huchu

[you can read a passage of tao lin’s recent-ish book, Shoplifting from American Apparel here.]

Maybe I just don’t “get” Tao Lin, but it’s like this: Lin’s got this total thing for youthful (mid-twenties, youthful, that is, not like teens youthful) irony and malaise (because let’s face it who doesn’t), and maybe Lin’s fans will tell me, like, he approaches these themes with irony in order to subvert/deconstruct the sardonicism that’s eating away at modern youth, or something like that. Which means that he’s being ironic about irony, which means he’s actually being sincere, but he’s sincere in an ironic way, or maybe ironically sincere, or sincerely ironic. So here’s the big question: if you have to hide your sincerity behind cynicism, why even bother?

edit: I’m not putting this very well. I mean to say, irony is an effective rhetorical technique and sometimes wicked funny besides, and I don’t have like this seething hatred of it; it’s just, I read Shoplifting and really what’s the goddamn point? Maybe there’s not any point, which would make sense given this book, but then why does the book make it a point (if you will) to make pointlessness so, well, pointless? It’s like not-meaning-what-he’s-saying is the only thing Lin knows, and he knows how utterly vacuous life becomes when you never mean what you say/say what you mean, and so he decided to say what he means by not meaning what he’s saying. Which is a tried-and-true use of rhetorical humor, but when you really consider what Lin is doing, i.e. ironically saying that irony works but really meaning that irony really doesn’t—it’s awfully self-defeating.

Or maybe I just didn’t get it.