1/12/2024 0 Comments Tao lin writer![]() ![]() “I am going to kill everyone here,” said the drunk man. In the police holding cell, by contrast, Lin introduces genuine ‘characters’ (“‘I don’t hold in farts,’ said a bony Hispanic lying on his stomach”), who invariably speak more fictionally (in a sense, more truthfully, for the purposes of a work of fiction): When Sam is with his friends, who are as languid and ‘alienated’ as he, the dialogue is pertinent because it’s so cutely banal (“I mean, I feel okay, or something”). Sam’s online chats (which seem a timely acknowledgement of how, these days, so many of us get to “know” others – via social networking sites or blogs like this one – without ever meeting them) are presented with no more or less significance than his arrest for shoplifting from American Apparel. It just went away after a while.” It’s the lack of disclosure which packs a – bit of a – punch.Įverything here is dealt with in the same manner, almost. “But there was nothing I could do with the emotion really. “I felt emotional today thinking about the past, like a year and a half ago, at Sheila’s house,” he tells a friend. I think about that the same time it’s happening.” We only occasionally find out how Sam is feeling. ![]() ![]() “If I’m having a shitty time with Sheila’s mom I think about writing it in my novel later. (The lack of question marks is key, I think, to why I find this funny.) We are in a world where everything is simultaneously uninflected and endlessly reflected upon, which is not surprising given that Sam is a writer very like Tao Lin. “I’m going to watch cartoon porn,” said Luis. The book continues in this affectless style, which becomes strangely funny when Sam engages in long Gmail chats with his friend Luis. He put things on eBay then tried to guess the password to Sheila’s email account, not thinking he would be successful, and not being successful. He showered and put on his clothes and opened the Microsoft Word file of his poetry. He lay on his bed and stared at the computer screen. Lin’s opening shares Ellis’s knowingly blank, mesmerising poetry (“Bruce calls, stoned and sunburned, from Los Angeles and tells me that he’s sorry”) – but without vampires. Shoplifting in its opening, reminded me of the first lines of the first story in Bret Easton Ellis’s The Informers, ‘Bruce Calls from Mulholland’. More than that, the importance of the tiny details also matches the content of the book. Depending on viewpoint, it is stupid, or funny, or – just possibly – a clever reflection on the replication of everything online: the copy-and-pastes, the clicking links, the lack of original content (nobody, after all, is going to be typing that URL in afresh). Lin is a self-made phenomenon, seemingly as interested in presentation of himself as in his work, perhaps as keen on ‘being a writer’ as in being a writer: he sold shares in his forthcoming second novel (to be called Richard Yates), and reading his irony-laden interviews, it’s easy to see why various publications have seen in him little but “vacuous posturing” or have considered him “the single most irritating person we’ve ever had to deal with.” Still, the publication of his new novella Shoplifting from American Apparel in Melville House’s Contemporary Art of the Novella series, meant the time to read him was finally here.Ī way into Shoplifting from American Apparel might be found in Lin’s blog. So, no, I did not rape and steal from her.Tao Lin is a writer I’ve been meaning to read since seeing praise for his novel Eeeee Eee Eeee. No, that is not statutory rape, let alone rape. Lin dismissed Kennedy's plagiarism charges, saying “I, and my publisher, had made sure she was okay with it, and that it was fictionalized sufficiently." BuzzFeed also republished a statement Lin made on his own Facebook page where he claims he "had consensual sex with Ellen in her parents’ house in Pennsylvania in her parents’ bed, as she tweeted, when I was 22 and she was 16. Kennedy says that, in response, Lin threatened to sue Kennedy "for character defamation" this morning and that Lin "wants me to make it clear that it was statutory rape so please address it as such if you feel the need to write." However, Lin told BuzzFeed that the age of consent in Pennsylvania, where Kennedy lived, is 16, and that it was therefore not statutory rape. ![]() The tweets circulated on Tumblr and eventually caught the attention of Ryan, who wrote about them on Jezebel. ![]()
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