Tao Lin is currently “flogging the shit out of” his new novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel. As part of this campaign, he’s offering “free shit” and “mad hits” (thanks to links from his site) to people who blog “>1500″ words about him. This is going to be my attempt to blog 1500 words about Tao Lin. I do not to know how to feel about Tao Lin. Because of this, I’m going to divide the post into two sections: 1) Things I Like About Tao Lin and 2) Things I Do Not Like About Tao Lin.
Things I Like About Tao Lin
I came across this piece when I had just moved to Seattle. I was using the library’s internet to “look for jobs”, which meant looking at blogs, which meant I was on Tao Lin’s blog and saw that he had written an essay on Seattle. The essay is basically a set of observations, most relevant to me at this point in my life being that “Seattle Tricks People”
So “Seattle” abstractly means to me something like “basking in the sunlight of overwhelming gratitude for life and art” but concretely means to me something like “feeling like there’s no possible routes for escaping a life of poverty and alcoholism while staring at sentences written by Sherman Alexie in an environment of people shouting things like ‘quadruple soy latte.’” I don’t know. I feel “tricked.”
I feel like Seattle had been sold to me as this magical hangout land, when it turns out that people here seem to be on the whole sort of morose compared to Philadelphia. I think it may be called “Laid Back” in sunny Cali, but here I think it’s sort of “Depressing”
His Essay on Good and Bad in Art
I feel like I ‘totally agree’ with his 1) commitment to relativism when it comes to art—drawing a parallel between seriously arguing that one form of poetry is categorically better than the other is something akin to trying to convince a 4 year old that “their favorite color should be ‘red’ instead of ‘blue’” and 2) emphasis on the arbitrary legitimacy of the role “poet” and the importance of being aware of the arbitrary embedded in the “I AM A POET/I AM A FUCKING POET”. Though he brackets the statement, explaining that though he enjoys poems that express the statement “I AM A POET/I AM A FUCKING POET”, that is just what he likes.
His Collaboration With Ellen Kennedy
Hikikomori may be my favorite of Tao Lin’s literary work (though I’m not terribly familiar with it outside of random things I’ve read for free on the internet). It’s very sad, it’s very funny, it’s very surreal:
dear tao
today i watched my ceiling fan spin for 6 hours.later i punched a hole in my tv to see how it worked. inside were three hamsters walking slowly around a calculator. i feel smarter now.
ellen
I think the work derives its concept from the Japanese phenomenon Hikikomori—an intense social withdrawal that affects Japanese youth. Hikikomori stay in their rooms for years…so the two in this book, Ellen and Tao, are poet-Hikikomori, sending messages to each other as their little worlds grow increasingly absurd. At one point in the book, Tao dies from cutting off one of limbs—correspondence with Ellen is then conducted by his Aibo. Even the super advanced Aibo ends up developing a capacity to feel loneliness. He also rewrite’s Updikes “A&P”, substituting the argument over the girls’ attire for a discussion over their all ‘being fucked’. I think that was ‘really ballsy’.
I Think I Like His Short Stories Or At Least Leftover Crack In Redhook
Here is a quote from the back end of the story. The concert is over, and they are in a Chinese food place or something. The paragraph begins with the narrator mentioning that Colin hadn’t thought over never seeing Dana again:
…when Dana was standing by the table, a few minutes ago, looking, she was waiting for him to stand, so that they could say goodbye or something, exchange phone numbers maybe, but Colin had sat there staring blankly at something…
I feel like this might be the point of the story, or at least that it is the point of the story as far as I am concerned. I feel like there is something very real here, a moment where interactions with an other crystallize into “what that meant” or “what is going to happen”. Colin knows about the boyfriend, but is still intrigued by this girl, who mysteriously held his hand. I think he likes her very much but she seems very far away (I think again because of the boyfriend). He likes her and he zones out, only to look back and realizing that she was indeed waiting for a formal goodbye. Though what did that waiting mean? I do not know and neither does Colin. It seems to me (to project my own experience) Colin feels like he disappointed her. He feels vaguely guilty for not giving her what it seems like she wanted (for him to stand and say goodbye, i think).It seems to me like Colin is looking back at this moment and saying “that was the moment when I made it so I would never see her again.” But he doesn’t actually know what that non-interaction, his zoning out, actually meant for Dana. The event is in itself meaningless but useful for Colin to explain things. I think. And reading over the thing again I guess it would be apt to mention the whole thing with Maura:
Colin said. “Hi,” the girl said. She had round eyes and a very thin, silver hoop in her nose. “I’m Maura. Do you want to eat Chinese food with my friends Frank and Donnie?”
Dana walked up.
When Maura enters the story she seems to immediately take control of the narrative. She invites Colin, alone, to eat Chinese with her and her friends. She dominates the conversation when Dana arrives, stopping her musings only to 1) ask/state that the two are together and 2) chiding the two for not being curious. But Colin and Maura don’t make a “two”, and Maura is attracting attention away from Dana. At this point Dana ceases to be the focus of both the Colin and the narrator’s attentions, and it probably makes sense that Colin would just sort of stares off and recall that she was waiting.
The note of regret, the whole “he didn’t know he would ever see her again” I think is very “real” given the context of he recollection and his possible motivations for action. I feel like Colin was active, rather than passive, in possibly snubbing Dana. I think he began care more about his interactions with Maura. Or, to be more clear, Colin “stopped liking” Dana and “started liking Maura”. I mean those statements in the vaguest terms. But the point of making the statement is that I feel it actually happens in life and sometimes I know have that thought of regrett: “but I didn’t _______”.
I like how Lin plays will with the ambiguous nature of human interaction (see above).
I Enjoy Some Of His Poems, Like This One
I like the ebook that is linked above. I feel like the poems here are ‘very intense’.
loneliness can fly a helicopter through a cut-out shape
of a helicopter the same size as the helicopter
and that’s its only skill
and it isn’t good enough
I think this is very good. I enjoy his repetition of ‘helicopter’ as well as his line break in the first two lines. You get two helicopters in the second line which makes it feel fast to me. Then with all that momentum, it all stops. The image/idea is presented and the speaker thinks about it. It makes me feel good (sort of) to read because it is unexpected and absurd yet for whatever reason makes sense. I guess the presentation of the spectacular image and it’s negation (that it isn’t good enough). It is, however, “still amazing”. This reminds me of Anselm Berrigan for some reason and I wonder if Tao Lin and Anselm know each other. They are both New York Poets (though while Lin has issued the statement “I AM A FUCKING POET”, I wonder, with this breadth of his work whether he actually thinks more like “I AM A FUCKING WRITER OF LITERATURE” or “I AM A FUCKING NOVELLA AUTHOR” or “I AM CARLES”). If they know each other (Berrigan and Lin), I wonder what they think of each other. Could they be enemies? What does Tao Lin think of Ted Berrigan? I wonder if Tao Lin knows that girl I met on OKCupid who apparently saw him in an American Apparel and “laughed at him”?
I really REALLY like his blog post on self promotion
Things That I Do Not Like About Tao Lin
I read the excerpt for Shoplifting from American Apparel in Hipster Runoff and felt sort of underwhelmed. And then I felt confused. And then I felt sad. Now I’m just confused. I feel like I like a lot of his non-literature work better than his literature? His persona? His brand? I think that may be it. I feel like I’m more into the ‘idea’ of Tao Lin than his ‘actual writing’, even though I do like some of it very much. I guess it does not matter. He seems to be very incredibly intelligent when he talks about literature, and is very funny when he writes about things in the non-fictional sense. **Having revised this blog post I can also confirm that Tao Lin is probably better at proofreading blog posts than I**
I think I have hit my word count. And I sort of feel like Lin is my professor or something and I have to email this to him or something (after just barely hitting the word limit). I will probably read my free copy of Shoplifting from Amerian Apparel.
2 Comments
jose diaz
Hi!