marco roth, chapter one
i'm writing a novel called 'marco roth' (summary)
in real life marco roth is an editor of n+1 magazine, in 'marco roth' marco roth is a human being who is in a relationship with dakota fanning and internet friends with haley joel osment
[read at the mississippi review; *update* i changed 'marco roth' to 'tao lin']
that is chapter one
marco roth is going to behead me probably on n+1 television, that is okay
here are two drawings of marco roth (naked and with n+1 t-shirt and n+1 totebag)
i saw him once at an n+1 party and this is what he looks like
the drawings are from memory so might not be completely accurate
in real life marco roth is an editor of n+1 magazine, in 'marco roth' marco roth is a human being who is in a relationship with dakota fanning and internet friends with haley joel osment
[read at the mississippi review; *update* i changed 'marco roth' to 'tao lin']
that is chapter one
marco roth is going to behead me probably on n+1 television, that is okay
here are two drawings of marco roth (naked and with n+1 t-shirt and n+1 totebag)
i saw him once at an n+1 party and this is what he looks like
the drawings are from memory so might not be completely accurate
*warning* the benjamin kunkel who commented in the comments section is not the 'real' benjamin kunkel
12:55 AM
52 Comments:
I can't stop laughing. Thank you.
Steve Schirra, B.A.
Can you sell Marco Roth t-shirts on CafePress please? I want the naked one on a t-shirt. Thanks.
While on my way to Rome, I stopped off in Oxford for several weeks at my mother-in-law’s. If you set out to imagine a don’s house, it would look a lot like hers. Three stories packed with books, from the orderly shelves of the study where she keeps those closest to her heart and work to the half-sorted heaps and two-deep shelves of the landings where several lifetimes of reading are stored: hers, her ex-husband’s, her children’s. As I went up and down the stairs I’d often stop for a browse, wondering whether to take the Life of Johnson down to breakfast or an undiscovered author up to bed (Rose Macaulay, Barbara Pym, a whole canon of British fiction from every phase of postwar life). It was in this way, on an earlier visit, that I first began to love Iris Murdoch. This time I was caught by a name more familiar to Americans: Edmund Wilson. His Europe without Baedeker was propped next to some other old Hogarth Press editions, a fine Henry Green with curious art deco cover, some Virginia Woolf. Wilson, Edmund is a strange name to find in a house more accustomed to Wilson, Angus and Wilson, A.N., but there he was.
The book is a collected series of essays that Wilson wrote for the New Yorker during the months just before and after V-E day in the spring and summer of 1945. He visited London, Rome, Paris, Greece and points in between, much in the manner of the classical “Grand Tour” of Americans and Englishmen of the 19th century; hence the allusion to the bible of English-speaking travelers in the title. But as the back of the book announces, “He had no need of his Baedeker for the second world war had just ended and ancient ruins were replaced with a whole heap of new ones.” Wilson knew Europe before the war, but his accounts are almost entirely free of nostalgia or even acknowledgment of the past. He wasn’t there to write a guidebook, and the guidebook genre makes a clumsy frame for what became a furious polemic against the English at the moment when only a few red rays of Empire remained. Every chapter details the petty hypocrisy of the British officials, the hash they make of everything they occupy, their casual racism, and also the destructive realpolitik of the little wars in Greece and Yugoslavia that followed the great war.
Better than a guide, though, Wilson had introductions. He seems to have done pretty much as he pleased: his Europe is populated by the officials he meets, Roman aristocrats, Russian emigrÈs, and, oh yes, plenty of prostitutes. It’s hard to imagine that today’s New Yorker would publish the journals of, say, a fifty-year-old sex tourist in Amsterdam, Moscow, and Thailand, but Wilson describes such encounters as naturally as he might a play attended or a new writer discovered. He picks up prostitutes whenever he feels “at a bit of a loose end,” whether in London, Paris, Rome, or Naples. At least his behavior certainly seems better than that of the GIs he sees “taking” women against the walls of the Via Veneto. With the manners of an old-fashioned gentleman, he pays his dolls extra to stay and talk, or takes them out for a nice dinner in a black market restaurant. He interviews one French prostitute he picks up in London who tells him (of course) that the English are bad lovers and the Americans among the best: “They were rather bruyants, but then they were ‘loin de chez eux’ and no doubt behaved better at home; and, in any case, they were gay to go out with and really liked to have a good time.” Who wouldn’t be seduced now, reading this vision of our greatest generation in action!
Above all, Wilson writes as an American in Europe at the dawning of the age of American world domination. He declares the new world order in which the formerly provincial powers of Russia and the US move to the center: “The little European nations, among which England now must be counted, have fallen into the provincial role in relation to the larger societies of the Soviet Union and the United States.” He recognizes that the Second World War brought an end to European nationalism and praises the superior organization of Russian and American life that seems to push them toward his imagined social democratic utopia. As much as he recognized the defects of Stalinism, Wilson remained both a russophile and even a bit of what we’d now call a patriot.
+ + +
Sixty years and a lot more separate me from Wilson and Wilson’s Europe. For one thing, I’m not on assignment or gifted with the mystical passpartout of something called a “war correspondent’s insignia.” I’m younger than Wilson was when he left, less established, and consequently as riven by self-doubt as the other was buoyed by being Edmund Wilson. (There’s a hilarious scene in Wilson’s travels when he visits ancient George Santayana in Rome and is briefly nonplussed to realize that the old philosopher has never read a word of his.) And, in a way unimagined by the men of Wilson’s heroic age, I occupy a curious subsidiary role, that of faculty spouse. Here at the American Academy of Rome they call us by the polite but uncanny name of “fellow travelers,” though no one is condescending.
Europe has long since been rebuilt. It moves in fits and starts toward a greater unity and a federal system closer to that of the United States than the former Soviet Union. Nationalism has never really gone away, though, especially in Italy, where it’s enjoying a resurgence of sorts under the bombastic “Forza Italia” party of Berlusconi. And, in what is perhaps the greatest difference between Wilson’s time and mine, when my plane touched down in Rome the new ruins were all behind me, in New Orleans. At no time since the end of the cold war has American dominance seemed more precarious, our superior attitudes more shambolic, our government so manifestly incompetent and indifferent to human suffering. Although a nominal liberal, I’m no less implicated in this indifference than our president and his cronies. In my newfound European refuge, I too have turned my back on my fellow citizens, as I lead my good life as a strange kind of American courtier, or, as I prefer to think of it, a member of a monastic order of artists, writers, intellectuals, and academics who, like the medieval monks of long ago, live within a walled cloister, its security assured by those captains of industry who still feel enough pricks of conscience to wash their money in the blood of culture.
Under the loggia in the Rome Academy courtyard, it’s easy to feel a sense of distance. The walls are decorated with fragments and ruins of old Europe, bits of late classical and medieval sculpture, inscriptions and graffiti from old Rome, and in this atmosphere I can slip into the long perspective. Is New Orleans our Pompeii? Pompeii too was a pleasure-dome kind of place, of brothels, circuses, and strange gods of the dark and decadent east. Its inhabitants knew they lived under the shadow of disaster, and yet were unable to save themselves or be saved. The end of the city was felt as a divine judgment and a crack in Roman imperial triumphalism. The analogical leaps come easy when you live in the ceaseless presence of the past, and forget the anxieties of the present only to give shape to them in work. People look for patterns. A guy I knew at college looks me up on the internet and sends me an email with a link to his new artworks. Among them, a poster: “It is of utmost importance that we repeat our mistakes as a reminder to future generations of the depth of our stupidity.” Santayana, vanished from Rome, is not amused.
Among the Rome Prize fellows is is a woman researching the persecution of private Christian worship after Constantine’s conversion; she began her presentation with the AP photograph of the Ten Commandments being wheeled out from the Alabama courthouse. Is it really possible to understand the roots of our own church-state separation by looking at how the worship of the father who sees in secret was forced into the open? There’s also one of those excellent Indiana Jones–inspired archeologists whose frat-boy persona provides cover for a curious mind. He’s working on the Aurelian wall, a part of which runs through and under the academy property. “Why was it built so far from the center of the city?” he asks, “What were the late Romans afraid of?” His thesis: the building of walls is itself a sign of decline. A security wall is a symptom of collective insecurity. The barbarians are already in, so walls are built to pretend to keep them out. These academic historians are our augurs; they sift the entrails of the past to know what the future has in store for us, and only a few superstitious types will be willing to put up with the trappings and mumbo-jumbo of Foucault and Bourdieu long enough to heed their warnings. Someday, someone will ask why the Americans built that chain-link, barbed-wire monstrosity so far from what turned out to be the new border of NorteAmerica.
In describing Allen Ginsberg, it's tempting to parody "Howl's" long lines, hypnotic repetitions, and frequent dashes of obscenity: lifted up by madness to escape madness, transfigured by grass, benny, hashish, LSD, H, Wilhelm Reich orgone, Rimbaud, rough sex, a Denver cocksman—not-so-secret begetter of his verses—self-proclaimed genius born to challenge Authority, middle fingers raised high in pursuit of life and liberty, happiness and death, destroyer of worlds, prophet, nudnik, beatnik, freak: Who came out of Patterson like a mangy young lion, roaring out the fall of America, offspring of a schizophrenic communist and a socialist poet. Who shipped out with the Merchant Marine, a slender kid and scared, to Africa, dreams of the blues, sex before AIDS. Who dreamed "mountains of cock and canyons of ass." Who wrote to Ezra Pound and was told, "You people don't know the meaning of fatigue."
I could go on, but Pound was wrong: Jews know fatigue, especially Jewish readers. They also know about eye strain. Fifty years after "Howl," Ginsberg's poetry often bores on the page. Gary Snyder described "Howl" as a ponderous list that Ginsberg, when he read it aloud, somehow managed to hoist up and fly overhead as gracefully as a kite. It's a wonderful image that captures Ginsberg's sublimity and the sense that his poetry, more than a honed craft, was really an act of indefatigable will.
But a will to what? Certainly something more than to write poetry for art's sake. In 1957, while touring around Europe with Gregory Corso, Ginsberg crashed a party at W.H. Auden's Ischia getaway in order to bring the older poet his unique gospel of American freedom—poetry that tried to make stuff happen. He recited Whitman:
I celebrate myself and sing myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
James Campbell, in his succinct and excellently composed history of the Beat Generation, has Auden replying, "When I hear that, I feel I must say, 'Please don't include me.'" Ginsberg, according to Campbell, called him an old fool and added, "Discouraging the revolutionary young. That's not the right spirit for an older poet."
A truncated, sanitized version of the story, complete with the younger poet's later regrets, is included in Bill Morgan's new, hagiographic life of Ginsberg. Morgan even takes the first line of the Whitman quotation as his title. Out of Whitman's context and in ours, the sentence suggests that Ginsberg's was primarily a will to fame, or, more precisely, "celebrity." From the numerous anecdotes Morgan has culled from Ginsberg's journals, there's no denying that fame-hunting and approval-seeking were parts of Ginsberg's character. Dropping in on Auden was only the beginning. Later in his life, he'd also seek out Bob Dylan and John Lennon and confess his wish to be a rock star. Most Americans today probably have no problems swallowing the idea of Ginsberg as a sort of Jersey, Jewish Elvis of poetry, even as doing so dilutes the meaning of Ginsberg's life and work into the dumbest American feel-good story of all, Horatio Alger by other means. He made it, so whatever he did was good in itself.
Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky in Mexico City, 1956
And yet, most people asked to riff on the meaning of 1950s and 1960s "counterculture" will think first of the will to freedom. For those of us who were born and grew up in the aftermath of the countercultural revolution and look back on it with the eyes of uneasy inheritors, it's no longer clear what sort of freedom this was. What began as a kind of rebellion, the freedom from a repressive society that wouldn't let you be gay, take drugs, write free verse, or speak obscenities in public, that didn't want you to be, in Kerouac's words, "a genius all the time," got transformed into a revolution based on a notion of positive freedom: everyone was free to be gay, do drugs, have sex with multiple partners, travel round the world, write expressionist poetry, chant mantras, and play the bongos (Ginsberg did all of these). The ideal was to turn experience back into something like Blake's "organized innocence," a paradise on earth. In practice, this sense of freedom also became restrictive. It turned out that you were only truly free if you did those things and had precisely those experiences. So, in retrospect, the 60s seem like a terrible period during which young people were torn between the two versions of cultural conformity that still divide the American landscape. Kerouac's line, "the only ones for me are the mad ones," turned from a gorgeous hyperbole of the negative, anti-authoritarian phase of Beat culture into the "only" of a restricted club. You had to be "mad" in the right ways to be free.
Ginsberg often resided in the gray area between negative and positive freedom, never wholly comfortable with the outlaws or the progressive utopians. One of the last poems he wrote rounds on the poetry slam culture he helped create:
Talk real fast
till your time's passed
Sound like a clown & then sit down.
Listen to the next
'cause she listened to you. 'Tho all she says is
Peek-a-boo-boo.
This ambivalence, slight and whimsical here at the end of his life but almost total at other times, is what makes him a compelling figure, and the depiction of the ambivalence is what makes Morgan's biography fascinating despite his abominably leaden writing and obsession with celebrity.
Ginsberg on the roof of his apartment building near Columbia, 1947
Consider the infamous "Fuck the Jews" episode that led to Ginsberg's suspension from Columbia University in 1946. Kerouac had spent the night in Ginsberg's bed, passed out drunk. Ginsberg had a crush on him, one of the first of many crushes on straight, all-American men. He also wanted his room cleaned and the cleaners had been ignoring him, perhaps because he was Jewish. So he traced "Fuck the Jews" on his dirty window, which faced out over the center of campus. It was a joke, he claimed. Of course it was also a plea for attention and a deliberate provocation to an administration that, like the administrations of other Ivy League schools at the time, remained uneasy about admitting Jews. Up came the cleaners, sure enough, along with the deans, and they found Kerouac—already barred from campus as an undesirable influence—in Ginsberg's bed.
Diana Trilling portrayed the incident as an expression of Ginsberg's Jewish self-hatred, a symptom of his mad, mixed-up mind. But so much depends on the meaning of "fuck." What the late 1940s mind read as an obscenity and a sophomoric instance of Dadaism, a mere challenge to authority designed to bring out the repressive nature of authority, could also be read as "Make Love Not War," 1960s style ahead of its time. Ginsberg did very little conscious writing about the Holocaust, and Jews were certainly not a topic among the Beats, except for Kerouac channeling his parents' antisemitism, but he wasn't oblivious to it. Don't kill the Jews, fuck them instead, and more importantly, Jack Kerouac, fuck this Jew.
It's worth dwelling on Ginsberg's graffito because when you're the kind of poet who wants to make poetry that sounds like ordinary America and breaks down the distinctions between speech, thought, and writing, there's really no distinction between accidental jokes, the random "American sentences" Ginsberg jotted down, and poetry. The imperative "fuck me"—really, "love me,"—stands behind Ginsberg's poetry. There's the will to love and be loved. Yet erotic love, like poetry, at least in the Western tradition, is notoriously not a matter of will, at least not the naked will. This is also the distinction between seduction and rape. Ginsberg could not command Kerouac's love, and the imperative is a particularly bad grammatical mode to seduce someone with. Ginsberg understood this intellectually but often fell into the mistake. He began his long open marriage with the essentially straight Peter Orlovsky with an act that Ginsberg himself acknowledged as a sexual assault. He always came on too strong. An early poem, "In Society," describes a "fluffy female" who immediately tells Allen she doesn't like him. Ginsberg records his reply, but also his self-consciousness, "'Why you narcissistic bitch! How can you decide when you don't even know me,' I continued in a violent and messianic voice, inspired at last, dominating the room." How quickly the need to be liked turns into a quest for domination.
Ginsberg reading at Royal Albert Hall, 1965
Apart from sadomasochism—and Ginsberg had his share of that too—the imperative aspect of love also presides over Western monotheism. Jehovah is the original demanding, destructive lover, forever requiring sacrifices and withdrawing at his horror of misplaced sacrifice. The prophetic language of Israel that Ginsberg took as his model for the prophetic language of his America is also full of jealousy and betrayal. The softer Christian model of love turns out to be no less demanding for poor humanity. Recognize that Jesus died for love of you, or go to hell. Ginsberg's off-and-on fascination with Buddhism, culminating in his 1972 official conversion, looks like an attempt to cut through the problem of will and love once and for all, because Buddhism teaches non-attachment to the self and harnessing the will in order to negate the will. William Burroughs, Ginsberg's longtime friend and mentor, and the only lover Ginsberg seems to have spurned, recognized most clearly the way that Beats turned to Buddhism as an escape from the problems of love and self love. Already in 1956, he wrote to Kerouac, warning him that Westerners were using Buddhism as a way of opting out, like psychic heroin. "We must learn by acting, experiencing, and living, that is, above all, by Love and by Suffering," he told him.
Although Ginsberg rejected Burroughs, he never turned away from eros, nor from suffering. Buddhism, in his practice of it, turned into organized sublimation, "a way of loving every sentient being," and it was crucial to Ginsberg's global politics. He made no distinctions between starving Bengali refugees and the victims of the U.S. war on drugs, and he wrote about them both. Buddhism also provided a way of memorializing his friends. By helping to establish Naropa University and its "Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics," Ginsberg put his own spin on American Buddhism, ensuring the Beats' names survived in blessed memory.
Ginsberg's commitment to memory does seem like the most persistent aspect of his Jewishness. From "Howl" forward, his poetry functions as a "book of life," that keeps the names of his friends and family alive when they might otherwise be forgotten: "...Holy Huncke, Holy Burroughs, Holy Cassady...." That "footnote to Howl" is both aggressive promotion of the Beat coterie and a mitzvah. Likewise, "Kaddish," Ginsberg's poem for his mother, rewrites Hebrew liturgy as an all-American prayer, specifically personal, yet aimed at the multitude. Jewishness, however, was always less important to Ginsberg than mystical One-ness.
Yet, for all the "Ah-Oms," One-ness seems to be almost the only thing Ginsberg never achieved. Reaching the end of Morgan's Life, it seems better to celebrate Ginsberg for his numerous contradictions, his mainly intuitive awareness of them, and his persistent exploration of them—the quest rather than the fulfillment. In the ways most of us recognize, he failed to become a "self," or a stable body, but, then again, not many people do. With his determination to loosen everything and live all he could, Ginsberg did become, in astronomical terms, something very much like a star.
Salman Rushdie’s new novel begins in Los Angeles:
"the beautiful came to this city in huge pathetic herds, to suffer, to be humiliated, to see the powerful currency of their beauty de-valued like the Russian rouble or Argentine peso; to work as bellhops, as bar hostesses, as
garbage collectors, as maids."
So far, so good. A fair observation enhanced by a sharp simile about the ravages of the free market in the age of globalization leads to a melancholy awareness of a local injustice, even if it is only about beautiful people. We can forgive the slight redundancy of the “huge herds” and the transferred “pathetic” as part of a gregarious narrator’s excitement at the spectacle of so much beauty undone. But he goes on: “The city was a cliff and they were its stampeding lemmings. At the foot of the cliff was the valley of the broken dolls”. Apparently LA has an equally inflationary effect on prose. The mash of analogies seems a high price to pay for an allusion to Jacqueline Susann’s novel (or the 1967 cult film starring Sharon Tate, or maybe Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert’s camp remake of 1970, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). But if you have never heard of any of these, or even if you have, you are left with nothing but a good paragraph gone bad.
Are these representative lines just lazy writing, or ought we to see this as a willed style? Isn’t the deliberate artificiality, the indiscriminate blend of hyperbole, political events and late-night satellite films what “stream of consciousness” sounds like nowadays? We are no longer shocked to learn that writers think about sex and toilets, like everyone else; now they must admit that they spend as much time in the media saturation bathroom as everyone else. Anything less, it seems, would be snobbery.
But is there a connection between these populist antics and Rushdie’s politics? Everyone knows that Rushdie is also a political novelist, an early veteran of the current clash between Islam and the West, and it was as a public figure that he was asked to comment on the elusive connections between the art of the novel and our latest war. Over the course of his Tanner lectures at Yale University in 2002 (published in Step Across This Line), Rushdie could be heard arguing with himself about the responsibilities of a novelist to newly vulnerable and frightened audiences eager for consolation: “Is it time, instead of endlessly pushing the envelope, stepping into forbidden territory and generally causing trouble, to start discovering what frontiers might be necessary to art rather than an affront to it?”. Unsurprisingly, Rushdie’s stated answer was no, though his defence of the transgressive value of art was surprisingly muted, echoing Auden’s defensive despair. “Artworks, unlike terrorists, change nothing”, he concluded, thereby serving notice that he would not be changing anything any time soon.
If Rushdie really believes that novels make nothing happen, he concedes far too much for the sake of his own freedom. True, a work of art does not become valuably subversive simply by trying to be so, but novelists may change our lives and this isn’t just humanist bromide: Azar Nafisi’s recent memoir, Reading “Lolita” in Tehran (2003), shows how a Muslim woman in Iran can find reading Nabokov and Henry James as valuable, liberating and counter-cultural an experience as reading The Satanic Verses.
In any case, the whole canting cult of pre- and post-9/11 novels could be said to spring from one odd misreading of Virginia Woolf’s remark about human nature changing on or about December 1910. If some human consciousnesses have changed in the interim, it is thanks to Woolf and not to terrorists. Their weapons of fear, surprise and fanatical belief in whatever they happen to believe have remained fairly constant from Gavrilo Princip to Osama bin Laden. Rushdie’s defensiveness, in Step Across This Line, is a symptom of a confusion that also mars Shalimar the Clown.
On one side is the author as the knight of free speech, someone whose style, by its very audacity, makes tyrants quake and makes critics, those petty tyrants of the literary world, pound their keyboards in envious frustration. On the other, stands the novelist as a chronicler of injustice, a person whose heroic status derives from an ability to make us feel and understand the distress of people who are too far away or too hidden from our everyday life. Regardless of the proliferation of news reports, or even because of it, the novel has a role to play in enlarging our awareness of suffering and its causes. These two roles for authors are not necessarily incompatible, but, in Rushdie’s case, they have become so. We may blame the effects of the fatwa, or the premature canonization of Rushdie’s style by university academics as a revolutionary performance of anti-nationalist, anti-fundamentalist, counter-hegemonic “hybridity”, though the flaw may have been there from the beginning, a frayed rope straining to cross an abyss between pleasure and responsibility.
That Rushdie now prefers the pursuit of a signature style to tragedy is itself a kind of tragedy. Shalimar the Clown is nearly that much needed thing: a tragic novel about the growth of a terrorist’s mind in one of those rogue regions of the world. Wasn’t it supposed to bring us the news about the fate of Kashmir, the origins of global Islamic terrorism and the resentments caused by the careless lust and greed of great powers? We find it so hard to grasp the motives for suicidal violence that any attempt to imagine them would be welcome. Instead, the novel is by turns satire, old-fashioned revenge romance and Hollywood action movie, and it seems to flaunt its determination to put as much padding as possible between readers and feelings.
In case you weren’t already clued in by the title, or a foil to the character named “Max Ophuls” – after the quirky director of self-aware films like Lola Montès and La Ronde and, in a bit of clever concealed doubling, a bit of an O’fool himself – you, dear reader, have been taken to the many-ringed circus of Rushdie’s imagination. The omniscient narrator plays the ringmaster and cracks the whip and the motley array sets off with trumpets blaring. Style is action and vice versa. The deliberate campiness and flight from character into archetype, which were so prominent in Rushdie’s turn away from politics to beauty and talent in The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Fury (2001), have intensified, as has his pursuit of that elusive beast, the great global novel. The quixotic quest for a new hybrid literary form seems to pit Rushdie in a rebellion against the history of the novel itself, a regression to Arthurian romance and staged melodramas
that draw more from Dryden’s The Indian Emperour and Aureng-Zebe than from any of his great nineteenth-century precursors: Dickens, Scott, or Thackeray. The global novel must appeal to the greatest number; the modern masses of Mumbai, New York, London and their provinces demand spectacle, so let us give the people what they want. Since they all seem to want to watch movies, novels should become as much like movies as possible, all the while winking in homage to the new master art form.
Rushdie’s characters also compete with the gilded and glamorous. They are stars and they are described in breathless superlatives. No longer do they have personalities, they have résumés. In LA lives a beautiful young woman called India. In her spare time she watches pornography (to help her fall asleep), makes documentary films, and practises the arts of self-defence; not only does she box, she knows kung-fu, not only does she know kung-fu, she is a fair shot with the pistol, not only does she shoot guns, she is a regular Diana on the archery range. (We learn all thisin a breathless paragraph.) The young India was rescued from a wicked stepmother (Lord Lucan’s neighbour, we discover in one of several improbable asides) and a one-paragraph self-destructive adolescence of attempted suicides, hallucinogens, heroin-addiction and prostitution under
a Jamaican pimp with a white fedora. The rescuer, her father, is an odd blend of Henry Kissinger and Nabokov’s Van Veen. Max Ophuls is aristocratic, impeccably mannered, with a weakness for beautiful women, and he is also a former American ambassador to India who helped arm the Taliban; before that he was an economist and one of the architects of the Bretton Woods agreement, and before that, a member of the French Resistance. Here is a list of his accomplishments in that line, the last three again from a single condensed paragraph: flying a plane across enemy lines to earn the sobriquet “the flying Jew”, master forger of Old Master paintings and passports, rescuer of
Jewish children, “but perhaps the greatest contribution Max Ophuls made to the resistance was sexual . . . . He was the man who seduced the Panther, Ursula Brandt”. Pick any one of these accomplishments and you could still write a serious novel about self-creation in times of conflict, one of Rushdie’s themes here, but multiplied to this extent you have something more like an index of possible plots, a satire which also repudiates any inner life. People are actors more than anything else, and it is only by their many deeds that they become fit subjects for Rushdie’s fictions.
The gargantuan mode doesn’t change much when the elderly Max’s throat is cut on his daughter’s doorstep, and the novel switches into a long retrospective account of how and why this powerful man came to be assassinated by an ex-tightrope-walking Kashmiri acrobat, possibly acting in the name of some Islamic
terrorist organization. The scene may be Kashmir or Occupied France during the Second World War, but the paragraphs remain jammed with all sorts of references to films, pop music, Erasmus, the Ship of Fools, Machiavelli and the Ramayana to list a few. There is even the Borscht-Belt humour of the concierge, Olga the Volga, the last potato witch of Astrakhan, a character who seems to have taken a wrong turn on her way to the latest Harry Potter novel.
The promised political dimension is present too, but it takes a wilfully sympathetic reader, such as Rushdie’s friend Christopher Hitchens writing in the Atlantic Monthly, to make it stand out. Shalimar the Clown gives us a vivid, if not always realistic, picture of Kashmir. At first it appears as a kind of Cockaigne; Hindus and Muslims live in harmony, a tolerant tribalism ensures the marriage of the young lovers, Muslim Shalimar and beautiful Boonyi,
the daughter of a Hindu pandit. When destructive, anti-social desires for sex, power and food arise, they are mediated by a ritual folk theatre and the elaborately managed banquets of “Thirty-Six-Courses-Minimum”. All this
is undone by the twin forces of nationalism and religious fundamentalism. As usual in Rushdie’s novels, these forces are not the enemies of enlightenment as much as they are the enemies of freedom, and that means they are the enemies of the natural. Having shown us the first Kashmir, Rushdie must also destroy it. And when he writes about the destruction of Shalimar’s native village of Pachigam in a reprisal action by the Indian Army, the sloppiness that characterizes the rest of the novel disappears into contained, channelled prose:
"Who lit that fire? Who burned that orchard? Who shot those brothers who laughed their whole lives long? Who killed the sarpanch? Who broke his hands? Who broke his arms? Who broke his ancient neck? Who shackled those men? Who made those men disappear?
. . . Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house?"
The litany continues, and the same speed that undermines our faith in Rushdie’s seriousness elsewhere in the novel here helps him to develop a quasi-biblical intensity. We are made to feel his outrage that such a scene has to be described and that he must write it in order to bear witness to it. The intrusions of the narrator also become meaningful here, since there is, at last, a real tension between the narrator and his material. The style James Wood called
“hysterical realism” finally has something worth becoming hysterical about.
Descriptions of violence and atrocity are one of Rushdie’s strengths as a novelist. Few people in the West understood what Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency was like until Rushdie brought it to life in Midnight’s Children (1981); in Shame (1983) he created the powerful anti-Islamist cartoon of a female Jack the Ripper who roams Pakistan tearing the heads off men. It is a discomfiting gift, and Rushdie seems to have become less at ease with it over the years. Despite his breezy go-anywhere, say-anything narrative style, he turns shy after he has shown us the death of the village, blow by blow:
"There are things that must be looked at indirectly because they would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun. So, to repeat: there was no Pachigam any more. Pachigam was destroyed. Imagine it for yourself."
Of course he has just imagined it for us, and this aside seems dishonest. Is there anything for him to be ashamed of here?
We do need novelists to imagine such things for us if we are to understand the consequences of terror and its violent repression by the state. Long before anyone thought novelists should change because nineteen young men hijacked aeroplanes and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, Rushdie was imagining what, in an essay in Step Across This Line, he calls “the unimaginable”. He has always been aware of terrorism and never shied away from incorporating it into a plot. The hijacking and suicidal destruction of an airliner is part of the comic set piece that launches The Satanic Verses (1988). In The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), he blows up a Bombay version of the World Trade Center in order to bring poetic justice to the global capitalist and mob boss, Abraham Zogoiby:
"Tower workers started spilling madly into the street. Sixty seconds later, however, the great atrium at the top of Cashondeliveri Tower burst like a firework in the sky and a rain of glass knives began to fall, stabbing the running workers through the neck, the back, the thigh, spearing their dreams, their loves, their hope. And after the glass knives, further monsoon rains. Many workers had been trapped in the tower by the blast. Lifts were inoperative, stairwells had collapsed, there were fires and clouds of ravenous black smoke. There were those who despaired, who exploded from the windows and tumbled to their deaths."
Rushdie now would probably try to get away with the elegant sleight of hand by which the very victims of the bombs “exploded from windows” by fencing it with an allusion to Die Hard.
With the exception of the Pachigam action, almost all the violence in this very violent novel comes to us as a déjà vu, safely buttressed by the same levels of cliché, mediation and distance that we find in our daily lives. Why else does the narrator give way to one of thoseHence the offhand description of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles which are taking place just as India flies off in search of her Kashmiri roots: “L.A. was a flame-broiled Whopper that night”. It is hardly shocking to turn a riot into a Burger King commercial. Indeed we have come to expect it.
In this way, Rushdie transforms his refusal to bow to the times into a capitulation to the voice of public opinion. Our larger culture exhibits a disturbingly split attitude to violence. We have a fascination with it. The twin industries of movies and video games make millions out of our desire to experience the horrible at a safe distance. And yet we still believe that there is something particularly awful about real violence; news organizations deem us too squeamish for photographs of real corpses or real torture, be it in Los Angeles, Kashmir, or Iraq, though we may turn on the television and see make-believe versions of them at any time. So we have a camp culture of violence that seeks to rationalize our obsession by emphasizing its safe unreality: gangster rap, John Woo’s slow motion bullet ballets, action hero slogans like “hasta la vista baby” and “mission accomplished”. Rather than explore the crossing points between Western civilization which aestheticizes violence and Islamic civilizations which sanctify it, Rushdie writes himself in on the side of the aestheticizers. Once we reach the novel’s high-midnight showdown between the terrorist and the family of his victims – after a briefly illuminating description of the private security systems of the rich and famous – we wonder if all Rushdie’s loud insistence on “a no limits position” for his own work is a mask for a world-weary conservatism: about suffering they were never wrong, the Hollywood Moguls.
you are fucked
Get out of town fast! The rumor is Marco is coming to your reading today at the Bowery Poetry Club! He will wipe the floor with you! On the other hand, Bob Holman actually was looking for someone to clean the floor, so maybe you'll both do Bob a good turn.
Don't forget to post a pic of what's left of your face after Marco gets through with you!
And don't say you weren't warned!!!
There's still time to apologize (again)!!!!!
i can still get a good review in n+1,
my post is 'kind-hearted' and without rhetoric
don't worry, 'you'll never get a good review in n+1 now'
thank you for your concern, though
I think you can still get a good review in n+1. Please don't worry, "you'll never get a good review in n+1 now." Tao deserves a good review in n+1.
He will probably get a black eye first, though.
I can assure you that Marco Roth will not harm you. Unlike some narcissistic adolescent bloggers, Marco is a mature, rational adult who can control his impulses. He is enjoying Mother's Day with his family. Unlike some people, he has a life.
I'd like to offer a critique of your novel. From the evidence in Chapter One, it appears to be a roman a clef. I suspect much of the text is taken from a saved instant message chat between yourself and Noah Cicero.
Here is the key to the novel:
Tao Lin = Marco Roth
Noah Cicero = Haley Joel Osment
Ellen Kennedy = Dakota Fanning
I am sorry about your romantic problems, Tao, but I find it interesting that you made yourself into Marco in the novel. Perhaps you aspire to adulthood after all.
I know you will delete my comment after you read it, but I hope you will consider deleting this entire post. It hurts people, no one so much as yourself. Eventually your adult enablers, the publishers and bloggers, will realize what kind of person they have been dealing with.
We at n+1 did nothing to you but respond courteously and professionally to your submissions. You certainly have the right to criticize us, parody us, satirize us -- but you should respond in an adult way. If you are upset about our stance on McSweeney's, then you should, as an adult would, as Marco suggested would be entirely proper, use logical counterarguments.
People are not toys. Marco is a person. He has a mother, just like you do. You've posted her poems and her photo on the web. Would she be proud of you for doing this?
Happy Mother's Day. I am sorry you are such an unhappy, lonely person.
Why is it an insult to say that someone "doesn't have a life"?
Also, art does not hurt people. Fiction, or any writing, does not hurt people, except in a society that wants a small group of people in power who control a very large group of people who have no power (in which case it makes that goal harder to achieve and so "hurts" society). Fiction helps people become less attached to delusions and abstractions like "identity," "success," "pride," etc.
My mom cooperated in posting her poem and photo, so yes, she likes that. Why is it incomprehensible to you that people like to do things that are "strange" and "uncomfortable" (but also "harmless") rather than "will fit into what is already there"?
This post is a joke, and it is fiction, and it doesn't hurt anyone physically and would only hurt someone emotionally if that person is a person who wants censorship, whose emotions are dependent more on abstractions than on concrete reality, and who is concerned more with what people think and less with what people do, concretely, in reality, which is a way of thinking that will lead to a small group of powerful people controlling a large group of powerless people (who "don't have lives").
Not that that is good or bad, it is not good or bad, not yet. But based on a worldview that I go by most of the time (because it seems to "work" with most things that are happening to me, and that have happened to me, such as that I started to exist, and I like to "feel good" and other people seem to do also), which assumes that pain and suffering is bad, it is then "bad," probably, based on what I know and have thought about.
This post has no rhetoric, it doesn't do anything to anyone, it is like a tree in a field, why would you go attack a tree in a field?
When things are in concrete reality I can "take criticism" and adjust my behavior, and I want to, for example if someone tells me in a book that eating meat is causing pain to a lot of things, or that shopping from corporations is causing pain to a lot of things, etc., but your comment saying that I am hurting people is so undefined and abstract and, I think, so based on the idea that "abstractions" have "feelings" that for me to just stop what I am doing based on your comment would be like someone telling me to stop thinking about hamsters because I am hurting people by thinking about hamsters.
I feel sad that you seem to be trying to "insult" me or "condemn my life" by calling me unhappy and lonely. Do you mean that people are "pathetic" if they "have no life" and are "sad" and "lonely"? And that you yourself "have a life" and are not "unhappy" and "lonely" and therefore are "good"?
Unhappy and lonely and confused people are the ones that can be helped by sympathy, not happy people in fulfilling relationships and a schedule each day of working, having fulfilling relationships, and doing things perceived by the mainstream as "productive" and "well-adjusted."
Based on my experience so far, in life, people who call other people "unhappy" and "lonely" and say that other people do not "have a life" tend to want to dissociate with people who are unhappy or lonely or "do not have a life," so that no one will think that they themselves are unhappy or lonely or "do not have a life," because they think it is somehow "bad" or "shameful" or "embarrassing" to be lonely or unhappy or "not have a life." For example in high school when the "popular" kids would "make fun" of the kids with no friends who were sad and lonely and didn't seem to "have a life."
Which is the kind of person that makes lonely, unhappy, and people who "do not have a life" even more unhappy and lonely and not want to "have a life [the kind of life 'you' have]."
and doing things perceived by the mainstream as "productive" and "well-adjusted."
...what is 'the mainstream' ??
this is a great first take at a new book. i think kathy acker would say so too.
If that's really Ben Kunkel, my estimation of him just plummeted.
"Happy Mother's Day. I'm sorry you're such a loser."
If I had gotten two (count em: two!) rave reviews for my first novel in the NYTBR, plus whatever staggering advance, plus a seven-figure movie sale, I'd like to imagine that I'd have the good sense NOT to sound like an elitist douchebag, so as to avoid confirming everyone's worst fears about me and my success.
Lighten the fuck up.
Here's what, if anything, Kunkel should have said:
"Marco Roth is my friend. I'm a little alarmed about seeing my friend pilloried on your blog, Tao."
Then, anonymously, he should have made fun of Tao. A short satire featuring a depressed asian guy stuffing hamsters up his ass, and saying "how does this hamster up my ass affect me in concrete reality"?
Instead, he revealed just what kind of obtuse, humorless sticks-in-the-mud he and the n+1 posse really are.
Marco Roth is anything but a rational, mature adult. Trust me. What is wrong with these n+funners? Where did they find their overbearing sense of entitlement? They're acting like cloistered, boringly angsty graduate students... oh wait. they are well-funded graduate students. Although, I was touched by Kunkel's appeal to mothers. That was sweet.
Also, that Rebecca Curtis story was the worst piece of shit I've ever read. What a sad attempt.
"Here is the key to the novel:
Tao Lin = Marco Roth
Noah Cicero = Haley Joel Osment
Ellen Kennedy = Dakota Fanning"
NO SHIT.
N+1 is a scam.
If you wanna play the scam game.
We can play it too.
At least we know it is a scam.
tao lin is a scam game
tao lin is a scam
tao lin is not a scam
I lied I am sorry I wanted Macro Roth to like me and ask me to play scrabble with him.
This is so fucking funny. Its hilarious. is that really benjamin kunkel? Why would he sign his name to a post that makes him look like such a silly, humorless fuck head?
Why would marco allow him to post somkething like this, when it makes Marco look like a little girl hiding behind her mothers skirt?
"Please Ben! Please tell them I am a nice guy! I have a MOTHER fuck chrissakes. Please make him stop putting me in his fiction!"
That is some of the silliest shit I have read in a long time.
But funny, nonethless.
I
I want to write something silly about Benjamin Kunkel now. Shit-talking is exponential and amusing.
This post has been removed by the author.
also, he wasn't asking whether your mother was proud of you posting her poems & picture, he was asking whether she would be proud of taunting marco roth.
Here is my key to the novel:
Benjamin Kunkel = Marco Roth
Benjamin Kunkel = Haley Joel Osment
Benjamin Kunkel = Dakota Fanning
i'm not sure if my mom would feel proud at this post, my worldview isn't to 'do things that would make my mother proud' since i don't know exactly what makes her proud or not
what do you mean by 'taunt'?
if marco roth or benjamin kunkel is still reading, i would like if either if you told me exactly how you feel when you read this post, and exactly why you feel 'hurt'
i really am interested and want to learn
It's hurtful because it uses someone's name without their permission. You can't understand because it wouldn't bother you. Nothing publicity-wise would bother you. You are a talented writer, but you are a messed-up person.
You yourself are constantly posting about how unhappy and lonely you are, how 'fucked' you are, yet when someone sympathizes with you, or states somethin about your emotions that you have stated, you attack them.
Posting here any contrary opinion is like trying to call the Rush Limbaugh show and voicing something liberal. You are not only abused by the host but then dragged in the mud by the "dittoheads." Rush Limbaugh is a bully. You are bully. Eventually bullies go too far, like Don Imus did, and they ruin their careers.
You seem to know when you go too far because you did take down your post about the hateful bigot Kenneth Eng, the guy who was fired for writing "Why I Hate Blacks" for Asian week, who harassed other students and NYU and got kicked out, who made a YouTube video laughing at the people massacred at Virginia Tech and taking credit for Cho's violence. You asked him to write to you, remember, because you too felt discriminated against, called a "chink" in fifth grade.
But you took that down after a couple of hours because you must have thought better of it. Maybe you think no one saw it, but people did. They can still see it, because once something is posted on Blogger, it never really goes away to those of us who know how to find it. Don't deny you had an appeal to Kenneth Eng, Tao.
You're a bully. As Nick Antosca, one of the few posters here who seems to have both a heart and a brain, said, you "taunted" Marco Roth. Well, Marco Roth has dealt with bullies before. See his posting of May 10 on the Nextbook site, about his adolescence. He's a more mature writer and person than you are, Tao Lin.
I am someone who once like you a lot but have now become disillusioned. I want to like you again. Stop doing mean things to people. Stop being a bully.
OK, the dittoheads can rip me a new one now. But sometimes people have to stand up to bullies. And then people who once supported them, like me, maybe like Nick Antosca, will either hope they change or forget about them.
I get the feeling that Tao -- who has sort of blown up in the last year or so since I followed the blog link from his story Zombies in Kitchen Sink -- is setting himself up to either become a cult literary figure or suffer a devastating fall.* I won't say anything about success and goals met along the way, about whether he is either satiated with smaller goals as he goes along with some sort of cathartic effect, or whether he is building toward something.
A lot of this discussion is stupid. No one likes being ridiculed. The only thing to do is either laugh it off and thus diffuse it by accepting it for what it is, ignore it and shrug if someone asks about it, or retaliate, but not by posting and calling Tao childish or hurtful or whatever. It's a given, and you know this because you read the fictitious post; you know this because that is what the post intended. It's satirical, farcical, intentional. It does deal with themes all of Tao's writing deals with, but that's the extent it. So now what? Either do one of the two things above, or hunker down (yes, hunker) and write your own satirical assault on Tao. I don't see any of the people on the receiving end doing this, so only two options remain.
I'm guessing Tao would enjoy retaliation, as I think he writes about established writers or celebrities to garner attention, either by the reader or, better yet, by the opposition of the writer or celebrity. That's all common sense though, and it's smart. That's one reason why he's gotten to where he is now. A very smart move indeed, and entertaining. Can't help but to wonder how it will play out in the end though.
* By fall, I don't mean he will get sued into bankruptcy. You only have to read the story Parade, from David Sedaris' Barrel Fever & Other Stories, to realize that parodying celebrities makes you untouchable under freedom of speech laws. If you haven't read Parade, sit down with the book over a coffee or whatever you like next time you're in a bookstore; you'll finish it before the coffee and thoroughly enjoy it. What I mean is, will Tao be able to keep his writing good while relying on the same voice, themes, animals, etc. What I mean is, writing has a market, and you need demand to thrive. That's what I'm wondering, will the demand remain stable or falter? (Please don't attack me for saying this -- admittedly, I'm not widely published. I'm still struggling to get a B.A. I write when I can manage.)
I am bullying Marco Roth and n+1.
That is like an ant that is crawling on a bison's back.
Should fiction ever be censored? Should something without rhetoric, without judgment, written from an existential viewpoint, ever be censored? Should non-fiction even ever be censored? (Don Imus, etc. were probably censored by the corporations they worked for because having an image of 'supporting' Don Imus might reduce that corporation's profits in the long-term) Do people have the 'right' not to ever come upon anything in the world that offends them? Should no one ever feel uncomfortable or be offended? What if I'm walking and I see a tree and the tree offends me and 'hurts' me? Is physical pain more difficult, and at times impossible (due to genes) to stop, than emotional pain, the emotional pain of being 'offended'? What if I wrote a book with masturbation in it and someone went in a bookstore and saw it and was offended? What about the thousands of works of fiction that have used real names, of public figures, in them; Derek Jeter, Martin Luther King, Hitler, Gurdjieff, etc., are those 'bad'? What if I state a fact, or state a neutral sentence, and someone is offended. Should I censor myself? What if the person being attacked is in a position of power, is a 'public figure,' and most people in the current society would agree that a person in power who is a 'public figure' should have his/her assumptions tested frequently, and be 'offended' often, like political figures, so that they can maybe have less preconceptions and view situations factually?
For more information about these things read a post on self-promotion:
http://reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com/2007/02/self-promotion.html
And a post on censorship in fiction:
http://reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com/2007/04/crippling-loneliness-and-killing.html
Also, look at my interview in Bookslut, and look at this post. They do not have rhetoric, they have no message about Marco Roth. They do not say, "Marco Roth is bad" or "Marco Roth is _____." They do not say anything. If they do say anything, they say, maybe, they say something about censorship.
I've found, through this blog, that when I say something without a message people interpret it as having a message that is 'against' something. If I just called Marco Roth a name, if I just name-called, I don't think I would have gotten as much as a response.
A lot of people name-call on the internet. I try not to name-call. Should name-calling be censored? I don't think so. If someone calls me an 'ass' I believe that I should change, and accept that that person thinks I am an 'ass,' and then make it my goal to use facts on them until they think I am not an 'ass' anymore, if that is what I want. People exist and when they do things that have no direct physical effect, of atoms moving and causing things, on other living beings, they, I think should be allowed to do those things, in a certain worldview that I think most of us have, which is that pain and suffering is bad.
I will post more questions and try to answer some questions factually soon.
Thank you for commenting your thoughts.
read comments from here to see links better and read easier
This is a pretty good story. i really laughed at the part about convincing Dakota Fanning's Mom with complimentary logic and a sonorous voice.
some of these replies make me sad.
The part about lying to Dakota Fanning's mom was well-written. Of course it is based on how Tao lied to Ellen's mother. Maybe that's the reason she broke up with him and wants someone else to be her?
I think now is the time Tao needs to call upon his friends to defend him.
Like Maud Newton -- she used to write kindly of Tao and link to him. Oh yeah, I forgot, Tao (while not saying anything untruthful about this 'public figure') ridiculed her and allowed people to abuse her on this blog and she stopped being Tao's friend.
Well, there's Whitney Pastorek -- she liked Tao's stories and published him. Oh, wait -- he broke the publication's rules deliberately (because of some higher, more important principle) -- and then when she came on here to comment, he allowed people to abuse her and Whitney stopped being Tao's friend.
Um, what about Kevin Sampsell; he admired Tao and his writing and wanted to publish him. Uh, but didn't they have some dispute and then Tao printed all of Kevin's private emails on this blog and allow people to comment and abuse him? But Tao never called Kevin any names or said anything about him that wasn't a 'fact.' Still, Kevin isn't Tao's friend anymore either.
See, the trouble is that you can make yourself known by 'talking shit' about people (while of course not calling them names or lying about them -- unless you call that they're considering publishing your pornography a lie, which of course it's not -- or that you told them that Harper's accepted your story -- that was a fact, sort of, right?)...
...but eventually you're going to find you've alienated all the people who once liked a funny young writer with a distinctive voice and nice manner and that no longer will defend you.
No, they'll just ignore you. The one thing you can't live with.
Well, there's always Gene Morgan and Tao's other friends to defend him. He still has plenty of friends, doesn't he?
Another long-ass, multiple paragraph post that I decided to delete, file those thoughts into the back of my head, and simply say: hahaahaahahahahahahahahahahaha.
By "taunt" I mean "do something that you know he won't like and that he will consider an attack/insult/mockery even if you claim it's not that."
****
Also, regarding the Kenneth Eng post, it was a joke. Tao posted it after I sent him a YouTube video of Kenneth Eng talking about cyborg dragons or something.
"...but eventually you're going to find you've alienated all the people who once liked a funny young writer with a distinctive voice and nice manner and that no longer will defend you."
Yes, I have alienated many people in my life. My goal in life is not to get as many friends as possible. I still have a nice manner. I am nicer now than when I started this blog. I really believe I am much nicer on this blog today than when I first started this blog.
I had shit-talking before that wasn't 'joke-y' and that had some name-calling. I was self-righteous a lot. Now I do not have that and have acknowledged and explained that my worldview is not any 'better' than anyone else's and that all worldviews are equally arbitrary from a point of view that blocks out no information. I think I got some emails and comments, when I talked shit about people, when I first started this blog, because people could see the message, on their computer screen, that ______ was being shit-talked, and they liked that someone powerful was being shit-talked. I felt uncomfortable when I got encouraging emails when I talked shit about someone. Now there is no shit-talking, the posts do not have messages, and I post mostly links, things about myself, things defending things, lists of facts, and neutral, existential, fictional things that are playful and not hateful--though sometimes offensive, yes--but which somehow generate more controversy than if people saw on their computer screens, on my blog, something like [someone] is a [bad word].
"No, they'll just ignore you. The one thing you can't live with."
The things I can't live without are probably air, water, and food. I didn't talk to anyone, had no blog, and received like one email a day from my mom and one a week from someone I hung out with about once every two weeks for about 1 1/2 years in college and the rest of the time spoke like 10 words a day or maybe a few times a week like 500 words a day. In high school I said less words than probably 97% of the people, I ate lunch outside, alone, most days,listening to music, etc. and I didn't die.
But yes, posting this gets me attention, which sells more copies, which gets Melville House and I more money, etc. These are things I've explained before. Search my blog for "money." I'm not going to buy a giant house or jet skis or eat $50 dinners if I become rich. I will do what I am doing currently except on a larger scale, probably.
Tao, you took my "no one has the right not to be offended" statement. I think it's still true. No one has the right not to be offended by something.
I think this was just a joke. It was probably meant to appeal to Tao's friends more than Marco Roth, but it was all in good humor.
If Tao really wanted to attack Marco Roth, he could have done a much more offensive post. Perhaps he did want to elicit a response from Marco Roth. No one can disagree that the Marco Roth portrait wasn't really cute and funny.
I think this was a social commentary on Marco Roth's comments that people are not characters. And then Tao made him a character in an amusing chapter from a novel.
I don't know.
I meant to say that no one can disagree that the Marco Roth portrait IS really cute.
after reading this post i went to the n+1 for the first time in 2 years (and the second time overall in life). i imagine n+1 is getting a lot more traffic this week than last week, and is also probably selling more issues.
i also imagine that marco roth, a name of a person i have no idea about other than what i've read here, has probably thought more than a couple times since this post, whether he likes it or not- 'i have a chapter in a novel written about me.'
if i saw marco roth's name on something now i'd look at it a little longer, rather than not know who he is.
publicity can be fun.
people should have a sense of humor.
I just read that people hate you. I assume it's because when they try to argue with you they sound like assholes.
I often arrive too late at the comment party. I have to stop staying off of the keyboard and make it permanent. Mr. Lin, this novel excerpt shows real promise and fortitude and the proper grasp of negative capability, but I think it would read better if you were to use the FIND-and-REPLACE function to replace the symbol "Marco Roth" with the symbol "Lenny and Squiggy". Try it; if it doesn't improve chapter one noticeably (re: flow and complexity), hit CTRL + Z. I'm not a "hacker", I just know a few tricks with "Windows".
If there's anything questionable about Tao's use of the name "Marco Roth" for a character in a novel, it's whether or not it's actually funnier than any other name he could have chosen.
I'm not sure that the name "marco Roth" is intrisically funnier than, say, "Bella Abzug" or "Raymond Carver."
I think the idea of using a saved gmail chat as fiction is sort of interesting, but I'm not sure that it makes for the world's most interesting reading.
In fact, if I have any objection to this piece, it's that the time Tao spent/wasted putting it together could have been used to produce something more worthwhile.
Tao, I know, doesn't believe in concepts like "worthwhile", and I find that aggressive, "I am a pure logician/Vulcan" stance tiresome, but there it is: once you demonstrate some real talent, your readers develop expectations.
That's just the way it is in "concrete" reality.
steve can't stop laughing still
I'm still laughing, you're right. Good "observation."
'an ex friend'
who are you?
'i like tao'
who are you?
email me if you're afraid to comment here
Surely there is no shortage of animals from which to write stories. I am partial to the moose and the bear myself.
Mark Rothko died in 1970.
an n+1 person has told another person who then told me that the real benjamin kunkel did not comment on this post, it is a fake benjamin kunkel, i'm glad
It is okay to be fooled. Humans make mistakes. I made a mistake in thinking the fake Benjamin Kunkel was real. I'm glad to know, and just because I feel foolish for making a mistake doesn't mean I consider "foolish" a "bad" feeling. It's a human feeling.
good work keep it up...
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