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These recipes for literary ingestion compute and activate our era's feelings. They autofill the blankest of architectural perfumes, landscapes, cigarettes in airports, and photos of my labels. Tan Lin reads my Wal-Mart in an utterly, compellingly boring way. He cures my indigestion. He photographs my hallucinations like a book with an obituary inside it.Tan Lin proposes a radical idea for reading: not reading. Words constitute the most fleeting engagements in our recycled textual ecology. Language is fluid and can be poured. Skim, dip, drop-in, tune out, click away. Today, they've come together between a book's covers; tomorrow they'll be a Facebook meme.Tan Lin returns us to the most traditional idea for reading. Words, so transitory today, are fundamental elements that constitute Orphic engagements, singular among the many technologies make up the shape of our rich semiotic landscape. You get the sense that Lin's words are meant to last forever. By setting up a textual ecology - archiving and rejuvenating language -- Lin makes us aware of something that is beyond both the material and ephemeral nature of words. Language is solid and palpable. Plunge the depths, close read, dwell, savor, project. Today these figments of eternity have come together between the covers of this book; tomorrow they'll be canonical.Begin with an anecdote: We took a train to the opening of an exhibition at the Fogg Museum. The show displayed the activities of Bas Jan Ader, whose work--might include singing, filmmaking, writing, etc. But the exhibition had the most unlikely of titles, a title that to me was so strange as to be inexplicable: Extreme Connoisseurship. The exhibition intended to demonstrate work of artists who did not specialize in any so-called "medium." I did not want to bother the curator with my queries. So I cornered one of the directors of the museum. I told him that the title and the argument it reflected appeared to me to be thoroughly settled a couple of generations ago. Towering over me and looking miffed, he said, "Some of us are just more conservative than others." Seven Controlled Vocabularies is an experience--not an argument--of the marvelous fluidity of categories. It demonstrates that any media is a quality of experience, not the definition of physical criteria. In its methodology, it might be compared to Warhol's A, A novel, which also demonstrates it own arguments--in that case about language--rather than declaring them. Tan Lin's Seven Controlled Vocabularies is a brilliant manifesto for conceptual, ambient writing, for non-reading. Part theory, part picture-poem, part airport novel, Seven Controlled Vocabularies ceaselessly surprises us by demonstrating that language, as wallpaper, reaches into an intensely profound and engaging way of experiencing text... "poems to be looked at vs. poems to be read." Seven Controlled Vocabularies is a significant contribution to today's discourse about readership and thinkership, where the poem is "camouflaged into the feelings that the room is having, like drapes..." Use this book as a guide to non-reading reading. "Here is your Moist Towelette."[blurb for Tan Lin]
*A mammoth composition, Tan Lin's Seven Controlled Vocabularies is a vane existing--where udders are not a road or dictionary but airport (or at least terminal).
*The saddle of a novel, where so many have stood, is no longer an objective cup.
*A musical wound is practiced, poems feed process.
*Painting (a toward action) is also part of its science, and he is a theory yelling author.
*Here Lin controls the chain to expand the film, a vaccine against harming willows.
*Unbecoming delays appear in atoms of photos; hallucination opera lisps.
*Landscape struggles so that "blandness has no boundaries"; empty plates at the book's outset comment on our hunger, a terrible volley (hand) that particularly records us.
*Running its length we are gradually filled, sating our need to see, then read, and think.
*To remain erases us.
*To peer connections is surveying the engineer and engineered.
*Readers who fear false endings will find no relief; instead, honest thoughts, psychological heads.
*Since so ideal a fortune in the assignment of memory presses the debate, a gear (drama), aggregate machinery, places us not at rest.
*When he is jazz (song landing), balance goes to speak and proteins laugh.
*Lin's writing is nodding, shades wiping so informal an element.
*A mill obtains testament. Tan Lin's work finds us bobbing in a Great Pacific Garbage Patch of language, bits of which can be pasted together to make a raft of a design that Otto Neurath could never have predicted. It's a snapshot of how we read in 2009: terminally distracted yet managing to find, here and there, meaningful connections.Is 7 Controlled Vocabularies like a performative manual? or an outline of flourishing conjecture? habitable (peripatetic)? I would say it "reminds me of Oulipo", but instead of Oulipo proposing performativity or some gesture, the text is enacting itself slowly, in a soft paradigm; the text becoming pink noise _with itself_. I wonder if this is via the object (book)--via its heterogeneity, architectural liminality, ambient outsourcing, dissemination--or the [potential] site in which it traverses, being-mobile, and the contingencies of the site (lighting, room temperature, humidity, decor, etc). Is a playback discrete?
Is reading production? is it viable?
(i feel like freud, asking, 'isn't this self-evident?')
Danielle Aubert, Sarah Gambito, Kieran Daly, Dan Visel, Kristen Gallagher, Chris Funkhouser, Robert Fitterman, Charles Bernstein, Kenneth Goldsmith, Josiah McElheny, Warren Liu contributed to these reviews.
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Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking: (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
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