Tao Lin is the living embodiment of the smug, detached Gen-X ethos.
I'd venture to guess he has never felt a single sincere conviction about anything since childhood. He exist as a polyp upon the colon of culture, satiating themselves on the perceived failures of others (i.e. "The Man") while adding nothing new to the discourse aside from ironic complaint.
He's an insecure, lost, rapidly aging burnout who silently believes he could do a better job of making art than the professionals in the industry. Yet he lacks the ambition and ability to actually enter into the academia that he is so obviously obsessed with. He chooses instead to fuck around and make "new age" tweet collections well into middle age.
He is an awful, awful person. I've met thousands just like him, and the last thing we need is for him to gain any attention for his navel gazing.
Please, /lit/, do not aspire to become anything like him. His is a lonely road leading to depression and a life devoid of real purpose.
I hope he disappears and his disaffected followers stop subsidizing his lifestyle. Perhaps that would force him to do something productive with himself.
>>7452462
and he is an autistic chinaman too.
>>7452462
You're completely wrong, Tao Lin is new sincerity.
>old as fuck pasta
>redditors eat it up
It's time lads.
You're thinking David Foster Wallace, maybe.
Tao Lin is not Gen-X. My dad is Gen-X. Tao Lin is Gen Y, on the older end of what people would call a "millennial." He's new sincere, eschewing irony and postmodernity such that he hardly even uses adjectives. Read The Sun Also Rises followed by Taipei to see how he's pretty much exactly re-modernism aka new sincerity.
>>7452462
So who is he? I know Yao Ming is a basketball player. :^)
I'm going to be messy and make a lot of assumptions but consider the following.
why do people think he's some 'generation definer' or like a Bret Ellis or David Wallace type? He has the fame on the internet (thanks to his self-promotion) of these big idea writers but really he's just an artist who also, primarily, writes fiction. I really don't think he considers himself a 'writer,' maybe a 'novelist.' I think the only reason you hate him is because you believe he is trying to 'define a generation' when really he is making sense of his experience through writing, much like his predecessors such as Carver, Lydia Davis, Pessoa.
Since the authors you usually see in media, or around here, like DFW/Pynchon/BEE, write 'system novels,' you probably expected this writer you've seen so much of to write a novel about 'the way we live now' when really his novels have more to do with relationships, isolation, desiderium, self-improvement, and memory.
I bet that is where so much of the hate comes from. People who see difficulty or abstraction as the main characteristics of literature. Have you seen those bookshelf threads? It's either type a) 'serious fiction' the type of person who has two bookshelves full of Faulkner and Nabokov or whatever, who considers himself a writer rather than a collector and reads for the 'difficulty' or something. or type b) guy who got bored of /v/ and read Lord of the rings or GoT or The Martian, slowly transitioning into literature through the more fantastical literary fiction, or ironic books like catch 22 or Lolita or Pynchon, or difficult books you have to 'defeat' like a video game.
>>7452462
>my name is OP and I can read Tao Lin's mind: the post
Bait harder next time, OP. You can't control art as a whole. All you can control is what you contribute.
Maybe your contribution is meant to be a cynical musical about Tao Lin? I'd watch it for novelty's sake, but wouldn't give you any money because you're a shitlord.
>>7452553
uhh those are some big names you're comparing to this guy and i dont think he exactly fits the shoe
>>7452580
let's be honest, everyone who posts in bookshelf threads is a complete wanker and self-wanker and group-wanker who will never produce a single object of literary merit
