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.