BELOW ARE THE SENTENCES, FRAGMENTS, AND PARAGRAPHS THAT COMPRISE MY REVIEW OF TAIPEI:
It's as if Paul is being observed by a second consciousness at all times, a consciousness that is also his own
Ummmm
It's actually insane. The idea that no matter the level of pain one feels one can be at peace with it. Can let go of attachment to the idea that pain is bad, and as a result actually alter the experience of pain. Like the man I saw on tv who nonchalantly stuck a metal stake through his arm.
If anyone finds it boring, I think it's because they want the moments in Paul's life to follow a satisfying arc, which they refuse to, but instead choose to spiral in on themselves.
Even though it's written in third person, it's as if the narrator's voice is also coming from Paul, and the narrator describes Paul's emails with his mother as if confiding in a close friend.
There were some lines which I had trouble translating into my imagination, like the line: "but if you're dead you'll be dead," said Paul in a loud, murmurred, (typo!) strangely incredulous voice that he felt aversion toward and confused by." 142 I tried to read Paul's dialogue out loud to myself like 3 times, and found it hard to be loud and murmur at the same time, but it actually seemed interesting and surprisingly weird-sounding.
It's also almost like a literary person writing a celebrity tell-all about people no one cares about but are about to care about (what?)
Even the way Lin describes things that happen is like experiencing a memory, instead of a reality based on memory. There are summaries of conversations, and each moment in time that is jumped to seems to have been jumped to just to look at a certain impression it made, a certain not-fully-understood significance that it had, or strong feeling of emptiness.
Maybe not
Lin wants to speak to the people of the present so he describes present-day experience, but the themes he reaches at are existential, timeless.
Immersing himself in contemporary culture nonjudgementally is what allows Paul to see the world in the clarity of time immemorial (jk)
Paul finds himself speaking in tones that seem to have come from nowhere, like eerie puppets are controlling the strings of his voice.
A person's inability to control his own actions - to feel his perceiving mind is at one with his actions - that how he expresses himself outwardly into the world is compatible with his inner feeling of what he should be.
In fact Paul is obsessed with using drugs to make social situations more enjoyable for himself and others, and it seems to be an effective tactic. (Until when?)
Which begs the question - why is it so hard for us to communicate with each other? Are drugs a defense against cultural systems which have dammed up our minds and the flow of our creativity? Even if they are, do they last? Do they point to some other possible reality?
Drugs and the Internet are vehicles of liberation, and of suffering, just like anything else.
It seems to me that anyone who reads Taipei and goes away with a feeling that its message is nihilistic, emotionless, and meant to be painful for the reader, wasn't open to trying to understand, or wasn't able to understand, the book. Uhh
Or because they don't understand it, they assume lin must be trying to attack them in some way, or insult them and their way of life. Don't review the reviews
Chogyam trungpa once said, "compassion is not so much being kind; it is being creative to wake a person up."
Quote about "continuously gifted from some inaccessible future"
But it's not that Paul has control over anything that happens - physical laws of the universe are not bent, no magical realism is employed. This is not what a mind-centric view means. We still don't have free will, and must comply with physics. The only way we can gain freedom is by freeing our thoughts, by training our minds to rewrite and recalibrate reality, to live in our minds. (make this better)
Tao mentions Don Dellilo as influence in one work. Dellilo says: DeLillo has described his fiction as being concerned with "living in dangerous times",[3] and in a 2005 interview declared, "Writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments [...] I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."[4]
But Lin says he is not making a commentary on contemporary culture in any way. But this doesn't mean he is an apathetic hipster. He is even more radical than the writers that seek to criticize the actions of the people in the world: he criticizes no one, but instead tries to change the conversation- criticizes the language itself. Or rather, rewrites the language.
Because Paul is able to view the world as springing from his mind, aided by drugs, which already make him hyper-aware of the open-endedness (whatness?) and bendableness of what he is perceiving, and aided by the Internet, which is another reflection of our minds-if the physical world
can be said to be a reflection of our minds- and is an alternate reality. Navigating the world of constantly recalibrating perception, the mind itself eventually can't be clinged to any more strongly than anything material can, and all sense of reality is lost.
This is where the ground of groundlessness is found.
It's not that other writers don't write introspectively - of course they do. But Lin places the parameters of Paul's mind literally outside the parameters of the universe. He makes his mind bigger. So Paul can go "afk" his face, can separate his consciousness from his body entirely, and be in another place, the Internet inside his mind.
It's not merely that Lin makes elaborate metaphors; he expands the parameters of what a metaphor is. He makes the metaphor so big that it becomes the thing that is real, the subject, and life itself is the metaphorical object.
The electric kool aid acid test
By observing strict rules, Lin’s writing becomes a microcosmic universe of its own, propelling itself forward relentlessly.
Inside one mind, what has been communicated between the mind (Paul) and another person can never be fully determined, only Paul's perceptions can be observed. By maintaining complete loyalty to his subjectivity, lin admits that his subject's object is inherently irreconcilable with his mind that observes it. What
That the outside world cannot be definitely pinned down, that others' actions and intentions and facial expressions can only be guessed at. That reality itself can only be guessed at and agreed upon, but in their hearts the people won't be sure if they understand the agreed upon thing in the same way, really, inherently.
I should finish reading first I'm only on like page 140something
Because if he lives inside his mind, then all outer appearances are simply arising phenomena, and to pass judgement on them would be foolish. So it's not detachment, but lack of judgement. Paul seeks love over enlightenment? Siddhartha? Read the damn book
Something about the title being a place
Someone once said of Tao Lin that he's a performance artist using the medium of writing, which sounds cool, but also kind of sucks and reminded me of when people said I was a conceptual artist when all I was trying to do was make beautiful things. (I'm lying, though, it's still a challenge to remain dogma-less)
But Taipei is the furthest from the performance artist assessment. It is merely a beautiful object, to be stared at happily.
Lin's radicalism is not in the drugs he takes or even in some perceived new style of writing: it's in his way of seeing the world, which is remarkably strict in its adherence to nondual thinking, ......
Events in reality are rendered uncertain, but the emotions underlying them are real
He takes the concept of drugs and applies it to experience in life that could be described as having the effect of the concept drugs....
Siddhartha sought answers in the world, but Paul seeks them in his mind. The Buddha taught that the mind rules everything, which is contrary to our western grounding in science. But when observation springs primarily from perception, when all observation is grounded in perception [clarify], a different metaphysical place emerges, inside a mind. From here is where real aloneness can be experienced: where emotions are confusing, complex, ever-changing and
Still obvious?
Paul's relationship with the world is like that of a stoic man with his equally stoic nephew for whom he has unspoken, inexpressible affection. It is platonic in the deepest sense of the word: platonic love etc
In an interview in which he was on MDMA, which is partially excerpted in the book, and which occurred before most of the events in the book**, Lin says that his goal is to find a girlfriend. Then he says that's a secondary goal, and his first goal is to have a comfortable relationship with anything happening externally. This is the relationship that is the story of the book: Paul's mind vs the external.
Is there some contradiction there? If Taipei is a modern day Siddhartha, are Lin's two goals reconcilable?
As someone who vacillates between extreme romanticism based on projections formed of Internet-based crushes and the desire to join a buddhist-ish monastery, this question is relevant to me.
By entertaining all possibilities in one's mind, one can avoid causing real-world harm ?
To me, Lin doesn't seem interested in denouncing anything at all, nor does he seek to elevate any certain kind of lifestyle. He simply wants to take what's around him and distill it, alchemize it, so that mundane experience can no longer be labeled mundane. So that all experience is worthwhile, and is equally beautiful and equally empty.
Paul doesn't feel less than other people, and he is not a robot struggling to understand human emotion, as someone wrote in their review on Goodreads.. Just because a person feels deeply isolated from other humans, and can't connect to them, doesn't make that person robotic.
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