the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

no one here reads books its ok

i know i don't read books much either tbh

just look at words and pictures

unreading

oh god, everything needs examining. i'm sure there's for it. i still find the phrase and concept useful in everyday conversation.

beautiful prose = perfect pop music

unread lunch

i got really bad at reading fiction over the last couple years. i'm maybe averaging 1-3 fiction books a year. i got a little burnt out.

alfred i don't know if this is what you're getting at but you know how people will use 'perfect pop music' to refer to, like, teenage fanclub or something

no one there reads books either

alfred i don't know if this is what you're getting at but you know how people will use 'perfect pop music' to refer to, like, teenage fanclub or something

oh yeah. I meant that I'm suspicious of both terms.

what's the problem - that beauty is in the eye of the beholder? do we really need to interrogate this particular aesthetic cliche?

xpost

rudolph wurlitzer , which is a name i never expected to see used as a term of praise

― i better not get any (thomp), Monday, July 8, 2013 3:53 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wrote 2 or 3 great screenplays, 1 or 2 halfway dece novels, there are much more undeserving names to be wielded as praiseblurbs, imho

In re "beautiful prose," Camus is my default answer for favorite writer, but I have seen his prose characterized as wooden. Which I can understand, because he had his own deliberate flatness.

I haven't read Tao Lin and all this discussion makes me not sure whether I want to, but stylistic flatness is not an automatic disqualifier for great writing. All in how you use it.

Nevertheless, many continued hoping that the epidemic would soon die out and they and their families be spared. Thus they felt under no obligation to make any change in their habits as yet. Plague was for them an unwelcome visitant, bound to take its leave one day as unexpectedly as it had come. Alarmed, but far from desperate, they hadn't yet reached the phase when plague would seem to them the very tissue of their existence; when they forgot the lives that until now it had been given them to lead. In short, they were waiting for the turn of events.

camus can be a little prosaic but it has a sense of insight + urgency that makes it more than just affectless or wooden imo.

i think this is beautiful prose:

In it Mathieu Marais, the chronicler, laments his lot; he says he has been cast into hell to languish without succor and without hope. Well, Mathieu Marais was blind! Never more intensely than today had he, Father Paneloux, felt the immanence of divine succor and Christian hope granted to all alike. He hoped against hope that, despite all the
horrors of these dark days, despite the groans of men and women in agony, our fellow citizens would offer up to heaven that one prayer which is truly Christian, a prayer of love. And God would see to the rest.

"Wooden" is a sign of ineptness, no? He's putting words in the wrong places. Even with my schoolboy French I can never accuse Camus of woodenness.

camus is a page-turner!

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

― scott seward,

I haven't! Looks good though.

-- i'm not sure 'x, y, and z write beautiful prose and a doesn't' is saying anything more meaningful than 'i like sentences by x y and z, considered in isolation, and not any by a'
-- a fun thing is to read the descriptions of being high and partying in ny in 'taipei' and then go and see if you can still take the descriptions of being high and partying in paris in 'the sun also rises' seriously

anyway i'm going to go and finish taipei i think

seems weird to build an argument about the the aesthetic merits of an author's prose around works in translation

xps, but to be clear, I love Camus' writing! I just know people who don't, and I can understand it turning people off.

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

― first I think it's time I kick a little verse! (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, July 8, 2013 11:52 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

any in particular you would recommend?

I can't be arsed with a writer who writes like he has thrown the towel in.

good one

original

You forgot to put "thrown the towel in" in quotes xp

Scott - Murphy's fun and clever and doesn't have lots and lots of pages detailing haemophiliac family lines for the sake of one impossibility (a thing I don't personally mind).

Guess I should read Tao Lin, but I suspect it would intensify feelings of weariness that i don't need intensifying right now.

haha that's pretty much exactly how i feel about it. i picked it up at the bookstore the other day, read a paragraph and lold in recognition, then put it down thinking 'i really don't need this right now.'

*i am drunk*

i re-read the whole thing today while waiting to be called for jury duty. this time i was struck by how paul's dissatisfaction with life leads him to accept some post-humanist, terrence mckenna type ideas about the singularity and the "computer at the end of the universe" that is just (to paul) a cosmic oneness and renders everything in our immediate experience irrelevant. to evade the burden of himself, he tries to seem himself as part of a larger system -- which makes sense -- but since he feels disconnected from other people this larger system is necessarily impersonal and cosmic. ironically, mysticism is just another kind of narcissism, and a cover for being careless with his time, his health, etc.... things in, as he says, "concrete reality." i thought this was a very convincing way to describe depression, and how by seeking out ways of thinking that seem to offer consolation we can just end up pulling ourselves further and further from our actual lives, which are always in a process of expiring and easy to miss. not that the book sees "living in the moment" as a kind of ideal to strive for -- it seems impossible, a fantasy, according to the novel, focused as it is on the way our experience of the world is always both actively and passively mediated -- but still, it is tragic that we are always missing out on life, as it is happening. paul doesn't think of his time with erin in taipei as positive until he watches video footage of that time months later. so it is through memory (finally i am getting to my point) that we lend meaning to our experience; our life is never lived until it is lived again. against this backdrop -- the idea of the vital importance of memory to experience -- the stuff about paul half-willingly disengaging himself from his own memories, which he describes as becoming harder to access with his increasing drug use takes on a much darker quality. it's not for nothing that near the very end of the book paul describes himself as feeling frightened by the degree to which he, at that point, felt he could understand the suicidal impulse, which had previously seemed abstract to him.

there is a lot of talk about tao lin being a generational writer, concerned with the internet, etc. but i think his real talent, now as always, has been his ability to write about depression, and the ways in which it distorts our understanding of the world. this book is great -- as opposed to his other novels being merely good -- because he seems to intuit, here, that "distortion" is always relative. drugs, depression, whatever, do change how we see the world, but not in a way that necessarily makes it less natural or accurate. what is a normal way of thinking anyway? how do we get back to it?

also there are some legitimately funny moments here. the whole hipster panel section is pretty good, also just the extremely flat style is often pushed to the point of self-parody, especially when describing sex and drugs, in a way that i think is intentional. also, just the matter of fact way paul explains to erin, without blaming himself really, that he speaks in a disrespectful tone to his mother because he has just always done that is lol, in a kind of kafkaesque way, as you are aware that this particular absurdity is also a kind of cruelty. paul's lack of boundaries -- giving heroin to high school students, for one -- is also kind of funny, but in a cheaper way.

i just read two long excerpts online - on vice and some other place - and they were kinda trance-like in a not unpleasant way. i could take 200 pages maybe. if it were a brick of a book like that i don't think i could do it.

meanwhile, i've been reading the same sci-fi trilogy for what seems like years now and their are PAGES of people thinking about rocks and lichen - not even talking about rocks and lichen just thinking about them - and i gotta tell you, i kinda breezed through those excerpts. kind of a breath of fresh air. literally months of my life devoted to geology. and i don't understand, like, 75% of it. Tapei would be a vacation at this point.

"there"

there i did the quote thing.

what sci-trilogy is this? and yea, you would breeze through taipei in a few days at most. it is kind of dreamlike, in that it is unstructured and rambling and, simple as the plot is, it is hard to keep track of what has happened in what order. this is intentional, i think, as a big part of the book is how paul is, due to apathy and ennui and drugs, half-willing losing touch with his memories and by extension his identity. this confusing, trancelike element of the book is not altogether unpleasant though.

you know another one where its kinda agony and you are hanging your head saying oh god its too real life is too real! is joseph heller's Something Happened. its like just wallow in it. that book is rough. i'll betcha lots of people start that book with good intentions and then just crawl away in defeat.

"it is kind of dreamlike, in that it is unstructured and rambling and, simple as the plot is, it is hard to keep track of what has happened in what order. this is intentional, i think, as a big part of the book is how paul is, due to apathy and ennui and drugs, half-willing losing touch with his memories and by extension his identity. this confusing, trancelike element of the book is not altogether unpleasant though."

this whole thing sounds a lot like Something Happened.

this one. been hard for me. i'm okay when i'm reading, its just when i put it down i really have to motivate myself to pick it up again. i know i'm in for some heavy weather talk for awhile.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cK2inJvMz_w/TgOFsdp3RrI/AAAAAAAAQv4/J9ZDJ4BaH7s/s1600/red+green+blue+mars.jpg

i've been cheating on kim stanley robinson too. seeing some other sci-fi writers on the side for a quick exciting short story or two. i have needs!

xp i'll look into the heller book. i bailed on catch-22 a few times in high school so am not familiar with heller, really. i have positive feelings toward him because he was friends with kurt vonnegut.

in terms of tao lin's works, this is his bleakest, i think, because it flirts with cosmic nihilism (even though its basically humanistic, in the end) but richard yates is far more devastating. the non-sequitir character names and other whimsical things sort of lull you into a comfortable sense of distance but then in the second half it basically stabs you in the face with "oh god its too real life is too real". that book doesn't delve into the characters' thoughts really, but mostly focuses on how "haley joel osment's" neuroses manifest themselves in passive aggressive, controlling behavior which you do get a glimpse of with paul in taipei. the real tough thing is the cracks in the text where you see glimpses of the "real" dakota fanning, and the extent of her suffering which is not a thing that haley joel osment usually allows himself/the reader to see. that novel is a masterpiece of suburban desperation -- not merely alienation or discontent -- and the title "richard yates" is anything but a non-sequitir. it's possible that that book will be the one tao lin is ultimately remembered for.

i like how even the titles and covers of those kim stanley robinson books look boring. i'm sure they're good but he/she really doesn't seem to be meeting the reader halfway lol

i have positive feelings toward him because he was friends with kurt vonnegut.

lol

i like how even the titles and covers of those kim stanley robinson books look boring.

lol i know spaceships are no drug-addled suicidal ennui but scott's trying to improve himself, not just be entertained

i bailed on something happened two or three times in high school cuz i was in high school and what was that gonna mean to me. LOVED catch-22 tho. started wearing a bomber jacket. god. i mean i still wear it but i've grown into it now. maybe.

...it is through memory (finally i am getting to my point) that we lend meaning to our experience; our life is never lived until it is lived again. ...the idea of the vital importance of memory to experience...

...he seems to intuit, here, that "distortion" is always relative. drugs, depression, whatever, do change how we see the world, but not in a way that necessarily makes it less natural or accurate. what is a normal way of thinking anyway? how do we get back to it?

...also there are some legitimately funny moments here. ...the extremely flat style is often pushed to the point of self-parody, especially when describing sex and drugs... the matter of fact way paul explains to erin, without blaming himself really, that he speaks in a disrespectful tone to his mother because he has just always done that is lol, in a kind of kafkaesque way, as you are aware that this particular absurdity is also a kind of cruelty.

― Treeship, Tuesday, July 9, 2013 8:58 PM (Yesterday)

okay, you've convinced me to give the dude another shot. at least i won't be reading it for months.

Can I just say one thing

just one thing, I promise. . .

LOVED catch-22 tho. started wearing a bomber jacket. god. i mean i still wear it but i've grown into it now. maybe.

― """""""""""""stalin""""""""""" (difficult listening hour), Wednesday, July 10, 2013 8:50 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

uhh pretty sure i also started wearing a military type jacket in high school because of catch-22

Hey guys, one thing