Site Archives

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…

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…

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…

“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…

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,…

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…

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…