“Such are the perfections of fiction...Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can’t prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness...There is more profit in an hour’s talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said 'Help me,' he’d hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake. You could both cry.” – Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things


Thursday, August 26, 2010

Literary Links: Why All of My Posts Will Now Be about Tao Lin


A quick tip for those wanting to increase your blog traffic: write about Tao Lin. My Tuesday review of his new (and excellent) Richard Yates resulted in, like, a, uh, virtual stampede to my blog after he posted it to his Twitter account. All props to his e-entourage. Anyway, if everyone commits to this plan, we could make this Internet shit 100% Tao Lin all the time (the Tao Linternet?). Who's with me?

So, in the interest of increasing web traffic to this blog:

TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! TAO LIN! 

Anyway, here are this week's literary links:

•  New York Magazine lists its twenty most anticipated books for autumn (how northern-hemisphere centric!). Tao Lin’s Richard Yates gets an honourable mention. Other than that, the only book on here I’m particularly interested in is Tom McCarthy’s C. I’m reading his novel Remainder right now, which is good in a systems-novel kind of way; it’s a must-read for those interested in second-generation cybernetics or Niklas Luhmann. So all five of you should get it.

•  Someone gets upset about something Jonathan Franzen does. Get used to this headline for the next several months. Jennifer Weiner (tee-hee!) calls for ‘non-Franzen novels about love, identity, families’, which accurately describes just about every boring novel published ever, non-Franzen or otherwise. Don’t we have enough of those? I would prefer more non-Franzen novels about demonic polar bears or people staring intently at rocks.

•  The Andrew Wiley v. Publisher standoff has been resolved (sort of). Rich publishing-types and famous authors everywhere can now breathe easily. Phew! I’d love to know the actual royalty deal on this one (and we all know it will be leaked soon enough).

•  A checklist of all Thomas Bernhard’s publications in English. Just in case you were trying to collect them all.

That’s it. If you want more, you’ll just have to read the internet yourself.

3 comments:

genevieve said...

Yess, yess, LET THEM READ INTERNETZ.

I am not surprised by the TL stuff though - he has the Internet all sewn up I think. Very nice blog here, Mr S. And thanks for the Genoways info. I did not particularly like all that sneering about snowflakes myself.

Emmett Stinson said...

Yes, I knew he was 'big' on the interweb, but I was still surprised. If you're really interested in the Genoways stuff, the most detailed article on the subject is here: http://www.readthehook.com/blog/index.php/2010/08/18/cover-tale-of-woe-the-death-of-the-vqrs-kevin-morrissey/

Obviously, Genoways disagrees with this portrait, and people can reserve their judgment as they want, but it sounds like there was way too much fishy stuff going on for there to be nothing to it...

Caleb Powell said...

Tao Lin's Richard Yates...most boring book of 2010 and perhaps eternity.

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