The French are Getting Tao Lin

I was reading some of Tao Lin's French reviews (three reviews of Richard Yates in Le Monde).

He did a press junket a little while back where he shot through France.

And I just read this interview:Fabien Dabert interviews Tao Lin for the Internaute.

I was particularly impressed by Tao Lin's loyalty to the novelists he's always cited as seminal influences, and his honesty about his feelings concerning two literary giants, when he could have made a self-aggrandizing move by going with either or both of these comparisons and embroidered upon his own "fame narrative," while simultaneously allowing for a critical contextualization (by those lazy scholars who believe the author is the best authority on his own work) that could have benefited him. This is Europe, after all, and those are European gods. Old Pantheon anyway.

I think it's proof of a generational change that Tao Lin's greatest acknowledged influences are all women writers. I could see several possible (mostly conflicting) arguments for why that is. Chance. Great writing has nothing to do with one's birth sex. Those writers wrote the world the way Tao Lin largely already saw it. Those writers shaped the world into the way Tao Lin sees it. Tao Lin is the opposite of the masculinist writer. Tao Lin is a masculinist writer and doesn't want the anxiety of influence which male novelists (especially living ones) can exert.

His novel is, of course, Richard Yates. A man the last time I checked. And he has expressed admiration for numerous male novelists anecdotally and in critical writing. And of course he's published many males through MuuMuu House. But he also used to regularly ridicule (admittedly obnoxious or overly safe/bland) male novelists on his blog (ex., Updike the former, Bellow the latter). I don't think he ever ridiculed female novelists, but I could be wrong. Maybe Tao Lin is just the old form of gentleman. Maybe ridiculing such authors was something he did in his early to mid twenties and now realizes this is something which no longer holds his interest or something for which he no longer has time. Maybe he's too happy to bother being negative.

On vous a comparé à Beckett. On a parlé de vous comme le "Kafka de la génération I-Phone". Ça vous impressionne ?

J'aime Kafka mais je n'aime pas Beckett. Et je n'aime pas suffisamment Kafka pour me sentir flatté. Ce ne sont pas mes références. Je ne me sens pas proche d'eux. Je préfèrerais être comparé à des auteurs qui m'inspirent : Ann Beattie, Lydia Davis, Joy Williams.

"You've been compared to Beckett. You've been called the "Kafka of the iPhone generation. Does this mean anything to you?

I like Kafka but I don't care for Beckett. And I don't like Kafka so much that I feel flattered by the comparison. Those are not my influences. I don't feel close to them. I would rather be compared to others who have inspired me: Ann Beattie, Lydia Davis, Joy Williams."

The interviewer is largely deferential and cordial and asks only a small handful of questions but very good ones.

Tao Lin's work ethic comes through. That pretty much comes through all the time.

When asked what he will do in 2012 to equal Richard Yates, he mentions his book deal with Vintage and its 2013 release date. But he stresses he will be writing constantly in that interval. "I write all the time."

If you've followed Tao Lin's career arc, you can't miss how serious he is about believing in doing the work. Early in his career, the constant worry was figuring out how to buy the time to write. The commitment to writing was never the problem. He talks about how much someone could accomplish if she could commit to writing 8-12 hours every day.

Interviewers often remark how slow to answer questions (in person) Lin is, and they often interpret this as shyness. Others have even espoused the extreme position that Lin must suffer from autism.

This latter belief seems to have amused Lin greatly.

I think the funny "autism" meme (Lin recently Tumblrd an AUTISM bumper sticker which gives me flashbacks to the early BRITNEY SPEARS ones) actually derives from a misunderstanding. I think it's much more likely that Lin's mind is constantly deep-processing everything that's going on inside him and he focuses on that rather than what's going on around him. Yes, I know that's a trait of some autistic people too, but they can't always choose to open that perceptual loop. Tao Lin's slowness to answer is probably more due to the way he studies the feedback language gives and the enjoyment he derives from turning words over in his mind (yours included) in a lapidary manner. This is why so many words end up in those quotation marks. Since Lin rarely leaves the mode of rational discourse unless he wants to make you laugh, I think it's safe to say "That ain't autism."

I think the author is pretty much on a permanent apperception loop. His writing is more about apperception than it is about perception. What a character is seeing is less important than what the character is seeing that perception through--which is usually another perception. Often a perception is filtered through a scrim of consumerist culture. Sometimes the Lin character tries to ironize this and so subvert the initial intent of the various products, names, etc. by reclaiming them in an absurdist manner. Hence, naming his characters after celebrities, having dolphins kill celebrities, linking his fame to that of Britney Spears. Linking his fame to the brand of Autism itself.

I think there's a strong ethical dimension to this struggle, this striving after the true essence of self, the dream of unmediated self.

Overall, half of Lin is epistemology and half is ethics.

It's definitely a conceptualist gesture: things like the Britney Spears (white text on black background) bumper stickers deployed through Brooklyn a few years ago by Lin and interns. Plastered all over a Duane Reade (and Gawker's doors?)

I think Tao Lin's mantras of simple unbranded foods (avocados, kale, seaweed) which he often tweets in the context of a-meal-I'm-eating signify his commitment to escape from media-filtered culture into the sanity of concrete reality. The idea that health lies in this sort of simplicity. It's a way of putting up a wall against just one form of toxicity. Much of his writing deals with people putting up walls against various forms of toxicity and sometimes the characters realize with horror they are the toxic ones and seem unsure where to put the walls at that point. Well, one can still put up walls against language. Which I suppose Tao Lin is also doing. By making abstractions "go away" (one wall) and simplifying the novel, he's doing the same thing he does with those meals. It's clear that he considers eating every bit as much an exercise in aesthetics and clear thinking as he considers writing to be that. Is that autistic? No, it's more consistency. Okay, a little O.C.D. maybe. A failure to compartmentalize? Or an indictment of compartmentalization? No, not the latter because I can think of instances where Lin's mind chooses to valorize comparmentalization. For that, see the next paragraph.

I've actually seen him share the mathematical formula for sanity one time, and it was only a few sentences long. And it scared the hell out of me. Because the formula was right. No mater how crazy your life is, if you followed the advice in those few sentences, your crazy life would no longer be crazy. Jedi mind tricks? Sure. But when has Tao Lin not been all about Jedi mind tricks? ;-)

Anyway, Congratulations to Tao Lin for conquering France.

He should do very well there.

Because Richard Yates should make sense to French literature.

It proceeds from many of the same assumptions as the literary theories which informed the work of writers like Robbe-Grillet--or even Barthes.

I've seen Tao Lin compared to Duras already (she's one of my favorites) but I didn't think that comparison was particularly apt or even valid.

Clearly that person was making the comparison based on the lucidity of both author's sentences, the--I would argue deceptive-- transparency of their sentences.

Duras obviously lives in a much more unabashedly emotional universe. Tao Lin is way too much of a rationalist (like Robbe-Grillet) for that comparison to stand and definitely falls on the avant-garde side of the wall.

Duras wrote truly great books and she's one of my favorites but to call her avant-garde seems silly to me.

Horace Walpole wrote to the Countess of Ossory on the 16th of August, 1776: "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."

Well, Tao Lin is a very funny guy and clearly finds the world's insanity amusing. When has he not been grooving on dysfunctional thinking.

But I think he lets enough of the world's felt tragedy through that his writing is not buffoonery--except when he wants it to be--like in his recent drawings-cum-vignettes at Vice.

But even those he's been doing forever. They're scaled down versions of the thousand word short fiction he used to blog.

They're largely grotesques and capriccios (to assign genre) but the funny thing is they're also realistic portraits. Because the grotesqueness and the Goyaesque craziness derive from the fact that these characters' lives are grotesque and filled with insanity. These are "normal people." And if you read between the lines, Lin has empathy for these characters. Because he's probably been all these characters at various points in his life.

It's weird that he's doing something so Thurberish as a side project, but I guess Tao Lin does have a Thurber in there among his other personae; it's definitely part of his repertoire.

Maybe he thinks through these into the novels. Who knows.

Thurber derived his identity from the way his writing and drawings were received by the magazine culture of New York and its social scenes. And Tao Lin used some of this same strategy in courting and winning over Gawker and in his (at that time) prescient use of other literary coterie type sites (like Goodreads) to saturation name-bomb. So if Thurber had been born in 1983, maybe he would have been a darling of sites (and parties) like these. Of course, he wouldn't be drawing the goofy stories he wrote half a century ago. He would probably be doing vignettes and fiction like the ones by Tao Lin mentioned above. Or I'd like to think so anyway.

I doubt Lin will end as badly as Thurber. Fortunately, few do.

Poor James Thurber.