Literary Clusterfucks 2013

so ppl like T4o L1n or other ppl who entrap vulnerable teenagers in abusive situations probably don't live in fear of exposure b/c they don't believe they've done anything wrong whatsoever, at all

yeah they say most rapists are both repeat offenders and dont understand that theyve raped anyone

which simultaneously makes perfect sense and is unfathomable

fuck tao lin forever. i guess "richard yates" was more real than i thought/hoped it was.

just getting that vibe u seem coiled ready to pounce xp

― lag∞n, Thursday, October 2, 2014 2:52 PM (34 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't like doing this and nowadays i usually just fuck off when people in a thread piss me off but i'd like to know if a poster i like is being an asshole

^

so ppl like T4o L1n or other ppl who entrap vulnerable teenagers in abusive situations probably don't live in fear of exposure b/c they don't believe they've done anything wrong whatsoever, at all

tao lin was so unafraid of exposure that he wrote an autobiographical novel about doing this

zachlyon ready to pounce on another poster for saying something he doesn't like?? hard to believe

http://www.pacific.edu/Images/library/news/POUNCE_logo.png

i don't like doing this and nowadays i usually just fuck off when people in a thread piss me off but i'd like to know if a poster i like is being an asshole

― linda cardellini (zachlyon), Thursday, October 2, 2014 2:55 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fine i will unpack 4 u the intention was to self deprecatingly display my own real self involved reaction which was omg what if someone accused me of rape (or some other awful thing, or anything really) on the internet, it was not intended as a judgment on this particular case

it can also be seen as a reaction to the immediate casual impersonal moral grandstanding thats so typifies todays ephemeral internet culture like "wow tao lin is a literal piece of human garbage" *forgets about it two seconds later*

instead of that fake fortified self i offered a real imperfect human reaction

this lyon's got claws

the perhaps semiconscious notion that ones sins are excused by their accounting - not even - their contribution to ones ~lived experience~ - it is all stuff, narrative, action - is maybe increasingly prevalent and i am not sure that some visible cultural reminders - shall we say 'strong suggestions' of universal morality would go amiss, dangerous as this might seem. the trick is not to be all fundie xtian abt it or w/e. the construction of a cultural morality that is permissive of all bar exploitation and abuse is the project of our time

so yeah, down w/ momentary bandwagon morality sure, but up w/ reconstructing these abysmal & plu-nietzschean trends in self-ideation

tbh not sure they were thinking about getting "caught" or worried about it, I feel like there are certain types of people who feel like by nature of their lifestyle and scene and "interests" and self perception of intellect that they've transcended certain types of crime and exist where such things are nbd, it just happens, everything's cool, it's all pleasure.

cf lost prophets dude maybe for most striking example of this insane phenomenon ^

i do think there are kinds of learned or inculcated sociopathy, yeah

how do u define exploitation or abuse w/o abandoning universality & reaching for the vulnerable subjective? by not being fucking stupid abt it obv, many subjectives make light work

yh omar u just rptd me ;)

which is sort of a banal thing to say, i guess. "people can give themselves justification to do heinous shit if they are getting away with it"

xp

it's like terry richardson or American apparel dude or w/e, all the stories sound the same. These guys who are actually used to just casually doing shit bc they're in this bubble of a scene where they have power and operate via some combo of respect and fear.

i think what interests me most about these two cases is that these aren't ignorant redneck high school football players who never learned that rape was wrong. these are members of the alt-lit community who are heavily educated in contemporary social justice themes + ideas. the first dude actually name-drops the patriarchy in his apology. it makes me feel like the problem isn't the lack of education, but the lack of ethics/morality/empathy/humanity.

Translating it for the colonists here, LJ ;)

mordy is on my buzz ~cool~ altho education is croosh, just maybe diff realms of it, or it applied difftly

omar u being tart w me omd

i think what interests me most about these two cases is that these aren't ignorant redneck high school football players who never learned that rape was wrong. these are members of the alt-lit community who are heavily educated in contemporary social justice themes + ideas. the first dude actually name-drops the patriarchy in his apology. it makes me feel like the problem isn't the lack of education, but the lack of ethics/morality/empathy/humanity.

― Mordy, Thursday, October 2, 2014 3:14 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah feel like w so much of these heavily conceptualized understandings that come out of our higher education systems that there really needs to be something deeper to animate it, there needs to be some heart and honesty not just like analysis of the levels, ultimately justice is not enough

maybe religion will save us (not unserious, 'religion' needs unpacking. panentheistic revolution bros n sisses)

i think what interests me most about these two cases is that these aren't ignorant redneck high school football players who never learned that rape was wrong. these are members of the alt-lit community who are heavily educated in contemporary social justice themes + ideas. the first dude actually name-drops the patriarchy in his apology. it makes me feel like the problem isn't the lack of education, but the lack of ethics/morality/empathy/humanity.

― Mordy, Thursday, October 2, 2014 3:14 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They're also steeped in the literary tradition of damaged antiheros doing terrible things and writing thinly-veiled books about it and getting praise for their honesty.

honesty itself venerated uber alles

what did walter benjamin say abt history

it's a crying angel flying backwards?

maybe religion will save us (not unserious, 'religion' needs unpacking. panentheistic revolution bros n sisses)

― Ƹ༑Ʒ (imago), Thursday, October 2, 2014 3:24 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah its interesting me an mordy are two of the more religious regulars around here thinking the same abt this, i feel like a lot of the time religion can lean a lil too heavy on the personal morality plays while ignoring or reenforcing structural/societal issues but at the same time we all do have an internal life that we have to relate to and our contemporary culture is so massively extroverted that it does a poor job of dealing w people on that level and often makes them feel like they dont matter or arent good enough or w/e

great post :)

:)

where's magill with the kool aid

this is bigger than Literary Clusterfucks tbf, its like the entire point of it all. as solved on ilx

it fees like a culmination of ilx 4.0 alright

before the unbanning

i also want to know where magill is with the kool aid

feel like its kinda weird too how people so invented in the concept of structural injustice are also so into rubbernecking these individual cases, like is tao lin literal human garbage or is he a product of an unjust society

Yeah this is an excellent discussion. The specificity of experience is (necessarily) lost when talking about any type of politics, yet it's inescapable for individuals, who must some way or some how construct an ethical code for themselves. In Tao Lin's early blog posts, he tried to do this via Schopenhauer and the principle of "minimizing harm," but his novels this decade have been preoccupied with the collapse of this system, and the paradoxically joyless hedonism -- walking death -- that lay at the other end. The fact that he might be a literal moral monster complicates this in a way I am not sure how to process

might?

he seems like an emotionless asshole

just from that Jezebel article alone

any kind of tap dancing around this is bullshit

and how does it make you feel to judge him in that way waterface

it's really not important how i feel

it doesn't feel good to be honest but i never liked him as a writer anyway

surely waterface is picking at treesh here who unfortunately was ilx's resident tao lin stan. i don't think your feelings necessarily need to be complicated by this treesh - i mean, surely this isn't the first fiction author whose work you've found meaningful and later you discovered to have horrific moral flaws? like my fave novel of all time is prob Dead Souls and gogol was a voracious antisemite

ok he's a terrible cunt cool

can we get back to saving the collective soul pls

(lol I'm feeling better about Peter Hammill's drivel outburst now)

well if anything good will have come of all this

wins how do u derive ur moral outlook

https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/projects/18691/photo-main.jpg?1397760312

(exponent)moral outlook^(exponent - 1)

Xp mordy I love dead souls too. Gogol is similar to Lin in that his moral confusion is right there on the surface and part of what makes the book compelling. Gogol was less self aware though: he aimed (I think) for moral cohesion in his epic satire of Russia, while Tao Lin's novels almost satirize the impossibility of that kind of clarity. The tagline on the cover of RIchard Yates is "what constitutes illicit sex for a generation with no rules?"