A generation of American writers will soon be runner-up Tao Lins

[imomus]

I've fallen under the odd spell of 25 year-old Chinese-American writer Tao Lin. I'd love to say it's because I've read his books, but at the moment all I've seen is a few video clips showing readings, book launches, and eBay auctions. But they're enough to convince me that the New York poet and novelist is an interesting and original voice, a man whose tone -- slightly twee in an absurdist / emo comic book way, depressive yet funny, existentialist -- brings to mind the weirdness of Kafka, David Byrne and Toog. (I wonder if, like Toog, he's lefthanded? It strikes me as a "lefthanded" imagination.)

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There's more than a little of the "Martian sends a postcard home" school (the phrase is originally Craig Raine's) about Lin's work, which uses Ivor Cutler-esque absurdities (many involving hamsters and other animals) to estrange banal and boring everyday realities. Another good reference point might be Miranda July. Or even David Shrigley. Insert pretentious references to ostranenie and the Russian formalists here, if you like. Or maybe just embed a video of Tao sifting through stuff he's offering on an eBay auction (now closed).

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Lin's approach to self-promotion is as original as his authorial voice. The commercial worlds of Hollywood and of book promotion alienate him (Elijah Wood and The Da Vinci Code pain him particularly, and sustain terrible revenges -- at the hands of dolphins! -- in his first novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee), but he's developed an alternative marketing strategy as original as his prose.

Not only does he sell his literary papers randomly on eBay (something trad writers do in deals with university research libraries just before they die), he's been selling shares in his second novel via an IPO of sorts -- a financing scheme as original, in the publishing world, as my Stars Forever project was in pop music. Like me, he managed to raise enough this way to avoid having to go down the salt mines -- $12,000, in fact, enough to buy three months of freedom to finish the book and pay rent on his East 29th Street apartment.

"Eeeee Eee Eeee concerns the travails of Andrew, a twentysomething pizza delivery guy with a penchant for intellectual contemplation and zero career ambition," reports Time Out New York. "Andrew spends a good deal of his time pining after a girl named Sara, but he also finds himself in a series of bizarre situations, discussing the meaning of life with President Bush and watching a poker game played by Salman Rushdie."

Here's a poem -- I'm tempted to call it "vexatious" and invoke Erik Satie -- called "When I Was Five I Went Fishing With My Family". It's funny, and then it isn't, and then it is again, and then it isn't, but by the end it is again.

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And here's a poem Tao Lin just wrote with Ellen Kennedy. It's called Japanese Children with Digital Cameras in a Field, and Gary Glitter fans will be delighted to learn that it features child orgies. Something about it reminds me of the work that won Elfriede Jelinek the Nobel Prize, and enraged some traditionalists. Jelinek is more explicitly political, though.

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I'd say Tao Lin is a dangerous writer, not just because there's something of the high school shooter about him, and not just because his writing gives you the strong impression that anything is possible to say, but because a brief exposure to his authorial voice makes you want to write like him, immediately. He's the kind of figure new schools are formed around, a head figure, a figure head. And while that's important for the future of literature, it tends to make a bunch of people runners-up at being Tao Lin, rather than winners at being themselves.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

i really hate your words, your blog is starting to sound like the back page record reviews on vice mag, spin, pulse, etc. maybe just a little bit more dangerous.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thanks, you just reminded me of someone else I planned to compare Tao Lin to:

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Hmmmnn

[(Anonymous)]

Dunno this sounds to me like a slightly avant Lake Wobegon Days and God preserve us from more of that ..........

Re: Hmmmnn

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Tao Lin has said he'd like to be described as "the Asian John Updike", but I think "the avant Garrison Keillor" might amuse him more.

[(Anonymous)]

There's something quintessentially Click Opera about this post - about an author whose works you haven't bothered to read. You like his look, his attitude, but I have a feeling you'd actually be bored by Eeeee Eee Eeee (which I have read).

I guess I'm beginning to tire of your schtick, but that's not really your fault, is it?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm actually fascinated by the moment an interest in someone or something is kindled -- by appetite, by desire. That's why I write about the moment I become aware of an artist like Tao Lin. It's not an analytical or a judgemental moment -- those can come later -- but a moment of desire, a "blink" moment, a coup de foudre.

That is indeed what Click Opera is all about, and what I'm all about, as a person who loves to listen to music in languages I don't understand and imagine what's being said, or visit cultures I don't ever expect to enter, or read reviews of books and records and construct fantasic, baroque ideas of what they're like -- often much better than what they turn out to be.

So I'm afraid your disillusionment with Tao Lin and with Click Opera isn't of great concern to me. I'm interested in glamour and imagination, in the construction of future pleasures, and in encouragement, enthusiasm and optimism. Perhaps I'll report back when I actually have read Tao Lin rather than just seen him reading (though there's a possibility that, as a poet with a distinctive voice and mixed feelings (http://www.timeout.com/newyork/articles/books/1552/debut-taunt) about books as printed media, he's best consumed in video anyway), but probably I won't. This -- the moment of seduction and capitulation and appetite -- is the part that interests me.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There's another phrase that captures what I'm after: signature specification. The first moment one locks onto the unique signature of an artist -- specifies in one's own mind what they're doing, and what makes it distinctive and valuable -- is an unforgettable moment, the moment of flavour. It's a moment you shouldn't allow to pass by. A similar moment happens when you first arrive in a country, or return after a long absence. That's why my best writing about America or Japan happens the day I get there. There's something magical about that day -- I actually see the place with a vision which is, in some ways, more penetrating than the vision of people who live there. In the same way, the first day of autumn matters more than the tenth. It's more autumnal.

[drywbach.livejournal.com]

He certainly appears to be left-handed in the ebay clip (depends on how heavy the camera is, though, I suppose).

I feel more optimistic about the impact of strong, charismatic voices on other writers than you seem to do. People may feel moved to imitate Tao Lin's writing, but pastiche is part of the ability to step outside themselves and try to see the world from others' perspectives that will benefit their writing long term. I feel it's when they only internalise one or a few strong voices that they're in trouble and that's because they don't have enough material to synthesise into something fresh and interesting.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's a good point, and it's also important that pastiche always gets key details wrong. The influence of Tao Lin will be to freshen people's perspectives and give them that exciting punk rock sense that you can break the commercial rules and get away with it, and that "if he can do it, so can I!" He stokes up the appetite to write by giving himself license to say anything (he's reportedly cancelled book deals because editors asked him to make changes he didn't want to make), then other people are energized by that license and go off and do something else with it.

The runner-up-ization thing applies much more to the "winner takes it all" world of commercial mainstream publishing, where formula is everything, and there are "formula kings" surrounded by hosts of copycat courtiers.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I'm pleased for you Momus, and I get your point. In fact, it rather underlines my own feelings. Your "unique signature" has become tiring to me. It's not the tenth day of autumn, it's the hundredth. Choose any subject and I can already tell you what you think about it. I look at a youtube you post. Yes, I think to myself, it's sort of interesting, but on the other hand it's so very Click Opera. There's no mystery. Stuff I would probably find interesting I find slightly less interesting because of where it's posted. Context is all, I guess.

For quite a while I read your blog without listening to a note of your music. I'd got the feeling that although I found your cultural analysis interesting, your music wouldn't be my cup of tea. Then one day I checked out a couple of your songs on youtube. It's funny, usually when I imagine what an album will sound like from reading a review or profile, I imagine it totally different to what it actually turns out to be. And yet in this case, your music turned out to be exactly how I imagined it to be!

I guess I'm still reading you from habit. Not a good reason. I should find some other blogs to read. Please don't suggest any!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

What you're describing is as natural as arable rotation, and totally healthy. I get sick of my own work too, my own signature, my preoccupations -- it's one reason I work with other people, and fall in love with new artists all the time.

I totally expect the audience for Click Opera to turn over as the months and years go by. And I wouldn't rob you of the rebellious feeling of choosing other blogs by suggesting which to go to!

All I'd say is that Click Opera introduces a lot of people to a lot of things they wouldn't otherwise know about. It may even have done that for you.

Anyway, goodbye and -- godspeed!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It may just be seasonal affective disorder (SAD), but disgruntlement continues amongst anon posters today. I outlined some reasons above why I think it's okay -- and interesting -- to blog about the moment you glom onto an artist's style. I'd add that writing about Tao Lin without having read his books is a kind of Tao Lin thing to do: not only is the man asking for people to buy shares in his unwritten second novel, he's written What I Can Tell You About Seattle Based on the People I've Met Who Are From There (I Live in Brooklyn) (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=567821&hp) -- and, inevitably, enraged (http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/05/what_tao_lin_can_tell_you_about_seattle) Seattle-based empiricists, the kind of people who think Calvino should have retraced Marco Polo's steps before writing Invisible Cities, or that Nicholson Baker should have researched U and I a bit better (he made a point of quoting Updike only from memory, because Updike-inside-us is more interesting than Updike-on-the-shelf).

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you Momus, ever the gentleman.

[(Anonymous)]

Blogging about Tao Lin in a Tao Lin stylee is a perfect example of runnerupization, though!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's too late, I'm in love! Here, I'm just going to quote Lin now:

"I think Kafka would have "thrived" in Seattle and written something like seven 800-page novels about the happiness of crippling loneliness with titles like Helvetica Font and The Seattle Public Library Is Beautiful and The Joy of Existential Non Well-Being."

(You see, he's a runner-up Kafka!)

"When I think about Seattle, I think about people who are very professional and clean and intelligent going home to apartments where everything is in Helvetica font. When they take off their pants, they have choads. A choad is a penis whose width is the same as its length. Having choads makes them think less about sex and focus more on creating beautiful streets and buildings and drinking coffee and subscribing to literary journals. I think in environments of a lot of coffee, lower levels of poverty than average, and higher subscription rates to obscure literary journals people start having choads. It feels logical somehow."

Thank Christ I didn't stumble on Lin while I was still writing my own novel!

[yellow6.livejournal.com]

[(Anonymous)]

Too whimsical for me, I'm afraid. I liked the "next day we had whale" youtube, though. You got it right, it was sort of menacing the way the laughter curdled to something else then back to laughter. You also got it right about his having something of a high-school shooter about him. He's reminding me of that Korean guy, who also had this flat way of talking and also wrote stories.

I have a feeling he's really a performance artist rather than a writer. As a writer he just fits into that twee Brooklyn literary bracket. As a performer, he's got something else.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, I hadn't realised that Tao Lin himself has made the connection with the Korean shooter:

http://reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com/2007/04/crippling-loneliness-and-killing.html

[(Anonymous)]

He comes across as very disconnected in that quintessentially post-Believer way; as if he is always wriggling away from wherever you'd like to pin him down. His writing has no emotional import, because it is always already ironised.

He also has another of Miranda July, Dave Eggers et al's annoying qualities: cute specificity, though it's lighter than theirs'.

cozen

[(Anonymous)]

Your "signature specification" idea is great tho. Will you write a post about that?

Glomming up on Tao Lin; feel I dismissed him out of hand a little, so will give him fair chance.

cznx

the reader as writer

[robinsonner.livejournal.com]

What intrigues me is visibility. How did you hear about this person? Did someone "turn you on" or was it a link to a link to a link as it often is these days?
Lots of people are doing things but how do they even get noticed? Is it still who you know not what you know?
The effort to get noticed is sometimes what intrigues me most of all. I get all turned on by the inadvertant promotion.
In a way commenting on a popular blog like imomus is an attempt.

Post-Olympian Masochist Humorist Renters

[(Anonymous)]

You can probably hear Tao Lin-isms in a hundred Seattle coffee shops already. Surely he is runner-upish, an immigrant trying to charm his way into the legacy culture by mirroring it. 'Asia wears the pants' and 'London really has to get tough to match Beijing' is not a future statement. Maybe he's subverting the east/west cultural cold war by scoffing at 'difference'.

Re: the reader as writer

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I was alerted to Tao Lin by a post (http://pulled-up.blogspot.com/2008/06/this-must-be-place.html) on Pulled Up, the blog of Joe Howe's girlfriend Emma. It quoted him talking about how he and his generation can't be bothered to do things for money -- it suggested an anti-commercial, post-materialist attitude to life which I liked the sound of. After that, it was readings on YouTube -- and specifically the sense that here was a new, young Chinese-American incarnation of Franz Kafka -- that reeled me in.

[(Anonymous)]

His "art" is the art of the Youtube/blog generation. We were all reared on video games and TV. We reach our 20s and realize we have no skills. We can't play any instruments, can't draw well, and have no poetic voice.

We then do the only thing that's left us: resort to faux-naive childish scribbling, plink-plonking on Casios and glockenspiels, and writing free association ramblings.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Was that Mirah's first album in the background of the eBay video?