The Relaxing Tan Lin

I’m taking in large amounts of Tan Lin’s stuff lately. What is he doing? Serving up bowls of ambience with crumbled toppings of philosophy. It is really splendid stuff in its placid weirdness. And it has a mind-bending effect on me similar to the effect I get from reading Boëthius, or as I got listening to Kraftwerk back in the 70’s. He’s rearranging categories, like most postmodernists, but I think he could actually lead us somewhere.

His poetics are gorgeously intellectual. While his poetry is a spray of space oddities, you ought to hear the man marshal out his intellect. Wow. Super rational, while the poetry is not. Here's his page at Penn Sound, I've listened to all of it.

Here is a typical example of the way he swirls around in things. It’s from a poem, which is a food review of a restaurant he hasn’t eaten at, fused with a description of an object ID system used by the Getty museum. This little riff pops up:
“the best waiting areas today are located in books and airports, where traveling equals waiting, time equals non-activity. Being in an airport is as close as we can come to being stranded on a grid. Now I am flying to Tokyo. Now I am flying to Reykjavik. The conflation of space with surface, and interior with exterior, mirrors the condition of global capitalism….” And on and on. Riff after riff.

Be on the receiving end of this stuff for an hour or two and it changes you. It's that change that excites me about his work.

There’s lots and lots more I could say about him, but I want to make this post readably short. Let me end on Tan’s primary stated purpose of making poetry "relaxing". I think relaxation for Tan is the intellect finding its satisfaction by quietly grazing over the grass. But I don’t think this thought will endure. I don't think more grass is going to keep doing it for him, long term. I think he's going to have to find some ideology. Or just grow gradually quieter and quieter.

Keep your eyes on the clouds as you erase content. Focus on your breathing as you dissolve categories. "I said that. Me. Bill Blake."

Thanks for reading.

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lin.php Tons of good stuff from Tan there!