I was made aware of a tweet posted by Tao Lin, a photo of his bedroom. I have to be made aware of tweets because I don’t look at twitter/x anymore. the room is spartan, a mat in the middle of the floor serving as bed, with some bookshelves, makeshift bookshelves, and stacks of books on the floor. otherwise empty. the conversation around this tweet also included a tweet from Lin about his cat being a “volcel,” and another where he urges himself to think less about the “deep state.” if you couldn’t guess, the tenor of this conversation was derisive. I myself said something about how it seems like Lin’s intellectual project in the last 10 years has been to reduce everything he cares about to an equal level of banality, so that his ideas about various foodstuffs are on the same plane as the possibility that there is a “breakaway civilization/deep state/new world order” suppressing anti-gravity technology. I tend to agree with Ezra Pound that an artist is always conveying a hierarchy of values in their work, but when you believe, like Lin does, that there’s no “good” or “bad” in art, only preferences, then having convictions about what’s more or less important is all but impossible.
in this way, tao lin makes it easy to dismiss him as an intellectual. unlike most people, I actually don’t object all that much to the subjects of his various (interchangeable) fascinations. it’s true that vaccines have a bunch of additives in them that probably aren’t good for us (whether that has anything to do with autism, or if autism can be “cured,” is a different question). I also spend too much time thinking about the “deep state.” what I object to is how cursory his engagement with all these subjects is, despite the fact that he can tell you exactly how many hundreds of academic papers he’s read about them.
so I included in this mockery a tweet where he “recommends” earning a living without having a boss. that’s easy to do when your parents paid for your apartment in NYC while you were establishing yourself as a young writer. don’t get me wrong, I also don’t object to him being supported by his parents. I have been so supported at various times in my life as well. but I certainly don’t give people useless advice that makes it seem like it’s easy to escape wage labor.
but I want to save my criticisms of Lin for another time, or not share them at all. if I’m being honest, you wouldn’t be reading this if it weren’t for Tao Lin. 10 years ago I discovered what was by then the dying online “alt-lit” scene, and though I’ve long since tired of the stylistic choices that characterized the movement, I still believe, despite the direction the internet went since then, that the idea you can write whatever you want, without regard for good taste or professionalism, online where an audience can find you directly, a little magical. and whatever disagreements I have with him, or feelings of superiority I might feel over what he chooses to spend his time writing, the fact remains that Lin is almost pathologically dedicated to writing as a vocation. he’s who first showed me how totally committed an artist ought to be, and how far you can get on pure hardheadedness.
the image of a thin mat surrounded by books. a writer’s bedroom, stripped of anything not directly feeding into the Work. if only I had the wherewithal to live so radically devoted.
Can I be as I believe myself or as others believe me to be? Here is where these lines become a confession in the presence of my unknown and unknowable me, unknown and unknowable for myself. Here is where I create the legend wherein I must bury myself.
Miguel de Unamuno, as quoted as epigraph to Black Spring by Henry Miller
The doctrine inculcated since Aristotle that moderation is the virtue appropriate to reasonable people, is among other things an attempt to found so securely the socially necessary division of man into functions independent of each other, that it occurs to none of these functions to cross over to the others and remind each other of man. But one could no more imagine Nietzsche in an office, with a secretary minding the telephone in an anteroom, at his desk until five o’clock, than playing golf after the day’s work was done. Only a cunning intertwining of pleasure and work leaves real experience still open, under the pressure of society. Such experience is less and less tolerated.
Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno
finished Open Veins of Latin America this morning. it’s so dense with information that I had to give up on the idea of taking notes, lest I end up rewriting the whole thing stripped of Galeano’s breathlessly invigorating prose. I’m not treating things like homework any more: all I ever did with homework was put in as little effort as possible so I could get a decent grade. that’s not a good way of actually learning things; almost everything I know I had to relearn after I left school.
I’m trying to be a socially conscious artist. no, a socially conscious person. that’s incredibly obnoxious to admit in that way, but fuck you. and I don’t mean socially conscious in the “In This House We Believe” stuck into the dying lawn way, I mean it in the “stare down the horror of the contemporary post-Hiroshima, post-Auschwitz, post-everything world” way. for real, though. not just by being the smartest in a roomful of people who haven’t heard of Operation Condor. could I actually tell you what happened in Operation Condor? not much beyond “we deposed Allende and backed Pinochet.” which, most people know!
nonetheless, I didn’t see the solution to my pseudointellectualism in taking more notes. it was a problem with attitude. rather than working, writing, reading, out of curiosity and humility, a lot of the time I did it out of self-imposed obligation, as a result of narcissism. this means it was more important to me that I have read than that I actually retain what I read. how little I remember of the many things I’ve read over the years can’t be attributed to smoking weed for a lot of that time, especially now that I don’t smoke weed.
anyway, I find all that boring to post here but I’m relinquishing the need to control the way I’m perceived. unleashing the tight grip on the back of my head so that I fall face first into a pile of dog shit.
Open Veins of Latin America should be required reading (god I hate that phrase. you know the only thing that should be required reading? Moby-Dick) required reading for anyone living in the global capitalist world order. nothing has so clarified my understanding of what “neoliberalism” means as reading Open Veins and watching The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire in the same week.
Open Veins was written right at the dawn of the neoliberal order, and so it’s not directly addressing everyone’s favorite political buzzword. but throughout, Galeano makes clear what the policies packaged under the misleading name “free trade” actually mean: free access to resources for European nations at the expense of colonial lands. an interesting aside highlights this for the Yanquis: during the 1800s, the United States, as we all know, was divided into the industrial North and the agrarian South. in the North, places like Massachusetts maintained strict protectionist policies that helped build their economies, using the proceeds from the robust manufacturing sector to establish economic independence from the European continent. The South, however, traded their cotton and tobacco freely with Europe (and the Northern states); some 80% of all cotton spun in European textile mills came from the Southern United States. this, however, left the South trailing behind the Progress of History, which was headed in a decidedly industrialized, capitalist direction. much like the Latin American countries who depended on proceeds from exports to buoy their economies, the South did not develop the industry it would need to hold its ground against firepower manufactured in Northern factories. of course, in Latin America, this situation came as result of violent conquest and coercive economic policy.
I’m not writing a book report, just wanted to organize some thoughts
my girlfriend moved her work desk out of our back room and into the front of the house, where it’s sunny. I moved some of my bookshelves into the backroom, where my desk is. this morning I wrote. tomorrow I’ll write. and the day after. and the day after.
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