the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

sorry, the quoted text is from the htmlgiant article i liked above.

xp interesting. i don't think lin's fiction is like most contemporary fiction i read, in that he imposes lots of contraints on himself, whether it be the concrete realist style of shoplifting or the convoluted, infinitely regressive style of taipei, which is hyperattuned to its representational limitations. in terms of most (literary) fiction being both bleak and sad, it's hard for me to imagine a work of realist fiction seeming honest and not being sad at least in parts. genre fiction isn't always bleak. i am biased toward sad literature though, probably. there has to be at least a tragic undercurrent for me to be interested, usually.

i wrote a multiparagraph reinforcement of a few of the ideas i liked from your review and then deleted them when i got to the part where you get baited in the comment section.

He's the Allen Ginsberg of his generation--really good at PR, not so great at writing.

from what i've read of this dude i really doubt he has a 'kaddish' let alone a 'supermarket in california' in him.

i guess my feelings toward tao lin are closer to treeship's than anyone else here. i think if you read any amount of contemporary literary fiction, like serious or frivolous print journals or things mentioned on htmlgiant, tao lin reads like a satire of a lot of it and at the same time a sincere reworking of a lot of the themes and forms of alt-lit or writing as writing is done by people under 30 in 2013, if that makes sense. there are a lot of people trying to write to describe the experience he writes about and most of that writing is fucking garbage. i'm not sure how to say this in a way that doesn't sound really obvious but the thing with, like, taipei or richard yates is not just appreciating it as solely as a piece of literature but looking at what it does beyond just being a piece of literature, it becomes more interesting for its reception and interpretations and what it means against the backdrop of contemporary literature and culture.... that's why i appreciate tao lin the character curated by the actual tao lin-- i like that he's obnoxious and provocative in a dull cuntish internet celebrity way.

how has there not been a thread on this guy yet? TAIPEI is brilliant.

― i also enjoy in line skateing (spazzmatazz), Thursday, June 20, 2013 1:44 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark

http://i.imgur.com/xRbrTaU.gif

give me a list of better writers

that might take a while

I read this in two days. Previously considered Tao Lin a bit of a stunt, but I bought his books anyway if I saw them used for eight to ten dollars and I defended him when friends said he was crap.

But this... This really is good. I guess... I guess I wanted it to be more like Savage Detectives and slowly start to scare me through the eventually overwhelming accretion of failure or madness or futility or something. I guess the closest to that in Taipei is eventual introduction of heroin (the drugs do slowly get harder) but, I guess, it doesn't really make me feel doomed or redeemed or anything.

Anyone care to unpack Tei Pei / Type A?

Bad spelling aside... I'm with fields of salmon - have read everything of lin's for the sake of I don't know with an impression of i don't know. taipei really is something else, though. he's referred to fernando pessoa a lot lately and i'm halfway through 'the book of disquiet' and there's something similar at work. it could be self-fulfilling though as i read 'richard yates' cause he was name-checking lydia davis' 'the end of the story' at the time which is an all-timer for me.

as of 18 pages in (why did they wait two weeks to release this in the uk, what the hell is the point of that) this is a really total and remarkable step forward for his aesthetic whilst also totally lacking the kind of fundamental reorientation that's going to win over haters

look: his writing has different aims than most "literary" prose.

Lin's all right some of the time & I'm interested by what I hear about Taipei but this ^^^ sort of claim is like the ur-copout. "you can't judge it on the grounds of literature!" cool then don't publish it and we'll be square

taipei has the most 'literary' prose he's written

there are sentences with, like, metaphors and shit, expressed in syntactically complex sentences, sometimes featuring parenthetical clauses

no one has yet been described as having "a ___ facial expression"

I have no real interest in reading anything by Tao Lin but I'm not sure why. I did read a column he wrote for the Stranger about his impressions of Seattle which made me giggle. I think part of my prejudice is that I don't know why anybody would write novels in 2013.

high standards

Nuvvels r gr8 thats why

tbf we have no evidence as of yet he has written a novel in 2013, maybe he has moved on to a more paradigmatically new-millenium form like 'IF' or 'weird twitter' or 'being ke$ha'

nuvvieworld: a novel

WHERE IS A SERIOUS WRITER, WHO REALLY AIMS "LITERARY"

http://cdn.imposemagazine.com/__data/franzen-has-itimei-tao-has-ithe-strangeri.jpg

They used all their MDMA in Calvin's basement while eating cake, ham, salad, cookies--the first time Paul had eaten food for comfort while on MDMA--then went upstairs to Calvin's room, where Calvin and Maggie drank beer, which Paul and Erin, who had eaten only a little food, declined. Paul began recording, at some point, with his MacBook. "Isn't it a thing?" he said after ingesting Codeine and Flexeril. "That people warn against? Combining drugs."
"Yeah," said Calvin, and laughed.
"I don't think that's true," said Erin shyly.
"I'm on like eight things now," said Paul.
Calvin asked if Erin wanted to smoke marijuana and she asked if Paul would be okay with that and Paul said yes, thinking he didn't like that she had asked. While Erin and Calvin smoked in the bathroom, with the door closed so Calvin's parents wouldn't smell it, Paul and Maggie created a GIF of a baseball cap moving around on their heads. Maggie, when Paul said he wanted to smoke marijuana, said he shouldn't becuase of his lung collapse history. Paul began coughing nonstop after smoking and repeatedly said his chest burned and fell, half deliberately, to the floor, grinning in a stereotypically marijuana-induced manner, he could feel, as he tried, with his MacBook, to find information on the internet about his situation.
"I feel like I'm unsarcastically viewing this as a major ordeal," said Calvin.
"I'm just trying to Google 'burned lung,' I'm not doing anything to indicate what you said," said Paul in an agitated voice while grinning. "I'm just idly looking up 'burned lung' variations on the internet."
"I was also viewing this as major until Paul just said that," said Erin.

idgi it's like hipster fanfic?

No

i feel like i'm unsarcastically viewing this as a major ordeal

Every generation gets the mailer it deserves

as of 18 pages in (why did they wait two weeks to release this in the uk, what the hell is the point of that) this is a really total and remarkable step forward for his aesthetic whilst also totally lacking the kind of fundamental reorientation that's going to win over haters

i ended up thinking that 'tie pay' was not as good a novel to read/think about as 'richard yates'. it was boring but not hypnotically so, it was grating but offered no release. i think his writing should be as ugly as possible, in order to better cocoon you in [indecipherable] [incomprehensible]. words arent wounds theyre abrasions or something.

i will get back to you after i finish it, i may also reread 'richard yates'

idgi it's like hipster fanfic?

― Mordy , Sunday, 7 July 2013 19:33 (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i mean, this is at least a little bit right

"that's not writing, it's reblogging"

p good tao lin diss

p good evaluation of tao lin diss

kerouac is kinda dire

Always seemed to be the voice of the Aspergered.

Good job disparaging people with aspergers that was really necessary and added to the discussion,

Sorry, didn't mean it to be disparaging (wrote it hastily, sorry - didn't mean to offend)), but that's the sense I've had often from his blog and writings.

(And not meaning it critic of his writing--if anything, it's maybe the most interesting thing about it.)

That's cool Eazy thanks for clearing that up. people use that term often as an insult, with the implication that "good" writing is tonally varied and engages the reader like a charismatic speaker would.

Also xp aero, what i meant by "literary" in quotes was a set of rigid criteria critics fall back on for what constitutes good writing. Taipei is written in a style that doesn't feel like "good" realist prose fiction - it's syntactically strange, flat, sometimes boring, and always seems aware of its limitations - because it is an experimental novel. It's highly literary bc it is concerned with form but not "literary" in the sense that to some critics it seems unrefined.

it's only 256 pages; I don't really have the time to read novels that aren't at least 700 pages long these days.

What is experimental about this novel

i have hard times with tao lin*. wanted to like richard yates, but got perilously bored halfway through and quit. dunno what he has to offer, other than being young and seemingly of his moment.

* novel title

you obtain much hard one

i looked at richard yates in a bookstore and thought it was a funny idea but i knew i would never read it. kinda conceptual in that way. like an art joke. which i appreciated and then put back on the shelf. i had a hard time reading dennis cooper in the 80's. i liked the concept, but i would get bored after awhile.

xp because he is experimenting with a way of writing that is different from what he's done before, and different from other things I've read by other authors as well. "experimental" doesn't mean good, but i think tao's experiments help him to achieve his goals, and are successful on their own terms if not those of each one of his critics. although tbf, this book is being praised very highly for the most part, it's just that its detractors can be pretty fierce, but then again that is helping it too.

throw in a few more quote marks and you've got hipster runoff

i also had a problem reading john rechy when i was younger. i could never finish a book. grove press put out so much flat stuff.

because he is experimenting with a way of writing that is different from what he's done before, and different from other things I've read by other authors as well.

In what way is his prose experimental, though?

because it violates received ideas about what good writing looks like, i.e. he explains things exhaustively instead of "showing" them, he pursues precision in his descriptions of his characters' thought patterns to the point of awkwardness and a loss of clarity, metaphors are not used to illustrate clearly graspable concepts but just as an approximating language to describe states of feeling, metaphysical impressions, that evade real description and in this way every metaphor in the book is a failed metaphor... idk, read my review or better yet the millions review. that reviewer hated it but she said that it seemed "hostile" to language, and it's true: tao lin is writing against the grain of convention, in a manner that on first blush seems antithetical to all ideas of eloquence, beauty, whatever but as other critics have noted his flat, convoluted style produces its own kind of lyricism for patient readers.

again, it's not finnegans wake but experimental doesn't mean totally new and radical just that he is doing interesting things with form.

You could say all that stuff about tons of books, though. Don't see how it's experimental.

so it's tumblr beckett, then? xp

yeah I loved how the book is really about recovery. glad you got around to it and stuck with it.

have read everything of his but could not go to bat for him until Trip. thankfully he's become a writer beyond his disaffected early style. it's a beautiful, sincere book. related; anyone reading Liveblog by megan o'boyle?

Didn't know it was finally out. Will check out asap

I wonder how pissed/sad he is when he sees Virgil Abloh “doing” “scare quotes” as an “aesthetic.”