship
are you
"drugs?"

i used to live there
too,
treeship

i am going to move
somewhere like that,
probably not super close to the L
because that shit
is expensive

waterface:
i don't do drugs
anymore,
really

no Treeship
what I meant was
you seem to be all of the places
Tao Lin was doing drugs
so i was thinking
"Maybe Treeship is drugs."

maybe we can summon him to appear like the chrisagis brothers.

we must make an offering to him. we'll need insense, a plate of research chemicals, and an Apple product. with our collective dissatisfaction over 21st century urban life combined, I think we can do it.

taoooooooooooo
taoooooooooooo
taooooooooooooooooooooooooo

waterface,
shit
wait
hm
no,
i remembered:
i am not drugs
i am a human being,
who is male,
and born in the state of new york
in 1989,
according to my passport
and drugs
don't have passports

spectrum:
tweet a link to this thread
to tao lin
and he will probably make an account
and show up.
i don't want to do that though,
because he will act in his characteristic, schticky manner
and i will look insane
to other ilxors
for arguing that "this guy" is a great novelist,
which is something i believe anyway
and won't back down from
on the strength of taipei and
richard yates

are either of those novels as good as 'a game of thrones'?

hahahaha

these fake tao lin poems
all end wrong
my asshole itches

i have never read game of thrones
because i don't read fantasy, usually,
or haven't since i took an entire seminar
on the lord of the rings
in high school
so i can't comment on that.
however,
regardless,
i am going to say
yes
xp

fwiw I like this excerpt:
http://www.vice.com/read/an-excerpt-from-tao-lins-taipei

no it's just that i started taking photos of the floor, looking at the floor through my phone and zooming in on the carpet, which was kinda filthy and hadn't been vacuumed since last year probably, and you could still see where the stain where the fish tank had broken had spilled smelly algae fishwater everywhere and it didn't dry for a week and the whole place stan. that was the day when my brother went to the hospital again, but i was thinking about tao lin and how i never even read anything he wrote except for maybe a couple poems on a blog that was linked off a message board that i post on sometimes when i'm bored at work. it was weird to think about how i have been on this board so long, since i was in NYU actually, like tao lin actually, even though i left new york after college and still have friends there but don't think i want to live there again but then i started a lazy approximation of his writing style and posted it on the board and refreshed the page a few times waiting to see what people thought, if it was funny or what

it's funny but not "funny"

it has a breathless quality

remove bookmark
from this
thread

"Never trust a writer who whiles away their time reading bout themselves, while throwing one off". Some wise fucker once said that to me.

tao lin has a tattoo that says
"fuck america,"
allegedly.

http://www.taolin.info/2009/07/i-desecrated-my-body-to-promote-my.html

the comments on that vice excerpt tho

Andrew Goldspink Smith · Keele University
Looks set to be an important book.
Reply · Like · Follow Post · May 29 at 2:03pm

"i desecrated my body" wow edgy tattoo man but "whatever"

i just think its weird for him not to mention that james joyce had the exact same tattoo

ok this guy

i just paged through hsi tumblr and lol forever

ok, i'm done talking about tao lin on the internet till his next book. later.

Goodbye Waterface

“I won,” said Chelsea’s dad, and went to give Chelsea a high-five, but missed, as they were standing too close.

“My fault,” he said. “That was my fault.”

“Oh,” Chelsea said.

And he stepped back a little and tried again, but Chelsea, distracted now by something—maybe the plant in the far corner, standing and waiting like a person in a dream; or maybe the green shoe or some other thing that was out there and longing, to be looked at, and taken—wasn’t ready, and their hands, his then hers, passed through the air in a kind of wave, a little goodbye.

Goodbye TreeShips
Though I never knew you at all
You had the grace to hold yourself
While those around you crawled
They crawled out of the woodwork
And they whispered into your brain
They set you on the treadmill
And they made you change your name

And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in
And I would have liked to have known you
But I was just a kid
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did

Loneliness was tough
The toughest role you ever played
Hollywood created a superstar
And pain was the price you paid
Even when you died
Oh the press still hounded you
All the papers had to say
Was that Treeships was found in the nude

And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in
And I would have liked to have known you
But I was just a kid
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did

Goodbye Tweeships
Though I never knew you at all
You had the grace to hold yourself
While those around you crawled

Goodye Treesjits
From the young man in the 22nd row
Who sees you as something more than sexual
More than just Tao Lin's publicist

And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in
And I would have liked to have known you
But I was just a kid
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did

And I would have liked to have known you
But I was just a kid
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did
You Stupid Fucks

much love to the young man in the 22nd row who sees me as something more than sexual.

this thread got me curious about the alt lit writer who went to my college and wrote an alt lit book which included a bunch of imagined sex scenes with friends of mine and he super-excitedly met alt lit superstar tao lin at a muumuu house reading and apparently he's pretty popular in the alt lit world now and did some thing with kitty pryde idk

i don't think becoming popular in this (very small) world involves much more than the right kind of self-promotion and i do think in 30 years lit scholars will revere it almost like the fucking beats if only because lit scholars need to cling to some evolution of lit (esp. young tortured male lit) that goes further than boring grad school novels/poetry and this is movement with the best branding

which is to say waaah waaah waaah i will never be as popular as these people

Pretty sad to have a go at someone who genuinely gets excited about about a writer you don't like, Waterface.

In that manner. I meant to say.

none of the fake tao lin poetry on this thread reads v much like tao lin poetry

i agree with that.

Pretty sad to have a go at someone who genuinely gets excited about about a writer you don't like, Waterface.

― Damo Suzuki's Parrot, Friday, July 12, 2013 11:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Treeship's a big boy and he handeld himself fine.

Part of the problem for
me is that
outside of my ilx 'life' I
go to a lot of readings and try
to support new writing in my
city as much as I can and

so many people
no but so many people
but seriously like all of them

try to 'do' the banal, the awkward,
the cute, in their stories and novels -
not like this fake 'tao lin poem'
that doesn't even resemble a tao lin poem
but very close to taipei

and it is boring crushingly boring
and one watches them building a profile
rising from being 'english students'
through the stages until they become
'published novellists'

and the thing is
i know this sounds inherently smug

but FFS they could read a book occasionally
you know bit of joseph conrad henry james
i dunno i'm not prescriptive
but it's very obvious they don't really like
words
books
novels stories poems stuff like that

they're basically reading-orientated
kind of operating in an interzone between
stand up and fiction
when it's not funny they have the 'it's fiction' excuse
when it's not well written they have the 'it's comedy' excuse

none of this is made explicit
it's all implied in the general atmosphere

and you go out for a cigarette halfway through
glaring at the ground because it's that boring

by reading-orientated i mean
them doing performances all the time
i don't mean they orient themselves around reading

obvs. But

it's like why the fuck would you portion
off a time and a place for a literary reading
a poetry reading a reading from a novel

why would you do that, right
and all turn up in their retro clothes
and all talking about how they're all writers

but then absolutely refuse to be anything other
than smug and ironic and undercut
anything literary anything you know like
oh i don't know
and references to some band they like
or some band they don't like

ffs

i get that. i wonder if it has to do with the marginality of literature to our culture. like, marginal people with boring lives are the ones drawn to writing, and their experience is impoverished so there writing is also. the infinite subtlety of social interactions in henry james' day, when living as an expat meant something, and people had real faith in the validity of their experiences... i don't know, this just seems different from my life, which isn't as interesting as that, and i assume many writers my age feel the same way.

Treeship

o
t
m

and for the record i would not
not ever consider this sort of thing
i'm typing now 'a poem'

but don't even get me started on the 'poetry'
i hear from these people

one thing i like about taipei is that it represents an extreme, and self-aware version of the kind of hipster despair that characterizes so many "literary" people in our country -- the sort of absurdity that comes from being a person who frantically tries to collect cultural capital in an era when this isn't valued anymore. at the end of my review i say that the extreme vacuity of paul's experience -- his lack of conviction in anything -- at the end, whatever tao lin's intention, reveals itself to be fundamentally unlivable. so like, i think taipei is a masterpiece basically because it is able to capture a certain kind of experience i relate to profoundly but i also think that it feels like the end of...something.

maybe that is just my autobiographical projection though: getting older, vaguely wanting more out of life.

like, it is telling that paul gravitates toward post-humanism: "the computer at the end of the universe... that will render everything irrelevant." i relate to a lot of things about tao lin: his sense of humor, his radical empathy for people whose lives, whatever their level of privilege, suffer greatly, and in an undignified way, and also his self-identification as a marginal sort of person, who cannot take seriously anything in the culture, really, especially on a political level and including various forms of "counterculture", but also can't not take things seriously because he is earnest and empathetic. and so, in this bind, where there is no subject position he feels immediately comfortable inhabiting, paul "absconds" almost, or allows himself to approach this point, from the whole idea of being a human being, invested in human life. and at the end of taipei he catches himself doing this and it scares him (the part about finding he understands the impulse toward "double suicides"). basically at the end of taipei i felt an overwhelming sense that 1.) this is how a certain subset of people live now and 2.) something about this has to change. and that's how i end my review.

ok, i'm done talking about tao lin on the internet till his next book. later.

― Treeship, Friday, July 12, 2013 10:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

i want to engage with cardamon now though, who is saying things that are very interesting to me

one thing i like about taipei is that it represents an extreme, and self-aware version of the kind of hipster despair that characterizes so many "literary" people in our country -- the sort of absurdity that comes from being a person who frantically tries to collect cultural capital in an era when this isn't valued anymore. at the end of my review i say that the extreme vacuity of paul's experience -- his lack of conviction in anything -- at the end, whatever tao lin's intention, reveals itself to be fundamentally unlivable. so like, i think taipei is a masterpiece basically because it is able to capture a certain kind of experience i relate to profoundly but i also think that it feels like the end of...something.

I hear all this.

And it's not even that a writer as distant as Henry James is hard to 'relate to'. I went to see Frederic Raphael talk about his favourite poems (some by Cavafy, Seferis, one by Lorca, T.E. Hume, one that a little girl had written and hidden in her shoe in Buchenwald). And the old silver fox sat there, eloquent, raised-eyebrows, a little combative, extremely cultured. Someone tried to ask him about Stanley Kubrick, but he waved the question away, saying 'But I don't want to talk about movies tonight, guys, I want to talk about poetry tonight'.

I spied from my seat some of the young writers I referenced upthread, in their young writer's uniforms, surrounded by a sea of people in their fifties and sixties, looking bored. Afterwards they were mugging and being ironic about it. And I suppose they were within their rights to be bored if they really wanted to be.

But equally, I thought, they could all just fuck off, because if I can relate to their inability to relate, but still get over my lazy boredom/bored laziness/lazy boringness, which is extreme in my case, and engage (with either a zippy writer from the not-so-long-ago 70s-80s, or with Henry James for that matter) then surely anyone can.

I dislike Zadie Smith mainly for her Dickensian rhythms and richness and sentiment, but I would point to her as someone worth reading just for the pleasure of seeing someone obstinately bothering to create something (a plot, characters, humane concern, witty observations) and I think I basically see Tao Lin and co as people who can't be bothered. Which I can't help but see in light of their privilege, self-promotion and so on. Mine is a silly but slightly justified jealousy for a success which is probably not as secure as it looks.

a writer as distant as Henry James

lol

not loling at u cardamon of course that was the correct phrase in this context, but, yknow, revealing