the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

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.

I'm just wondering which wu-tang song he was thinking about and not knowing which song he meant kind of proves his point in a way.

Richard Yates is still good. Infuriating, but good. I like how he incorporates scenes of ultra-contemporary living without smirking or self-consciousness or DeLillo-style censure, and without trying too hard to aestheticize the contemporaneity.

It's to Tao Lin's credit that he can write with such objectivity about the shitty behavior in his recent past. Even though the events are fictionalized, I think he's fair to everyone involved; I don't get the impression that he makes anything up, or flatters himself, or makes fun of anyone. And the story is an uncommon one, so just telling it honestly makes it worthwhile to me.

The opacity of the narration almost hides some of the workings of the plot, such as when HJO is reading Disturbing the Peace, and how that triggers (or furthers?) his preoccupation with mental health and his distrust of mental health professionals. At least that's how I remember it. I still think that Tao Lin is stylistically tone deaf, but beyond that his craft is admirable.

http://glasgowreviewofbooks.com/2014/04/03/this-is-alt-lit-anomie-in-the-age-of-social-networks/

But what is its goal? One commenter to Kiesling’s piece suggests that “Tao is attempting to expose […] Internet-reliant culture and nihilism.” Maybe so, but “expose” suggests an enlightenment, a philosopher-adventurer breaking the chains that bind us (and that us only applies if you identify as a doped-up internet-obsessed millennial hipster, which by the way I do) to our digital and chemical mania. Lin likes the chains; he aesthetically and philosophically embraces them. Kiesling complains that Lin doesn’t pathologise his protagonist’s drug use; she fails to realise that this drug use is not for pathologising. It’s an aesthetic – drugs and internet FTW. It takes another “codger,” Stan Persky in the Los Angeles Review of Books, to hit the suitably affectless nail on the head: “Lin’s book is your standard once-a-generation report on youth anomie.” Persky may prefer the “previous report” – Douglas Coupland’s Generation X – because “the content of the anomie [ is] more interesting,” but I want to know about the content of our anomie. Here, Lin’s crossover-hit reportage will only get us so far; we had better go underground to the scene he helped create, wilfully chaining ourselves before the shadows that flicker in the cave called alt lit. To this end I’ll be investigating the anomic content of three products of the alt lit “community,” each more “alt” than the last (in form at least): Mira Gonzalez’s poetry book i will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together, Steve Roggenbuck’s free pdf IF YOU DONT LOVE THE MOON YOUR AN ASSHOLE, and the open-submissions Tumblr blog Internet Poetry, edited by Michael Hessel-Mial.

Anomie is the default mode of existence in Gonzalez’s collection, the title alone of which suggests a formula for “mutual dependence” broken beyond repair. The poet has a flair for titles, with another giving a succinct diagnosis of the problem: “I feel more lonely when I am with people than I do when I am alone looking at the internet.” She is most visible when, as Durkheim puts it, “not clearly visible.” As Gonzalez elsewhere recognises, this constitutes a “semi-humorous paradox” (another great title) to which one can only respond with “stimuli of a certain intensity”:

would you put some coffee ground on your tongue

and then put your tongue in my hand

in my dream I watched you masturbate

while floating 5 inches above you

I was invisible until I kissed your mouth

will you let me do that tomorrow afternoon

I will text you

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/when-i-moved-online.html?_r=0
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/19010/1/tao-lin-predicts-the-future-maybe

haha he's so wet

i forgot about this guy

i have a lot of trouble putting a finger on what exactly it is about tao lin's writing that puts me off. i read taipei, and i felt like there were some well written sentences (both style and content -wise) and he has some good thoughts but by and large i thought it was pretty devoid of value. i get the existential emptiness of the decadence of well off youth in the big city, but it really doesn't resonate with me on any level. i worry that the only artistic representations of 'my generation' (vomit) are the products of folks in lin's milieu - drug guzzling, tragically hip youths who are unable to form emotional attachments because of an endemic and permanent disaffection with whomever they're currently involved. this isn't my experience or the experience of anyone i know. his book reminds me of this horrible movement in advertising/marketing to brand youth to labels ("my generation is blowing up right now because LEVIS"). like all that matters is the appearance of depth and meaning.

apologies about this post - i'm not sure if it makes any sense. i have difficulty putting to words

tao lin seems to me the equivalent of john gruber on the apple thread:

-I don't have any particular problem with his writing but...
-I don't know why he's popular
-I don't know why people hate him (the explanations people give don't make a lot of sense)
-It shouldn't be difficult to write better, if he's that bad
-People also find the alternatives terrible

The only explanation that makes sense is that they've both chosen to write in a specific genre that is intrinsically both hateworthy and attention-getting, and the actual person involved is sort of an irrelevant circumstance.

in contrast, jj abrams actually has some kind of agency in the hate directed towards him.

Tao Lin is really good at writing about people who want to connect with others but can't, or otherwise flee from opportunities to do so either through drugs, the internet, or antisocial behavior. I don't think the protagonist in Taipei thinks he'll find "depth and meaning" by retreating into himself (as he did in hs) or escaping himself (through drugs). He's just looking for some sense of emotional security and the banality of this desire, which for him is all-consuming, is what makes the book so bleak. I disagree with the idea that his characters are tragically hip or are experiencing a form of anomie that is specific to urbanites or the privileged.

5 Dreams/Nightmares I Had In 2013
by Tao Lin

http://thoughtcatalog.com/tao-lin/2014/07/5-dreamsnightmares-i-had-in-2013/

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-20/reviews/nobodys-protest-novel/

Good article I think but long and behind a paywall. I have a copy of the issue but haven't finished it yet.

lol someone sent me that and their login and i just, i still haven't even opened a tab

It's not as if there aren't grounds on which to criticize Lin's work, but before I leave this place, it really must be said that to recycle, when reviewing the first great male Aisan author of American descent, relentlessly and without even the slightest consideration, the same slurs typically aimed at Asian males by white Americans to deface and devalue them socially -- this comes off as a desperate and disorganized, even downright illiterate attempt to erase not just his greatness as an artist, but all the struggle to be human he's invested in his art -- invested there and only there, because there was nowhere in this culture he could take it but the art of words, faceless as he is. Abstractions though you are, you still hold all the power, and so I'm asking anyway: Tell me, if you know, you white American reviewers, section leaders, incurious overseers -- how the fuck can you do so much to create a monster, then try to take away all he has left -- his status as unique?

^ taken from the n+1 article

i figured out why I don't like Lin so much: he shows us the ugliness of modern living, that we all know is there, and just leaves it at that. it's like if someone walked into a room, farted in your face, and then peaced out. there's nothing interesting about that unless you're a masochist or something. now i understand why i want to punch this guy in the back of the head.

i thought this article was interesting because tao lin has made a point, it seems, of not addressing his asian identity in his books, or interrogating how that might have related to the alienation and hostility he describes feeling from his peers growing up in suburban florida. also, in his first novel, having characters murder jhumpa lahiri seemed like a symbolic attack on the idea that rediscovering one's ethnic roots was a necessary path for self-discovery for second generation immigrants in america. and yet, i do think race plays a role in his books up to and including taipei, partly by its conspicuous absence, as if bringing it into the picture would fatally weigh down his already overloaded analyses of social interactions, and also in these other ways that frank guan describes. i know i am sort of alone on these boards in thinking tao lin a major author, but if you are interested in him at all i don't think this article should be missed.