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Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004, the Joy of Cooking
How do we read a book as an object in a network, in a post-book, post-reading, meta-data environment? Seven Controlled Vocabularies models a generic book, a kind of field guide to the arts, wherein distinctions between various aesthetic disciplines are relaxed or dissolved and where avant-garde notions of difficulty are replaced with more relaxing and ambient formats such as yoga, disco, and meditation. Each of the book's seven sections is devoted to a particular art form--film, photography, painting, the novel, architecture, music, and theory--and includes both text and found photographs as it explores the idea of what it means to be a book in an era when reading is disappearing into a diverse array of cultural products, media formats, and aesthetic practices. Seven Controlled Vocabularies will be available in a variety of print and electronic book delivery systems and formats.
- GenresPoetryAmericanNonfiction
224 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2010
8 people are currently reading
272 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
August 15, 2022
felt like either/both of:
poetry taking the form of aesthetic critique lateral thinking puzzles - series of claims that i had fun thinking like "what are the implications of this" "do i agree with this"
being in a crowd of people all wearing jil sander inside a store that likes like a 1st generation iphone watching random objects disintegrate and the crowd muttering "oh lovely" every time one does
poetry taking the form of aesthetic critique lateral thinking puzzles - series of claims that i had fun thinking like "what are the implications of this" "do i agree with this"
being in a crowd of people all wearing jil sander inside a store that likes like a 1st generation iphone watching random objects disintegrate and the crowd muttering "oh lovely" every time one does
March 20, 2011
Reading this book is more relaxing than doing yoga or meditation.
November 11, 2013
So I was entranced by "Blipsoak01" and much less by "Seven Controlled Vocabularies." I read everything I can find that mingles novels, poems, and images, from Roddy Doyle's memoir of his parents to Samantha Fox's memoirs, Anna Carson's "Nox," of course Sebald, Frisch, Foer, and many others. In that diverse field this isn't an especially interesting contribution. The choices are consistently part of the recent art-world interest in the everyday, the mundane, the suburban, the overlooked, the faintly nostalgic. And although this is not an uncommon property, Tan Lin doesn't comment on the images themselves, except rarely and obliquely. Nominally that lets the images resonate with the text, but it also frees him, and his readers, from more intense engagements with visual material. [return][return]I'm also put off by the aesthetic theorizing, which I liked in "Blipsoak01." A large portion of this book is aesthetics (or non-aesthetics, or anti-aesthetics, or inaesthetics). It is philosophic in the way that Kundera often was, so that the book sometimes appears to exist for the sake of slightly decorated and patterned philosophic musings. When Tan Lin writes at length about his aesthetic positions, they seem much more commonplace than in "Blipsoak01": although he mentions Duchamp, he is clearly in line with current relational aesthetics, uncommitted institutional critique, and post-fluxus practice as in Nicolas Bourriaud, Dominic Willsdon, and others. It's a very familiar position in the art world.
June 3, 2023
A meditation on art and the novel in comparison to architecture and what it means to be human.
"In such a world as identity branding and diffusion, everyone becomes the human equivalent of an entertainment barcode, data celebrity or Human Muzak (Humak): data "working" 24 hours a day to be transmitted to someone else in exchange for something "real"."
Photos and text that will make you appreciate the more boring aspects of life for their artistic qualities and ability to stir emotion. Art doesn't have to be the biggest and the brightest but can also be "the Varsity Cinema movie theater in Athens, Ohio that was recently converted into a Taco Bell".
"In such a world as identity branding and diffusion, everyone becomes the human equivalent of an entertainment barcode, data celebrity or Human Muzak (Humak): data "working" 24 hours a day to be transmitted to someone else in exchange for something "real"."
Photos and text that will make you appreciate the more boring aspects of life for their artistic qualities and ability to stir emotion. Art doesn't have to be the biggest and the brightest but can also be "the Varsity Cinema movie theater in Athens, Ohio that was recently converted into a Taco Bell".
January 4, 2021
“Because certain books function as labels rather than mirrors, the most beautiful things take place before our eyes for the most indignant of reasons.�
November 26, 2012
While EUNOIA’s experimental frame and strange content inspired everything in me from quirky interest to enthralled imagination, the only thing I feel when reading Lin’s � well, whatever the title for this collection is � is a general malaise of “why?�. Nothing seems to quite work here, in my opinion, and I think the heart of the problem is split into two parts: one, my complete and profound disagreement with Lin’s “mission statement� of sorts (i.e. his editorial note, and the random “prefaces� interspersed throughout), and two, the occasional, though terrible, pseudo-philosophy of the book’s content. I have no issues with how “experimental� this collection is, nor do I have any particular objection to the book’s layout, length, use of images, time-to-completion (decades), style, much of its language and writing, or even its obsession with the notion of “book� and its insistence that it is one; however, the driving forces behind the content itself are what cause this collection to fail.
Now, these two issues with the content are often intertwined, as seen with the editorial note: “There are numerous errors of omission because blandness has no boundaries� (10). The implicit position in this statement (and the rest of the note) is that words, by nature of existing within context, are ultimately unoriginal and therefore unworthy of poesis; while I would agree that caesura and omission (occasionally) add elements of mystery to what would otherwise be a straightforward text, Lin is saying something different here; not only is Lin damning that very medium with which he chooses to communicate this idea (i.e. it’s an ironic reduction to absurdity that solves nothing, and indeed, says nothing), but he is also espousing the rather amateurish aesthetic that content is irrelevant, and it is the act of reading itself (“Such reading is of the present� (10).) that inherently possesses meaning. Of course, the meaning just so happens to be obscured because� hm, oh yes, because there’s no content.
Metadata aside (I don’t object to the notion that our classification systems can be seen as poetic), and Tan’s amazing writing noted and admired (“Because certain books function as labels rather than mirrors, the most beautiful things take place before our eyes for the most indignant of reasons� (78).), there are plenty of instances where Chomsky’s “colorless green ideas sleep furiously� comes to mind; syntactical constructions of meaningless value populate this book in droves: “[As anyone] [who has spent time on the Las Vegas strip] can tell you, / FUSE / there is minimal enclosure and negligent direction. Hence removing the jacket / > / from a book is the best way to create a kind of empty enclosure within the book or a black box recorder or closed parking garage without it� (78). Barely coherent and pseudo-intellectualized with arrow symbols (ooo, it kind of looks like a book jacket), brackets (ooo, you took away the brackets and you wrote “minimal enclosure”� that’s so smart!!!), and capital letters (ooo, you’re calling attention to the space you’ve left open, but you’ve called it a “fusion� of space and words� so edgy!), this phrase defeats itself in irony.
Pretentious and rambling, contrived and annoying, hipster-ish and far too overly long, Tan’s book not only failed to impress me, but Tan’s dedication to his uneasy philosophical frame actually caused me to downplay the good writing that is fairly common throughout this dense collection of stuff.
Now, these two issues with the content are often intertwined, as seen with the editorial note: “There are numerous errors of omission because blandness has no boundaries� (10). The implicit position in this statement (and the rest of the note) is that words, by nature of existing within context, are ultimately unoriginal and therefore unworthy of poesis; while I would agree that caesura and omission (occasionally) add elements of mystery to what would otherwise be a straightforward text, Lin is saying something different here; not only is Lin damning that very medium with which he chooses to communicate this idea (i.e. it’s an ironic reduction to absurdity that solves nothing, and indeed, says nothing), but he is also espousing the rather amateurish aesthetic that content is irrelevant, and it is the act of reading itself (“Such reading is of the present� (10).) that inherently possesses meaning. Of course, the meaning just so happens to be obscured because� hm, oh yes, because there’s no content.
Metadata aside (I don’t object to the notion that our classification systems can be seen as poetic), and Tan’s amazing writing noted and admired (“Because certain books function as labels rather than mirrors, the most beautiful things take place before our eyes for the most indignant of reasons� (78).), there are plenty of instances where Chomsky’s “colorless green ideas sleep furiously� comes to mind; syntactical constructions of meaningless value populate this book in droves: “[As anyone] [who has spent time on the Las Vegas strip] can tell you, / FUSE / there is minimal enclosure and negligent direction. Hence removing the jacket / > / from a book is the best way to create a kind of empty enclosure within the book or a black box recorder or closed parking garage without it� (78). Barely coherent and pseudo-intellectualized with arrow symbols (ooo, it kind of looks like a book jacket), brackets (ooo, you took away the brackets and you wrote “minimal enclosure”� that’s so smart!!!), and capital letters (ooo, you’re calling attention to the space you’ve left open, but you’ve called it a “fusion� of space and words� so edgy!), this phrase defeats itself in irony.
Pretentious and rambling, contrived and annoying, hipster-ish and far too overly long, Tan’s book not only failed to impress me, but Tan’s dedication to his uneasy philosophical frame actually caused me to downplay the good writing that is fairly common throughout this dense collection of stuff.
April 25, 2012
I had the orange hardcover library edition.
January 10, 2019
declarative & sometimes relaxing. sad to find all of the restaurants described here are now closed
December 31, 2020
a good collection of paper about Words Online
April 23, 2023
Highly effective bit of codex.
A book that you never stop reading.
A book that you never stop reading.
May 2, 2025
from A Field Guide to American Painting
16 ‘What are the forms of non-reading and what are the non-forms a reading might take? Poetry = wallpaper. Novel = design object. Text as ambient soundtrack? [...] It would be nice to create works of literature that didn’t have to be read but could be looked at, like placemats.�
26 ‘Nothing that is negative is simple. Everything that is artificial is related to everything else in the room. Poetry should aspire to the most synthetic forms (the colors or numbers around it) and the most synthetic forms are to be found in houses with rectilinear walls, hallways, and foyers [...] For this reason, poetry (like a beautiful painting) ought to be replaced by the walls that surround it [...] A poem should be camouflaged into the feelings that the room is having like drapes, silverware, or candlesticks. All painting should aspire to the conditions of encyclopedias, sequencing and b/w diagrams:�
32 ‘A beautiful poem is a poem that can be repeated over and over again.�
page 259
(page 259)
'Later that year or early in the next year, I bought my first Chinese cookbook, a cheap British Penguin that I got for 48 cents on one of the metal outdoor carts at the Strand. This book had a picture of a huge pig carcass hanging from somewhere, which I did not like because I thought it gave Chinese people and Chinese food the appearance of modern-day primitives who keep pigs in their backyards and hang them from porches (I think differently now about that cover) and while I read this book in tan- dem with the Beard book, I never cooked from it because the recipes did not seem at all Chinese. The language of "Cooking in Chinese in China" and "Cooking in Chinese Abroad" were bipolar chapters that seemed to come abruptly, one from another century and one from another continent. Like most cookbooks, this two-in-one book was about repression and memory disorders. The language was arch, old-fashioned, colonial and depressing because the English used to describe pressed ducks and soy sauce and stir-fry and soup in dumpling or tin wok seemed too nostalgic to actually eat a meal in. What is the use of a language if you cannot consume it? The language of true Chinese cooking is very spare and very very thin, just like a recipe or a very fine novel. To be able to eat in Chinese you must also be able to cook in Chinese. To be able to cook in Chinese you must be able to see the food first. There was no mention of what a scallion pancake looked like when it was fried or what bean paste should taste like when it was fresh [uncooked]. There is always so much irreconcilable information in a cookbook. As anyone who cooks can tell you, the longer a recipe, the more miniscule the finished dish will be. Yet I found in the book the most apt metaphor for Chinese food. In the first chapter on ingredients, the author remarks: cornstarch is the glue that holds all Chinese food together. When I told this to my mother she just laughed and laughed and said:
That is very true
OR:
That is a load of nonsense (hoo sha ba dao)'
16 ‘What are the forms of non-reading and what are the non-forms a reading might take? Poetry = wallpaper. Novel = design object. Text as ambient soundtrack? [...] It would be nice to create works of literature that didn’t have to be read but could be looked at, like placemats.�
26 ‘Nothing that is negative is simple. Everything that is artificial is related to everything else in the room. Poetry should aspire to the most synthetic forms (the colors or numbers around it) and the most synthetic forms are to be found in houses with rectilinear walls, hallways, and foyers [...] For this reason, poetry (like a beautiful painting) ought to be replaced by the walls that surround it [...] A poem should be camouflaged into the feelings that the room is having like drapes, silverware, or candlesticks. All painting should aspire to the conditions of encyclopedias, sequencing and b/w diagrams:�
32 ‘A beautiful poem is a poem that can be repeated over and over again.�
page 259
(page 259)
'Later that year or early in the next year, I bought my first Chinese cookbook, a cheap British Penguin that I got for 48 cents on one of the metal outdoor carts at the Strand. This book had a picture of a huge pig carcass hanging from somewhere, which I did not like because I thought it gave Chinese people and Chinese food the appearance of modern-day primitives who keep pigs in their backyards and hang them from porches (I think differently now about that cover) and while I read this book in tan- dem with the Beard book, I never cooked from it because the recipes did not seem at all Chinese. The language of "Cooking in Chinese in China" and "Cooking in Chinese Abroad" were bipolar chapters that seemed to come abruptly, one from another century and one from another continent. Like most cookbooks, this two-in-one book was about repression and memory disorders. The language was arch, old-fashioned, colonial and depressing because the English used to describe pressed ducks and soy sauce and stir-fry and soup in dumpling or tin wok seemed too nostalgic to actually eat a meal in. What is the use of a language if you cannot consume it? The language of true Chinese cooking is very spare and very very thin, just like a recipe or a very fine novel. To be able to eat in Chinese you must also be able to cook in Chinese. To be able to cook in Chinese you must be able to see the food first. There was no mention of what a scallion pancake looked like when it was fried or what bean paste should taste like when it was fresh [uncooked]. There is always so much irreconcilable information in a cookbook. As anyone who cooks can tell you, the longer a recipe, the more miniscule the finished dish will be. Yet I found in the book the most apt metaphor for Chinese food. In the first chapter on ingredients, the author remarks: cornstarch is the glue that holds all Chinese food together. When I told this to my mother she just laughed and laughed and said:
That is very true
OR:
That is a load of nonsense (hoo sha ba dao)'
July 13, 2021
“You know what
people think about an author, right?
…as controlling the material
and authoring material.
And now maybe being an author isn’t
controlling � isn’t about, um, sort of
producing material.
It’s arranging it or
organizing it.
In some ways that first piece is about
, um, a huge amount of information that
a single person, um, who maybe we used
to call author has organized it and sequenced it
and arranged it. And maybe that constitutes a kind of version of subjectivity or at least
cognition or
some sort of self engaged with � as you said �
“ephemeral material…�
At what point does after sort of organizing that
material� does it become yours?
Um, at what point can you say that oh I have
a sort of subjective writerly or even readerly
relationship?
Here the lines between reading material and processing it and writing or generating material are kind of blurred as well�
So
yeah I think your point is very well taken�
Um,
for me that material all resonated in some sort of way.
That’s a deeply personal thing�
Is it autobiographical �. yeah kind of�
Is it novelistic �. yeah sort of�
Im not sure though�
Um, but it’s definitely specific to, um, a lot of different, um, media platforms, um, in particular Tumblr, I think, and Twitter, um, for those are sort of
dominant. But I use a lot of video game walkthroughs and paid a lot of attention to just what I would call residual formats that I’m also deeply attached to
namely the couplet and
, um, you know, the line break�
Um, in some ways poetry is about counting time, right?
Poetry really slows reading down.
You don’t know where it’s going to end exactly.
Forces you to count syllables.
Creates all sorts of rhymes that also slow you down and make you very much aware of the sort of acoustic or auditory properties of language as they’re deployed over time.
A poem is perfect for that.
And this way these pieces too are all about temporal deployment of language over a period of time.
Um, they just don’t seem to have a beginning or a middle or an end�
Free Verse: Tan Lin
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Comments 3
people think about an author, right?
…as controlling the material
and authoring material.
And now maybe being an author isn’t
controlling � isn’t about, um, sort of
producing material.
It’s arranging it or
organizing it.
In some ways that first piece is about
, um, a huge amount of information that
a single person, um, who maybe we used
to call author has organized it and sequenced it
and arranged it. And maybe that constitutes a kind of version of subjectivity or at least
cognition or
some sort of self engaged with � as you said �
“ephemeral material…�
At what point does after sort of organizing that
material� does it become yours?
Um, at what point can you say that oh I have
a sort of subjective writerly or even readerly
relationship?
Here the lines between reading material and processing it and writing or generating material are kind of blurred as well�
So
yeah I think your point is very well taken�
Um,
for me that material all resonated in some sort of way.
That’s a deeply personal thing�
Is it autobiographical �. yeah kind of�
Is it novelistic �. yeah sort of�
Im not sure though�
Um, but it’s definitely specific to, um, a lot of different, um, media platforms, um, in particular Tumblr, I think, and Twitter, um, for those are sort of
dominant. But I use a lot of video game walkthroughs and paid a lot of attention to just what I would call residual formats that I’m also deeply attached to
namely the couplet and
, um, you know, the line break�
Um, in some ways poetry is about counting time, right?
Poetry really slows reading down.
You don’t know where it’s going to end exactly.
Forces you to count syllables.
Creates all sorts of rhymes that also slow you down and make you very much aware of the sort of acoustic or auditory properties of language as they’re deployed over time.
A poem is perfect for that.
And this way these pieces too are all about temporal deployment of language over a period of time.
Um, they just don’t seem to have a beginning or a middle or an end�
Free Verse: Tan Lin
3.5k views 8 years ago
Share Download Create Save
Walker Art Center
30.8k subscribers
Comments 3
March 6, 2023
hmm interesting. i'm not quite sure how i feel about this book which is why i'm writing a goodreads review of it a few hours before we discuss it in class. the author will be there for a bit, unclear if he is the type to check his own goodreads reviews
i was initially very charmed, which faded as the book went on and i developed a cold/hangover but still needed to finish it before class. but i was charmed! i grew up in the suburbs too. i think about malls a lot. my youtube algorithm has helped me realize that i am in fact drawn to architecture, but probably because of malls, not the other way around. i loved the idea of reading being reduced to passive, brain liquefying, commodified entertainment like shopping and playing golf. it was funny and subversive. i think i was more drawn to the subversive part of it that was like, anti art/literary traditions/institutions more so than the part that was anti consumerist/capitalist? just bc that latter line of critique felt more self evidently true/said before. as the book went on, it felt less funny and delightful and anarchist(?) and more straight ironic, or philosophical, about how consumerism is bad
i was also more interested in the ideas outside of consumerism, about art's relationship to memory/emotions. i could not really grasp them, which i think is okay/the point. i was most interested when i took his ideas for granted, that he really did believe that to be beautiful was to be boring, "immaterial, diffuse, and ambient as the memory attached to them." i think in rejecting permanence/artwork that is more narrative or ego-driven, there's something flattening in a democratic way? like yeah, a hint of anarchy alongside critiques of culture flattening and all becoming the same under capitalism
sometimes the language was opaque in a beautiful way, other times in a frustrating way
i feel like there is an asian american read to have on this haha. about flat affects
i was initially very charmed, which faded as the book went on and i developed a cold/hangover but still needed to finish it before class. but i was charmed! i grew up in the suburbs too. i think about malls a lot. my youtube algorithm has helped me realize that i am in fact drawn to architecture, but probably because of malls, not the other way around. i loved the idea of reading being reduced to passive, brain liquefying, commodified entertainment like shopping and playing golf. it was funny and subversive. i think i was more drawn to the subversive part of it that was like, anti art/literary traditions/institutions more so than the part that was anti consumerist/capitalist? just bc that latter line of critique felt more self evidently true/said before. as the book went on, it felt less funny and delightful and anarchist(?) and more straight ironic, or philosophical, about how consumerism is bad
i was also more interested in the ideas outside of consumerism, about art's relationship to memory/emotions. i could not really grasp them, which i think is okay/the point. i was most interested when i took his ideas for granted, that he really did believe that to be beautiful was to be boring, "immaterial, diffuse, and ambient as the memory attached to them." i think in rejecting permanence/artwork that is more narrative or ego-driven, there's something flattening in a democratic way? like yeah, a hint of anarchy alongside critiques of culture flattening and all becoming the same under capitalism
sometimes the language was opaque in a beautiful way, other times in a frustrating way
i feel like there is an asian american read to have on this haha. about flat affects
December 8, 2021
decided this book wasnt what it claimed to be, stopped reading for a while because I got bored. remembered an interview with author stating he wants his readers to be bored. came back with an indifferent attitude which suits it better
"a film a landscape a face become a tracking system whose purpose is to register frequency or probability rather than communicate any emotional content"
that one stood out as confirmation of a certain way of consuming art that resonates.. reminds me of why i usually dont understand the point of talking about movies after watching them. yet here i am talking
"a film a landscape a face become a tracking system whose purpose is to register frequency or probability rather than communicate any emotional content"
that one stood out as confirmation of a certain way of consuming art that resonates.. reminds me of why i usually dont understand the point of talking about movies after watching them. yet here i am talking
January 15, 2025
don’t know if i buy into the concept of the poem as information / metadata to this extent, but remain captivated by the dry, aimless style and winking humor of lin’s writing. pushes the lyric into a medium of social diagnosis and cheeky anthropology that feels sweeping yet precise—feels like an art critic’s negative of a poem, and i’ve been on an art world bend lately?
May 6, 2019
brilliant
April 7, 2021
he almost had me
Read
December 31, 2023Or have I�
🤔
🤔
August 25, 2015
This was one of the most experimental works I think I've ever read in my life.
It was a highly sophisticated, complex, avant-garde read, but at the same time, strangely self-effacing and ironic. The tone of the entire work is impersonal for the most part. The narrative asserts that the most generic, symmetrical, and uniform expressions in architecture, film, books, places, etc. are the most beautiful because nothing is actually happening in them. The more one forgets and is removed from a piece, the more essentially "perfect" it is.
Mass consumerism and the homogeneousness of one's surroundings (e.g. golf courses as landscapes and parking garages as functional spaces) are also commented on repeatedly throughout. There's this weird hypnotism in the blandness of the voice's tone and it's utter lack of emotion, but by the same token, the irony lies in the fact that there probably isn't a work like this anywhere in existence, which makes it entirely original and singular. I'm not even sure if you can categorize this as "poetry."
There are photographs and what appears to be text laid out in a sort of chart-like/diagram manner that I haven't been able to quite make out the connection to insofar as how they relate to the work as a whole. There are also a series of pictures of the back covers of books as well as photographs of random places. Plus, there are numbers all over the place page by page, almost emulating a kind of cataloging of text as data.
This work seems like a commentary on the modern age where we've become more systematic in our approach to everyday life with regard to mass consumption of not only goods and services, but also of the way we take in information.
Even the cover of the book which lacks an image and/or a title (but the back cover includes it), and instead offers in very tiny text the Library of Congress cataloging information up front is a reflection of the impersonality of the modern age and the way it organizes and presents data.
Reading is also referred to quite frequently in this work and there's certainly an irony in the way the author states how "A book should reflect the symbols that pass before it before they become emotions." It's almost as if implicit in this tongue-in-cheek line is a criticism that the book as object - and the way we have come to consume them as objects - has become a means for a past time (reading) which we as a modern culture are adopting in a detached, emotionless, and passive way.
With that said, this was a highly challenging artistic piece and I very much enjoyed it. There was definitely an academic air about it, and in that way, some people might find it dry and not really like it.
I could probably write a lot more about this, but then I'd probably end up writing a book.
It was a highly sophisticated, complex, avant-garde read, but at the same time, strangely self-effacing and ironic. The tone of the entire work is impersonal for the most part. The narrative asserts that the most generic, symmetrical, and uniform expressions in architecture, film, books, places, etc. are the most beautiful because nothing is actually happening in them. The more one forgets and is removed from a piece, the more essentially "perfect" it is.
Mass consumerism and the homogeneousness of one's surroundings (e.g. golf courses as landscapes and parking garages as functional spaces) are also commented on repeatedly throughout. There's this weird hypnotism in the blandness of the voice's tone and it's utter lack of emotion, but by the same token, the irony lies in the fact that there probably isn't a work like this anywhere in existence, which makes it entirely original and singular. I'm not even sure if you can categorize this as "poetry."
There are photographs and what appears to be text laid out in a sort of chart-like/diagram manner that I haven't been able to quite make out the connection to insofar as how they relate to the work as a whole. There are also a series of pictures of the back covers of books as well as photographs of random places. Plus, there are numbers all over the place page by page, almost emulating a kind of cataloging of text as data.
This work seems like a commentary on the modern age where we've become more systematic in our approach to everyday life with regard to mass consumption of not only goods and services, but also of the way we take in information.
Even the cover of the book which lacks an image and/or a title (but the back cover includes it), and instead offers in very tiny text the Library of Congress cataloging information up front is a reflection of the impersonality of the modern age and the way it organizes and presents data.
Reading is also referred to quite frequently in this work and there's certainly an irony in the way the author states how "A book should reflect the symbols that pass before it before they become emotions." It's almost as if implicit in this tongue-in-cheek line is a criticism that the book as object - and the way we have come to consume them as objects - has become a means for a past time (reading) which we as a modern culture are adopting in a detached, emotionless, and passive way.
With that said, this was a highly challenging artistic piece and I very much enjoyed it. There was definitely an academic air about it, and in that way, some people might find it dry and not really like it.
I could probably write a lot more about this, but then I'd probably end up writing a book.
September 15, 2018
3.5 stars.
There's hermetic, and then there's HERMETIC. This book is willfully obscure, and wears its obscurity proudly (with some requisite tongue in cheek, appropriate for the Age, sprinkled in here and there)...yet, it is enjoyable at times, and quite the impressive rhizomatic cloud of text and image/objects whose book-ness is only held together via the covers enclosing it, along with the smells of well-“cooked�, transformed Western reading habits baked into the text.
Is this self-reflexive modus enough to make it a work of "genius"? Some seem to think so...but I can't help feeling this to be something of a late-Modernist gesture that we have seen time and again through the decades (a la Edmund Jabes in a way, or perhaps closer in flavor to some of the experiments of Ascher/Straus, but all vaporized with the distant memory of Mallarme's “Livre�), only this time, it’s glazed with some fancy Post-Internet ingredients...
I am a sucker for highly experimental prose ("Finnegans Wake" and "The Temptation of St Anthony" are two of my favorite books), but this one didn't completely satisfy me. I wouldn't say that was because it was "pretentious", as I've heard it called, but clever self-referentiality mixed with some diffuse shards of our peanut brittle contemporary culture makes for a kind of diaphanous literary meal that I just can't quite sink my teeth into. That being said, I will certainly give this text a go through again, if not several times, to see if its amorphous menu may grow on me.
There's hermetic, and then there's HERMETIC. This book is willfully obscure, and wears its obscurity proudly (with some requisite tongue in cheek, appropriate for the Age, sprinkled in here and there)...yet, it is enjoyable at times, and quite the impressive rhizomatic cloud of text and image/objects whose book-ness is only held together via the covers enclosing it, along with the smells of well-“cooked�, transformed Western reading habits baked into the text.
Is this self-reflexive modus enough to make it a work of "genius"? Some seem to think so...but I can't help feeling this to be something of a late-Modernist gesture that we have seen time and again through the decades (a la Edmund Jabes in a way, or perhaps closer in flavor to some of the experiments of Ascher/Straus, but all vaporized with the distant memory of Mallarme's “Livre�), only this time, it’s glazed with some fancy Post-Internet ingredients...
I am a sucker for highly experimental prose ("Finnegans Wake" and "The Temptation of St Anthony" are two of my favorite books), but this one didn't completely satisfy me. I wouldn't say that was because it was "pretentious", as I've heard it called, but clever self-referentiality mixed with some diffuse shards of our peanut brittle contemporary culture makes for a kind of diaphanous literary meal that I just can't quite sink my teeth into. That being said, I will certainly give this text a go through again, if not several times, to see if its amorphous menu may grow on me.
March 5, 2012
Probably the bext thing I've read in the last few years.
July 27, 2012
Really useful to me in figuring out some stuff about Jack Spicer-- especially weird, cryptic 'Golem.' I don't know.
July 31, 2018
[Has apparently completed her annual reading challange]
[Has apparently limitless faith in herself]
[Has apparently limitless faith in herself]
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