Taipei
by Tao Lin
Vintage, June 2013
256 pages / $14.95  Buy from Amazon

Tao Lin is a writer whose novels, short stories, poetry, and essays have won many admirers, and inspired what seems like an equal amount of detractors (it’s a conversation being energetically carried out on the Internet, for the most part). His recent novel, Taipei, is his most publicised book. It’s about a young writer living in Brooklyn who ingests lots of illicit and non-illicit drugs, uses his MacBook to ‘work on things’, goes on a book tour, visits his parents in Taipei, ingests more drugs, and tries to connect with people.

Though I’d come across bits and pieces of Tao Lin’s writing online, my response was emphatic in neither a positive or negative direction, and it would hardly constitute a bias. The thrill, therefore, I got from reading the first sentence of Taipei was pure, and due as much to my having an immediate feeling as it was to the sentence being good. I’ll reproduce it here, for the pleasure of doing it, and possibly to annoy anyone who doesn’t agree with me: It began raining a little from a hazy, cloudless-seeming sky as Paul, 26, and Michelle, 21, walked towards Chelsea to attend a magazine-release party in an art gallery. As far as sentences go, it’s accessible, controlled, and idiomatic. Its tone, too, is consistent throughout the novel – which could pass as one definition of good writing. In regards to Tao Lin, whose prose veers so close to ‘bad writing’ that it sometimes reads like parody of bad writing, it’s an important distinction to make.

I’ve read that Tao Lin completed his bachelor’s degree in Journalism. Although it’s a bad habit to speculate on a writer’s influences, I can’t help but draw a connection between this biographical fact and his third novel. For one, Taipei is an autobiographical account covering 18 months. The novel is, for the most part, chronologically linear, and much of what happens finds its genesis in Paul’s (journalistic?) impulse to self-document. There is the absurd, fake documentary Paul and Erin decide to make about the ‘first’ McDonald’s in Taipei; filming themselves on MDMA and other drugs to post on YouTube; live-tweeting X-Men First Class while on heroin; writing accounts of their first ‘drug fight’ (both Paul and Erin render it in a ‘Raymond Carver-esque manner’, as it happens); Paul emailing himself a bullet-point account of a dinner with Erin parents, etcetera.

What’s most interesting, though, is the manner in which Tao Lin uses as a model journalistic prose. In doing so, he upends certain expectations of artistic and imaginative writing. For instance, there is a pretence to objectivity that characterises much reportage, and it results in writing that is cold and impersonal; this is a quality mimicked in Taipei, whose sentences are often flat and literal. However, while this is what the surface of the prose conveys, what it’s actually presenting is a third-person voice so close (and indistinguishable from Paul) that it is radically subjective. Tao Lin adopts stylistic traits associated with the opposite of ‘literary’ writing; a denotive, sub-literary style becomes prose whose innate quality is not what it seems. The agility and nuance of the syntax can balance multiple clauses, and take the reader off-guard with the most unlikely images.

On the plane, after a cup of coffee, Paul thought of Taipei as a fifth season, or ‘otherworld,’ outside, or in equal contrast with, his increasingly familiar and self-consciously repetitive life in America, where it seemed like the seasons, connecting in right angles, for some misguided reason, had formed a square, sarcastically framing nothing -or been melded, Paul vaguely imagined, about an hour later, facedown on his arms on his dining tray, into a door locker, which a child, after twenty to thirty knocks, no longer expecting an answer, has continued using, in a kind of daze, distracted by the pointlessness of his activity, looking absently elsewhere, unaware when he will abruptly, idly stop.

One specific example of a stylistic signature that Tao Lin has made his own is the noting of the age of any person in Paul’s social life (as in the novel’s opening sentence). I’d say this does at least two significant things. Firstly, as I’ve mentioned, it’s reminiscent of purposely bland, direct reporting; and secondly, it satirises a contemporary social reality. Among creatively ambitious people (and the twenties might be its most intense manifestation) age is tied to notions of precocity and perceived achievement. Socially, these are two things many people want to embody, and which are the cause of much anxiety. As trivial though it may seem, the curiosity surrounding a social rival’s precise age, for many of us, is hard to overcome (often it’s the only thing we want to know).

His style also makes use of what can appear an egregious placement of adjectives.  ‘Dancey’ music, or, a ‘vague’ amount of time: these are just two instances of a writer who might seem bored with writing.  After all, it’s the sort of silly shorthand we use when we’re being lazy in real life.  On the other hand, however, it’s also unsettling close to how many supposedly over-educated people speak, and narrate internally (as Paul is doing).  To me it’s funny for its accuracy.  And more than just comic effect, it captures the way clever, emotionally-isolated people can use language to distance themselves from their concrete surroundings, other people, and their own feelings.  (A similar thing is achieved by the use of stock phrases and cliche, as contained in those now ubiquitous ironizing quotation marks.)

This all being the case, I’m not going to deny there was a point about mid-way through the novel when I put it down with the thought I’d had enough.  Some of the long, diffuse sentences seemed unnecessarily confusing: It had seemed like they would never fight, and the nothingness of the future had gained a framework-y somethingness that felt privately exciting, like entering a different family’s house as a small child, or the beginning elaborations of a science-fiction conceit.  But when I did put it down, I found the novel’s voice was stuck in my head.  There is something about a sentence like the one I’ve just quoted which, to my mind, resembles pre-articulate thought.  The spirit of Henry James hovers over the pages of Taipei.  A Jamesian sentence does the impossible, it gives an impression of the inchoate process of consciousness, and at the same time, it crystallises multiple thoughts (all in what appears to be a single thought).  A Tao Lin sentence makes the journey from inside Paul’s head, onto the paper, untransformed; in other words, it is an underdeveloped version of a Jamesian sentence in which nothing is crystallised.  Tao Lin’s portrayal of the inner life is similar to the common experience of thinking like a genius, and when it comes to articulating the thought, speaking like an idiot (I’m misappropriating Nabokov.)

Which brings me to a final comment.  It is tempting to read Paul (Tao Lin’s fictional avatar) as intended to be representative of an entire generation (or at least one of its more visible sub-groups – namely, Brooklyn-dwelling literary poseurs).  But I don’t think that is the intention.  To me, Paul is strange (and maybe even unique); and despite frequent moments of recognition, reading Taipei is not like looking into a mirror.  For all its representation of a life lived through the internet, the novel’s aim is a traditional one.

…[Paul] uncertainly thought he’d written books to tell people how to reach him, to describe the particular geography of the area of otherworld in which he’d been secluded.

***

Tim Curtain writes fiction and lives in Melbourne, Australia.  His reviews and stories have appeared online and in print.

Great Guns
by Farnoosh Fathi
Canarium Books. 2013
88 pages / $14  Buy from SPD or Amazon

 
Farnoosh Fathi’s greatly anticipated debut poetry collection, “Great Guns,” begins:

Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care.
Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care.
A light peck cracks the constellations. (3)

Immediately, the book demonstrates the gale-like sonic qualities of Fathi’s writing. It’s almost difficult to utter the words “Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care” in a way other than that of the melodic, popular folk song. For many, this tune will immediately call up the coziness of the sing-alongs of playful childhood. These earthy comforts are very suddenly shattered, however, in an ambitious, universal way when we are struck out of the familiar, almost-ingrained melody by the unexpected, “A light peck cracks the constellations.” When I read the staccato-like single syllables of “A light peck cracks the,” I can almost feel the tapping of each word. Then comes the shattered release as we flow into the multisyllabic “constellations.”

Fathi’s orchestration of sound is masterful and complicated, not unlike the contents of her poems. For example, while reflecting upon all that happens within the first three lines of this opening, untitled piece, we might ask ourselves, why “Jimmy Crack Corn”? This tune, also known as “De Blue Tail Fly,” has less-than-straightforward roots. While many readers might nestle into the memories of their childhoods, then be immediately shaken by the third line, even the song choice is infused with complexities; the origins are somewhat undetermined, but may have been rooted in blackface minstrelsy. Perhaps these first lines are a warning to heed, one regarding the intricate layers of the collection.

Despite the readability of the rhymes woven throughout Great Guns, and amidst the provisions of aural comfort they do provide, the silver-tongued speaker’s conveyances are multiplex:

the waves explode but cannot kill a snail
whose castle is the quiet
on a nun’s navel. (3)

Nothing is forbidden, yet nothing is damaged, or perhaps everything is cherished, but also broken. It’s difficult to say. Regardless, each element is handled with the care of an old, almost-omnipotent soul.

This seemingly transcendental speaker paints scenes in which the lines between we, as humans, and the rest of the natural world are not blurred, but rather seem to be intentionally blended:

Who goes, asked the pore, there on one hand so beautiful? The modern
nets and fishes out contumely; there is palsy in the grass high on noon’s shoulders. (8)

This title poem, “Great Guns,” weaves together personification, chremamorphism, and somehow even a mixture of the two techniques, which perhaps refuses to be defined. For example, “The great guns of a lover— / his sweat broke into ants that led the other way” (8).

Both nature and meaningful coalescence are common themes within this collection. Fathi writes, this time within a prose poem, of the “Iris”:

and wield it like the too-deeply green-dipped paintbrush it
resembles. The wrist aches to hold and flex it, a newly
handled thing, to air-stroke a crescent n, a crescent u, a swirl, a
figure-eight, and this playful act of no consequence is a privilege
to anyone who beholds the iris, painter or no. (41)

Yes, we desire this iris, but do we yearn for it as a flower or a paintbrush? We long to create a crescent, both an n and a u, two shapes that are identical yet opposite.

Perhaps more than many other recently published collection, Great Guns feels, to me, reminiscent of its predecessors. While reading the title poem, I find the fluid, spreading lines, as well as the way in which the speaker celebrates her lover through and among the natural world, to nod quietly toward Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Upon completing “Iris,” I am both quietly satisfied in thought and also wish to revisit Jorie Graham’s early Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, including “Penmanship.” Regardless of Fathi’s intentions, it would be difficult to debate that she isn’t an incredibly well read poet and an astute scholar.

I do not by any means intend to oversimplify or sterilize the accomplishments of Great Guns. Quite the contrary, it’s hard to believe this is Fathi’s debut collection. The poems manage to demonstrate the sage-like steadiness of a storyteller, yet, rather, are hauntingly lyrical. Each line glides, as if water slipping pleasurably through our fingers and then back into itself, as something we can’t quite grasp or keep. Nevertheless, Great Guns is certain to change – quite possibly deeply change – its readers for the experience.

***

Heather Lang is a poet and critic studying with Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. Her poetry has recently been published by or is forthcoming within The Del Sol Review, Green Humanities, IthacaLit, Jelly Bucket and Mead. Her reviews have been published by or are forthcoming within Atticus Review, Gently Read Literature, HTMLGIANT and Prime Number Magazine. Heather serves as Assistant Editor for The Literary Review.

Videotape
by Andrew Zawacki
Counterpath Press, 2013
128 pages / $14.00   Buy from Counterpath or Amazon

“Science fiction poetry” is already a confusion of forms, a mash-up of brainy and hoity, nerdy and emotional, clunky and raw. If both science fictional and poetic, must this inter-genre be narrative-oriented, pithy, lyrical, and riddled with lasers? What else can we call it? “Science poetry” doesn’t account for future-speculation per se. “Cyberpoetry” resonates with cyberpunk and prescribes the rubric for an internet made 3D—strung up with tubes every shade of the neon rainbow. William Gibson himself, the supposéd godfather of cyberpunk, rejects the term applied to both his and his contemporaries work because it reduced what could’ve been a revolutionary alteration on the larger science fiction genre to a subgenre and therefore made it separate and disarmed. “Futurist” or “neo-futurist poetry” already has its predecessors in Marinetti, Mayakovski, and the like. “Speculative poetry” becomes overwhelmingly broad and “futurepoem” has already been claimed by a fabulous small press. For now, we’ll stick with science fiction poetry because everyone knows what we’re talking about when we say it, and any discussions based around the term should necessitate we at least acknowledge it as a genre that will be constantly at war with itself, a form containing two disparate worlds, that, most of the time, would probably rather not have anything to do with each other in the first place.

Many have gone to extreme lengths to define both poetry and science fiction separately and they are indelibly linked by a desire to write down what cannot possibly ever actually be written down. Ben Lerner talks about an Allen Grossman essay called The Long Schoolroom in his Believer interview, citing that Grossman calls all poetry “virtual” because it explores “an unbridgeable gap between what the poet wants the poem to do and what it can actually do.” For the world of poets, while our want may be for access to that Platonic ideal hovering above, we are also caught up in an inevitable failure to ever reach that world. So it is for science fiction writers, except they are concerned with the future rather than the divine. Where they may use the vocabulary of science and technology in order to provide insight into how the nuances of that future may one day appear, poets look to music, linguistics, and extreme concision in order to record their pursuit of those sublime, unknowable moments of everyday life. The rest is simple addition. Science fiction plus poetry equals a work that looks to material “progress,” the sonic, semiotics, and the pages white space in it’s pursuit of both spiritual transcendence and a prophecy for that grand tomorrow.

Another way to define a genre, as always, is simply to point the people who practice that genre well. Cathy Park Hong discusses science fiction poetics in one of her Harriet posts, where she outlines Andrew Joron’s Science Fiction, the most committed exploration of science fiction poetry to date. Hong dabbles a bit in the genre herself in Dance Dance Revolution and the “The World Cloud,” the third section of her own Engine Empire, with poems like “Engines Within the Throne” and “A Wreath of Hummingbirds.” There are countless others who’ve taken a crack at science fictionish projects in recent years. From genre-poets like Hong to conceptual writers like Christian Bök, to Pulitzer prize winners like Tracy K. Smith, everyone seems to be getting a piece. Bök isn’t interested in the conceits of science fiction as a genre, but is willing to spend nine years in a lab teaching the genome of a bacterium to store and write a poem that should last long after the human race is extinct. He calls it The Xenotext and however outlandish the project may seem, he has had a surprising amount of success. Other Conceptual poets, like Kenneth Goldsmith and Josef Kaplan, construct poems dependent on their own machines. Goldsmith’s projects succeed or fail based on how they are figuratively programmed to reproduce. The common language in his transcriptions of news anchors and weathermen are interesting because he captures human malfunctions in otherwise robotic speech, while the success of Kaplan’s Kill-list depends on the rage it provokes in the hivemind’s many forums and comment threads on the web.

“It’s all science fiction now,” is the oft-quoted phrase in these sorts of discussions, which Hong transmits from Joron and which Joron beams-up from Allen Ginsberg and Arthur C. Clarke. We’re turning to the futures of the past in order to interpret a society more and more affected by accelerated progress. Indeed, the list of poets goes on—Heather Christle has poems that unabashedly employ zeros and ones, cybernetic trees, holograms, and sublime computer programs in What is Amazing and elsewhere. Modern Life by Matthea Harvey contains a series of poems about a robotic boy and his half-human perceptions. Ben Mirov tracks the clicks of our increasingly cybernetic brains in Ghost Machine; Mathias Svalina obsesses over the beginnings and ends of all things in Destruction Myth; Timothy Donnelly offers the sky for purchase in Cloud Corporation; and Jasper Bernes enacts a dystopic LA in Starsdown. Even Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy K. Smith toys with future-speculation in Life On Mars. Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney proclaim themselves Futurist in their Action Books manifesto, and McSweeney revels in a future plague ground, a poetics of doom, in much of her own writing and criticism. After all, Tao Lin is basically Neo, who opted out of The Real and instead chose to remain dangling in his giant pink egg sac, so long as he had access to a Macbook Pro.

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The Best American Comics 2013
Edited by Jeff Smith
Series Edited by Jessical Abel & Matt Madden
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Oct 2013
400 pages / $25  Buy from Amazon or Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The Best American Comics series is an anthology of comics, published annually with numerous guest editors, showcase what the editors feel are the best comics of the year. This edition contains thirty comics; some of them being complete, and others excerpts from larger comics. What is also nice to see is the vast majority of webcomics that are included in this edition, such as Kate Beaton’s tumblr famous ‘Hark A Vagrant!’ series. And although different, these comics all seem to share something in common, something ethereal that seems to connect these pieces all together that I can’t quite put my finger on, and I am glad that I have trouble doing this.

One of the things that I think brings the comics together is the feelings of anxiety that the characters seem to have. As I was reading the collection, I couldn’t help but think that they all seemed to be looking for something; in Alison Bechdel’s Mirror, the protagonist is searching for not just her own identity, but also seems to be searching not just for her mothers approval and love, but for her mothers identity, as well as trying to find her own place in the world. I think that the search for purpose and identity, although not just central now, as It has been a common problem for centuries, speaks to a generation raised in the internet age, one that has tried to find a personal identity through the lives of millions online.

In You Lied To Us!, by Jorge Aquirre and Rafael Rosado, the protagonist, a little girl, lies to her friends in order to look for, and slay, a local giant. Here, the protagonist is trying to create her identity through tackling the giant on her own, but in confidence is scared and alone. I think that this narrative, the David and Goliath story, echoes throughout a lot of us in our modern day lives; we want to tackle giants on our own, but we are too afraid and lack the skills to do it, and asking for help can make one appear weak. Although, like the previous comic, this is not a new narrative, I do feel that this story seems to hit at the centre of our shared anxieties. We live in a world of self made millionaires, twenty somethings who changed the world, who appeared to do it on their own, indadvertedly causing an entire generation to feel like they have to go it alone as well

Faith Erin Hicks Raiders also talks about individualism, but does so in a different way. The protagonist retrieves what appears to be an artifact of some kind, to return to a ghost seeking some sort of atonement. She does this with the help of her friends at first, but decides to sneak of an seek out the ghost alone, thinking that her friends will think less of her. It appears, despite not finding atonement through the ghost, that her friends also see the ghost, which gives to her a different kind of atonement, causing the ghost to leave. I feel that this seeks to tell us that going it alone is intact damaging, showing one that we all have hidden doubts and fears, here symbolized by the ghost, and sharing these fears and doubts is healthy, and one can overcome the giant, or the ghost, by reaching out to those around you.

What is also interesting to note is how different each piece is from another aesthetically. Each comic in this anthology is distinctly unique in its artwork, ranging from the almost life like, which can be seen in Mirror, to the surreal and weird. Some comics are full of texts, others nothing but a series of images. What is fascinating to note is that they are all able to tell a story, regardless of the way they do so, full of as much power, emotion, and expertise as one would find in a more ‘traditional‘ piece of fiction, such as a novel.

In editing the anthology, the editors seem to be aware of the problems the artists are trinyg to tackle, subconsciously or actively, and are seeking to address these problems through the anthology. What is clever about the addition of the webcomics is that a lot of these problems, of identity and feeling isolated, are ironically magnified by our existence in an online world, but can also be cured by our participation in the same world. One can construct our identities through others; our mothers, stories of great people, our friends, but we aren’t really able to overcome these anxieties and self doubt until we try to identify with ourselves, by confronting our doubts, opening up to our community, and just being ourselves. I feel that this is one of the central messages of this anthology; a reflection on the way we interact and inhabit the world has so drastically changed that we haven’t had the time to catch up to it yet.

***

Rhys Nixon is a writer who lives in Australia. He has been published in electric cereal, Gesture magazine, and posts occasionally on his blog, rhysrhys.tumblr.com.

The Circle
by Dave Eggers
Knopf, 2013
504 pages / $27.95 buy from Powell’s or Amazon

1. Nothing about The Circle is very surprising or new. Big Brother is a clichéd, outdated reality show. The privacy vs. transparency debate is as ubiquitous as the scope it describes. It’s obvious from page one which side the novel will end up on.

2. I don’t care about any of this. The transparency-obsessed campus of The Circle (a proxy for Google) is not an unappealing environment to me. Most of the time, it’s ridiculously attractive.

3. The relentless lists of online activities that the protagonist, Mae, conducts daily are not the downward spirals of doom they should be. Instead, the repetitive passages feel hypnotic and pleasurable and I live vicariously through Mae’s Internet high. I should read her decline into web addiction and over-sharing critically, but instead I feel the same breathless, click-through-again compulsiveness that I do staying up too late online, browsing websites and managing my own social media accounts.

4. I can’t figure out if I’m the exact target audience for The Circle, or the exact opposite of it. Are its warnings meant for those younger than me who’ve never known a world without Google? Or those older, who take a certain pride in refusing to get an Internet connection or email account?

5. The novel circles around the same few themes, visits the same few locations, and its protagonist, Mae, repeats the same tasks over and over again. This repetition gives me an intense, almost physical pleasure: a caffeine-like tightness in my brain, behind my ears; a lifting in my chest; the impulse the read as quickly as possible.

6. It’s more engaging to read about what Mae does on her computer than about her interactions with human characters, who are consistently flat—placeholders for perspectives.

7. Internet Rorschach: is this passage a dark chute of terror or an energizing, endorphin-generating endurance run? “[Mae] embarked on a flurry of activity, sending 4 zings and 32 comments and 88 smiles. In an hour, her PartiRank rose to 7,288. Breaking 7,000 was more difficult, but by 8, after joining and posting in 11 discussion groups, sending another 12 zings, one of them rated in the top 5,000 globally for that hour, and signing up for 67 more feeds, she’d done it. She was at 6,872, and she turned to her InnerCircle social feed. She was a few hundred posts behind, and she made her way through, replying to 70 or so messages, RSVPing to 11 events on campus, signing nine petitions and providing comments and constructive criticism on four products currently in beta. By 10:16, her rank was 5,342, and again, the plateau — this time at 5,000 — was hard to overcome. She wrote a series of zings about a new Circle service, allowing account holders to know whenever their name was mentioned in any messages sent from anyone else, and one of the zings, her seventh on the subject, caught fire and was rezinged 2,904 times, and this brought her PartiRank up to 3,887.” The passage continues for several more pages.

8. Fiction Writing 101: A complex character should always want something. For effective character development, ask: what does the character want? Mae wants a job at The Circle, and she gets it on page one. Her character is empty, simplistic, a shell.

9. Perhaps stripping Mae of any real wanting is the novel’s innovation: what happens when we want for nothing? Are we human anymore, or just shells of ourselves?

10. Something Mae sort of wants is a good rating of her work at The Circle (99% or higher for every inquiry she answers, which number in the hundreds each day). But this obsession with approval and high ratings doesn’t quite ring true to me: with quantity comes ambivalence, not a desire for quality. When reviews are always perfect, they have no meaning. READ MORE >