"Has any author ever represented all young Americans"
judy blume? maurice sendak? richard scarry?
― scott seward, Thursday, 11 July 2013 17:52 (ten years ago) link
I dont think his parents send him money in this book but they seem to have paid for his college. That makes him as privileged as i am, i guess. My dad also lives in a major asian capital too but im not ethnically asian. If i write a novel i'll make sure to not send you a copy.
I sort of hate drugs to an extent i am embarassed about. They've only ever made things worse for me.
― Treeship, Thursday, 11 July 2013 17:53 (ten years ago) link
literature and culture serve a class function since we don't have an outright aristocracy here, so it's not a shock we mostly just get novels by and about rich kids farting around for a couple hundred pages. doesn't mean there isn't any value there ... somewhere... but it's a little wearying when there aren't any relatable voices in a medium you love.
― Spectrum, Thursday, 11 July 2013 17:55 (ten years ago) link
You need to have a good deal of free time to write a novel so that's a factor. Although, maybe not because the writers of the past seemed busy. Clarice Lispector was in law school and working full time as a journalist when she wrote near to the wild heart
― Treeship, Thursday, 11 July 2013 17:59 (ten years ago) link
I don't think you need a ton of free time, you just need passion + enthusiasm
― waterface, Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:00 (ten years ago) link
so it's not a shock we mostly just get novels by and about rich kids farting around for a couple hundred pages. doesn't mean there isn't any value there ... somewhere... but it's a little wearying when there aren't any relatable voices in a medium you love.
This is some bullshit!
― waterface, Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:01 (ten years ago) link
What part? Privileged ppl are overrepresented in literature, pretty clearly.
― Treeship, Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:04 (ten years ago) link
Novels by and about rich kids farting around. Not true and believe me if there's one thing I know, it's farting.
― waterface, Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:09 (ten years ago) link
i was lucky to grow up in a grittier era
http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/6622437-M.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AMBLVX9NnzM/TgfuY8BXxaI/AAAAAAAAAUE/gZh2K-wmIYE/s320/nittygritty.jpg
http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n13/n69840.jpg
― scott seward, Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:10 (ten years ago) link
"Real and Tough"
― Treeship, Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:26 (ten years ago) link
- bret easton ellis
― """""""""""""stalin""""""""""" (difficult listening hour), Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:27 (ten years ago) link
treeship if you write a novel i would read it. i don't hate privileged people. i question their monopoly on greatness that's all
― reggie (qualmsley), Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:30 (ten years ago) link
tao lin is the face of white privilege
― dylannn, Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:33 (ten years ago) link
or asian-american privilege
― reggie (qualmsley), Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:37 (ten years ago) link
tao lin is an anchor baby
― dylannn, Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:37 (ten years ago) link
tao lin's parents are convicted felons
― dylannn, Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:38 (ten years ago) link
tao lin is a miscegenist and child pornographer glorified by the leftwing media
― dylannn, Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:39 (ten years ago) link
tao lin is marijuana
― waterface, Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:39 (ten years ago) link
lol dylannn
― Treeship, Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:40 (ten years ago) link
those whose parents pay for their $200,000 NYU tuitions and expensive NYC housing and medicine cabinets, right on
― reggie (qualmsley), Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:41 (ten years ago) link
life is so depressing!
yep makes you wonder where they got all that money.
― dylannn, Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:43 (ten years ago) link
tommy wiseau?
― reggie (qualmsley), Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:45 (ten years ago) link
http://www.theliftedbrow.com/12-poems-by-tao-lin/
― scott seward, Thursday, 11 July 2013 18:57 (ten years ago) link
Pyrazolam, which as the name suggests is structurally very closely related to alprazolam, is like a mild xanax in that it doesn't have much of a benzo buzz, yet its anxiolytic properties are as strong, or if anything, stronger. If you're actually wanting something functional, rather than a euphoric high, I'd say they're the best benzo ever, both for dealing with ordinary anxiety-producing situations, and for cancelling out the bad effects of come-downs. They're currently legal to buy online in U.K. £45 for 250.
[Being wary of analogue provisions in the Misuse of Drugs Act, 1971, I double-checked by calling my local county police force (using non-emergency "101") to ask if it was ok for me to possess these; they said they'd check with the national police drugs agency then get back to me in 15 minutes, when I was informeed - yes, "we can confirm it's not a controlled drug". Feels so much safer buying something like this when you know that conversation will have been recorded..]
― Campari G&T, Thursday, 11 July 2013 19:01 (ten years ago) link
i was walking on the street behind nyu’s libraryit was cloudy, i was thinking about a girlmy heart felt like a non-organic potatowith root things starting to grow out of it
― reggie (qualmsley), Thursday, 11 July 2013 19:19 (ten years ago) link
important highlight from a vice interview of early this year
PART VI: HATE
What are five things you think about when you think of love?Like stream of consciousness?
Yeah.Fish. The shape of a heart. A halo. Hate. For some reason: a fish flopping around.
What about hate? Five things.HTMLGIANT’s comment sections. Hamilton... I get the VICE guy confused with the Gawker guy...
Nolan?Yeah. Hamilton Nolan. The other Gawker guy too. What's his name? There's another shit-talker on Gawker.
They all are.Yeah. So—Gawker.
Max Reed or something?Something like that.
― i better not get any (thomp), Thursday, 11 July 2013 19:39 (ten years ago) link
occupy taipei
― reggie (qualmsley), Thursday, 11 July 2013 19:48 (ten years ago) link
haha if i wanted reasons to like lin less
― BIG HOOS aka the denigrated boogeyman (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 11 July 2013 20:17 (ten years ago) link
max reed
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Thursday, 11 July 2013 20:55 (ten years ago) link
that's the title of his next book: Max Reed
― scott seward, Thursday, 11 July 2013 22:04 (ten years ago) link
about an uninspired young sax player burdened with high expectations
― BIG HOOS aka the denigrated boogeyman (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 12 July 2013 01:53 (ten years ago) link
Alt-jazz
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 01:53 (ten years ago) link
I'm sitting on my macbook
I open gmail
I click on the emails
I read the emails
I click on facebook
Oh my god like why do people keep posting feelgood images to facebook?
I go and make some instant noodles
I spill some of the noodle powder on the worktop
The noodles aren't very filling
I go back to my laptop
I click on gmail
I look at my emails again
I've got a notification on facebook
Apparently someone's invited me to an event?
― cardamon, Friday, 12 July 2013 15:36 (ten years ago) link
^ THIS is how we live now. THIS is great literature.
I think it communicates something really essential, you know? Like about a contemporary lack of empathy? But perhaps you need to have been depressed when you were a teenager. I mean you can't really say anything negative about this because although it's serious literature - not for squares who like the Da Vinci Code and Twilight - it's not 'literary', right, because when I say 'literary' in quotes like that it has a definite meaning and isn't just a vague conversation-stopper.
― cardamon, Friday, 12 July 2013 15:38 (ten years ago) link
It's not serious literature
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 15:40 (ten years ago) link
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, 12 July 2013 15:41 (ten years ago) link
it's the poetry of daily life, like if you had a red wheel barrow in your yard and wrote about that.
― Spectrum, Friday, 12 July 2013 15:42 (ten years ago) link
Yeah William Carlos Williams is another writer no-one has any business criticising ever
― cardamon, Friday, 12 July 2013 15:45 (ten years ago) link
Untouchable
Yeah ok whatever
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 15:45 (ten years ago) link
More seriously, now that I've got my flippant reaction out of the way:
Compare Tao Lin's best prose with J.G. Ballard's best prose. It becomes clear that there are at least two types of 'affectless' or 'dead' writing.
Tao Lin's writing might be 'affectless' as opposed to, say, 'flowery', but it doesn't actually come across as numbed or traumatised in the way that Ballard's does. I don't bring this as evidence that one is better than the other, I'm just pointing out an important stylistic distinction. Calling Tao Lin's prose 'affectless writing' is rather like calling a contemporary brick-box shopping mall 'minimalist architecture', that is, true, but only in a technical sense.
Compare Tao Lin's writing with J.G. Ballard's writing. It becomes clear that there are at least two ways of writing about 'how we live now'.
It's true, if you create a checklist of things you commonly encounter (your email inbox, your laptop, your trainers, your flat, the food you eat, the sort of people you associate with, the sort of job you do) then other people who commonly encounter those things may read that piece and feel as though how they live is being recorded. But merely putting a list of things together does not mean that the recording of life is accurate, in the same way that an observational comedian is not necessarily an observant comedian.
Further, suppose I am someone whose life, in its quotidian detail, corresponds fairly closely with that described in, say, a novel by Tao Lin; just that he has made a recording of things he and I commonly encounter does not permit me to say that he has captured 'How we live now', because there is an entire world containing many millions of entirely different lives to the one I live and the one he records. Who is this 'we'?
There are plenty of writers as bad as Tao Lin, in opposite directions: there are people who write very, very 'affected' prose, and there are people who wouldn't think that concrete details of everyday life were something you might want to write about. But avoiding one type of bad isn't something to be praised for and doesn't outweigh some other bad you fall into. Just because I've never knocked down a popular young American author with my black classic Ford doesn't mean that I'm in the right if I spit on him in the street.
― cardamon, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:14 (ten years ago) link
and there are people who wouldn't think that concrete details of everyday life were something you might want to write about.
Every piece of "successful" fiction has concrete details, that's what makes fiction fiction.
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:15 (ten years ago) link
That's cool, and it's fine if you don't like it, but i think i've said more sophisticated things about why i like tao lin's writing than just "it's affectless and about daily life." I do think there is something about the particular awkwardness, or superficial "badness" of taipei's prose (which isnt similar to those poems linked above, really) that pulls you out of the text, and makes the stones of digitally mediated life "stonier", to borrow an idiom from shklovsky. I never attacked people who said they didnt like tao lin, only those who said, like, "you must not have read beckett if you like this" or whatever.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:26 (ten years ago) link
no one said that Tweeshit
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:28 (ten years ago) link
tree also made some credible arguments about the uses to which lin puts his prose style
― twerking for obvious reasons (contenderizer), Friday, 12 July 2013 16:29 (ten years ago) link
People said stuff like that waterface.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:30 (ten years ago) link
I'm on zing so i am not going to find examples, but there was an implication that nothing about lin's style is original and peoplemaking claims about that are overlooking other authors who have already done the same thing.
― Treeship, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:31 (ten years ago) link
i don't think the excerpts i read were bad. or written badly. they were interesting. they were more thoughtful than i thought they would be. the stuff about the kid's childhood.
what was the name of that British woman who wrote those mundane diaries of her life? she got some critical acclaim. i think she died recently. kinda want to read those sometime.
― scott seward, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:36 (ten years ago) link
People just said that there was nothing experimental about Tao Lin, not "you must not have read Beckett, LOL U LOSER."
Different strokes
― waterface, Friday, 12 July 2013 16:37 (ten years ago) link