Tao Lin, self-promotion and the servals

Tao Lin has offered a free copy of his new novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel, to twelve people who write >1500-word blog posts about him. Here is mine.

But wait, why would I go to such a length — not that 1500 words is much of a length, really — just to get a free copy of a book? I'm inundated with free books as it is. If I'd invited Tao Lin onto The Marketplace of Ideas for an interview — which I strongly considered until I saw that he'd already busted out a bazillion interviews about SFAA, though if you're reading this and game, Tao, I'm still game myself — I'd get mailed a copy anyway. At least one copy. And if I were to come down with laryngitis that rendered me unable to interview, I could just request the book and never get in touch with its publicity contact.

The reason I participate nevertheless is partially because Lin has promised "mad hits" if my post makes it onto the list of twelve, but mostly because it exemplifies the sort of wonky self-promotional strategy for which he has become known. Perhaps the most notable of these happened when, overcome by an understandable desire to put "real" jobs behind him forever, he sold advance "shares" of his upcoming novel, simply titled Richard Yates, for about sixteen grand. He has raised Gawker's ire — though he later earned its forgiveness — for his constant self-promotional salvos. In what could also be reasonably deemed a sort of stunt, he founded his own publisher, Muumuu House, which for some reason interests me greatly. Regardless of its degree of stuntage, I should probably pitch my many experimental novel ideas to it. I have experimental novel ideas which I could execute at a moment's notice.

I must admit that anybody with such willingness to self-promote, self-market or whatever one wants to call it interests me greatly — though Lin more than most, since he's got a real product — because, as I've laid out here before, I have sucked at it more than anything I've sucked at before, currently suck at it more than anything else at which I am now sucking, and, probably, will continue to suck at it more than I shall suck at anything in the foreseeable future. I'm so bad at self-promotion that I have to participate secondarily in other peoples' self-promotional antics in hopes of "mad hits." Terror at the prospect of being seen as a self-promoter has something to do with it, though when Lin is depicted as a self-promoter, he somehow wins an even higher profile from the slam! It's like he's in a physical-law-breaking feedback loop of internet/literary fame.

Of course, to effectively market oneself requires boldness, which I sadly lack. I have only recently noticed this in myself; it happened at just about the same moment that I noticed that boldness is one of the two qualities I most admire in others, curiosity being the other. While I can safely say that I Am a Curious (Fellow), my instinctive conservatism irks me like nothing else. I cannot even say that, on any identifiable level of awareness, I "want" not to take risks. In fact, I do want to take risks, but the monkey brain within me remains convinced that what I actually want is to avoid serval attacks. And self-promotion just puts you right out there, dead in the crosshairs of roaming serval packs.

But Lin, in his published photos, displays very few serval bite marks. Certainly none have thus far proven fatal. And this after making such bold moves as:

• Writing and publicly reading a poem that ends with the line "the next night we ate whale" repeated over and over again until everyone leaves
• Sending Gawker numerous e-mails jam-packed with lines like "I'm hot, young, that I went to NYU, and have ironic book-covers. I think you know what all this means" and "It would be good if you could cover an entire glass window with my 4x6 glossy, two-sided flyers."
• Asking for money, specifically in the Richard Yates fundraising instance (I can't imagine ever getting money out of anyone simply by asking for it, even if I framed it as an investment — perhaps this is why, despite my interest in all things entrepreneurial, I'm no entrepreneur)
• Starting his own publishing house
• Spending punishingly ascetic eight-hour writing days in New York University's library computer lab
• Tweeting tweets like: "feel like 'crapping out' garlic bread thru my 'pee hole,' seems like it would feel like intense masturbation, not sure what i'm describing"
• Asking people to write >1500-word blog posts about him

I am pretty sure that if I did all that stuff, I would gain a hundred times the radio listeners I have and perhaps a thousand times the readers. But Lin has already done it all, thus robbing me of the vital "originality."

As it happens, he's written a whole post of his own on the subject of self-promotion. Naturally, it is an impassioned defense of the practice. Some of its lines read as if directed, slightly angrily, straight at erroneously shrinking violets such as myself. "if you feel bad about promoting yourself you either have an error in thinking (you think not with facts but by received ideas and peer pressure)," he claims, "or you should begin to exist less and do the opposite of promoting yourself, if you want to not be a contradiction." If I've got this correct, his argument boils down to the facts that, if you consider yourself to be good and working in the name of advancement of things that are good in this fallen world, then your self-promotion is really just promotion of the good, and thus you should not hesitate to do it. "if you feel shame or disgust at self-promotion that means you either aren't able to view yourself without preconception, as just a 'tool,'" he writes, "or you are ashamed and feel guilty of your own existence, of what you do with the power, influence, and money that you already have." Perhaps the most elegant distillation of this viewpoint is as follows: "not promoting yourself is only 'in line' with your philosophy if you are 'insane.'"

Reflecting on this, I personally find that I am indeed working for the advancement of things that are good. When I record and broadcast a radio interview, I work for the advancement of sharp, entertaining conversation. When I write a blog post, I work for the advancement of information delivered on the Information Superhighway with humor and clarity. When I write up a movie I've watched, I work for the advancement of quality cinema (and the dis-advancement of mediocre cinema). When I whip out my DJ gear and spin a set or two, I work for the advancement of fine ambient music. When I make a field recording, I work for the advancement of richer listening experiences. When I get my act together to crank out more film and video, I will work for the advancement of more interesting visual media.

It is by marshaling the pieces of evidence that lead me to these conclusions that, despite his refusal to engage in normal capitalization, I judge Lin as genuinely smart and witty. Nobody who has read his Stranger article on what he, as an outsider, can tell you about Seattle could disagree:

People from Alabama or Florida or anywhere else seem to always be talking about how Alabama and Florida are a lot better than wherever they currently are, I think because they are trying to convince themselves that they were not "cheated" out of something by growing up in Biflow, Florida. It isn't sarcastic at all when someone from Alabama says they wish they were back in Alabama. But people from Seattle when elsewhere somehow do not ever try to convince themselves of anything, I think because they feel like if they say something like "In Seattle my chicken fingers would never be served raw by accident" it would be like saying "A poodle is a kind of dog" in that it's "an accepted fact" to people from Seattle that Seattle is "better" in the same way that it is "an accepted fact" that poodles are dogs. Someone would never try to say that a poodle is a kind of cat.

I should add that rarely does a day go by when I don't think about the Urban Elitist interview in which Lin claims that he feels as if "'making money' is 'inextricably tied' with 'just doing something so that there can be things to do instead of feeling bad,' 'trying to have more people know about you so that you can meet new people for various purposes,' 'doing things to feel excited,' and 'doing really ‘retarded’ things in order to relieve boredom, like buying a large billboard on Houston street and putting a hamster drawing on it.'" Man oh man, does that ever resonate with me. Money is one thing, and it's no doubt an important thing, but it's also just one thing of many, and I go all nutty if I focus on it to the detriment of the others. If I were to articulate my own goals as far as making cool shit, "trying to have more people know about you so that you can meet new people for various purposes" wouldn't land too wide of the mark. Collaboration, after all, is the soul of creativity. And all these experimental novels ain't gonna get written in a vacuum.

And indeed, Lin seems to both (a) make cool shit and (b) meet new people for various purposes. He even goes on reading tours! In his brilliant essay "How to Do What You Love", Paul Graham defines to work as "to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve," and I think Lin falls more or less in line with that. He's making original contributions to the world, and, though his vegan-ish diet seems to be unsettlingly packed with unsatisfying-sounding foods like "kale" and "baby watermelons," he looks far from the point of starvation. This has to have been the first instance of Tao Lin-Paul Graham linkage on the entire internet.

I see that this post has now reached 1673 words, so I should probably slam on the brakes. I've overshot the goal line, but some of the words in this big chunk of prose are Lin's, so I bet it all evens out.

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