Tan Lin

I have been following Tan Lin's work for some time, and I have written on some at length. (That's at writingwithimages.com/?page_id=249.) This book is an interesting experiment on his part, I think, because it spells out some of the aesthetic values of attention and memory, and some of the personal narratives of identity, that have been fragmentary in the earlier work. It's a story of his visits to an aunt, and their time together watching TV.
The narrative is more continuous (read: traditional) than in his other work, and the placement of images is more unobtrusive (they are alone on facing pages). There are footnotes taken from the internet, in a different font and a different format, which are reminiscent of the earlier work--more on them in a moment.
For me, this book shows how Tan Lin hopes to build descriptions of new states of attention, memory, and pleasure. Many of the ideas that fitfully emerge in the narrative about his aunt have been present in the sometimes isolated aesthetic and theoretical passages in the earlier books, but here they are embedded in a continuous meditation on his memories of his aunt, and that results in a kind of chafing between the memoir form and the philosophic or aesthetic inquiry--especially because the properties and meanings he wants to explain need to be put as surprises, apparently contradictions, and paradoxes.
He is interested in the dispersal of attention and memory, the rewriting of boredom and time, the reimagining of packaged commercial media, and the repositioning of the self in a distributed network of mediatized messages. The resulting affect--the mood--is bemused, cool, sad in a thinly distributed way, and intermittently emotionally neutral or absent. I call all these "minor aesthetic qualities," after J.L. Austin (and also after Kant, who was first to investigate them). They are becoming the objects of ordinary scholarship, for example in Sianne Ngai, so they are no longer experiences that only exist in novels and poems of noia and related experiences. In Tan Lin, they're in between, and that tension is constitutive of his project at the moment.
The dust jacket copy is clearly written by Tan Lin, and ends this way:
"Ostensibly about a young man's disintegrating memory of his most fascinating relative, or potentially a conceptualist take on immigrant literature, it is probably just a treatment for a prime-time event that, because no one sleeps in motels, lasts into the late night and daytime slots."
The "ostensibly" is a good description of the book's content; the "probably" names the author's ambition; and the "probably" is an unwarranted poetic extension of the book -- or a potential line in the book itself.

Unresolved effects of the new narrative mode of writing

The shift from experimental bricolage or multimedia collage to more continuous narrative is not yet resolved. Sometimes he's suddenly abstract and academic: "If live TV is disturbingly real, canned TV for my aunt is a function of reincarnation, or maybe morphology, at once vague, causal, and novelistic" (p. 20). He mostly writes with a calm Duchampian sort of detachment and bemusement, but that sometimes slips, for example into dire or deep pronouncements like "somewhere in the world a TV set made my aunt disappear into the black and white wilderness that is the truth" (p. 22).
Some examples of unresolved juxtapositions or imbalances:

1. All the footnotes are to web searches, and they're fragmentary and oddly formatted. That works, I think, as a nice contrast to the narrative in the text, except that some notes are fairly self-explanatory but others ask readers to go to a computer for explanation -- and there is no apparent reason why that should happen sometimes and not others. Footnote 6 begins:
"Manipulating Ethnic Tradition: The Funeral Ceremony, Tourism, and... / by S. Yamashita - 1994..."
You'd have to look that one up for it to make sense in context. But the note just after is immediately meaningful in context, and sufficient as it is cited. Why?

2. Tan Lin has a tendency to construct sentences with two alternative images. They are usually presented in parallel, but one is opaque or unexpected and the other is consonant with the context and more or less expected. For example:
"It is true that watching TV with my aunt, I experienced moods I could not find for myself, and those moods resembled a lover who has almost walked into a room or those patented colors produced by an expensive TV" (p. 35).
The first image doesn't make sense: what does it mean to say a person "almost" walks into a room? The second image is intentionally disconnected from the first, but makes good sense in context. I can appreciate Tan Lin's strategy here: these double-imaged sentences -- and there are many of them; they're one of his main strategies -- produce an effect of mild surrealism and also mild obscurity. But it's bothersome that he seems not to pay much attention to some of his images (why a lover? a room with what in it?), and more importantly that he seems to assume that such juxtapositions produce interesting meaning, what I call minor aesthetic qualities. But with fair frequency, the juxtapositions just seem devised in order to produce a calm, partly impenetrable philosophizing tone, and when they work that way, I think readers do not need to pay attention to the content of either image or their possible combination. I wonder if a stronger practice might be to produce careful balances of alternatives, and even to try avoiding the binary structure altogether.

The images

The book's images are mainly models and pop-culture references that go with the text. They're not that interesting, and they don't add much. But there is one amazing moment, right at the end, when Tan Lin describes a photo he says he took, but doesn't reproduce -- and then he writes, "As you can see from the photo..." (p. 50). It's a simple gesture, but really wonderful, and I think unique in the literature. I don't know any other example, especially including Barthes's Winter Garden photograph, in which an unreproduced image is referred to conversationally as if it's present.… (mere)