1/20/2024 0 Comments Leave society tao lin![]() But I don’t remember the term existing back then. I feel like I might have been an incel in high school or college. WLT: I feel sympathy for what are known as incels. And then the suffix ‘cellectuals’ has been adopted by numerous accounts to describe this way of posting where a group of posters all post on a common topic. It was a compound word for intellectuals and incels. MASTER: Yeah, over quarantine there was a popular account it was the first to use a group of admins posting anonymously. WLT: The first account was just called “incellectuals.” I’ve wondered, where does the name “cellectuals” come from? WLT: We’ve got a lot of mileage out of you on Yeah. But, we’re hoping that that will change after this interview with you. WLT: She seems to be the closest of all of us to getting “clegged.” I recommended Honor Levy to him and he said he was happy to read her stuff. MASTER: Would you say that as soon as you recommend a book to Bill Clegg that it’s almost like a curse? I’ve recommended probably six or seven things to him and he’s rejected all of them. TAO: I don’t know if I’ll recommend your novels to my agent. Do you think we can go on with the interview? ![]() MASTER: Do you think we could get a “highly enjoyed” from you? The most I usually say is that I highly enjoyed it. Wait… actually, I feel like I’ll read both of your novels, but my blurbs usually aren’t that superlative. MASTER: Unpublished but hopefully this year. MASTER: So, before we begin, we want to know if you promise on the record to write superlative blurbs for our forthcoming debut novels. Within a matter of seconds, a muted, bespectacled Tao appeared on our screen, looking somewhere past the camera with an “is-this-thing-working” type expression. We fired up two voice memos and started screen-recording our Zoom call. So, embodying Li, we boarded a relaxed 2:45 from Grand Central to my parents house in Poughkeepsie to talk Leave Society with Tao. Thumbs buff from meme-ing Tao into the canon, we knew our next step was to sit down, chads-to-chad, and connect with Tao, and to get Tao to pass the Alt-Lit torch to us. ![]() ![]() ![]() “Li,” an elder-Millennial Manhattanite novelist vows to “try to understand his own reality,” devoting himself to researching and exploring pharmaceuticals, environmental toxins, romance, vaccines, psyops, psychedelics, statins, god, UFOs, autism, and “dominator” vs “partnership” models of society, all while spending time with his parents and their toy poodle in Taiwan, where quotidian scenes of bickering, eating and visiting doctor-herbalists coalesce to a grand project of self-rehabilitation.Īround the time I began to feel the first rumbles of Leave Society churning in the gargantuan organs of the Random House presses, Jiv Johnson, Zachary, Dagsen, Ivan, Master and I coalesced around the then-zygotic Instagram meme page Some believed we were a team of unpaid interns at Vintage Random Rouse and The Clegg Agency. Leave Society is the next summit in Tao’s autofictional odyssey. Master, a Millennial with a Gen Z mindset, shared many of my ideas on how contemporary literature was shifting from pol’d-out Millennial navel-gazing to a certain Gen Z Christian exuberance, a naive-seeming (Matthew 18:3), cheerful and warmhearted sobriety, the true New Sincerity, an emergent literary movement that some have begun to call Alt Lit 2.0. Our friendship blossomed just as I got the Tao Lin follow-a major milestone in a young author’s life- and began my correspondence with Tao, in early spring (Instagram DM’s which mostly centered on how little we each planned to get vaccinated). Honor Levy, Obese and I, having gone Harry-Ron-and-Hermione mode on Honor’s birthday just weeks before, squadded again for New Year’s, this time meeting up with Master and his girlfriend at Master’s apartment, where we chilled and discussed Phillip Roth and John Cassavetes before Obese, Master and I went Husbands Mode for the first time (and surely not the last) on the streets of downtown Manhattan on that crisp winter’s night. I first met him on New Year’s Eve, a rather symbolic time to meet a guy, I should think. A year ago, I did not know that I would become such utter boys with a fellow chadded author. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |