EEEE EEE EEEE Week DAY 1.
All this week will be EEEE EEE EEEE week on this blog.
I have read EEEE EEE EEEE on microsoft word, and on paper.
They are good both ways.
Tao Lin wrote a poem called Ugly Fish Poem, it is here.
I think this poem is beautiful.
I've read this poem many times.
my favorite lines are:
"i have lain on the ocean floor alone at night on my birthday
and felt very aroused and ugly"
"i have made small noises of despair in the presence of those i respect most
i have suffered unseen in the nooks of jetty park
and i have swam unseen"
"felt the generosity of loneliness"
I like more lines.
But that is enough.
There is something about Tao Lin that isn't like Eggers, Foer, Pressl, etc.
you get the impression he isn't trying to impress anyone.
he is far too alienated to care what the world thinks.
I hope, if life is remotely fair, that EEEE EEE EEEE gets into a lot of hands and changes the current mode of clever for clever's sake, to someting more thoughtful, something that says to the young writers, "Quit trying to be fucking clever! And just write about life!"
posted by Noah Cicero @ 9:42 PM
8 Comments
8 Comments:
Yes, Noah I agree 100%. I read with tao on Sunday, and I left completely convinced of his greatness.
Tao wore a bear suit and read poetry in a tea shop.
Tao did jumping jacks out in the street.
Tao broke into a gym next door and got onto the exercise bike, and did some sit ups.
and then he read his poems.
It was beautiful.
he made my hangover go away for a while.
Maybe, but he's an ass. He said he was better than me because he's vegan and I'm not.
how does a poem about a little alienated fish represent a young writer that's not trying to be clever and is just writing about life?
Or stories about retarded moths? Or any of the weird, anthropomorphized animals in the Lin menagerie?
It must be a cold day in Hell, because I'm actually agreeing with "asshole."
I read Eeeee Eee Eeee. Slogged my way through every last page of fluff about Andrew and Joanna, even enduring the parts about Elijah Wood, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Salman Rushdie (whose first really successful book, Midnight's Children, is, in my opinion, still the benchmark of magical-realist fiction, not to mention historical fiction or any of the other categories [sci-fi, fantasy, etc.] it finds time to occupy). I still can't figure out the point.
If there's something literature needs, it's a defining statement about each piece. Usually a title helps with that-- Joyce's "Counterparts," for example, with its brutal realism, serves as a "counterpart" to the idealization of Ireland in English-language literature of the time. "Eeeee Eee Eeee," however, fails to even go into Andrew's mind a little bit as far as titles go, and the rest of the book is just about as devoid of meaning as the rest.
In fact, Tao's characters wind up getting more unrealistic as time goes on. Not only is the President of the United States, as depicted, utterly faceless at first-- when he's obviously another powerful asshole, and deserves to be treated seriously-- he winds up being, quite possibly, Jesus by the end.
I wish I was kidding. But it happens that way. It's not even wrong and useful, a la Céline, it's just wrong. Bad enough that a piece of literature doesn't make a coherent statement about its time-- "Eeeee Eee Eeee" is just a dolphin's squeal of joy-- but Tao's having the ability to get something incoherent and blatantly false into the mainstream, frankly, makes me a little less happy about the world.
wow.
I wouldn't go that far. I just took exception to the idea that Tao Lin writes about life.
Because he doesn't.
I think if someone's writing about anything other than life in some easily recognizable way, they're not actually writing something that's particularly good. Take "Dubliners." Those stories are not necessarily about the *readers'* lives, since the distribution's gone beyond early 20th-century Dublin, but there are things that are fairly common experiences for *humanity--* the search for dignity under oppression, the death of romance, etc.-- in clear language. I read "Dubliners" before I knew about, say, "Finnegan's Wake," let alone that the latter was this "revolutionary" piece of literature, and I'm convinced there are still more ideas in any of "Dubliners'" stories than there are in "Finnegan's Wake."
I'm just agreeing with you-- as writers, we need to stick to reality.
It depends - if the language is interesting enough, I feel like it justifies whatever the writing is actually 'about'. For example, I can read Raymond Chandler because I like his prose style, even though I have no interest in detectives. In contrast, I might actually be interested in a lot of the subject matter Raymond Carver writes about, except that I dislike his 'minimalist' prose style. James Joyce is another example: while I don't have any interest in early 20th century Dublin, I like the construction of his sentences and his word choices. Something like Ben Marcus, most of his writing is based entirely on syntactic rhythm rather than the internal coherence of the words - it's experimental in that it doesn't make literal narrative sense (at least conventionally), but the flow seems to 'force' the reader to assign some kind of meaning. That sounds pretentious, but if you look at some of the examples you can see what I mean. It's like repeating a poem in another language or singing a song in another language, you can still rock out to it even if you don't know what it 'means.'
I don't think just stating 'the truth' is enough, if it isn't phrased beautifully enough. If I want to get 'the truth' I can look at a journalist or the news or something; if I'm reading a book I want to get sentences I can repeat in my head a bunch of times, it's like frozen music that you have to play yourself. (I'm not saying writing is or should be like music, I'm just saying my mind repeats it in the same way).
I think Finnegans Wake is more like a debugging code or instruction manual or something; if you get tired of reading "clear" and "logical" sentences like journalists use and Naturalist writers use, you can pick it up and flip through it and feel a bit better, maybe.
i think tao lin does write about life. for example, there are things going on in my brain right now. things that may seem inconsequential or 'meaningless'. mostly they are reactions to the world around me + things already in my brain, or whatever. i might make these things into a story, and who knows what form that story will take, but how would it not be about life? it seems like it is impossible for something not to be about 'life' if it is written in a language on paper.
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