Wednesday, May 02, 2007

DAY 3 of EEEE EEE EEEE week: review of Tao Lin and EEEE EEE EEEE

I personally like Tao Lin because he is incorrigible.

He is an incorrigible asshole that entered the literary world.

You would think more writers would be incorrigible but sadly, most are complacent.

This is why i like EEEE EEE EEEE:

Awhile ago some girl emailed me from Reno, i'm not sure who the girl is.

She said something about how Tao and I wrote stories that made everyday life kind of exciting.

That there was a world of people standing amongst that were strange and funny and weird, and if we only looked around we would see that there was adventure and imagination and silliness going on all around us.

I like that:

When he goes on about dolpins and bears, to me that is someone just sitting around imagining things, having fun in their head.

People do that all the time.

Also at the same time his writing isn't like Foer or Eggers or the McSweeney's people.

Tao Lin who grew up upper-middle-class like them but shows a different world.

he shows a world where the people feel and are meaningless.

In Incredibly Close and Extremely Loud the characters are meaningless, but they are given an artificial meaning by the author. He makes their lives mean something when they are just people floating around with money in Manhatten and the kid Oscar had one single bad thing happen to him.

I learned by someone screaming it at me that Foer's dad or anybody related to him didn't die in 9-11.

So, I could assume nothing bad has happened to Foer.

And say Eggers who wrote a book about his parents dying.

Like, poor people parents die too and they are like poor also.

Tao doesn't go that route.

Tao says, "We are upper middle class and meaningless. This is our meaningless life. It is sad and depressing. It isn't miserable. I'm not the writer of miserable books. I'm the writer of depressing books."

This book does the same thing American Pycho does. In Lunar Park Easton-Ellis says that American Psycho is about no matter how much money you can get, the retardation of American life still sucks you up and makes you depressed and makes you feel constrained.

But Tao Lin didnt need to use gore and murder to show it, that scene with the girl and the u-turn sign is enough.

You can really see that upper-middle-class have deranged neurotic problems with that scene.

So it is like, either be poor and worry about your leaky radiator or jail time and having to work your ass off to pay the bills, or get some money and you become neurotic to the point that u-turn signs make you into a small child begging for help.

Note Added:

I think what I'm trying to say is this: People from the upper-classes I've met, above the school teacher/accounting bracket, a little higher than that. Have all been crazy neurotic and crazy alienated.

Like look at the sports they enjoy:

Solo Tennis:
Solo Golf:
Solo rock climbing:
Solo Skiing:

A bunch of weird solo sports that require plastic and not touching anyone.

As opposed to lower-class sports:

Team football:
Team basketball:
Team baseball:
Team hockey:

A bunch of sports that involves group work ethic and at least some touching.

When I think about a golfer standing out there alone holding his little plastic stick, all alone alienated, he has no desire to work with anyone. He has desire to work with his fellow humans to achieve goals. No desire even to tackle them or slide into homeplate smashing the catcher into the ground.

I feel like that sucks.

And Tao Lin's book, really kind of shows me that, that thing that sucks about being alienated and having too much money.

Like in my opinion, from what I've seen:

The happiest people I've met have all made between 40,000 and 60,000 dollars a year.

They had boring jobs that required little thought so when they went home they could grow a garden, participate in fantacy football, go drinking on friday, go see a movie on Saturday, and read for like an hour three days a week.

That seems like a good amount to me, what 40,000 to 60,000 can provide. It provides enough that you still need to work with your fellow humans to survive so you aren't insanely alienated, it provides enough for a good vacation, and since the job doesn't make you responsible for a million things you don't bring work home with you.

Below that if something like the water heater breaks you're fucked, and above that you are either too responsible for things and bring work home with you, and you start not to need other people, and start not to worry over the little things of life, because you can afford big things, and that makes the person alienated and distant from reality.

4 Comments:

At 10:50 AM , Erick said...

eat the rich.

 
At 4:47 PM , Susan Miller said...

and we become the message we preach against. nice.

 
At 5:49 PM , The Man Who Couldn't Blog said...

Thank you for reminding me of the scene in the car with the u-turn. I really liked those bits. They were my favorites parts of the book. They are sad, but incredibly funny.

 
At 8:36 PM , adam said...

Sports. Further evidence I'm in fucked middle ground. I love cycling (when the bike's not dead, like now), but I also love basketball (even though I got into it because I was attracted to my basketball-playing neighbor, who wound up being gay anyway).

 

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