Status Updates From Taipei

The writing becomes so much more alive when Paul gets back to his endless stream of drug use. There’s an interesting conflict at the core of Paul and friends’ seemingly mundane tedium - that our conceptions of health are flawed if you assume that human connection is the height of existence [and emotionally damaged folks might need damaging medicine to be healthy]. I think Im getting the hype now.

most of this is dreary and boring bc of lins detached aloof voice. but “then moved chips and guacamole onto his lap … and focused on steadily eating while repeatedly thinking ‘eating chips and guacamole’” made me belly laugh. hell yeah dude

apt

“On average, since the urge to kill myself isn't so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in.”

“It would take her thousands of steps to get anywhere, but she would get there easily, and when she arrived, in the present, it would seem like it had been a single movement that brought her there. Did existence ever seem worked for? One seemed simply to be here, less an accumulation of moments than a single arrangement continuously gifted from some inaccessible future.”

“On average, since the urge to kill myself isn't so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in.”

“Nice" said Paul staring transfixed at Fran's delicate and extreme gaze, like that of a skeleton with eyeballs, or a person with their face peeled off.”

“...and sleepily thought of how technology was no longer the source of wonderment and possibility it had been...”

“Gradually, after being the target a few times of a similar capriciousness, which he discerned as default behavior for most people, and not liking it, Paul learned to not be more generous or enthusiastic or attentive than he could sustain regardless of his mood and to not talk to people if his only reason to was because he felt lonely or bored”

“Gradually, after being the target a few times of a similar capriciousness, which he discerned as default behavior for most people, and not liking it, Paul learned to not be more generous or enthusiastic or attentive that he could sustain regardless of his mood and to not talk to people if his only reason to was because he felt lonely or bored.”

Paul thought of Taipei as a fifth season, or “otherworld,” outside, or in equal contrast with, his increasingly familiar and self-consciously repetitive life in America, where it seemed like the seasons, connecting in right angles, for some misguided reason, had formed a square, sarcastically framing nothing”

This is not a banger

I’m having a miserable time here

20 pages in, this book is—like most books inspired by Pynchon—incredibly annoying, almost agonising, to read, sometimes I wonder, why I am not allowed to connect two independent clauses, to one another using a comma, yet every author, including Tao Lin, is allowed to do this, and it is considered, great, while I get the comment, comma splice