SECONDARY DOCUMENTS ATTESTING THE EXISTENCE OF TAO LIN’S LOST ONE-HUNDRED-THOUSAND-WORD NOVEL
In an interview posted in May 2007, Tao Lin says:
I have a lot of unpublished work. I have a 100,000 word novel that won’t be published, like five twenty-page stories, and like fifty not yet published poems. I think it’s absurd to worry about being too prolific, but I admit I have worried about that pretty often. People do absurd things even if they know it is absurd, which is bad, maybe.
A fragment of a deleted blog post dated September 2007 (URL purportedly http://heheheheheheheeheheheehehe.com/2007/09/my-art-is-worth-more.html) recovered from britishblogs.co.uk reads:
esquire is publishing me next week
if i get some money i will stop drawing and my art will be worth more
someone should resell the art they bought from me on ebay for profit now that it is worth more
i mailed all the art that was sold today except the person that didn’t pay me yet
i like drawing
maybe i will quit writing and just draw
i wrote a 100,000 word novel before i wrote bed or eeeee eee eeee but it is on a computer that i put in a public trashcan in new jersey because i felt desperate to get it away from me because it weighed a lot and i didn’t want to carry it when i moved from jersey city to manhattan a long time ago
i want to sell that novel on ebay
i should stop supporting ebay
they are a publicly-owned company so whatever they do will be in service of profits
maybe the extra money i[…]
In an interview from December 2008, Tao says:
I have been writing with thoughts like “I am working hard” for 4 or 5 years. The first 20+ day writing project I had was a novel, I think. I finished it when I was 20 or 21 and edited it a few times. It was around 100,000 words.
In July 2009, Tao Lin wrote on his blog:
just read in my ‘diary’ from 2004 that i emailed ‘about a dozen’ people my ~100,000 word unpublished novel
i don’t have the novel anymore, it was on a computer that i ‘threw away’ in a public trash can in jersey city and i think an aol email account that i don’t have access to anymore
do one of those people that i emailed the novel to exist, where are you, can you email me back my novel, if you still have it, i would like to ‘regain’ my unpublished novel, in order to sell it on ebay probably, and am offering a $30 ‘reward’
In Tao Lin’s “decade in review” from December 2009, he says (my italics):
2002 Enters relationship with NYU student. Writes Palahniuk-esque short-story set in office. Begins ~100,000-word novel. Seems to finally comprehend the word “abstract.” Meets Carles. Reads White Noise, Nicholson Baker, Lorrie Moore.
2003 Relationship ends. Reads The Broom of the System, Why Did I Ever. Completes ~100,000-word novel. Seems to finally comprehend the word “categorically.” Reads Jean Rhys. Moves to New Jersey. Reads Kafka’s diaries. Begins Bed. Eats at Vietnamese restaurant alone in Jersey City. Writes whale poem. Feels “severely depressed”/”cripplingly lonely.”
ANALYSIS
Ockham’s razor would suggest that Tao Lin did write a 100,000-word novel, which he emailed to some people via an AOL email account circa 2003, then threw away along with a computer in New Jersey.
Maybe an AOL employee, having read this, will locate the document, and print it off, a few pages at a time, to read on his lunch breaks, afterward dropping them into the blue recycling bin.
Maybe the hard drive with the novel was shipped to one of those waste dumps in Guiyu, China, where children cracked it open with rocks in order to strip the copper from the circuit board.
ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESIS
The existence of a lost Tao Lin novel may be a hoax invented and perpetuated by Tao Lin himself in order to build his mystique, maybe to provoke comparisons between him and Ernest Hemingway, who had a manuscript stolen along with his suitcase on a train in 1922. Maybe he wants to mislead collectors and enthusiasts on an impossible quest to find it, like the people in the woods on the History Channel looking for Big Foot.
CONCLUSION
Whether Tao Lin’s lost novel ever existed, and what it might have contained, we can’t know. As Tao Lin becomes more well known, we shouldn’t be surprised to see various people come forward with 1.5-megabyte word docs that they attribute to Tao Lin. The job of verifying their authenticity will ultimately fall on future Tao Lin scholars and digital forensic scientists. I expect each to fail.
