Richard Yates and 'Richard Yates'
Richard Yates (the man)
Richard Yates almost rhymes with WB Yeats and John Keats. This marks him into the fold of serious literature. Without any conscious decision, reviewers may make this automatic association. His name rhymes with famous fictional serial killer Norman Bates, but when one thinks of an author, one thinks of an author. Yeats was a symbolist, but seemed to be conservative in his style at heart. Keats was a qualified apothecary who was more interested in writing poems than treating diseases or looking after patients at all. Tao Lin has no such luck with his binomial. His name sounds unfamiliar and foreign, and will mark his work out as being gimmicky or different in some way. I don’t even know how to pronounce Tao Lin. My ex-housemate would emphasise that I should pronounce Tao like ‘Dao’, but I’m pretty sure that no-one else would do that. In a time when comedian David Mitchell is producing videos worrying about the correct pronunciation of valet, I feel like I should find this out. All information is at our fingertips in this digital age. Once of the best strategies might be to look on Youtube for a video where he is introduced. I am relatively sure the name is pronounced like ‘Tao’ not ‘Dao’, though.
If anything, the name Tao Lin makes me think more of ‘Towelie’, an episode in the TV programme ‘South Park’. This character is an invention that the US military invested a lot of research into, a towel which dries itself. However, at a critical juncture, Towelie disappeared and could not be found. It turned out that he had simply wandered off and become intoxicated. After all the investment that had been put into him, he simply could not function in terms of doing anything useful. This may or may not be a deep fable about our education system producing too many arts graduates and not enough science graduates. Science graduates seem to be more generally useful to the world in general. If Tao Lin had studied chemistry instead of English during his years at New York University, maybe the world would now have a better soap. I am generally skeptical about new college courses which aim to make people creative, as if that is something that can be taught. I am not sure that many of the best new writers of the future will graduate from creative writing courses, just as I am not convinced that the best new electronic music of the future will be made by people graduating from music production courses. Learning about writing from writers in such an introspective way may simply propagate the status quo and insulate literature from future progress. There is also the potential effect that forcing students to do something that they previously enjoyed could take all the fun out of it, and they could lose the love. Once artists lose the love of their craft, they will not be able to produce to such an enjoyable level. It seems unfashionable to consider the potential harms of higher education alongside the potential benefits.
Yates is a reasonably popular surname. Richard is a reasonably popular forename. It does not seem unfeasible that, in the future, many more people will be born with the name Richard Yates, with or without a middle-name. There is nothing intrinsically bad or embarrassing about the name Richard Yates. However, it may cause a crisis in identity or formation. It is normal to maintain a rich fantasy world. It is not normal to not feel like you do not own your own identity. If my surname was Yates, I would not like to name a son Richard, although this would not as bad as naming him after someone more famous and calling him Michael Jackson Yates or something like that. In the UK, there is also some association with Yates Wine Lodge, a popular chain of places where people go to drink alcohol and socialize. Richard Yates still sounds like a solid, dependable name. Richard Yates, I would have presumed, would usually refer to the author. However, a Wikipedia search of ‘Richard Yates’ refers the searcher to a choice of results. These are an English comic actor from the 18th century, the novelist, the former governor of Illinois, another former governor of Illinois and a Welsh footballer. By footballer, I assume the Wikipedia community is referring to someone who played association football, rather than American football, or ‘hand egg’, the sport which most people in North America refer to as football although there is little foot contact, and the ball isn’t very ball-like. This is because Wales has a great rugby tradition, and it is strange to imagine someone from there becoming an American footballer. It is similar to imagining an American becoming the world’s best cricketer - there’s no reason why someone from there could not become great at cricket, they would just never encounter it in the first place. I cannot imagine ‘Tao Lin’ referring to anything but the cult author. Maybe one of his fans will write a novel, or more likely novella, called this. It is a shame that Richard Yates is dead so that he cannot write a book called ‘Tao Lin’. Maybe someone should edit a collection of Richard Yates’ stories and call it ‘Tao Lin’. Maybe one of Tao Lin’s fans should legally change their name to Richard Yates and write a book called ‘Tao Lin’. Using ‘Richard Yates’ as a pseudonym seems like half an effort, and may be legally dubious. All of the above seem quite unlikely, there is more chance of an obscure indie band or bedroom chillwave project naming a song ‘Tao Lin’ in order to get linked to by the man and gain blog love. The song would have lyrics, but they would have nothing to do with him. Counter-intuitively, that may well be more of a tribute than referencing him or using his prose.
Richard Yates (the website)
Tao set up a website for the novel ‘Richard Yates’ at richardyates.info, there doesn’t really seem to be much point to this. Have always considered ‘event’, or temporary websites a waste of time. I suppose back in the bad old days before Google, people wanting to find information on a topic would have to use a search engine such as AltaVista or Yahoo. These search engines were terrible, so it was difficult to use them to find websites that were required. What is the World Wide Web for? At this stage it was a lot more top-down than it would become in the future, before the emergence of more social phenomena such as Youtube and Facebook. There were message boards, and bulletins, and things like that, but they were almost entirely the preserve of a select group of WEIRD people. This is not me shouting the word, ‘weird’, this is an acronym that has been invented, probably by psychologists, for Western, Educated, Industrialized and Rich. I do not think that the ‘D’ stands for anything; it is simply there for convenience. ‘Weird’ is a word with strong negative connotations, it would not be culturally acceptable to insult other groups of people in this way. It is fine to insult ‘WEIRD’ people though, as they are in a position of power within society. People looking for information would type a website address into the address box and they would go to that site. At the height of the dotcom boom, popular website addresses sold for millions of dollars. This was before you could simply type what you wanted into the textbox at the top of Google Chrome, and it would find relevant sites or information for you. Google decimated the price of website address, to the chagrin of cyber-squatters everywhere. The modern day equivalent would probably be something like hogging a Twitter username of a celebrity and impersonating that celebrity. I wish that I had opened Google and Twitter accounts earlier so that I could have had better usernames. By better, I mean more succinct. I am glad that I was more an early adopter – albeit not that early – to Tumblr so I have a shorter site address.
The website itself seems well designed for an event site, and is admirably restrained. This may be a metaphor for Tao Lin’s style of writing. It is quite sparse, but all the essential information is there. The comment-inspiring front cover of ‘Richard Yates’ is present, along with a link to a Google search. There are various links for people more involved in the industry with regards to media and rights, as well as information on how to contact Tao directly. There is a selected chronology of Tao’s coverage in different forms of media, including radio, with links to some of these. The links are to the most recent coverage, it seems like Tao did not feel that older information was so relevant, or finding it was simply a waste of his time. There are also the dates for his book tour as they stand, not fully conceived. A book tour sounds like something quite rock ’n’ roll. I would like it if authors were more like destructive youth icons. One day society may change so this is the case. Kathy Reichs will refuse to read any text from her new novel until someone finds her two bottles of Stolichnaya vodka chilled exactly to two degrees below room temperature, a bowl of M&Ms with only the yellow ones in and repaints her dressing room all purple. Mothers will be horrified when they catch their children reading Kazuo Ishiguro because of terrible behaviour falling intoxicated in and out of exclusive nightclubs. In France, philosophers are said to be treated like rock stars. There were mass outpourings of grief when Jacques Derrida died; when he had given public speakings, thousands of people would turn up. In other countries you would probably need a bedroom producer to sample him talking and set it to a repetitive beat in order to have the same effect.
‘Richard Yates’ (the book)
When I read that one of the three contests was to write about Richard Yates, I genuinely could not remember whether the contest was about Richard Yates, or ‘Richard Yates’. In my usual style of writing, or most people’s style of writing, it would be reasonably obvious which of these ‘Richard Yateses’ referred to a book, and which referred to a person. However, due to Tao Lin’s style of using apostrophes more than other authors do, the issue becomes more ambiguous. This may ironically be a case of the author losing more of the control of his narrative by using a device attempting to gain more control. Tao wrote something like that he sometimes puts words and phrases in apostrophes because they are probably what he is trying to get across, but maybe not or he would have preferred to have communicated in different words.
I wonder why ‘Richard Yates’ was meant to come out before ‘Shoplifting From American Apparel’. Feel like maybe because ‘Richard Yates’ is a first novel, many people will not consider any other work to have any real value up to the standard of a novel, or will at least not consider any work from an author to be up to any real standard until a real novel has been published. Therefore it is imperative to publish or perish. Alternatively, publishers may feel like it is good for Tao to publish shorter works to let them off his shoulders, let off some steam, benefit his mental heatlh, or not seem like a let-down after his debut novel is published. One of the advantages of novellas is that they can read reasonably quickly compared to true novels. This is an advantage in that more people have read them compared to novels maybe, and that people who just started to read them and then get bored have read a greater proportion of the book and therefore have more invested in them. They are more difficult for social networking fiends to put on their favourite book lists as they can be read relatively quickly, enabling others to ‘call bullshit’ on their tastes. An advantage is the logical fallacy whereby people associate the amount of time of work they have put into a piece of art with its actual value, so people who have spent really long reading a book may assume that it’s really good. They may be really wrong. The main characters in ‘Richard Yates’ are named after the famous actors Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning. Haley Joel Osment seems to be one of the celebrities designed to irritate a certain group of people. I am a member of this group of people. For starters, he is a boy, and his first name is a misspelled version of a girl’s name. His surname looks like a misspelled, or dumbed down, version of the surname of the Osmonds. The Osmonds were a family band in the seventies who by reputation were anathema to authenticity, or real credibility in music. Haley started off in a credibly good film, The Sixth Sense, and then went downhill with his career. Not as much as M. Night Shymalan, whose career has been plotted in a graph to show the declining interest in his increasingly poor films. In his next film, if anyone will back him to make one, he should consider his big twist being there not being a big twist at the end. Haley Joel Osment announced publically that he would like to be Harry Potter, when the casting for the first motion picture was beginning to take place. This was always going to be a terrible idea. I am glad that JK Rowling abandoned her tight schedule of releasing one Harry Potter per year so that she was on track with each of Harry’s years at school in order to feed into the film-making process. I wonder if stopping Haley Joel Osment jeopardizing the most significant artistic creation of her life was the reason why she did this. Haley does not look anything like how I imagined Harry Potter or how he was originally conceived in the mind of JK Rowling. How he is meant to look is fairly evident from the original illustrations of the books – a skinny, brown-haired boy who is slightly more dolichocephalic than usual. The actor who was cast, Daniel Radcliffe, seems to fit this description, despite initially not being very good at acting. I find it hard to believe that Haley could have maintained a credible English accent for very long; he would most likely be more Dick van Dyke than Renée Zellwegger. Also, the ‘star factor’ of Haley Joel Osment, as a known name, could have overshadowed the movie to a certain degree. In my mind, there is no question that Haley would have acted better, but been a worse casting choice than Daniel Radcliffe.
Dakota Fanning sounds like a place in America, but is probably an actress I would recognise as a generic star but be unable to name any films she was in, although I most likely have seen several of these films. I think she might be named after a song by the Stereophonics or something. Her name fits into the bracket of ‘names which sound like they may be a description’. If she has a big public breakdown and needs to retreat from the public eye in order to recuperate, I might suggest that she becomes a punkawallah. This would partially be because it would be completely new for her and would help her to forget her problems; partially because it would be good for her physical fitness; mainly because it is a stupid joke about nominative determinism; and partially because I don’t get to use the word punkawallah nearly often enough. I hold the electric fan partially responsible for decreasing its popularity. I wonder if I will be able to contact Dakota by email, or whether she is on Twitter. Some Grey Bloke made the observation that the main function of Twitter, after all, is to be ignored by celebrities. There seems to be some truth to this.
‘Exclusive extract’ from ‘Richard Yates’ (this may not be true)
Haley Joel Osment got home from the vegan food store with about three bags of organic food. He had a shake and some organic Japanese food. He went on Gmail chat. Dakota was online. Haley messaged Dakota. ‘I feel fucked’ said Haley. ‘That’s not cool, bro. Once I felt fucked too’ said Dakota. Haley had a neutral facial expression. Dakota also had an expression which was maybe 20-30% neutral but 60-70% depressed. Dakota’s face was 10% bemused. ‘Why do I only feel like I can only describe things which are happening in ‘concrete reality’?’ said Haley. ‘This artistic style does not allow representation of any internal mental states’ said Dakota. ‘Is Tao Lin a behaviourist?’ said Haley, ‘Does he not feel like it is worth exploring mental qualia, which are surely the most interesting thing in the ‘entire universe’? ‘ ‘I don’t think so. Maybe Tao is an eliminativist’ said Dakota. ‘Tao can’t be an eliminativist’ said Haley, ‘He definitely believes in mental states. There is no way that ‘you can be a little bit happier than I am’ if no one is happy. Tao cannot be a ‘reader of depressing books’ if no one can get depressed.’ ‘There is more of a challenge conveying character if you don’t directly say how they are feeling’ said Dakota. ‘Maybe’ said Haley. ‘Is this a good imitation of Tao’s style?’ said Dakota. ‘Not really’ said Haley.
'Richard Yates' 'Contests'
Tao Lin changed the terms of this competition multiple times. It is unclear whether he wrote the initial version deliberately leaving it so that it would have to be changed in the future, thus drawing more competition to it or himself, or he failed to predict that people would have difficult writing about a book they haven’t read. I don’t think I would particularly have trouble writing about a book I haven’t yet read. Just an author and a title name is enough to elicit some preconceptions. Our preconceptions colour our views of the world and our experiences. Sometimes I feel like I can talk confidently about the entire work of a particular philosopher after having skimmed through their Wikipedia entry.
The last ‘contest’ which Tao Lin held online, one of his books could be won by publishing an essay 1000 words-long. I was one of the fortunate entrants who was able to get an entry in before the unpreviously announced deadline and it was no longer possible. For my essay, I was sent Shoplifting From American Apparel. Shoplifting From American Apparel was released in September 2009, and Richard Yates is to be released in September 2010. I wonder if this will be the pattern of future releases from Tao Lin, with one competition in the middle giving away a book of choice. I hope this is the case, as then I will be able to enter the contests and win a copy of the book. It is possible that I will enjoy the book more as may feel that it is more earned than if were simply randomly given to me. In this way I will keep writing essays, and reading one new book a year. I will simply be able to write about Tao Lin’s last book and receive his new one. However, I would never be able to catch up and read his first few books. I may have to spend actual money that I have earned doing a real job on them. There is a certain satisfaction in being completist.
I wonder what proportion of entries to this competition will be Gmail chat, and what proportion will be straight prose. I remember at least one of the entries in the last contest containing quite a lot of Gmail chat, which seemed legitimate as the essay by Tao Lin contained a certain degree of Gmail chat. I am concerned that this will unduly date the work, as I do not believe that Gmail chat will be necessarily extant in the future. Maybe it will serve as period detail, being an aid to nostalgia. I usually find nostalgia about technology fairly pointless as things are getting better and better. Technology continues to become increasingly cheaper and better, in an almost Marxian progress which has not been observed in any other sphere. I have never really used Gmail chat, but I think I can understand what it is used for compared with other online tools such as Google Wave. I’m not sure if anyone understands what Google Wave is really for, though.
I find it interesting that I opened a Tumblr account for the sole purpose of entering a Tao Lin contest, and am now maintaining it with entries for more of Tao’s contests. I like the idea of keeping it relatively ‘pure’ by only updating it with entries for Tao. I think most Tumblr streams are probably focused on what people find fun and interesting outside of their work and study, and their authors try to reflect this side of their personality. My Tumblr stream would be in sharp contrast this, more like a portfolio of my work, the words I have typed in order to receive my dead-tree reward. Having a Tumblr account seems like an ‘online accessory’ that some people seem to vaunt in some bizarre way, although it is free. I do not spend enough time sitting in front of a computer to compete with the most busy users, I will simply have to try to maintain some form of consistency. It would have been possible for me to have simply left the essay I had where I typed it in Google Docs, and merely changed the sharing settings. Some entrants did this. However, I did not feel like this would be legitimate. Seems that society is more chill now that legitimacy is now primarily a matter of individual citizens what is and is not acceptable, rather than the Establishment making the decisions in a top down manner via courts, the mainstream media and other channels. Children born to unmarried parents were previously termed ‘illegitimate’. It seems unfair that an entire person can be seen as not really a proper person because of things that happened before they were conceived, seems unfair that they should shoulder any of that blame. Google Docs has changed its format in the last few months, now every document I create is labeled ‘private’ and has a small picture of a lock on it. This seems designed to encourage people to open up their documents. When these documents consist of simply text, it would seem to be much more useful to post them in blog format where there are already settings to be played with, with regards to layout and so on. Only with large data-sets and tables would it seem to be the easiest thing to do to store information on Google Docs and then incorporate it via code into other web pages. The Guardian’s Data Blog appears to be taking that approach. It seems like Tao Lin is cracking down on freeloading. There were some pretty tenuous authors in the previous competition, and he has already disallowed one entry for not being more than 70% related to ‘Richard Yates’ or himself. I wonder if he would allow an article entirely pertaining to Richard Yates the author. Tao has specified that the word count must be at least 1000 words. However he has not specified what language the entries should be in. I wonder if I attempted to write a paragraph in French or Latin that would be ‘cool’, ‘conceptual’ and ‘groundbreaking’ or just pretentious and attention-seeking. It is tempting to simply copy and paste some completely unrelated writing that I have already done into Google Translate and translate it into Arabic. I do not imagine that Tao Lin or many of his fans would be able to understand Arabic. However, I suppose that it would be possible for someone to simply copy and paste my translation back into Google Translate, which would scupper it somewhat. Timeo danaos et dona ferentes. Tao did not specify what format the words should be in, and I do not think he would be disappointed with a nascent Homer handing in 1000 words of an epic poem. 1000 words really aren’t too much to write. I am aiming to produce at least twice that. Maybe for the next competition I should write entirely in haikus. Haikus seem to be taken seriously by people for some reason, even though they are easy to write than other forms of poetry. They may be well triangulated between skillful traditional poetry and more free-form trendy stuff. The word ‘haiku’ sounds interesting, to start with. I think there is a Twitter-clone online social media service with a similar name. Tao should specify that entries to his next competition should be entirely in the form of poetry. Some people would probably submit prose and claim that it was free-form poetry. Tao should not legitimize these entries. It was predictable that contest 1 would have more entrants than contest 2 or contest 3. Contest 1 simply requires a person to have access to a computer at some time and the Internet at some other time. This opens it up to lots of people. Those who are not sufficiently privileged to have a computer in their homes can type what they are thinking, at a public library and will be able to have technical guidance from librarians should they require it. I think that librarians may be called information services workers or something like that now, I prefer the older term, I think it has more grace and power in its brevity. Same as door managers, the term does not really do justice to bouncers. I accept that there are some areas of the world where there are difficulties in accessing the Internet, but modern blogging software is a credit in not constantly needed brand new software. The marketing drive whereby users are urged to continually buy ‘harder, better, faster, stronger’ computers seems to have ended in a way in comparison to the way it is ongoing with televisions. I wonder how much of this is due to Bill Gates. His company, Microsoft, would regularly bring out major new versions of the Windows operating system and ‘hustle hard’ to make them essential. They would be buggy at first and require updates. They would have compatibility issues with software and hardware. This marketing ploy seems to have ended, probably not just to increasing competition from Google. Bill Gates has taken more of a back seat over the last few years, and paid attention to all the good work he could do with his spare billions of pounds. I wonder if this is ‘one in the eye’ for the Marxists who see all profit as surplus waste that is unneeded. Come to think of it, any Marxists still remaining have had to contend with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so probably now think only in evidence-resistant theories. Information that confirms their hypotheses is fine, but anything that doesn’t is to be ignored. Bill Gates’ work may have helped him see that it is better to have a simple, common basis and then to work from there rather than aim to constantly improve. Every now and then it may make sense to have one big change similar to a Kuhnian shift whereby a scientific field gets ‘turned upside down’ by new information or theories. However, if there are lots of medium-to-big changes all the time, there will be compatibility issues.
There are more barriers to access in contests 2 and 3. Contest 2 and contest 3 both require the use of a video camera. Increasing, these are ubiquitous and present on many newly manufactured mobile telephones. They are often of very poor quality though, and it is difficult to follow what is happening in them. The archetypical video appearing on my Facebook feed is an undecipherable creation from a club, with some flashing lights, muffled kickdrums thumping at some point, and a drone of music in the midrange. I say music, it is more like simply sound.
Some real relativists will probably believe that music is a totally subjective entity, and that field recordings can be music. They will believe that anything can be art, as long as one person thinks that it is art. I’m not convinced by this, I don’t feel like context can ever be entirely everything. There is always interplay between context and content. I do not consider Merzbow’s work music. People may also be reluctant to put images of themselves in the public domain. There is a popular perception that although you give away lots about yourself by putting a picture of yourself up, you do not by merely putting up writing. Again, I tend to disagree. Just as when people write to imitate Tao Lin’s style, their voice is frequently audible coming through. When we write, we give information away our educational status, our national background, our mood and most importantly of all, lots about our internal mental processes. For the purpose of describing an animal, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but not in the case of human beings. There is more to be learnt about people by reading their thoughts in text format.
I want to aim for a legitimate word count to make it seem like I am trying to win the prize and not just doing the bare minimum, when really I feel like I don’t have a chance. I feel like I have more work and other things to do than Tao’s other fans, of whom many are probably undergraduate English students with less than ten hours of contact time per week. This gives them great flexibility with their time. I feel like it may be the holidays for college students anyway. I can imagine several of them frantically waiting on their laptops with a stimulant in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other typing into their MacBooks as the deadline approaches trying to outdo the author who has just submitted a 4500-word essay with a 4600-word essay like eBay addicts. The website eBay is an online marketplace where many different physical virtual items are sold. Sellers pay a relatively small amount of money to list the item, whereby the details will appear on the site and will be searchable. The sellers decide upon a period of time in which bids may be made from the initial time of listing. The time at which bidding ends is publicly available where anyone can see it. If you already know how much money you are willing to spend on an item, it makes sense to make this bid as late as possible. A bidder’s bid must be an increase on the previous ones by a certain amount of money, which increases in increments with greater maximum bids. Websites and software and things like that have been developed in order to beat the eBay system. A bidder will enter a maximum bid, which will then automatically entered at the last possible moment. I feel like this explanation may be pointless, as anyone reading a blogpost on Tumblr is unlikely not to understand how eBay works. I was using an analogy to try to capture the sense of people sitting nervously with their laptops or iPads balancing bidding too early with its associated risk of being outbid with bidding too late and its associated risk of bidding too late and missing the deadline. Perhaps the most traditional analogy of ‘circling like vultures’ would have been better, with some sort of electronic caveat. I had to go onto a website to make sure that I knew the correct time difference between where I was and ‘Eastern time’. I presume that Eastern means the time where Tao Lin probably is in New York on the Eastern coast of North America, not Eastern as in his population ancestry. It appears that geographical terms like the middle-East and the Far East are based on the relative position of Britain from back when it was more influential. I am not aware of any attempt by the dominant country in the world, the United States of America to change this. In a few years, when China is the most important country in the world, they may change this to assert their power. I hope they don’t do anything like changing the numbering of the years, that would be really confusing. I really don’t mind if ‘2010 AD’ becomes ‘2010 CE’ or something like that, as that seems quite neutral, I just don’t want existing systems to be confused for arbitrary political reasons. At this moment I do not have as much Internet access as I would like, but am doing my best to work around technical limitations. In a way, we all do our best to work around the technological limitations of our age. There is a procedural, and potentially ethical, problem with this entry into the contest. I wrote an initial version of this essay which was only a couple of thousands of words long. I have now rewritten parts of it to make it significantly longer. People who are watching to see how long they need to write the winning entry will probably not notice that this has been significantly lengthened. Tao has stipulated that each entrant is only permitted to submit one essay, but not that they cannot be altered once submitted. This may be a turning point. Perhaps it was implicit that once work was linked to from Tao’s blog it should then be immutable and be left set in stone as a piece of art or criticism or both. Tao used the term ‘essay’, the same as that a teacher or lecturer might use.
The minimum wage in the United Kingdom is quite low: £3.57 per hour at age 16, £4.83 per hour at age 18 and £5.80 at age 22. I have performed low-skilled work for this rate of pay before. Once I have worked myself into a state of flow with judicious use of appropriate lyric-less music, coffee and isolation I am able to write reasonably quickly. If I were to win the contest then I would be able to earn money far over the minimum wage, due in the part to the current weakness of the pound sterling currency. At the end of the day, I would like $250. I am unsure whether or not I would make better use of it than other entrants. I don’t think I would spend it all at once on a big weekend, just buy things that I wanted. The happiness that I would feel would be tri-fold. There would be happiness at winning the competition, happiness in receiving money and happiness in spending it. I do not, however, expect to win. I am quite simply happy writing. But even if at the end of the contest, having expended time and effort that could have been used doing other things, I do not win; I will not consider it a waste of time. I am developing my critical skills and am writing what is probably the second longest piece of work I have ever produced. This essay is fairly stream of consciousness, with alterations from time-to-time to improve spelling, grammar and some of the flow. I wonder if this makes more ‘authentic’. Certainly makes it easier to ‘see into my head’ and analyse the way that I think. Ultimately, this work consists of a few ideas scattering around with no big underlying thesis; in a way, this is suitable for an essay on Tao Lin. At some point, Tao decided to run an auxiliary contest for ‘Richard Yates’, hosted by popular website HTMLGiant. This was to promote more comments on some of the videos. The contest was for five people to win copies of one of his books by producing 200 words of commentary on people in these. On Youtube, comments are mainly snide and negative, but in the context of the contest, people were generally positive or at least neutral. Tao Lin may have been engineering society to make us be nicer to one another. ‘Richard Yates’ (the essays)
It seems that you are put almost at once at a disadvantage by being one of the first people to enter one of Tao Lin’s contests as you are not yet able to reference the other entries. These are diverse, and reflect the breadth of interest in Tao Lin. Some of these come in the form of short stories, but most are fairly introspective, often touching on the social issue of talking about Tao and his work with a friend. I hope Tao stays ‘hungry’ in the future, but is financially stable enough to keep doing what he’s doing.
Fishkind review of ‘Richard Yates’
The picture on David Fishkind’s blog accompanying his musings on the book ‘Richard Yates’ by Tao Lin shows a glass of water over the promotional picture from the front cover distorting the image printed into the jacket. This original image seems to be a man with a conch shell for a face, holding his face-conch shell hybrid. It is unclear how significant this absurd imagery is to the plot of the novel. The way the glass of water is positioned suggests a view on colposcopy, reminiscent of the view of the external os of the cervix. Other people will not be bothered by this. Although now I’ve mentioned this, people may be more inclined to ask questions, or perform Google Images searches to look for photographs online. Information technology will eventually be the death of security by obscurity. David Fishkind has self-published a book called ‘Baby Hedgehogs and American Apparel Dogs’ this year. The previous year, Tao Lin released ‘Shoplifting From American Apparel’. I wonder if every year now there will be a new work of fiction with the phrase ‘American Apparel’ in the title. This would be an example of guerilla marketing or possible viral marketing or marketing of some other kind. I’m not sure how much that would translate into sales for American Apparel though, I read on Hipster Runoff that things hadn’t been going so well recently. I don’t think I approve of dressing dogs in American Apparel, except for comedy or dramatic purposes. A dog can’t understand irony, it’s a dog.
Contest 1 Entry 1
The first entry is by someone possibly named ‘Caity Poops’ from a blog named ‘short stories from a Tall me’. I take it from this that ‘Caity Poops’ is quite tall. Her post is aptly titled, ‘A Gmail chat about Tao Lin’s ‘Richard Yates’’. Caity talks to her friend Cathy. They talk about things you might expect young women to talk about, like Grey’s Anatomy as well as Hipster Runoff and Lolita. Caity says, ‘Tao can be like the new Banksy’. Banksy is a reasonably famous graffiti artist who tries to get his identity secure, but is most likely originally from Bristol. The comparison is most likely due to an incident where Tao or one of his minions stuck lots of stickers saying ‘Britney Spears’ over the door on the way into the website Gawker’s office. They had some sort of falling out over a review. This may be ‘urban art’ and may also be ‘criminal damage’. This may be some sort of metaphor: perhaps you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Possibly phoenixes rise from the flames, like the re-birth of Britney Spears’s new career with her overtaking Ashton Kutcher to become the most followed user on Twitter.
Contest 1 Entry 2
This is a newly created blog, currently with the one single post for the purposes of the contest. The title of the blog is ‘A bath tub full of…’. I am not sure what that is a reference to. It may be referring to the traditional charity activity of filling a bath tub full of some sort of foodstuff like baked beans, and then taking a bath in it. The point was to highlight how out of the ordinary the activity was. It never really struck a good note with me. Often the bathers were trying to raise money for charities such as Oxfam, which acted to help those who were starving, and the blatant waste of food seemed a bit too ironic. If you were starving somewhere, and turned on the television to see how people were helping to get you food, you probably wouldn’t be too pleased. The blog is written by someone calling themselves simply ‘The Doctor’. It is unclear whether this person has a doctorate, is medically qualified or is a big Doctor Who fan. It is possible that all of those things are true, but it is likely that none of them are.
Contest 1 Entry 3
The address of the blog is pettyquarrel.blogspot.com, but the title is ‘my lonely journal’. This is apt for this entry. The author attempts to contact her friend Sara via Gmail chat, but Sara is not there or is not responding. Sara proceeds anyway with a conversation with herself. The soliloquy can be a very useful dramatic device, and is used by people such as William Shakespeare in plays such as ‘Macbeth’. Shakespeare uses the soliloquies of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to allow them to externalize their internal monologue, to explicitly let the audience know the turmoil they are going through. Tao Lin tends to take the opposite tack, by not expounding at all on what his characters are thinking, and attempting to express all their thoughts and feelings in what they do and say. In her Gmail soliloquy, the author ponders the idea that Tao may be ‘The Voice of our Absurd Generation’. This seems highly feasible. Tao Lin is sometimes considered to be an existentialist, with writing in the tradition of Jean-Paul Sartre. I see Tao Lin as being more in the absurdist tradition of Albert Camus. Strange, sometimes magical things happen to Tao’s characters, and they can only deal with the strangeness of the situation. His characters may find meaning in their own lives, but it is by no means essential.
The author quotes Clancy Martin’s blurb of Tao Lin being ‘a Kafka for the iPhone generation’. Franz Kafka was a lawyer who was able to use his professional experience as the basis for absurd scenarios in novels such as ‘The Trial’. As an English graduate (a graduate of a course on English, rather than a graduate from an English institution, or a graduate who is English) Tao is more likely to write about writing. As far as I am aware, he has not had a proper job. I base this assertion on the fact that he hasn’t really written about having a real job. I see Tao Lin as being more akin to Camus than Kafka, but above all he is Tao Lin. Besides, I prefer BlackBerries to iPhones.
Contest 1 Entry 4
The fourth entry to the competition is somewhat confusingly from the Sara to whom the author of the last competition was speaking. Her full name may be ‘Sara W-x’. She complains about beans and rice taking too long to cook. It is unclear whether this the traditional Caribbean dish I usually hear referred to as ‘rice and peas’. I used to think that this was a combination of what I thought of as ‘rice’ served with ‘peas’. I was incorrect in this assumption, ‘rice and peas’ is in fact rice interspersed with kidney beans. Sara seems to be somewhat attached to Elvis Costello. He is probably the second most famous Elvis in contemporary music, behind Elvis Presley but ahead of L-Vis 1990 and DJ Mujava, whose real name is Elvis Maswanganyi. Strange how Mujava uses a moniker that doesn’t include his forename. Maybe it is because he is from South Africa, where Elvis Presley is not such a big deal. Sarah considers getting an iPhone. I think maybe she should get a BlackBerry instead.
Contest 1 Entry 5
This blog is written by Sarah B, but is quite cryptic. This is a different person to ‘Sarah’ who I think wrote the third entry and appears in the fourth entry, and Sara, who wrote the fourth entry and appears in the third one. The title is Dinger, but the URL is sabealm.blogspot.com. I am not sure what this means at all. On the right-hand side is written ‘to go/aller/gehen’. This is the same verb written in English, French and then German. This may be a statement of Metropolitan intent. There are also links to five different websites. Sarah refers to the figure on the front page of the book as the ‘conch-face man’. I like this. This is succinct and fairly empirically to the point. Sarah expresses doubts that ‘Richard Yates’ will be Tao Lin’s magnum opus as he is still under thirty. I would tend to agree with this. While most great physicists tend to come up with their best work before they are thirty, authors often mature and write better novels as they age. I am trying to imagine Tao maturing, and failing. I anticipate he might move to longer and longer works, or stop using vowels, or some other great statement like that. This is another difference between the ‘two cultures’ of arts and sciences.
Contest 1 Entry 6
‘It is boring, whatever’ is a nonchalant title for a blog. The author, Ami, does not seem bored of Tao Lin. However, the first part of the essay is subtitled ‘I Liked Tao Lin A Lot In High School (Ass Hi Books, Today The Sky Is Blue)’. Stating that you ‘used to like something’, or you ‘liked something when you were less mature than you are today’ is a classic playground method of subtly denigrating it. Ami does say that the stories he used to like are ‘still really good’ despite the advance in the story of life that he or she has made. Ami once brought three of his friends to see Tao Lin do a live reading, which was a ‘weird time’ that hasn’t really been remembered. I’m not sure if I’d like to see Tao Lin do a live reading. Certainly the idea appeals, but it might be like a live performance of Panda Bear. There isn’t much too it, and if you think about what is actually happening too hard it might become really boring really quickly. The success or otherwise of the night would be entirely dependent on your company. Ami admits later in the essay to owning a Tao Lin shirt and at least two of his books which would presumably mark him or her out as being among the top echelons of Tao’s fans. This is in contrast with the claim that ‘Eeeee Eee Eeee’ is ‘basically unreadable’. Ami’s essay seems very ‘human and readable’. I enjoyed it.
Contest 1 Entry 7
Uncle Farkus’s entry is a multimedia experience, with his text interspersed with photos he has taken, photos he has found on the Internet, and even a drawing he drew on Microsoft Paint. I sometimes feel nostalgic towards Paint. In the era of Windows ’95 and Windows ’98, it was the only program by which you could manipulate images which seemed to make any sense whatsoever. I wish I knew of good webcomics that were drawn in Paint. I can think of one, but it is finished, and it is so offensive that I am censoring myself rather than mention it. Uncle Farkus touches on the Arcade Fire, studying architecture, Hipster Runoff and bro politics. I like Uncle Farkus.
Contest 1 Entry 8
JK is the author of this blog ‘Flying Houses’ and he claims to be sad. JK seems to be made less sad by Tao Lin’s actions in general. JK seems happy to have some sort of online relationship with Tao Lin. JK feels ambivalent towards hipsters. He is humble sort of guy, but has regrets about his carelessness in previous relationships, one in particular comes to his mind now and again. I think I could be a psychic if I completely lost my moral compass. Cold reading doesn’t seem too difficult. JK feels a sense of belonging with Tao Lin’s worldwide diaspora of fans. I empathize with him there as I am beginning to feel the same way. Maybe one of the drivers for Tao Lin to get all these people to write who wouldn’t normally be writing is to help them help themselves in seeing their own thoughts out there in cyberspace being commented on by friendly strangers. This may have a public health benefit in staving of, or ameliorating the symptoms of depression or related mental health problems. It has been said that writing is as good as psychotherapy. Someone should fund a non-inferiority study at once.
Contest 1 Entry 9
‘God damn colourblindness’ is a blog written by Harry Foster. It was founded for the purposes of the contest and currently only has one post. It stands as yet another example of a blog that owes its existence to Tao’s competitions. I imagine Tao would rather see these blogs being used, flourishing and living rather than littering the World Wide Web. There currently seems to be a paucity of methods of culling dead and dying blogs. I quite like the idea of being in charge of a commission whose job it is to cull old websites. I would model myself on Clint Eastwood’s character Dirty Harry and carry a big gun for no good reason. I felt happy when Homestead and Geocities committed e-hari-kari. Harry (Foster, not Dirty Harry) considered going to the supermarket where he occasionally works and shouting out ‘Richard Yates’ for use in ‘contest 2’. He also tried to use popular website Chat Roulette to attempt to do something else, exactly what is slightly unclear to me. Harry seems to be in the minority in that he has read books by both Richard Yates and Tao Lin, which may mean that his essay may be more meaningful than many of the others.
Contest 1 Entry 10
‘Newhandsweepstakes’ is a blog written by multiple authors. This particular post is written by Brian McElmurry, a writer who has also posted short stories to the blog. Its title is ‘What the Fuck, Richard Yates?’ which is a reference to some avant-garde art from the mid 1990s. Brian states that Tao is a ‘question mark’ who ‘brings along a Buddhist element to his writing’. Tao is certainly a provocative writer, but I couldn’t comment on Buddhism as I don’t know much about it. I think some Buddhists are atheists, some Buddhists are monotheists and some Buddhists are polytheists. I imagine there will be aesthetic differences between the trendy upper middle class North American and European Buddhism and the lower class East Asian form. Brian qualifies his statement by saying that we must ‘suffer through’ certain elements of our lives. I would classify this as a Stoic statement. My frame of reference is definitely more Ancient Greece than Oriental. Perhaps I need to broaden my horizons.
Contest 1 Entry 11
Entry 11 to the competition is this one. Not as it currently stands, as it would be impossible to simultaneously write an essay and review it or comment on it. The sands would constantly be shifting. The title of the blog is ‘B-)’, which appears to be an emoticon of a smiling person wearing glasses. This may or may not be quite vacuous. I suspect that is may be a temporary or placeholder name, and that the author may be simply waiting to come up with something better. There are some pretty bad blog names out there, and it may be simply too egotistical to just use your own name. Even Tao Lin, who is often accused of being narcissistic, has named his Tumblr ‘Tao Lin’s Tumblr Presence’, which seems ironic and funny.
Contest 1 Entry 12
‘Sexcaliber Hrosspower’ is another brand new blog for the competition with one entry currently, and possible one entry ever. It is probably written by somebody named Ross making some sort of jokey pun which may be an in-joke. The author asks the rhetorical question, ‘Since when do we talk about the “message” of a book any more?’ In the 1977 essay, ‘The Death of the Author’, Roland Barthes has sketched out this argument. Each piece of text or work in an individual person’s hands means something different. All that we experience is coloured by our own experiments, values and judgements. We are a big prism. Therefore, once a text is finished, it no longer belongs to the author; it belongs to those reading it. The birth of the reader comes at the cost of the death of the author. This is related to similar work by Gilles Deleuze, who is another good name to drop occasionally if you are as keen to impress girls occasionally as Ross seems to be.
Contest 1 Entry 13
The author of the blog ‘neo.nada’ says that Tao Lin reminds him of Kanye West. I took issue with that on a comment on Tao Lin’s original blogpost, however as I was doing it on my phone it showed as being written by ‘Anonymous’. The comment reads, ‘I enjoyed Cody’s essay except that Tao does not remind me of Kanye West. Tao would remind me of Kanye West if he took good books by other people, inserted some underwhelming writing in the middle and then submitted it as his own work’. This comment appears scathing and perhaps even a little unkind. It was probably best left anonymous. It probably also aroused hostility as people may assume that the writer doesn’t like any rap music or hip-hop and therefore may be quite old-fashioned or even a Luddite about sampling. This is not the case, honest.
Contest 1 Entry 14
‘That feeling when you lose things’ is a blog with a slightly wistful title, several posts and an author by the name of Dan Hoopes. He talks about Jersey Shore, a television programme which has been both celebrated and vilified for its portrayal of the vacuous lives of young Italian-Americans. Dan describes these characters as ‘emotionally stunted, ignorant, and for the most part unable to form meaningful connections with other people beyond fulfilling their hedonism of the needs of their own vanity’. He then uses scare quotes to refer to ‘educated’ people who criticize these people, but are sadly unaware of their own failings, due to the big psychological blind spot that we all have. Dan seems quite pensive, and ponders the ethics and economics of the competition and the publishing company. Tao’s imprint Muumuu House is apparently barely breaking even. Running competitions and giving away books seems to be a worthwhile thing to do if you have the means, seems like a worthwhile way to bring meaning to your life.
Contest 1 Entry 15
“My ambition is handicapped by laziness” is a good name for a blog – it seems honest and insightful. The blog currently costs of a picture of some oranges from the Internet and the entry into the contest. The entry is a copy and pasted Gmail chat put into Google Translate in order to translate it from Finnish. The author of the blog is a literature student called Daniel Vatsvåg. Daniel does not seem to have made any alterations after this translation, so most of it does not make literal sense, but is understandable to a native English speaker. For instance, the title is ‘Google translating can make you look like a dyslectic teenager (Tao Lin/Richard Yates contest)’ rather than ‘Google Translate can make you look like a dyslexic teenager (Tao Lin/Richard Yates contest)’. It has a certain charm but is difficult to read, like the first few pages of ‘Trainspotting’ before you start to understand some of the highly idiomatic language.
Contest 1 Entry 16
Drew is an ‘Experimenter, Student, Designer, Musician, Skeptic, Contributor, Explorer’. He is also a blogger who maintains ‘Ultraviral Radiation’ a blog of ‘absurdities, philosophies, art, culture & music’. Again, I’m drawn to the word absurd, and I like it. I also like the way he has pluralized philosophy, possibly to highlight the way we each have our perspective on things. Drew references Friedrich Nietzche’s work, ‘The Gay Science’, which is nowadays probably less well known than ‘Bad Science’, but still a thought-provoking book. The main idea he gets it is that whatever language we employ, we never really get our thoughts across to another person. What we think about, is what we think about. We will never be truly empathetic, feeling what another person feels. The invention of the word ‘logocentricism’ to highlight how our thoughts are dependent on language in this way is the cornerstone of Jean-Paul Sartre’s career.
Contest 1 Entry 17
Here comes another Gmail chat, this time between two brothers. The title of the post acts as a disclaimer that it may be ‘moderately embarrassing and possibly homosexual/incestuous’. The pair in correspondence is Cameron Bock and his brother RWT1515. Reading the conversation feels very voyeuristic. Although this is in the public domain, presumably with the consent of both participants, it does not look like it should. I felt more like I was intruding into a private space. This conversation is probably the only entry in this competition is which the word ‘bro’ is used to literally mean ‘brother’ in a real sense. Cameron postulates that ‘even people who hate [Tao Lin] buy his books just so they have specific examples of what to make fun of’. This is an interesting idea, which lays bare the pointlessness of hating things. Love and hate are similar when they both mean that an idea, person or work of art is consuming a significant amount of your mental resources for a significant amount of time. The idea of people ironically buying books they hate made me laugh.
Contest 1 Entry 18
‘Is this really what you want’ is a reference to Tao Lin in its very title. ‘Is this really what you want?’ is the name of an mpfree given away by the sound project, “Jesus Christ” (the indie band). Despite having ‘band’ in its name, the group claims to be more of a sound project. ‘Is this really what you want?’ is also the name of the EP to be released at some future date including the title track. The track is reminiscent of a more depressed and wistful Teenagers. The personnel in the group are listed as Carles and Tao Lin. Carles, or ‘CRLS’ is the author of the popular weblog Hipster Runoff. The identity of Carles is kept quite secret, but there have been pointers that he is Tao Lin. This does not seem possible as HRO (Hipster Runoff) produces so much material every day, but it is possible that Carles is or was one of several contributors. The two posts on the blog are the entry into the competition, and a reposting of one of the videos entered into a different contest. The contributors to the blog are listed as ‘tomentosus / luke’ and ‘ihaveasmallcloset’. They share with us that ‘Sian’ is a Singaporean equivalent of ‘ennui’. That’s interesting, I only new it as a Celtic name. They mention the ‘meta-ness’ that Tao loves. This did not make me think of self-referencing; rather it made me think of the original Godzilla films. A robotic version of Godzilla is created called Mecha-Godzilla. I imagined an ironic, detached version of the Loch Ness Monster called Meta-Ness being created by aliens to defeat the original Nessie.
Contest 1 Entry 19
Marshall and Alex Sheppard have a Gmail chat about Tao Lin. Marshall is afraid of being disqualified for being off-topic. Lots of one-word lines are in operation. As the Gmail chats are being measured, this would seem to be a sensible way of ramping up word count. Marshall and Alex consider what score they would give to ‘Richard Yates’ if they were reviewing it for Pitchfork. It is unlikely that this would actually happen as the popular website Pitchfork Media only reviews music, and no longer gives scores to individual tracks, only albums and EPs. Maybe if there was a CD release of ‘Richard Yates’ being read by Stephen Fry over some music by Pantha du Prince or Four Tet they might be interested. In the meantime: sorry guys, it’s just not happening.
Contest 1 Entry 20
The URL of this Tumblr account is ‘hikikomoripop.tumblr.com’. I am familiar with the word ‘Hikikomori’ and the social phenomenon due to the short story ‘Hikikomori’ by Tao Lin and somebody else. The word is Japanese in origin and refers to young men refusing to leave their bedrooms, and instead locking themselves in happy with the technological delights our age has to offer. The story that Tao Lin and his co-author wrote was in the form of letters sent from one to another as correspondence. Not literally letters, I think they were emails, but that was the classic literary style. In this post, which is a Gmail chat, one of the writers asserts that Crystal Castles’ second album is nowhere near as good as their first one. I’m not sure this is the case. There are certainly more tracks that would be more palatable to the general public on the second album, such as ‘Celestica’.
Contest 1 Entry 21
The Tumblog ‘All-Time Gringo’ also hosts a Gmail chat pertaining to Tao Lin and Richard Yates. The inclusion of ‘all-time’ made me think of Kanye West again, specifically Kanyegate – his storming the stage and outburst at some music awards. I probably shouldn’t think about Kanye so much as he makes me angry. The by-line to the blog is ‘meaningfulcore’, which I think is ironically a fairly useless descriptor invented by Carles of Hipster Runoff fame. It seems that Tao Lin and Hipster Runoff have a lot of audience in common. The author states that he feels like ‘Tao Lin just has a huge secret smirk inside when he writes’. The qualifier ‘inside’ seems to imply that Tao may try to be a reader of depressing books and act morose on the outside, but on the inside he doesn’t feel so sad after all.
Contests 2 and 3
I don’t tend to watch many videos on the Internet, with the exception of some comedy like The Onion and the work of David Firth. Also, I am in a public place where people can see what I doing onscreen. It is probably vaguely assumed that I am working in some capacity. If there is simply text on screen, passers by will not be able to see exactly what I am reading or writing. With a comedy video, it will be spotted as the eye is trained to notice moving images. Also I may be laughing out loud. I cannot justify the time it would take to watch a low-budget documentary that no one else I know in real life will ever watch and is two hours long. I would rather watch The Wire, or something else I know I will enjoy, and can have conversations with people about. This is more of a commentary on video as a medium rather than the merit of specific entries, which I know nothing about.
Conclusion
Tao Lin seems to have a more heterogenous group of fans than he may be given credit for. People who like Hipster Runoff will probably enjoy the work of Tao Lin. Tao Lin is more of an absurdist than an existentialist or a stoic, but he should simply pigeonhole himself in this way. Writing contests seem more good than bad. People may expend time and effort into them when they could be doing other things, but this writing may in fact lead them to self-actualisation. It can certainly lead to a sense of purpose, and evidently a sense of community for at least some of the participants. I will look forward to taking part in Tao’s next contest.