Heath

by Tan Lin

Poetry. Cross-genre. HEATH (PLAGIARISM/OUTSOURCE) exists somewhere between a Project Gutenberg version of Samul Pepys Diary and a minute-to-minute news feed and blog of Heath Ledger's death. Sad, appropriated, lyrical and confused, the book contains a brief history of recent performance art, a legal defense of plagiarism, the diary of a poetry workshop at the Asian American Writer's Workshop, an MP3 protest song, and an examination of SMS and GMS technologies as distribution networks for human sadness. Multi-authored, and with numerous text blocks and photos, HEATH (PLAGIARISM/OUTSOURCE), NOTES TOWARDS THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE, UNTITLED HEATH LEDGER PROJECT, A HISTORY OF THE SEARCH ENGINE, DISCO OS is in full color.

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Paperback

First published January 5, 2009

Reviews

[Chad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tan Lin is the shit.

[a l n · Rating 4 out of 5]

digital maw of voracious information—which is to say conceptually interesting but not always pleasurable / fun to read?

[Claire]

This cross-genre text simulates the reading environment of the Internet and calls into question the notion of authorship. Lin presents appropriated text and images that visually reference the Web, and challenges the reader (perhaps viewer or book-surfer is more appropriate) with a difficult entry point into the text. The art director, Danielle Aubert notes in the back of the book that Lin did the design work in Microsoft Word. “The text is set in Courier except where text was imported directly from the Internet, in which case the original formatting is preserved.” Lin comments on the reading experience in Heath in an interview by Chris Alexander, Kristen Gallagher, and Gordon Tapper, “On some levels it's not supposed to feel like reading at all, maybe more like participatory skimming/recording or as you suggest looking at someone else reading, and this mirrored labor practice is not so much neutral or dematerialized as something specific to Web-based reading practices.” In this piece Lin also explores the blurred lines between writing, publication, distribution, and marketing in a Web-based environment. Lin masterfully plays with the tension between the book-reading experience and the Web-reading experience.

This short review also appears in The Journal of Artist's Books, issue 31 (Spring 2012).