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3.56 AVERAGE
3.56 AVERAGE
Memoir, experimental, informative narrative through the unique voice of Tao Lin. This is very much a book about Tao as well as psychedelics, society, and being a human. The Epilogue, written in the third person it the most powerful part of the book. Its effect is Tao viewing his life from an objective point of view, as a playful actor in a world of complexity and goodness. Tao's trip is fractal and natural and life-embracing and curious. He is a finding happiness along the way.
Also loved reading his documentation of his experiences with psychedelics including Psilocybin, DMT, Cannabis and Salvia.
Also loved reading his documentation of his experiences with psychedelics including Psilocybin, DMT, Cannabis and Salvia.
Depending on the day I read it, it was either pretentious, boring, or profound. Take a trip.
The perfect sequel to Taipei, and a reversal—where the last book was a single long, sustained sigh, frightening in its narrow vision and mental-emotional limits, Trip is expansive, experimental, invigorated, and useful (though I’m skeptical of its conclusions about pesticides and processed foods, among other things). (Re)legalize psychedelics!
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
informative
reflective
medium-paced
funny
informative
reflective
medium-paced
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
fast-paced
"When you get the message, hang up the phone."
— Ram Dass, Be Here Now
Guilty Thoughts
Tao Lin's fictions are guilty pleasures. We sense that, behind the scenes, the author is suffering a whipping in order to produce them. Nothing prior to the invention of Myspace compares to the crucible of (self-inflicted) pain his characters inhabit. (And yes, this includes those notorious Events of the 20th century, which are only less painful because we know, at least, that the victims dissent.) I had once described the reflexively-alienating social structures of these fictions (from the perspective of which one cannot even know what it would look like not to be alienated; these unpleasant reading experiences) as surpassing the works of Kafka, whose characters, not without humor, continue to address each other in earnest, and I maintain that designation.
These days, the Mandalas Tao Lin constructs for his blog, under the edifying influence of psychedelics, appear to (unintentionally) reprise the alienated structures of his earlier fictions. Such drawings, which are pressed full with colorful forms (excluding extraneous movement), become totalizing geometric structures not unlike the "triangular" orgies in de Sade: "she who shitted, whips; she who whipped, sucks; she who sucked, shits," (Marquis de Sade, 120 Days). Those Sadean women, bound to play their roles on penalty of death-by-libertinage seem to have three qualities in common with our harrowed author: First, in being newly consecrated to disburse punishments-by-the-whip; second, as demonstration that the trajectory that begins with whipping must, before long, end up sucking; third, for a reason I will reveal later.
The crux of this text (if we are generous enough to omit the reference to Joe Rogan on the first page) appears to be Tao Lin's perspective on a recording of a 1992 discussion between Ram Dass and Terence McKenna. In this excerpt we are reading Ram Dass as arrogant for his declaration that, "My life is my message," in contrast with McKenna's claim to still be figuring things out, "Please don't look at my life because I'm a fallible human being and I'm constantly fucking up," (21). The consequence of this divergence may be less-than-obvious. Ram Dass, whose ‘Gandhian’ declaration is really the request to be held accountable, seems to take the 'transcendence' of psychedelics for what it is yet is also able to set it aside, "When you get the message, hang up the phone," (Ram Dass, Be Here Now). Meanwhile what goes unnoticed in McKenna’s modesty is that his search for certainty is always already constructing what Deleuze (sorry) might call a Paranoiac Machine i.e. mechanistic thought processes converging toward a 'molar' obsession.
Even when the Paranoiac is 'right' his obsessions make him dubious. McKenna's un-presupposing interest in 'good, clean living' is not so easily satisfied, and this is where all those supplemental theories about Cannabinoids and Purity come. (Of course, what goes unstated here is that, if psychedelics were as good as McKenna says they are, a supplement would not be needed . . .) Psychedelics, we read, are the crux of natural euphoric feeling (which we have lost), non-hierarchical societies (which we have lost), and the evolution of hominid brains (which we are losing), all threatened by the anti-Psychedelic. Pesticides and Toxins become antagonists in the Manichaean struggle. One sees how this trajectory transforms our paranoiac's interest in psychedelic transcendence into a concern with the minutiae of things like wisdom tooth removal in what one might call a paranoiac poisoning delusion (even though, on a factual level, it may be true). It seems that what's important in this structure is that our initiate, at last, has a whip to brandish for the sake of his molar dentition.
We find paranoiac thought-mandalas make easy work of fault-finding in the ailments of others, yet are not self-critical in the way one might have hoped. In Leave Society (2021), Tao Lin attributes his headache and malaise to poisoning from toxins in his tooth fillings and has these removed. Toxin-laden diets and mercuric fillings explain his friends' depression and mother's prediabetes. The progression of the chief character's ankylosing spondylitis therefore suggests a conundrum. One wonders how Tao Lin will resolve the dialectical superimposition in which he is simultaneously obeying the conduct of a less-poisoned lifestyle yet is always-already-more-poisoned than others. Actually, we find the notion of being 'always-already-more-poisoned' helps the work of whip-wielding, since it allows the paranoiac to operate without the guilt-complex of being insufficiently self-critical. In Trip we find the apotheosis of this complex with the presentation of McKenna's malignant brain tumor, which, given his notion that all pathogenesis derives from exogenous impurities, would seem to call at least fifty hours of youtube videos into question. As we might have expected, the paranoiac simply takes this development as an opportunity to whip ‘impure’ conduct toward even stricter standards; in short — it sucks.
And yet, it would seem that the third thing Tao Lin shares with the Sadean women is the potential to go from 'sucking' to 'shitting' (in the good sense). By the time Tao Lin had finished the despairing Taipei (2013), it would appear that Sheila Heti had already noted the key to that text: "[you] should to put a lot of shit in the play," (How Should a Person Be?, 2010). One should read this as a rule for personal conduct, which particularly applies to artistic production: [to make anything] you have to make the choice to shit it up. Perhaps this is what Gertrude Stein means when she says that the most important quality of an artist is "being able to empty yourself completely," (Picasso, 1938). We think that, at some point, we were certain Tao Lin had abilities. Even though it seems like he sucks now, we hope he stops sucking and starts taking 'shitting' seriously (if this text isn’t already an example of him having done so). That would be a good place to start, so long as what he produces doesn't lead to more grasping at the whip. He's written his first nonfiction book, let's see what comes next.
Detailed, well-researched and sentimental.
If you have ever considered yourself a nihilist, this book will give you hope.
If you have ever considered yourself a nihilist, this book will give you hope.
Skimmed through a good portion of the book but actually ready probably 80 pages. I found his trip reports to be uninteresting as someone that is more experienced in the field. The best part of the book was his review of Terrance Mckenna’s life.