my entire correspondence with n+1 including when benjamin kunkel emailed me a private email and when i lied to them about harper's

(*'s indicate footnotes; there're seven—*, **, ***, ****, *****, ******, *******—scroll down for them)

From: Tao Lin
To: editors@nplusonemag.com
Date: Dec 21, 2004 8:08 PM
Subject: Attn: Fiction Editor

Hi, N+1,

My name is Tao Lin. Here's a short story submission. I'm forthcoming in *punk planet magazine, *hobart. I'm online at *pindeldyboz, *eyeshot, etc. Thanks for reading this. It's a simultaneous submission,

Tao Lin

one day later (i sent them the same story again; don't remember if i had a legitimate reason for this; probably not)

From: Tao Lin
To: editors@nplusonemag.com
Date: Dec 22, 2004 12:25 PM
Subject: Attn: Fiction Editor

Hi, N+1,

My name is Tao Lin. Here's a short story submission. I'm forthcoming in *punk planet magazine, *hobart. I'm online at *pindeldyboz, *eyeshot, etc. Thanks for reading this. It's a **very simultaneously submitted submission.

Tao Lin

a day and a half later

From: Benjamin Kunkel
To: Tao Lin, editors@nplusonemag.com
Date: Dec 24, 2004 12:12 AM
Subject: Re: Fiction Editor

Dear Tao Lin,

Thanks very much for your submission. We're ***in the midst of putting together and laying out our second issue, so it will be a while before we get a chance to read your story. But we--I--look forward to it.

Things sometimes ***fall through the cracks at n+1, so please get back in touch if you haven't heard from me or one of my fellow editors within the next two months. Meanwhile consider subscribing to n+1 at the low rate of $16 a year: http://www.nplusonemag.com/subscribe.html.

Best of luck with your work. Yours sincerely,

Benjamin Kunkel (for n+1)

one month and thirty days later

From: Tao Lin
To: Benjamin Kunkel
Date: Feb 23, 2005 2:23 PM
Subject: Re: Fiction Editor

Hi, Benjamin. Just giving you a two-month 'reminder' on this. Thanks, Tao.

over a month later

From: Tao Lin
To: Benjamin Kunkel
Date: Mar 31, 2005 3:10 PM
Subject: Re: Fiction Editor

hi, Benjamin

i'd like to withdraw my story 'love is a thing on sale for more money than there exists,' submitted 12.21.04, as it has been accepted by Other Voices

thanks

sorry for any trouble

tao lin

that night

From: Benjamin Kunkel
To: Tao Lin, Benjamin Kunkel
Cc: Editors of n+1
Date: Apr 1, 2005 1:19 AM
Subject: Re: Fiction Editor

Dear Tao Lin,

My congratulations on placing your story in Other Voices.

Please feel free to send us more fiction in the future. Yours,

Benjamin Kunkel (for n+1)

four days later

From: Tao Lin
To: Benjamin Kunkel
Date: Apr 5, 2005 12:39 PM
Subject: ATTN: Fiction Editor

Hi, here is a short story submission for N+1 magazine.

My stories are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Other Voices, The Portland Review, Kitchen Sink Magazine, Punk Planet Magazine, and others.

Thanks,

Tao Lin

ten days later

From: Benjamin Kunkel
To: Tao Lin, Editors of n+1
Date: Apr 15, 2005 1:47 PM
Subject: n+1 magazine

Dear Tao Lin,

I'm afraid we won't be able to use your story ****"Love is the Indifferent God..." It's well-written throughout, but it seemed too deliberately whimsical to fit in with what we're trying to do with n+1 #3.

Thanks for your interest in the magazine, and congratulations on placing your stories in so many excellent publications. Yours,

Benjamin Kunkel (for n+1)


> [Original Message]
> From: Benjamin Kunkel
> To: Editors of n+1
> Date: 4/8/2005 12:49:33 AM
> Subject: Tao Lin's story
>
> Dear All,
>
> Well, I read or tried to read Tao Lin's story. *****It's not horrible, nor horribly written--some of it is pretty nice--but I found it over-rhetorical, full of the deliberate whimsy afflicting many of our younger writers, and it seemed kind of aimless too, although I might not have thought so if I'd read through to the end.
>
> I'll reject in on Monday unless someone begins to champion it. Yrs
>
> Ben

eight days later

From: Tao Lin
To: editors@nplusonemag.com
Date: Apr 16, 2005 11:38 AM
Subject: Attn: Fiction Editor

Hi, here is another submission. I'll be honest, ******this is the best story i've written i think, maybe. It's a simultaneous submission.

My fiction is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Portland Review, Other Voices, Opium Print, and other places.

Thanks for reading,

Tao Lin

five months and thirteen days later

From: Tao Lin
To: editors@nplusonemag.com
Date: Sep 28, 2005 2:31 AM
Subject: Submission Status for Tao Lin

Dear N+1,

I submitted a story on April 16th called "Cull the Steel Heart..."
And am just e-mailing to check on that.
Thanks,

Tao Lin

half a month later

From: Tao Lin
To: editors@nplusonemag.com
Date: Oct 12, 2005 1:10 PM
Subject: Submission Withdrawal

Dear N+1,
Please withdraw my story, "Cull the Steel Heart...," submitted 4/16/05 from consideration, as it's been accepted by Harper's. Thanks.
Tao Lin

next morning

From: Marco Roth
To: Tao Lin
Date: Oct 13, 2005 5:54 AM

Dear Tao Lin,
Congratulations on having your story accepted by Harper's.
with best wishes,
Marco Roth (for n+1)

that afternoon

From: Tao Lin
To: Marco Roth
Date: Oct 13, 2005 1:53 PM
Subject: Re: Submission Withdrawal

Dear N+1,
*******Just kidding. It wasn't accepted by Harper's. Thought I'd just do something insane, like say my story was accepted by Harper's when it wasn't. Thanks for participating.
Tao

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* it annoys me that i didn't capitalize these magazines but did capitalize my own name like myself in relation to those magazines was like god in pronoun form in relation to myself in pronoun form; and why that annoys me is because it annoys me that god is capitalized in pronoun form but normal people aren't, and even greek gods or satan i think aren't; when people do that—write He instead of he when it's jesus or god—i always feel embarrassed and stupid and vaguely self-righteous and fourteen years old and like the person who capitalized the pronoun is trying to convert me to christianity and i'm being stubborn and immature for not converting and should 'grow up' and convert and deal with it; and, so, actually, i think it's this last sentence, somehow, out of all this, that is the real cause of why i feel annoyed about not capitalizing those magazines
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** i feel stupid about 'very simultaneously'; did i think they'd panic and read it faster and panic more and then accept it out of the fear that the new yorker or harper's might accept it first?
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*** 'in the midst'; 'fall through the cracks'; i feel strange when 'stock phrases' like that are used; it's a sort of received knowledge in that you stop thinking openly and without preconception; your brain, in the process of trying to express something specific and unique and simple and personal (without help from other perspectives that are not your own), is stopped, as if by someone else's brain, stopped and told, 'go home, brain, we don't need you,' and then it puts the stock phrase there; and that is received knowledge; and i feel once-removed from the person who is actually trying to communicate to me; and that is why i 'feel strange' about stock phrases (unless the writer uses them consciously, as some do—uses them ironically, in a way that changes their 'received' meanings; for example, saying, 'things sometimes fall through the cracks at n+1 because our office has cracks on its floor') (and this was just an email but it happens all the time in literature—this disregard for the actual meanings of individual words—though there are exceptions and one is jean rhys' good morning, midnight; jean rhys was intolerant of received knowledge; i read that in an essay in the review of contemporary fiction that itself was almost all received knowledge)
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**** love is the indifferent god of the religion in which universe is church

it'll appear in spring 2006 in an issue of spork edited by kevin sampsell

here are the first three paragraphs of the draft i sent n+1; these paragraphs have since been cut, and won't be in the spork draft:

Sean had been spending his nights leisurely, with much intuition and very little actual engagement with the real world—the real world outside that was really happening. He was twenty-one. He lived with his older brother, Chris, in Manhattan, and dreamt mostly of love. These were terrible, cloying dreams. They involved prolonged moments of passion, vague and painted colors, and people sitting around in a sort of curtained and euphoric gloom, which was what love, in Sean’s dreams, seemed to be. He slept in the daytime, on the sofa, and would wake, sometimes, with such an awful, spongy feeling of love—the soggy cake of it pressed against his heart like another heart—that he would then move through the apartment, the one long room of it, like a hallway gone wrong, in an unenlightened sort of searching (where was the beloved?), not touching anything, but just moving, between things (piles of clothes, the TV, the low white raft of his brother’s bed), feeling husked and ancient and—sitting, then, back on the sofa—thankless, as what was there, in this cheap and witless world, to be thankful for? Not much, Sean knew. He didn’t like the world, and the world had perhaps grown weary of him.

The world was weary of him!

Though probably it was not even love that Sean dreamed of, but some sleight of love, some trick of crush or inwardly thwarted desire, like a chemical seed; or else some boldly fraudulent expectation—an expectation that leads a fantasy out into the real world, gets it an apartment and, illegally, a job—as Sean had probably never been in love. He’d once told a girlfriend that he loved her, but had then felt suddenly vanquished, as if in swift and arrow-y battle, on some nighttime field; as if the world, in that moment, had thought of him, and mastered him; memorized and set him aside, like a learned thing. The world was maybe finished with Sean. And yet—he remained. Alive, doing things (eating, writing a novel, moving to Manhattan), as there was still, and always, the feeling—the suspicion—that the world knew him, and loved him, that the world was trying hard to convey this, was forming itself a language, progressing gradually, thoughtwardly, and slowly, along. Which was, perhaps, the sensation of being alive—the reason why Sean existed, kept going—the waiting of that, the faith in it, that there was a big thing of love out there, a mansion of it, and that the world, however incompetent, was trying every day to get Sean there, was thinking of where he should go, and how.

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***** i really like the structure of this sentence; it's a kind of lorrie moore sentence in that it qualifies, turns back on itself, questions its own rhetoric a little; it's pleasant to read, and has an intelligence to it; i like sentences with em-dash parentheticals in them; it is like giving a sentence a brain, to give it an em-dash parenthetical; it's a kind of hesitation, a moment of thought
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****** it's this one, and i like it because it has politics in it and homeless people and a satanic ska-punk band and it also has me in it and what we are inside of—the politics, the homeless people, the ska-punk band, me—is the story, and the story does not give us free will (it's already written) and it treats us all, eventually, the same, with death (with no more words, a last page); and the story's relationship to its characters is analogous to the universe's relationship to its characters (me, others); and so we are just words on a page, already happened (schopenhauer said that, said there's a consolation to that, and there is, i feel).
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******* some of you might be thinking 'why did he post this'; the last time i did something like this almost everyone assumed—almost everyone superimposed the cliche, and the same thing happened, to a lesser extent, with ben marcus' essay—that i did it to show how 'bad' a person elizabeth spiers (benjamin kunkel, n+1; jonathan franzen, etc) is, to somehow 'get back' at whatever person by 'exposing' them; but that is not true at all, to me; it's false to 'get back,' to 'hate,' to 'dislike,' even, and i know that; and by 'false' i mean it's a disconnection from the way things really are: we're born, we have no choice, the first choiceless thing happens to us and that is the cause to every effect and we are that effect (we're just one effect, and each thing before us is just one effect; and so the world, perhaps, is just one effect; that's it) and finally we die; 'good' or 'bad' have no place in that, and so neither do 'hate' or 'like'

i think it's 'okay' to 'disrupt' people's lives, though, like by lying about something

if someone thinks they know what they want in life, and it is a thing, an abstraction, that is unfulfillable—success, power, influence, happiness, etc.—then that can only cause more pain and suffering for other people maybe

and when you disrupt their lives they have to stop a little (acknowledge the em-dash parenthetical just inserted into their thoughts, somehow deal with that) and so then they have a chance maybe to remember a little that they actually don't know what they want in life

and since this is a literary site, i think that's relevant (though, probably, no; i think, if one is to not have illusions, everything should be taken into account, at once, so that 'art' and 'reality,' or 'life,' are the same)

in that if a writer wants to write about 'truth' then he or she will probably need to learn to think objectively, without illusions (when you think objectively, 'like' and 'dislike' and 'important' and 'good' and 'bad' and 'evil' (as in 'george bush is evil') and 'politics' become meaningless words)

to think that a kind of tone, a kind of worldview or personality—detached, neurotic, whimsical or whatever—can, quoting kunkel now (though he was being a bit 'ironic' or something, i think, when he said it, maybe, though that's irrelevant to this, which isn't directed at him really), be 'afflictive' (which implies a worldview where things are 'good' or 'bad') to writing is less 'objective' than 'another illusion,' which is a kind of intolerance or prejudice

but, because i am attempting to think objectively in this post, i am not going to say that it is 'bad' to think that whimsical writing is 'afflictive,' that it is 'bad' to have 'illusions' or be 'intolerant' or 'prejudiced'

because for a thing to be 'good' or 'bad' you have to know what you want in life; you have to know the meaning of life; you have to know what other people want in life, what they think the meaning of life is; you have to aggregate all that and put it in a computer and maybe survey animals too (dogs, cats, whales) and then you can still only determine if a thing is a certain percentage good or bad that changes depending on a context

that is an illusion also, to know (what you want, what the meaning of life is), when you think objectively, the word 'meaning' doesn't 'mean' anything and is irrelevant; things just are

if you're confused what the 'point' of this post is you could just accept that maybe; that i didn't have any intentions, really, with this post, except maybe to think about some things and type them and try to be objective and get 'outside' of 'good' and 'bad,' to not have an 'identity' and to sabotage myself a little and do something to relieve boredom

and to become a little less secretive with things and maybe disrupt some things; myself maybe, to disrupt my aspirations for publication, success, etc. and disillusion myself a little more