Tao Lin

If you visit Tao Lin's site, you will see he is conducting a contest (with some nifty prizes, including cash and drafts of his mss.). These are sweet. Good investments. Except for the coin collection. That's pretty much naff. Okay, I like old coins. That Walking Liberty silver dollar is pretty. I think that's the name.

Since I was up with the collywobbles from my Dollar Tree delight, I watched a couple of the video entries. That's one category. You can film yourself talking about the author or his books, character, whatever. He doesn't care if it's negative or not.

My favorite clip has already lost in its category because I think you win by being longer and it was only forty-eight minutes. And two other people had talked for over two hours. Very slowly. I didn't watch it all but it was an interesting clip. I mean the forty-eight minute one on Vimeo. It was interesting to me because it featured a defensively hetero male having this funny engagement with Tao Lin's writing (he had read a total of twenty-two pages of one novel). He kept thinking the writing was making advances at him or something. Or maybe the cover was making advances at him. At one point his girlfriend alludes to Lin (metaphorically) hugging his readers and the hetero recoils in hetero horror. From the metaphorical hug. It's really a fun clip. I would have watched the whole thing if I hadn't had to post the albino squirrel video lol. And then the young hetero said something fascinating about the cover image of Lin's forthcoming novel, Richard Yates.

He said it looked like a "reverse facehugger."

And the two young women (one presumably his girlfriend) immediately and rightly jumped on this stunning phrase.

It completely sounds like a bedroom term. I was sure it was something cunnilingual.

But No. He meant the creatures in Alien. Facehuggers. The earlier rather crustacean phase in their metamorphosis when they wrap around a human face and inject the larva or whatever. The one that later gives itself a Caesearian section.

He's referring to the stunning visual impact of the conch shell the author holds in front of his face on the cover of the book. Check it out online. If it doesn't win a book design award, I'll be shocked.

I thought that was interesting, his reading of this image as threatening. Then he made the much more obvious interpretation of the image as vaginal, which is an unmistakeable one. It's a very pink interior to the conch.

What's funny is the hat Tao Lin is wearing, which seems (for me) to hearken back to the time when Richard Yates was still alive and in his prime. The floral wallpaper is the perfect visual complement to the foreground of the image. I don't know who took that photo, but they totally know what they're doing.

It's funny and appropriate. The idea of equating Tao Lin with the vaginal and the creature from Alien at the same time. Because his persona (I don't presume to know a writer's real character in ninety percent of writers encountered) eschews masculinist tendencies (or possibly masks them) which is why I think he appeals so strongly to women. Of course, there's always just bone structure and "looks." But women seem to write about him and after him in a way that they don't often do with male writers--even male writers they admire.

And yet there is the other thing. The Alien thing. The master of the medium. Propagating. And the medium is definitely the net. Not that the books aren't solid writing as books. But sometimes they seem just a tad more real when they are backlit by the computer. When they are on their home planet.

The Alien thing is funny and apt too. Because Lin is clearly a master colonizer. He has injected himself everywhere. At first this was done forcibly. But now the Alien Queen can actually relax for a bit. Because he's certainly realized he's gotten to the stage where people are making the comparisons he wants made for him. Blogs are talking without prodding or incentive. When CNN.com talks about Bret Easton Ellis's Imperial Bedrooms, they mention the influence he has had on a new generation of authors. Authors like, oh say, Tao Lin.

Many of the comparisons with Ellis seem to focus on the commonality of attention given to the superficiality and vacuity at the heart of American culture, the desire for brand and commodification which turns people into American psychos. But this is funny. Because the comparison is invalid. With Ellis, it's an indictment of that superficiality and vacuity and the way it's used to cover up the real massive damage of the psyche. His characters are always fleeing. Ellis grew closer to Fitzgerald after his first novel, which probably owed as much to Camus as it did to Petronius. I read some quotes from him at his one reading and I was surprised to hear him refer to "immoral" acts in Less than Zero. Funny. I had thought he would have used "amoral." Because that's so much more swank. The cachet. I bet when he was twenty-three he said "amoral." Tao Lin's first novel was in another universe altogether. It was more about apperception than it was about perception. He rarely has a perception he doesn't filter through apperception. That's not really filtering, I suppose. It's more a loop. Feedback is created. That's the noise he loves which is a big part of his style. You understand why he likes the music he does then when you realize that. Also, if you haven't gotten by now that the author hates abstractions (and value judgments) and feels that his ultimate investment is in the idea that only concrete reality exists, then you probably haven't really been reading fully awake. I believe he said somewhere that he believes that abstractions are the root of all evil. This is a mystical and well-intentioned idea, but it's also a disingenuous one. I thought it was funny when someone (Lin?) edited his Wikipedia entry from the line about writing "concrete reality" to writing "concrete." He is writing the concrete. He must have realized that concrete reality is an oxymoron. That word's an abstraction latching onto concrete (something). Like an Alien facehugger.

Oh, of course he writes about much more than that. No author writes several novels* with only one idea in his or her head, and an idea that's been around for centuries at that, sometimes in favor and sometimes not. But conviction is a good place for a writer to start. Whether they are right or wrong or both or neither.

I can't think of another writer (maybe Vonnegut or Brautigan) where the variation in the critical reception was so age-segregated. Okay, that probably wasn't true of Vonnegut really. Not completely. His experiences in the War meant he wrote books that made sense to a wide age range. But then he started doing that sci-fi, countercultural embrace thing and the fan base started to shift. Vonnegut's a complicated figure. He evolved (okay, changed) his entire life. I always say it's no mistake his books are shelved so close to Voltaire's Because really they were the same person in different ages. But Brautigan, yes. The generation thing. People like to compare Lin to Andy Warhol and I suppose that's unavoidable. The delegation thing and the idea of communal creation, the mockery of pop culture, and the mysterious androgynous hierophant who has a huge Emotional Disconnect (which may or may not be a "put on") who does the star making all point to a new Factory. All that's missing are sex and drugs. Okay, get real. Right? But it's not foregrounded. Suicidality is ironic and not sincere with most of these writers. Not that I'm saying that's a bad thing! These are just different times.

In the night, I also read Lin's Gawker piece on being arrested (again) for "trespassing" in NYU's one coffee shop. I think that was the location. Anyway, this little essay is broken into the stages of the actual arrest. It was definitely readable and certainly nowhere as bad as the comment stream suggested. But I don't think the commenters were making a formal critique of the writing, apart from their hatred of Lin's use of those ubiquitous "language is lying again" quotation marks, so much as they were critiquing what they perceived to be an indulgent act. Possibly they believed he lacked that old Sartrean authenticity. They seemed to believe he was deliberately putting himself in the trammels as another publicity stunt. I have no idea if that was the case. Maybe he didn't want to say the conciliatory thing. Because one senses the conciliatory thing would have gotten him off the hook. But he didn't want to eat ass I guess. It's not that bad really. Ass. I would do it to a cop or rent-a-cop any day rather than lying around on cinder block furniture. Maybe Lin sees it as a dialogue class by now.

The funniest bit in that "arrest essay" was the part where they are having trouble fingerprinting Tao Lin and he offers to do it himself since he now knows the "right way" to do this. I do too, but only because of the post 9-11 federal laws for those who work in the transportation industry. Roll, don't press! But the funniest bit is at the end where Lin talks about cleaning the ink off his fingers and he does this green aside where he says he only ever uses soap and water to clean anything. It's the best moment in the essay. By far. He wants to remind you that he's green even if he's criminal. How can you not assign that to conceptual art. Artists hate being put in dovecotes of any sort. Of course. It's like the thing with feminist. Nobody really wants to be called a conceptualist or a feminist. Well, they do. But they want to be a lot more than that. Because both of those categories (probably compltely unjustly) have been assumed to have a completely defined set of core values. And of course, that's wrong. Completely wrong. Neither one of those things has been defined because neither one of those things is a closed set. Tao Lin is sometimes a conceptualist. And I think the way that paragraph I am referencing above brackets moral behavior within what is (nominally, ridiculously) immoral behavior is Tao Lin enjoying being a bit of a conceptualist lout. Well, it's stupid to call that sort of trespassing, soi-disant, immoral. That's a different type of branding. Not the kind Tao Lin excels at. The kind society excels at.

I also read his review of a bunch of different blogging platforms online. It was a funny article, but the Gawker piece was better. It was interesting to me because it showed the master of the medium assessing the medium and only occasionally pulling out some literary tricks to enliven the article. But it was a mismating of mindsets. It was too arty for the techheads and too tech for the literary sort. But it's useful writing in that he actually does review the strengths and weaknesses of the various blogging platforms in concrete detail. If you are on Blogger, you will be happy to hear you're on one of the better ones. By far. I hadn't even heard of a few of them. The article is funny in places. Like his review of Wordpress and some blogs which he sees as Wordpress clones.






*I say several because I'm counting the co-authored Hikkomori, which actually may be "his" purest work. But then I'm a sucker for the epistolary form.