the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

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

i would have endorsed you publishing that thing to the local college alt weekly hurting. i wasn't the one holding you back. xp

probably mostly because of its relationship to richard yates, which is a novel about the relationship between the two authors of this thing. i

Oh ok, so if we haven't read Richard Yates we won't "get" this crappy link you posted as well, cool, that's awesome.

i guess so. i'm going to leave now so i can work on learning how to start forgiving myself for this.

the fiction of this embarrassingly immature and pointless sub-sub-segment of my generation really captures how immature and pointless that sub-sub-segment is

every human life is technically "pointless"

I would totally read a non fiction book written by/about hikikomori

every human life is technically "pointless"

― Treeship, Monday, July 22, 2013 3:24 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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http://www.arthuralevinebooks.com/images/86.jpg

lol

The Depressed Ugly Fish by Franz Fafka

"a depressed ugly fish lives in pennsylvania in the wintertime. it is snowing outside. the nearest store is two miles away. the ugly fish leaves his room to go buy energy drinks. when he leaves his room he disappears into the snow. the snow is three feet deep. the ugly fish is two inches tall and five inches long. the ugly fish thinks, 'this is fucked.' his face freezes and then his body freezes. two days later the snow melts and a party girl teenager boy sees the ugly fish and runs to it and kicks it into the forest."

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Football/Clubs/Club%20Home/2009/3/1/1235933046692/Albert-Camus-001.jpg

don't mind being compared to camus. or oranges with terrifying faces.

every human life is technically "pointless"

Can't speak for Hurting but I don't think it's a favorable comparison

oh shit. really?

There's an apt Camus quote, in fact:

The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.

sounds like something he would say.

by linking to the hikikomori fiction thing i wasn't somehow at the same time saying that there is no point in having convictions anymore.

i do think demanding that discrete artworks or even movements have to have a "point" that you can state in definite terms is stultifying.