/lit/ - Literature

>432 replies omitted

>>4245813

Seriously American Apparel was shit.

WHAT THE FUCK?

>>4245804
>>4245814
He's a one-man shrine to mediocrity.

u just dont understand man

>a middle schooler could writer a better short novel

in what way? like with more magic spells and chainmail bikinis?

I liked Taipei.

I "sat" down in a comfort-ish position when I saw this thread. My mind rolled in 5mg of valium and I think I smiled like an idiot. "spalone babagooscooties" I bubbled softly so my roommate wouldn't hear and think I was a crazy person.

>>4245804

I don't know why people read his books. My advice is to read classics and keep it to yourself if you are ever chatting in the coffee shops.

>How in the fuck is Tao Lin a legit writer?

It's post-modernism, I've got to explain shit in the most meticulously autistic way conceivable.

>>4245804
I bet you're one of those people who goes to a modern art museum and loudly exclaims "This isn't art! A five year old could paint that!".

>>4245804
I don't think you got the point. I don't love him either, but I honestly do feel that American Apparel went over your head.

The point of Shoplifting is that it removes all baggage, thoughts, and is a simple reporting of various events, with the intention being to make the theme simply 'the passage of time'.

I'm not saying I think it's especially great or creative, but its not completely without purpose. I much preferred Richard Yates.

>>4245851
Shoplifting from AP+middle schooler= Dakota Fanning in a chain mail bikini
>I'm ok with that.

>How in the fuck is Tao Lin a legit writer?

He's no more a "legit writer" than E. L. James. They both pander to respective audiences, so gained traction that way.

Almost all authors do this.

>>4245804
>legit writer
Pleb notions of artistic hierarchy are hilarious.

>>4246979
Ahehahehehaheh. You've got it right, my fellow patrician. I'm so glad there are other patricians like me who come to 4chan. We've got to keep the raging river of pleb at bay! Ahahahehehahehehaeheh.

It is utterly ridiculous that all these pleb betas believe that a Joseph Conrad novel, say, requires more talent, intelligence, and skill with words than your average Tao Lin contribution. Fools!

Oh well, maybe they'll one day be patrician like us. But, maybe they won't!

>>4247004
>It is utterly ridiculous that all these pleb betas believe that a Joseph Conrad novel, say, requires more talent, intelligence, and skill with words than your average Tao Lin contribution. Fools!
This unironically.

>>4247011

>>4247020
I'm not privy to your pleb memes, peasant.

I just tried listening to one of his "talks." He sounds like a fucking illiterate plebshit.

I like tao because he engineers his real life to give himself material for his books then he just writes what happened and changes the names

>>4247037
I think he talks and writes like a stroke victim.

Taipei was a pretty boring read but there aren't any other valid criticisms of it.

Tao Lin is one of those people I really can't imagine living to old age, like Kurt Cobain or David Foster Wallace

>>4247062
This.

His prose is so clean it is impossible not to admire him. He is completely uninteresting in interviews though. Not that his performance in person matters at all.

>>4247071
I did think his persona and writing were a part of some kind of faux hipster joke until Taipei. The dense, balanced, cumulative sentences which jump between objective descriptions of macbooks, people on klonopin, and metaphysical thoughts, are impressive. Knowing that he grew up without friends and has been on some kind of drug cocktail in most of the interviews he's done in the past few years explains some things, too.

>>4247113
Pretending to be impressed by schlock doesn't make you more discerning. It's not that you've found some way to appreciate garbage that others haven't. You've really just found a way to lie to yourself.

>>4247140
The critical consensus is that it's a good book. /lit/ has a weird relationship with Tao
that I didn't hear about until after I'd read his works.

>>4247163
Cite critical analysis that says it's a "good book".

>>4247113
>Knowing that he grew up without friends
pls don't make me feel these feels

>>4247172
>tfw they were his only friends
>tfw toy poodles feature in a large part of his work
>tfw his email address is still the combined names of these two poodles to this day

>How the fuck is Tao Lin a legit writer
It's a trick question: he's not a legit writer. He's known by only a handful of people, and among those people is regarded as a proficient writer by a minute percentage. Something like .0.000....0.0005.0.5% of people who are aware of him respect him as an author. Half of those people are his direct family, while the other half do it ironically.

>>4247067
One can only dream.

He's a very uninhibited self-promoter, like Mira Gonzalez and the rest of the alt-lit crowd.

They have the inflated ego of the internet generation and put in little effort in their works (see: Eat When You Feel Sad, I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough to Make Us Beautiful Together, ad nauseum) put still demand that these works be read and praised and so on.

It's a temporary pose that isn't even as big as people make out.

Of all the people that really love or really hate Lin, only three or four have ever read one of his novels.

>>4247193
That's the part of alt lit that isn't Tao, not Tao himself.

have you guys even read Taipei? It's a legit and good novel

>How in the fuck is Tao Lin a legit writer?
Nobody really knows the story of how Tao Lin joined the Legit Writers' Society. Legend has it that the ghost of David Foster Wallace himself appeared at Tao Lin's initiation ceremony and said:

'His work is shit. I just got done reading Shoplifting From American Apparel, a middle schooler could writer a better short novel. WHAT THE FUCK??'

As far as I'm concerned a writer isn't legit until they've received Harold Bloomies stamp of approval.

Here's a better question. How did he get famous/popular?

It's called minimalism.

>people who think Tao Lin is a nobody

>>4247260
By writing books.


He's not famous famous.

He's noticed by the New York Times and the Guardian and Vice and all that.

I was just about to make a thread to share this. I'm a grad student at tcnj. You guys have any messages you'd like me to pass along?

I might just print out this thread and hand it to him..

>>4247188
I think his books are pretty funny, unironically.

Not even related to him.

>>4245804
Shoplifiting is my favorte ^_^ y don't u like it??? curious! :3

>>4247276
That's because you're Tao Lin. Now, go to ed.

>>4247250
Just as Barthelme appeared to David, saying, "His work is shit. I just got done reading Broom Of The System, a middle schooler could writer a better short novel. WHAT THE FUCK??"

Barthelme hadn't read Broom, and never did, but he had seen a guy in a beret reading it and so knew that it was a piece of shit.

>>4247290
BOTS was actually pretty good though

>>4247299
Yeah but Broom:Infinite Jest::Shoplifting:Taipei

I just read a excerpt from Tao Lin and it confuses me.

Most of his paragraphs and sentences start like shitty greentexts but then he starts dropping these incredibly tight descriptions that I can't avoid thinking that, yes, the praise is deserved but his writing is partially shoddy but at the same time is genius and I can't get the 10 successive "Paul did this, Paul did that" which I realize are shit.

I don't even know.

>>4247700
There's nothing shitty about simple descriptive sentences, anon.

>>4247707
I didn't meant that; it's that his prose is effective but it doesn't sound good.
It reads like the summer report of some kid on some parts but then you take notice that it's actually effective at getting you on the scene.

>>4247724
so slightly high brow young adult fiction right

>>4247724
Not every work of literature has to have the refinement and ornate style of Flaubert.

He's trying his own thing.

This is the shittiest part of Taipei. It fits the tone and themes of the novel but oversteps the mark.

>>4247736
not every work of literature has the refinement or the ornate style of flaubert in the first place

tao lin doesn't have much, and would probably be forgotten if he didn't mention 4chan

>>4247188
>.0.000....0.0005.0.5%
somewhere a mathematics professor just had a stroke

>>4247738

Is this real? Is he retarded?

>>4247738
Well it was something that actually happened in his life, so really you're not calling Taipei shit you're calling the universe shit. I think the prose is fine.

>>4246729
Post-modernist literature ended with Infinite Jest. We've been in a new era for awhile now. Lin's prose and writing actually captures the current zeitgeist: minimal, dry, austere, no dickering with chronology or indulgence in fantasy. Straight up transcription of living.

then write a better novel

do it

unless you're

a faggot

>>4247821

That's entirely retarded. You experience a straight transcription of reality by living in it.

>>4247782
I don't understand. What's so bad about it? It's a reproduction of a conversation. People have inane conversations. If you want to read fantastical, quotable whimsy with engineered bombast unrealistic to every day speech there is always the monologue in Atlas Shrugged.

>>4247836
I don't think he means the conversation itself, but how it's written.

>>4247834
>a thing is a transcription of itself

His work makes people feel stuff. It's not "bad" prose either. Really, his sentences tend to be well constructed when he's being authorial. Only when it's part of the mood/tone does he lapse into mumbling minimalism. And he's writing about the internet in a more honest way then anybody else I can think of in fiction. It's not the great American novel but that's okay sometimes, I think.

>>4247834
I get what you're saying, but have two objections. So, what you want is a book that has fantastical and imaginary elements, like dragons and magic? Is real life not worth writing? Are you calling autobiographies or biographies "entirely retarded"? Do you like post-modernist literature where the author switches their style eight times in during the course of the novel, fracture the chronology (telling the last part of the story first, jumping back and forward in time in the same chapter), use opaque stream-of-consciousness? Is realism inherently worse than surreal or other styles of writing? I thought people liked minimal realism. Doesn't half this board worship Hemingway for that very reason?

>>4247842
What would be a better way to describe that conversation? I think he pulled it off nicely.

>>4246721
Jesus fuxking christ this! Just read the classics, keep your reading to yourself and stop boasting about intellectualism.

>>4247851
>feeling this threatened by people who are smarter than you

>>4247845
>he's not a great writer because there's no great writing on the internet
>but that's OK

for you maybe, in the end he's just a bad writer

>>4247820
>>4247836

But he got to choose what to redact. He left out any evidence that Paul was writing, every day -probably, for instance. There are loads of inane conversations in the first half of the book, is the taco conversation really important?

>>4247821
First off, calling it a new era or something doesn't really help your point. But more importantly, and I think you're on the right track with this, it is important to note that our relation with the autobiography has changed radically in the last 50 years. The successes of Dyer, Houellebecq, Knaugaard etc. are testaments to this. I'm not so sure that Lin (and Dunham in film) necessarily need to be viewed as the new face of this shift. I think Lin is right in aligning himself more with the K-Mart realists (Purdy, Carver) then anything else. And I think he has yet to write his masterpiece.

>>4247860
So just to be clear, your issue is either with the conversation itself or the choice to include the conversation, not the writing.

>>4247858
Pretty clever juxtaposition of two unrelated quotes, but this isn't the Daily Mail, and you're missing the point. I think small triumphs of domestic literature are valuable hence "It's not the great American novel but that's okay sometimes." Also I think Lin has yet to write his masterpiece. He's moving closer and closer to no-frills confessional, which I think is to his advantage. I like to imagine that he'll be remembered similarly to how we remember Edouard Leve or Schlegel or some of the other depressive aphorists.

>>4247878
Nobody remembers those people.

>>4247881
lol

>>4247885
nice new york post response m8

>>4247860
I would call most of the scenes in the book "inane," really, he was just chronicling his memories, whatever they were.

>>4247890
nice ignorance

>>4247846
So much strawman lol

>>4247892
He's trying something new and in this post post modern internet world, that's OK

>>4247896
Not my fault I spent the college english course fees on actual books~

>>4247873
I think the conversation and prose compliment the themes and tone, and that it's easy to defend even the most jarringly unnecessary content in the novel.

>>4247903
we could probably do this forever but if you dont know schlegel, pessoa, schopenhauer, baudelaire etc. (who I was referring to as the 'depressive aphorists' under the misguided assumption that you knew something about literature) then you should probably head to grad school asap

>>4247892
Stripping the prose of adjectives and describing his subjective experiences in objectives terms wasn't accidental, though, it must have been intentional and have taken a lot of effort. You must agree that he is conveying things about the world and interior lives of his characters through his prose style, even if he's also chronicling his memories?

>>4247918
Why would I do that? I don't particularly care and the knowledge wouldn't enable me to enjoy Tao Lin in any way!

>>4247918
Be honest mate, how many of these authors have you actually read?

>>4247918
schlegel

Tao Lin is the classic caricature of the artist breaking previous norms and treading into unknown territory, so /lit/ is of course the ones who hate him the most.

>>4247937
go back to bed tao

>>4247821
>still clearly in the material conditions of the postmodern era
>postmodern literature is over
>totally superficial analysis of an obviously postmodern style

>>4247956
I'm not sure we know how to classify Lin yet. Some would have said that Wallace was writing after the post-modern black humorists, but now many would say he's a definitive postmodern writer. Lin blends Minimalism and Postmodernism into some kind of soup of New Sincerity that to some looks like a kind of aspergerian realism. "Alt-lit" will die and we'll get some new lenses for interpreting Tao.

>>4248056
http://fuuka.warosu.org/lit/thread/S2875378#p2877236

Is this your post?

>>4248056
Does anybody outside of Academia give two shits?

>>4248067
It's odd that a writer who uses almost no adjectives has forced his readers to coin a new adjective in order to describe his writing.

>>4245804
His stuff is jarring in a weird and interesting way. What else do you need to know?

>>4248124
So is Tao Lin a darling of English grads because of subversive use of post-modernism, or because they like to wag their fingers at people who don't care for his writing because of said subversive use?

>>4248135
Because he writes good books.

>>4248169
but that's your opinion

I say he writes bad books

The only question Lin's best works leave me thinking is - does Tao understand why this is a good book, or is this just how he thinks?

>>4248135
Neither. He's the darling of people who have spent enough time on the internet to become neonihilistic transhumanist zazen masters and respected by academics who actually learned a thing or two.

You will dismiss these masters as autists and sperglords in much the same way as the Roman government dismissed Christians as plebeian troublemakers, but there might be some of the academics willing to give you a job teaching entry level courses to college freshmen.

>>4248220
You may want to consider a follow-up question: Is your obsession with how he thinks based in a deeply rooted desire for you to make sure he thinks well enough to your liking for him to think for you?

>>4248257
More like, if this is just the way that he thinks, is this style of thought a symptom of what it means to be a young adult today, or is he parodying how he interprets life today feels to some people?

>>4248175
debate me irl faget

>>4248278
The style of thought is indeed a symptom of an upper middle class upbringing in an America where children are either raised by parents who vicariously inflate their joys or brutally hone their discipline, but Tao Lin himself is the parody. Whether or not he understands this is irrelevant because it's possible for everyone else to access the humor of the situation.

>>4248307
Coincidentally, I've heard Lin suggest that the fact that Taipei is about a world where people fail to express all of the experiences and thoughts inside around them, and who would have little reason to even reflect on them or try to express them in words, but that it's not tragic that this is so because the reader has the opportunity to explore them.

I've read his poetry and I really like it. He does name-dropping which I'm not a fan of though, but I do like his work. Haven't read his novels though.

I'd buy some of his poetry compilations though.

>>4248220
It's how a middle class twenty year old twink thinks. The only people who likes his books are other white washed asians.

>>4247700
Can you post some examples of this tight prose?

>>4248324
I'm a beautiful Nietzschean Aryan and I love Tao Lin.

>>4248321
That's the better, kinder literature post-modernism is giving way to. Some people are spooked by the internet because anyone could be watching them and they quickly jump to the revolting subconscious notion that everyone is watching them, other people convince themselves they're not afraid because anyone else on the internet is uneducated and autistic and they slowly reach the comforting conscious notion that everyone else is uneducated and autistic, others yet accept the truth that a global telecommunications network readily adaptable to an emerging and developing social media is far to vast and complex for any one person to comprehend and summarize.

>>4248237
I don't dismiss them as autists and sperglords, I dismiss them as the same vague empty mirror they despise to begin with.

>>4248353
Tao Lin can only describe his reflection in the mirror to you. If you snatch the mirror out of his hand so you can tell it to go fuck itself, you can only dismiss yourself.

>>4248353
I think Lin believes that everyone is (or at least all of his characters are) in search of a mirror that will reflect them back at themselves accurately. Whether this is a generational desire or a basic human desire is up to the reader, I guess.

>>4248349
It's post-modern literature that's given up on self-reflection itself, and instead embraces itself with all its banal vulgarity. You might like that, feels like a snake biting it's own shit tail though.

Hopefully Tao paves the way for a better writer

>>4248369
Or I can just tell Tao Lin to fuck off.

Tao Lin's mirror is a flimsy 2-Dimensional thing, it's a nice schtick but doesn't hold up.

>>4248056

>"Alt-lit" will die and we'll get some new lenses for interpreting Tao.

No it won't. No we won't.

Alt-lit is Gen Y's primary literary aesthetic. It embodies the "black hole" of ironic and insincere meaninglessness that is so heavily associated with being a young adult (read:"hipster") sometime during the last decade or so. If postmodern lit's (Pynchon and Barth) calling card is narrative distance through irony, self reference with regard to writing aesthetic, and black humor, then Alt-lit's calling card is narrative separation through irony, self reference with regard to authenticity, and anti-humor. Alt lit is still postmodern, just from the perspective an increasingly relevant generation, and it isn't going anywhere.

>>4248378
In my view, the successor to post-modernism must start with a demonstration of why post-modernism is intellectually grotesque. I could see Tao Lin being this demonstrator, but his career is still in its nascence. Whether he clears the way for the new path or collapses in on himself remains to be seen.

I see in him the potential to lay the foundations for a higher caliber of human being, but I also see in him the pitfall of feeling entitled to irrefutable achievement as he ages.

Some asshole is posting "Who is Tao" fliers all over my university.

Seriously, there's like 30 in a single pathway.

I can't believe this shit followed me into the real world.

>>4248408
If an academic community that encourages the study of emergent knowledge in numerous forms spooks you, you should have gone to a college instead of a university.

>>4248402
Higher calibur of human being? No...but I could see all the work he's striving for is perhaps a way of surpassing the bottleneck we've placed around ourselves. However, there's a degree of unreality to everything.

He's created a world of cardboard people on purpose, but he refuses to go beyond that. I'm not sure if he even can. And if he can, do what with it? Tao's captured the post-modern resignation to a sort of "self abyss" but no more.

>>4248408
sorry m8 he p8 me

>>4248433
Adding to this, I can imagine Tao Lin being bandied about as the post-modern Camus.

Just as annoying too.

He's either related to someone famous or he made the right friends.

>>4248440
Tao isn't shameless enough to publish an analogous abomination to the mittens of sissyfuss

>>4248450
Nah, Tao has decades of life ahead of him to lose his shame

>>4248433
His standing in the doorway is what makes him the litmus test for writers, artists and philosophers who can go through it. If you view his presence there as refusal or incapability, find another door. Saying Tao Lin knows is false, because Tao Lin may not know. Saying Tao Lin lacks the capacity to know is also false, because Tao Lin may possess the capacity to know. Alt lit is the literature of social media; in defiance of prior academia, it does not expect you to be able to have a firm grasp of it because it has experienced firsthand the kaleidoscopic array of human condition. Rather than knowledge only a select few can understand, rather than entertainment that the masses can afford, it presents art that can be universally enjoyed or not. It asks not of prescription to schools of thought or mass hysteria, for it knows that joy must always begin with each individual and it has an internet full of individuals to demonstrate this.

>>4248453
Maybe the drugs will drive him to that point. He's still way too self-concious and humble to get uppity enough as a novelist to drag his amateur ass all across philosophy like a filthy pied noir.

>>4248466
It's not an abyss of prior thought. It invites (and is ripe) for new lines of thinking. Tao Lin and Alt Lit presents everything as-is, it'll evolve into other forms and will eventually seek form and build upon itself like everything else.

>>4248420
If I wanted intellectual and artistic masturbation bundled into a single passage, I would have gone to a liberal arts school

>2013
>disliking Tao Lin

only fedoras do this

>>4248490
you're on /lit/ aren't you

replace artistic masturbation with shit posting and occasionally actual masturbation

>>4248484
mumble mumble muh divine sublimity

>>4248495
Oh please, you can understand the message and still dislike the author.

>>4248498
>you're on /lit/ aren't you
Damn, ya got me there

>>4248504
you know it's gonna happen

shhh close your eyes and accept muh sublimity...

>>4248400
There's nothing ironic or insincere about Taipei. Did you even read the book?

The antithesis of post-modern literature is also a rejection of irony and insincerity. The whole *wink wink isn't this all a great big joke* mode that dominated post-modern literature is exactly what's being shed right now. Look at the emotional rawness of McCarthy, for another example.