On "Heath Course Pak," by Tan Lin
I bought this deeply strange little book at McNally-Jackson in Soho; I had got word of it somehow, several years prior, but had not been able to obtain a copy. It is unlike most any other book one is likely to encounter. An art book / poem / visual collage / postmodernist meta-fictional artifact, Heath Course Pak is the product of the the feverish imagination of one Tan Lin - not to be confused with his more famous compatriot Tao Lin. The book is an intentionally crude mishmash of poorly reproduced Internet screen grabs, public-domain disclosures, random blotches of computer code, fragmented and deliberately redacted snatches of poetry, a series of real-time blog reports on the death, in January 2008, of Australian actor Heath Ledger, and a long interview in which the author provides a dizzying stew of highly theoretical frameworks for the book’s often seemingly artless randomness. Heath Course Pak thus radically calls into question the very nature or meaning of such received ideas as “text,” “book,” and “author.” Readers with a deeper and more rigorous background in semiotic theory than mine might find much of this stale or gimmicky, but I found it startlingly original and quite fascinating. It serves, intentionally or not, as a tiny, whirling carnival of postmodern tropes, disorienting and provocative.