making friends: update

Having set myself the task earlier of becoming friends with Tao Lin I have been doing some research, to see what ‘makes him tick’. But, first of all, I need to address the issue of the motive behind my quest to befriend Tao Lin.

When Lee read my early blog post, he said it sounded quite stalkerish. Like a slightly over obsessive fan. I would like to point out that I am not Tao Lin’s ‘fan’. I cannot decide whether I like his first novel. It’s like an abstract painting- you can’t decide if it’s a piece of genius, or something that might have been scrawled by a 2 year old. I had intended to ‘review’ (in a sense) books that I’d read on here, but Tao Lin had me stumped. So I decided to befriend him instead. Perhaps not the most logical course of action, but in Tao Lin’s writing logic isn’t particularly important.

So having furthered my research, what did I find?

Tao Lin is quite possibly obsessed with self publicity and a complete ‘ego-maniac’. He, apparently, emails Gawker constantly, he is difficult to interview and he is demanding of his interns. He puts piles of crap on ebay and recently sold shares of the royalties for a book he hadn’t written yet.

I don’t really think I want to be friends with Tao Lin, based on this, and I definetely wont be one of his interns. In fact it is quite possible that he set up and wrote most of the intern blogs himself. But, still, I will put my friendship plan into action. Perhaps when I get to know Tao Lin I will discover he is a ’sensitive soul’, who is ‘putting on a front’. Or I might just discover he is a dick. I wont know until we are friends.

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