SHREK 2: my 1553-word response/”defense” re [someone’s 152-word post on Tumblr “shit-talking” Marie Calloway & “Adrien Brody” & “The trend”]

heheheheheheheeheheheehehe:

Hey, this is Tao Lin. You said:

It is in this peculiar and upturned universe that you will experience Tao Lin congratulating the honesty in your misuse of “laid.”

I haven’t “congratulated” anyone for honesty and I hadn’t said anything to anyone or even noticed the misuse of “laid” until I read about it on blogs like yours. Nothing in that sentence happened. I don’t know where you got it from. Feel like you probably read only a little of Marie’s story or maybe most of it but then didn’t include it as relevant information for your post, which I feel describes a view you already had, from some previous situation, which you’ve now applied to this situation in a manner that completely ignores the new, unique specifics of this situation. The only reference you make to Marie’s story, as an actual presence outside of yourself, is when you facetiously say the ~15,000-word story is “about relative abdominal grace ineffectively deployed.” Seems really annoying to read things like this. I see you write for The Awl and other publications that thousands of people read. Most of those people will assume everything you type is true and that you have some integrity about facts and wouldn’t just type anything you wanted or apply thoughts and feelings about prior situations to whatever new thing appears, ignoring the reality of the thing you’re targeting.

While I’m here, you like stories and novels where someone might have learned something (in a manner more explicit than that people can be assumed to always while conscious to be learning) by the end? (See quote below.) If so, then I feel like you’re definitely not the ideal reader for Marie’s story. It’s like you’re going to see “Husbands and Wives” by Woody Allen or something but wanted to see “Shrek 2.” It would be absurd to expect “Shrek 2” from Woody Allen. It would be reasonable (and you also wouldn’t be shit-talking the efforts of people you don’t know and have never met and have no direct information about and who themselves are not shit-talking anyone else but simply creating the art that they want to create) to just go see “Shrek 2.” 

ineffectively deployed, where you hope someone might have learned something by the end, except both parties definitely didn’t, because this is how they chose to treat it. They turned it into an internet story in which two people can be irresponsible toward each other and become completely absorbed by it.

Also, I see one of tags you made for the post is “Did you know that Chuck Schuldiner died 10 years ago and no one talks about how sad that is.”

No, I didn’t know that, because you just typed a paragraph shit-talking the work of a person (Marie Calloway, 21) you don’t know (implying she’s exactly, that she perfectly fits, a trend of “unformed humans” with “amateur sociology”) and only referencing her work once and not in earnest. Your thoughts about Marie’s story are based on “[t]he trend,” of which you provided no concrete references. Feel like the only time you thought that wanted to include something from the reality outside of yourself you completely made it up:

It is in this peculiar and upturned universe that you will experience Tao Lin congratulating the honesty in your misuse of “laid.”

I don’t know more about Chuck Schuldiner than what’s in the tag. I know more about how you dislike Marie’s story because you’ve abstracted it and combined it with the pre-existing “trend” that you feel condescension toward. You say the characters “definitely didn’t” learn anything, which seems like something a middle school baseball coach would say about a student he didn’t like and probably only in a tone that would also show he was, to some degree, aware of his hyperbole. Your reason why they “definitely didn’t” learn anything is “because this is how they chose to treat it.” That doesn’t make sense. You don’t know what each character did an hour or day or month after the story’s last sentence. Marie decided to end the story at a certain point. You don’t know, after that point, what Adrien Brody did with his experience. You don’t know what Marie did either except that she wrote a ~15,000-word story and that (in a period when probably 40,000+ other stories by people with connections, reputations, etc. were rejected from publication or were accepted but not widely read) it has been published and has attracted more attention and will now probably be the most widely-read and discussed ~15,000-word short-story by someone without a book out and not already famous or published in the New Yorker for at least a few years. The story contains relatively little sex and is not shocking and Marie doesn’t live in NYC or go to Brown or NYU or, based on what I know, have family or any other connections to help her achieve what’s happening now, which feels exciting and highly interesting to me. It seems extremely unlikely, based on my experience, that anything like this could’ve happened. I like and am excited by Marie’s story in a similar manner I was excited when I first read “Good Morning, Midnight” by Jean Rhys or “The End of the Story” by Lydia Davis. But there’s so many more layers of information, separate from the text and that do not detract from the text, to this situation, if one wants to be interested in them.

Your response to all this, after I just typed all that, feels really, like “disgusting” to me right now.

Marie even arguably stated her intention with this piece and it was not “write something in which it is clear to a reader that will assume otherwise that the characters have learned something by the end of the story.”

Your last two sentences seem to say that you don’t like to read stories in which characters are irresponsible and that irresponsibility equals no learning and that you aren’t interested in characters that are absorbed in their situations. And you believe that these elements, which you view Marie’s story as embodying, indicate an artistic failure on the part of Marie and a kind of “life failure” on the part of what you call “both parties” and all of this to be part of a continued societal failure you describe as “[t]he trend” and you view all this with disapproval and from some outside and fixed position from which you’re able to earnestly type a series of declarative sentences in “[abstraction] is [abstraction]” form and not define any of the abstractions or even specifically reference, without making it into a joke, your ostensible targets.

Based on what you’ve described, it just seems like Marie’s story isn’t at all what you would like. You seem, just based on your last two sentences, to want a story featuring (1) responsible characters who (2) explicitly learn things in (3) an internet-less world and are (4) responsible to each other and (5) are not “absorbed” by their relationship with each other. 

I feel like “Shrek 2” isn’t even that. It would need to be something like a natural disaster movie in which every character is, based on whatever standard, “responsible” but also aren’t very interested in their relationships with each other. Maybe a disaster movie with only one person in it, who was responsible to himself but also kind of bored and uninterested in his own thoughts and situation.

Posts like your post will probably cause its targets to feel depressed and discouraged from creating art (and just depressed overall, to have strangers saying negative things about them in an omniscient, condescending tone) while also diverting attention away from subjects that (in your case, you seem to have implied awareness of this with the post’s tag) you would rather have be discussed and feel are more worthy of promoting wider awareness. You relegated it to the tag, when you could’ve featured it; instead, you featured information about a trend whose existence you seem to disapprove of, promoting its continued existence and, whether this was intended or not, probably gaining you many more pageviews than a post on Chuck S.

About pageviews you said:

pageviews suggest we should celebrate the confessional ability of unformed humans.

I don’t think that’s accurate. Celebrating things doesn’t gain as many pageviews as being authoritatively against things while using phrases like “amateur sociology” and “unformed humans.” Feel like if you and Marie met IRL the only communication I’m imagining, if I didn’t believe that you probably wouldn’t say these things IRL, is you lecturing her or you wanting to get away from her.

So, why would you type a paragraph targeting Marie without referencing anything she made, in a post that would get more pageviews than the other thing you want to promote awareness of, and then tag the post in a manner that feels to me like you’re “bemoaning” the failing condition of a society (populated by Marie who, based on what I know from talking to her, seems actually to be writing exactly what she wants to write) in which no one is writing about what, I feel you implied with the tag, is more important to you and, as is suggested by your declarative prose-style I described earlier, therefore more important universally. Doesn’t make sense. You could simply type about Chuck Schuldiner. If you typed a paragraph in disapproval of a stranger and her art and then get to the tags and realize you feel sad that there’s not more information about something else, then you have the choice of deleting the paragraph and replacing it with the information you desired. Seems sweet to do that.

(via heheheheheheheeheheheehehe)