Blake Butler—
Christian Lorentzen profiles Tao Lin for the New York Observer, writing in a ‘parody of his style.’ What do you think, did he nail it?
74
Alternative Magazine Covers
As Jonathan Franzen solemnly graces the cover of TIME magazine, we got to thinking who of his peers were also deserving of a cover on other magazines, and what those magazines might be. Here are our top picks:
56 Comments
August 17th, 2010 / 4:17 pm
August 17th, 2010 / 4:17 pm
Blake Butler—
All this time and then we find out Tao Lin has really just been Chris Burden (see object #1, Send Me Your Money). He might also be that dude in the question mark coat.
Interview with Cool Famous Hot Literary Agent Erin Hosier
http://htmlgiant.com/q-a/interview-with-cool-famous-hot-literary-agent-erin-hosier/
Hey. I interviewed Erin Hosier. She’s a literary agent to a couple of fiction writers (Shya Scanlon, Brad Listi) and a lot of memoirists. Okay. I have a doctor’s appointment soon. I think that there is something wrong with me. Interview.
You mostly represent non-fiction writers, but a few fiction writers too, right? What kind of fiction manuscripts catch your eye? Do you want fiction that resembles memoir?
You should ask me more glamorous questions, like what kind of shampoo I use, or who my favorite designers are. I currently represent four literary fiction writers: Paul Jaskunas, Edan Lepucki, Brad Listi, and Shya Scanlon. I represent more illustrators than fiction writers. And more rock stars. Furthermore, these four writers are very different from each other, but I expect great things from each of them. I have represented other fiction writers over the years, but fiction writers tend to switch agents when I can’t sell their work. This is why I don’t handle more of it. My strengths are in writing, editing and pitching non-fiction. That’s my comfort zone. I even prefer documentaries to other movies, and I see way more movies than read books. Also, I’m a slow reader, and fiction comes in long manuscripts. I’ve noticed too that even if a novel is brilliant in so many ways – it makes you laugh or cry or it haunts your dreams or makes you look at the world in a new way, if it entertains – but it has just ONE fatal flaw in the marketing or manuscript department, it’s not going to sell.
82 Comments
August 10th, 2010 / 12:39 pm
August 10th, 2010 / 12:39 pm
Richard Yates Contest
Tao Lin’s Richard Yates contest, encouraging entries of video or chats about his forthcoming novel, ends tomorrow. Alongside this, Tao has offered to give away copies of Richard Yates to the first 5 people who comment here with 200+ words about one of the people appearing in one of the video entries so far (below). Comment with your email included so prizes can be received. Also, entries to Tao’s contest, with cash prizes and such, remains open until 10 PM Eastern Tuesday.
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
Small Hours Time Difference Roundup
Hong Kong skyline w/ self-portrait & living room.
Hey it’s night time here but morning there–unless there is here for you, too, which if it is you should leave me a note and we should hang out. Anyway, here’s some stuff I’ve come across recently that might be of interest.
First, in honor of my being in Asia, here’s your weekly dose of Tao Lin- homeboy’s got “An Account of Being Arrested for ‘Trespassing’ NYU’s Bookstore” up at Gawker.
Hoist the blowhard flag! Ron Rosenbaum jumps a stack of sharks, and the moon too (jumps the moonshark? sharks the jumpmoon?) propelled by nothing more than an endless current of his own hot air. If you thought that the Original of Laura was a tempest in a teapot, then his “next big Nabokov controversy” is, I don’t know, a cheerio on a baseball field or something. Basically, Rosenbaum takes the fact that the poem “Pale Fire” from the novel Pale Fire is going to be published as a de luxe essay-accompanied strand-alone by Gingko Press, in November, argues for a reading of the poem that boils down to “even when Nabokov was bad he was good,” and then flogs the fact with the argument like an octopus against a stone. When it’s over, four breathless screens later, he passes out in a sweaty heap of his own inane superlatives, leaving the Slate commentariat to communally shit the bed with rage, which they promptly do. In a fitting Kinbot(e)-ian irony, the most interesting piece of interesting and useful information in this article (to me, anyway) is the footnote-fact that the artist half of this art-book, Jean Holabird, was for many years a collaborator with the great poet, Tony Towle. Here’s a picture of the two of them together in 1981. You can see some samples of their collaborative work at Tony’s website (look down near the bottom).
You may or may not remember that I was also in Hong Kong this time last year, and my visit happened to coincide with the Hong Kong Book Fair. Well, it happened again- I came, and so did the Fair. So I went back. The line for entry was even longer this year, despite the controversial banning of the pseudo-models in effect for the first time. Once more the Kubrick bookstore/art-publisher booth won my vote for Best In Show. Unlike last year, where I just gawked, this year I came prepared to buy some art books–and I did. More on these later. I also made it over to the Hong Kong University Press booth and bought a few books about Hong Kong: Ken Nicolson’s The Happy Valley: A History and Tour of the Hong Kong Cemetery, after reading about it this morning in this article in the HK Weekly, and Ackbar Abbas‘s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance.
In non-meatspace news, a preview of The Incongruous Quarterly #1 is now available. The new magazine will have fiction, poetry, and a section called “Kill Fee,” which will feature “Work that was originally meant for other publications gets a new lease on life. Featuring art, essays, fiction and articles that were supposed to belong to the New York Times, the Believer, the Globe and Mail, NPR, Daily News and Analysis India and more.” This is especially interesting, because I had been under the impression that the term “kill fee” was invented by the Paris Review two weeks ago, so I can only wonder where these guys heard it. Speaking of which, I’ll end this post in my least-favorite way possible, which is with a self-correction & apology. I contributed a piece of bona fide “shit talk” to the comment thread attached to this post of Blake’s. Without rehashing what it was I had a bug up my ass about, let me just say that I completely misunderstood what I read, and responded from a position of pure ignorance. So, you know–sorry.
Richard Yates | Story Prize | Fence
1. Tao Lin is hosting a huge Richard Yates contest at his blog, with cash and books and other things to win. I am reading Richard Yates right now. It’s kind of crushing and insane. Emotional-minimalist brutalism? It’s good.
2. The Story Prize has a blog, where they are hosting authors talking about their nominated books. Our man J.T. is all up in it, as are several others. Do a look!
3. New issue of Fence is out, and as always looks amazing. Checking my mailbox daily as I do during this time. My local homeboy Chris DeWeese has some poems in it from his Alternative Music series, wherein he tries to remember the lyrics to rad songs from the 90s without really relistening to the songs. I am ready to see that project become a book that I can hold.
Tao Lin Tao Lin Tao Lin Tao Lin Richard Yates Richard Yates Richard Yates Richard Yates
I’m baffled by the back cover of my Richard Yates galley. The relationship between the book’s two main characters–one, the Tao figure, 22, and the other 16–is described three times, in three separate paragraphs, as “illicit,” a heavy-handed enforcement of theme which should hold truck with the novel itself: one would expect, going in, that the scandal which supposedly holds the weight of the novel would actually sustain itself as a scandal. Which happens to be so little the case that it’s kind of funny, this negation of the back cover, and is a fascinating, if unintentional, way of diverting expectations: by Richard Yates failing totally in self-description.
Uncategorized / 99 Comments
July 5th, 2010 / 8:06 am
July 5th, 2010 / 8:06 am
Tao Lin News x 2 re via scare quote hamster with 3 x killing scare rampage quote potential
Today is Tao Lin’s birthday. He is 27 years old.
Also, according to his blog, today is the last day of operations for The Tao Lin Store. If a person was a person who enjoys Tao Lin, or in some respect ‘supports’ his existence, this might be a fine day to lend some ‘existential’ ‘support’ in the ‘form’ ‘of’ ‘purchasing’ one or ‘more’ ‘i’te’m's’ ‘f’r'o’m’ the Tao Lin store. One item ‘you’ might ‘want’ is a ‘copy’ of the ’2nd’ edition of Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs by ‘Ellen’ Ke’nn’edy. Early ‘reports’ suggest ’5 x fixed typo,’ and an ‘updated’ copyright page. You could also pre-order a copy of Richard Yates, either at the bn.com ‘link’ ‘I’ ‘just’ ‘offered’ or you could get your ‘copy’ early if you join the Rumpus Book Club, because ‘RY’ is ‘their’ next ‘selection’.
IS THERE A ‘CONNECTION’ BETWEEN TAO’S BIRTHDAY AND THE ‘CLOSING’ OF HIS ONLINE STORE? Stephen and Marshall will be moderating a discussion on this topic in our comments section. Wild speculation is encouraged. Happy birthday, friend.
5 larksons of elly yo
1. Cleaned out under my fridge today and found a fillet knife, dust-gorillas, and a chapbook. It is called “thunderstorms as familial convulsion.” Ryan Call as good as any at using weather as something more than weather.
2. Made me think of this sonnet by Kathleen Kirk. It is “Roof Leaks, Mimi Calls.”
All across the city the tyrant ice
pries up the tar and flashing, disturbs the peace
of shingles, their social order. It’s not the freeze
but the thaw that ruins us, the sudden spies
wiring the closet walls with new secrets,
the trickle-down effect in our kitchens,
cups and buckets competing for attention,
disintegration: sheetrock into dust.The phone rings, your mother with the news.
The ceiling shifts, sure it wants to open.
Nothing falls, not even the sky.
Your voice is like a level, its yellow tube
tipping the bubble of air toward hope
and back. Cancer—just another tyrant.
4. I have decided those who get bothered about quotation marks bother me. Dialogue isn’t about those little cheese curls. Do it right and you won’t have to do it right anymore.
5. Hold up. Tao Lin (actually Kacper Jarecki) wants your money. Wants your money. And then they ate whale.
fuck
1. Fuck that story by that guy. Read something else. I wanted to introduce you to this new writer anyway and this story will make you pant-pee and laugh like a photogenic butcher.
2. Has anyone seen the fucking new Hayden’s Ferry? Number 46 is re-donk. I can’t link it’s so new. What’s up with these people? In a short time, they have made their magazine crisp, beautiful, full of bad-ass writing, crazy. I mean they stepped up their Slay and are not looking back. My mind on their magazine has gone from throw-me-a-bone to ranch-style nacho pie. Fuck yes. Get it.
3. fuck you. punk.
4. Yesterday walking the hallway and I see a lady at a table and advertising a free raffle. A FREE RAFFLE. What the fuck?
5. Heroin. Sex. Scientology. What do you want? NSFW pics, so sorry if you work on Saturday. I include this because I think the guy’s write-up was CW techniques all glow (He uses Tao Lin quotes and all types of solid pacing, transitions–”This is where things get weird.”) Also I’ve been drinking fake absinthe and it fit well in my “fuck” theme I have going here.
Last Thanksgiving I was staying at a friends house for a few days before a trip to South America.
Stories that begin this way always end up with heroin and Scientology, this we know. A lot could be learned from that opening sentence. If you say friends should be friend’s I’ll punch you in the spleen. It is Saturday. relax.
6. Kristen Shaw with a great fucking flash at decomP. It includes the term fuck.
4 crowbars eating fries
1. This Stephen King piece by William Walsh is exactly why I glow persona fiction. Not sure how I missed this. Maybe it was even noted here (I’m too lazy to look now). Anyway, enjoy. I think this piece is using the persona (King), its echoes, connotations, in a way I really admire and enjoy. Walsh is waltzing the term “Stephen King” in a technical manner. The King character is an object/emotion/thought process. It enacts a void and need and unspoken thing for this family. It…oh, I could go on, but why not read?
2. Sardine sandwiches do rock. (1:56 to end made me fly/why like a detail) I am serious now, go watch. Isn’t it what we like and need to live? Isn’t it a good story, or better a poem? If I could meet one sardine sandwich woman a day, this very life would be enough.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ872YZCPG8
3. Here are some crystals for sale at a reasonable price. They were found in Tao Lin, China.
4. I am sick, feverish, that somebody-stuffed-wet insulation-in-my-head-cavities thing, something, but just ignoring it because I have a lot of work to do. Does anyone like to write when ill? I have been writing the last two days and my fingers are large, like balloons (those party ones clowns make into dachshunds) floating over the keys, all tinnitus and forehead simmer. I’m not sure what it means to the words on the page. You?
On Zachary German’s “Eat When You Feel Sad”
[NOTE: The reviewer discloses several personal acquaintances, and asserts his unequivocal subjectivity.]
A Few Moments of Sleeping and Waking
.
When I was a kid my parents had a no-censorship policy on my reading material. The only exception they ever made to this rule was when I wanted to read a book that my dad was reading, called American Psycho. This was sometime in the mid ’90s, when the book was out of print. Dad had gotten it from a woman who worked in his office, who herself had found it on a website that specialized in hard-to-find books—probably the first person we ever knew who had used the internet to actually get something. I remember asking him about it, and that my interest was immediately piqued by his no-doubt abridged description. I remember asking to read it, and how, after much deliberation (which was baffling in itself, because I hadn’t meant “can I” so much as “when can I”) he finally told me, not without evident regret, that he would not let me read the book. “It’s not the content itself,” he said, “so much as that I don’t think you have the context to understand the content for what it is.” I must have expressed some outrage—this was unprecedented, after all—and he, concerned I might sneak a peek despite the ban, hid the book so well that we never found it again, even years later, when we emptied that house out and moved.
I started college in the summer of 2000, a few months after the film version of American Psycho debuted at Sundance. Now the book was everywhere. You could just walk into the store and buy a copy—with Christian Bale’s face on the cover, no less. I didn’t go see the movie in theaters, but I went and got the book. And I’ll tell you something—my father was absolutely right. Even at eighteen I didn’t really understand the book for what it was, namely the darkest of satires, mostly because I didn’t know enough about what was being satirized: Wall Street culture, the ‘80s in general, etc. So I took the book absolutely seriously, and treating it in this way made for one of the single most disturbing reading experiences I had ever had before, or have had since.
Zachary German would have been eleven years old the year American Psycho was released in theaters, and though I don’t know whether he saw the film before he read the book, it’s highly likely that a trailer for the film alerted him to the book’s existence in the first place. He would have understood going in, then, that the ultra-violence was a kind of cartoonish excess, and that the whole thing was to be understood (on some level) as a comedy, but he would have probably been still too young to fully grok how (or even that) the pathological cataloging of brand-names was meant as an extension of the central “joke.”
86 Comments
March 24th, 2010 / 3:56 pm
March 24th, 2010 / 3:56 pm
5 swank stalls of roaring!
1.This dork will grant you a Lorrie Moore book.
2. We don’t want your damn glowing buoy things in our river, arty-farty.
3. Oh no we copy edited The Broken Plate 7 full times and should have done 8. Sweet mag but we konked up some of the table of contents. Like the page #s might not match the author’s work. Uh, sorry.
4. Publisher Or Books has had enough of Amazon’s bullshit.
5. I almost forgot to mention Tao Lin. Whew. Hold up. Here’s a classical album on Ebay. Art work, something.
I. Fontana on Publicity
[This is a comment--regarding some recent posts here--that I. Fontana posted and also sent out to me & Ken, and we thought it was worth presenting on the main page for those who missed it. I. Fontana knows whereof he speaks, and he's one of my favorite "new" writers out there. Love his short stories, which I've linked on HTMLGIANT before, and I know he's got some other stuff in the works that I'm very, very excited to see published. –N.A.
Nick says it: I. Fontana says it. Presented with no further ado: –K.B.]
Superagent Nat Sobel said in an interview last summer that he chooses at most one in 500 unsolicited manuscripts to represent in a given year. Grove/Atlantic, HarperCollins etcetera — all the major New York publishing houses, in other words — explicitly announce that they will not read any manuscript which does not come from an established agent.
In the early 19th century, literature (and in particular the novel) evolved into a popular art form generally serialized each week in newspapers, which meant that in order to keep the particular novel being read, there had to be narrative pull, even cliffhangers — in general, plot. But this meant that the socalled “unwashed masses” now were exposed to such writing, so that writers no longer had to hang around court or otherwise suck up to aristocrats, publishing their books by subscriptions to the wealthy (which constriction obviously required that the wealthy find such books pleasing). Democracy means including the lowest common denominator as well as the connoisseur.
Sean Lovelace—
Anyone with HTML G sensibilities (have no idea what that means, so or not) has a reading during AWP please comment here with time, place/sarcophagus of shouts. This is a selfish post (but not, people wanna know). My emails bury me, like all. I am at AWP Denver interviewing professors for a job (at BSU/work), but would love to strike (hunger, bass lure, match box, beauty, etc.) mad readings every single night, 7pm to oblivion. List them here. For those in town Tuesday to Sunday of AWP, where should we go, when? And how exactly are the nachos?
A. Pope, Tao Lin, and HTML Giant walk into a bar…
This past week, there have been several blogs (plus the mention in the New Yorker) about Tao Lin and the reviews lodged for and against him. To be fair, I haven’t read much of Tao’s work, but I am entrenched in the pure spectacle of “Tao Lin.” Mostly out of boredom but partly because I can’t get away from it, even if I wanted to.
But consider this, in his Author’s Preface, Alexander Pope argues, “Poetry and criticism [are] by no means the universal concern of the world, but only the affair of idle men who write in their closets, and of idle men who read there.” So I’m back to the question of boredom. Why do we care who says what about Tao? And here, just look back at the comment streams about Tao. People seem to do more than simply “care.” They’re invested! I barely have time to care about the reviews written about my friends, much less any other contemporary. I have no desire to be an idle man writing in my closet, nor an idle man reading there.
It doesn’t matter much to me whether or not Tao (or any other writer, for that matter) cultivates this particular brand of hype. My concern has to do with the unabashed responses that indicate how very right Pope is. Even this post reinforces Pope’s argument that I’m simply an idle man—or woman in this case—reading in a closet.
A Review of Reviews of Shoplifting From American Apparel
[Ryan Call and I asked Brandon Scott Gorrell to take a look at some of the negative reviews of Tao Lin's Shoplifting from American Apparel, and maybe say something. This is the result of that. - Gene Morgan]
I’m going to try and ignore the thought I keep having that I shouldn’t be shit-talking people’s opinions, that it’s obvious they’re opinions, and that these reviewers aren’t stating their opinions as facts.
Here are some opinions of mine about quotes from four negative reviews of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting From American Apparel. I don’t feel I took the quotes out of context.
Kati Nolfi, Bookslut: “There is so little aboutness in Lin’s work.” What?
Lisa Foad, Globe and Mail: “After all, Lin – feted darling of the hipster coterie – is known for his pomp-and-pageantry-fuelled exploits. Witness: Lin glutting NYC with a Britney Spears sticker campaign to promote the release of his 2008 poetry collection, cognitive-behavioral therapy; Lin routinely repeating the same line – “The next night we ate whale” – at readings (seven monotonous minutes mark his record to date); Lin auctioning drafts of his writing on eBay, and most recently, his MySpace account (it fetched a whopping $8,100); Lin selling shares of the anticipated royalties of his upcoming 2010 Melville House novel, Richard Yates (to the tune of $12,000); Lin founding Muumuu House, a publisher that boasts an appreciation not just for poetry and fiction but Tweets and Gmail chats; Lin enlisting fans as “interns” to rally on his behalf by blogging about him, reviewing his work on Amazon and padding his Wikipedia profile.” I understand Tao’s gimmickry is disarming for people, but it really doesn’t take that many steps in logic to figure out that everyone does what he does, they just present it in a way that’s more familiar.
Publishing houses hire publicists to expand their audience. Authors hire agents to make them money. Independent lit publishers hire fans as interns (would they really hire someone who didn’t like the press as an intern? That wouldn’t happen) and have them write Wikipedia pages for their authors. The difference is that Tao is transparent and vocal about it.
Uncategorized / 687 Comments
March 17th, 2010 / 8:47 am
March 17th, 2010 / 8:47 am
Blake Butler—
Twelve new poems from Tao Lin at The Lifted Brow, the new issue of which has more good shit that you can handle, including from David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming final novel. I like these new Tao poems a lot, ‘seems fun or something,’ think most of them were in an issue of Zachary German’s The Name of This Band is the Talking Heads.
