FANNING THE FLAMES, part 2; or, IS TAO LIN FOR REAL?

i love picking on the book section of salon.com. and i wish that laura miller had been the one to pen this article on internet literary "it boy" tao lin. or maybe not. because i absolutely agreed with the author's observations on "the next big thing in urban hipster lit," and happen to be one of those twenty-somethings that comes to lin's defense in blog posts (even if just secondarily by my defense of the significance and value of his proteges' style and literary import). indeed, i am "typical of a certain ilk of detached 20-somethings across the country."

sure, i was miffed that daniel roberts got the opportunity to give new york credit as metaphor for the loneliness of the internet generation at a major online venue after i'd already staked that claim for tokyo here. even so, roberts has a dead pin on tao lin's importance, even if he doesn't go so far as to cast his lot with lin and the rest of the alienated online reading public.

shoplifting from american apparel was total quality. and i don't just say so because of the passage set in gainseville, fl in which an onlooker to the primary conversation is heard to advocate the cool of my hometown in almost the same words that i've heard myself use to do the same thing. critics say the writing's bad and lazy, and maybe lin is just the happened-to-be-published voice of another rehash of generational angst, but his conscious and adept mimic of the emotion of common discourse amongst the kids who most commonly discourse online is impossible not to recognize.

halfassed evidence as it may be, my roommate, a self-acknowledged internet savvy twenty-something hipster, hated shoplifting, not because it wasn't a perfect telling of our lives, but because of its bleak implications for the artistic potential of our generation. roberts gets it, acknowledging the same by quoting a reviewer at amazon.com: "If this is the literature of our generation, then I'd rather die in a car crash." be that as it may, it's real, and the readers who are readers seem to be the ones that can appreciate tao lin's prose for the intentional effort that it is. we're happy to laud the accomplishments of older writers who wrote on their own generational angst so long as the significance of their language was only appreciated after their initial writings. all the more reason, i think, to love that lin is telling a generation in its defining as-it's-happening vernacular and being criticized for it as it's actually happening. i'll defer here to madonna as eva perón, vindictively singing at the stuffed shirts idling on the bowling green: "but your despicable class is dead. look who they are calling for now!"

really, though, the salon.com article won me over because it "got" me. roberts offers his opinion on how open tao lin is to accepting online friendships and furthering his financial goals by means of those outlets. i've never bid on any of the "stupid things" lin has up for auction at ebay, but the only reason i rushed to check salon this morning was because lin, my facebook friend, had posted a link to his feature. what's more, roberts' article links to a new york magazine profile on tao lin authored by none other than the sam anderson who wrote the piece on james franco ("is james franco for real?") on which i commentated last night! and what's more what's more, that anderson profile surmises that lin "seems to have planted his aesthetic flag on the treacherous Miranda July fault line between art and cutesiness." didn't i just talk about miranda july in my post on anderson's other article?!?! YOU ARE AMAZING INTERNET! we are all so connected. and, as tao lin reminds us, so awfully alone.

it is, like in my clever fantasies of meeting franco and july, almost as if we could (or somehow already) know these people in real life (whatever you take that to mean). right now i'm thankful, though, that i haven't had the pleasure. i'm not sure how fun it would be for any of the parties involved to have the opportunity to neurotically scorn each other in public when we're all already at such a pervasive and lonely loss for...whatever.