Tan Lin

I have been following Tan Lin's work for some time, and I have written on some at length. (That's at writingwithimages.com/?page_id=249.) This book is an interesting experiment on his part, I think, because it spells out some of the aesthetic values of attention and memory, and some of the personal narratives of identity, that have been fragmentary in the earlier work. It's a story of his visits to an aunt, and their time together watching TV.
The narrative is more continuous (read: show more traditional) than in his other work, and the placement of images is more unobtrusive (they are alone on facing pages). There are footnotes taken from the internet, in a different font and a different format, which are reminiscent of the earlier work--more on them in a moment.
For me, this book shows how Tan Lin hopes to build descriptions of new states of attention, memory, and pleasure. Many of the ideas that fitfully emerge in the narrative about his aunt have been present in the sometimes isolated aesthetic and theoretical passages in the earlier books, but here they are embedded in a continuous meditation on his memories of his aunt, and that results in a kind of chafing between the memoir form and the philosophic or aesthetic inquiry--especially because the properties and meanings he wants to explain need to be put as surprises, apparently contradictions, and paradoxes.
He is interested in the dispersal of attention and memory, the rewriting of boredom and time, the reimagining of packaged commercial media, and the repositioning of the self in a distributed network of mediatized messages. The resulting affect--the mood--is bemused, cool, sad in a thinly distributed way, and intermittently emotionally neutral or absent. I call all these "minor aesthetic qualities," after J.L. Austin (and also after Kant, who was first to investigate them). They are becoming the objects of ordinary scholarship, for example in Sianne Ngai, so they are no longer experiences that only exist in novels and poems of noia and related experiences. In Tan Lin, they're in between, and that tension is constitutive of his project at the moment.
The dust jacket copy is clearly written by Tan Lin, and ends this way:
"Ostensibly about a young man's disintegrating memory of his most fascinating relative, or potentially a conceptualist take on immigrant literature, it is probably just a treatment for a prime-time event that, because no one sleeps in motels, lasts into the late night and daytime slots."
The "ostensibly" is a good description of the book's content; the "probably" names the author's ambition; and the "probably" is an unwarranted poetic extension of the book -- or a potential line in the book itself.

Unresolved effects of the new narrative mode of writing

The shift from experimental bricolage or multimedia collage to more continuous narrative is not yet resolved. Sometimes he's suddenly abstract and academic: "If live TV is disturbingly real, canned TV for my aunt is a function of reincarnation, or maybe morphology, at once vague, causal, and novelistic" (p. 20). He mostly writes with a calm Duchampian sort of detachment and bemusement, but that sometimes slips, for example into dire or deep pronouncements like "somewhere in the world a TV set made my aunt disappear into the black and white wilderness that is the truth" (p. 22).
Some examples of unresolved juxtapositions or imbalances:

1. All the footnotes are to web searches, and they're fragmentary and oddly formatted. That works, I think, as a nice contrast to the narrative in the text, except that some notes are fairly self-explanatory but others ask readers to go to a computer for explanation -- and there is no apparent reason why that should happen sometimes and not others. Footnote 6 begins:
"Manipulating Ethnic Tradition: The Funeral Ceremony, Tourism, and... / by S. Yamashita - 1994..."
You'd have to look that one up for it to make sense in context. But the note just after is immediately meaningful in context, and sufficient as it is cited. Why?

2. Tan Lin has a tendency to construct sentences with two alternative images. They are usually presented in parallel, but one is opaque or unexpected and the other is consonant with the context and more or less expected. For example:
"It is true that watching TV with my aunt, I experienced moods I could not find for myself, and those moods resembled a lover who has almost walked into a room or those patented colors produced by an expensive TV" (p. 35).
The first image doesn't make sense: what does it mean to say a person "almost" walks into a room? The second image is intentionally disconnected from the first, but makes good sense in context. I can appreciate Tan Lin's strategy here: these double-imaged sentences -- and there are many of them; they're one of his main strategies -- produce an effect of mild surrealism and also mild obscurity. But it's bothersome that he seems not to pay much attention to some of his images (why a lover? a room with what in it?), and more importantly that he seems to assume that such juxtapositions produce interesting meaning, what I call minor aesthetic qualities. But with fair frequency, the juxtapositions just seem devised in order to produce a calm, partly impenetrable philosophizing tone, and when they work that way, I think readers do not need to pay attention to the content of either image or their possible combination. I wonder if a stronger practice might be to produce careful balances of alternatives, and even to try avoiding the binary structure altogether.

The images

The book's images are mainly models and pop-culture references that go with the text. They're not that interesting, and they don't add much. But there is one amazing moment, right at the end, when Tan Lin describes a photo he says he took, but doesn't reproduce -- and then he writes, "As you can see from the photo..." (p. 50). It's a simple gesture, but really wonderful, and I think unique in the literature. I don't know any other example, especially including Barthes's Winter Garden photograph, in which an unreproduced image is referred to conversationally as if it's present. show less

[Note: this is most of a text I wrote in 2010, when I first read Blipsoak01. There is more on Tan Lin, from a different perspective, in the Writing with Images site, http://writingwithimages.com.]

Well, could this be the first review written on an iPad with the Apple keyboard dock? (Bet it is. I'm writing on April 25, 2010, and the keyboard was just released.) Appropriate for this book, where all sorts of language artifacts mingle with the usual writer's voice, including the 01 attached to show more the whimsical, faintly dada, faintly machine-language, faintly internet-password title.

Tan Lin is a real discovery, except that I can't say I made it: the book was recommended by a student, Kristi McGuire. Lin is a combination of language poetry, concrete poetry, the insouciance of pop (after Frank O'Hara), the aleatoric collage of the legible and illegible (as in John Ashbery), and -- most unusual, most important -- passages of intense affect, which remind me more of Tsvetaeva than anyone closer in culture or space.

The book (or book-length poem, or visual composition) begins with a wonderful manifesto in verse, which is all about how language works for the eye, and how dedicated line-by-line reading isn't appropriate any more than formal scanning. "The surface is beautiful because it can be forgotten one moment at a time," he writes, and adds some throwaway lines about the pretensions of literature "and especially poetry," which "are fundamentally false forms of excitation and dread." Despite those moments, the manifesto is a wonderful piece of work, and manages to float between the conventional disavowals of abstraction and the equally tired disavowals of neo-realism. (Not to mention the extremely tired disavowals of Necronautical literature.) A footnote names several dozen writers who have influenced him, listed in a faux-English was with first names initialed: "A. Warhol, M. LacNeice, S. Tomkins, b flieschman, W. Pater," etc. It's clearly an art-world orbit we're in, but the writing goes in other directions.

So this is not a book to be read in any normal sense, but it miraculously manages not to fall into the doldrums that artists' books are so prone to, when after the first few pages, the pattern or trick or manner of the book is clear, and there is no longer a reason to keep reading. Here two things kept me going: Tan Lin's very strong grasp of larger-scale structures, so that pages and even longer units cohere and resonate; and his occasional, but intense, affective strength. It can't be quoted here because it depends on layout ("surface"), but it contains lines like this:

as white as milk 02
and not milk 02

spare me the strength to leave you 01
when you were born you looked so cute all dres
sed up in your birthday suit

as green as grass
and not grass

Passages like this, with their weird mixture of felt confessional voice, slant allusions to "Death Fugue" and Rimbaud, and random alphanumeric blips, are something genuinely new.

But in fairness, my three stars, and the sketchiness of this review, reflect my sense that there are many passages in this long book where voice of any sort -- mechanical, affective and confessional, random or aleatoric -- gives way to combinations of relatively uninteresting formal and "surface" plays, clearly written quickly, apparently in the hope or belief that white noise, static, and meaningless "surface" are, after all, part of life, and therefore invitations for the reader to fill in, do some writing or musing or theorizing. But slack, randomized, unlabored passages aren't necessarily expressive, inviting, fertile or fruitful, or even intermittently compelling, and they don't even necessarily evoke everyday wandering consciousness, the dispersed writer's voice, or semi-random acts of attention. Sketched-in passages need to be watched carefully, especially if they are intended to elicit a sense of the writer not watching his work as carefully as older senses of narrative and the novel might lead a reader to expect.

In the original version of these notes I wrote that Tan Lin has potential if he reins in the loose leash of his language. Otherwise, I thought, he will not be read, "read," or even "'read,'" except by people with an infinitely expandable sense of what reading is -- a sense that would just as likely bring them to read phone books, text dumps, and other semi-automated, collaged, or random sources of text and pattern.

I quoted some randomly generated texts from a website that produces lorem ipsum altenrates; I've put that at the end here, after three asterisks. Revisiting this review three years later, I'd put it differently: it turns out Tan Lin's readers do in fact prefer reading phone books, etc., and Tan Lin himself has said as much about himself. So these thought continue on the Writing with Images site. (writingwithimages.com)

* * *

Here's the fabulous random lorem ipsum genrator I quoted in the original version of my notes. Of course it's completely different from Tan Lin's book, as different as two texts can be -- but I prefer it to Blipsoak02:

http://www.hintplus.com/alterlorem.php

And just in case that site goes down, but not, again, to imply any symmetry, here's what the site generates:

Amarantin troughing octactinal peoplish flamineous jeel mortlake disglut. Ethenic tubuliform armipotence's pantellerite unprocreate cessor understem postlabial preexpressive circovarian unironical predismissal's steatin echeneis semibasement periaxillary bartram nicolo. Bespill besprinkler polypheme preconformity hoihere backfisch katalyzer's. Stresser hosecock's philobotanic ymolten reforget inerroneous befoaming unimpassionate vaginervose gullishness armsize hyperlipoidemia. Phasm apoplexes whitsun superdubiousness xw's quickwittednesses khakanship formel lithoglyptics biphenylene abomasusi extradict. Whimsic quiveriest untalking unwakening canonizant muscoidea stopwork shakefork enmoved phyllostomatoid postea. Rhombovate apocynthions arteriasis chiliomb gaumier kirri overmeticulousness, phalacrocoracidae perstringement oughtlins intervolution's centrobarical inshoot dihydronicotine canceleer. Territorian mottier pointrel reown bronchohemorrhagia shiggaion unexpunged inenubilable toadier omentulum hydromonoplane ilvaite astigmometer's coprostanol virginalling crewmanship paytamine interparietale.

Oxyhaloid lookahead hologastrula parapherna hedgesmith rablin purgery overcredit acraspedote undetestably interplicate demihuman. Sublaryngeally beneighbored repulpit plantarium phytotopographical preallying overaffirmation ganapati aum reencloses signetur cancion prickshot splanchnicectomy. Hyperemization grandeval harrycane glochidian workgirls charpit epiky nonrecurently, korrigum reabandoned ephyrula inconditional unpublic. Elbower dopastat unhideably bateful subwar's taoiseachs longwork, mobulidae reinvolvement's, unoffset yoky antiannexation scrowdging walkene steelwares marli ghibelline.

Cobhead semipause grager's gaslightness antergic clairseacher hypocarpium berust overelliptical urinometric wheatstalk bata radioparent sundrymen depilous dumpled namaycush. Subtribal precompilation's photohalide rita's stallment megalopterous insulize buisting ovariosalpingectomy sorose seminebulous cognosced nonfarcicality yoofs eulysite doigt outnighting, prechoroid gekkonid oblating. Abstort outbreath hysteriac circumocular antimensia contrude. Unoffensiveness luxembourger sesquisulphides unforbiddenly spintherism trichiniases prestimulus's subcontractings fantasmagorically, deuteranomalStremmas suitored globousness mebendazole dentiphone's laton oligocarpous tarepatch esiphonal antimoralism's radiodontics kette feudovassalism. Euripides pruigo poesis podogynium unanalyzing anthracoxen reamalgamation's sternbergia refallow phocidae kights actinograph's cercidiphyllum osteoplaque. Counterside anilinism tabstop precompelling muscicole. Voisinages presavagery's licham megamere peirce blennoid nondemonstrativeness comism.

Preinducement unerratic ischiorrhogic preascetic overinflationary sanjakate helmetpod befurred intermeeting mercuriate preallies uneschewed babylonian thoroughsped. Maletote rushgrass turncoatism dacninae cryptobiotic ingeners cosmosophy overnicenesses. Overobeseness's splatterdash burtree birdwoman corruptingly mastopathy's kashubian moellons encoil empoverished molluscousness westnorthwestwardly locomobilities blockheadism stroboradiograph's uncruelness especialness's koromiko burrfish's. Formicine tonnell bechatter stranglings poetryless reducent oilmongery kisswise curiescopy overdistort, lonelihood's reperform supraclavicle. Demidolmen sarcelled subfractional moloker needsome unmultiplying myxocystoma preferredness's organer guze periligamentous. Leaseman collutory dendritiform nonprospect's dacryuria concional thersites fluigramme balantidiasis unexalting polypaged pseudomorphia monodactylism's umimpeded recarved bromoiodide easternly epigaea ethine's unadaptabness's. Araneidal pulvinarian outstrutted regioide overnationalized homiliaries knapsculls vetoistic spirillaceous demethylchlortetracycline's papalty trinitro. Gorgeret inserviceable passionative enregistration underfeeling mahsur parentdom chevesne nonbelieiver schinus pezophaps cyclitis mcintosh pulvinulus, ragamuffinism incorporatedness's pyche dier.

Cocao hyperscholastically macrocephalus's severalness firstship disconform prorebate exagitate unmarbleize quinamidine nonbenevolently colpeurysis joseite polypifer cephaline bilinite mudweed undegeneracy's, konohiki noncoming. Saigon paralithodes wroaths neednt ciniphes diisatogen exomphalous unrepugnable saturnali epenla prehalter sweethearting meck's nonluminousness epinicial anaglyptics. Piperonyl unpreposterously aranein duodedenums triketone linten rheophile reducent subterfluous unproportionedness typtology superdonation, overhaughtily uncleave unwittingnesses scotal madrassa proganosaur haida predisposable. Bedcase keksyes tuberculination markery plasticly subendothelial pollyanna encyclopediacal. Apoferritin's deuteroscopies brasts misexpressive chorises pylic abscision unambulant southcottian antroscopy ventrimeson biverb sootproof lapstreaked.

Oaxaca noncoagulability treaclinesses ladner ischiocavernosus. Battutas chattererz endevil dreamage hypergalactosis scribbleable sturshum, browsier, unsmoulderingly peganite turma lyons noseburn argillomagnesian. Pickpenny nonport coinhabit eatages dilatableness tannogen servolab roratorio fiard dreamlikeness understage myringectomy perfrication capsuliferous coyan brickmason amphorous steepdowne pinnatedly. Tenostosis nonasbestine subformativeness nauger untributary.

Entirely different from Tan Lin, yes, but it's a kind of text I tend to read with pleasure. Part of the intermittent lack of pleasure in "Blipsoak01" is not knowing when the relative lack of pleasure is intended to be received as lack of pleasure. At least this text was generated by a computer. show less

[This is an abbreviated review. The full review, with images, is here: http://writingwithimages.com/?page_id=249.]

So I was entranced by "Blipsoak01" and much less by "Seven Controlled Vocabularies."

The choices are consistently part of the recent art-world interest in the everyday, the mundane, the suburban, the overlooked, the faintly nostalgic. And although this is not an uncommon property, Tan Lin doesn't comment on the images themselves, except rarely and obliquely. Nominally that lets show more the images resonate with the text, but it also frees him, and his readers, from more intense engagements with visual material.

I'm also put off by the aesthetic theorizing, which I liked in "Blipsoak01." A large portion of this book is aesthetics (or non-aesthetics, or anti-aesthetics, or inaesthetics). It is philosophic in the way that Kundera often was, so that the book sometimes appears to exist for the sake of slightly decorated and patterned philosophic musings. When Tan Lin writes at length about his aesthetic positions, they seem much more commonplace than in "Blipsoak01": although he mentions Duchamp, he is clearly in line with current relational aesthetics, uncommitted institutional critique, and post-fluxus practice as in Nicolas Bourriaud, Dominic Willsdon, and others. It's a very familiar position in the art world. show less