Word Spaces
POP: A Polemic on a Contemporary Language-Based “Objectivity”
I do not like metaphor. My personal education pertaining to literature takes a very French bent, and it is here that Robbe-Grillet himself, king of the nouveau roman one could say, has denounced metaphor, preferring, I suppose, some sort of metonymy, but–if anything–participating in the creation of a style of fiction in which the surface is more important than a subtext.
I think that this adherence to the surface, at least in terms of language, is good, positive, because it removes an additional level of signification, which brings us, as a reader, closer to the experience the language itself is hiding, carrying, revealing. Though often, in the creation of atmosphere, metaphor can be adequately used to help evoke a mood, I feel like there are often more interesting ways to do this (and I suppose that here, by “interesting,” I mean “heterogeneous, diverse, wildly more creative”).
What I’d like to establish, before I dive into the meat of this post, is that I feel like there is a wide range of literary tools available that create modes of writing that exist outside of a binary between “concrete details” and “metaphor,” at least in terms of the way language is working, whether it be in the creation of narrative, the creation of affect, or simply that of emotion.
What I’m saying is, basically, this sort of internet-culture based movement towards flat, emotionally blatant poetry and fiction really speaks to me more in the favor of self-indulgence and laziness than any sort of wildly revolutationary tact (and I feel like I can lay this claim without using the word “rhetoric” in every other sentence, as it seems like many proponents of the ‘style’ are prone to doing).
The first thing that warrants being established, in my view, is to determine what exactly I mean by ‘objective’ or ‘concrete’ writing, especially as established as both “contemporary” and “language based.” First of all, I want to distinguish a distance between what I’m talking about and the historical idea of “Concrete Poetry,” which, while possibly sharing a similar ‘point-of-departure’ in terms of ideas, in practice is a remarkably different beast. I am talking about stories & poems that are written in what, as I suppose named by “haters” in the comment section here on HTMLGIANT, could be considered “muumuu-style” writing, referring of course to the writers associated with Muumuu house. The post-Eeeee Eee Eeee fiction of Tao Lin, Brandon Scott Gorrell’s poetry book, Zachary German’s Eat When You Feel Sad, everything written by Jordon Castro ever, portions of Poncho Peligroso’s manuscript The Romantic, and so on.1
I am invested in ideas of “innovative” and “experimental” and (fill in the blank with whatever term you prefer to use for “progressive writing”–and by that I mean writing that pushes itself forward as an art-form, not necessarily in a well-defined narrative arc, but rather as something exploratory that avoids becoming stale) writing. This, alone, finds me taking issue with the aforementioned mode of writing. I say this because to me, this “objectivity” has already been explored in fiction. Arguably this “objectivity” is what the new novelists of France in the 50s & 60s were generally known to be exploring (it is possible to argue that this is not what the nouveau romanciers were actually doing, and you would be right, but there is a level of this that is definitely present within said moves). The difference here, of course, is that while Robbe-Grillet, for instance, was exploring an objective & highly articulated in terms of description realm of fiction, he was specifically an anti-realist writer. Robbe-Grillet was turning attention to material detail and using it to construct (literally in some cases) an artificial world for his violent sexual fantasies to play out it.
Take, for instance, Robbe-Grillet’s short story “The Secret Room”, from his collection Snapshots. Within the story, Robbe-Grillet pays specific attention to describing, with a somewhat intense attention to detail, the architecture of the titular room. Everything about the room, and everything within the room is described to a T. This, arguably, is a grasp at “objectivity,” in the sense that there is little provided in the realm of subjective response or any sort of psychology of character. The tension, and what it is that makes the “objectivity” interesting here, lies in the fact that the scene that Robbe-Grillet has presented is a scene of sexualized violence. There’s contrast between the clean detailed oriented nature of the story & what seems to have happened within the described space. This avoids not only romanticizing what could arguably be considered the ‘subject matter,’ but also avoids psychologizing the subject matter at all. Within the level of the text itself, there is no judgment passed. We have to move to an extra-textual level, literally judging Robbe-Grillet as the author himself, if we want to assume any judgment whatsoever.
In contrast, the aforementioned authors & poets seem to have a tendency to borrow this “objectivity,” though they remove the tension by using it inside of a world completely divorced from the fantastic; namely, a ‘realist’ world. Let’s consider the Tao Lin story “We Will Drink our Coffee and Complete our Novels and Lay in Sunlight and Sit in Darkness”. This story displays an obsession with detail that is similarly present in Robbe-Grillet’s story, although there’s a real obvious difference. Lin’s language here, really just a list of concrete details that could be perceived as funny (“poetry about llamas”), is perfectly suited for the subject of the story. The subject here seems to be, basically, a realistic, “relatable,” romantic reverie. As readers we assume that the “you” of the story is not literally us-as-readers, but rather a specific “other” that Lin is addressing. Where Robbe-Grillet’s story opens up a space of mystery & intrigue via concrete details, Lin’s story denies any sort of depth in favor of being “cute.”
What’s interesting to me is that, arguably, both Lin & Robbe-Grillet are using concrete details in order to turn personal fantasies into literature. Aside from the ethical difference in these fantasies (sexual murder is illegal, kissing a girl in a supermarket at 3am is not), it’s interesting to me to speculate as to the motivations each author holds. Both are, of course, selfish in their own right, seeing as they are both presenting fantasies tied to sexual desire (Robbe-Grillet’s being purely lust, “primal” if you will, Lin’s being what I could see being described more as a “fulfilling relationship,” which I suppose ultimately relates to lust as well). Lin’s story is more immediately easier to relate to, at least in terms of a hegemonic approach to desire, especially within the age-group the story is targeted at. Both stories will seem ridiculous to certain people if approached as paeans to desire: Robbe-Grillet’s interest in sexual-violence will be alien to someone averse to sadism, and Lin’s interest in twee midnight ‘adventures’ is going to seem ridiculous to someone without any interest in…well, twee midnight ‘adventures’ I guess.
Tao’s story is arguably “more fun” to read. However, before writing this entry the last time I had read “The Secret Room” was four years ago, and I remembered it precisely. I read Tao’s story a couple months ago and literally had no memory of what it was about until re-reading it (I picked it based on the fact that the Pop Serial website is new & I knew Tao had a story in there). Is this entirely subjective on my part? Am I prone to remembering the Robbe-Grillet story over the Lin story purely out of the fact that, personally, sexual sadism is more exciting than a twee midnight adventure? Well, yes, but I think the point is generally that “good writing should transcend its subject matter” or something.
I have no interest in saying what is good and what is bad literature, but what bothers me about a lot of the recent wave of “internet writing” is how fun it is versus how much I find myself invested in it. This is of course still entirely subjective I guess, I mean I’m sure there are other people that find themselves far more invested in it than me, but, really, I think this is ultimately symptomatic of all art that relies almost exclusively on the ability of the audience to relate to it instead of probing anything deeper. I guess what I’m saying is that a lot of this shit tastes like candy. It is pop, of course, but it’s an antiquated idea of pop. If you look at actual pop today, there’s a lot more going on than a saccharine sweetness.
There is an implied goal in pop music, of course, to be as widely accessible as possible, to appeal to the largest number of people, to make the most money possible. Pop music as a genre has eschewed specifically addressing these mandates (to some degree there has been a systemic indoctrination of the general public via the media to the point where these “things” no longer even need to be addressed, they are just presumed via the larger system that late-capitalism is operating under, but that’s not specifically my point here), instead working as a new route of subversion (though I will be the first to say that subversion on its own isn’t enough to be interesting). What I’m saying is that pop-music has more depth lately than pop literature. Contemporary, late-capitalist pop music has a lot more depth than 80s pop music. There’s an entire journal related to addressing Lady Gaga. The relative locus of popular culture has been taken up by all sorts of members of the intelligentsia, from the contributors of Montevidayo to (everyone’s favorite diva) Zizek himself.
So here I am: I enjoy something, but it almost specifically refuses any further thought. What’s there to do about this? Should I deny any interest in this sort of writing based on the absence it leads to me finding myself within? I’ve found most of my attempts to engage further with this kind of work futile, with rare exceptions that already find themselves denying the confines of what the “concrete emo” style seems to hold.
I refuse to insist that it’s “not literature,” or that it’s something that’s “not worth reading,” because there is pleasure to be found in it, whether or not the pleasure holds, or even affects to any large degree.
I almost feel like right now, as a stylistic trend, this ‘mode’ of writing is operating almost specifically as networking. Writers will write in this style until they have more friends, or connections, and then move on into writing something that surpasses the pop. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong. Who knows.
FOOTNOTES:
(1) I should note that I have no interest in approaching this subject from a “shit-talking” perspective, which is often how discussions surrounding these authors end up.
Tags: alain robbe-grillet, muumuu house, Pop Serial, Tao Lin
“I almost feel like right now, as a stylistic trend, this ‘mode’ of writing is operating almost specifically as networking.”
Yes. I do believe that the Muumuu House gang to be a real boundary object for literature on the internet. I’ve read such scathing and well thought out screeds against Lin’s writing style, yet I totally disagreed w/ it. Like, I just had to have zero reaction to it but acknowledge that it was at least a valid point.
Personally I find the MHG style prose to be really endearing and a little subversive. I can totally see how a bunch of undergrads, however, look up to them and let their writing style be infected w/ MHG style.
But, that also feeds back into that boundary object thing. Like, they write like that and repel whom they want to and attract like-minded other potential ganglings.
I also think a lot of the haters out there are hating because the MHG are much younger than them. Honestly.
However “sweet” it tastes, muumuuviana does not seem “pop” to me or ‘me’, I think.
WHEN METAPHOR IS POP THAT POPS THAT METAPHOR IS CONCRETE EVEN IF IT IS NOT CEMENT, IS WHAT i FEEL AS THOUGH i THINK
I think Robbe-Grillet’s work has a symbolist bent that denies what you have called the removal of “additional level of signification.” Symbols are more furtile that metaphors, (vitruously authored), and less pedantic. This currently fashionable style is just self obsessed without an eye to anything beyond its own immediate material realities. Old writers made gestures to elegance and mystery through the concrete worlds they described…or at least I think RG did.
Thanks for your thoughts, Mike. I am definitely influenced by Tao. The piece by Tao you reference seems to me to use concrete details AS metaphors, for example, the closing phrase, “a violin that sounded like it was being played from another room.”
I don’t think of my writing as objective, though I have played with the use of edited/selected gchats and texts in fiction pieces as dialogue, and in the case of “ALL CAPS NO PUNCTUATION,” as the text entire. That to me is a kind of formal experimentation or play, not an attempt at objectivity. The only thing akin to objectivity in which I am interested is a kind of Zen detachment. I also don’t want my writing to read as “flat,” and many of the people/texts you reference don’t read to me as flat. What I want are deep shallows.
When I read your posts, Kitchell, I am at every turn amused to note how very little we have in common. What’s worse, you’re full of passionate intensity. I wish you a long and fruitful life, but I wouldn’t curse the fruit truck that knocked the french right out of you. You’d make for good bar talk, though.
While I wouldn’t argue with the idea that there are symbols in Robbe-Gillet’s work, I think his symbols function more as fetishized objects (vis a vis Gradiva of course) of a personal (sexual) lexicon that serve to heighten the experience of what’s being signified instead of distancing it, you know? Like the repetition of the broken high heel is both a cultural allusion and an obvious point of reference of Robbe-Grillet’s own taste, and so what this object-as-symbol is serving is more of a heightened eroticism.
And yeah, I agree fully that RG made gestures to elegance & mystery via the concreteness of their language, absolutely.
is this fake deadgod or is the real deadgod expanding his repertoire? I guess i’m asking you, deadgod.
I think it’s absolutely ‘pop,’ in talking to Stephen, even the naming of his magazine as Pop Serial is indicative of a Warholian cultural stance.
The age thing might be right (I am around the same age as most of the MHG & I know for a fact that there are people in the world who won’t take me seriously due to age [in fact it’s even happen here in htmlgiant comments before!]), and if so that’s just really dumb and annoying but I guess revelatory in the fact that most haters generally have little to say other than “this is dumb.”
I think it might have been subversive at some point, or at least it might maintain a sort of subversion if anybody using the style were to take up a non-naval-gazing subject-matter ever (which is arguably fine; like I’ve said I feel like you should be able to write about whatever you want ever, but it’d be more interesting to me at least if the people who approach literature via this ‘style’ came from different backgrounds, because at this point virtually all the experiences described are identical, which, i guess, is part of the “i can relate to this so i like it” mode).
I do think your comment regarding the boundary object thing is interesting, because it’s simultaneously attracting a larger audience than many other “things,” but it’s still very inclusive in terms of subject-matter. I don’t think it’s actually breaking through in any regard, because it’s just a larger self-contained ‘pool’ that it appeals to.
While this might surprise some people, I find some of Lin’s writing “enjoyable” and charming, but it doesn’t make me think. Doesn’t move my blood. It’s mostly forgettable and passes through my system.
The style is also annoyingly derivative of the most experimental Modernism–about a hundred years too late. Furthermore–and most importantly–it’s not doing anything new. For instance, I’m not interested in further attempts to prove the concreteness of language and how language creates its own reality as a response to the world. Again, about a hundred years too late. Gertrude Stein was writing this kind of intentionally flat, “concrete” prose before Lin’s Great-Grandparents were born, but at least she had the excuse of writing in response to the Victorians and The War To End All Wars. She was also an intellectual who could speak in a range of artistic discourses, and her experiments didn’t come sealed in air-tight echo-chambers.
So, I chalk my personal responses up to Lin’s apparent anti-intellectualism–there is a vapidness there, and an unwillingness to engage with ideas beyond “aesthetics,” an unwillingness that is almost gleeful, that reminds me of some of the most affected, drug-induced, unworldy Beat writing.
I don’t get this same sense when reading Robbe-Grillet, a writer who consistently inspires rereading, and one who seems sincerely and honestly engaged with literary tradition, politics, and philosophy. Like Hyruledungeon above, I also think Robbe-Grillet’s concrete details are informed by a kind of purposeful symbolism (beyond navel-gazing), not to mention French Surrealism.
hi stephen
i don’t know if i would agree with you on the list working specifically AS metaphor; i think there’s some symbolic intent, but that’s totally different (also, in full disclosure the seed of this post was planted with liam tweeted something that sort of drew a binary between “concrete” [in its usage here] poetry and poetry filled with metaphor, which is why i take that approach to begin but hopefully by saying i don’t think that there’s actually a binary there i move away from that)i don’t think most of your writing is objective, i kind of lazily used you as a sign-post to a lot of the stuff in pop serial or smth, but i think when i wrote the beginning (which was like… almost two weeks ago?), i was referring specifically to the story you read at the pop serial/nwv reading. i don’t think most of your writing fits this description… similarly i’m only really referring to parts of THE ROMANTIC when I mention Poncho, since most of his poetry on the internet is more of a fun exercise in bombast and direct comparison (in terms of calling himself an egg, etc). i mean i think a lot of “Internet Poetry” in terms of you & steve r & co has actually moved beyond what like Jordan Castro does due specifically to the inclusion of bombast & play, but i’d still problematize a lot of that realm of IP too, tho that’s another post hehe.
i think this might be the first time you’ve agreed with me about anything on htmlgiant ever.
i would like to note that the “apparent anti-intellectualism” of this kind of shit in general is probably the #1 thing that pisses me off about it, but i was trying to avoid being angry in favor of actually interrogating this shit.
Yes, it is; I’m trying to behave myself from here on out, and to not assume that everyone on this site is a shill for a certain writer, or writers.
But back to the topic: yes, it’s the anti-intellectual bent that is a huge turn-off for me (not just in Lin’s work, but in any work, in any style).
For me, it all comes down to honesty. I’m open-minded to any style of writing, as long as its honest, and I don’t feel like Lin is an honest writer.
yeah i definitely used to do this a lot more, in my stuff from like a year ago
been trying to get away from it recently, though
i don’t mind the aesthetic in and of itself but what bothers me is when people jack the surface-level gimmicks and stylistic tics that mark some of tao’s work but without any of the underlying philosophical POV that justified those tics at all in the first place
ok, mike, gotcha.
you were thinking of the piece by me that segues from sad narrator in bedroom to memory of fling with bi-curious (?) older girl to mother’s near-suicide attempt to reference to father’s poem about mother, known to exist but unread by narrator
i agree with you about ‘the romantic’ to be honest, but largely because that’s most of my earliest stuff, much of it written before i’d even interacted with steve roggenbuck to any significant extent. it’s because of how much it influenced me at the time that i now encourage writers to move past their tao-aping phase as fast as possible.
i don’t think it’s a lazy style as tao does it, and i think it’s justified in his work, but many of his imitators, even those he personally approves of and endorses, seem to have no real reason to continue using the ‘objective/scarequoted’ style except to keep this kind of argument going for promotional purposes of some kind
well i was also drunk and don’t remember most of that narrative so maybe i should just take you off the list because clearly i don’t know what i’m talking about lol
please don’t take me off the list =]]]]
it seems to me mostly irrelevant for tao now though; i think it fits in the earlier stuff, but at least based on his short pieces for various online outlets it really does strike me as lazy– it felt specifically motivated in like eeee eee eeeee and before though, i won’t argue there.
shit u already did. hehe. “fastfingers” kitchell
what in the hell do intellectualism and honesty have in common lol
do they have to be mutually exclusive? i think that’s kind of some weird idea that got started in some point via a ‘hipster’ rejection of an intellectual bent via non-mainstream art or whatever. it still insists that there’s some sort of low-brow/high-brow divide, instead of accepting the idea that none of this shit exists in a binary opposition, instead floating around and overlapping and intersecting.
when i say honesty i’m not talking about “authenticity.”
wired to the machine mang
idk i can add you back if you want
not talking about brows either
so you do actually think that honesty & intellectualism are mutually exclusive?
And to be fair, this isn’t just a symptom among “hipsters.” I know people are tired of the MFA talk, but there is an undeniable attitude of anti-intellectualism in MFA Land. Almost all discussions are reduced to “craft,” a place where many writers retreat for safety (it’s another thing entirely if craft is connected to other ideas, but all too often, this isn’t the case). This is one area where I agree with Anis Shivani in his critique of the workshop model.
also i obviously don’t actually mean “hipster” in a derogatory way i just don’t know how else to describe “people our age who are interested in art and aesthetics while at least in someway rejecting a mainstream hegemony while at least acknowledging and perhaps reveling in the pleasure it can bring”
honesty to me is emotion borne of physical existence. just googled the word and it has a morality-based definition on wikipedia, but not to me
you have said so
“Honesty” is admittedly difficult to define in this context, but I think most readers can tell when a writer doesn’t have his or her complete heart or soul in the text, and when he’s “hiding it with clothes”….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXpfYZnpnzo
MK,
i think your post here is terrific, in no small part due to how you seem to have succeeded in “avoid[ing] being angry” in order to get through it – a feat in itself when discussing this particular topic. however, what most intrigued me about your piece is the connection you’ve made between Lin and RG (or, i guess, the muumuu house style and the nouveau roman). i’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about/working on this connection, which strikes me as obviously worth interrogating, and i see a kind of direct lineage, or line of influence reaching from RG & the nouveau roman up to/through Tao & co., even if someone like Lin wouldn’t count RG among his direct influences. i think of J-P Toussaint as an important figure in this trajectory (again, even if TL&co. don’t specifically draw on Toussaint and his milieu). i wonder if, instead of setting up a RG/TL comparison, it doesn’t make more sense to think through some sort of
RG–>Toussaint–>TL/muumuu house progression (or regression?). i’d like to read your thoughts on the matter.
and although it’s tempting to see it as a regression, a kind of devolution from the “depth” [or whatever other term you’d like to use] someone like RG cultivates below the surface to the sugary superficiality of TL’s version of “objectivity,” i worry that this is a bit like old people complaining about the deterioration of culture or the fragmentation of meaning or something – too simple, maybe. while i, like you, decidedly prefer RG [and Toussaint] to the muumuu style, i’m interested in the ways they relate to one another, and i’m excited to see someone else diving into it.
so, uh, kudos to you. thanks for this piece.
i think we should all learn a lesson from the silent film classic METROPOLIS in the idea that the heart should mediate between the head and the hands, the point being that one without the other is always dumb, no matter which way you’re moving!
i could be called a hipster and i like both mainstream and non-mainstream things, but i don’t think of myself as rejecting a mainstream hegemony. this difference is what i was getting at when i said i don’t believe in authenticity–that was like a reference to a late-90’s Gen-X hipster stance. i’m also not especially into gettin’ my Sontag on unless that means reading sweet books from other countries
“due specifically to the inclusion of bombast & play”
Oh, totally. That is a pretty fine distinction, but totally works for me. Hmm. I want this to sit between my brain teeth for a little while (not a metaphor).
i started and have yet to finish “camera,” but i heard toussaint on the “bookworm” radio show and liked him a lot. i like his concept of the infinitesimal novel and his ideas about maintaining energy in his writing.
idk mang ’emotion borne of physical existence’ doesn’t make sense to me unless you are specifically referring to like ‘pain’ i guess but even that is mediated via yr brain. i don’t think you can feel sad or happy without consciously being aware of what’s going on.
I hope this post ushers in a new era of calm and candid discussion. The internet literature community swings hard between emo arguing and bland props-giving, neither of which is very productive. It seems like it’s a necessary (unpleasant) phase that a lot of internet communities need to go through before becoming a space where people can be thoughtful and disagree and still be friends.
another thing, mike, tao is producing and has produced many things that are playful in a language and cultural sense if not in an intellectual or political sense (the primary aim seems to be humor, a means to joy), such as his elaborately captioned drug-related photoshop pieces at vice (several involving celebrities in absurd fictional scenarios), his satirical guide to “north american hamsters” complete with info on the hamsters’ favorite music and movies as well as hunting and cooking tips… etc.
I don’t know…physical existence with the brained turned-off seems rather boring to me.
I also don’t think you can avoid “morality” in these discussions.
*with the brain turned off.
Sheesh. Irony meter broken.
It might make more sense for me to draw the parallel via Toussaint, but to be honest I haven’t read enough Toussaint yet to be comfortable enough using him as a point of reference :B
But yeah, I just kind of really hate it when people try to isolate American authors & what they’re doing exclusively within the realm of American literature, because clearly there’s (literally) an entire world of books being written outside of the US, and a lot of them are being translated and read in the US.
I mean, I also guess I don’t necessarily want to specifically say that a distance from “depth” or whatever would be inherently “regressive,” because I think there is “more than one way to skin a cat” as they say, but i’m definitely wondering if a distance from this sort of intense engagement is where literature is heading… seems very Houellebecqian–and not in prose styling, but in terms of his Content. Like, I think my interest in literature does, to an extent, diverge from an idea of a studied ‘depth’ (or whatever), but it also diverges from the ‘meme-plex’ of the surface.
i agree with this, i finally watched bebe zeva and actually thought it was really fun & interesting [though the review is going to wait until i watch mumblecore so i can review them together]; i’m tempted to say that tao’s “alternative media” stuff works a lot better for me than his writing does. i still think that e.e.e. is fantastic, because he does “play” more in there
awareness is something i’m interested in, or mindfulness. that to me has nothing to do with intellectualism
how are you using ‘intellectualism’? we might’ve split a gap here
How is “awareness” not related to “intellectualism,” unless one is only using “intellectualism” in a pejorative manner?
METAPHOR!
when i mean intellectualism, i mean rhetoric-based thinking and argument, theory… i guess i’m most biased against the more contemporary manifestation of intellectualism that seems to be primarily based around sociocultural politics and theory. i have enjoyed many writers who play with intellectual ideas (Joyce, for example) but those writers seemed to be primarily interested not in intellectualism but rather in aesthetics and form and, ultimately, in emotions.
Hipsters like mainstream. Part of their Irony.
i want to be excited and i want to feel emotional as a way to mindfulness
It would depend on definitions, but I am considering “awareness” as a (near-?)synonym of “mindfulness,” the spiritual faculty, from Zen Buddhism.
steve roggenbuck and i talk a lot about post-irony
bb
stephen you use ‘rhetoric’ in every comment thread related to tao lin/muumuu ever and i have absolutely no idea what you mean by it when you use it. do you mean it simply at the level of “persuasive in someway”? if language is not persuasive in someway, like, at any level, then it’s arguably aiming for objectivity, right? objectivity is literally not possible due to the fact that we can only experience the world from a subjective level (which is why every time i say objective in the post i have it in scare-quotes). if you’re going by aristotle’s ‘rhetoric,’ you have to keep in mind that that definition specifically includes pathos as being important, which is of course an appeal to emotions, so if you’re specifically saying you are interested in emotions, then you are actually pushing towards rhetoric.
yeah i would agree that ‘alternative culture’ is definitely post-ironic (i have had this conversation with both ryan & reynard sort of), which is why when venues like The New York Times try to write a piece on the zeitgeist and still hold up irony as a virtue they are just wrong
I would argue that heavy theory and theorizing are actually out of fashion right now in academia (compared to the 80’s and 90’s). There’s a push now toward narrative and discourse analyses, which can only help the writer who wants to study aesthetics and form. Narrative Theory in particular is making a comeback in academic circles (esp. Narrative Theory that engages “Cultural Studies”). More scholars are now attempting to bring the structural to the post-structural.
It’s also important to distinguish between fiction writers and poets writing fiction and poetry and academics writing academic criticism. I don’t think anyone expects fiction writers or poets to sacrifice emotion in their respective genres.
traditionally, pop art has strong ties to commercial viability in the form of being a mass-marketable product, something i’m not sure the inward-looking muumuu coterie will ever be able to achieve.
again, these guys constitute the mendoza line of contemporary american lit, and this is me speaking critically, not ‘shit talking’.
Though what seems ironic here is how this all relates to Lin’s work, a writer many consider emotionless. The “emotion” in his work feels stunted to me, like it has nowhere else to go and has a ceiling that’s already been reached, and one that is severely limiting in its range and potential depth.
Think of James Baldwin for a minute, probably one of the most passionate and “emotional” writers America has ever produced. It’s no coincidence that he’s also considered one of American’s most “intellectual” writers–there’s an awe-inspiring range in his work that is facilitated by an intellectualism that informs passion/emotion.
The “post-irony” argument doesn’t make sense. You mean there is no such thing as irony anymore? We’ve somehow transcended irony? Or perhaps we’ve transcended it in another way?? Like we’re even more ironic now?
I would like to believe that my tone in this post was ironic. But maybe it’s post-ironic.
this would be funny if you had a point other than: HAHA POOP
Muumuu House & Pop Serial have both been featured in Nylon magazine (Muumuu in print & PS online), Tao Lin has specific (possibly unknown) ties to HRO, Tao Lin has expressed specific interest in making as much money as possible, Steve Roggenbuck has multiple manifestos regarding how poetry should spread to literally everyone on earth. I think they’re aiming for a commercialism, but instead of approaching it via the LCD, they’re branding themselves within a very significant cultural zeitgeist that seems to be gaining cultural prominence daily (again, that of the “hipster,” term used exclusively as a short cut)
“I almost feel like right now, as a stylistic trend, this ‘mode’ of writing is operating almost specifically as networking.”
this is why i quit facebook. i am tired of poems and stories being used as social trading cards. people need to just start writing poems that mean something to them or make them feel different as human beings.
post-irony is indicative of a cultural status in which, after years of a certain subculture exploiting cultural detritus out of a desire for snarkiness, a distinct pretension of awareness, this cultural detritus starts to be enjoyed sincerely, and suddenly it’s ok because being ironic and overtly self-aware at all times gets boring and old and annoying. post-irony is a sense of relaxation. for example, a 25 year old “hipster” (please refer to my explanation of the word “hipster” elsewhere in these comments) can earnestly enjoy justin bieber. there is, probably, an expectation that his enjoyment is ironic, but in the foggy haze of reality, whether or not it’s sincere is no longer relevant, which becomes the point.
what i’m saying is when i make or take in art i am not thinking about an intellectual framework. when i am defending someone in a forum i am trying to persuade someone of something or at least trying to present something for consideration. art may be ineluctably rhetorical and can always be intellectualized, but i don’t want to make art as a means to academic bonafides or as a means to intellectual discourse or as a means to anything. i also don’t want to make art as a means to impressing aesthetes or self-styled weirdos. i want to make art as a means to greater mindfulness in life, as a way to and from emotions, not to transcend but to be in and open.
“but i don’t want to make art as a means to academic bonafides or as a
means to intellectual discourse or as a means to anything.”
Again, I don’t think this is what people are suggesting when they say they want art that is intellectually-engaged.
First of all, thanks for this post, Mike.
Second of all, I admire your stance on the binary of “concrete vs. metaphorical.” Reminds me a bit of the section of “Marvin K. Mooney” wherein the metaphor is transformed into a literally concrete object, one so popular that everybody on the airplane has his or her own to tote around.
Third of all, as another one of these young writers who has occasionally dabbled in “Internet poetry” before (SHAMEFUL PLUG: http://letpeoplepoems.com/2011/03/26/a-quick-poem-by-matt-margo), I think that it may be kind of unfair to assume that this purely objective/emotional/concrete style is blossoming out of a sort of laziness or an immature drive toward self-promotion, and I also think that it would be unfair to assume that “purely objective” is synonymous with “symbolically barren.” Now I am not claiming that you have made such assumptions yourself, but I’m just saying that it is important to remember not to group the people behind such writing into a hive of the same intentions or motives. Some of these authors may simply be striving for “cuteness” or “hype” or “fun” via their Internet literature, but you cannot assume such authorial intent for the style as a whole. Really, I’m speaking only for myself in this instance, I guess. I’ve written one or two “Muumuu-esque” poems in the past, but I’ve also written plenty else that is more realized or envisioned or “mature.” And that isn’t even to say that my objectively stylized work is void of a higher purpose anyway. It may be pop lit, and it may have a highly (or even solely) centralized focus on the surface, but does depth always have to be located beneath the surface?
I am probably going to regret having posted this comment.
nylon’s a fashion magazine, right?
i think maybe we’re confusing the business side of literature with the art part.
biz part: there’s nothing wrong with the cultivation of celebrity to help an artist’s work-as-a-product sell.
art part: there is something wrong when the work-as-a-product comes crippled as a work of art.
if the muumuu coterie can’t find a way to satisfyingly engage with all the criticism they get (honestly, all it would take would be one seriously good-if-not-great novel), then they’re always going to belong in the fashion magazines. and won’t ever really belong in discussions re: art, literature.
maybe my issue is with their apparently flawed business model, i’m not sure. i just know that a publishing house is going to fail if they don’t put out good writing.
ps – what are you referring to with HRO and LCD?
for a lot of people–people who would otherwise be supporting him–the underlying philosophical POV is a dishonest, puerile sham. again, just speaking critically.
HRO – hipster runoff & LCD – lowest common denominator
their presence in Nylon (yeah, primarily an art & culture mag) links them closer to Pop Art in the Warholian sense (I don’t inherently buy into the idea of Johns & Rauschenberg, for instance, as “pop artists”) than like, I don’t know, a Bookforum review would. The idea of literature as pop would be for it to break out of the closed world of literature and into the world of pop culture.
I understand your use of hipster. And I’m aware of the phenomenon you’re talking about. But at the end I think is where you might be mistaken.
Whether or not the enjoyment is sincere was never the point. At any point. Hipsters are the spawns of visual culture. And what’s at the heart of a visual culture? To be seen.
The irony of the hipster is to simultaneously engage in both “alternative” and “mainstream” behaviors. To be aware of the underground and live partially above. “I know better than this but am going to do it anyway” irony. The point of the behavior is image. Whether or not they are aware of their own irony is a different question. And itself ironic.
this is what i’m getting at. take a look at the NY Times best seller list once in a while. the world of literature has long been out in the world of pop culture; it’s a form of entertainment! (think: dickens, conan doyle, etc.) these guys should be studying/aping the likes of James Patterson, Danielle Steele, J.K. Rowling et al. if they were actually serious about pushing the envelope of pop lit. instead, they quite obviously dabble in imitations of stuff they read in college lit classes that was (like someone above said) groundbreaking a century ago.
if i have any point, it’s this one: these guys really need to hunker down on improving their craft if they want to be taken seriously by more than just their immediate social circles.
(honestly don’t know how i blanked on Lowest Common Denominator; was like: …daft punk is playing at my house, what?)
Well, arguably Pop Art itself should have imitated portrait painters & whatever proto-Thomas Kinkade shit existed in the late 50s by that accord, right? I think there’s a difference between the aspirations of Pop Art (which was my point here, right?) and like mass-market success.
it’s fine that you’re not thinking about an intellectual frame work; i don’t think i’m necessarily asking for you to. i just don’t understand the necessity of insisting that intellectualism is inherently not honest. like, i know for a fact i read things that are allegorical, but i hate allegory so i ignore it. the allegory is still there whether i care about it or not, knahmean? also, there’s clearly an intellectual engagement in the consideration of how best to achieve a writing style that leads to Mindfulness. I don’t read theory because I’m interested in intellectual bravada, I read theory because there are a lot of smart people who have spent a lot of time thinking about things that often end up being applicable in bringing me closer to my goal of articulating & creating Art As Experience. Clearly my obsession with art as experience is the ultimate in wanting emotion, but I’m basically not satisfied with the representation of emotions, because that’s futile to me.
The designation “post-irony” precludes the possibility of irony, is my point. And it’s still alive and well whether the hipsters know it or not.
i like some art that others would term intellectually-engaged, but i also like art that is “simply” funny and/or emotional, that is intuitive or personal, whose potential value to someone is not tied to any aesthetic or formal achievement, nor to any overt philosophical position, nor to any sociopolitical significance, but rather, perhaps, due to how the art makes someone feel, the creator or the reader, via intuitive reaction or real-life resonance or craft or something else
i feel you mike
i see what you’re saying
the bottom line for me is i don’t need to justify what i write
i don’t think art needs justification
and to me intellectualism, intellectual engagement, in any way being beholden to intellectualism as an artist is to justify
You continue to argue in binaries. “Intellectually-engaged” can take numerous manifestations, even ones that are ” ‘simply funny/and or emotional.’ ”
As with most things, the “how” is a lot more important than the “what.”
This is a great post, Mike. I really like that distinction
between Grillet’s model for ‘objectivity’ and Lin’s, because I think it
really reveals the banality of a lot of what that ilk writes about, and
more specifically why so many people find it so distasteful.
I understand that an underlying conceit of the repetition of
surface level detail and banality is to bring attention to the passage
of time, or the futility of articulating a lot of what can’t be
articulated, but I think its ultimately a cop out. Regarding that
MuuMuu house post you linked to, the whole discussion on ‘rhetoric’ is
just brain dead stupid, not to sound antagonistic, but for an aesthetic
that wants to emphasize the ‘contrived’ aspect of thought &
language so that conventional exposition and psychological development (or ‘whatever’) is
totally eschewed, it seems incredibly contradictory to believe that any
form of speech isn’t obviously artificial or contrived — something
that people have been talking about for a long time but at least as far back as Heidegger.
I read Bed and I was actually moderately impressed by it,
and I think there is a future for ‘that kind of writing’ but as a
‘movement’ it seriously needs to ditch some of its collective
proclivities, which in all honesty makes them seem more vapid and attention seeking than anything — which I would like to think they are not. I want to think
that our generation (people born in the mid to late 80’s) has a
literary future, but as of now I don’t think there is any writer of
this generation that I will back up totally. All of my favorite
literary writers are my parents’ age.
Also want to add an addendum that I haven’t read a lot of the comments on this post so sorry if I am repeating what has already been said, and also, I am not trying to antagonize the MuuMuu house crowd, I just think that a lot of their central philosophical and aesthetic choices are worth taking to task, which is why HTML Giant needs more of these posts.
I like this article a lot but I also tend to think that there is a real political work going on in Tao Lin’s aesthetic stance. I tried to write about it a while ago in the context of the shifting representation of work in art in a post-industrial society (or a political economy that is more and more defined by reproductive labour), and I tried to make the claim that Lin breaks equally from both the Modernist tradition and the Realist tradition, at least on the ethical level. Which is to say that the Modernists were characterized by an understanding of the ethical novel as being the novel which represented as fully as possible the interiority of the subject, while the ethical Realist novel is the novel which identifies and interrogates the objective/structural/systemic conditions which are in place that cause that interiority (this is all following the Brecht/Benjamin/Adorno/Bloch/Lukács debates on expressionism, so of course it’s from a Marxist perspective). But what I see as most important in Tao Lin’s writing is what most people see as the gimmicks, the light-hearted moments, like naming the characters in RY after child actors, because that is where I think the political work does happen, since I’m a little bit Derridean and margins and all that.
The hermetic environment that the Pop Serial/Muumuu House writers seem to me to facilitate has always bothered me, though, and I think that has a lot in common with what you were saying about networking; although, for me, that seems like exactly the problem with the more ‘playful’ elements of the culture, as I tend to think of playing as having a sort of hermeticism as a constitutive element. That’s sort of why I tend to think that Steve Roggenbuck’s insistence that his veganism/buddhism are major inspirations for his work is both totally accurate and not very interesting – all three share a particularism or individualism that I don’t think does a whole lot to advance the struggle, as it were, and so while I am happy that they work for him and give him (and a pretty sizeable group of other people) pleasure, I don’t think they work on the level of proper politics, really. Well, let me backpedal a little, I do think that play has a very important political role (communist dance parties, emma goldman and all that), I think it is a political role that is inherently problematic and requires very intensive critical engagement to be useful. Otherwise it too easily falls back into the structure of deferred enjoyment that capital so successfully harnesses (ie the point about tumblr memes made earlier in the comments thread)
Then again I am pretty convinced that the most important political battle going on in the world of aesthetics at the moment is (at least if you consider yourself anti-capitalist, like I do) in relation to cuteness, and the ways in which cuteness is also harnessed by capital, and how it can potentially be made to do otherwise, so maybe that’s also where I tend to fall in this muumuu/pop serial camp as well despite a tendency for these writers to be explicity apolitical, or something, fuck I dunno, I wrote a lot here, sorry.
if a work of art is, to the artist, funny and/or emotional and not anything else, then it takes an intellectualizing reader to turn it into something else, to make it part of an intellectual discourse. my initial comment in this part of the thread was a provocation. apart from that i haven’t been trying to persuade but rather to explain. my attempt to present or explain as opposed to argue/”prove” is related to my POV re art-making and appreciating: what i want is freedom, as much as possible–freedom from other people’s ideas of what has been or is or theoretically would be a valuable or important artwork. if i don’t think about whether my art is intellectually-engaged or not or whether other people’s is or not, then i am free to openly enjoy it in my way.
i really feel like the most relevant thing that culture should take from post-structuralism is the idea that binaries are limiting and that subscribing to binaries posits a really terrible & homogenized world, so i really think it’s important to remember that in all circumstances.
also, i think there’s an important distinction between where this ‘objective’ style has come from and why it’s still around; as a style i don’t it problematic as a style, i find it problematic (in any case, regardless of a specific style), when a style is enlisted as a posture; that’s to stay the style is not serving the subject matter at all. i mean, arguably i also find the subject matter of a lot of muumuuvian/IP stuff, well, “uninteresting” or something, whether or not I personally have interest in the subject matter should basically be irrelevant if it’s pulled off with panache, I guess. I guess what I’m saying is that as a reader in the 21st century, I generally don’t give a shit what your intention was. All i’m seeing is the final product, and I’m going to judge that final product based on that product itself, not on a combination of the product with the life-story of the artist. I don’t think an artist has to have a narrow trajectory of work in terms of aesthetics (obviously I prefer wildly heterogeneous bodies of work, hell I prefer a single work itself to be wildly heterogeneous in itself), but I don’t think as an artist you should expect the reader to be familiar with your entire career & life.
re: “I also think that it would be unfair to assume that “purely objective” is synonymous with “symbolically barren.” ” i agree with that, and have said so above, because i think assuming as much would be drawing a binary again, heh, but i do think that symbols work differently from metaphors.
i also think there is a divide between “muumuu objectivity” and internet poetry, which i highlight in comments above–this blog is more specifically about the muumuuvians than internet poetry.
also, finally, (hehe), no, depth doesn’t have to be hiding below surface. as i open the blog post with, i like art that sits exclusively on the surface due to the idea that when everything is laid out on the surface there is less distance between the signifier & the signified, which, as i’ve also stated elsewhere, ideally brings the viewer closer to a pure experience of the art.
yeah, the idea of speech always being a level away from anything, you know, ‘real’ and therefore inherently artificial is kind of a big part of my understanding of literature, so it’s always at least a little confusing to me when that understand is like… ignored? or something? (but yeah the post i linked really pissed me off, mostly because there was like literally no even attempt to engage the arguments via “muumuuvians” themselves).
most of my favorite (fiction) writers are dead, heh.
we’re way over to the side so this will be impossible to read, but i think mfbomb is right here regarding the fact that you seem to be establishing a binary here. i’m with barthes & his ideas regarding the death of the author; i.e. the reader creates the text. you seem to be too, based on your final sentence here, “if i don’t think about whether my art is intellectually-engaged or not or whether other people’s is or not, then i am free to openly enjoy it in my way.” i mean, i think the only reason i might be actually arguing towards something here is that i think refusing the potentiality of intellectually engaged art to achieve visceral reactions (i.e. funniness, sadness, emotions in general) really limits what art (across all mediums) can do. i think you should make art however you want, but since you can read a work however you want to, it seems like it’s pointless to hold it against someone who wants their own work to be intellectually engaging. i mean, beckett, cortozar, they were major intellectual figures, and i know you dig both of them. like i think the main point i want to get across here is that it doesn’t have to be either or.
I don’t think intellectual discourse and/or criticism about art is an attempt to rewrite the art in intellectual discourse, which is why we distinguish between primary and secondary sources. I’m also not sure why you continue to conflate “art that is
intellectually-engaged” with abstracted forms of non-artistic discourse
(e.g., academic scholarship, criticism, etc.). No one here has suggested that fiction and poetry should read like some academic article. And, I’m also not sure why you have the odd habit of intellectualizing about Lin’s work yourself while at the same time resisting others’ attempts to do the same, usually those who disagree with your criticism.
Here’s what I see: you seem to want the “freedom” to create, the freedom to offer your own criticism on Lin’s work, and the contradictory “freedom” to pretend like only certain criticisms of Lin’s are valuable or worthwhile. I think this all speaks–to quote another poster–to the “hermetic” environment that you work within, and the one that limits the potential impact and reach of Lin and MH. When it’s all said and done and all the experimental veneer is lifted, y’all are a pretty close-minded, conservative bunch.
I also think the below sentence speaks to the annoyance many have with Lin and the MH/Pop Serial writers:
“if a work of art is, to the artist, funny and/or emotional and not
anything else, then it takes an intellectualizing reader to turn it into
something else, to make it part of an intellectual discourse”
It’s THIS disingenuous notion that the work is somehow “itself” and “not anything else” that people find dishonest; it’s similar to New Critical posturing that was exposed half a century ago.
Well, I’m here to tell you that art is never reduced to what the “artist wants it to be,” and you’re going to have a hard time passing that one off on many folks today.
what have you read by me?
Oops, I meant to say “All of my favorite *living* fiction writers are my parents’ age” ; most of my favorite writers are dead as well.
Hey Kitch i reposted you here “we’re way over to the side so this will be impossible to read, but i
think mfbomb is right here regarding the fact that you seem to be
establishing a binary here. i’m with barthes & his ideas regarding
the death of the author; i.e. the reader creates the text. you seem to
be too, based on your final sentence here, “if i don’t think about
whether my art is intellectually-engaged or not or whether other
people’s is or not, then i am free to openly enjoy it in my way.” i
mean, i think the only reason i might be actually arguing towards
something here is that i think refusing the potentiality of
intellectually engaged art to achieve visceral reactions (i.e.
funniness, sadness, emotions in general) really limits what art (across
all mediums) can do. i think you should make art however you want, but
since you can read a work however you want to, it seems like it’s
pointless to hold it against someone who wants their own work to be
intellectually engaging. i mean, beckett, cortozar, they were major
intellectual figures, and i know you dig both of them. like i think the
main point i want to get across here is that it doesn’t have to be
either or.”
i’ll respond to some of this:
I am not trying to establish a binary. I indirectly criticized intellectualism as I understand it and then tried to explain my approach to art making and appreciating. I agree that one can be a smart writer and an emotional writer. I don’t agree with anyone (not sure if you think this) who thinks that one “ought to be” smart or “intellectually-engaged” or that one must be if one wants one’s work to be “valuable” or “interesting” or “mature”/”serious.” To me a smart writer is not necessarily an intellectual writer. Many artistic innovations and achievements that have been praised by intellectuals using academic language and frameworks after the fact were initially intuitive or emotional actions on the part of the artist. If my work is to be intellectually-engaged, I don’t want it to be because I sat around pondering a fresh take on post-structuralist blah de blah and executed that.
I don’t enjoy Barthes’ death of the author. I don’t like theory.
I don’t think an author can control her work’s reception or interpretation, but I think the author’s intent is as important as anything else (a lot/some/not at all).
I don’t think the “greatness” of Beckett or Cortazar to me has anything to do with their intellectual relevance in the academic context. Beckett said he had his breakthrough when he began to write from emotion. Early in his career he wrote the poem “Whoroscope,” elaborately mocking intellectualism. Joyce, his onetime mentor, regularly mocked intellectuals and intellectualism in his work and comments. Cortazar became a politically-engaged writer/person but the work of his I value most is formally playful, impressive from a craft standpoint, and complexly emotional, in my opinion.
if there’s one thing thomas kinkade and the muumuus have in common, it’s that they consistently exhibit a distinctively derivative schtick in the aesthetic of their work. and i’m sure warhol did landscape paintings/screen prints every once in a while, to say nothing of all the other genuine pop artists of the latter half of the 20th century who exploited popular iconography in their art (off the top of my head: lichtenstein, jasper johns, etc etc).
re: aspirations of pop art
to be popular? or not to be popular? that is the yadda yadda…
there actually is a sizable streak of LCD-ness in the muumuu oeuvre, i’d argue. one of laziness. one of facileness.
sorry to any and all if i sound crass/blunt, but it always strikes me as surreal how apparently ‘seriously’ their work can be taken.
I have read Richard Yates and the Shoplifting book; unfortunately, though, I don’t remember much sincere emotion in either (unless boredom counts–boredom from feeling like you were hitting the same notes over and over again–notes that were interesting, fun, funny, and charming at first that eventually lacked range and the ability to sustain themselves over the course of a book-length text; your style feels very mannered and limiting to me, almost as if it’s gotten you to where you are now and you have no way of turning back. Have you ever considered just disappearing for maybe a year or two, or three avoiding all of the PR hijinks and coterie activities and documentary movies, and just reading a crapload of books, preferably classics or stuff written before 1995?)
tao, you should be composing a thoughtful and reflective analysis of what’s going on in this thread, and then posting it on your blog.
Heyyo MFBomb bb, I reposted you here with my responses indicated by stars around them:
“I don’t think intellectual discourse and/or criticism about art is an
attempt to rewrite the art in intellectual discourse, which is why we
distinguish between primary and secondary sources. I’m also not sure why
you continue to conflate “art that is
intellectually-engaged” with abstracted forms of non-artistic discourse
(e.g.,
academic scholarship, criticism, etc.). No one here has suggested that
fiction and poetry should read like some academic article. And, I’m
also not sure why you have the odd habit of intellectualizing about
Lin’s work yourself while at the same time resisting others’ attempts to
do the same, usually those who disagree with your criticism. ***I am hypocritical sometimes, it’s true. In some cases, I would say, and this can be read as defensively argumentative I realize, that I resist other people’s intellectual readings of Lin because they seem “unfair” and “obviously based on unacknowledged bias and bullshit.”***
Here’s
what I see: you seem to want the “freedom” to create, the freedom to
offer your own criticism on Lin’s work, and the contradictory “freedom”
to pretend like only certain criticisms of Lin’s are valuable or
worthwhile. I think this all speaks–to quote another poster–to the
“hermetic” environment that you work within, and the one that limits the
potential impact and reach of Lin and MH. ***I don’t think the impact and reach of Lin/MH will be based heavily on the nature of the HTMLGIANT comments section spats re them.*** When it’s all said and done
and all the experimental veneer is lifted, y’all are a pretty
close-minded, conservative bunch. ***I don’t know what you’re talking about re “experimental veneer” or how it would be “lifted.” I strive to be open-minded actually, however I am passionate about the relatively few people/artworks whom/which I love, and it can lead to defensiveness and inconsistencies. I see intellectualism as potentially leading to a limiting of the creative mind, not an opening or expanding, which may seem illogical to you, I don’t know. I don’t understand how appeasing the intellectually-engaged people of the world with one’s art is a liberal move and disregarding something many peers thinks is important would be a conservative move. Excitement is liberal and tends to provoke scorn from the fearful.***
I also think the below sentence speaks to the annoyance many have with Lin and the MH/Pop Serial writers:
“if a work of art is, to the artist, funny and/or emotional and not
anything else, then it takes an intellectualizing reader to turn it into
something else, to make it part of an intellectual discourse”
It’s
THIS disingenuous notion that the work is somehow “itself” and “not
anything else” that people find dishonest; it’s similar to New Critical
posturing that was exposed half a century ago. ***To clarify: the work is not DEFINITIVELY, WITHOUT QUESTION, OBJECTIVELY, ONLY itself—RATHER, it is TO THE ARTIST, and ONLY TO THE ARTIST, ONLY that and not anything else. There is a big difference between what I just said and how you’re interpreting my quoted statement above. The distinction is based on a frail, limited existence, the artist’s little thought world, which, like life itself, is fluid and temporary. So I’m not being disingenuous, I’m simply stubbornly not playing your game. The joke I tell my friends will be funny to me and to some of my friends and to some strangers, and you can come along and try to tell me things about the joke and what it means or signifies or is, but I don’t have to care about what you think. A work can’t be ONLY one thing, but it can be to myself as I’m saying or thinking it and ignoring what you think about it. If i disregard your intellectual discourse about any given thing, it is not real to me, therefore it doesn’t exist to me.***
Well, I’m here to
tell you that art is never reduced to what the “artist wants it to be,”
and you’re going to have a hard time passing that one off on many folks
today.” ***I’m not worried.***
Craft is not some isolated language or discourse that just fell out of the sky–or that exists “intuitively.” In might come out “intuitively” for the experienced writer, but that’s not possible without thinking about it in “intellectual” ways for many years as an apprentice. Therefore, one might say the exact same for ideas other than craft and aesthetics–if the writer is thinking deeply about those things, they will likely come out organically during the creation process, no? I don’t think any of the exemplary writers mentioned on this thread ever sat down to write a “story about racism that proves racism is bad,” and your continued implication of such is sort of annoying, as is this apparent assumption that craft is somehow natural, while things like politics and philosophy are tend to be forced onto a text.
It sounds like you’ve taken a very broad and in no way specific word–intellectual–and whittled it down in relevance to a few negative connotations, primarily having to do with being wary almost to the point of paranoia of the academic, abstract or stale. That is not what this word means. When you argue against a very specific kind of thinking and writing, using a word which carries about it a full hundredfold other associations than those you favor, you are being reductive and confusing.
You do not write poems without your mind, you do not have emotions without ideas, you do not know ideas but by your core (the one that beats). If you do not like people who attempt to exist only in the realm of ideas, people who attempt to strip ideas of emotions even as you’ve attempted to strip emotions of ideas, then you need to come up with a better way of dealing with that, rhetorically.
‘richard yates’ and ‘sfaa’ have similar prose styles
it is a prose style whose main strategy in influencing a reader to feel emotion is to remember what concrete details (what i saw, heard, smelled) or specific memories (experienced in what order, and to what degree) caused me to feel an emotion and then to present those details in a manner that a reader might experience, in some manner, the details i experienced and then feel a similar emotion
hemingway described his usage of this prose style, saying something like that he closed his eyes (paraphrasing a lot right now) and remembered what exactly caused him to feel a certain thing and then wrote those few details in a way that the details would manifest in a reader’s imagination, maybe causing the reader to feel the certain thing
i googled some things and haven’t found the quote, but it is on the internet somewhere
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:r83ywLxU75QJ:fencer.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/write-like-hemingway-a-book-review/+hemingway+details+emotion&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com
there are probably 10+ other writers i like who would describe the usage of this prose style in a similar manner
i googled my name, ernest hemingway’s name, ‘prose,’ and ‘concrete’:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YN6OACaZnD4J:heheheheheheheeheheheehehe.tumblr.com/page/33+ernest+hemingway+tao+lin+prose+concrete&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com
‘your style feels very mannered and limiting to me, almost as if it’s
gotten you to where you are now and you have no way of turning back.’
my story-collection, ‘bed,’ is in what i feel is an almost opposite prose-style than that of ‘ry’ or ‘sfaa,’ it was written around 2003 to 2006
some of ‘eeeee eee eeee’ is in that style, ‘eeeee eee eeee’ was written in 2005 and 2006
i wrote ‘richard yates’ and ‘sfaa’ from 2006 to 2010 and was conscious that they were in a different prose than ‘bed’/’eee’
from something like 12/09 to a few months ago i worked (not continuously) on http://www.viceland.com/int/v18n6/htdocs/relationship-story.php which is in a style similar to ‘bed’
throughout 2009 and 2010 i worked on essays and other writings that i feel are closer to a third style than either previous styles mentioned in this comment
http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/almost-transparent-blue-ryu-murakami/
http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/koko-the-talking-gorilla/
http://heheheheheheheeheheheehehe.com/2011/05/vice-is-publishing-weekly-column-by-me.html
(see my blog for other examples)
‘Have you ever considered just disappearing for maybe a year or two, or
three avoiding all of the PR hijinks and coterie activities and
documentary movies, and just reading a crapload of books, preferably
classics or stuff written before 1995?’
i haven’t thought about ‘disappearing’
i don’t have a job, i’m currently something like $5000 in debt, i’m not sure how i would ‘disappear’
i feel like i enjoy tweeting and reading blogs and participating in things on the internet and i also feel like i’m securing some kind of financial security for when i’m like 33 to 80 years old
i think ~80% of my favorite books were written before 1995
here are books i read repeatedly: http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/89893-tao?sort=rating&view=reviews
i feel like if i had something like $25,000 i would think about, to some degree, ‘disappearing’ and not, like, submitting things to magazines for a year
i feel like i still would want to tweet and draw things for ‘vice’ and look at the internet
The article introduces a dichotomy between metaphor and concrete that it never follows. I assume this to mean a figurative/literal content base as the examples follow the contemporary, stylistic choices such as Tao Lin’s. The focus primarily seems centered on what is considered a key facet of this writing: subject-less attention to detail. Kitchell aligns this “concrete” detail, “antiquated pop,” and seemingly shallow matters.
I don’t find Kitchell’s distinctions helpful, and they don’t seem to be doing him any good either. Rather, we can compare “The Secret Room” and “We Will Drink” on ideological grounds as Kitchell’s late-capitalist interest in the latter half implies worth noting. Whereas “The Secret Room” and other such seemingly objective-based writings (see, for example, the second portion of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and her notes on it) may ascribe to the ability to produce a concrete-oriented narrative that, as Kitchell states, “avoids psychologizing the subject matter,” Tao Lin’s supposed take on objective interests reveals a progressive, literary stance. Here, Kitchell mangles categories of language, style, content, and theme in “We Will Drink,” creating a reading that assumes Tao to be merely cute. Rather, as the other aforementioned works did not have, “We Will Drink” follows the details of two characters in both first and second perspective narration (in a way that could perhaps be argued as omniscient third). This stylistic choice alongside the minimal language exposes Tao’s interest in distancing himself from the other authors insofar as his work is vehemently self-centered.
The content reinforces Tao’s interest in a psychological reading as the reader is not made aware of the reality of the narration in two senses. By bracketing out whether or not these events did take place, the reader’s focus remains on the intention of including these specific events which contextualize a specific demographic with which Tao aligns the protagonist and his works in general (tofu-eating, organic-buying, late night-munching, suburban sprawl-living literary sorts). Second, the play between what cannot be considered first, second, or third person perspective creates a Zizekian “short circuit” in which Tao has rewired these positions to inform a voice that is better able to inform the desires of the protagonist.
Thematically, Kitchell assumes “We Will Drink” to be more interested in relatability than depth. In this case, we can have our cake and eat it, too. It is the relatability to the protagonist’s desires that acknowledges our own in our late capitalist generation. We are slapped in the face in the first sentence with our own relationship’s ties to Facebook and Youtube (to our particular, face-to-face contact interchanged with url connectivity). The “You” and “I” thus become archetypal and incredibly traditional in this sense as Tao marks a universal within twenty something socializing. However, it is the baseness of these appetites that deconstruct our own fantasies. Tao critiques the tie between our quest for organic food and an interesting mix of music and its seeming embedness in our notions of romantic life. Our fantasies for the Other, as Tao may be summarized here as stating, revolve around the sad contextual referents we have for such a thing.
One last note: the true polemic concerns the inability for such readers as Kitchell to understand why they should be appreciating these works, let alone have the ability to communicate it. Though Tao’s work has created some heavy dialogue as to its worth in the literary world, it would be difficult to say he isn’t describing our current condition on a variety of levels with a powerful eloquence and daunting voice.
Well my appreciation for craft is inconsistent. Sometimes I read a story and it seems “well-written” and “well-crafted” but for some reason I don’t give a shit about it. I like Cortazar and I think his stories in particular seem impressive craft-wise, although it’s difficult for me, at this moment in my head, to clearly distinguish craft from formal play. I agree that authors commonly learn from other authors and adapt/steal things from other authors. We may not disagree about this particular cluster of things as much as it might seem. I’m just saying I don’t care about post-structuralism or Marxism and I don’t care about Derrida, and I feel like some writers and commenters on this site do care about those things/people. I do care about Cortazar.
i could be more precise, i agree
i have a lot to respond to here, and more above, but what i find problematizing, inherently, about your reading of my reading, is that you mention that lin adequately or even brilliantly describes a certain subcultural zeitgeist without indicating to me why it’s relevant to adequately describe our current condition. it also overlooks the fact that this sort of ennui-soaked mumblecore in textual form is inherently privileged, which is something else that nobody seems to want to address in any form.
i can’t find my comment…
I will read your earlier books. Thanks for pointing out those distinctions.
It’s interesting to me that you mention (or allude to ) Hemingway as an influence, because–at least in the two books of yours that I read–the style felt very similar to his style, particularly his style in “In Our Time.” Almost derivative (sorry, just my opinion), which is why I mentioned Stein before you even showed up here. It’s just such a loud and “of its time” style that, if not updated, can turn-off some readers. I’m really not interested in reading the uber-staccato Modernist style a hundred years later, stripped from its “post-WWI, rise-of-technology, shift-from-agrarian-to industrial-context” in today’s post-modern, technology-saturated world, especially after it’s already been imitated to death (Amy Hempel Ann Beattie, the most minimal of Ray Carver, etc.)
I have to say, though, that Hemingway had more stylistic range than the guy in “In Our Time” (even some of the stories in that book show range, like “Big Two Hearted River,” both parts). The sentences aren’t all staccato and declarative in his work–there are even paragraph-long sentences, like the one in “All The Sun Rises” in the cathedral. Perhaps you will prove me wrong when I get to your earlier books, though.
Yes, I think that what I’d failed to realize while reading the initial post was in fact that distinction between the style and the implementing of that style, which I can see now. And I wasn’t trying to use authorial intent as a crutch for my contribution to the discussion. As aforementioned, I was more or less just defending myself as someone who has written such work before and trying to clarify the heterogeneous nature of what I’ve done so far, thus letting it be known that I can relate to people who are accused of being a stale/lazy/gentrified/shitty author on the basis of one poem or one short story or one style and that it is unfair when that happens. I understand that what you read is what you get, but that is why I always try to make an effort for second chances. I don’t know. I never know what I am saying or what I am trying to say and it would probably be best for me just to shut up.
same, what gives
i was interested
What’s interesting about the Muumuu House style (which, if we’re being honest, is really Tao Lin’s style) is how massively influential it has been. This post refers to it as an “internet-culture based movement,” and it is, which is strange given we are talking about a writing style. Referring to literary fiction as “pop” is almost a contradiction in terms but when speaking of Tao and his style, it’s (amazingly) somewhat accurate.
So, putting aside issues of whether it is as good or meaningful as Robbe-Grillet, I think you have to concede that the Tao Lin style is a bit of phenomenon. Hemingway is actually a fair comparison– not because Tao is “as good” or celebrated as Hemingway, but strictly in the sense that many writers of his generation have adopted, or been influenced by, his unique voice.
That voice is widely copied to the point we can refer to the very general term “internet poetry” and know this means something akin to Tao Lin’s poetry. That’s pretty remarkable and I think it shows that whether or not Tao Lin is a “good” writer, he is definitely an important writer.
I’m not saying we are prohibited from criticizing his work or preferring Robbe-Grillet, but to dismiss the Muumuu House style as merely “twee” or “cute” feels a bit lazy and dishonest.
This is my final response, because it’s obvious we’re talking past each other now. You may have the last word. You write:
“I see intellectualism as potentially leading to a limiting of the
creative mind, not an opening or expanding, which may seem illogical to
you, I don’t know. I don’t understand how appeasing the
intellectually-engaged people of the world with
one’s art is a liberal
move and disregarding something many peers thinks is important would be a
conservative move. Excitement is liberal and tends to provoke scorn
from the fearful.”
I don’t know where to begin, really: “Appeasing the intellectually-engaged people”? What does that mean when we live in an otherwise anti-intellectual society?
Who are all of these people to appease with intellectualism?
If anything, it’s the opposite, and this stripped-down, staccato, flat style has a commercial appeal because it’s not a particularly challenging style to read, esp. for its target audience; many who like the style comment on its “readability,” and how easy it is to read. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the style is marketable, even if the audience is somewhat niche, and ost writers are never profiled by the NYT, The London Review of Books and The Guardian, so guess what? Plenty of people in high-up places are being “appeased” enough to devote page-space to Lin.
I agree we might be talking past each other to some extent, MFBomb. I don’t think I’m being as precise as I could be.
I think the phrase “appeasing the intellectually-engaged people of the world” is not very precise. What I was trying to convey is that there are people in the academic and literature worlds (with overlap between the two) who think a given work of art is not valuable unless it demonstrates awareness of and a “serious” or otherwise notable response to a tradition of ideas both contemporary and non-contemporary that have been codified and argued through books and papers in an academic or otherwise “serious” setting, such as literary journals or intellectual forums online, and I don’t want to consider those people or those ideas when creating or seeing/hearing art. I also, vaguely, would like to encourage and support other writers to not focus on the things/people mentioned but rather to focus on their own emotions and thoughts and style and excitement. I am aware that it is impossible to write without being influenced by what one knows or has read, but I think it is possible for one’s work to not consciously cater to or be heavily informed by academic ideas. I do not think the size or predominance (as it might be abstractly understood) of a cultural body (in this case, what I am calling intellectually-engaged people) determines the possibility or logic or appropriateness of someone (in this case me) referring to how one wishes to operate in relation to said cultural body.
I think there are many reasons why the work of certain purveyors–at the moment, primarily Tao–of what you call “this stripped-down[…]flat style” is and might be popular and covered by the press. I think the relative accessibility of the work referenced combined with its relative popularity and critical acclaim is “threatening” and/or frustrating to some people who write or like less accessible work, and this is logical.
I think the various meanings of “pop” are blended in your discussion, Mike.
There is the idea of popularity, of deliberate popularity, of fitting in successfully (albeit in a way that reshapes its context in a small way) with expectations of a pacifying excitement. That is the “pop” of power ballads, Peanuts, and (I guess) of Marilyn’s oom pah.
There is also the practice of conforming mechanically to “pop” form(s) at some distance – subverting, mocking, interrogating, ironic, appreciative, joyless-smirkingly prolific, and so on. This is the “pop” of lounge lizardry, of Warhol’s “Marilyn”s.
When one uses “pop” to encompass Bieber and Warhol, that is, to me, an equivocation too far.
I haven’t seen muumuuviana – that I ‘liked’ or not so much – that I thought was “pop” in the way Britney Spears and Sugar, Sugar and ballroom Frank and Elvis in Vegas and Transformers N are “pop”. (The former three I ‘like’; the latter two, no–“pop” is, to me, neither pejorative nor approbatory.)
IS THIS A FAKE M. KITCHELL OR IS THE REAL M. KITCHELL PRETENDING NOT TO RECOGNIZE A “REPERTOIRE” THAT INCLUDES VOICES OF INTERLOCUTION
which word or words in “this” confused and angered you, tiny-minded one
While I like what you said about the muumuu style, “anti-intellectualism,” Stephen’s bizarre use of the word “rhetoric,” etc., I just can’t get behind being against metaphors.
It seems like you simultaneously argue that 1) certain styles are better suited to certain subject matters (like the objective style being better for sexually charged or fantastical content vs. eating pasta and tweeting about it), and 2) there is never a subject matter where it would be best to use metaphors. This is confusing to me; maybe I’m not understanding what you’re saying…? Because right now it’s coming across to me like, “all the ‘best’ writing is in an objective style about charged/non-literal subject matter.”Are you basically saying you want the text itself to kind of be one big metaphor, without the language of metaphors? Kind of the way that a metaphor is a simile without using the words “like” or “as,” you want to go one step further and not have the text acknowledge that it’s a metaphor at all… so something like Blake’s copy family is OK as long as it’s described in an objective style vs. saying “It was as if they had to remove copies/ghosts of themselves before moving into the new house”? That’s as close as I can get to understanding what you’re saying, right now.(Is anyone else having this same problem or is it just me…? Maybe it’s just me.)Also, in this very thread, I feel like you gave such a strong argument for the power of metaphors with your example from Metropolis. Visualizing head/heart/hands in that way, to me, brings me a lot closer to the meaning you were getting at than if you had tried to rewrite that in an objective style like, “Emotion should mediate between reason and action” (or something.. you can already see how the statement loses its power/clarity when the metaphor is taken away).
Everyone is comporting themselves so well, I love it.
MFBomb, what do you mean by “honesty”?
An unacknowledged self-contradiction in argument is one kind of objection – does the other person realize the cancellation of argumentative self-contradiction? is there some intellectual creative reason for it? – as, say, there always is with Nietzsche.
But, for me, anyway, if an artist doesn’t ‘believe in’ her or his methods or goals or whatever, how would I know? Let’s say, for example, that Yeats was actually pretty skeptical of 2000-year ‘cycles’ that generated and/or were abstractable from human events; would his appeals to their intelligibility count against his poetic mellifluity and causing of passion and thought?
Tao Lin’s interest in making money – and, if he has them, his interests in mass popularity and many imitators – –what have any of these interests to do with you getting anything from his writing? I mean that, if you don’t like his books, is it because they’re “dishonest” and not because they are, to you, ugly or boring or trite or some combination of values that pertain to your reading (and not your evaluation of the author)?
idk dan
that sounds like a good goal to have as a writer but if people like being social as well as writers then it’s not all bad. the idea of ‘connections’ shouldn’t be entirely spurned; it’s nice to find out places you can send shit to, and if the people running it are cool, then it’s nice to meet/chat with them. there is definitely a downside to making such kinds of connections, for example feeling like you ‘have’ to at least try sending something to somesuch mag or site because you don’t want it to look like you’re blowing them off, but as long as people don’t go overboard with the expectations or (especially) with the “networking for the sake of self-promotion” then things like Facebook With Writers are fun to have
i could write a lot more about the pros & cons of social networking but really the above post had nothing new said in it and neither would a longer one
so here’s something new
imagine a mug that says WORLD’S GREATEST WHEAT THRESHER ACCIDENT VICTIM
nice column
ben laden
“The
great problem with trying to retreat into a life of private dignity and
saying ‘let’s make the best of what we’ve got’ is that the world does
not stand still. The existence of capitalism implies a dynamic of
development which attacks us constantly, subjecting our lives more
directly to money, creating more and
more poverty, more and more inequality, more and more violence. Dignity
is not a private matter, for our lives are so entwined with those of
others that private dignity is impossible. It is precisely the pursuit
of personal dignity that, far from taking us in the opposite direction,
confronts us fully with the urgency of revolution” -John Holloway
I don’t recall speaking for anyone other than myself, deadgod, or claiming that I was an arbiter for others’ tastes–and I don’t understand why you’ve presented me with an either/or dichotomy here, as if a work’s perceived dishonesty or insincerity wouldn’t likely be tied such traits (or others).
oh god this disqus platform is confusing the shit out of me
Are you talking about this one http://htmlgiant.com/word-spaces/pop-a-polemic-on-a-contemporary-language-based-objectivity/#comment-242910658 because I would love if more people replied to that. It got kind of buried.
Maybe you’re talking about a different comment.
@Stephen It seems like you use “i could be more precise” kind of as an out from the argument, like people write back things disagreeing with what you’re saying, and instead of engaging with it you just say “well I wasn’t being precise enough” (in other words, “you didn’t get it”). Likewise with saying “well I don’t like rhetoric/intellectualizing” and all that.
And it seems like that’s kind of the standard defense of the Muumuu style (as, I think, M K. pointed out re: Jordan’s post, where the Muumuu proponents didn’t actually engage in any of the criticism).
It reminds me of the NYT review quote about Richard Yates: “If he falls short, though, he’s maintained enough ironic distance to have an out: Just kidding, see?” There’s always that out.
I really can’t figure out why Tao’s, of all styles, inspires such passionate defense and (alleged) widespread adoption, or as Noah called it, a “phenomenon.” I don’t know the backstory and have been catching up on the whole Muumuu thing (didn’t even recognize it initially)… but I still can’t find the bottom of it. I mean, is it just that Tao was really nice to Stephen/Jordan/etc and so they look up to him and want to copy his style? There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s like they won’t straight up admit it and so instead there’s all these circuitous justifications like Jordan’s post or Noah’s comment to M K. below.
It strikes me as answering “Why do you get high all the time?” with “I don’t believe in states of mind, except sometimes, and I don’t think there should be defenses of any behavior ever except being high except that’s not what I’m doing, and also, nobody should study neuroscience or psychology (that’s intellectualizing rhetoric)” etc etc instead of “It makes me feel better about myself” or “It makes masturbation feel even more terrific” or whatever the genuine answer is.
(I initially picked “being high” as a random example, but when I got to the masturbation line, I realized that’s also what the muumuu writing strikes me as, because writing about your gchats and media consumption without any higher purpose and while seemingly purposefully stripping away all emotion/intimacy is masturbatory, and the manifestos and “scare quotes” and so on are just ways of saying “I masturbate for a higher purpose” so you don’t have to admit “I masturbate because my dick is there” etc)
Robbe-Grillet may not be signifying, but he’s stunningly articulate. People like Tao Lin stay on the surface, as well, but have turned lazy inarticulateness into some sort of style. It’s a pity when writers don’t like words.
stephen, you say (above, where the thread gets t/h/i/n) that sometimes you want to persuade, to convince with demonstration (“prove”), but that other times you want to explain or to present.
I don’t mind dichotomies that aren’t imposed dogmatically; they’re often ‘recommended’ by experience and disclose much of experience mechanically even when reality or one’s experience of it seem to be an indivisibly organic whole.
– but: persuasion is not extricable from explanation, because they are not separate-but-tangled, but rather, implicate each other. Even the most disinterested-seeming presentation ‘persuades’ (or would) of the perspective presenting it.
Mike, in asking you what you mean by “rhetoric”, might have been implying this idea: linguisticality that is intelligible always acts from and for a perspective, regardless of some particular speaker’s commitment to not trying ‘to win’ a conversation.
Eh??
I ask you about what you say about your priorities–nothing to do with you “speaking for anyone [else]” or “arbit[ing] for others’ tastes”. I do not present an ‘either/or dichotomy”; I take you at and in favor of your word.
When you say “it all comes down to honesty”, what do you mean by “honesty”? (How, for example, is Tao Lin’s “honesty” relevant with respect to his art, as opposed to the reactions to his writing that you had/have to the writing?)
It is not a hostile or even provocative question.
Man, I just want to say that Peanuts is so fucking good. Charles Schultz is easily one of my favorite writers of the 20th century.
that makes sense, deadgod. i am not on an anti-rhetoric crusade, personally. i do try to avoid implying that my preferences or biases are somehow better or more correct than other people’s. i want to champion some art and defend some art, and rhetoric is involved, but i’m not interested in being an armchair serious lit critic or engaging in debates over what art is best/great/important/relevant, etc.
I’M SLIM SHADY YES I’M THE REAL SHADY ALL YOU OTHER SHADIES ARE JUST IMITATING
haha pooop
CORRECTION ***I do try to avoid [strongly, overtly] implying that***
yeah, my comment was kind of general. i’ve been really exasperated lately and it’s been a whole build up of wondering how much writing should be a solitary thing vs. a thing that is used to interact and i think that for me personally i don’t write quality anything when i’m forced to constantly write in order to keep in the conversation that seems to be happening with the scene mike talking about in the post. yeah, not a lot new has been said. maybe i haven’t read a lot about this group elsewhere, but i haven’t seen someone address the social networking aspect of that, which for me obviously, seems unnecessary to creating good art. good art is all i want shaun gannon. art that is thoughtful and not just so personal and talky that it seems (to me) to have no real weight to it other than to declare that “i have feelings and i feel them and i don’t know how to feel about that.” i think a poem is a thing that demands a relationship with the poet and too many poems these days seem like one night stands. #smug
i’m not saying that i’m right. i’m just saying i have feelings and they are not always worthy a poem.i love you shaun gannon. i will kill you with a wheat thresher and then buy you a mug off of cafepress.
When you say “it all comes down to honesty”, what do you mean by “honesty”? (How, for example, is Tao Lin’s “honesty” relevant with respect to his art, as opposed to the reactions to his writing that you had/have to the writing?)
_________________
How is his artistic honesty/sincerity relevant to reactions to his work?
Is that a serious question?
It is not a hostile or even provocative question.
__________
I agree. It’s just not very interesting, or worth my time Sorry. Maybe someone else who doesn’t mind spelling out the obvious for you will answer it.
I understand these new trends in literature. groundbreaking…no! art…sure, popular…yeah. emotional, narcissistic, youth. What is it exactly that these teachers at my school possess that’s causing me to fall so deep into debt???? Hopefully, if im lucky…..it will b something transcendent, inspirational, and accessible to more than just the internet lit scene ie muumuu, thought catalog, HRO, ect. Maybe one day I’ll be published by doubleday. It is really neat to watch this grow and although im not directly inside this “circle” of writers i am a part of it thanks to comment sections, self publishing and the power of the blog. “read lots write more.”
concrete pooop = metapop
Nothing is self-evident.
What do you mean by “honesty”?
I’d be tempted to join an anti-rhetoric crusade
it would fail, but it might fail better
a perspective–a “bias”–champions itself no matter what
so I think you – anyone – should champion indefatigably the art you champion
(- but I would make an ultrashitty buddhist)
“I don’t read theory because I’m interested in intellectual bravada, I
read theory because there are a lot of smart people who have spent a lot
of time thinking about things that often end up being applicable in
bringing me closer to my goal of articulating & creating Art As
Experience.”
where can people read your work?
note: when i said ‘the above post’ i meant my own, not yours.
dan the next time i see you im gonna kiss you on both cheeks twice
make sure you hold me to that
here’s one of my favorites available online:
http://www.pankmagazine.com/m-kitchell/
and here i’ll be tacky and just link my cv:
http://topologyoftheimpossible.com/silence/cv.html
also, i should of course qualify that as much as my goal is some sort of text-as-gesamptkunstwerk, i’m not totally there yet
MIKE JONES! (WHO?) MIKE JONES? (WHO?)
sigh. don’t make me change my handle again, you needling prick, you. :D
“sorry to any and all if i sound crass/blunt, but it always strikes me as
surreal how apparently ‘seriously’ their work can be taken.”
I agree with this (re: the muuinternet), but Tao Lin’s novellas are actually pretty good.
Your question seems to be why is it relevant to adequately describe our current condition which is taken to mean Tao’s relevance to this specific generation. (I assume you wouldn’t be critiquing the relevance of writers in general in describing their current condition.)
What privileges any writer to be the prominent figure within their field? There are various factors outside of the literary choices in the author’s texts that affect their reception to an art world public, some in the author’s control, some not. You appear to want answer to “Why Tao? What has he produced more so than someone else?” I don’t think you’ll find a singular or combination of points that will satisfy a questions like that.
Nevertheless, if one were to defend mumblecore as worthy of being privileged, it could be in terms of its ability to resonate to “a certain subcultural zeitgeist” thereby depicting a current epoch as all art has done always (or in other words, being metonymic for the subculture, time period, space in which it was produced).
As to why it’s relevant or necessary for art to do this, that is a larger conversation. As to the particular positions that have popularized mumblecore (i.e. campy films made on mac books, zany vids, exhaustive internet presence, minimal writing style, play on perspective, droning voice, feigned existential nausea, etc), whether or not you consider these indicative of a current condition is the issue. You may pick at these references in regards to other authors having done them before Tao or better than Tao; however, none have been combined to this extent in any other author. Again, it seems to be your unwillingness to accept the whole being more than the sum of its parts.
I would agree that there are political moves that occur, ethically & aesthetically in Lin’s work, but I question whether or not Lin actually has any interest in positing these moves in such a context. It being present & visible makes it a move in itself,yes, but I’m not sure it warrants celebration with these moves are occurring as an unconscious accident, probably just because the moves are “funny” (or i could be completely wrong, of course).
Also, I agree with your thoughts on hermeticism, particularly in this: “I think it is a political role that is inherently problematic and requires very intensive critical engagement to be useful. ” There is a distinct lack of critical engagement on the level of the political– I’ve been meaning to talk to Steve about this, but while systematically/dispersively I think the structure being established is fascinating, I feel like in terms of actual Content there is very little to engage with, which makes me feel like it won’t be long before the structure itself is dismissed due to a lack of sustainability.
I think I am uncomfortable with the idea of cuteness as a politic, but I’m not sure if I could articulate why; I think I also feel like the cuteness itself would really need to be a critically engaged ‘cuteness’ to ever affect anything/one culturally.
But hey! Great comment here.
I think a particular point that is worth making at this point is that, on an entirely subjective level, I don’t think there’s any specific value in privileging art as representation. That is to say, if art is communication, and all that a specific work of art is communicating is a representation of a banal experience, I don’t particularly care, nor do I understand why I should. Tao is not an especially marginalized person, so the fact that he can adequately speak to a generation is of young people that share the exact same socio-economic status as him is an entirely moot point for me. There is nothing of interest for me in that.
I’m not saying mumblecore is privileged as an art form, I’m saying that ethically, in order to be able to revel in some sort of mumblecore context, the artist himself must be exhibiting some sort of privilege. Tao is a heterosexual living in Brooklyn, which is a fairly privileged socio-economic position to be in. If Tao is complaining about being $5000 in debt, maybe he shouldn’t be spending so much money on drugs. Most people are more in debt exclusively from student loans. I am more in debt from a single year of student loans. That is Tao exercising privilege. The point is there is no voice of the Other in Tao’s texts, and if we are suppose to accept the idea that purely representing experience at all is worthy of praise, you need to accept that I don’t give a shit about how bored a privileged straight dude in Brooklyn is. Eeee Eeeee Eee was interesting to me because when the character is bored he talks to bears and goes into the underground bear land, which is not something that I encounter every day. I don’t understand being empathetic to boredom, I don’t understand how it is fulfilling.
You seem to be unwilling to accept the fact that I just basically find “the whole being” bullshit, while I’ve articulated specifically why. Addressing something from the point of totality is not going to change anything, which is why we break something down into its constituent parts to edge closer towards clarity.
I’m not sure why acknowledging the fact that “the Tao Lin style is a bit of a phenomenon” is relevant or interesting. That’s like acknowledging the fact that vegans don’t eat dairy products or that the Tea Party is completely fucking insane.
People can find meaning wherever and however they want to; I don’t want to try to dictate what a person should find meaning in, rather, my interest in this post was more to illustrate and interrogate why I personally can find more “meaning” or “depth” in R.-G. than Lin.
It is interesting to me, the sort of weird dichotomy that seems to exist, and I think you’ve summed it up here (“It’s a pity when writers don’t like words”)
I get what you’re saying and I can’t really argue with your personal preference for Robbe-Grillet. But is that really the point of your post? If so, it seems a bit random. I mean, I personally prefer William Faulkner to Tao Lin but I’m not sure why that alone is noteworthy.
I think you’re soft-selling your message a bit– there is a dismissal of Tao Lin’s work when you suggest his writing is “pop,” “lazy,” “self-indulgent,” “twee,” etc. It’s strange to me that we would have a young, innovative writer of literary fiction who is genuinely inspiring other young writers, and feel the need to dismiss his writing style by way of comparison to Robbe-Grillet. I understand it’s fair to criticize any artist’s work but I feel there is an especially reactionary response to Tao from people who don’t think he fits the definition of what literary fiction ought to be.
I almost feel like Tao is getting the Bukowski treatment from the literati. Despite his popularity and influence, there is a high-minded strain of literary types that don’t want to let him in the club.
which one in particular would you recommend?
This is similar to what Rorty means by ironist.
‘I almost feel like Tao is getting the Bukowski treatment from the literati. Despite his popularity and influence, there is a high-minded strain of literary types that don’t want to let him in the club.’
that’s just the thing, there’s not exactly much evidence for his purported popularity/influence outside of various vanity blogs/websites/social media feeds. the dude’s clearly well-funded, and has a lot of time to promote himself.
re: ‘the club’
there are a lot of people are waiting for him to deliver a novel that transcends the tweeny/hipster movement he’s largely associated with, or at least one that timelessly encapsulates it. it’s just that in a decade or so, all anyone will remember him for is his earlier work, if not his knack for keeping his name out there in literary circles sans an overtly impressive body of work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2fL_teQbUk
I’m reluctant to dismiss the “tweeny/hipster” movement. How many graybeards do you think dismissed Fitzgerald’s writing as flapper nonsense or Kerouac’s writing as beatnik drivel? The “tweeny/hipster” movement that appreciates Tao Lin is actually the group of young writers interested in art and literary fiction (and social media). So, today’s tweeners are tomorrow’s tastemakers and I think a lot of the criticism of Tao that sniffs at his appeal to “hipsters” is going to seem really out of step.
As for the quality of his fiction, I agree that we are still waiting on his “Sun Also Rises” but we have seen tantalizing glimmers that it may not be far off. If I was investing in the stock of a young literary phenom, I think Tao would probably be a smart bet (insert joke about Tao selling shares of his royalties). I mean, how many kids are slaving away in MFA programs around the country? Any of them seem as fascinating as Tao?
Also, I think Tao is significantly underrated as a poet. Some of the techniques he brings to his poetry (like them or not) are genuinely innovative. I try to read a lot of contemporary poetry and Tao is the first poet I read in a really long time that I found exciting and not derivative of academic anthology twaddle.
This post isn’t so much about Tao, more than a response to the following common tactic used to suggest that some critics are “just too old” and will be proven wrong by time. While this is sometimes true, it’s more often not true, or, it’s overstated and/or operates as an overused rhetorical tactic in these discussions:
“How many graybeards do you think dismissed Fitzgerald’s writing as flapper nonsense or Kerouac’s writing as beatnik drivel?”
First of all, though some “graybeards” dismissed Scotty, he had mainstream, national appeal before he turned 30. He was published by Scribner in his 20’s and was writing stories for Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post at Tao’s current age. His biggest downfall was not being “misunderstood by graybeards”–it was the bottle.
As for Kerouac, well, I think time has shown us that Capote was correct. None of his novels (other than one) have really stood the test of time, and that “one” is widely-considered misogynistic and immature by today’s readers and most often a hit with 20-something, nostalgic frat boys.
Definitely have to take issue with your assertion that none of Kerouac’s novels except OTR stood the test of time. Many of them are great but Dharma Bums is actually my favorite. I also think your dismissal of OTR is bizarre but that’s fine. Anyway, if you really dislike Kerouac that much, I’m not surprised you don’t like Tao either.
Fitzgerald’s mainstream success was a product of his era. Is there any novelist under 30 today that we could honestly say has “national appeal?” This is why I find characterizing any literary fiction as “pop” to be borderline comical. I would say Tao has something that is close to the modern day equivalent of Fitzgerald’s popularity at the same stage in his career (although not sure what we prove by comparing the national appeal of artists at various stages of their careers).
And if you are going to side with old literary critics over Tao Lin… well, I’ll take Kerouac over Capote any day of the week.
‘I mean, how many kids are slaving away in MFA programs around the country? Any of them seem as fascinating as Tao?’
you sound like an ad.
amen: ‘When you argue against a very specific kind of thinking and writing, using a word which carries about it a full hundredfold other associations than those you favor, you are being reductive and confusing.’
m., you are rocking this debate.
I’d just like to point out there there’s a difference between a book “standing the test of time” and a book “being your favorite.”
I have a tendency to sort of directly quote Robbe-Grillet’s position “against” metaphor without acknowledging that I’m doing as much, via his very, arguably, defensive essay in For a New Novel. I’m not actually against the idea of metaphor, I just don’t personally like them on a literal level (though they’re still preferred to similes).
I think my “ideal” text is an area where we’ve encountered friction in comment threads before, postitbreakup (specifically in that for my review of Blake’s latest book)– I guess, for me to try to explain it, I’ll actually explain it via analogy: text as representation, as it currently stands most often, is like “riding” a roller coaster in the computer game Roller Coaster Tycoon. The game is giving us the opportunity to, basically, pretend that we are riding a rollercoaster. If we turn off all the lights and put our heads really close to the screen, there’s an illusionistic insistence that we are ‘immersed’ within this representation. This is like, for instance, when we as readers get really ‘sucked in’ to a book. We are reading about an experience, but not having the experience ourselves. It’s possible that we can empathize with the experience, but unfortunately that limits the experience (like, the literal experience that we as human bodies & minds are having) to the experience of empathy. I’d rather encounter a text that was directly parallel to riding the roller coaster itself. I am interested in an experience, mediated via a book, the places me within an experience beyond the experience of empathy. Does that make sense? I’m more interested in non-representational narratives.
This is all interesting. I’ve been pushing the idea of a return to pop literature for a couple years. Now Tao lin, who is anything but a “pop” writer, being too much a pseudo-intellectual, decides to adopt the term.
What is pop about his kind of writing? Seriously?
Pop fiction is distinguished by plot and melodrama, everything today’s current literary intellectuals have rejected.
(To see what genuine pop fiction looks like, you might want to pick up my new ebook, “Ten Pop Stories,” now available as a Nook book at Barnes and Noble, coming soon to Amazon.)
Pop fiction like pop music isn’t intellectual! It’s about having fun– as a reader and a writer.
This is all interesting. I’ve been pushing the idea of a return to pop literature for a couple years. Now Tao lin, who is anything but a “pop” writer, being too much a pseudo-intellectual, decides to adopt the term.
What is pop about his kind of writing? Seriously?
Pop fiction is distinguished by plot and melodrama, everything today’s current literary intellectuals have rejected.
(To see what genuine pop fiction looks like, you might want to pick up my new ebook, “Ten Pop Stories,” now available as a Nook book at Barnes and Noble, coming soon to Amazon.)
Pop fiction like pop music isn’t intellectual! It’s about having fun– as a reader and a writer.
Maybe, but I’m not sure I understand what “standing the test of time” even means other than modern audiences still consider it a “favorite.” I suppose a modern reader could really like a book that has not stood the test of time but then how many modern readers must like it before we can decide it has stood the test of time? Am I the only person that likes Dharma Bums? If so, does that mean it hasn’t stood the test of time?
But you also raise another interesting point in that MFBomb suggests that OTR is dated because modern readers find it immature and misogynistic. This, to me, is a perfect example of the pernicious influence of academic criticism. Sure it’s misogynistic and immature, but so is Tropic of Cancer, most Hemingway, Catcher in the Rye, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, all Bukowski, etc. etc. As if a primary criterion for judging novels was how well they reflect modern progressive values…
dude yes. 100% agree. my local library has the first several of the complete peanuts series being printed now. the first few years are my favorite, but they are all so good.
You: “I also think your dismissal of OTR is bizarre but that’s fine. Anyway,
if you really dislike Kerouac that much, I’m not surprised you don’t
like Tao either. ”
Me: It’s not “bizarre” at all: plenty of critics and readers have commented on the book’s misogyny and JK’s misogynistic tendencies. Google the necessary terms if you don’t believe me.
You: “Fitzgerald’s mainstream success was a product of his era.”
Me: Not really, in terms of the novels (maybe for the short stories, a genre that had commercial appeal back then yet has almost none today).Check the bestseller lists from that era–most of them are filled with genre fiction, not literary fiction. “The Great Gatsby” wasn’t that successful commercially. So, yeah, his mainstream success should be viewed in its proper context, as one coinciding with the kind of work he wrote, similar to a literary writer today who experiences “commercial success” relative to market realities.
Shoplifting from American Apparel is a pretty amazing image of my generation. Richard Yates is a disturbing account of an abusive relationship. Both of them can be read in an afternoon. Definitely grab them at your public library.
I probably should have expanded on my statement that your dismissal of OTR was “bizarre” but I didn’t want to turn this thread into debating the merits of Kerouac. Basically, as I explained to MK below, I think those characteristics aren’t particularly relevant to judging its literary merit and I think the impulse to politicize art by requiring it to sync with contemporary values is, actually, the death of art. So, this view + my general feeling that OTR is one of the shining Great American Novels of the 20th c. led me to consider your dismissal bizarre. If you are going to toss the work of immature misogynists out of the canon, we are going to lose a lot of the brilliant rascals and iconoclasts of world literature.
Re: Fitzgerald’s popularity– I don’t even know where this is going or why it is relevant to anything.
“But you also raise another interesting point in that MFBomb suggests
that OTR is dated because modern readers find it immature
and misogynistic. This, to me, is a perfect example of the pernicious
influence of academic criticism.”
Well, first of all, the writers you mentioned were all better than JK–that’s not even debatable.
Second of all, the misogyny in OTR is over-the-top and plenty of non-academic readers pick up on it ALL THE TIME. In fact, this criticism is probably levied by non-academics way more often than academics because not many academics write about OTR.
“As if a primary criterion for judging novels was how well they reflect modern progressive values…”
As if my pointing out the book’s misogyny is somehow an admission that I only read books for “how well they reflect modern progressive values.” Talk about “bizarre.” If the book were actually good enough in other areas to make-up for this shortcoming, perhaps I’d be a fan; unfortunately, it’s not, though I admit to going through a JK phase in my early 20’s, back when I was some easily impressed know-it-all, parading around campus in my Goodwill Green Army Jacket, smoking unfiltered Camels and reciting Doors lyrics as “poetry.”
It seems like you really dislike Kerouac. I’m not sure this opinion is as widespread as you think but maybe it is. I honestly don’t know. I like his work.
You conflate Tao as not being marginalized with the notion of art as communication in the first paragraph. Is this to state that art as communication is only worth caring about if it comes from a marginal area of discourse?
I don’t see what Tao’s (or any author’s) money/drug issues necessarily have to do with appreciating the text unless you are stating that Tao’s work is unethical (and thus not worth reading?) as to its use of mumblecore from a non-marginal place. You bring up the Other in this passage; however, what you seem to mean is the little other which is the presentation of that which is different from you (i.e. the non-heterosexual, non-Brooklynite) whereas the capital O which I was referencing to in Tao’s work is the absolute negation of self, that which is wholly distinct from us and evades comprehension. In this way, Tao’s insistence on depicting that which is commonplace among this demographic – that which is necessarily not marginal – has the effect of alienating us from ourselves as we have used these referents to constitute an identity (from the food we eat, the music we listen to, the blogs we read, the statuses we post). It is by being cute and appealing to these stereotypical symbols of ourselves that Tao critiques this dialectic of self and other since Hegel. (Or as the child of Lacan’s mirror stage looks in the mirror, it is forced to “come to terms” with the Other of the reflection.) It is when Tao’s protagonists stopped talking to bears that his work began to have merit in relation to its statements on contemporary society and our ability to articulate our own ontological condition.
I don’t know what to take from “Addressing something from the point of totality is not going to change anything,” as that doesn’t really explain your understanding as to why that is the case.
“I didn’t want to turn this thread into debating the merits of Kerouac.
Basically, as I explained to MK below, I think those characteristics
aren’t particularly relevant to judging its literary merit and I think
the impulse to politicize art by requiring it to sync with contemporary
values is, actually, the death of art”
_______________
I think this sort of strawman is utterly ridiculous, and that we just went over this issue with Stephen, as if the “politics” of a work of art aren’t somehow connected to its more “artistic” elements (like plot, style, etc.), as if having brainless, over-sexed women in a novel whose PLOT function is to satisfy men sexually and then be discarded is not somehow reflective of the novel’s lazy artistry, especially when there’s no meaningful purpose behind those character’s woodenness (nothing, say, that’s ironic).
You mentioned Hemingway earlier, but Hemingway’s female characters are much more complex than JK’s, even if he was somewhat a man of his time. In fact, it’s really not even close, so just stop it already.
You don’t like metaphors on a literal level? Is that a joke?
Do you understand what “systematic oppression” even means?
Self-alienation is inherently a bourgeois concept, you still haven’t told me why I should care about a privileged heterosexual from Brooklyn. My point is that realism is boring and that I’m not going to care about it unless it’s showing me something I can’t understand myself.
You didn’t answer any of the issues raised. Turning this thread into a Marxist refusal towards Tao has little to do with your article (unless you want to stretch your notion(s) of pop in relation to the bourgeois that far). Your skirting the point: Tao has more potency than being diluted to merely “a privileged heterosexual from Brooklyn.” My posts have been in reference to the potential readings that may give greater appreciation of his texts as well as similar authors. To say “realism is boring” is an unfortunate scenario I would expect to hear from one of my gen ed students.
seems like your gen ed students are onto something then
I wish we could move away from this idea that criticizing a writer and his/her work is a matter of “liking” or “disliking” the writer.
JK wrote a book, OTR, and put it out into the world, where it still resides. It’s no longer in his hands, dead or alive. It’s a fluid text open to interpretation.
You inserted OTR as an example of a book that was essentially “ahead of its time,” one that somehow “proved” the graybeard haters of JK’s time wrong. I’m telling you that there’s not enough evidence to support this claim, as, say, with “Moby Dick,” or Faulkner’s oeuvre (if not for Sartre and the French picking up America’s slack, Faulkner probably doesn’t win the Nobel).
OTR, however, has almost ALWAYS garnered mixed-reviews.
Thank you. My frustration with these writers goes beyond that of simple vocabulary limitation to their lacking musicality of diction, in a combined sense never seeking poetry. The Muumuus, Michael Kimball, etc. write in and only in 4/4 time, don’t they. Never a change of pace to occasionally skip, gallop, or hesitate, just always Johnny-One-Note plodding along. Compare that to someone like Kundera to illustrate what they are denying. These writers are like Beat Happening in print. The punk rock play-instruments-like-amateurs Calvin-singing-like-a-lonely-frog sound is worth listening to for a bit, but who can live on a diet of that?
Perhaps you wouldn’t think it strange that he’s being dismissed if you considered that outside of a clique he is seen (if at all) as regressive, not innovative.
You know, at the end of the day, I just think you’re going to be wrong if you are betting against Tao Lin. The guy is smart and he’s a good writer and he’s got something people like and if you don’t see that when you read his work you are just not getting it and the problem is you. I don’t know what it matters to be successful or not or if people like your writing or they don’t or if they think it is less meaningful or more meaningful than Robbe-Grillet or if realism sucks or just Tao Lin’s realism sucks or metaphor sucks or literary critics like him or they don’t or whatever. But I think critiques like this one are going to look as laughably wrongheaded as Donald Judd trashing Cy Twombly (disclosure: I only know about this reference from reading Twombly’s obit in the Times recently). Maybe that doesn’t matter, maybe no one cares, MK is entitled to his opinion and so is everyone else. I’m just saying– this piece reads exactly like the confused critical reasoning one would expect as an early response to a challenging writer who provokes and unsettles established ideas about fiction and youth culture.
Lin is a bottom of the card jobber who will do anything get himself over.
Hey, love the Rollercoaster Tycoon analogy, that helps a lot. (Sometimes I feel like I will never get over metaphors simply because I learn almost exclusively from metaphors/examples; it’s like I’m wired for them.) Very helpful, and it’s also actually the first time where I can really see the appeal of the kind of book/”non-representational narratives” you’re talking about. A rollercoaster instead of a simulation, I can dig it.
One thing: you mentioned “sucked in” in the context of the simulation, and I think this is probably my favorite feeling I can ever get from a book (it’s why I can get into Franzen or Stephen King even when I don’t like their sentences–especially King’s–on a “word” level). Do you think that “sucked in” feeling is possible only with representational narratives, or would you say that the non-representational kind makes you even more “sucked in”?
(also, I am reading Blake’s book now*, so my opinion has softened at least a little from that other thread, just by being here for all these conversations, I think)
Thank you, great & helpful reply
*very very very slowly the way I read everything these days
Not that I’m comparing any of these people directly to Tao at all, but I think that substituting other writers reveals the problem with your reasoning:
STEPHANIE MEYER/THE FRANZ/LADY GAGA (etc etc–anyone who’s popular and speaks to a certain population would fit here) is smart and s/he’s a good writer and s/he’s got something people like and if you don’t see that when you read his/her work you are just not getting it and the problem is you….. I’m just saying– this piece reads exactly like the confused critical reasoning one would expect as an early response to a challenging writer/artist who provokes and unsettles established ideas about fiction and youth/yuppie/pop culture.
And maybe you’re actually saying that a negative reaction to anyone who’s popular and picks up a subset of an audience is “confused,” (in which case you could insert a ton of other people where I did above), but I doubt it.
I think you’re actually saying “I already like Tao and so do my friends and anyone who doesn’t is confused.”
saving other people the googling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesamtkunstwerk “total artwork”
Very cool. Does everything you make fall under that, or do you have some pieces that you consider to be like, “canon”?
I don’t think I’ve actually successfully accomplished that yet. It seems remarkably more difficult to do exclusively on the page than it does in some sort of art-environment or even film, but I’m working on it, heh.
I don’t really… know what’s going on here. I’m not confused at all. I’m simply addressing issues that I’ve had with a certain vein of writing that has a presence in the realm of independent literature often read by people who visit HTMLGiant. As far as I know this is literally the first somewhat negatively critical examination of the style that’s been on the site. Tao’s been publishing work for something like 8 years now, and while compared to writers who write for a lifetime that might seem like much, ~5 books + a regular stream of articles and content online is a lot more than many authors publish in their lifetime, so I really don’t think this is any sort of “early response.”
Also, my problem is specifically that Lin is not a challenging writer. I’m not looking for a challenge every time I read something. I don’t want to insist that “challenging” is immediately better than “non-challenging” because I don’t support the idea of a hierarchy, just a rhizome.
just checked. none of his work is available.
I first encountered Tao Lin six years ago. He was then what he is now– a nakedly ambitious opportunist with no character and no scruples, who was busy ingratiating himself with the literary In crowd at the same time he was pretending to be a DIY writer. Everything wrong with the literary scene now.
I’ll ask the question again and see if anyone can answer it: What’s pop about Tao Lin’s writing?
When you think about pop songs, you think about fun, fast pace, and a lot of hooks.
At one time, in the short story’s heyday, from O. Henry through Scott Fitzgerald, there was such a thing as pop fiction. Fitzgerald wrote scores of such stories. Many of them retain their freshness, as popular as they were. These writers went after not the intelligentsia, but the populace.
When you think of pop art, you think of artists like Liechtenstein celebrating pop motifs, including comic melodrama, in a tongue-in-cheek way.
Pop songs and pop art is over-the-top. These are the ideas and motifs I’ve advocated for pop fiction. I’ve been presenting examples of same.
As, for that matter, have others– Tao Lin surely not among them.
Tao is a guy who’s never had an original idea in his life, but won’t hesitate to borrow catch phrases which sound new, even if they have virtually nothing in common with what he’s doing.
Take a look at my examples, in my ebook, and see the stark difference between pop writing and that which is not.
(Some intellectual honesty here please?)
Thank you.
I first encountered Tao Lin six years ago. He was then what he is now– a nakedly ambitious opportunist with no character and no scruples, who was busy ingratiating himself with the literary In crowd at the same time he was pretending to be a DIY writer. Everything wrong with the literary scene now.
I’ll ask the question again and see if anyone can answer it: What’s pop about Tao Lin’s writing?
When you think about pop songs, you think about fun, fast pace, and a lot of hooks.
At one time, in the short story’s heyday, from O. Henry through Scott Fitzgerald, there was such a thing as pop fiction. Fitzgerald wrote scores of such stories. Many of them retain their freshness, as popular as they were. These writers went after not the intelligentsia, but the populace.
When you think of pop art, you think of artists like Liechtenstein celebrating pop motifs, including comic melodrama, in a tongue-in-cheek way.
Pop songs and pop art is over-the-top. These are the ideas and motifs I’ve advocated for pop fiction. I’ve been presenting examples of same.
As, for that matter, have others– Tao Lin surely not among them.
Tao is a guy who’s never had an original idea in his life, but won’t hesitate to borrow catch phrases which sound new, even if they have virtually nothing in common with what he’s doing.
Take a look at my examples, in my ebook, and see the stark difference between pop writing and that which is not.
(Some intellectual honesty here please?)
Thank you.
Aaron you’re loading the words “challenging,” “provokes,” and “unsettles” with bravado and bluster that Lin’s work simply doesn’t merit. Have you considered instead that some might actually find his writing transitory and base? Have you considered that his version of “something people like” might drop off when the next trend comes along or when his core readership actually ages a year or so, reads more, and realizes where he exists in relationship to better writing. Have you considered that you seem to have latched onto him with more of a fervency and effort over these posts than he probably spends on an entire book. I’m sorry but lazy writers might be able to coast on personality for awhile, but they can’t maintain longevity. Lin’s ethos alone betrays his continuance. His writing gives you the impression of literary punk rock but it’s ultimately right in line with the status quo. Sure, Random/Penguin/Harper/etc. may eventually claim him and praise him to the ceiling, but what does that say, really?
hello all,
very much enjoyed this post & all the comments / just wanted to add a few thoughts:
firstly that pop impulses seem broadly at work across poetry
communities & age groups right now. consider what’s going on at wave books: both c.a. conrad’s poems & his online presence, dorothea lasky’s, her lines
“there is an anthem to the ages / there is an anthem of the ages / this is
that anthem / this is that anthem” are an anthem for pop anthems & for our need for them (hope i didn’t just misquote but i
don’t have the book on hand) or compare stylistically matthew rohrer’s first book with his most recent (the flattening of his language) or the changes
in james tate’s poetry over the last decade or so (from highly wrought lyric to a more naked narrative).
secondly this trend seems the inevitable backlash to langpo, academicism, literary maximilism (the new pop is minimalist in some or all respects) & a century of avant-gardisms as well as a legitimate response to the radically shifting landscape of our language & our lives
<3
is now in the oed
consider the rapid, fundamental changes we have undergone
collectively & individually since say 2005 (back when jim behrle & ron
silliman were pioneering lit blogs)…
but aside from the language of the text or
the chat or the post or the comment or the tweet, all of which was & is
bound to intrigue poetic sensibilities & influence them (probably toward minimalism or at least simplicity), consider the
unambiguously sinister: the degradation of discourse that has gradually
occurred over the last decade since bush first opened his mouth, & the onslaught
of palins & bachmans ever since, the stupidification of our language, the fictions presented as facts, the loss of logic both within the language & within our everyday lives (airport security seizes my water but not my lighter / look deeply into the causes of the economic crisis: it is a crisis of meaninglessness)…i
think pop minimalism is also a natural response to this, a varied response, with
various intentions, results & various levels of conscious awareness to any
& all of the above
literature is changing as it has to change to suit this moment
to come back to things: whether you care for his work or
not, tao lin has contributed a great deal in moving us along from point a to
point b / he has moved himself along…does anyone remember his first book of
poems blip soak (i think that was the title & it wasn't that long ago
2002/3)? at the time you might have been tempted to categorize him as a new
generation's language poet. clearly he's something else now.
i am rambling a little sorry
i will get to a point & that point is that pop results
or pop ambitions do not equate with commercial (or self-interested) motivations
(see mozart, jesus, che guevara) although for something to be commercially viable it must be pop (mozart, jesus, che guevara)…
penultimately: i sincerely hope steve roggenbuck can spread
poetry to every person in america
and on a final tangent this is what other kids are using social media for:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/nyregion/30suicide.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
hello all,
very much enjoyed this post & all the comments / just wanted to add a few thoughts:
firstly that pop impulses seem broadly at work across poetry
communities & age groups right now. consider what’s going on at wave books: both c.a. conrad’s poems & his online presence, dorothea lasky’s, her lines
“there is an anthem to the ages / there is an anthem of the ages / this is
that anthem / this is that anthem” are an anthem for pop anthems & for our need for them (hope i didn’t just misquote but i
don’t have the book on hand) or compare stylistically matthew rohrer’s first book with his most recent (the flattening of his language) or the changes
in james tate’s poetry over the last decade or so (from highly wrought lyric to a more naked narrative).
secondly this trend seems the inevitable backlash to langpo, academicism, literary maximilism (the new pop is minimalist in some or all respects) & a century of avant-gardisms as well as a legitimate response to the radically shifting landscape of our language & our lives
<3
is now in the oed
consider the rapid, fundamental changes we have undergone
collectively & individually since say 2005 (back when jim behrle & ron
silliman were pioneering lit blogs)…
but aside from the language of the text or
the chat or the post or the comment or the tweet, all of which was & is
bound to intrigue poetic sensibilities & influence them (probably toward minimalism or at least simplicity), consider the
unambiguously sinister: the degradation of discourse that has gradually
occurred over the last decade since bush first opened his mouth, & the onslaught
of palins & bachmans ever since, the stupidification of our language, the fictions presented as facts, the loss of logic both within the language & within our everyday lives (airport security seizes my water but not my lighter / look deeply into the causes of the economic crisis: it is a crisis of meaninglessness)…i
think pop minimalism is also a natural response to this, a varied response, with
various intentions, results & various levels of conscious awareness to any
& all of the above
literature is changing as it has to change to suit this moment
to come back to things: whether you care for his work or
not, tao lin has contributed a great deal in moving us along from point a to
point b / he has moved himself along…does anyone remember his first book of
poems blip soak (i think that was the title & it wasn't that long ago
2002/3)? at the time you might have been tempted to categorize him as a new
generation's language poet. clearly he's something else now.
i am rambling a little sorry
i will get to a point & that point is that pop results
or pop ambitions do not equate with commercial (or self-interested) motivations
(see mozart, jesus, che guevara) although for something to be commercially viable it must be pop (mozart, jesus, che guevara)…
penultimately: i sincerely hope steve roggenbuck can spread
poetry to every person in america
and on a final tangent this is what other kids are using social media for:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/nyregion/30suicide.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
sorry about the formatting
It seems less that “pop minimalism” is a natural response to “degradation of discourse” and more that it is a collaborator of sorts. Tao Lin, Palin, and “Eighth Grade Bites” each come from their own signifying cultures and have their own unique (likely not overlapping) audiences (hipsters, Tea Partiers, adults who read YA books, respectively), but I would hazard that each is performing the same role for its own audience, that is, a dumbing down, pushing low-brow down even lower, and perfectly meeting basement expectations.
it could be a collaborator & sometimes is / but it’s not the minimalism nor the pop that makes it inherently so / it’s the spirit of the work that determines that collaboration or resistence
I might very well be misunderstanding, but in case not: Life is life and literature is literature. Do you really desire one to perfectly replicate the other? Think seriously about that. Since Robbe-Grillet is key to the discussion, don’t we benefit because “The Erasers” feels in the moment but also has some level of detachment for the author’s artistry to take shape? Don’t we also tend to think most fondly of life experiences in which we are so in-the-moment for the sake of enjoyment that we do not even contemplate and mull over that of the other layers?
by pop here i mean popular appeal… (not pop in the warhol sense, candy music sentimentalism, etc)
The Secret Room and We Will Drink our Coffee and Complete our Novels and Lay in Sunlight and Sit in Darkness
is a gross comparison in more ways than one
“…unsettles established ideas about fiction and youth culture.”
I think you should reread this thread. Though some people expressed a boredom or dislike of Lin’s work specifically, the original post and most of the comments are RE Lin’s style-biters and how they can’t articulate exactly why they cop it beyond generally liking it (and, unspokenly perhaps, being literally able to do it.
I would argue finding and wholly schlurping on to a thing you can easily do is actually one of the most settled aspects of your “youth culture.”
hi mzell:
are you responding to me?
i’m not sure i understand. do you think life is life & literature is literature? i don’t see how they can ever perfectly replicate one another. i also don’t see how they can ever be separated. it is never all just a dream …
& yes i personally think most fondly of those moments in which i have felt completely present while simultaneously aware of the moment without intrusion on the part of that awareness / that is joy
sorry for not understanding…
I was responding to the Kitchell comment about wishing for text to express beyond empathy. Again, unless I’m misunderstanding, I don’t think we can or should desire life and literature to replicate one another. Sure, they overlap a great deal, but I have no desire to push the concentric circles any closer together. In my mind, the blurriness, the off-kilter sense that they (life and literature) have is what makes it all more interesting, the which is which.
By “spirit of the work,” do you mean intention? If so, I can’t imagine that anyone intends to assist with the atrophy of culture and language. Of course, good intentions can be harmful and the audience is complicit or even responsible moreso than the author. Example. The author of “Eight Grade Bites” probably had no more of a goal than to write a fun book for middle school kids. When readers well above that target audience (I’m thinking of someone in particular I know in his 50s who only reads this kind of book.) have an appetite mostly solely this genre, it causes atrophy of thinking skills, vocabulary, etc., no question, in the same way that an adult would be cognitively affected by listening to no music other than Raffi.
Speaking of YA books and indie-minimalist books, they appear to me to be the “upperground” and the underground versions of the same coin and they are ultimately producing the same results in their respective readers. I am not speaking of these results in a complimentary way.
Tao, this is from David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing…”: “What does TV’s institutionalization of hip irony have to do with U.S. fiction? Well, for one thing, American literary fiction tends to be about U.S. culture and the people who inhabit it. Culture-wise, shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive? Can we deny connections between an unprecedentedly powerful consensual medium that suggests no real difference between image and substance, on one hand…Or in contemporary art, that televisual disdain for “hypocritical” retrovalues like originality, depth, and integrity has no truck with those recombinant “appropriation” styles of art and architecture…with the self-conscious catatonia of a platoon of Raymond Carver wannabes?” Wallace originally published this piece in 1993, well before modern SMS influence. Do you have any response to it?
“What does TV’s institutionalization of hip irony have to do with U.S.
fiction? Well, for one thing, American literary fiction tends to be
about U.S. culture and the people who inhabit it.”
after studying those two sentences i feel like the information i derive from them is something like ‘tv has something to do with american fiction because an amount of american fiction is about america and americans’ which i feel like i agree with
i don’t know what he means by ‘institutionalization’ or ‘hip irony’ in that sentence
‘Culture-wise, shall I
spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual
values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz,
self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that
cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive?’
it seems like he is asking if he should spend time ‘pointing out’ to what degree tv influences those things he listed
those words don’t reference anything to me, i feel unwilling to allow those words to refer to large groups of things that contain, to me, specific and unique situations and people
‘Can we deny connections
between an unprecedentedly powerful consensual medium that suggests no
real difference between image and substance, on one hand…Or in
contemporary art, that televisual disdain for “hypocritical” retrovalues
like originality, depth, and integrity has no truck with those
recombinant “appropriation” styles of art and architecture…with the
self-conscious catatonia of a platoon of Raymond Carver wannabes?’
i feel like someone could deny connections if they also had specific definitions for each of those abstractions (originality, depth, substance, etc.)
in response to that i feel like i think ‘yes, we can deny those things’
overall i honestly don’t know what he is conveying to me
i’ve read that essay more than once before this comment
Tao, this is from David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing…”: “What does TV’s institutionalization of hip irony have to do with U.S. fiction? Well, for one thing, American literary fiction tends to be about U.S. culture and the people who inhabit it. Culture-wise, shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive? Can we deny connections between an unprecedentedly powerful consensual medium that suggests no real difference between image and substance, on one hand…Or in contemporary art, that televisual disdain for “hypocritical” retrovalues like originality, depth, and integrity has no truck with those recombinant “appropriation” styles of art and architecture…with the self-conscious catatonia of a platoon of Raymond Carver wannabes?” Wallace originally published this piece this excerpt is from in 1993, well before SMS influence. Do you have a response?
by spirit i very much mean spirit not intention / intentions mean little / intentions often even stand in the way of what i’m talking about / it’s what inside the work that counts … think great poetry that is both minimalist & appeals to a wide audience / think sappho or the tao / simplicity is not necessarily stupidity…but there is much stupidity in excess / simplicity is a necessary remedy for a culture that cannot see past its own nose / a culture that is already a too-muchness
i am not saying that anyone has yet begun to write the tao for our moment but i also think it would be defeatist to presume that something of that nature is beyond our capacity
That’s a bold conditional implication to make, and one I just can’t see as sustainable.
Love Will Keep Us Together was “pop” in the non-Lichtenstein, non-Warhol sense – as you say below, “candy music sentimentalism”. The year it came out, it was the top-selling 45 in America (I think).
At roughly the same time, Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here were selling well – not (nearly) as fast as the Captain and Teneille (sp.?), but, over 30+ years, in numbers of sales and all-in single-song radio plays absolutely to beggar that one C + T hit (they had another that I remember: Muskrat Love (similarly, um, similar)).
I’m not a Floyd fan – badly overrated; the Stones and Zep and Steely Dan are all much better studio and rock-and-roll bands – , so I’m not an art-hipster Pink Floyd booster–
but do you really argue that Pink Floyd – unmistakably “commercially viable” – is “pop”??
by that i meant it must have popular appeal (otherwise who will buy it)…so yes pink floyd in this sense would be pop
but then again i mentioned jesus & mozart…
Sorry, but I just don’t see how simplicity merely for simplicity’s sake is any better than excess. Plus, if you’re still asserting that this perfect simplicity is no more than a response or a remedy, then it’s certainly sunk.
also i want to add that i grew up listening to pink floyd on the radio / never had a really strong opinion about them (i know some people do) but i would probably group them with all the other music on the “hard rock” station
also me personally i obviously don’t care whether or not something is commercially viable (again some people do, people who publish books for example)
at the same time i also am not going to reject something simply for its appeal to a wide audience
my criteria is basically: would reading this, listening to this, watching this, remembering this, thinking of this in the last moment of my life feel worthwhile?
there are a lot of things that you can say yes to & many things that you would probably want to say no to & whether you say yes or no has nothing to do with any of these external factors but everything to do with yr own sensibility & its response to the spirit of a thing
“meat of this post” is a metaphor
Well, for me, the categorical definiendum of “pop” that would account for Mozart and, say, Collins-Genesis remains elusive. Mozart was (and is) popular with a slice of the community whose ‘palate’ had (and has) been educated in receiving the music in a way not the case with music I think of – and usually see referred to as – “pop”. “Pop” is easy pleasure, whether by cynical or by shared-joyful calculation.
Warhol’s work is now fabulously expensive per piece, but was it ever, and is it now, “popular”? I mean, is its “commercial viability” a matter of mass appeal, or of a hysteria at the nexus of art and ‘investment’?
Again (as I said differently to Mike far above), I don’t think Warhol and, say, the Archies are even close to the same “pop” – and using the word equivocally to account for them both because it’s a groovy category is . . . what??
No, see, that’s the thing, I have no interest in literature being a replication of life, I mean that’s kind of entirely my point; I want literature to be an entirely new experience, something that I haven’t already lived through.
[I mean clearly my sort of leaning towards the text-as-gesamptkunstwerk is more of a pure idea at this point, similar to Mallarmé’s Book, his totality (note: I am in no way comparing myself to Mallarmé) clearly at this point it’s still completely a theoretical construct. Also I’m not, like, ONLY interested in books that aim for this yet-unseen thing; I read tons of shit constantly and it’s not like I spend every night freaking out. Basically it’s just an aesthetic position that I’ve taken because it’s specifically what I’m interested in; I would identify it as coming from a fine-arts background in which I just, through looking at things and learning, realized that the ‘total art works’ were what were most appealing to me, and then discovering a push towards this experiential mode in film, and then postulating how that idea could be converted to the page. ]
If we consider the roller coaster analogy again here; you can have the experience of riding a roller coaster without having to establish “riding a roller coaster” as the state in which you spend your entire life in. I guess it’s more of a push to blur the boundaries between literature and life, for them to seep into each other.
please see above as to my positioning of the statement on metaphor in the opening section of this blog post (aka “resistance to metaphor is entirely not the point”)
It seems you don’t know what you’re talking about. The bulk of the arguing in which I was involved was precipitated by me intentionally saying something provocative–“what in the hell do intellectualism and honesty have in common lol.” i have not shied away from any arguments, although my overall goal has been to explain my viewpoint, not to “win” any arguments. my statement of “i could be more precise” was a humble acknowledgment that numerous of my statements would likely have elicited less misinterpretations and misdirections vis-a-vis what i intended (but failed) to convey and where i intended to steer a potential dialogue with my comments.
W/r/t any anti-rhetoric/intellectualizing statements–first of all, i stated above i’m not on an anti-rhetoric crusade, but rather am not interested in strongly implying the relative importance of my opinions and am also not interested in conversations of best/greatest/relevant/important.
As for any anti-intellectualizing statements, as I said, most of this arguing came from a provocation by me. An anti-intellectualism provocation followed by explanations of my positions w/ attendant criticisms and counter-explanations by others of their positions is not what I would describe as me not engaging with criticism. As a sidenote, there is something inherently absurd about my engagement with the criticism you speak of because, so to speak, i am pointing at specific flowers in my garden and they are trying to convince me that my garden is part of the highway and of the importance of the highway (despite me not owning a car (though i do need to get around, so i take the train)).
I passionately defend Tao because I like his work a lot and he has inspired me and he seems nice and exciting to me, whereas his detractors often seem jealous, bitter, and/or ignorant. Also because he is so passionately attacked, much more than any other author I know of, at least on the internet, if not in general.
When I read all this term-paper intellectualizing about something– pop– which isn’t intellectual but instead pure and emotional and instinctive, I’m reminded of a scene in the classic Elvis movie “Jailhouse Rock.”
Elvis Presley of course was one of the early embodiments of American pop culture. His movies became a pop genre unto themselves.
In the flick Elvis (previously seen smashing a guitar) is dragged to a party by his manager. Elvis gets into a discussion with a stuffy prof who, upon hearing he’s a musician, proceeds with a long-winded pseudo-intellectual analysis of contemporary jazz. Elvis stares at her for a moment then drawls, “Lady, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
This was in the early days of rock n’ roll which, like the punk version twenty years after, was a rejection of artistic pretentiousness. (See 70’s Pink Floyd.) It embraced instead the natural and the organic.
Tao Lin is a pure hustler, and in that sense he’s akin to the Colonel Parkers of early rock. But there’s nothing remotely punk or genuine about him, absolutely nothing counter to the status quo. I know this well, as I remember his attacks on what was a rebellious, DIY, punk-style lit group from last decade, the Underground Literary Alliance.
Does anyone here know– or care– what real pop writing looks like?
For some thoughts on this see my blog, American Pop Lit, at
http://www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com
I’m waiting for someone to take apart the stories in my ebook, “Ten Pop Stories”– but that’s not gonna happen, is it?
Thank you for your time.
tao lin may in fact be a hustler yes but then again so was allen ginsberg / will the world ever be rid of hustlers? i doubt it
poor elvis & all the movies they made him do
i will take a look at yr blog
yr blog is too angry for my taste, i’m sorry
“The point is there is no voice of the Other in Tao’s texts, and if we
are suppose to accept the idea that purely representing experience at
all is worthy of praise, you need to accept that I don’t give a shit
about how bored a privileged straight dude in Brooklyn is.” -M. Kitchell “The point is there is no voice of the Other in Tao’s texts, and if we
are suppose to accept the idea that purely representing experience at
all is worthy of praise, you need to accept that I don’t give a shit
about how bored a privileged straight dude in Brooklyn is.” -M. Kitchell “The point is there is no voice of the Other in Tao’s texts, and if we
are suppose to accept the idea that purely representing experience at
all is worthy of praise, you need to accept that I don’t give a shit
about how bored a privileged straight dude in Brooklyn is.” -M. Kitchell “The point is there is no voice of the Other in Tao’s texts, and if we
are suppose to accept the idea that purely representing experience at
all is worthy of praise, you need to accept that I don’t give a shit
about how bored a privileged straight dude in Brooklyn is.” -M. Kitchell “The point is there is no voice of the Other in Tao’s texts, and if we
are suppose to accept the idea that purely representing experience at
all is worthy of praise, you need to accept that I don’t give a shit
about how bored a privileged straight dude in Brooklyn is.” -M. Kitchell “The point is there is no voice of the Other in Tao’s texts, and if we
are suppose to accept the idea that purely representing experience at
all is worthy of praise, you need to accept that I don’t give a shit
about how bored a privileged straight dude in Brooklyn is.” -M. Kitchell “The point is there is no voice of the Other in Tao’s texts, and if we
are suppose to accept the idea that purely representing experience at
all is worthy of praise, you need to accept that I don’t give a shit
about how bored a privileged straight dude in Brooklyn is.” -M. Kitchell “The point is there is no voice of the Other in Tao’s texts, and if we
are suppose to accept the idea that purely representing experience at
all is worthy of praise, you need to accept that I don’t give a shit
about how bored a privileged straight dude in Brooklyn is.” -M. Kitchell “The point is there is no voice of the Other in Tao’s texts, and if we
are suppose to accept the idea that purely representing experience at
all is worthy of praise, you need to accept that I don’t give a shit
about how bored a privileged straight dude in Brooklyn is.” -M. Kitchell “The point is there is no voice of the Other in Tao’s texts, and if we
are suppose to accept the idea that purely representing experience at
all is worthy of praise, you need to accept that I don’t give a shit
about how bored a privileged straight dude in Brooklyn is.” -M. Kitchell “The point is there is no voice of the Other in Tao’s texts, and if we
are suppose to accept the idea that purely representing experience at
all is worthy of praise, you need to accept that I don’t give a shit
about how bored a privileged straight dude in Brooklyn is.” -M. Kitchell
“What’s interesting about the Muumuu House style (which, if we’re being honest, is really Tao Lin’s style) is how massively influential it has been. ”
How are quotes like this real?
A handful of people on a handful of blogs in a very small, inward-focused scene is not “massively influential”. Jesus christ.
Really? My discussions of Asimov, or the American Writer Tournament, are angry?
(Opinions you disagree with aren’t anger.)
*********************
Convoluted thought is everywhere, but there are points about this thread, this discussion, to be made.
A couple are about M. Kitchell himself.
Beneath the self-referential nature of his post, (“I suppose,” “I feel like,” “What I’d like to,” “I am invested,” “I almost feel like,” et.al.) is the underlying mindset. Kitchell and Tao Lin have superficial disagreements but are in fact ideological soulmates.
The incoherence of Kitchell’s post is a reflection of the incoherence of his thought. It’s not his fault. His situation is likely shared by most of the readers of this blog.
Everything is conditional. Kitchell can’t say anything for sure. Anything he says comes with provisos. Sure, he “disagrees” with “Tao” about “language,” but what’s “language,” something having to do with “words,” whatever “words” are. “Tao” is pushing “objectivity,” but as we all know or rather are supposed to know our professors have told us there is no “objectivity,” and can be none. Or rather, there “is” “no” “objectivity,” we can’t really know or ultimately say anything, can we? “Know,” “say,” etc.
Why does Kitchell reference Robbe-Grillet? Why would any American writer reference Robbe-Grillet? R-G and his feckless ideas have nothing to do with the history of American letters, the American character, or the American voice. With the path writers like Kitchell are on or should be on. Robbe-Grillet is taught in the university because his ideas are quirky, and so absurd that for bored profs they’re interesting. Kitchell, like so many eager students, has swallowed him whole.
What can we say about Robbe-Grillet?
Yes, I know we can’t really say– or know– anything about anything, but if hypothetically we lived in an alternate universe where not everything was relative and conditional, where people had sense, then what would we say about a writer like Robbe-Grillet?
(We should put “writer” in quotes in this instance, because scarcely being a “writer” is the R-G appeal, at least for the easily gulled.)
We would say that Robbe-Grillet was a bigger con artist than Tao Lin. Could we say, he was a quack? (“Quack.”)
What was Robbe-Grillet peddling? Do you know?
He was selling the ideology of stupidity.
Can anyone dispute this?
Robbe-Grillet wished the writer to empty the mind and so regress himself as a writer as to become the equivalent of a house cat. Like an observant house cat, to merely notice and record, with no thought or judgement brought into the equation.
The great historical analysis, assessment of human society, and theological musings of a Tolstoy– or even a Frank Norris– aren’t allowed in. That, truly, for Robbe-Grillet, is (“is”) another literary universe.
A universe where literature is relevant and important.
Now for some further comments on Tao Lin himself. Such comments are for you unfamiliar, uncomfortable to read. Just remember that many people in this society– possibly even yourself– are Eloi to whom strong opinion, disagreement, and emotion are new experiences.
A revealing discussion about Tao Lin is the infamous one he had several years ago with Whitney Pastorek. It’s still to be found at Tao’s “hehehehehehehehe” blog, which might be better named “mememememememememe.”
Tao describes how he uses “concrete language,” “without emotion.” Very Robbe-Grillet-like. He means, without opinion, judgement, humanity.
Here are some interesting quotes from Tao:
“I live in the universe
therefore I have no answers, I have no rules, and I don’t know anything.”
“It should be obvious to everyone that no one knows what to do, no one is right, nothing is right or wrong . . . it is impossible for me to know any of these things, etc.”
Like Robbe-Grillet, we see in Tao’s statement a deliberate retreat from sense, discrimination, and thought.
Yet, traditionally, it was the writer who made sense of the world. Who Zola-like thundered down judgment at the inequities and tragic happenings of the world. Who used emotion and words to arouse emotion. “I Accuse!”
Tao’s philosophy might be called Buddhist, but I consider it Nietzschean, “Beyond Good and Evil.” Everything is allowed. If you feel good, do it. A nihilistic viewpoint. Such mindsets were a constant target and theme of Dostoevsky’s best work.
The philosophical foundation of too many contemporary writers is the junk philosophy being drummed into their heads in the academy. Which are the tragic philosophies of the Twentieth Century, of Heiddegger and Nietzsche. It could be argued that this is what postmodernism is about. It’s an overall philosophy that was instinctively embraced by the Twentieth Century’s baddest actors, and led to the most inhuman crimes and wars in all of human history. That fact should give everyone pause.
Or, there’s nothing new under the sun about what Tao Lin stands for and advocates. It is, in fact, the same-old same old. The embrace of madness.
(But, how can we judge?)
What Tao is expressing, what he surely represents, is the god of whim. The god of self. The morality and ethics of the moment.
Isn’t this shown in this other quote from him?
*****************************************
“sometimes my goal is to gain as much power in the lit world as possible, sometimes my goal is to focus on real human beings that i can touch in reality as much as possible, sometimes my goal is to try to be as truthful as possible in the world, sometimes my goal is to try to reduce pain and suffering as much as possible in the world, sometimes my goal is to be as selfish as possible and get as much pleasure as possible for myself, sometimes my goal is to try to not care about identity and to destroy my own, etc., about a thousand more goalsand all these goals have probably occurred before within the same hour, if even just ‘entertained’ for a millisecond”
*****************************
I’m just asking.
By the way, if you’re looking for writing of clarity and sanity, my “Ten Pop Stories” is now available at Amazon’s Kindle Store for a ridiculously low price.
No, it’s not the answer. It’s simply a tentaive first step. More sanity will follow.
Thank you.
Dude, quit flogging your book. Hilarious that you are accusing Tao of being a “pure hustler” when you are on the HTMLGiant comment section nakedly pushing your book like Tony Robbins or something.
And BTW, did we just reaffirm Godwin’s Law? I think there is a Tao/Hitler comparison buried in your comment.
Nihilism specifically sets out to destroy (annihilate) aggressively and violently without emotion and although destroying convention is on the agenda here (please do) the approach is more passively malicious and done from a disenfranchised and ego-erasing viewpoint/posture. There is a wager and more reliance on reaction than action.
Your anecdote about Elvis exposes that, yes, you don’t know what anyone is talking about. “Pop which isn’t intellectual” only notes the origination and/or intentionality of that which is created. As to its interpretation (which, regardless of my disagreements with Kitchell, we are in agreement), hermeneutic work involves a dialectic with both the text and the reader that is less narrowly defined than assuming the authorial intent to be supreme.
You hate monger academia and theory (“term-paper intellectuallizing” and “are supposed to know because our professors have told us”) and yet later consider Tao’s relation to late 19th and 20th century Continental philosophy. And while contradicting yourself, you assume a causal relation between postmodernism and “the most inhuman crimes and wars in all of human history.” Furthermore, you attack Kitchell’s reference to Robbe-Grillet on the grounds of it not being related to American identity/works. So by being hypocritical, rantish, anti-intellectualizing, and tangential, you’ve fully embodied the Glenn Beck of the literati. Keep up the Ayn Rand references on your blog and maybe some tea baggers will buy your pop.
not everyone who is influenced by Tao Lin tries to imitate Tao Lin. I think there might be a lot of writers influenced by him in more subtle ways, maybe.
if you say “like who?” I’m going to have to admit that I don’t know for certain, but I just think it’s possible.
Random-thought-nugget-after-reading-thread:
Why are defenses of Tao more interesting than his work, at least the work I’ve read, the work that hits the same declarative, deadpan note repeatedly and tastes like Literary Slim Fast?If Tao’s stunted, tin ear style were half as interesting as some of the defenses of his work–even if I happen to disagree with many of them–I’d be more willing to give him a chance.
But all the intellectualizing in the world can’t hide poor, derivative, lazy style, because style is the final verdict.
Say what?
Lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Criticizing the academy isn’t “hate monger”ing it.
I’m anti-intellectualizing, sure. But I’m for sense and intelligence. As I’ve pointed out, the standards of the academy of late have embraced nonsense and anti-intelligence.
It’s a documented fact that many of the creators of postmodernism were either card-carrying Nazis (Heiddegger) or collaborationists (Paul DeMan). It’s also impossible to read Nietzsche without seeing some stark parallels to “Triumph of the Will” and such. I assume nothing about postmodernism. The links are there in black and white.
I was using the example to analyze the thinking of Tao Lin, whose own words speak
for themselves. I wasn’t discussing there the idea of pop per se. I know that Tao isn’t beyond appropriating any idea, without crediting the source, if it serves his own end.
I can’t comment on Glenn Beck, as I’ve never watched his television show. From what I’ve heard about him, he’s yet one more con artist himself. I guess he makes an easy label for you to use. Is that all you can come up with? Go to it.
Re Ayn Rand. She espoused a philosophy of selfishness. The lone artist etc. I understand the appeal, though I strongly disagree with much of it. My entire history speaks against her mindset. The ULA espoused a cooperative mode of operating.
What I won’t do, however, is compromise my integrity to the extent of insisting she wasn’t a significant American novelist. For me, truth is the highest value.
The difference between Ayn Rand and today’s nonsensical postmodernists is that she was living, more or less, in the real world. She knew that you have to know up from down in order to build a house. In Tao Lin’s philosophy, in his own words, one can’t know anything. He’s got the egoistic will part of Ayn Rand down pat but has thrown out the reality (“A is A”) part.
Dude, I’m a hustler but I’m not a pure hustler.
Those who’ve seen my appearances on this blog before know that. in addition to adding intelligent comments, I’ve promoted my American Pop Lit blog. Tao has decided to adopt the “pop” moniker. I’ve come on this thread now to point out that Tao isn’t a pop writer. I offer my ebook as an example of real pop writing. Get the book and judge for yourself.
p.s. Broah’s post shows the way he’s bought the Right/Left binary way of thought which the mass media– and the educational system– pushes everyone toward.
Things are a little more complicated.
For instance, in the Cold War context of the time, Robbe-Grillet’s ideas were reactionary. They were anti-populist and anti-activist. They were a retreat from involvement in the world. In this sense they were in line with the attitude espoused by William Styron in the Paris Review when he came out against “axe-grinders.” In 1950’s Europe the Paris Review and Encounter magazine, both backed by CIA money, were promoting a nonpopulist style of literature as an alternative to what might be called anything smacking of social realism or socially active literature. The same battle was happening within American literature, of course.
This isn’t to say Robbe-Grillet was on the “Right.” But– our artistic work is the product of our thought, the foundation of the underlying belief system. The progress of a culture and its art can be tied to the underlying belief system. Is it an accident that the Enlightenment created the greatest works of art and architecture the world has ever seen?
ideas matter.
Many of the ideas being pushed today, in places like the academy, are an intellectual and artistic dead end. You limit yourselves as writers if you fail to recognize this.
You repeatedly are vague about the term postmodernism in your posts. You misrepresent the history of the term and its philosophical ties by relating its creation to Heidegger (one “d”) and DeMan. Whereas you could point to Heidegger’s later works in relation to destruktion as having ties with what many of the French writers would later popularize, it is inaccurate to call him a “creator.” Also, Paul DeMan is a stretch as his works are overwhelmed by the popularity of Derrida (who aligns the two references and seems to be one of the main figureheads you won’t note). However, mentioning Derrida who wrote several texts on the Jewish plight (and who is much more appropriately noted as one of the “creators” of postmodernism) would not allow you to make your skewed point as to the evils of the movement. Furthermore, Heidegger’s biography notes that as he was writing for the Nazi party, he quickly conceded his role when he began to realize their unethical intentions were in stark contrast to his philosophy of “Being-alongside-others with care.” If truth is the highest value, I suggest you read more.
Even if your argument was valid (both in the sense that these two could even be considered in the top ten main fore thinkers of postmodernism and that their Nazi ties were so tightly knit), it still assumes that the work is less valuable as its originators have unethical ties. This is your greatest fallacy aside from your ignorance of these topics as you assume that a work is less worth consideration if its ideological system has unethical practices.
Your traditionalist ties to the superiority of the Englightenment and supposedly greater American writers misinform your views on what postmodernism means/can refer to. You want to discredit this supposed academy (which you still haven’t defined) for its over-intellectualizing yet are unable to draw a distinction as to where your own ignorance should end and education should begin. Please articulate just how knowledgeable us as readers should be before we begin to stare to closely into Nietzsche’s darkness.
real pop, heh
Here’s a definition of sorts about what is and always was a jumble of ideas, from historian Eric Hobsbawm from his book The Age of Extremes:
“All ‘postmodernisms’ had in common an essential scepticism about the existence of an objective reality, and/or the possibility of arriving at an agreed understanding of it by rational means. All tended to a radical relativism. All, therefore, challenged the essence of a world that rested on the opposite assumptions, namely the world transformed by science and the technology based upon it, and the ideology of progress which reflected it.”
Both Kitchell in his original post, and Tao Lin in the quotes I posted of his, dismiss or even mock the notion of objectivity. In this sense, they’re postmodernists in the broad sense that Hobsbawm uses the word.
To further push Hobsbawm’s point: It’s one thing to dismiss objective reality in parlor-game philosophizing (“hermeneutics”) akin to debating the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin. I kind of doubt that you or Kitchell or Tao dismiss objectivity when out in the real world. I’m fairly certain you don’t often cross against a red (“red”) light into the middle of traffic, into what may-or-may-not be real automobiles. You don’t walk UP the stairs when you wish to go DOWN to the street, or put your shoes on your head instead of your feet. Why, then, do you dismiss objectivity when it comes to literature and writing?
As for the supposed superiority of the Enlightenment, Hobsbawm’s massive work allows me to attempt to further connect the dots about a few of the other things I said, which I admit may seem like a stretch.
In a long section about the past century’s endless nihilistic wars, Hobsbawm stresses that the Allies, both the Anglo-American liberal democracies on one hand, and the Soviets on the other, were united by what he calls “the shared values and aspirations of the Enlightenment.” Both so-different parties saw themselves as products of the Age of Reason, heirs to that legacy. They united against a society which plunged itself into pure madness, whose leaders embraced UNreason and scorned the Enlightenment in favor of notions of blood, irrationality, and will; ideas which can be found in Nietzsche again and again. Even the uber-Conservative himself, Winston Churchill, was alarmed enough by what he expressly viewed as a unique threat– a retreat from the values of civilization into barbarism.
How does this apply to literature?
For most of the history of American literature there was a similar consensus between Left and Right about what literature was, what made literature great, the “great American novel” and so forth. And so we see that two great American novels, The Octopus by Norris and Atlas Shrugged by Rand, share aesthetic assumptions and values while coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Neither author believes that the writer can know nothing about this world. Instead they seek to express very large themes embracing all of America, using interwoven narrative threads that lay themselves out like a chess game on a chess board, exemplars of intelligence.
You throw this away for– what? The mentality of a housecat?
As I’ve said, it leads not only to jargon-filled writing, it’s an artistic dead end.
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On one point Tao Lin is right– that’s in seeing “pop” as an aesthetic path, a way to revive the literary art. But to take that path writers will need to knock hermeneutic nonsense out of their heads, to be able to speak, as writers once spoke, with clarity, intelligence, and sense.
Your understanding of postmodernism follows from, by your own post, a secondary source. The only philosopher you’ve noted to have actually read is Neitzsche which you erroneously assume is a postmodernist (which even considering someone a proto-postmodernism seems fallible if they were before the linguistic turn). Any comments regarding actually discussing postmodernism and its relation to hermeneutics (a field of study) is deemed as parlor tricks. How an entire field of study with numerous, divergent opinions can be a parlor trick or nonsense is anybody’s guess. Please inform yourself of the topics you want to rave about.
Hermeneutics is not an ‘anti-objectivity’, but rather, takes seriously subjectivity and intersubjectivity as modes of or paths to – or constitutive of – “truth”.
Gadamer takes up the philosophical conversation of Aristotle, Hegel, and the rest of the tradition of philosophical investigation that’s before him, and does so with a seriousness not a bit less humane – and readable – for its intellectual strength and meticulous scholarship.
Anyone interested in a presentation of actual relations between hermeneutical perspectives and postmodern ones would be well-advised to read the Gadamer/Derrida book and see first-hand a vivid example of the contrasts between these diverse philosophical approaches.
But Heidegger makes little sense even to philosophy professors! There’s strong debate taking place about Heidegger within the academy about what he was talking about, and how much he was or wasn’t a Nazi. The prof at
http://www.n4bz.org/gsr10/gsr1004.htm
for instance argues that Heidegger was a Nazi through and through.
Nearly all sources present Martin Heidegger as the father of postmodernism.
These same sources give Nietzsche as a major influence on Heidegger’s ideas, if not the chief influence.
Eric Hobsbawm, from whom I took my definition, is a writer of rare clarity and intelligence. NO ONE has written with more thoroughness about Twentieth Century thought than he has, as you’d understand if you read his Age of Extremes.
The world and what we make of the world is a reflection of our thought.
Clarity of writing is a reflection of clarity of thought. It’s that very clarity which is missing from too many writers now– and it was certainly missing from the work of Martin Heidegger, likely the past century’s #1 intellectual con-artist. He even conned his way out of any punishment after the end of the Second World War. The guy could rationalize anything. He was the ultimate bullshit artist– puts others of the breed like Robbe-Grillet and Tao Lin to shame.
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