Tao Lin (Wikipedia)

If you were wondering what kind of people fork over money for a class taught by the guy who live-blogged Hurricane Sandy for Thought Catalog while on Ecstasy, well, they’re pretty much what you’d expect.

“Suck it, Paul Dano!” crowed one young Williamsburg resident, referring to a play in which the actor had recently appeared. “I say ‘James Franco’ whenever something bad happens,” said another.

Finally, Mr. Lin arrived in his signature hoodie and plaid shirt. He kept his eyes cast to the floor and mumbled questions so softly that his students looked at each other, confused, until someone had the courage to ask him to repeat himself.

The topic of the night was George Saunders’s short story, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.”

“I’m surprised that so many of you got the thing with the ghosts,” Mr. Lin said. “I didn’t get that part at all. I also felt like the language was too idiomatic.”

Later in the two-hour session, the author of Shoplifting From American Apparel explained that Mr. Saunders operated with the premise that art has a moral function, and questioned the effectiveness of stories written by a man who once claimed in an interview to “know nothing.”

“Saunders reinforces what I already feel. Curtis Sittenfeld [whose work was also read in the class] forces you to relate to someone else’s point of view,” Mr. Lin said. Additional words of wisdom included “selling out is very moral,” and “I think you are making the world a worse place,” in reference to something the Transom said about art, reality or some such.

Nevertheless, the dozen and a half students attending the class—who ranged in age from slightly younger than Mr. Lin’s own 29 years to a woman who talked about working at a bank “before you were born”—seemed satisfied. Later, on the train, Mr. Lin told the Transom that we should have come a week earlier, when he had taken “a lot more drugs” before his lecture. Then he tried to sell us some sunglasses he said he had stolen from LensCrafters before kneeling on the floor and scooping up the dust of an Adderall tablet, which he had accidentally stomped with his boot.

Tao Lin

Do you like your hurricane coverage with a healthy dose of ennui? Do you find most Hurricane Sandy news too "newsy"? If you want to read about how the hurricane makes people feel, about what it does for hopes, dreams, unfulfilled goals, general anxiety and drug intake, then maybe you should be reading Tao Lin's liveblog over at Thought Catalog.

Stay tunned as Mr. Lin and other Thought Catalog contributors feel the crushing dread and anxiety of being alive--all while dealing with the reality of being stranded inside during a storm.

Below are a sampling of some of our favorite posts:

6:57PM, Murray Hill, Manhattan Ingested ~15mg Adderall. Waiting for more Adderall to arrive. Ate a pint of “Three Twins” ice cream & 2 packs of chocolate-y, mint-y “cup” things (via Paul Newman) on low doses of Ativan and Xanax. Typed “hurricane xanax” in a chatroom. Keep glancing at an unopened package of Fig Newman’s in corner of room. (Tao)

9:06PM, Murray Hill, Manhattan Felt distracted while pouring cereal into bowl. Missed bowl & poured cereal onto [thing I found on street a few weeks ago], friend’s bag, my floor. This happened probably 40-60 minutes ago (have been having problems resizing the pic). (Tao)

10:01PM, Murray Hill, Manhattan This is me liveblogging this. The window beyond the bed is open & I hear “nothing” except sometimes the leaves rustle a little. Was thinking about Hurricane Irene…feeling emotional. (Tao)

Readers and Thought Catalog contributors are also contributing:

12:58, East Village Roommate and I are not really sure how we’re supposed to prepare for the impending doom of the hurricane. So we filled up all our dishes with water. Still not sure what we’re going to do with them. (Reader submission — Erika Hakanson)

8:13AM, East Williamsburg, Manhattan Just woke up. Good morning. Wasn’t awoken by wind or hurricane sounds last night. Pics of outside, and a giant thing of Coconut Water my roommate gave me. (Brandon)

This is a liveblog that captures the way we live--if the way we live is a Thought Catalog liveblog.

The bounty (Click to enlarge)

But last night, we were rewarded for financial supporting the cause of making sure Mr. Lin's Luna Bar supply was fully stocked. Why ever settle for an NPR tote bag when you could get this for your donation?

An incomplete list:
- a handmade "thank you" card
- 5-10 stickers reading "I Support the War on America with Bath Salts"
- Two copies of selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee by Megan Boyle (published by Mr. Lin's Muumuu House)
-Adam Wilson's Flatscreen
-Into the Wild
-Socrates Adams' Everything is Fine
-The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
-Sam Pink's Frowns Need Friends Too
-Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy (published by Muumuu House)
-The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Sigmund Freud
- Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, hardcover
- Brandon Scott Gorrell's book of poems, during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present (published by Muumuu House)

This has left Mr. Lin broke and, for at least the second time in his career, desperate enough to sell all of his possessions. While the first round of self fund-raising in 2011 involved a Vimeo showcase of his eBay items, this weekend's cry for cash was limited to a now-deleted tweet and a correspondence with The Observer over what he's willing to part with.

So grab your piece of Tao Lin history with this lot of the scribe's juvenilia, all of which have been confirmed for sale by the writer himself. Several of the items did not include pictures, and we were required to take the images from a different source ... mainly from Mr. Lin's endlessly amusing Flickr.

So far he has sold a three drawings for a total of $48, a $15 book, and a collection of literature of his choosing for $50. He was sent a $200 donation via PayPal by a generous benefactor. But there's still so much more of Mr. Lin's never-before-seen oeuvre left! Just think of all the money you could make by one day selling a signed and dated copy of the writer's journalism notes from his 2003 NYU class, or 15 to 20 unpublished poems he turned in for another NYU credit. Or how about a drawing of a koala? And while he doesn't have the time to write commissioned fiction, he told The Observer that he'd consider taking requests for an art piece. For the right price, of course.

If none of this ephemera interests you ... well, there's always that juicer.

The author with his stuff (via Flickr's FakeSalt)

After yesterday's breaking story about Shoplifting From American Apparel's Tao Lin being so broke that he was selling everything he owned, we heard encouraging news from the author. Having to wait on his advance for his next book and check from teaching at Sarah Lawrence has made Mr. Lin rely on the kindness of strangers...some of whom don't even want anything in return.

Mr. Lin sent The Observer this message via email yesterday evening:

Subject: Thanks for the post
Someone paypal'd me $200 for nothing

He also gave us a list of what he's been able to sell (besides our $50 for books and "two nice handwritten notes"):

$7 drawing
$11 drawing
$200 nothing

We hope he uses the $268 to purchase some Zoloft or pizza, as his tweets of late have been getting pretty dark:

He is literally a starving artist now! Maybe he shouldn't be selling his juicer, since he'll soon be using it to squeeze nutrients from health bars, tempeh crumbs, and tears.

Tao Lin, selling his shit. (Megan Boyle)

The life of a successful writer isn't as lucrative as Franco or Franzen would have you believe. Just ask Tao Lin: Saturday evening, the micro-messaging wunderkind sent out a tweet asking if anyone wanted to buy his stuff. All of it. Like, all of it. (The tweet has since been taken down.)

Some sort of viral marketing stunt? Maybe, but he's done this kind of house cleaning before. Since we were in need of a good microwave, we took the bait and emailed him. Within five minutes, we received a reply:

"i don't have a microwave, i do have a used but good juicer for $50 + $5 shipping (bought for $99)

and a metal bed-frame with wheels for any-size-up-to-queen bed that i packaged to return to amazon but never mailed to them (too late to send back now) for $40 +5 shipping (bought for ~$120)"

What about non-antibiotic medication? He could do that, too.

Was Mr. Lin eschewing all earthly possessions to obtain a higher level of consciousness (one in which all thought would be communicated via Gchat acronyms)? Doubtful, since he also emphasized that he needed the money NOW, sent via PayPal. Did he have a huge gambling debt? Owe money to the powerHouse Arena mafia? Need some capital to invest in a pop-up store with Moby that only sold vegan milkshakes?

Sadly no, he explained in a follow-up message:

I'm selling anything people want, I'm about to put my previous MacBook & stuff from college & high school on eBay. What prompted it: I don't have any money and am waiting on the 2nd installment of my advance & 1st payment from teaching at Sarah Lawrence, but those aren't coming in for at least ~10-20 days.

We didn't need a juicer, and the bed frame seemed just ... weird, but how often do opportunities like this come along? We bought a collection of books (his choice) for $50, which he promised would come with a nice handwritten note. But think of the possibilities! Tao Lin's T-shirts, possibly stolen from American Apparel! Tao Lin's high school diary! His vinyl collection! The idea for that milkshake pop-up!

For the right price, you can probably have him show up to your reading at Housing Works and clap really loudly while shaking his head as if to say, "Wow, that guy is good."

The possibilities are endless. Take advantage of them before he gets his Sarah Lawrence paycheck.

Brea Souders for Canteen magazine

A lengthy analysis of novelist Tao Lin's career was published yesterday in Eye, the Columbia Spectator's weekend magazine. The author, Kaitlin Phillips, is a n+1 intern and the author of the @nplusinterns. She also contributed to @tao_lininterns.

The 4,617-word piece--which touches on Mr. Lin's college years, early professional struggles, and shrewd online self-promotion--reflects a fine marriage of writer and subject. In the piece, Tao Lin says "all college students" are part of his otherwise eclectic target audience, and we're hard-pressed to come up with a person more qualified to observe Mr. Lin in his natural habitat than a social media-savvy and ambitious lit mag intern.

Although the Tao Lin Interns Twitter account bio reads,"Don't bother asking us to write an expose about Tao. We are nothing if not loyal," Ms. Phillips has written a fairly loyal expose. It portrays Mr. Lin as an internet-accessible mentor for young writers disillusioned by the publishing industry.

"[Mr. Lin] will, to a small group of people, fame and money aside, be known as the guy who helped them find their place as writers," she wrote.

Her profile does not describe Mr. Lin's appearance, but readers can find a complementary take on Mr. Lin in Canteen, which recently named Mr. Lin a Hot Author. Mr. Lin told the magazine that his favorite sexual moment in literature is SPENT, by Joe Matt, which is about a guy masturbating and thinking about life. (Wasn't that excerpted on Thought Catalog one time?)

Mr. Lin told the magazine:

"It's memorable, to me, I think, because I feel like masturbation is a strange, complicated, affecting thing--whose strangeness, in its harmlessness and universality and solitariness, feels almost inherently literary--that seems to be definitely a part of my life, and the lives of people I know, but I haven't read that many books that describe it in detail."

Mahajan as photographed by Boru O'Brien O'Connell for Canteen Magazine's "Hot Authors" series.

Tired of Kardashians, Canteen magazine decided it would take sexy pictures of writers instead.

"Writers have lost their place as cultural heroes," laments the magazine. "But why can’t they at least try to compete with pop-culture stars on the same terms? Let’s promote novelists as sexy and fabulous! Insist that the PEN Award require a turn on the catwalk! Hold the National Book Awards on a sliver of sand populated by buxom models in horn-rimmed shades; let the champagne pop for the cameras, as Oxford tweed gets wet on Temptation Island!"

So they took some photos. Stephen Elliott , author of The Adderall Diaries, does not lounge on a sliver of sand populated by buxom models. Instead, he lies in the lap of a tattooed blond in leather trousers, his forehead being gently stroked as if all that Adderall had left him with a migraine.

Tao Lin poses as a Persephone in boxer shorts, his mouth stained with seeds of the fatal pomegranate, in a photo by Brea Souders. Michelle Tea has wonderful flowery tattoos.

We wrote to the novelist Karan Mahajan, author of Family Planning, who lies next to a model under a white sheet in one fabulous photo, and in a metal washtub in another. Who was the girl? How was the photo shoot?

"Her name is Julia Morrison," he wrote back. "She's modeled for Boru [O'Brien O'Connell], the photographer, before. She and I had a wonderful literary conversation about Palo Alto, her grandmother's eccentric hoarding habits (particularly as they pertain to fur coats), climate change, the perils of working at shifty downtown nightclubs -- all while we lay (near-naked), wrapped in a thin sheet, coughing up the January air on Boru's freezing industrial studio floor."

We asked what he thought about this treating-writers-like-Victoria-Beckham project. He called it an "inspired idea."

"Authors, like all other artists, ought to advance cults of personality that extend beyond their usual nebbishness and reclusiveness," he wrote. "I also now happen to think that, if I could be photographed naked with a glamorous woman after every paragraph I write, I could produce a dozen masterpieces in half as many years."

Teju Cole contemplates the literature of solitude. [Guardian]

Tao Lin interviews Ben Lerner [The Believer]

E-books with soundtracks? "Much of the music — about nine hours’ worth for the typical novel — is instrumental or ambient noise. But during livelier passages, a reader may hear the patter of footsteps, a booming gong, a crackling fire or the tick of a grandfather clock." [NY Times]

Walker Percy's The Moviegoer turns fifty. [The Millions]

Mass correction: a Wikipedia "editathon" at the British Library (behind a paywall.) [New Yorker]

Lin.

As the foremost chronicler of the young novelist Tao Lin's every whim, The Observer was hoping we might break the story of Tao Lin's next book deal, which he announced he was shopping a couple weeks back. Then, on a Sunday when our moods were already dampened by incessant rain and the looming prospect of Monday, Mr. Lin wrote to inform us that we had lost the story to Mike Vilensky at The Wall Street Journal. So he granted us an interview.

"Mike 'scooped' the news via Clegg himself," read the e-mail from Mr. Lin we received in our inbox as Sunday turned into Monday, The Wall Street Journal went to the presses, and the rain thundered down. "Clegg" is Bill Clegg, Mr. Lin's agent at William Morris Endeavor. The announcement can be found here. The novel, entitled Taipei, Taiwan, will be released as a paperback on Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

"Vintage/Knopf publishes most of my favorite writers: Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, Bret Easton Ellis," Mr. Lin told WSJ. And now Tao Lin.

So here is some stuff that is not in The Wall Street Journal: The book was sold for $50,000 with a $10,000 bonus if it earns out its advance, with one-third up front, one-third upon delivery of the manuscript and one-third upon publication in the U.S. and Canada. The proposal consisted of a 5000-word excerpt and a ~3-page outline. The other houses that made offers were Harper Perennial and Little, Brown. Tim O'Connell, who is an associate editor at Vintage and Anchor Books, will edit Mr. Lin. Mr. O'Connell was described by his new author as a "prolific Tweeter." Mr. O'Connell has Tweeted four times since March 2010.

Here is the rest of our exchange with Mr. Lin:

NYO: Did you get to go to meetings at the publishing houses?

TL: Yes, I met with 4 editors.

NYO: Who has the nicest office?

TL: Bloomsbury had the bleakest office, in my view. The other offices were all really nice.

NYO: Did Tim make the highest offer or was he the editor (and Vintage the publisher) you liked best?

TL: I liked everyone. Vintage didn't make the highest offer. I liked them best, based on a number of factors and with Bill's input.

NYO: Did you meet Sonny Mehta?

TL: I did not, but Tim and I talked about him. Tim spoke to him a number of times. Sonny had asked Tim which book by me he should read and Tim had said "Richard Yates," so Sonny may have read some or all of "Richard Yates."

NYO: Were you counseled against putting out a book proposal when everyone is on vacation (did they say "wait until September" or did you have to talk with any editors on Martha's Vineyard)?

TL: Everyone seemed very available, but I think mostly because of Bill's influence and enthusiasm. Bill highly exceeded my expectations at what an agent does or could do.

NYO: Do you feel now like you've "made it"?

TL: I honestly feel, to a large degree, like me and everyone else are close to death and that the awareness of this has, to me, precluded thoughts of "making it" (this is a theme of the novel).