the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

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

http://yogsototh.github.io/Category-Theory-Presentation/categories/img/mindblown.gif
http://mastersfilmreview.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/vertigo-2.jpg

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.

I'm not saying those crappy pieces of fiction don't have a point

what is the point of your conceptual art troll project on ilx?

The point is they are pointless

good point

Searching for the point of something is an empty endevaor

sometimes

holy fuck that orange

a promising young american author is TAO LIN

the most promising young orange in America, Tao Lin

waterface:

http://images.angusrobertson.com.au/images/ar/97808166/9780816654598/0/0/plain/hikikomori-adolescence-without-end.jpg

Sweet thanks

So I finished the last few pages of Taipei yesterday afternoon. And yeah, it is reminiscent of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, at least in the obsessive intensity with which it burrows into a single self-absorbed state of mind. The focus doesn't budge. Right through to the end, it concerns little but Paul's thinking about Paul (and Paul's depression) and Paul's thinking about thinking about Paul (and Paul's depression). It's a grind.

Though I didn't enjoy it much - I'm honestly tempted to call it the single most aggressively unpleasant book I've ever read, even including nasty shit like Houellebecq - I can't deny that's an honest and insightful exploration of its subject. Lin's especially effective in using a limited third person narrative to communicate the things Paul himself can't see, such as his blindness to his own withering hostility and the almost terrifying depth of his unhappiness. He also deserves credit for managing to slowly build suspense within a seemingly plotless, even pointless narrative simply by modulating the level of his protagonist's oblivious agony. On a literary level, Paul's withdrawl into depersonalized alienation functions much like the drugs do in his life. It's a screen that increasingly distances us (him) from the story (events in his life). This strategy made me feel increasingly anxious as the story went on.

The problem, for me, is that Taipei's content doesn't justify the length, even allowing for the horrible, bad-trip intensity of its final pages. Like The Unconsoled, it's a kind of fractal: any one random chunk says exactly the same thing as any other (that depression feels bad and feels like exactly like this). Unlike The Unconsoled, there's nothing compelling about the nightmare it describes. Taipei's universe has been stripped of all but its dullest, weakest, most miserable details. The environment and characters are described only in general terms. No one ever says or does anything worth noting, they just drift in and out of view.

There are bright spots: clever turns of phrase, blackly comical asides, the beguilingly fried story of an acid-blazed, late-night trip to a Chinese McDonald's. But overall, they weren't enough for me. I respect Lin and his work but didn't like this book at all.

it concerns little but Paul's thinking about Paul (and Paul's depression) and Paul's thinking about thinking about Paul (and Paul's depression).

A little like a first-person version of DFW's The Depressed Person?

it's in third person, but yeah, that seems sort of accurate. although the depressed person is both much bleaker in my view and not as good. for one thing, the depressed person's depression is characterized by narcissistic self-loathing -- she is revolted by her appearance, and feels that nobody likes her -- whereas paul's depression, while it seems to have gone through that phase in high school, has settled into this mode of cosmic ambivalence, which is maybe more frightening (if easier to read about) because he is drifting further and further away from the concerns of ordinary people.

i do think the humor in the book is successful in making it palatable. for me, it wasn't a chore to slog through. i don't think paul has lost himself as much as he thinks/fears he has.

http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-01-0059425.pdf

^^Masterpiece