the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

The part of that text that implies an audience being much more into a performance style than any of the actual content, I'd agree with

TNI piece, re non-neurotypicals: "They can speak more freely, see more clearly, and love more truly than we can. They lack the part of us that holds us back."

this is a terrible thing to say in my opinion

There's also a trend whereby people rendered emotionally dysfunctional through substance abuse come to see themselves as on the autism spectrum.

"Oh man, that MDMA made me totes autistic last night"

Also see relationship between hipsterism and self-diagnosed autism spectrum. "My artisanal hand-crafted typewriter ribbon shop isn't doing so well. Why?"

TNI piece, re non-neurotypicals: "They can speak more freely, see more clearly, and love more truly than we can. They lack the part of us that holds us back."

this is a terrible thing to say in my opinion

Whichever vacuous arsewipe wrote that clearly knows less than nothing about autism. Fucking hell. But it isn't much worse than some of the general shittiness you read on ILX about autism.

http://logger.believermag.com/post/60186486815/michael-w-clune-my-experience-with-addiction

Sid Meier’s Civilization

i feel like i've wasted my life, i feel like i've wasted something bigger, i feel like i've wasted a minute or two dreaming of something other

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/how-to-be-considerate-on-the-internet/

i like the way he writes but the subject matter is so nothing. i was trying not to dislike the book because if i convince myself i might like it i will finish it. treeship's posts have convinced me this book is not for me because he is a young person and i am not.

i can finish it though. i am 46% done.

aw that was the opposite of my intention

my college advisor who is like 75 i think claimed to really like my review and i was worried she was going to actually try to read the book and be like "wtf is this" and then cut off contact with me.

I'm right about where you are, harbl, also an old. I am liking it more and more as I go. I suppose I should say I am "liking" it. At the very least I'm glad I'm reading it.

i'm 28 btw. i'm just telling myself i'm not part of this kind of books.

well i'll be 29 in 2 weeks. gulp.

28 isn't old ffs

- a 28yo

Oh yeah no you're not old, I'm talking past 40. 28 is how old many of the characters in Taipei are!

it's barely older than me

40 isn't old either. leonard cohen is 79 i think and he says that he has only experienced the "outer reaches" of old age so far, and is hesitant to say that he truly knows what it feels like to be "old."

ya I've said this a few times but ilx has a really really stupid conception of age (everyone under 30 a "kid", everyone over 28 "old"); I thought at first it was a lack of perspective but now I just think it's an inability to basic fucking arithmetic

*to do

yeah i guess i'm just stupid

treeship will understand when he is my age, though

i did end up kind of liking this. i'm 88% done now. it got good between 46% and 66%

i bought this book cos of riveting ilxor discussion and i have not read it yet but i have used it to kill a fly that was bothering me for like 2 days

Tao would approve.

you know another one where its kinda agony and you are hanging your head saying oh god its too real life is too real! is joseph heller's Something Happened. its like just wallow in it. that book is rough. i'll betcha lots of people start that book with good intentions and then just crawl away in defeat.

― scott seward, Wednesday, July 10, 2013 12:55 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark

this has to be the most depressing book ever written.

OK just finished Taipei, really liked it!

I've also just finished Taipei. The first 50 or so pages were great and it really felt like Lin was trying to detach himself from the intentionally detached style of Bed or Richard Yates, with all those page long descriptions of emotions etc...then it kind of becomes Lin-by-rote. On a prose level I was still interested - whoever upthread, possibly Scott, mentioned it seeming trancelike which is something I a) agree with and b) really like about it - but I don't know how much more I can take about people livetweeting the X Men movie and listing drugs they've taken. A tiny part of me is jealous that I don't have that lifestyle despite having a nominally similar lifestyle to the characters he writes about.

A year ago now I wrote the VICE piece on alt lit being the worst thing ever (http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/alt-lit-is-the-worst-thing-to-happen-to-literature) which, in that world, was a weirdly big deal (and likely the only thing I'll ever write that people actually respond to critically) and I still stand by it. I don't what it is about Tao Lin that makes me want to keep reading him but there's something there.

for some reason my reaction when i saw this revived was a fear he'd killed himself

i think there might be some reason to fear for his mental well-being.

i basically agree with that alt lit article you wrote dwight. tao lin's style leaves dfw's in the dust when it comes to insidiousness and you would be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't agree that 99% of "alt-lit" writing, especially the poetry, is garbage. i get the sense that what many of these writers are drawn to in lin's work is mostly the sense of validation they get that their experiences, too, -- no matter how banal -- are a worthy topic for literature, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. the appeal of every major generational writer has probably been something like this. this is why i am reluctant to come down too hard on alt-lit as a genre. the chaff is just visible in a way it wouldn't be in previous eras due to the internet, and a lot of these writers might need to imitate lin's writing for some time (years?) before finding their own voices. if they all forced themselves to change course now and force themselves to write in a style that might be less annoying but means less to them maybe they'll never find their own voices.

man, the last sentence of that post is disastrous.

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.