the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

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

agree w treesh tapei is good

his free energy tweets are hard to take, tho i see no evidence/reason he isn't having this drug bk published

bret eastao elin

In some ways it's just Kerouac or whoever though, isn't it? Just a guy who's very, very high writing stuff in such a way that you can't tell if he's trying to write well or using "not very good writing" as formal grammar for something more naturalistic than the prose pyrotechnics of mid-brow brit lit, for example. It's really not new to read this kind of lad stuff, I've been reading it for 20 years, it's just that with Taipei the drugs have been updated—what does that one do?—and there is now the internet. I seem to remember a moment in Kerouac, though, the end of the novella The Subterraneans that was quite jaw-dropping in its spare, emotional impact (a group of people standing around outside a bar, doing nothing). I thought to myself, Kerouac you old con artist, you actually meant to do that.

I mean I can kind of see Taipei posing a more troubling and possibly more urgent question about literature itself, but I think that's possible because I read some Blanchot as an undergraduate and so I'm conditioned to look for halls of mirrors in fiction because they tie in nicely with theory which in turn allows you to stretch your paper's word count using more block quotes from the theory.

has everyone forgiven him the whole rapey thing?

by the "rapey" thing, you mean the consensual relationship between a 22-year old and a 16-year old, with the approval of her mother, that lasted for over a year?

yeah I forgive him. actually, I never gave a shit in the first place.

re the vaccine stuff and 9/11—I don't think this is some kind of performance. I just think he's ruined his brain with drugs.

he most likely believes all of this stuff but it’s still a performance. you can tell how he is setting up his bext book — “beyond existentialism”, or beyond the sense of meaninglessness he sketched in his last novel.

*next

bring back treeship the first

maybe this is just Tao's way of responding to mainstream acceptance from the literary establishment

by the rapey stuff I mean everything outlined here: https://jezebel.com/alt-lit-icon-tao-lin-accused-of-horrific-rape-and-abuse-1641641060 which sounded bad enough to me. if you think that all sounds consensual, I guess, fine, go ahead and think that.

"Yes, I had consensual sex with Ellen in her parents' house in Pennsylvania in her parents' bed, as she tweeted, when I was 22 and she was 16. No, that is not statutory rape, let alone rape."

actually it is statutory rape, that is the definition of what statutory rape is. I understand there are some grey lines here with older adolescents and consent, but it legally is statutory rape, dumbshit.

*googles* legally speaking, its not

it depends on where it happened and what the age of consent is. in some places it is 17.

Are people really interested in talking about this? His reputation in the mainstream literary world has rightly been torched. That doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting things about the work.

In some ways it's just Kerouac or whoever though, isn't it? Just a guy who's very, very high writing stuff in such a way that you can't tell if he's trying to write well or using "not very good writing" as formal grammar for something more naturalistic than the prose pyrotechnics of mid-brow brit lit, for example. It's really not new to read this kind of lad stuff, I've been reading it for 20 years, it's just that with Taipei the drugs have been updated—what does that one do?—and there is now the internet. I seem to remember a moment in Kerouac, though, the end of the novella The Subterraneans that was quite jaw-dropping in its spare, emotional impact (a group of people standing around outside a bar, doing nothing). I thought to myself, Kerouac you old con artist, you actually meant to do that.

I mean I can kind of see Taipei posing a more troubling and possibly more urgent question about literature itself, but I think that's possible because I read some Blanchot as an undergraduate and so I'm conditioned to look for halls of mirrors in fiction because they tie in nicely with theory which in turn allows you to stretch your paper's word count using more block quotes from the theory.

― fields of salmon, Monday, November 27, 2017 11:33 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What is your point? it's obvious you don't like his writing, this is just a thing of "if it works for you, it's insightful; if it doesn't, it's transparent horseshit." as with all discussions of divisive art. i agree with treeship, i mean i started this thread right after i got Taipei, and I still think it's one of the best books of recent years. Tao Lin really brings out the ire in NYC media people & academics, and I just don't give a shit about these internecine battles. the idea that Vintage isn't going to publish his next 2 books because of his tweets is just stupid. he's provocative, he's controversial = easy sell.

re: the jezebel piece, from what I remember the person recanted their initial statement & it was resolved & the situation was clarified. take that as you will. I certainly understand the hate & suspicion, but again, you gonna throw out your Burroughs books? yea yea we get it, you don't dig Tao Lin, that's fine, the knee-jerk hate he gets is so ott and boring. most of it stems from annoying Gawker in the 00s and now his (comparatively mild) paranoia on twitter. whatever, i don't give a shit. i just find the intense loathing of this guy to be so strange