Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary: The Joy of Cooking is a book project on reading practices making extensive use of found material, appropriation, different layers of commentary, paratextual play, and category shifts. It consists of text and images and has been published in multiple editions, including PDFs, a book version published by Wesleyan University Press—which was awarded with the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry (2012)—and a print-on-demand version on Lulu, which was the first to be published.

The book is divided into seven sections, each devoted to a different art form, namely film, photography, painting, novel, architecture, music, and theory. These are tackled with conceptual writing techniques, presenting language to look at as well as offering different ways to approach the framings of language. In Lin’s terms, the book presents itself as a container to control and document different states of reading, which is understood as copying, digesting, and transcribing text from all kinds of analog and digital sources. As each source implies a different kind of reading practice with a different intensity, these practices get somewhat tamed and leveled in the book format, making it a way to control their vocabularies. This controlling is just one side of how the book presents its contents, as it also plays with different modes of publishing and paratext. It is also closely connected to Lin’s personal life and his experiences as part of a migrant family.

The Lulu version presents itself with three different titles, with Seven Controlled Vocabularies on its back cover,* The Joy of Cooking* on its spine and no less than three different title pages, including one listing Obituary as the book’s title. The cover lists two ISBNs that can be traced to different editions. These paratextual uncertainties in addition to the multiple editions, as well as an editing event series initiated by Danny Snelson further enhancing the book in eleven publications and editions, also frame the book in a networked environment as a temporary device for controlling text just waiting to fluidize again. Several parts of the book’s content have been previously published on Tumblr blogs, as stated in an interview with Lin that featured in Appendix, a book published as part of Snelson’s series 11 Books Expanding Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary: The Joy of Cooking, 2010.