Peripateticisms

I've read Tao Lin's novel, published [in Spain} by Alpha Decay. I could say a number of things. It's we'll written. It's strange. And, above all, frightening. The same sort of frightening as The Outsider or American Psycho. It's the worst kind of fear, because it gets into your body without you noticing. Like cold at altitude, or mine gas, something that might cause you to lose your fingers from frostbite, or fly through the air. I think of Haneke. In Haneke the important thing is not the ellipses of time, but the ellipses of emotion. In [Richard Yates] it's the total opposite. It's a cocktail of nihilism and playground sensibility. There's a lot that's emotionally invalid. It's like watching someone walking around without any legs or arms. It reveals that adolescence, like Eliot's April, is the cruelest age. That we're all adolescents. Something we already suspected. That purity exists only in the concentration camp. [Richard Yates] is a cruel and lovely novel. It make you hate the author. You feel sorry for him. It also makes you go on believing in literature.

* eso es una traduccion de un post en peripatetismos2.blogspot.com que me interesa
** This is a translation of a post I found interesting on peripatetismos2.blogspot.com. I wanted to post something there about Tao Lin's 'concrete slash literal' novelistic style (see post below), and surfaces, and the rejection of the realism credo (Robbe Grillet's "destitution of the old myths of 'depth'"), and how this might feed into people's love/hate of Tao. Translating the post was as far as I got... I thought the 'emotionally invalid' translation, followed by the limbless image was suggestive -- you could translate it as 'there's a lot of emotional invalidity', or even maybe 'there's a lot of emotional untruth/ falsity/ fabrication' (which feels closer to my idea of this writer's idea of Tao Lin, but would really be stretching the translation), but you'd lose that overlap.

deceptively concrete slash literal vegan

03:24 "...I think that people might not understand all the time that it's a conscious choice to really work to strip your writing of anything that's like a way that something is commonly expressed..."

balls

Whoever (me) thought Damien Hirst was clever in single-handedly restructuring artist-consumer relations by cutting out Mr Gallery, Tao Lin’s in on it too now .

Hirst’s straight-to-auction stunt was precipitated by two things - i) Georgian mining magnate Boris Ivanishvili buying a Peter Doig for £5.7 million (nearly five times Sotheby’s estimate for ‘White Canoe’ and at the time, early 2007, the highest price ever paid for work by a living European artist), which showed there was new money for new work ii) the success of the charity auction in part organised by Hirst, held on St. Valentine’s day 2008 in New York for RED, a third world charity, in which Hirst’s work sold for more than that of people like Howard Hodgkin, Jeff Koons, Wilem de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

As it says here : ‘The moment to repeat Pharmacy [the selling off of bits and pieces, many of them entirely incidental to Hirst’s work, from the trendy restaurant which had had some of Hirst’s work in it] had come’.

: These showed that the time was right.

I don’t know enough about the publishing industry to guess what might have said to Lin that this was a good time to cut out Mr Agent - part of whose role is to give the writer an advance, which the writer then must ‘pay off’ with sales, before making any profit himself.

: I suppose that since writers have to be good at concealing stuff in their work, any time is a good time to demonstate the fact you understand the stuff outside your work - apart from anything, by creating a stakeholding (if small) public, Lin has recruited a devoted (if small) number of people who will sell sell sell his work, maybe even more assiduously than those traditionally pushing an author’s work.

And this kind of investment is totally NEW (I think...). Cue a tremor in bloggerville, and more publicity.

The publishing industry is a very different fish to that of visual arts - mainly, in this case, it seems to me, because one cannot ‘own’ a book exclusively (can you…….?) and even if you could, displayed in your mile-wide hallway, it wouldn’t wow your billionaire neighbours as effectively as a formaldehyde-encased calf with really big testicles.