the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

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

Tons of books are experimental. It's not a rare distinction. It's a term to differentiate books that are messing around with form to achieve unusual effects from "realist" fiction, which hews more closely to conventions. Ben Lerners leaving the atocha station is not an experimental novel because it is written in a style that feels familiar and is supposed to, even though 1.) it's great and 2.) on the level of content it is concerned with questions about literary form, like the characters have conversations about that kind of thing.

Tumblr Beckett is pretty accurate, especially for the earlier stuff. This is more like Tumblr Proust, but with a Beckettian detachment to it.

So how is any of that experimental

So how is any of that experimental

tree's answered that pretty clearly, i think. experimental writing "messes around with form" to achieve effects other than those typically generated by more conventionally structured fiction. tao lin is deliberately "writing against the grain of convention, in a manner that on first blush seems antithetical to all ideas of eloquence, beauty, whatever but ...[which] produces its own kind of lyricism for patient readers."

that all seems pretty straightforward, even if you don't accept the proposed definition and characterization.

It reads like jibberish

I just don't see how this dude is going to save my generation.

Not having read a thing this dude's written, I think the question is coming more from the standpoint of "How is an extended exercise in already-explored literary styles an experiment?" because the impression I'm getting is that dude is doing stuff other venerated authors like Becket and Proust did years ago, only about boring modern young people.

and in a boring modern young manner. see? experiment ho!

what did you call me

Dude is doing stuff lots of other writers have written only he uses "scare quotes" to pull "meaning" out of his sentences. It's a pretty silly "trick."

why are modern young people boring?

i mean, i don't care for tao lin, but i'll grant for the sake of argument that he passes some low-bar experimentalism test