the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

i agree with that.

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

Treeship's a big boy and he handeld himself fine.

Part of the problem for
me is that
outside of my ilx 'life' I
go to a lot of readings and try
to 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 profile
rising 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 occasionally
you know bit of joseph conrad henry james
i dunno i'm not prescriptive
but it's very obvious they don't really like
words
books
novels stories poems stuff like that

they're basically reading-orientated
kind of operating in an interzone between
stand up and fiction
when 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 through
glaring at the ground because it's that boring

by reading-orientated i mean
them doing performances all the time
i don't mean they orient themselves around reading

obvs. But

it's like why the fuck would you portion
off a time and a place for a literary reading
a 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 other
than 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

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

o
t
m

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

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.

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.

ok, i'm done talking about tao lin on the internet till his next book. later.

― Treeship, Friday, July 12, 2013 10:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

i want to engage with cardamon now though, who is saying things that are very interesting to me

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.

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.

a writer as distant as Henry James

lol

not loling at u cardamon of course that was the correct phrase in this context, but, yknow, revealing

cardamon you are killing it here fyi

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.

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

wait lol are you from portland because

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 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.

Download: Tao.Lin.Taipei.rar
File Size:
1.63 MB

Max Speed:
3000 kbit/s

Duration:
~ 4.45 Seconds

Your download is being prepared.
Please wait 10.91 Sekunden.

Oh My God

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

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".

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.

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.

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.)

you guys got a little zany in here...

hahaha I dig this thread. It might be too good...

having finished it i am more cautiously pro than i was when i started it, i would say it is like an 8/10 novel maybe

i don't know if i agree that it's "less cynical" than 'eeeee ee eee' -- i think the way that that book is constructed with an event of emotional heft to retroactively justify some of its tone is actually p cynical?

one thing i do feel is that while lin-the-writer seemed to be covering the life-events of 'sam' in 'shoplifting' and 'haley joel osmont' in 'richard yates' with a level of irony, a narratorial distance, an awareness that these events demonstrated that these characters were pretty shitty people, 'taipei' is more normally autobiographical in that it seems more to want to demonstrate and make you empathize with paul's emotional causes for his actions, if not to make you think paul is a good person. whereas the earlier two often omit the interior stuff that would normally do the work of presenting a character's actions as justified at least in that character's own psyche

when i say 'irony' in the above i don't mean irony as in the kind of glibness and refusal-to-commit that people reduce him to and then dismiss as in a lot of the posts upthread (writing a parody of a writer and then pointing out how bad the parody is is a not-great mode of criticism unless your parody is really, really good) -- i am going to say 'flaubertian' in a vague sort of hand-waving way, since i have not read either these books or flaubert since 2010 or so -- and besides this irony isn't the tonic in 'taipei' the way it is in the earlier stuff. it's been replaced by something deeper but probably unhealthier.

it's probably a decade since i read any bret easton ellis but i have described lin as being 'like a bret easton ellis that was actually good' on a couple occasions -- also (and this is for people who are better at doing the american scene to unpack than i am probably) it seems like bee's being an LA person who spent formative years at a NE liberal arts school vs lin's being a suburban florida kid who went to NYU and stayed there thereafter might be pretty operative in their worldviews

heh also i totally appreciate treeship in this thread but

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

haha dude

oh, i think eeee eee eeeee is less cynical than taipei. it's very empathetic in its portrayal of that teenage girl, ellen i think her name was, and in general i think it is a far less radical, more relatable depiction of lonely, alienated people than taipei, which depicts the mental experience of a person in the outer reaches of depression, who at times isn't even sure he wants to be human anymore. maybe "cynical" isn't the word: eeee eee eeeee is superficially glib, but there is a pretty clear humane core, and while that is still true of taipei it seems, at times, that it is withering away. of course, by the end of the book with paul's "revelation" it becomes clear that tao lin/paul, in the end, doesn't want to pursue that direction any further... paul is in the novel's final line "surprised to hear himself say he was happy to be alive."

i didn't think this was a cheap moment, personally, i think it is in keeping with tao lin's whole "project". he is at heart a kind of old fashioned novelist -- his main concern, in each of his books, in my view, has been to depict private suffering in a way that doesn't cheapen it, and he has used different devices throughout his career to do this. maybe is lin allowed himself to push taipei further, and allow paul to settle comfortably into his alienation as he fantasizes about doing in taipei very early on in the book, it would be a more radical achievement, but i wouldn't like it as much. the book, in reality, never does more than skirt the abyss because paul's sense of absurd humor anchors him, most of the time, to a more recognizable, relatable kind of consciousness. he is never really as alone as he feels.

part of the "magic" of novels, or certain kinds of novels, is that it allows people to see how their strangest, darkest, most paranoid moments -- when they feel the most isolated -- are things other people have also experienced, and are in fact part of a kind of shared experience. the fact that lots of people can relate to and appreciate kafka is an inspiring thing, really. george orwell said this about dostoevsky: that finding he could relate to raskolnikov, a fucked up antisocial murderer, actually had the effect of making the world seem smaller and less hostile. like, this recognition that even the worst people are people after all... that even if you find yourself thinking that you are the worst person, you are still a person.... this is what orwell found valuable in dostoevsky, and i think a similar thing is at least part of what i find valuable about tao lin.

why do you find that valuable about TAO LIN and not a billion other young authors?

cf. my review and my other posts on this thread.

sorry i don't mean to be glib, but i really shouldn't write more about tao lin on ilx. i don't think people want me to do that.

i do. don't let occasional mockery and sense that you're taking an unpopular position get you down.

contenderizer otm, if you can get a reaction out of people you're prob doing something right

he's great at self-promotion apparently. as far as writing goes what i've seen of TAO LIN doesn't hold a candle to what dylann's been up to in his hotel job thread imho

xxp yes. i liked your comments treeship, made me think twice about checking out tao lin, which is a first.

i meant to write "less cynical than 'taipei'". oops

Yeah I have enjoyed treezy's contributions to this thread but I also think he was right to respond glibly to that dumb question above

i dunno treezy comparing his appreciation for TAO LIN to orwell's appreciation for dostoyevsky sorta called for clarification

let's return to the part where Henry James is distant

xp reggie

the way it connects to the orwell-dostoevsky thing is that i think paul's experience is about a person who slowly recognizes that, lonely as he is, he is not really alone because even his darkest, strangest, moments of despair are a part of his experience of being human, which is what orwell felt when he read dostoevsky.

the book pushes hipster apathy -- a sense of not being able to take things seriously, but at a historical moment when not taking things seriously has lost its subversive charge -- to metaphysical dimensions: paul flirts imaginatively, throughout the novel, with allowing his identity, his memories, all his connections to the world disintegrate. but at the end of the book he kind of comes back down to earth. he hallucinates that he has died and has been sealed into his own imagination, and will have to rebuild the universe from scratch with himself as the starting point, and he realizes... by overhearing himself say a bunch of things (lol harold bloom) -- that this isn't what he wants. disconnected as he feels from society he is, in fact, essentially of it and not a rootless subjectivity. being "happy to be alive" isn't just being happy to exist... the word "alive" implies more than that, in this context. it has something to do with wanting to embrace being a part of the world, i think, but at the end of the novel it isn't clear how paul is going to do that.

Yeah but why do you like it

I think you owe us an explanation of why you think he's a good writer

xp to myself. this sounds melodramatic but that scene at the end. paul keeps saying "i guess i'm just going to have to deal with it" about being sealed inside his mind forever. i think that's another thing you get from the last section: that paul's absurd humor, his ability to detach himself from what he is experiencing, is a thing that has throughout the novel tied him to a humanistic (vague word i know) mode of experiencing reality, and all his intimations of being fundamentally alienated were bullshit, basically. hipsters can pretend they don't care but it's impossible to *actually* live carelessly in a fundamental sense. i want to say something about heidegger here but it's been a long time since i've read heidegger.