Corporate America Wants to Buy (and Sell) Tao Lin
I’m going a different route with my column this week. No theoretical physics. Nothing (hopefully) too abstract. No footnotes. Less than 1,000 words. No frills. Just a straightforward conversation about something that basically vexes me: the idea and process of “selling out”. I’m also half breaking my rule about rhetorical questions today, i.e. there will be questions that, upon first glance, appear rhetorical, but, in reality, are questions I’d actually like answers to.
First of all, what’s the big deal with selling out, anyway? For a writer, I mean. How does a writer even sell out? Because if it means signing with a huge publishing house for seven or eight figures and some seriously wide distribution of your work, well, wouldn’t that be, all things considered, a pretty fucking good thing?
Really, there are probably only two types of writers, with respect to this issue, if it is even a real issue at all: writers who have “sold out” and writers who have not “sold out” yet. The third (read: inconsequential) type of writer is one who is never afforded the opportunity to “sell out” (sorry, third type!).
A popular notion on the old Interwebs these days is the notion that Tao Lin has sold out. Bullshit. Have you ever actually read Tao Lin? “Selling out” for him is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. I mean, seriously, the man on the cover of Richard Yates has a vagina-face. Lin simply can’t sell out, unless of course he, say, writes a sequel to The Notebook, which, actually, come to think of it, I would totally read! My guess is that it would be told solely through alternating Tweets, replete with hashtags and relevant bit.ly-shortened links.
Let’s just agree to agree that Tao Lin (like many others) has not “sold out”.
Something perhaps a little more debatable is whether or not any “experimental writers” could “sell out,” even if they wanted to.
Of course, I submit, this requires some sort of agreement as to what exactly “experimental writing” actually is, and if my previous three columns and HTMLGIANT’s truly fan-fucking-tastic series (found here and here) haven’t come to a singular consensus, we might have to go with a somewhat generic definition for the purposes of this column.
The designation “experimental” kind of depends a lot on, among other things, the time in which the work was written. When satire was new (or newish when Jonathan Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal”), it was considered experimental. When Thomas Pynchon started turning out postmodern novels, they were considered very experimental. When Donald Barthelme and John Barth garnered attention for their whip-smart metafiction, that shit was definitely seen as experimental!
Likewise, when Nicholson Baker wrote The Mezzanine, almost no one outside of academia was using footnotes in their writing. It was certainly the first book I’d ever read that used footnotes just for fun. The Mezzanine also played a lot with time dilation in that it was an entire novel that takes place during the course of a single escalator ride.
These days, it’s almost experimental to “simply” (air quotes here) write novellas or 1,000 page epics (see Adam Levin’s The Instructions and John Sayles’s A Moment in the Sun, both published by McSweeney’s). Maybe writing “experimentally” is as simple as keeping readers guessing as to what you’ll write next.
And by that token, Pynchon’s Inherent Vice might be his most experimental effort to date due to its overall general linearity and readability. Just forget Gravity’s Rainbow.
In the end, I suppose this entire column has been one giant protracted exercise in thinking (typing?) out loud that really has no concrete answer.
I mean, for me, personally, I can think of a couple ways I, as a writer, would “sell out” that have less to do with writing than they do about cold, hard cash: (e.g.) if, say, Google wanted to pay off my car loan (~$15k), I’d let them paint their multi-colored corporate logo all over my Volvo C30. To that end, if Google also offered to take care of my student loan debt (~$50k), I’d get a giant Google tattoo across my back, from shoulder blade to shoulder blade.
Seriously.
I don’t rock the shirtless look that often anyway.
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Tao Lin did NOT and would NOT sell out. Getting a measly $50,000 advance could never possibly be selling out. It’s hardly “seven or eight figures” and is probably like minimum wage for all the hours Tao works hard on the novel. If anything, he is still undervalued and highly underpaid.
Indeed! That was basically the whole point of my column. That, and the idea that it’s really hard to sell out in the literary industry for anyone. I think we are in agreement (possibly).
Selling out implies that one is doing something that would compromise one’s principals, integrity, or morality in exchange for success (usually wealth). Getting paid to do something is not the same as selling out. Getting paid a LOT is still not the same as selling out. That’s employment (sure, one could argue that if one has ever been gainfully employed to do a job one wouldn’t otherwise wake up every day to do, one has sold out. But, then we’re all sellouts and have no right to judge). I’ve never gotten the impression that Mr. Lin was against making money or that he was in any way against being employed as a writer. Selling out in his case would mean something more like taking that advance to write a teen vampire novel (assuming he didn’t wish to write one; because, if he DID want write one, it wouldn’t really be selling out).
@dtomaloff Yes, totally agree! Thus what I was mentioning w/ The Notebook sequel, etc. The whole point of the column is actually that Tao has not/ (ostensibly) cannot “sell out”. The idea of “selling out” actually seems like a buzzword [buzz-term?] that gets tossed around on the Internet without people truly understanding what it means. Which is also why I mention that, given the opportunity, I’d “sell out” in an instant because, really, who wouldn’t want to become wealthy doing what they love?
Hola, quizás os interese saber que tenemos una colección que incluye el relato ‘Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired’ de Richard Yates en versión original conjuntamente con el relato ‘A Small, Good Thing’ de Raymond Carver.
El formato de esta colección es innovador porque permite leer directamente la obra en inglés sin necesidad de usar el diccionario al integrarse un glosario en cada página.
Tenéis más info de este relato y de la colección Read&Listen en http://bit.ly/ndSymF