the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

Yeah I mean I know I clown you a lot but your last few posts have been easy to understand, I get why you dig the guy.

kind of wish you would stop using the word hipster tho

everybody should stop using the word hipster

except me cuz i'm mad judicious

i would wear that on a shirt

The word hipster is not without its uses. Or maybe... it is.

wait, jonathan franzen said the n-word??

yeah, when he was being interviewed on deakin's right wing radio show.

Franzan's a sweet thoughtful dude, I don't think he would use bad language. Would like to see what he thinks of Tao, would be interesting. He is well read and stuff.

maybe like with movies we need a ratings system for novels, but based on social class instead of age. not sure if it should be by letter or number or color or some other arbitrary index

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-e9ybWTlWFME/T7FMeDoXR7I/AAAAAAAAAE0/zg1C-2ALH2U/s1600/arrested_development_report_card.png

if it's rated bluth people whose parents paid for college/housing would like it?

THAT POST MAKES WATERFACE FEEEL. . . C-

i went to a school that didn't have a grade system

you're lucky. i don't think i believe in grades, except maybe for college or something. even then: for me, they are stressful and anti-motivational.

every semester each of your teachers would write about how you did and all these comments as they were called would all get sent home in a packet

my high school had both grades and comments, and i think it was good to have had the comments.

richard yates is sad sad

It is. It's sort of hilarious too though in its fucked upness, especially the arguments between df's mother and hjo.

The deal with that book, i think, is that the reader slowly realizes that dakota fanning is 16 and all that entails. She is not the sarcastic twentysomething haley joel osment imagines her to be.

What I would say now, two weeks after reading Taipei (it took me two evenings to read it) is that, as gripping as I find tales of young people using drugs, it hasn't left me with much. Maybe it's because whatever insight Tao Lin can offer you is better if you're 12 or 72 years old, but not 25-35.

Last summer about this time I read The Savage Detectives with the same kind of feverish summery heat reading. But that was a book that really left me something. It lasted after I closed the pages. I still think about it here and there and it scares me. Taipei doesn't scare me, it doesn't comfort me, it doesn't really do much of anything once it's done.

"is it, um, a studio apartment?"

this is nice:

After blearily looking at the internet a little, then peeing and brushing his teeth and washing his face, he lay in darkness on his mattress, finally allowing the simple insistence of the opioid, like an unending chord progression with a consistently unexpected and pleasing manner of postponing resolution, to accumulate and expand, until his brain and heart and the rest of him were contained within the same songlike beating -- of another, larger, protective heart -- inside of which, temporarily safe from the outside world, he would shrink into the lunar city of himself and feel and remember strange and forgotten things, mostly from his childhood.

taipei reminds me, as much as anything else, of kazuo ishiguro's the unconsoled. it's true to the what it describes, but what it describes is a single, unvarying moment, that moment sustained well past the point where traditional narrative would demand development or divergence. a key difference between the two novels is that where the unconsoled energizes its eternal now by hanging constantly on a cliffhanger note of desperate incompletion, taipei mires itself in a listless bog of alienation and routine.

i'm finding the experience of reading this almost aggressively unpleasant, but not because it's a "bad novel". i dislike it because i feel helplessly trapped in it, suffocated, and that's clearly the point. whether or not it's a point worth making at this length remains to be seen.

The Unconsoled is fucking dismal!

i look back on it fondly, but the reading experience was an ordeal

Hmm maybe I could reread it, it's been at least 20 years

or nearly that ;)

tbh, i can't imagine rereading it

In Montreal, three days later, beneath a uniformly cloudy expanse which glowed with the same intensity and asbestos-y texture everywhere, seeming less like a sky than the cloud-colored surface of a cold, hollowed-out sun, close enough to obstruct its own curvature, Paul walked slowly and aimlessly, sometimes standing in place...

You made that up,

lol, but no!

Comparing it to The Unconsoled really makes me want to read this.

i should read that. one for the list.

they're alike only in that both describe the confines of a solipsistic bubble. in the unconsoled, the protagonist's desperate internal state is mirrored by his ever-shifting nightmare environment. taipei's paul, otoh, wallows in depressive self-absorption.

Man I've been wanting to read the Unconsoled for, like, five years now.

i'm jealous of the version of myself in the alternate reality where the internet does not exist who has read all the books he planned to read

http://www.bearparade.com/hikikomori/

epistolary fiction thing by tao lin and ellen kennedy (the alleged model for dakota fanning in richard yates). the premise is that the two correspondents are depressed and never leave their bedrooms and write to each other about their surreal experiences.

so it's about ILX

That is horrible, I just threw up all over my keybard, thanks a lot Barfship

;-)

man, I just looked up this ellen kennedy person's poetry, and one thing I can at least say for her is that her writing is worse than tao lin's

yeah...

i don't like the knockoffs so much.

i read the first dozen entries or so and i did not like it at all

Treeship you need to learn about good links and how to link to them

i think it's pretty entertaining. it's not as good as taipei.

It's horrible and you should be ashamed and broaded your horizons

i should have broaded them, you're right

what is the reward for reading it?

does it cause enjoyment?

does it delight you?

is there even a story there?

it just reads like something a friend and I would come up with in college while goofing off on gchat stoned, only we would have better sense than to go on for that long. And if you're going to say "that's the point," I'm going to tell you that "that's the point" is the exact justification we would have then used for printing the transcript of our stoned gchat conversation in the college alt weekly.

(except I guess it would have been AIM, not gchat, because I am old)

xp elmo, there's not really a story there.

i thought it was enjoyable. probably mostly because of its relationship to richard yates, which is a novel about the relationship between the two authors of this thing. i like how it seems sort of juvenile, like comics i would have made with my friends in middle school that involved surreal, non-sequitir humor.

idgi