PART 23. THE MEAD BIBLIOGRAPHIC CODA III

A newspaper obituary, like an instamatic camera and perhaps the future perfect tense, is one of many mediums or documents that intersects with adulthood and which is collectively responsible for making it what it is. Because most of the obits I now read appear on the Internet, I think of most obits, even those printed in a newspaper, as devices for extending the human sense of time or its passage. I believe that the lengthening of childhood and the delay of the onset of adulthood is linked to the dying of newspapers and letter writing in our era.

I pull down the Mead notebook and glance at it. Forty-odd years have passed from my initial notation in a Mead notebook, and I'm unable to recall the moment I began to write all this down or the reasons for doing so. Like the moments surrounding my father's death, or maybe a telephone conversation, the process of adulthood is neither emended or perfected by the results of a Google search in 2014 for "Henry Lin AND obituary," an eBay listing for one of my father's pots, and an email from Dick Hay.

I know that one thing always follows another thing in strict chronological sequence and I know that many peripheral, unnoticed, and unchanging details, some of an archival nature, produce an image of history. I also know one obituary is not in the Mead notebook, and this present moment of writing must be concurrent with a search bracketed by other searches, and with electronic devices that precede my era. If I examine the track changes for this document, I see, as I write this, and just to the right of the margin, deletions of "now," "will," "be," "not," and "improved" on 6/24/2015 at 1:01 a.m., 1:17 a.m., and on March 26, 2016, 4:40 p.m. I knew something was missing before I started looking for it.

The missing obituary is from the Santa Barbara News Press, the oldest daily newspaper in southern California, and it records my father's death one day earlier than the Messenger does. I'm sitting in my apartment in New York City. I have not written in the Mead notebook for a year but I begin writing again. I write the date: March 26, 2022, 4:42 p.m. My mother and father had a good many technological appliances and they are inseparable from what I think of as our family. I go to a cupboard and take out her favorite, an old Wollensak reel-to-reel, and one of my favorites, a Panasonic answering machine from the 80's. I remove the Chinese speaking tapes that she used in early 70s to teach Beginning Chinese at Ohio University, and slip on a fresh sixty-minute reel. I load a microcassette into the Panasonic 4128 answering machine. The cassette has my mother's name written on it in ink. I press the Panasonic's play button and the orange record button on the Wollensak. I rattle ice in a glass. The red needle shudders, and the room appears to be pausing inside of itself, like the recording of a little bit of late afternoon sunlight and noise inside it. It's my mother. She is talking to me. I'm in my apartment at 3147 Broadway in New York, studying for oral exams at Columbia University. My mother thinks an answering machine not much different from the transcription of a letter, which is why both she and my aunt in Concrete, Washington periodically leave me ten- or fifteen-minute phone messages. This one is short: "Dear Tan, I hope you are ok dear, studying must be so hard I hope you are eating enough." And there is a message from my aunt: "Tan, come to motel. I have a suitcase of your father's writing with things in it." And then I write the date down.

Hegel was right. Sound's defining characteristic is to disappear. Some readers will say that the time of this writing, and in particular, my mother and father's deaths, is not really right. There is something intangible as two or three lives try to complete themselves inside a clock. This book was rewritten over thirty-two years, beginning with my father's death and ending with my mother's. A book is just the unfinished part of some other thing. And so, too, I suppose is a family and the story of my father. Instead of the horizontal outlines of a fiction, the objects described herein lie mostly outside of it, next to a farm, a Quonset Hut, a kiln, a newspaper article, an apartment, Central Park, a photo album, a bibliography, or obit. Truth, unlike a stamp collection, the elusiveness of coffee, or a Led Zeppelin album, might be made to reside inside the thing I'm compiling for my father and mother. It now has to. Or maybe life is just a list, and the list is unordered. And so, one gets myth or something close to it. What I thought was a story about my parents isn't about them; it's about itself. And the sparseness, found or invented, fashions the truth, which can be bent. Bent, I know, just like the time.

Both my parents died in the summer. It is 3:11 AM, June 28, 2015 when I write this, and later, I come back to the MS Word document in my office, surrounded by my parents' books. I'm in my office, a makeshift library inside a library and it is July 15, 2017. And when I return to the document for a fifth, sixth, or seventh time it will have been September 24, 2017, August 1, 2019, and May 4, 2021, as I leaf through their books. The Panasonic TV I brought back from my aunt's motel is on the fritz and I'm watching TBS late-night shows on a computer. The phone rings. I run to answer it, but there's no one. On the table, there are a few books and xeroxed articles I've been reading through the various summers of a book, in a roughly thirteen- or sixteen-year period, and they sit in various stages of completion and incompletion. So, what I'm saying I suppose is that summer is specious, it falls in no acceptable order, but I remember what it feels like anyway. And so, the list writes itself, or seems to. Most of the books of summer are not summer at all; they are just trajectories and technical debris of a bibliographic nature, or what might be called a bibliography inside a bibliography. This bibliography reminds me of my parents' obituaries and the feelings surrounding them. Like most things without terminus, like the feelings, the books on the table are endlessly reproducible. I pick up Dreams Objects Moments by Pati Hill, who photocopied hundreds of domestic objects, gum wrappers, the stray glove, a collection of spoons, engagement rings, a Chinese scarf, and so rendered domesticity — grainy, indistinct, ghostly, misplaced — as something exhumed. Once, she photocopied a dead swan that she'd found on a beach and called it an "Opera," as if an office machine could propel a swan into song. She proposed photocopying Versailles in its entirety, and of that project, wrote: "I wish to copy a cobblestone, parts of espaliered trees, anti-damp grilles, graffiti, lollipop sticks, the embroidery on Marie Antoinette's bedspreads and draperies, and the King's left foot from the equestrian statue in the front yard." Ambiguity is a problem when the mind tries to reproduce it. No, ambiguity is a problem when the mind tries to solve it. 

Although this looks like a list or a bibliography, it's just an obituary I haven't written yet. That obituary of reading would be mine. The question for my father, and now, I suppose me, is how to make a garden or a love affair, or a family into something to die in. On the bookshelves beside my desk, like a cycle of life reading, there are two sets of the American art historian Ernest Fenollosa's two-volume study of Chinese and Japanese art; a copy of Botteghe Oscure, published in Rome in 1956; and two books by the French Annaliste historian Fernand Braudel, one published in France in 1949, and one translated into English and published thirty years later. Seeing my parents' libraries reminds me that reading comes to an end.

Braudel's books were the most important historical/sociocultural books in my library from the late 1970s to the 1980s, and I actually read them, the later one in a graduate school seminar taught by Steven Marcus. The course, "Modes and Methodologies," was required of first- or second-year graduate students at Columbia. It was the best course I took in graduate school. In Marcus's seminar, I gave a twenty-minute presentation on Braudel's concept of "la longue durée," which I argued was a descriptive methodology, a Rabelaisian accumulation of the things of the world. Marcus, stinting with his praise, and terrifyingly dismissive in manner, said, after my presentation, "That was interesting."

I had first read Braudel in college, and his idea of the Mediterranean as a body of water — an almost material substrate, event, and congelation of social forces and inertia — stuck with me. Braudel introduced me to "the first level of time, geographical time, . . . that of the environment, with its slow, almost imperceptible change, its repetition and cycles. Such change may be slow, but it is irresistible."1

I'm not sure why a fragrance, a two-volume duplicated set of books published in the U.K., a bunch of Captchas and an Asiatic fern, along with their competing publication histories, taxonomic characteristics, and intersections with a patio belong here anymore than photos of late night TV, a few restaurants in Manhattan, a weeping cherry tree, and a terrace overlooking some orange trees, but, like ferns, roses, and family albums, I believe that my father's and mother's and later my search for happiness was marked by an "alternation of generations." A photograph in a book doesn't elucidate a book or a life; it just makes it longer.

Adulthood is a life increasingly lived in that first level of geographical time known as endless daily retrospect, and it is irresistible, and so, too, are my parents and in particular my father, who at times manifests the inertia and volume of a durational sea mass. And so, time, no longer an arrow, becomes a shape. And childhood, its slow and indolent amassing of books and photographs, once erased, begins to reproduce as a geography one keeps coming back to. In my office, I keep two photo albums of our family. The albums date from the final California years. Each contains fifty or sixty photos. All the photos were taken by my mother with a Kyocera point-and-shoot camera, and she took the rolls to a drug store. I'm surprised by the number of photos from these years, when our family was most in flux. My mother put the photos in two small albums, the size of a paperback book and two inches thick. I look at the albums and ask what is the difference between a photo taken in California and one in Ohio?

My father started his life in the United States as a photographer. The last photo I have of him holding a camera is a Polaroid. The photo sits on my bookshelf, next to a photograph of my mother reading. In the Polaroid, my father is standing on our patio taking a photo of the yard with his Nikon. I don't know who took the Polaroid, probably me. The photo dates from the early 80's, and after it was taken, I never saw him pick up a camera again. Unlike my father's, my mother's photographic project, like the family it was entwined with, never really ended, and her albums tell me that we celebrated a few birthdays and Christmases together in California, that she and my father had made some peace with each other, that their marriage was about staying together, that staying together meant sharing a house in California for a few months, and that two people who happened to be husband and wife continued to live in proximity for whatever that was worth. I am searching for my father, now, and again, and he is or was becoming something else. Or not. The family that I had known growing up in Ohio was still a family in California. And for my mother, it remained that way after my father's death — and until her own.

I believe the end of a life is where certain desires, once dormant, become visible again. Was this true for my father? And if so, what is absorbed by the life of a family? And if a family, like grief, is a process that never ends, what becomes of the objects of grief? Where do they go? Do they burn into images? Where can they take us?

During my summers with him, my father appeared to have walked into retirement with nothing to occupy himself with. He had traveled to California. The move expressed a desire, an intimation of something better, but there was an incompleteness about the place and the desire. He was less unreachable, and some tint of suffering, sadness or renunciation shadowed by a wish to be released emerged — and not specifically from us — though I could not have sensed this then. My father had not potted for years. I asked if he wanted to throw again and he replied that he was not strong enough. My sister was more attuned than I to my father's loss of vocation, and she tried to get him to do something artistic again. I found letters of hers in the bankers boxes urging him to not be sad and to start drawing or writing or doing calligraphy, and I believe my father, as he always did, listened to her and he gave these a try. But none of them stuck.

There was an inkwell and an expensive set of brushes on the desk where he read the newspaper each morning. I pointed to them.

"Japanese," my father replied.

This was a difference. Before, my father shrugged or grunted when asked a question. He believed a question meant finding the answer for yourself. Now I was asking a question, I rarely did, and he answered with a word.

I believe Maya mailed the brushes, but he never said anything more about them and I never saw him write or draw with them. The thing he had achieved mastery in was now out of reach. What point talking about that? He never had to pretend to be an artist, and the artistic accoutrements probably struck him as self-deception — not in any moral sense but because it was too much work. He was good at getting things done without thinking about getting things done; that had been his purpose, he had so much purpose, it defined him, and now he was without it. And this I did not ascribe to illness or his heart condition though I might have.

I spent four summers with him, joined at moments by my mother and sister. We were a family before California and we were a family after it. I arrived early in May and stayed until the beginning of September, and after I had finished my course work, I lingered into the fall, and pretended to be writing a dissertation for a solid chunk of any given day though I mostly tinkered with poems that would never be published. My sister had won the competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1981, spent a year in Washington and then began grad school, and was starting to become famous. My father was extraordinarily pleased and called her repeatedly to visit him in California, but in the end, it was I who spent the most time with him. We would watch a little football and late-night TV almost every night, just as we did when I was in high school, and my father and I would laugh hard during the opening monologue. My father loved to laugh and this exuberance never left him, and we got considerable pleasure sitting in a room with a TV playing. This four-year period was the only time my father ever asked me how my studies were going. I told him I was "getting close" but what can a graduate student say about an unwritten dissertation? He never reprimanded me just as he never reprimanded me growing up, and I do not remember him losing his temper in those final four years, as he did in Ohio. We took walks on the grounds of the co-op and I would jump up and hold the branches down, and he would pluck as many oranges as he could. We spoke little. In the end, I'm not bothered by this. I don't think talking mattered much to my father, it was mostly keeping someone company that did.

One day, after we got home from a walk, management called to complain that he was picking too many oranges, and that if he took so many, there would not be any for the other residents. My father said, and this was one of the few times he expressed a desire, that it would be nice to own a house with orange trees of our own. And so, my father and I started getting the local paper, the Santa Barbara News Press, and we spent a few hours every week looking at the classifieds for houses. And then, we would walk around to look at the houses we had circled. 

I think in the end, or near it, he just wanted Maya to return, come home — she was his daughter, his child, after all; he'd made a part of her and she'd arrived, housed in a certain color because she partly believed it, color of air that is agitated before calming down, the color of California. She was so like him, part apparition, part love maybe, and he wanted it back, to unite with this place where it had been imagined, where it had started and not ended because unending.

My father loved food but we never went out to a restaurant and there was no decent Chinese restaurant so the only Chinese food we ate at home, like Athens in the 70's. We never contacted a real estate agent and we never saw the inside of a single house, so I'm not sure how serious my father was about owning one. Most of the houses that we liked, the Spanish stucco ones with gardens and swimming pools, and a decent driveway, were too expensive, and my father understood this just as I did. There was a sense, too, though I did not understand it, that my father had given up. The time was shadowed by this, the watching without doing, the observing calmly because there is no recourse, watching someone surrender and then half-wondering what, if anything, lies on the other side and what of this had ushered from my parents' childhoods and from earliness? And California, what was it, the feeling of it, like a description of a feeling detaching itself from experience.

I spent my days reading and writing and studying for my orals exams. I don't remember much of what my father did. He would make his coffee in the morning and fry an egg and make some toast before I awoke, and take a walk and get home around lunch time, when I was just waking up. He never liked potatoes but he started eating them for breakfast, slicing them length-wise into discs, and frying them like hash browns. On the rare occasion when I woke early, he would make me breakfast. All his life he had loved to shop but he bought almost nothing in Santa Barbara. I suggested, stupidly, a Porsche 911 convertible, but he said, no, he was happy with his Mercedes and that he preferred walking to driving. My father seemed unmoored, at a loss to do the things he knew how to do, and without friends. He had a wooden cane he sometimes used to walk with, but mostly he was mobile. He occasionally brought a pastry home, an éclair, from a French bakery on the main commercial thoroughfare, and we shared it. He did not seem bothered by his loneliness. He lived, as perhaps he always had, inside a solitude that was not altogether of his own making and was partly a reaction to circumstances beyond his control, circumstances that he took for granted, and this solitude existed, as he did, in a world set apart from my mother or my sister and me. Had we not come to visit in California, I do not believe he would have come back to Athens to see us.

He was, in the end, who he was and had always been. He was not a recluse. He took walks. He practiced tai chi in the carpeted living room. He took pleasure in shopping for things to eat. We went to Albertsons the grocery store to buy fruits and vegetables a few times a week. He went to the fresh produce section first, where he bought vegetables he would cook later that week, followed by a half watermelon or peaches, and he told me the vegetables in California were better than the ones in Ohio. For the first time in many years, he could go into a grocery store and buy Chinese mustard greens and bok choy and lychees. He never bought half watermelons before, as he liked looking for the biggest one, knocking it before he bought it, and slicing it right before eating, and I ascribed the change to age, to diminished appetite, to a contracting household. He talked to no one outside the apartment, which meant he talked only to me, and when my mother was there, with her. When it was just me and him, which was a good part of the time, we were a boy's club grown old, and he enjoyed cooking for us, was proud of cooking again. We occasionally split a beer but he drank little alcohol. He remained a fine cook, and one evening said, "I can still make good food." Most nights, we ate Chinese stir fry in front of the TV, and watched the evening news. Even when my mother visited, my father cooked. It was his house, and we were guests to be cooked for. He occasionally made fresh egg rolls and scallion pancakes, which everyone in our family loved. I remember his cooking more than my own, for I did not learn to cook Chinese food until I left New York for my first teaching job in 1993.

My father had purchased the largest unit in the complex, one that the owner of the compound had lived in, and the apartment was a spacious three- or four-bedroom unit too large for a single person, so I think, but maybe this is just a wish, that my father anticipated or hoped that we, my mother sister and I, would spend time there, but I don't think anyone in our family, not even my father, knew what the possibilities for a life were at that moment.

The apartment had two terraces overlooking the common gardens. It was the top floor of a two-story structure, it had wall-to-wall carpeting like the house at Cable Lane, and my father brought a few pieces of furniture from the house and a few of his very large pots, the ones we used to keep plants, including a large brown planter with horn-like protuberances that Maya and I called "stegosaurus" and in which we kept an enormous rubber tree plant that our parakeets perched on. He left most of the Cable Lane furniture, including the prized coffee table, at Cable Lane, with my mother, but he brought a five-foot high room divider with a tripartite walnut frame into which he had inserted six metal rods running length-wise. He hand-oiled the walnut and it had a lustrous near-black tonality. The flattened, mildly oblique or geometric ceramic slab pieces were threaded to sit on the rods. About five or six inches in tall, they could be swiveled to create a flattened mural effect or a three-dimensional sculptural relief that looked like it was turning or mottled depending on how light was falling upon them. The pieces looked like Christmas ornaments. When swiveled they looked like the phases of the moon, and I suppose the divider was a make-shift ceramic version of a Christmas tree in a part of the world where it never snowed. Each ornament was a lovely light grey with vivid and ribbed textural striations that had been pressed into the softened clay, and each ornament was separated from the one next to it by a series of wooden beads that he had painted a matte black, like a bracelet or necklace. From afar, it looked like an abacus of flying birds or wind-borne leaves. It was jewelry for a room or a wall. It was among the most beautiful pieces my father made; unlike most of his ware, which existed in multiple forms with numerous glaze treatments, it existed only for itself.

The apartment was sold to my father furnished and we sold it furnished. This was unusual because he was fussy, did not like commercial, readily available stuff — unless it was an automobile or tool — and because we were accustomed to holding onto our things. The apartment contained a blue built-in couch that pulled out from under a bookshelf system and doubled as a bed, a desk done in an American colonial style, cheap aluminum lawn chairs on the terrace, and numerous French regency-style lamps. My parents detested anything colonial or baroque. I thought the furniture ugly and I'm sure my father did too, but he never replaced any of it.

The coop did not allow barbecuing and so there was a Hibachi that my father had brought from Athens on his terrace and it went unused. I had asked my father about the other residents, and he said something in Chinese. I don't know, but I think it was "fussy." The apartment was a ten-minute drive to the beach, but we never went. Aside from the furniture and the wallpaper, it was an airy apartment with a lovely second-floor view, but it was not home or Athens to me, my mother or my sister, and I think my father too, but I do not know this. For my father, it was something to be accepted or lived with. The gardens were lovely and manicured but there was nothing to do with them. There was clearly an effort to make Santa Barbara into something like Cable Lane, but I'm not sure he succeeded and I'm not sure how much it bothered him. My father had gotten used to things as they were, and made less and less effort to change them. He'd retired from work and from life, and maybe us, too. When we went to Albertsons, I drove and my father sat in the front passenger seat. On one trip we passed an abandoned Chevron station, and my father turned to me and said he had been looking for a place he might rent and start potting. Over the course of four years, he occasionally spoke of finding a studio space to rent. He never did.

It is the third or fourth week of August 2022, and the clock inside this novel has caught up, maybe more and probably less, with the time around it. The TV is playing. I'm reading and writing poetry much as I did in high school, what I think of as late-night tinkering. TBS is playing a rerun: a throwback-style episode of Conan, in which O'Brien has announced he is quitting. The last show will air on June 21. Like very late-night news shows, which are breaking news shows where very little news trickles in, a life modeled on late-night TV or the dispersal of a library would be a life with few hints of the novelistic, i.e., the photographic, inside of it. 

Seth Rogen is on tonight and he tells Conan he was twelve when he started watching the show, first on NBC, and then on TBS after O'Brien's run at Late Night ended. Fallon went on to host Late Night, Leno's prime time show bombed, and O'Brien landed at TBS in 2010. The TBS shows leading up to Conan's last one, tonight's in particular, feel, as commentators have noted, a lot like a wake.2 I watched Conan religiously in the 90's with my aunt, a few years after my father died, just as I had watched Johnny Carson and then Jay Leno with my father. My aunt and I were insomniacs, she had never gone to college and her English was worse than my father's. I went to college and I'm still an insomniac.

I'm watching Conan on a computer. I'm in my office, alone. Most of the late-night talk shows are being reinvented for the Internet, i.e., a phone. Everyone wants someone to talk to late at night, and talk has gotten a lot cheaper with the Internet. Rogen is joking. He's brought some weed (he's a weed entrepreneur), and Conan says, "This is the kind of thing you do when you know it's over for you." I'm not sure what I'll watch after Conan is gone for good. I suppose I'll watch re-runs. I'm not sure if Conan is leaving his late-night show or if the genre of late-night TV is leaving me. 

My father's life, now that it's over, is the opposite of melodramatic. And yet the years of his life remind me of things happiness smells like. And like summer and a fern through a window, the feelings are indirect and self-propagating, like reruns of TV after adolescence has gone away or like the books of childhood. When I think of my father's death, it tends to re-occur and alternate a little like the weather.

END

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Tan Lin is a poet, artist, professor, essayist, and novelist whose works include The Fern Rose Bibliography (New York: The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, 2022), ambience is a novel with a logo (Katalance Press, 2007), and Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking (Wesleyan University Press, 2010), among many others. Several of Lin's performances and PowerPoint works are viewable at PennSound.

"Part 23. The Mead Bibliographic Coda" is an excerpt from Lin's forthcoming novel, Our Feelings Were Made by Hand (Coffee House Press, 2025).

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References