the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

*Shreds a sweet guitar solo*

nonsarcastic lol

Two months into freshman year he had committed to not speaking in almost all situations. He felt ashamed and nervous around anyone who’d known him when he was popular and unself-conscious. When he heard laughter, before he could think or feel anything, his heart would already be beating like he’d sprinted twenty yards. As the beating slowly normalized he’d think of how his heart, unlike him, was safely contained, away from the world, behind bone and inside skin, held by muscles and arteries in its place, carefully off-center, as if to artfully assert itself as source and creator, having grown the chest to hide in and to muffle and absorb—and, later, after innovating the brain and face and limbs, to convert into productive behavior—its uncontrollable, indefensible, unexplainable, embarrassing squeezing of itself. To avoid awkwardness, and in respect of his apparent aversion to speaking, Paul’s classmates stopped including him in conversations. The rare times he spoke—in classes where no one knew him, or when, without knowing why, for one to forty minutes, he’d become aggressively confident and spontaneous as he’d been in elementary/middle school, about which his friends poignantly would always seem genuinely excited—he’d feel “out of character,” indicating he’d completed a transformation and was now, in a humorlessly surreal way, exactly what he didn’t want to be and wished he wasn’t.

See to GOWF* right here, this sounds like bad DFW.

Good Ol' Watrr Face

he had committed to not speaking in almost all situations

grammar

what about that phrase is grammatically incorrect?

What I'm saying is he's on the cover of Time magazine and being published as literature and talked about as literature but that doesn't mean it's okay to ask if he's actually a good writer, yeah? Have some fucking decorum guys. And what with him being Asian, well clearly you can justify his writing style because it's Buddhist, because no-one of Asian descent who claims to be a Buddhist is also a total bullshitter, nu-uh, not ever.

― cardamon, Friday, July 12, 2013 11:41 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol dude, Tao Lin was not on the cover of Time Magazine, he was on the cover of an issue of The Strangler that was a spoof on the Time cover with Franzen

if TAO LIN is our thomas de quincey, who are his wordsworth and coleridge?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhKpaTOG4yg

This guy is both

Kidding!

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

because the farmer
needs it

to carry all the
eggs

you stupid
fucks.

so much depends
upon

parents paying for
NYC

housing glazed with
drugs

and yes tuition
too

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
You Stupid Fucks

this is just to say

I have smoked
the buds
that were in
the cig case

you should have entered that red wheelbarrow "remix" poem in the poetry context, hurting

i think that's the whole point. we are all Tao Lin.

laying on my Ikea mattress
looking for new shirts on my iPad
the delivery man buzzes my door
for the Chinese food I ordered an hour ago

sitting on the top of the stairs
because the internet doesn't reach my room anymore,
otherwise i would probably be on my ikea mattress,
feel "sick and tired" of "defending tao lin"
spectrum's comment reminded me to heat up chinese food
left over from last night.
singapore rice noodles.

site new answers
site new answers
i should do some work now
site new answers
fart

sitting at home
i my underwears
watching wheel of fortune
reading ilx
vanna is so hot
need a snickers

hurting stole my joke

I think that captured something about our generation's predicament
is this still part of my poem?
I am not sure.

once i get a full time job
i am never coming back to this website
you stupid fucks

jk

you are the poem

hurting stole my joke

― waterface, Friday, July 12, 2013 4:15 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

stole? motherfucker I preemptively shocked and awed your joke.

a guy on the internet said I stole his joke
I said that I didn't
fart

treeship
treebutt
treeship
treebutt
treeship
treebutt

not a bad "strategy" i thought
scratched my bellybutton
considered what ilx would be like without "tweeshit"

sometimes i wonder what it would be like to be a website

waterface:
your hostility toward me
seems excessive
and unwarranted
and "insane"

Treeships your idea of hostility
is kind of crazy
i was merely responding
to your joke about quitting ilx

sweet
makes sense
"tweeshit" sounds like a hostile nickname
i was bullied as a child
i think some of the stuff you say is funny
and loled when you compared me to malcolm gladwell once

i also reminded you
that you are the poem

if you can't laugh at tweeshit
what can you laugh at

sometimes i wonder what it would be like to be a website

if you don't write this poem, tao lin will. he's probably reading this thread right now.

there is a ninety-five percent chance
he is reading this thread right now
because
he reads all of his press
and shit
and tweeted to me once when i mentioned him
to clarify something

tao lin is reading every thread
right now

guys

hey guys

hey TAO LIN can i borrow some money i want to go to NYU

i like how in taipei
"paul" lives in williamsburg
off the graham street stop
because my friend lives there
and i am there all the time
and all of the public spaces
where
in the novel
they did drugs
were places i have been

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