The OED provides the pejorative definition of obvious as “lacking in originality; banal, forgettable.” As any reader of Tan Lin’s work knows, he is a proponent of art that is…
Contemporaries Essays
Anybody Who’s Everybody
In “Disco as Operating System, Part One,”1 Tan Lin proposes that to consider disco would be to miss the point. “No one really listens to disco,” he assures us, “not…
PowerPoint Poetics
PowerPoint is slow, simple, boring, dull, beautiful, ugly, chaotic and evil. I love PowerPoint. I hate PowerPoint. I am obsessed with this strange piece of software. I use it to…
Quantum Raciality and the Becomings of Mourning: Tan Lin and His Ideal Forms
In Tan Lin’s work, there has long been an affective interchangeability between people, objects, texts, and images. I suggest that there is a continuous throughline between Lin’s experimentations with affect,…
过眼烟云(字): an homage to Tan Lin
“People can be so sentimental. Twelfth Master is not himself.” —Rouge (1987) It’s difficult for me to write about Tan Lin’s work because for a long time now, I’ve felt…
Tan Lin: Poems
obituary = Robespierre ligature dichotomy-cellulose lipid baboon fumble morgue threesome loan word go ferrous butane tax unguent fuzz butter January: saw off their hands black refractive Index: 1.34 loophole fog…
Introduction: Tan Lin
For a writer so often associated with an aesthetics of boredom, Tan Lin has been a source of unusual excitement in experimental literature for the last three decades.1 Perhaps this…
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…
Palestine/Israel and the Dynamics of Suspicion
*Note: I conceived of this article and wrote much of it prior to October 7th, 2023. It’s reasonable to contend that cultural repression is not the most urgent matter in…
The Family Plot: Suspicion, Conspiracy, and the “Shadow Pandemic”
In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 lockdowns began for the foreseeable future, it felt quite obvious that, among a myriad of emergent crises, domestic abuse was suddenly surging. It was…