the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

Interesting twist at the end of that email. Apparently, Lin thinks that toxins in vaccines cause autism and other adverse reactions... but also that all of that stuff is easily cured, by eating organic food or something.

holy shit! LMAO

have they figured out how to cure his terminal assholism and misogyny

the responses are pure gold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEFKH9KzJEE

Tao Lin‏
@tao_lin
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I've gotten less autistic over time through nutrition, detoxification, & cannabis

take a look at my autism graph and you can see the steady decline since i started smoking weed in 1999

lmao

There's some 9/11 truther type stuff in his recent tweets as well.

I don't like to armchair diagnose, but I don't want to be mocking him if he's dealing with mental illness. Some of this reads that way.

i mean it’s not a recent development

anyway i’m glad overrated male writers have a jenny mccarthy

i was thinking the same thing tbh, v mentally ill tweets

I'm following that thread like the hypocritical TWITTER MUST DIE schmuck that I am, see that p4re3ne pointed out that this guy sucked in 2009, and I'm like how did he know? and I looked up his bibliography and you know what, I really, really have to stop following all y'all down these fucking rabbit holes

dickens, i hear charles dickens is good

actually in the past few years he definitely sounds healthier and less into pharmaceuticals and more chill. like, he's into fringe new age shit but yeah i dunno, based on twitter and following his new books' developments... he seems to be in a good place in his life.

i'm not sure why the flood of opprobrium is upsetting to me. maybe i don't get enough of the dark side of twitter or something, it just like filters thru ilx sometimes. he's just a alt-lit twitter weirdo that's into fermented food and smoking weed not the fuckin surgeon general. that's the kind of email i got from my vancouver island super liberal aunt when i had a kid--not mentally ill, just reads too much detox organic food grassfed butter blogs and was worried about the kid. vaccines are fine, safe yeah whatever and a buncha arabs flew planes into the buildings but skepticism of big pharma and the american government is justified, i think. i guess i find it cruel to say hurr hurr tao is retarded he worries about his brother's son and is skeptical of monsanto what a rube i bet he voted for trump.

https://soundcloud.com/stonerfm/episode-23-tao-lin-author-of he sounded sprightly and articulate at least more than he did before on here

I have no difficulty saying the absolute worst things about absolutely anybody who sends a letter to a new parents discouraging them from vaccinating their child and pushing a bunch of trash pseudo-science on them, whether that person is a twitter weirdo or whatever. if you try to stop people from vaccinating their children, fuck you, shut the fuck up.

he’s a skilled media manipulator who can’t write and who consistently preyed on women much younger than him (source: his own writing), and his response to even the mildest critique is to unleash his “fans” via wounded social media posts that make even less sense than his terrible books. so yeah, fuck him.

i wish you could unbookmark threads on zing, lol, i bookmarked this by accident

"the most promising young american author is SOME
TWITTER WEIRDO"

i wish you could unbookmark threads on zing, lol, i bookmarked this by accident

I fell down this rabbit hole just the other day. Found myself wondering whether he really thinks vaccines are full of Roundup and making us all autistic, or whether this is some kind of long-term performance he's rolling out.

The thing is, I still think this guy is a good writer, even when he's writing 100 tweets that merely recapitulate an epistemically closed belief system I've seen performed a hundred times before, he does it better.

I conçur w/eephus but there's so much good stuff in the world that if you have a reason why you might not wanna be giving a dude oxygen, there is literally no reason to do so

^^^^^^^^^^

Wait since when does concur get a ç

lol I have no idea how that happened

I concur with JCLC's concurrence, except to say that TAIPEI was good in a different way from other things I read and I think I'd be sorry not to have read that particular book -- but beyond that no reason for me to spend time thinking/talking about this writer/person

it's spelled conçur, eephus

Picking up the convo form a few weeks ago, Lin’s turn toward psychedelia, mysticism, and conspiracy theories is obviously a performance, but I think it’s also “real.” He’s living out a false solution for the philosophical and spiritual dead end he conjured in Taipei. Like, the “self” in that book was a prison. Now he’s decided that it was this way for social and political reasons, I guess. The original title of his upcoming book was “Leave Society.” It’s all kind of predictable — he turns from existentialism to the most narcissistic form of politics, an obsession with liberating himself from his own so-called false consciousness, and doing so in part by obsessively regulating his own body, purging himself of “toxins.” If this helps him to stay alive then I guess it is good but it seems like it will be shallow fodder for a novel.

I still think Taipei is an extraordinary book—an uncompromising document of our cultural moment. But everyone who’s mentioned that this is a bad person we are talking about is righ. I feel very weird recommending Taipei to people nowadays even though it’s an important book to me.

the most disturbing stuff on his twitter feed is not the anti-vaxxer tweets btw, but the 9/11 ones. He thinks some kind of “free energy” superweapon was deployed to take down the towers, a fringe theory even among the fringes of truthers.

if you write really concise prose you can disguise intellectual bankruptcy with woo, I guess

jet fuel can't melt steel beams, treeship

i don't know how to formulate that as a tao lin style deadpan joke but that doesn't mean it's not true

If you said it with a neutral facial expression you’re good, j

I'd be surprised if this guy publishes another word on paper as long as he lives. I think he's crocked, personally. I don't think Vintage is publishing his "non-fiction book about psychedelics" in 2018 anymore than I think he believes or disbelieves the irresponsible horse shit he toys with on Twitter.

Taipei made a big impression on me because it didn't seem like fiction or writing at all, but I suspect that'll be the last time a major publisher will be as patient or generous with their editorial time (or promotional budget, for that matter) for a high-risk author who could quickly become a commercial liability for a variety of reasons.

Taipei was probably the last risk a major fiction publisher ever took, the parallel here is probably some crap late-90s indie rock band during the final days of the major label gold rush. Get Butch Vig or Alan Moulder in to keep an eye on them in the studio and edit the living hell out of it after they pass out in the control room...

Wouldn’t Vintage make a statement if Tao Lin was lying about them publishing his next book?

"Oh, tell to me, Tao Lin, " she said, "why came you here to dwell?"

lol

I dunno, Vintage either a) doesn't look at creepy Twitter accounts, b) has a financial/contractual/PR reason for not saying anything, c) is worried he'll show up at their office.

he's probably contractually obligated to continue posting to his creepy twitter account

I considered that, but it would be a pretty fucking edgy play by a publisher to have anything to do with this guy.

i would guess tai pei sold better than most of the vintage contemporaries catalog, even if that isn't saying much. leaving aside his directed energy attack on building 7 and alex jones-level attacks on big pharma... i guess they appreciate his "self-promotion."

9/11 free-energy attacks and anti-vaccine nonsense in 2017 is fairly mild compared to, you know, what's out there... it's almost quaint.

he's probably contractually obligated to continue posting to his creepy twitter account

I would be extraordinarily surprised if this were the case

I think he sucks but cmon guys it’s the publishers job to sell books I’m sure they have done way worse

fuck this guy; his writing is shit, he is shitty, end of story

an uncompromising document of our cultural moment

taipei was good but stuff like this makes me think, no, actually, taipei was bad

what if i said it felt extremely contemporary which is a unique thing for me to feel about writing that i find in a book

part of this had to do with the way he represented the mediated quality of his characters' experiences -- through drugs, technology, etc. it was dystopian fiction in the present.

i'm not trying to say he is shakespeare or something but he did some new stuff