TAO LIN | BLOG

5/29/05

lorrie moore

i like thinking about lorrie moore's career

i will type about each of her books

self-help

some of these stories seem 'crude,' but the tone and voice and whatever are very idiosyncratic, and so it is still 'engaging' to me because there's the feeling that a real person that i feel interested in is trying hard to entertain me or somehow 'connect' with me

'how to become a writer,' the one published in the new york times, is the least crude, probably due to it being published in the new york times

anagrams

very depressing and funny, not as crude

i like the stories in here a lot (before the long novel part)

in the novel part the main character has an imaginary friend and an imaginary daughter

like life

my favorite book by her

'joy' and 'like life; are the two stories in here that were not previously published in literary magazines

who will run the frog hospital?

her novel about teenage girls

the grown-up sections are funny and depressing

the teenage girl sections are sort of television-y

the fat sister commits suicide by hanging herself

birds of america

the stories about feeling depressed i enjoyed

i lost interest a little when she wrote about gay midgets who go on a roadtrip to a vietnam memorial or something and one midget is blind i think

the story that everyone, rick moody and the o'henry people and best american short stories people and everyone, likes a lot is the one about cancer, which i like as much as her other stories, but not any more i don't think, but it is acceptable and respectable to like, and view as 'important,' because of it is about cancer, a real problem

conclusion

people generally like it (deem it acceptable and 'important') when problems are concrete, like cancer or immigration, but do not like it (call it self-indulgent, unimportant, and selfish) when problems are complex, like feeling sad or strange or doomed for no easily explainable reason

but why do people feel depressed?

not because of one single thing like cancer or immigration and not because of being self-indulgent or weak-minded, but because of the cumulative effect of the following, all of which are real things

that we will all die one day, that time moves in one direction and we only get one chance to get things right, that we are conscious things and so are conscious that other people are thinking things that we will never truly understand, that we do not choose to be born and that that first event of birth is the cause to every effect of our lives, so that we probably do not have free-will, that in a world of electrons and protons and neutrons, each particle the same, we are required to arbitrarily differientiate, that... about a million more things

which is more universal, less simplified and maybe 'more important,' (i'm writing now from the point-of-view of people who go around saying that 'stories matter' and that 'tea-towel' fiction, stories where 'nothing happens,' is not as 'important' as 'immigration' stories or 'political' stories) than for example cancer stories or stories about being confused of your identity, if you are 'hispanic' or 'white' or 'asian' or 'asian-american'

so one argument could say that writing about feeling depressed, about 'nothing,' is writing about life itself while writing about cancer (or race-issues or whatever) is writing about the distraction that is sitting there, in front of life itself, distracting people, people like editors of literary magazines, people like award-givers, who forget about that list of things i listed above

because after cancer and after you resolve your cultural identity issues then there are still the other problems i listed above

(though maybe writing about cancer is being more specific, picking one thing to use to talk about it all, yes i am aware of this argument, i'm just thinking things through in this post, not saying that i'm right, not even making a point either, but probably just defending 'tea-towel' fiction)

5/26/05

good morning, midnight by jean rhys

i like jean rhys, i have read her letters, she apologizes for having nothing happy to talk about, then complains, then apologizes for complaining, then makes some jokes and funny observations

many people will probably think 'good morning, midnight' is a self-indulgent book in a bad way which i don't understand

if someone is sad and lonely and very weak and afraid, and that someone withdraws into him or herself, harming no one, afraid of everything, what is bad about that, why call that person self-indulgent and hurt them more and make them hate the world even more?

what about the people who are sad and lonely but not afraid, not weak, who instead of withdrawing into themselves go places and act like assholes and do things that will make it so that they can 'be a man' or be a 'strong, independent woman' and are mean to people and violent and do drugs and are inconsiderate to people but don't care because they aren't afraid or nervous or afraid of hurting people

5/24/05

the easter parade by richard yates

richard yates was a depressed man who drank a lot, his novel 'the easter parade' starts by saying that neither of the two sisters, the two main characters in the novel, would ever be happy

it ends with one sister dead, maybe killed by her husband, and the other sister telling her dead sister's son that it's funny that she's almost fifty and still has not understood anything in her life

i felt a little good after reading this book because i am pretty sure that when i am almost fifty i will also not understand anything in my life, it's good to know that i am not alone in this

i believe that richard yates also, at fifty, the age he was when the book was published, did not understand anything in his life, which is why he kept on drinking and ended up dying alone in a house with a personal oxygen tank

i think he probably wrote the book with sisters instead of brothers because people would have been said things like 'what kind of man cries all the time and doesn't understand anything at age fifty and cries about it'

which somehow makes me want to talk about this article, What kind of Latino am I?, on salon, by daniel alarcon

in the article, daniel is irritated that people want to know about his parents, if his parents are poor latinos or illegal immigrants

I have come to feel I am disappointing certain people when I say I grew up in the suburbs.

i don't know what daniel is talking about, i feel that 'of course he is disappointing some people'

because he writes about people who did not grow up in the suburbs, who did not go to an expensive college, people who are not him

some people are disappointed because, given the choice, and they are given the choice, they would rather read about the third-world from someone who grew up in the third-world than from someone who grew up in the suburbs 'obviously'

It's about making things up, isn't it? Don't all writers -- regardless of race, gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, native tongue, national identity, social class -- don't we all attempt to write about people who are not ourselves? And how boring would it be if we didn't?

i feel like daniel is being naive or something

to answer daniel's questions, 'no, not all writers attempt to write about people who are not themselves' and 'i don't know how boring it would be, probably not as boring as if everyone wrote about things they didn't experience'

richard yates said he only writes about failures, people who fail in life, never about people who are succesful

When we should be judged on the basis of our ability to imagine worlds and empathize with our characters, we are instead reduced to merely representing that which we must surely know firsthand.

he said 'we should' without saying why, he didn't say the effects of not doing so and the effects of doing so and then type things saying why one of those effects is 'better' than the other

'what is he talking about'

'not everyone in the world is the same'

i am a person and i don't read a book to judge and congratulate the writer, but to feel connected to another human being

and i don't feel like i can (as effectively) feel connected to you if you're making up characters who are not you, who have not had the same experiences as you, who are deliberately not you, than if you are writing about yourself

but other people, i know, are different than me

i'm not saying it's 'bad' that you are good at 'imagining worlds'

just that me personally would rather read something by someone who does less of 'imagining worlds'

people are different, they read for different reasons, and it is 'impossible' for anyone to logically 'should' anything unless contexts, perspectives, and goals have been defined