Someone shit talked me

Here is the shit talking.

Tao Lin commented.

Tao Lin talks about shit talking.

Here is my opinion on shit talking.

I don't like to shit talk people on small presses because it is pointless. Why shit talk someone who is trying to sell only a thousand books. That barely has any audience anyway. Why even shit talk someone who is trying to sell 10,000 books.

I don't shit talk unless the person is selling like 500,000 copies and is walking around like Jesus.

If I got a book published at a huge press, shit talk me. That's fine. I'm so damn rich I'll buy a corvette to cheer myself up.

Tao Lin is popular in terms of the Internet but can only afford like some vegan ice cream with his royalties to cheer himself up.

To me when someone gets a book published on a small press they are saying, "I'm writing because I love it. That's all. I'm writing because I like to read. And I like words. I want to tell someone else a story for fun. I want to have fun and do some readings and be part of the online Internet community."

If someone gets an agent, editor, has a giant publisher and is seeking a movie deal they are saying, "This is my job. I'm following rules and trying to make money."

I shit on people all the time where I work for doing a shitty job. Now if you view writing as working and you mess up, than you are not doing your job well. If a person messes up a spreadsheet, or fucks up plastic parts, or doesn't put breaks on correctly at their job. People are going to bitch.

The only other real shit talking I think is allowed is when someone writes something racist or sexist.

There are two main things concerning writing:

Style and content.

Style is two things.

How content is viewed.

Like Yates viewing suburban life existentially as empty and miserable. Or Hemingway viewing war having heroes and James Jones viewing it has horrible.

And how the configuration of the words. Like if it is in monologue form, or first person mixed with third kind of, or long sentences, or short sentences etc.

Content is what the story is about. If the story is about war, or life in the suburbs, the lives of share croppers, or life as a black man in the south in the thirties, the life of pimping or drug abuse etc.

If you don't like or can't relate to the content and style, then you probably won't like the story.

I've come to the conclusion that people really don't choose what art they like. There is some choice. But what is most important is analyzing why someone likes a certain thing, what makes them relate to it.

I personally can't relate to lorrie Moore stories. The lives of the characters, their behaviors, the way they talk don't resemble mine and the world I live in. Do I hate lorrie moore, no. Is she crap, no. I just won't advertise her. That's all.

The only direct comment I have to Eric Shonkwiler is that it isn't Hemingway we are imitating. First Hemingway was imitating two things, a literary influence would be Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound with their short terse sentences. But it goes back farther than to Li Po and Basho and the old school Asian poetry and painting. Also Hemingway was influenced by staring at Cezanne paintings and their simplicity but yet being full of emotion.

The other thing they were influenced by is how Americans talk in short terse sentences. Which I assume they recognized their unique speaking habits when being in Europe and comparing how many words they used to describe something compared to how many a British person used. By being in Europe they could hear there was something unique about their language. And they researched and saw that old dead poets from Asia used similar methods of style.

But I think we are influenced by how we write on the internet, how we write text messages, how Americans talk, we write like we talk.

I do not believe we have the only way of expressing emotions through words. But these short lines are a way. And I've seen a lot of people be able to express themselves more clearly when they stop trying to write a long flourishing line full of abstractions.

I understand as I sit here in my living room alone in silence that my writing does not appeal to a large audience. It is hyper-sensitive, but at the same time insensitive, it has strippers, drug addicts, blue collar people not described as morons, there is never any redemption, and generally hopeless.

People like to be hopeful, they like happy endings or cool endings, I'm sorry I can't give it.

A comment to the comments:

I wrote somewhere on this blog that In Cold Blood was the last GREAT book, and that there are some books that entertain a certain portion of society. But since then we lack something Kierkegaard talked about in Either/Or which is content. A GREAT book requires GREAT content. Homer had wars, Herodotus had wars, Tolstoy had war, Zola had the great minor strike, Hemingway had war, Milton a war in heaven and hell, Dante heaven and hell, Shakespeare the lives of kings and ceasars, Richard Wright had Jim Crow and Civil Rights, Mailer, Jones, and Heller had World War 2. Steinbeck had the depression and dust bowl, Dickens the French Revolution and debters prisons.

There is a correlation throughout that content those writers had, they lived through it, or close to it, and GREAT content involves GREAT human suffering.

Us Americans, even our poor who are fat and play video games all day are not starving and working in the fields or in a dirty factory. I've worked in factories, they are clean and you get a fifteen minute break every two hours and a twenty minute lunch break. Aren't suffering GREATLY.

If our writing, the Bear Parade writings are doing anything, which in my opinion makes them mature is that they point out how our lives are easy. How Americans aren't suffering to the point of being bored out of their minds. And that the biggest events our of lives, which can be seen from our commercials, which are more honest than art now, is that Americans are preoccupied with video games, cell phones, having nice skin, fast food, getting a good nights rest, and having the ability to get boners.

If you try to make American life a great big thematic event you are lying.