Posts tagged tao lin

Once one of my friends went out and a got a tattoo. He didn’t tell us he was going to do this, probably because he knew we would warn him against it. So when he came back to show us, he looked a bit sheepish. There was a conflict between his wanting to show us his new tattoo, with which he had strongly aligned his personal brand, and wishing to avoid the inevitable mockery. In the end he showed us, knowing that we would see it at some point. The tattoo was the symbol ‘tao’. ‘Tao’ I think is pronounced more like ‘dao’ . This means ‘way’ or something in a language from Asia. Wonder if the original route is Chinese or Japanese or something. I know that there are a lot more Chinese people, but seems like Japan used to invade China from time to time. It took a few minutes on Wikipedia to relate ‘tao’ to some kind of word for ‘man-boy love’ or something like that. There was no real reason for this, just some kind of petty insult with which to set ourselves against the tattoo. It’s always good to have some kind of reason to ‘shoot someone down’ if it’s at a primary school level. My friend liked the idea of being philosophical, but wanted to avoid being seen as too Eurocentric. He enjoyed the work of some European writers, like Camus and Sartre, but didn’t want to be told that he was too narrow-minded. 

I sent Tao Lin a friend request on Facebook and he accepted. I don’t send many friend requests, maybe I think I’m ‘too cool’, or maybe I just don’t meet enough interesting people. Or maybe Facebook isn’t what it used to be. I don’t know what I was trying to achieve,  but I did want a copy of Shoplifting From American Apparel. I asked for Shoplifting From American Apparel for Christmas but no one bought it for me. Feel like I might be too old to ask for things for Christmas. I had some Amazon vouchers but I spent them on other things. I had earned them doing a job which wasn’t like a real job because I wasn’t paid real money. It made me think of Tao and his friend taking stimulants in the story. I feel like there may be a point to the mention of Adderall. Cosmetic pharmaceuticals are becoming increasingly ethically relevant. Adderall is a capsule with a mixture of different forms of amphetamines, which is prescribed clinically for the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I came back to this paragraph after doing something else and realised that I had left ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’ half-written. This may be ‘ironic’. The Internet has really altered our relationship with the world and the way in which we go about gathering information. Previously, the only people with interest in or access to amphetamine and its derivatives would have been young people who liked ‘Northern Soul’ or some kind of youth culture like that so that they could dance. Nowadays, students are utilitizing the same pharmaceuticals with a view to studying.

I just opened a Tumblr account specifically for the purpose of posting this essay and getting a copy of Shoplifting From American Apparel. I read the essays which had already been submitted, probably more in a sense of ‘checking out the competition’ and wanting to be alpha-male (or academic alpha-person maybe) rather than looking for guidance. Of course if someone had written text very similar to what I would otherwise have written, changes would have to be made. Henryu opened a Wordpress account and posted the essay, without taking the time to delete the text post. This may be ‘efficient’, or possibly ‘slack’. I opened a Tumblr account because it seems more relevant even though I don’t like the way it produces the URLs of posts much compared to Blogger or Wordpress; it seems to add numbers for no good reason. I’m not sure if it is more functional than Posterous, but it certainly seems more fashionable. Maybe I have opened Pandora’s Box and will now expend more time doing things on Tumblr that are ‘fairly pointless’. A Tumblr post by Tao is inevitably followed by people ‘liking’ it and ‘re-blogging’ it. One of the other authors who has written in this ‘offer’ (don’t really feel like it’s a competition as it’s not a zero-sum game) has a blog titled ‘Pre-teentious’ but the blog URL is ‘2000wordsfortao’. The blog wasn’t specifically created today for this ‘offer’ like Henryu’s one. Seems like the author is ‘impressively prescient’ like he has ‘connections on the inside’ or very dedicated. Before I asked Tao for some stickers and he posted them to me. I gave one of the stickers away to one of my friends and then agonized over what was the best way to use the others to promote Tao.

I am used to getting books free, but only educational ones. My family used to buy books for me , and I’m sure they still would if I asked them. I write book reviews for an academic publishing house and they send me books to review, and then send me other books when I ask for them. Think this might be the way that work goes in future. All my work seems to be sitting around somewhere typing text into Google Docs. Most people who write textbooks now are probably too old to be aware, or at least to understand the unique selling point of GDocs, so they probably write into a word processor such as Microsoft Word. It is most likely twenty years since most authors were able to indulge themselves by typing onto a typewriter and having some ‘dogsbody’/employee of the company re-type it into a reproducible format and edit it. Don’t think many publishers would ‘stand for this’ nowadays. They would want to be ‘shown the money’ right there and then. Maybe ethically we have only ever been worth what our output is, but it is becoming increasingly hard to obfuscate or hide the amount of work that we are really doing. This is probably good news for people who are ‘real’ and can back up their hype.

I hadn’t heard of Marina Abramovic, but I had heard of the Museum of Modern Art. This is because it had featured on Hipster Runoff, a ‘blog worth blogging about’. The author of Hipster Runoff refers to himself as Carles, but it is often assumed across the blogosphere/Twittersphere that at least some of his output is due to Tao Lin. This is because of similarities in their writing styles - including self-awareness and use of scare quotes - and online evidence such as Tao posing in a T-shirt which reads ‘I am Carles’ and Tao and Carles following each other on Twitter. Not sure how much this evidence is ‘circumstantial’. Certainly this is evidence in a ‘legal’ sense maybe and not robust enough to amount to proper science. People question how much Marina Abramovic staring at people is actually art. Maybe it is like stealing a urinal from somewhere and presenting it as art. I don’t know what art it is. People also question how much of Tao Lin’s writing is ‘good writing’. I feel like it is meritorious because I connect with it and it makes me feel empathetic and various other emotions from time to time. The common thread between Tao and Marina is that although they have detractors, they are both dedicated to their craft. They know that they are both achieving something non-technical and non-scientific that will nevertheless be appreciated by a certain segment of people and hopefully be thought-provoking, and thus working in a ‘positive direction’ for improvement.

‘Shoplifting From American Apparel’ is an eye-catching title. If I sit around this summer wearing ‘relevant’ sunglasses and reading it, people may come up and engage me in conversation. These people will most likely be more interesting and have a higher ‘signal-to-noise ratio’ in their conversation than the average person. Not sure what the offline equivalent of ‘bloggable’ is, ‘talkable’ reads and looks like a horrible word. Seems like the book is a novella rather than a novel and I may read it quite quickly so I will have a limited time period in which to accomplish this. I’m generally not too keen on re-reading books too soon after I’ve finished them, even if I find them thought-provoking, like ‘The Dice Man’ or ‘Cloud Atlas’. Maybe I will have to pretend to be reading the book while hiding another book or my phone inside. I just checked the word count and it is over 1000 words. Wonder if subconciously I am competing with the other writers and want to do more than them, or am trying to improve myself. I didn’t check the word count very often, certainly less than usual, so I may have achieved a sense of ‘flow’. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has proposed this psychological phenomenon in which the operator becomes fully immersed in themselves and what they are doing. Feel like this may be related to ‘speaking from the heart’. Also feel like this may be related to a lack of self-awareness or censorship. Not sure if I have earned a book with these 1000+ words as I have not been wholly supportive nor provided a ‘puff piece’. Regardless, I have created a series of letters of words which will most likely outlive me and remain in cyberspace for many years to come.