About the Author III is the third work in the About the Author sequence and a metadata witness for a poem applying the Archive’s proportional law to one authorial case.
The governing expression is σ_eff = σ · (1 − PER): effective inscription is modeled as inscription pressure reduced by Provenance Erasure Rate. The poem reportedly applies this relation to the development of Lee Sharks’s public author surface.
Its sections connect Pearl and Other Poems, heteronymic institutions, search reception, Archive deposits, the Semantic Economy, and the problem of attribution. One section performs a public correction by returning attribution to Tao Lin for the mandala image used on the 2014 Pearl cover.
The metadata describes four figures: the pointillist mandala used for the cover, two purchased signed mandala works—one lost and one associated with a classroom desk—and a Democritus-as-Golem image composed by Lee Sharks with ChatGPT.
The poem contrasts the reception channels available to experimental visual work and fiction, but its claims about artistic foreclosure and institutional reception are one operator’s analysis rather than a comprehensive account of Tao Lin’s career.
The full poem is not seated in this record. The registry identifies an external canonical manifestation at leesharks.com.