it's funny but not "funny"
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 20:50 (ten years ago) link
it has a breathless quality
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 20:51 (ten years ago) link
remove bookmarkfrom thisthread
― Mordy , Friday, 12 July 2013 20:52 (ten years ago) link
"Never trust a writer who whiles away their time reading bout themselves, while throwing one off". Some wise fucker once said that to me.
― Damo Suzuki's Parrot, Friday, 12 July 2013 20:54 (ten years ago) link
tao lin has a tattoo that says"fuck america," allegedly.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 20:56 (ten years ago) link
http://www.taolin.info/2009/07/i-desecrated-my-body-to-promote-my.html
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 20:57 (ten years ago) link
the comments on that vice excerpt tho
Andrew Goldspink Smith · Keele UniversityLooks set to be an important book.Reply · Like · Follow Post · May 29 at 2:03pm
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Friday, 12 July 2013 20:59 (ten years ago) link
"i desecrated my body" wow edgy tattoo man but "whatever"
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Friday, 12 July 2013 21:01 (ten years ago) link
i just think its weird for him not to mention that james joyce had the exact same tattoo
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 21:03 (ten years ago) link
ok this guy
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 21:09 (ten years ago) link
i just paged through hsi tumblr and lol forever
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Friday, 12 July 2013 21:12 (ten years ago) link
ok, i'm done talking about tao lin on the internet till his next book. later.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 21:14 (ten years ago) link
Goodbye Waterface
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 21:28 (ten years ago) link
“I won,” said Chelsea’s dad, and went to give Chelsea a high-five, but missed, as they were standing too close.“My fault,” he said. “That was my fault.”“Oh,” Chelsea said.And he stepped back a little and tried again, but Chelsea, distracted now by something—maybe the plant in the far corner, standing and waiting like a person in a dream; or maybe the green shoe or some other thing that was out there and longing, to be looked at, and taken—wasn’t ready, and their hands, his then hers, passed through the air in a kind of wave, a little goodbye.
“My fault,” he said. “That was my fault.”
“Oh,” Chelsea said.
And he stepped back a little and tried again, but Chelsea, distracted now by something—maybe the plant in the far corner, standing and waiting like a person in a dream; or maybe the green shoe or some other thing that was out there and longing, to be looked at, and taken—wasn’t ready, and their hands, his then hers, passed through the air in a kind of wave, a little goodbye.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 21:31 (ten years ago) link
Goodbye TreeShipsThough I never knew you at all You had the grace to hold yourself While those around you crawled They crawled out of the woodwork And they whispered into your brain They set you on the treadmill And they made you change your name
And it seems to me you lived your life Like a candle in the wind Never knowing who to cling to When the rain set in And I would have liked to have known you But I was just a kid Your candle burned out long before Your legend ever did
Loneliness was tough The toughest role you ever played Hollywood created a superstar And pain was the price you paid Even when you died Oh the press still hounded you All the papers had to say Was that Treeships was found in the nude
Goodbye Tweeships Though I never knew you at all You had the grace to hold yourself While those around you crawled
Goodye Treesjits From the young man in the 22nd row Who sees you as something more than sexual More than just Tao Lin's publicist
And I would have liked to have known you But I was just a kid Your candle burned out long before Your legend ever didYou Stupid Fucks
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 21:39 (ten years ago) link
much love to the young man in the 22nd row who sees me as something more than sexual.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 21:44 (ten years ago) link
this thread got me curious about the alt lit writer who went to my college and wrote an alt lit book which included a bunch of imagined sex scenes with friends of mine and he super-excitedly met alt lit superstar tao lin at a muumuu house reading and apparently he's pretty popular in the alt lit world now and did some thing with kitty pryde idk
― ty based gay dead computer god (zachlyon), Friday, 12 July 2013 22:02 (ten years ago) link
i don't think becoming popular in this (very small) world involves much more than the right kind of self-promotion and i do think in 30 years lit scholars will revere it almost like the fucking beats if only because lit scholars need to cling to some evolution of lit (esp. young tortured male lit) that goes further than boring grad school novels/poetry and this is movement with the best branding
― ty based gay dead computer god (zachlyon), Friday, 12 July 2013 22:06 (ten years ago) link
which is to say waaah waaah waaah i will never be as popular as these people
― ty based gay dead computer god (zachlyon), Friday, 12 July 2013 22:07 (ten years ago) link
Pretty sad to have a go at someone who genuinely gets excited about about a writer you don't like, Waterface.
― Damo Suzuki's Parrot, Friday, 12 July 2013 22:11 (ten years ago) link
In that manner. I meant to say.
― Damo Suzuki's Parrot, Friday, 12 July 2013 22:15 (ten years ago) link
none of the fake tao lin poetry on this thread reads v much like tao lin poetry
― i better not get any (thomp), Friday, 12 July 2013 22:17 (ten years ago) link
i agree with that.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 22:27 (ten years ago) link
Pretty sad to have a go at someone who genuinely gets excited about about a writer you don't like, Waterface.― Damo Suzuki's Parrot, Friday, July 12, 2013 11:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― Damo Suzuki's Parrot, Friday, July 12, 2013 11:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Treeship's a big boy and he handeld himself fine.
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 23:27 (ten years ago) link
Part of the problem for me is that outside of my ilx 'life' I go to a lot of readings and tryto support new writing in my city as much as I can and
so many people no but so many people but seriously like all of them
try to 'do' the banal, the awkward, the cute, in their stories and novels -not like this fake 'tao lin poem'that doesn't even resemble a tao lin poem but very close to taipei
and it is boring crushingly boring and one watches them building a profilerising from being 'english students' through the stages until they become 'published novellists'
and the thing is i know this sounds inherently smug
but FFS they could read a book occasionallyyou know bit of joseph conrad henry james i dunno i'm not prescriptive but it's very obvious they don't really like words booksnovels stories poems stuff like that
they're basically reading-orientated kind of operating in an interzone betweenstand up and fictionwhen it's not funny they have the 'it's fiction' excuse when it's not well written they have the 'it's comedy' excuse
none of this is made explicit it's all implied in the general atmosphere
and you go out for a cigarette halfway throughglaring at the ground because it's that boring
― cardamon, Friday, 12 July 2013 23:40 (ten years ago) link
by reading-orientated i meanthem doing performances all the timei don't mean they orient themselves around reading
obvs. But
it's like why the fuck would you portionoff a time and a place for a literary readinga poetry reading a reading from a novel
why would you do that, right and all turn up in their retro clothes and all talking about how they're all writers
but then absolutely refuse to be anything otherthan smug and ironic and undercut anything literary anything you know like oh i don't know and references to some band they like or some band they don't like
ffs
― cardamon, Friday, 12 July 2013 23:44 (ten years ago) link
i get that. i wonder if it has to do with the marginality of literature to our culture. like, marginal people with boring lives are the ones drawn to writing, and their experience is impoverished so there writing is also. the infinite subtlety of social interactions in henry james' day, when living as an expat meant something, and people had real faith in the validity of their experiences... i don't know, this just seems different from my life, which isn't as interesting as that, and i assume many writers my age feel the same way.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 23:45 (ten years ago) link
Treeship
otm
and for the record i would not not ever consider this sort of thing i'm typing now 'a poem'
but don't even get me started on the 'poetry' i hear from these people
― cardamon, Friday, 12 July 2013 23:48 (ten years ago) link
one thing i like about taipei is that it represents an extreme, and self-aware version of the kind of hipster despair that characterizes so many "literary" people in our country -- the sort of absurdity that comes from being a person who frantically tries to collect cultural capital in an era when this isn't valued anymore. at the end of my review i say that the extreme vacuity of paul's experience -- his lack of conviction in anything -- at the end, whatever tao lin's intention, reveals itself to be fundamentally unlivable. so like, i think taipei is a masterpiece basically because it is able to capture a certain kind of experience i relate to profoundly but i also think that it feels like the end of...something.
maybe that is just my autobiographical projection though: getting older, vaguely wanting more out of life.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 23:50 (ten years ago) link
like, it is telling that paul gravitates toward post-humanism: "the computer at the end of the universe... that will render everything irrelevant." i relate to a lot of things about tao lin: his sense of humor, his radical empathy for people whose lives, whatever their level of privilege, suffer greatly, and in an undignified way, and also his self-identification as a marginal sort of person, who cannot take seriously anything in the culture, really, especially on a political level and including various forms of "counterculture", but also can't not take things seriously because he is earnest and empathetic. and so, in this bind, where there is no subject position he feels immediately comfortable inhabiting, paul "absconds" almost, or allows himself to approach this point, from the whole idea of being a human being, invested in human life. and at the end of taipei he catches himself doing this and it scares him (the part about finding he understands the impulse toward "double suicides"). basically at the end of taipei i felt an overwhelming sense that 1.) this is how a certain subset of people live now and 2.) something about this has to change. and that's how i end my review.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 23:57 (ten years ago) link
― Treeship, Friday, July 12, 2013 10:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 23:58 (ten years ago) link
lol
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 23:59 (ten years ago) link
i want to engage with cardamon now though, who is saying things that are very interesting to me
― Treeship, Saturday, 13 July 2013 00:03 (ten years ago) link
I hear all this.
And it's not even that a writer as distant as Henry James is hard to 'relate to'. I went to see Frederic Raphael talk about his favourite poems (some by Cavafy, Seferis, one by Lorca, T.E. Hume, one that a little girl had written and hidden in her shoe in Buchenwald). And the old silver fox sat there, eloquent, raised-eyebrows, a little combative, extremely cultured. Someone tried to ask him about Stanley Kubrick, but he waved the question away, saying 'But I don't want to talk about movies tonight, guys, I want to talk about poetry tonight'.
I spied from my seat some of the young writers I referenced upthread, in their young writer's uniforms, surrounded by a sea of people in their fifties and sixties, looking bored. Afterwards they were mugging and being ironic about it. And I suppose they were within their rights to be bored if they really wanted to be.
But equally, I thought, they could all just fuck off, because if I can relate to their inability to relate, but still get over my lazy boredom/bored laziness/lazy boringness, which is extreme in my case, and engage (with either a zippy writer from the not-so-long-ago 70s-80s, or with Henry James for that matter) then surely anyone can.
I dislike Zadie Smith mainly for her Dickensian rhythms and richness and sentiment, but I would point to her as someone worth reading just for the pleasure of seeing someone obstinately bothering to create something (a plot, characters, humane concern, witty observations) and I think I basically see Tao Lin and co as people who can't be bothered. Which I can't help but see in light of their privilege, self-promotion and so on. Mine is a silly but slightly justified jealousy for a success which is probably not as secure as it looks.
― cardamon, Saturday, 13 July 2013 00:09 (ten years ago) link
a writer as distant as Henry James
― """""""""""""stalin""""""""""" (difficult listening hour), Saturday, 13 July 2013 00:16 (ten years ago) link
not loling at u cardamon of course that was the correct phrase in this context, but, yknow, revealing
― """""""""""""stalin""""""""""" (difficult listening hour), Saturday, 13 July 2013 00:17 (ten years ago) link
cardamon you are killing it here fyi
― tight in the runs (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Saturday, 13 July 2013 00:18 (ten years ago) link
Another traumatic experience I once had was when I went to a reading of competition-winning stories in a room under a bar in one of the fashionable suburbs of where I live.
Now many, many years ago in pop-cultural terms, a singer-songwriter from that same suburb had become famous. And many other singer-songwriters had copied that singer-songwriter to the extent of wearing matching beards and hats. It was definitely a thing, and it was something you might notice if you spent much time in that suburb.
A guest writer, of quite some 'renown', specially invited, got up and gave a tortuous, half-hour long story based around a scenario where all these singer-songwriters were attuned to a kind of hive mind and the hero, who was bored of them, had to knock off the singer-songwriter's iconic hat in order to stop the plague. The audience chuckled.
I sat there fuming, enraged that all the possibilities inherent in 'a short story' had been reduced to a suburb-specific injoke and that this was being treated as 'important'. There was no attempt at judicious phrasing, no attempt at plot as such, just a piece of extremely thin material - the conceit of this guy and his hat - stretched out for thirty minutes.
Renowned guest writer, famous singer-songwriter and suburb shall all remain anonymous.
But this is the omnipresent kind of thing in the culture that makes it hard to like Tao Lin, for me - my patience and energies as a reader turn out to be finite and it's hard to be bothered with someone who seems like someone who can't be bothered.
I'm tapping all this out because I don't think I'm entirely alone in all this.
― cardamon, Saturday, 13 July 2013 00:26 (ten years ago) link
this is a+ material in why you don't like young writer types in yr city but i'm kind of waiting for the point where it turns into a penetrating crit of taipei, a book i still have not finished
― i better not get any (thomp), Saturday, 13 July 2013 00:27 (ten years ago) link
wait lol are you from portland because
― i better not get any (thomp), Saturday, 13 July 2013 00:29 (ten years ago) link
i think it's obvious he bothers quite a bit. taipei is very deliberate and constructed. it's not this affectless ironic posture at all
― i also enjoy in line skateing (spazzmatazz), Saturday, 13 July 2013 00:29 (ten years ago) link
i totally agree with cardamon about most alt lit writing, but i think that tao lin's writing is different, somehow. like, everything that you say you want from literature, which is also what people/i want out of life -- a sense of connection to and interest in the outside world to the extent that you can take joy in storytelling -- figure negatively in lin's work by their profound absence. taipei is about a person who is basically traveling through a waste land -- a world he feels profoundly disconnected to, to the extent that he half-intentionally decides to allow drugs to eat away at his memories -- and most of his thoughts are oriented toward "consoling" himself. the book's form embodies, at one level, wink-nod hipster ambivalence where it seems taboo to care about anything but at the same time all of the characters are suffering immensely, and i think it is this disconnect that makes the book so memorable and troubling. the characters are superficial, they don't care about things, and they don't feel connected to anything, and they are privileged so they can do whatever they want, and yet they find reality extremely oppressive.
― Treeship, Saturday, 13 July 2013 00:33 (ten years ago) link
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― the most promising US ilxor has thrown the TOWEL IN (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Saturday, 13 July 2013 00:35 (ten years ago) link
Oh My God
― waterface, Saturday, 13 July 2013 01:21 (ten years ago) link
he book's form embodies, at one level, wink-nod hipster ambivalence where it seems taboo to care about anything but at the same time all of the characters are suffering immensely, and i think it is this disconnect that makes the book so memorable and troubling. the characters are superficial, they don't care about things, and they don't feel connected to anything, and they are privileged so they can do whatever they want, and yet they find reality extremely oppressive.
isn't this basically less than zero
― tight in the runs (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Saturday, 13 July 2013 02:56 (ten years ago) link
kind of but it's more "twee" than less than zero. like, the characters are apathetic but not cold to the suffering of others. they retreat, sheepishly, from the harshness of life in the world. tao lin likes to use the adjective "meekly".
― Treeship, Saturday, 13 July 2013 03:00 (ten years ago) link
although, that doesn't mean lin's protagonists are nice people. both paul and haley joel osment -- but especially the latter -- can be cruelly passive aggressive.
― Treeship, Saturday, 13 July 2013 03:02 (ten years ago) link
also the drug use and sex is not aestheticized in a way that makes it seem cool or glamorous at all. and while anti-glamor is its own kind of glamor -- the glamor of "authenticity", of a renunciation of commercial aesthetics -- i think this is a notable difference from the way bret easton ellis would portray sex and drugs. however, i've never read less than zero so my ideas about the differences between taipei and this book are probably less than worthless.
― Treeship, Saturday, 13 July 2013 03:05 (ten years ago) link
i think you would dig eeee eee eeeee aerosmith. that is an earlier, less cynical novel, and lin writes convincingly, and empathetically about life in suburban florida, where teenage inhabitants often confuse their dissatisfaction with the present conditions of their lives for existential despair about the human condition, and vice versa. i have a real affection for that book because the voice it is written in is unmistakably that of a very young person (lin was 23 when it was published.)
― Treeship, Saturday, 13 July 2013 03:17 (ten years ago) link
you guys got a little zany in here...
― scott seward, Saturday, 13 July 2013 04:10 (ten years ago) link