Qui est Tao Lin? Et qu'est-ce que c'est la réalité concrète?

Ce qui suit est un échange avec un économiste/écrivain, sur le sujet de "la réalité concrète." L'échange suivant s'est passé par courriel.

Unaova:

[...] Et moi qu'est-ce que je deviens? Il y a un mouvement littéraire qui me passionne en ce moment à New York, des auteurs jeunes qui écrivent en "réalité concrète" (Tao Lin et al), je les connais, j'assiste à leurs événements de temps en temps, je fais la critique - à part ça, le raffinement de soi habituel m'intéresse de plus en plus ces derniers temps. Pour le reste, je vous dirai […] dès que je saurai.

L'écrivain:

Merci. [....]

Dites moi plus sur la " réalité concrète"!

Unaova:

Tout simplement, le mouvement concrète réalité, guidé par Tao Lin (26 ans), signifie selon moi pas moins que l'avenir de littérature et la délivrance du roman imprimé. Cette déclaration a été déjà faite par The Austin Chronicle dans un article du 9 octobre ("Works like Shoplifting From American Apparel just might be the future of literature[...]") et Tao commence maintenant à recevoir la reconnaissance dans Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, The Guardian (qui parle d'une 'fiction neuve') et globalement il m'a dit que son roman a été traduit vers l'allemand et le japonais et il a fait une tournée en Allemagne pour son livre. Son livre récent, Shoplifting from American Apparel est son 5ème à être publié par la maison d'édition Melville House, à Brooklyn. The Stranger, le journal urbain de Seattle (qui tire son nom de Camus) déclare qu'il est "un révolutionnaire." J'ai toujours pensé que les œuvres de Tao et ses compatriotes étaient la plus grande chose depuis le mouvement Beat pendant les années 50 et les 60s, et cette pensée a été presque confirmé le mois dernier quand la maison d'édition de "Howl" par Allen Ginsberg à San Francisco a invité Tao faire une lecture d'un extrait de son livre.

A mon avis, les associés de Tao Lin écrivent beaucoup moins bien que lui. Mais au moins qu'ils sont unifiés! Pourquoi a-t-il pris 50 ans pour un mouvement unifié de littérature contemporaine? Je ne sais pas.

Ce qu'il écrit est attirant à l'échelle humaine mais avec les éléments qui résonnent avec cette génération. Son style est incroyablement direct, avec peu des descriptions littéraires ou abstraites. Un exemple:

"Sam ate cereal with soymilk. He put things on eBay then tried to guess the password to Sheila's email account, not thinking he would be successful, and not being successful. He did fifty jumping jacks."

Dans ses propres mots pendant un entretien avec The Stranger:

There's just some things that are better conveyed through surface, concrete details. Some feelings I experience are from certain concrete things that are happening. Say if the sun was shining on my face and I think about some other concrete thing that happened a year ago. Those two things combined make me feel a certain way. That's what I wanted to convey when I use only concrete details. I wanted to re-create what I felt in the reader with the accumulation of concrete details. Instead of describing [the feeling] to them.

Est-ce que ce mouvement est le remède pour la faim mondiale? La pauvreté? Je sais que non. Peut-être le plus grand défaut de la réalité concrète est que, tandis qu'elle formule les points de sens, de signification dans la vie, elle ne les relie pas. Mais artistiquement, c'est incroyablement passionnant.

Tao Lin and concrete reality

Alright. Let's try this again.

This is a blog about reality, my favorite topic. It is a blog by a young college graduate living in the United States. If you quote my blog, please refer to it either by using a link or by asking my permission first (unaova at gmail com).

Please allow me now to discuss what this blog is not:

• This is not a "concrete reality" blog, in the style of Tao Lin, Brandon Scott Gorrell et al. Lin (br), Gorrell (tl) and MuuMuu House in Nylon, March 2009
  

But that doesn't mean it can't or won't document concrete reality from time to time. Which begs the first question, what is concrete reality?

In my opinion, concrete reality is best summed up in examples; such as these lines from the poem "Nervous Assface" by Brandon Scott Gorrell:

"I sat in front of a computer before I was supposed to go to your house and I felt anxious.

"I drank two beers and smoked some cigarettes and I felt a little less anxious."

It seeks to be abrasively objective and emotionally blunt. Don't get me wrong - I like it. I've bought the books, as should every sentient person in our age group.

Was the Stranger right to call Tao Lin "a revolutionary?" Yes it was, without a doubt. He, Gorrell, and their Muumuu House compatriots are indeed at the forefront of a revolution - the most unified literary movement since the Beat generation.

Tao Lin's work has already been translated into Japanese and German, and Tao has been promoting them on book tours overseas.

His most recent book is the novella Shoplifting from American Apparel, which was published in September from Melville House.
It is undoubtedly the most exciting expression of his work so far.

At best Tao's work is a dreadful torrent, brilliantly compiled, of common experiences that resonate with humanity and with our generation ("Do you think in five years the national media will create a stupid term like 'blogniks' to describe us?" "He put his arm under the back of Kaitlyn's neck and she turned toward him putting her arm across his chest."); at its worst (which is merely on occasion) it is random and flat -- on the back of the Melville House copy of Shoplifting, the jacket quotes a single line from the book: "THE INMATE WITH A MOP HELD BACK THE INMATE WITHOUT A MOP."

I studied that line for a moment and then laughed out loud, first at its directness and then at its implication. How symbolic, I thought! The haves and the have-nots! How germinal, how minimal, how essential, how distilled, how politic, how utterly real! When I read the novella, though, I found that the jacket of the book had misquoted its own contents. The quote really reads: "The inmate without a mop held back the inmate with a mop." There is no double meaning. Such is concrete reality. While it duly articulates the points of meaning in life, it does not connect them.

The ultimate goal of this movement, however, is perhaps not to connect meaning in our lives. It grasps and japes at something more fleeting, and infinitely seedier: attaining happiness. In a world where "being good" exists simultaneously with ripping items off the racks at stores and leaving with them, perhaps there can be nothing beyond the concrete and the emotional.

So I will distinguish between the two by calling my style "essential reality." Essential reality expresses the world as it exists, drawing thematic unity from its iterations, rather than avoiding it completely. Does essential reality - or even reality, for that matter - have what it takes to spark a new literary revolution? Decidedly not. But it may be the only view from whose heights we can gain any perspective on the concrete.

What is this blog?

[post deleted]

summary of deleted post: I basically rambled about the difference between "concrete" and "essential reality," as I called it. Thanks for tuning in.


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