Recently Christian Lorentzen, a writer for The Observer, sat down for dinner with Tao Lin and decided to write a profile on him, using Lin’s annoying unique writing style. Tao Lin ordered the scallops.

The Observer was sitting at his desk. It was Friday at 1:03 p.m. His Gmail was open, and the inbox showed a new message from Tao Lin. The subject of the message was “just confirming, 630pm five leaves.”

The Observer replied, “Yes, and the assignment is fully confirmed. The profile of you will run in the Observer issue of August 18.”

Tao Lin replied, “Sweet. Thank you.”

A few minutes later, The Observer decided to write his profile of Tao Lin in Tao Lin’s style. An editor came up to The Observer‘s desk to check on his work. The Observer told him there was no problem with his work. The editor seemed relieved.

Read the rest here.

Gawker’s favorite whipping boy Tao Lin has thrown a (now closed) crazy self-indulgent contest to coincide with his latest output, a little book by the name of Richard Yates. All the contest needed was you to produce some sort of piece all about Tao Lin. The longer the better.

I can’t even bring myself to watch the videos as the essays themselves are batshit crazy and enough for one sitting. A chosen few even went over 6000 words, which, last time I checked, was 10 doubled-space pages of life they will never get back. That being said, my nominee is this guy. It’s just self-referential to work, all while still constructing a pretty legit homage to House of Grass. Plus, check out the pie graph!

I was already sitting at my computer on Monday when I “sat down” with Tao Lin (blog, twitter), author of the recently released Shoplifting From American Apparel, to have a little gchat about being fucked, Dan Brown’s new book, and his new life as an internet t-shirt model.

I volunteered that we’d keep this interview embargoed until next week sometime, but am posting it now so the New York Times will see they’re not the only ones breaking those things these days.

Here, have a look at what we talked about!

An Interview with Tao Lin, author of Shoplifting From American Apparel

me: hello

tao: hi

me: shall we chat?

tao: yes

(No, that’s not it! There’s more! After the jump…)

(more…)