i made this

it references this graph and this graph (the graphs in the two posts below this post)

i made this

an alternate design can be viewed here

books mentioned can be viewed here, here, here, here, here

i made this

new urls, update your links

heheheheheheheeheheheehehe.com

hihihihihihihihihiiihihihihihihihhi.com

Shoplifting from American Apparel (Sept. 2009) promotional post part three

The cover has arrived. It has a special feature courtesy of IBM, with help from Intel and Sun Microsystems.

If you push my name on the cover of the physical book you will be transported to a concrete version of my Wikipedia page. There you may walk around and touch my accomplishments, feeling for contour and texture, while not denying color and composition. Because of this feature the book costs $13,000,000 and will have a small print run. I think six will be available, four of them beta.

One review copy, albeit with limited capabilities, will be made and sent to Bookforum, as per my request (thanks again Dennis).

If you order from Amazon I think Melville House will receive between $3000 and $5,000 whereas if you order from Melville House Melville House will receive in excess of $3,500,000, I think. Thank you IBM (and to lesser extents Intel and Sun Microsystems), I'm really excited.

Goodreads page.

Facebook group.

Previous promotional posts: one, two.

"'Another "'fucking' 'retarded'" blog post,'" I thought in a vague, low-level manner while typing and editing this blog post; then with clarity (and a certain sense of accomplishment actually) upon the blog post's completion.

american apparel has sponsored this blog (see ads on sidebar)

*rare em-dash usage; justified? discuss* this blog post exists to provide a forum of discussion (in the comments section) for american apparel models and products—specifically sasha grey, the four-way stretch high-waist side zipper pant, and the beret *rare em-dash usage; justified? discuss*

*update* the sponsorship has ended (ads are no longer on sidebar) *update*

view muumuu house books on amazon

sometimes my heart pushes my ribs
by ellen kennedy

during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present
by brandon scott gorrell

depending on your worldview you may want to buy from amazon instead of the muumuu house store (if you feel confused which choice most effectively actualizes your worldview comment what you know about your worldview, specifying context & goals, and i will tell you what to do)

if any muumuu house interns currently exist they are encouraged to tag and do other things to the books on amazon

where are my interns

where are you (plural), i know you exist

no i don't

i don't even know if you exist anymore

have you left me, why, and are you coming back

do i need you, can i just get new ones (history)

i would like someone to spray paint hamsters and other animals on buildings for me in the style of the things here (or like to the right)

i would like someone to be arrested while doing intern work and then publish an account of their time in jail in a 'south american dictators' themed issue of 'vice'

i would like powerful interns who become more famous than me five years from now, appearing on the cover of 'people' holding a baby; conversely i would like severely depressed interns who 'cease to exist' less than five months from now

i would like to develop 'highly clinical' relationships with interns that will allow situations where they are drawing things in my room for me to sell on ebay while i comfortably exercise naked less than five feet away

i added myself to american apparel's wikipedia page, i have become my own intern

i remember a time when i had interns that weren't me, it was a different time, in some ways a more hopeful time, amounts of money seemed maybe possible, it felt like i could just sit there and things would happen

perhaps my career is over, because i don't know where my interns are

why am i alone, without interns

i don't even know if humans who view a percentage of their identity as 'tao lin intern' exist anymore, is the 'tao lin intern' extinct? or 'simply dormant,' waiting for this blog post?

i feel i am not promoting myself hard enough, articles about me still mention my writing

in the future when an article is written about me it should not be apparent to the reader that i have written books

new york magazine profiled me

'he looks like he might actually die'

my poetry can be listened to on hipster runoff

tao lin - sometimes i feel like another person is 'insane' [mp3]

tao lin - i want to start a band [mp3] (from this book)

i recorded 31 poems (view) for hipster runoff's radio show on sirius xmu, 'carles' will use an amount of those in 'the following week(s),' he said



prathna lor blogged about bed (scroll down) and other books

my five most played songs on my ipod for half of 2008 are here (scroll down)

new muumuu house information is here

new lorrie moore novel, a gate at the stairs (september, 2009)

Difficult Women by David Plante

Difficult Women by David Plante (1983) is a memoir about David Plante's experiences with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer. I first read it when I was around 20 and reading everything by or related to Jean Rhys. It contains dialogue and many scenes. Each woman has their own section. The first section is about Jean Rhys. It has David Plante in Jean Rhys' hotel room where she lives I think and is in her 80's. David Plante interviews her I think for the Paris Review (the link has someone else's name because David Plante didn't finish it or something) and talks to her and assists her with her autobiography. It shows Jean Rhys drunk for most of it. At the end David Plante pees and leaves the toilet seat up and Jean Rhys goes to pee and falls in the toilet. I think there are some weak struggling noises before she asks for help. I think the last image is of Jean Rhys sitting on the bed in the hotel room with her dress wet with pee and toilet water.

The second part shows David Plante as a young, "aspiring" author (25, I think, with no books published) hanging out with Sonia Orwell (George Orwell's last wife who cared for Jean Rhys when Jean Rhys was old) who is around 40 I think. David Plante says Sonia Orwell is more depressed than Jean Rhys. The word "depressed" is used often, I liked whenever it was used, it seemed funny. I enjoy David Plante's tone, he is mostly detached in his interactions with the three women. He is sexually attracted to men only. He seems passive and funny and afraid sometimes. At one point Sonia Orwell while drunk talks continuous shit about David Plante (saying he can't write, criticizing his life) and David Plante says, in the book, that he just kept saying "yes" whenever a new unit of shit-talking was directed at him and that each time he said "yes" he became more depressed. Sonia Orwell is drunk for maybe 40-70% of her section. She talks at one point in a sarcastic tone about killing herself. Throughout the book David Plante questions his intentions and says maybe 5-10 times that he seems to be hanging out with these people for selfish reasons. Sonia Orwell dies of a brain tumor, I think.

In the third section Jean Rhys and Sonia Orwell are dead. David Plante hangs out with Germaine Greer (David Plante is a little famous at this point, Germaine Greer is very famous) and they drive around and go to Italy I think. Then they are in Oklahoma both teaching at a college. The dialogue in Difficult Women is sometimes very long. The scenes seem very detailed psychologically, like David Plante wrote down what he thought each day, or some days, in a diary or something. I sometimes felt myself "studying" people's facial expressions and movements and thinking about their possible emotions and thoughts. David Plante wrote it in a way that many things were ambiguous. Sometimes someone would make a facial expression or say something that did not seem logical, or seemed to be the effect of something not known to David Plante, and David Plante would not try to assimilate it (except speculatively) into a narrative, or into anything, but would describe it concretely. Sometimes if I have an intense night socially I will later rethink what happened during certain conversations, "viewing" it in slow motion in my head to detect previously unnoticed behaviors, and I had that feeling sometimes with this book.

I would like to read many more books like this, where someone who is currently not severely depressed writes scenes and dialogue of hanging out with various people, focusing mostly on the other people, who are famous and maybe preferably severely depressed. I like reading about famous people who are severely depressed, severely detached, extremely productive, severely unmotivated in life, or a combination of those. If a famous person in a book is severely depressed I feel that it is almost always funny to me, whereas if for example a Yates character is severely depressed it can sometimes feel like something else. I like reading scenes where people are drunk at a party, or just at any kind of party. I would like to read many more accounts of people hanging out with Jean Rhys.

At the end of the book is a glossary type thing. David Plante writes words like "money" or "music" and then writes each woman's views or thoughts about each word. Under "party" it says "Jean loves going to parties. She sits quietly in the centre and people lean towards her and talk. For periods no one speaks to her, and she stares out."

U and I by Nicholson Baker

I read U and I (1992) by Nicholson Baker in college alone in a cubicle, not for school, just because I didn't know what else to do or something. I remember reading it in the cubicle. It is about John Updike's role in Nicholson Baker's life. In the book Nicholson Baker says John Updike is his favorite writer and that he admires Updike's writing a lot. Then at one point he makes a list of what Updike he has read and it is something like less than 10% of Updike (like 10 pages of 5 different books, 50 pages of two books, and one or two complete books). Sometimes Nicholson Baker feels like he and John Updike are friends or something though they have never met. Nicholson Baker talks about how he has fantasized about playing golf with John Updike. In one scene Nicholson Baker gets jealous at a party when Tim O'Brien (who just won the National Book Award, at the time, for Going After Cacciato) mentions that he golfs with John Updike. Nicholson Baker thinks that he, not Tim O'Brien, should be golfing with Updike (Baker had published something like two short stories in the Atlantic at that point in his career). There is a scene where Nicholson Baker goes to McDonald's because there is a penny shortage and McDonald's is offering a free Bic Mac or something to anyone who brings in 500 pennies. Nicholson Baker is excited and feels clever and productive and gets 500 pennies and goes to McDonald's. But then feels really nervous when he gets there and feels stupid while the manager counts every penny even though there is a very long line and talks shit in his head about the manager for being stupid and counting the pennies instead of realizing there is a penny shortage and that it is more important to just get the pennies instead of making the line wait. I remember that scene well. I have a strong image of Nicholson Baker eating the Big Mac. He must have described the Big Mac well or something. I think he still felt clever while eating the Big Mac, the free Big Mac. I forget how that scene related to John Updike. Everything in the book is related to John Updike, I think. The book starts with Donald Barthelme's death and shows Nicholson Baker trying to write a tribute to Donald Barthelme to send to the New Yorker. Nicholson Baker experiences debilitating anxiety about whether or not his tribute will seem like he is just trying to sound better than other people or like he is just trying to get published in the New Yorker. He sort of wants to get his tribute published but he also wants to write a tribute that reads like it doesn't care about getting published or something. Later the New Yorker comes out and he reads the tributes that have been published and sees Updike's tribute and feels, I think, that Updike has defeated everyone else in terms of everything. I remember at one point Nicholson Baker describes how his mother fell down laughing or something after reading a golf simile by Updike that compared the size of something to a shirt, like "a ___ the size of a shirt." I remember at one point Nicholson Baker says he doesn't understand the point of non-homosexual males hanging out with each other. He also misquotes Updike extremely inaccurately many times, from memory, then later looks up the quotations and includes the correct quotations in parenthesis or as footnotes, and I think I thought it was very funny every time that happened. I think for a few Updike quotes he could not find the quote at all in Updike's oeuvre. (I may have written inaccurate things in this post in the same way Nicholson Baker did, I will not fact-check however; this is a disclaimer).