[Noah Cicero sent this to me last week. And yes, it is another (slight) commentary on a review of Shoplifting from American Apparel. It's more than that, too. If you're unfamiliar with Noah Cicero's writing, you can visit his blog, or check out his latest book The Insurgent. -Gene]

In one of the reviews of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel Huw Nesbitt makes the statement, “Real art seeks to examine the truth as it is; not through relativism, atomism, or universalism, but by seeking that which once was or irrevocably, true.” If you have read analytic philosophy your first thought after reading those lines will probably be, “Those sentences don’t make any sense.” The proposition, “the truth as it is,” is actually relativism and universal in its meaning. How can something be true but not universal is a contradiction. READ MORE >

[Ryan Call and I asked Brandon Scott Gorrell to take a look at some of the negative reviews of Tao Lin's Shoplifting from American Apparel, and maybe say something. This is the result of that. - Gene Morgan]

I’m going to try and ignore the thought I keep having that I shouldn’t be shit-talking people’s opinions, that it’s obvious they’re opinions, and that these reviewers aren’t stating their opinions as facts.

Here are some opinions of mine about quotes from four negative reviews of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting From American Apparel. I don’t feel I took the quotes out of context.

Kati Nolfi, Bookslut: “There is so little aboutness in Lin’s work.” What?

Lisa Foad, Globe and Mail: “After all, Lin – feted darling of the hipster coterie – is known for his pomp-and-pageantry-fuelled exploits. Witness: Lin glutting NYC with a Britney Spears sticker campaign to promote the release of his 2008 poetry collection, cognitive-behavioral therapy; Lin routinely repeating the same line – “The next night we ate whale” – at readings (seven monotonous minutes mark his record to date); Lin auctioning drafts of his writing on eBay, and most recently, his MySpace account (it fetched a whopping $8,100); Lin selling shares of the anticipated royalties of his upcoming 2010 Melville House novel, Richard Yates (to the tune of $12,000); Lin founding Muumuu House, a publisher that boasts an appreciation not just for poetry and fiction but Tweets and Gmail chats; Lin enlisting fans as “interns” to rally on his behalf by blogging about him, reviewing his work on Amazon and padding his Wikipedia profile.” I understand Tao’s gimmickry is disarming for people, but it really doesn’t take that many steps in logic to figure out that everyone does what he does, they just present it in a way that’s more familiar.

Publishing houses hire publicists to expand their audience. Authors hire agents to make them money. Independent lit publishers hire fans as interns (would they really hire someone who didn’t like the press as an intern? That wouldn’t happen) and have them write Wikipedia pages for their authors. The difference is that Tao is transparent and vocal about it.

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A couple days ago, I sent out an email asking a fairly large group of writer, editor and publishing friends to send me their nominations for “top 3 books published this year.” I told them to interpret “top” any way they chose to, and to feel no pressure to expound on their choices in any particular way. The plan is to publish a large list of all the Top 3 lists next week (so far I’ve received 20 contributions, and they’re still coming in) but yesterday I kicked off the festivities early by posting one response by Zak Smith in advance of the full list. Today I’m offering up my own selections, prefaced by a short explanation of the way I chose to interpret my own injunction to choose the “top” books of the year.

I spent large swaths of 2009 struggling with fiction, especially novels, while also struggling to write one. (Anyone see a relationship between those two facts? … Didn’t think so.) Here are three novels that challenged and expanded my notion of what a novel could, should, or ought to be, but more important than that: they provided me with enormous entertainment and edification. The three are vastly different, but each is, I think, a work of startling interiority, and this seems to be what I needed in ’09. Each book in its own way offered me succor and deliverance from the confines of myself, by offering up for a getaway space the extraordinary confines of some other self, and I returned from each readerly excursion in better shape than when I left.

Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin.

The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell.

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker.

ALSO: A special shout-out to My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which has a 2008 © in it but didn’t really surface until early ’09. A massively important book and instantly among the most important and treasured Collecteds I own.

Getting a head in life

In writing about Shoplifting from American Apparel, I will try very hard not to say if it’s good or bad. I will also not align myself as a fan or dissenter of Tao Lin, or participate in the murky controversies over what people think about him — controversies which both propel his fame while compromising it. That kind of discourse is inflated and not interesting to me. I will admit I’m ambivalent about writing a review of this book, as it already has had its ample share of attention — I just wanted to write about some formal things I thought about while reading the book. (I am writing this review without the book in hand, and cannot check facts, and I read the book briskly, so this may be a compromised account.)

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Tao Lin reads from the first section of Shoplifting from American Apparel, then answers questions about writing process, influence, shoplifting, etc.

I read and greatly enjoyed this novella a couple weeks ago. It makes some interesting use of what people who want to put tags on things could call verbal minimalism inherting cinéma vérité, as well as a mash of Andys (Warhol and Kaufman), new uses of internet language in print, and a linear-alinear timeline modeling that more correctly models everyday life than most textual attempts at representing everyday life. That’s if you want to put tags on things.

I’d prefer to just say that I laughed more at parts of this book than I’ve laughed in a long time, and I think those who see this book as ‘incomplete’ might be missing part of the point here, which is not to exploit the expectations of Tao Lin’s previous work while also not exploit some kind of forced shifting of an artist’s tone. Like many artists who are ahead of the curve, this book is ahead of a curve that you might not yet see curving, particularly because it most succeeds on the level of entertaining the reader while being ahead of the curve, which then most easily becomes mistaken as unfocused, when in fact it is the extreme opposite: focused beyond focus.

I really enjoyed this book.

You can buy it here.

*click on covers to purchase original, and much better versions

Blake and Tao are two very talented writers, both in their own right spearheading the world of indie publishing in two very different ways. Just poking a little fun guys, good job both of you. I’m excited to read your books.

Drew Toal and I were having such a great time talking about Tao Lin’s new novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel, that we figured we owed it to the world to go public. So we forced ourselves to not discuss the book anymore until we were both finished, then we scheduled a time to meet up online and gchat about it. We ended up talking about a lot of extra-literary stuff (maybe too much?) but given that it’s Tao, and that we know him, that was pretty much unavoidable squared, but I think we did a pretty kickass job with the book when we got around to it. Drew was at his office, in mid-town, and I was at my office, in my bedroom. After the jump, we get down to it.

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Really excited about this one, releasing September 15th from Melville House.

Set mostly in Manhattan—although also featuring Atlantic City, Brooklyn, GMail Chat, and Gainsville, Florida—this autobiographical novella, spanning two years in the life of a young writer with a cultish following, has been described by the author as “A shoplifting book about vague relationships,” “2 parts shoplifting arrest, 5 parts vague relationship issues,” and “An ultimately life-affirming book about how the unidirectional nature of time renders everything beautiful and sad.”

From VIP rooms in “hip” New York City clubs to central booking in Chinatown, from New York University’s Bobst Library to a bus in someone’s backyard in a college-town in Florida, from Bret Easton Ellis to Lorrie Moore, and from Moby to Ghost Mice, it explores class, culture, and the arts in all their American forms through the funny, journalistic, and existentially-minded narrative of someone trying to both “not be a bad person” and “find some kind of happiness or something,” while he is driven by his failures and successes at managing his art, morals, finances, relationships, loneliness, confusion, boredom, future, and depression.

More info here. Preorder here.