the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

thye're not boring they just dont read so claims abt new shit are usually wrong

lol DJP

tao lin is a blogger not a writer

thye're not boring they just dont read so claims abt new shit are usually wrong

Exactly

Books about people doing drugs are usually boring

feel like Alice Munro missed her chance to write a story about kids in Saskatchewan tweaking and eating cake, ham, salad in Calvin's basement.

looking at Richard Yates it kinda just looked like a joke. the way he repeated the names haley joel osment and dakota fanning 40000 times in the course of the novel. a funny joke though! but it does seem more like a conceptual thing than a thing i would want to read. so, experimental, in a sense. the repeating thing. could drive you nuts to read the whole thing.

xp: I liked that post more when I thought it said "twerking and eating cake"

And everyone in line in the bathroom
Trying to get a line in the bathroom
We all so turned up here
Getting turned up, yeah, yeah

-Tao Lin

Much of the criticism leveled at Lin would apply equally to Beckett, Hemingway, Camus, and any minimalist or writer concerned with ennui. So maybe it's the critics who say Tao Lin is "too detached" and "hates language" who need to read more and not the people responding to those critics who say, essentially, "it's not trying to do what you seem to think fiction is supposed to do."

treeshit

i don't understand the comparison between lin + beckett, hemingway or camus tbh. they all seem to be doing very different things in very different ways.

and it does remind me of dennis cooper in a way. cuzza the drugs and deadpan kids and boredom and yeah after awhile you go zzzzzz....and YET i still respect dennis cooper. and john rechy too. and genet too come to think of it. another gay writer i have trouble reading after about 30 or 40 pages cuz i get numbed. i have no idea if this guy is gay. but that deadpan thing...wait, is genet deadpan? see, i never got far enough into his books...think its just the grove press connection. i wanted to read all those books when i was a kid cuz they were "transgressive" and shocking but mostly i fell asleep. burroughs definitely made me fall asleep. de sade. all the biggies. selby i could hang with cuzza the breathless thing. carried you along. and james purdy could do deadpan, transgressive, AND experimental, but i was drawn to him more cuzza his baroque flourishes. i think i need baroque furniture to sit on if i'm going somewhere heavy. minimalism just makes me not care. i will check out taipei if i see it in a store though. it does sound kinda interesting.

camus wrote the stranger tao lin was on the cover of the stranger beckett is a stranger to someone who doesnt know him hemingway shot himself in the head

I don't like Taipei on the ground that it's the first novel to write about loneliness or anything extreme like that, i just think it handles its subject manner in a way that is effective, memorable, and yes distinctive in the sense that what he's doing -while it echoes many other authors- is it's own thing, and i wouldn't mistake his writing for anyone else's.

It's cool not to like it. I'm just clarifying my position. Also goddam this PA system test at the train station it 's the most annoying thing i've ever experienced.

beckett too. i can't read him. makes me feel like a zombie. those longass novels. stein too. i really should give genet another shot. right? people love him. or they used to.

read the first half of watt

one thing camus, hemingway + beckett do that i don't see in lin is write really beautiful prose

treeship started off well in this thread but is digging himself into a deeper hole. i feel like i have totally different taste to scott seward but he's giving a good account of himself.

Wait who said Tao Lin hates language

some reviewer. dead end tbh

mordy what if i said robbe-grillet instead

scott, Becket's early novels are like early, funny Woody Allen

based on the one dennis cooper i have read dennis cooper is also a really good comparison. one of the pull quotes on taipei exhumes rudolph wurlitzer , which is a name i never expected to see used as a term of praise

alfred that is such a fucking lie

Lol Murphy is so bleak

when is carles coming out with a "novel"?

going a little OT, this is my fave piece ever about beckett:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/488027

i would enjoy reading that if it were possible for someone to possibly mail me a pdf

camus wrote the stranger tao lin was on the cover of the stranger beckett is a stranger to someone who doesnt know him hemingway shot himself in the head

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, July 8, 2013 11:47 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

and they were drinking from a fountain that was pouring like an avalanche coming down the mountain

I would like one too

lol I like wurlitzer

i have a pdf copy on my hard drive. webmail me yr email addy and i'll send it.

Lol Murphy is so bleak

― Treeship

which is what makes it so damn funny

wurlitzer's okay but i never bothered finishing either of the ones i read, i just think "this guy is like the new rudy wurlitzer!" is just ...

tao lin is kinda like beckett narrowed and turned inwards

tao lin's writing did take on a pretty interesting quality when he started writing in ascii and translating it back into english

tao lin is kind of like the opposite of hemingway

mainly tao lin is kind of like only being able to remember adjectives by consciously striving for them. meanwhile 'is that all there is' plays on a permanent loop in your head

one thing camus, hemingway + beckett do that i don't see in lin is write really beautiful prose

otm, though that does tend to support treeship's point. if we accept that writing in a deliberately deadened, empty, faux-blogpost manner is a worthwhile experiment. i mean, i suppose it could be, if the end result were interesting...

i bought 6 books by harry mathews a couple months ago and i swear i'm gonna read them cuz i think i need that kind of inspiration in my life right now. i'm not afeared of "difficult". just so you know. though tedious different than difficult.

where does one start w/beckett

tlooth is the best harry mathews

but, imo, just read roussel's locus solus

mathews short shit and poetry is good sometimes though, country cooking in central france is great

nabisco used to rep for cigarettes, the more "mature" and soap opera-y mathews, but I could never get into it

Murphy and Watt, crut

idk but why not something short like krapp's last tape

nabisco used to rep for cigarettes, the more "mature" and soap opera-y mathews, but I could never get into it

actual lolz

alfred, you ever read this guy? insanely labyrinthian stuff and this book has tons of film stuff in it too:

http://books.google.com/books?id=jor0nug4FSAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

crut the 'trilogy' is the best work but also not a trilogy, the prose from 'murphy' onwards all reflects in and back on itself

there are four novellas frequently published together or in the collected short works, 'first love', 'the expelled' and er two others. those do a good job of establishing the style of the longer prose work (i think better to jump right in with 'molloy' or 'malone dies' than start w/ murphy or watt) though they feel not self-complete. but if reading them doesn't make you want to read more then maybe you don't want to read more.

if you like reading plays (ehhh) 'endgame' is the funniest