the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

life is so depressing!

yep makes you wonder where they got all that money.

tommy wiseau?

http://www.theliftedbrow.com/12-poems-by-tao-lin/

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..]

i was walking on the street behind nyu’s library
it was cloudy, i was thinking about a girl
my heart felt like a non-organic potato
with root things starting to grow out of it

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.

occupy taipei

haha if i wanted reasons to like lin less

max reed

that's the title of his next book: Max Reed

about an uninspired young sax player burdened with high expectations

Alt-jazz

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?

^ 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.

It's not serious literature

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.

it's the poetry of daily life, like if you had a red wheel barrow in your yard and wrote about that.

Yeah William Carlos Williams is another writer no-one has any business criticising ever

Untouchable

Yeah ok whatever

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.

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.

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.

no one said that Tweeshit

tree also made some credible arguments about the uses to which lin puts his prose style

People said stuff like that waterface.

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.

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.

People just said that there was nothing experimental about Tao Lin, not "you must not have read Beckett, LOL U LOSER."

Different strokes

which reminds me of this classic. funny stuff.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1026/1026-h/1026-h.htm

Treeship, I'm responding to various pieces of Tao Lin hype and Tao Lin writing which I've been absorbing for a few months. Some of what you said might be a part of that, but I wasn't trying to single you out, hope it didn't look that way. As ever, there's nothing wrong with people liking a thing, but sometimes people put forward arguments for a why a thing should be liked that are open to question

Fair enough, its just that on this particular thread i was the one who brought up the buddhist thing and who consistently was questioning what people meant by "good" writing so thats why i was defensive.

i'm not sure i understand what you guys are describing as "affectless." i don't necessarily think this style in unaffected at all, & it's maybe naive to consider the conspicuous 'artlessness' of this style to be the absence of affect. it's a pose like any other. it's not one i find particularly endearing or interesting, tho.

on the other hand, if you mean "affectless" as in, having a blunted emotional affect, then yes i think that's right. dude sounds clinically depressed.

I mean the latter. Clearly his style is very intentional which is why its so distinctive (well.. before it started getting ripped off.)

o cool writing without emotions sounds "great"

You really are a comic genius, huh?

That's what Mom tells me

sweet

*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.