Tan Lin

Introduction

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 is because any writer interested in boredom is already by definition not bored by boredom; or because boring is what most people find poetry to be, therefore making it highly relevant to any contemporary poet. Regardless, one of the longstanding yet underrated qualities of Lin's wide-ranging work is its subscription to fun. Defined as both "an act of fraud or deception" and "light-hearted pleasure,"2 fun is slippery. It is less profound, more generic than poetic pleasure but also less susceptible to reification than traditional critique (think: to make fun of, to have fun with). Like boredom, fun seems difficult to fake, and yet it also presents a spectrum — kind-of fun, enthusiastically fun, "sounds fun but is actually boring" (and vice versa), dangerously fun, mildly amusing, etc. — while having a close relationship to irony, as when monkeys "play" fight to signal they are not "really" fighting.3 Whenever I listen to a recording of Lin, whose voice is low and deadpan, I think about how seriously he takes his fun.

Fun, I believe, is also one of the reasons why Lin's work has such a cult following. This is especially true for a generation of experimental writers who emerged in the 2010s with an eye toward technological possibility, such as those published under Tumblr-based presses Troll Thread and Gauss PDF. It is also true for younger minority writers who have emerged under certain expectations to produce narratives of struggle and trauma. Born in Seattle in 1957 to Chinese-American immigrants and best known for his "ambient" works Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (2010), Heath (plagiarism/outsource) (2009) and Heath Course Pak (2012), and Insomnia and the Aunt (2011), Lin has typically been associated with "the end of language and the beginning of conceptualism" in American poetry during the 1990s.4 For a long time it was not unusual to hear his name evoked alongside those of Kenneth Goldsmith, Robert Fitterman, and Vanessa Place. However, the essays in this cluster show how Lin's conceptualism has functioned in service of what feels like a more singular project. In fact, while the writer's technological interests could just as well put him in conversation with Nam June Paik, Carl Cheng/John Doe Co., and the 1960s "Bell Labs" collective Experiments in Art and Technology, his recent non-fiction veers far closer to a lineage of experimental poet-memoirs such as Gertrude Stein's Everybody's Autobiography (1937) and Keith Waldrop's Light While there is Light (1993).

Lin's work spans categories, fitting uneasily into arguments about "whiteness and the avant-garde" and the binaries of identitarianism and formalism.5 It leans into assimilation and appropriation, escapism, nostalgia, and objectification, but in a way that isn't totally legible. Like Wylie Dufresne's food or much of self-theorizing art, it nearly becomes gimmicky — what Sianne Ngai calls the "endpoints of poetic decline: results of an entropic devolution of literary figures into 'tricks.'"6 As the poet Steven Zultanski has put it, Lin's work is beautiful but in a cheap kind of way; it's superficial and profound at the same time.7 Or as Trisha Low describes it in her contribution to the cluster, various markers "vibrate between truth and untruth." In Lin's work, such forms of ambiguity are first and foremost tonal, and it is the difficulty of pinpointing Lin's tone that contributes to the fun of reading his work as much as it suspends normative judgment, throwing off any critical tendency to redeem texts as "subversive" or critique them as "complicit." Uneasiness around interpretation and judgment are therefore always counteracted by, or partially sublimated into, a more assuring form of readerly fun, a fun that emerges out of transparency of technique as reproducible style. More than simply being "ironic," Lin's tone also revolves around the collapse of irony — i.e. the collapse of the distance between what is and what seems. In this way, his work approximates the metaphysics of social construction, whereby a certain degree of arbitrariness nevertheless allows for real modes of identification and nonidentification.

"America is a fun country. Still, there are aspects of it which I would prefer not to think about," John Ashbery once wrote. The divorce between fun and innocence — which, as Ashbery goes on to say, can be seen in the brutal reality behind "large 'chain' stores," masked by "big friendly ads" — appears in Lin's longstanding relationship to Andy Warhol.8 In essays by Lin like "Warhol's Aura and the Language of Writing" (2001) and "Disco, Cybernetics and the Migration of Warhol's 'Shadows' into Computation" (2014), the pop artist serves as a cornerstone for thinking about Lin's relationship to technology, seriality, mass consumerism, surface, appropriation, and reproduction. Still, the choice of Warhol goes beyond certain methods of artmaking. Between 1972 and 1973, the celebrity artist created 199 silkscreen paintings of Mao Ze Dong; a decade later he visited Hong Kong and China (where he once reciprocated the gift of a Chinese flower painting with a painting of a dollar sign). To read Warhol through Lin, and vice versa, is thus to observe a cultural paradox rather than a one-way assimilation into certain cultural and formal heritages. On the one hand, there has been the global celebration of Warhol's genius, the re-inscription of mechanical reproduction into a signature style that has been praised as the work of a "truly revolutionary artist."9 On the other hand, there is the Asiatic stereotype of post-revolution Communist China as being conformist, homogenous, and endlessly reproducible in its ideology and subjecthood. Lin's work constantly manipulates these readings of East and West. The joke is something like this: did Warhol's Chinese methods of flattening and homogenization make Mao more western (and expensive) than ever? Or did Warhol's American methods of capitalist mass production make Mao more Chinese (and reproducible) than ever? Or, to ask another question that is hinted at throughout the cluster: if you're an Asian American in America, does assimilation make you more white or more Asian? The irresolveability of these questions inevitably calls attention to the grounds on which they are produced, for the terms as such do not pose real alternative options.

Characterizing all of Lin's work as fun would be a mistake. Often there is an aloofness that categorizes the work as predominantly and merely interesting. And often, the economy of fun is a stand-in for forms of Americana: a world where mourning, hoarding, reading, remembering, and letting go take place among a kind iconography made up of disco, playing pool, candy, barbeque, television, games, and shopping. It's as if Lin has chosen the most playful things to think about his personal and familial habits with, as a way to attach to those habits play's original relationship to ritual and rite. As charles theonia notes in their contribution, "Fun, in poetry and on the dance floor, takes some doing." Nevertheless, the appearance and effect of effortlessness is present throughout Lin's work. In The Fern Rose Bibliography (2023) and "Part 23. The Mead bibliographic Coda III" (published for the first time in this cluster), for instance, Lin takes on the difficult subject of the loss of his parents. Yet, in doing so, he tarries with ephemeral versions of happiness, reminiscence rather than recollection. Reminiscence doesn't make things fun per se, but it does make it easier to encounter the past. It elongates rather than accelerates time, generates sweetness out of familiarity rather than risk. The point of reminiscence is not accuracy or sense-making but how the lives of Lin's parents "remind me of the things happiness smells like," how the things that once "triggered enjoyment in my father" last "in the subsequent memories I have."10 Against the dominant psychoanalytic preoccupation with generational trauma, Lin's writing about his parents bears witness to generational joy and acceptance. The passing of a parent's unspeakable life onto the child is a version of love.11 The things we don't and will never know about our parents do not separate us from them but become part of who they are for us: it is the ability to remain close to a parent without having to have all the answers about them that maintains the adult's inner sense of childhood.

In an effort to bring the literature on Lin up to date, this cluster begins with several {1} new {2} works {3} by the writer himself. Following these pieces, Takeo Rivera and Low both contribute to understanding racial signification in Lin's work. While Rivera engages with recent critical discussions surrounding objecthood and animacy, arguing that race for Lin is not a fixed category, but "one that only exists precisely through incapacity to locate it," Low pays homage to counterfeit aesthetics, describing how fraudulence can be a source of comfort rather than anxiety. In Low's essay, Asianness involves recognizing and loving generic brands, generic stories, and generic Chinese aunties. Reading it, I am tempted to situate it alongside both Alan Davies's "Cereal" (1988) — which contrasted the flatness of the serial poem with the spherical nature of the poem cycle — as well as Anahid Nersessian's 2023 essay on flatness and the mistrust of expression in American poetry. Low and Rivera both remind us that Asian Americans — often cast as being good at science and math but not the humanities, good workers but not good leaders — are especially positioned to make use of flatness. Flatness, as Low reads it in Lin's work, is not a "mood-stabilizer," but a site of melodrama, a "flavor enhancer." Flatness, because it pushes some things into the background, amplifies what other things are at the point of vanishing. 

While the figure of the generic person raises questions about racial stereotypes in Rivera's work, it makes a somewhat different appearance in Violet Spurlock's essay on obviousness, which situates Lin as a counterpoint in a theoretical lineage concerned with demystification and suspicion. Adopting a unique angle to recent literature on the "commons," Spurlock shows that for Lin, certain linguistic constructions call attention to the epistemic validity underlying universalizing claims or "common sense." Obviousness turns out to be a highly grammatical effect — one that manifests itself in what Spurlock calls "person of experience" clauses. Related to sociological classification, Lin's use of generic experiences is nevertheless distinguished by Spurlock from more recent uses of standpoint epistemology.

Speaking to both the sociality and the impersonality of disco, theonia puts Lin in conversation with two unlikely candidates: Arthur Russell and Julius Eastman. Disco's ability to repeat endlessly is not just a technological feat but a celebration of "mutation," a resistance to closure, and an inducement to constant transitioning and lingering. Turning to Lin's video work "Disco Eats Itself" (2004), theonia discusses how viewers are invited to move between "grazing" content and "exerting" attention. Such varied modes of engagement and disengagement are extended in Jake Reber's essay on Powerpoint aesthetics. Writing that Powerpoint "is more so a controlled attention to the movement of information than an actually useful means of communication," Reber argues that Lin's powerpoints are "moderated reading experience[s]" that call attention to the strangeness rather than the seamlessness of the platform's preset constraints.

Finally, given that the contributors to this cluster all work in various genres — and are themselves critics as well as art-makers — they represent the influence of Lin's work on contemporary letters. In reading and writing about Lin, we do more than celebrate a multifaceted work. We become fans.

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Jennifer Soong is a poet, critic, and assistant professor at the University of Denver. She is the author of several works of poetry including Comeback Death (2024), Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (2022), and the forthcoming collection My Earliest Person. Her critical monograph Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting is coming out with the University of Chicago Press in 2025. Critical essays of hers have appeared or are forthcoming in Critical Inquiry, Textual Practice, Modernism/modernity, and the Journal of Modern Literature.

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References

1. Charles Bernstein, in a Close Listening interview with Lin, asks with a hint of skepticism, "you really want your writing to be boring?" When Lin replies "yes" and offers an explanation, Bernstein asks again, seemingly unsatisfied, "but you really want people to be bored?" "Close Listening with Charles Bernstein," May 23, 2005. Accessed Oct. 9, 2023. https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lin.php.[⤒]
2. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "fun, n. & adj." (September 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5232765026.[⤒]
3. See Gregory Bateson, "A Theory of Play and Fantasy," in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: U Chicago Press, 1972).[⤒]
4. I take the phrase from Burt Kimmelman's talk "The End of Language and the Beginning of Conceptualism in the Nineties: Art Poetry & the Material of Writing," qtd. in Daniel Morris, Kenneth Goldsmith's Recent Works (Vancouver: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2019), 177.[⤒]
5. See Cathy Park Hong's 2014 Lana Turner essay "Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde."[⤒]
6. Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2020), 28.[⤒]
7. Steven Zultanski, "Genre and Process in the Poetry of Tan Lin," presentation at "North American Poetry 2000-2020/2: Poetics, Aesthetics, and Politics” (Paris, France, June 30, 2022).[⤒]
8. John Ashbery, Collected Poems 1956-1987, ed. Mark Ford(New York: Library of America, 381).[⤒]
9. Paul Overy, "The different shades of Mao," The Times (London), March 12, 1974, 7. Overy takes as his reference Rainer Crone's influential book on Warhol from 1970.[⤒]
10. Tan Lin, The Fern Rose Bibliography (New York, Andy Warhol Foundation, 2022), 56.[⤒]
11. For more on this concept, see Nicolas Abraham, "Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology," trans. Nicholas Rand, Critical Inquiry 13, no. 2 (Winter 1987): 287-292.[⤒]

Past clusters