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Cooking a Book with Low-Level Durational Energy; or, How to Read Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies
- The University of Alabama Press
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cooking a Book with low-level Durational energy; or, How to Read tan lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies Kristen Gallagher reviewers of tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies (7CV) have produced some interesting misreadings. some mistake the story of someone (“i”) meeting his wife at a Macy’s event for straight autobiography; others regard the reproduction of Laura (riding) Jackson’s Foreword to Rational Meaning as a statement of affinity between Lin’s book and her theory of intrinsic meaning ; still others compare the book to Theodor adorno’s aesthetic theory or treat it as a manifesto. each of these misreadings presents its own problems. taken together, they show us exactly what the style of the book does—tempts us to lapse into certain habits of reading (focusing on what is most recognizable to us, projecting our own desires and interests into places they aren’t, etc.). The stylistic play of 7CV is only the latest variation on a way to perform something Lin has sought in all his projects: to create reading environments that get the reader thinking about how various texts trigger certain kinds of reading. yes, 7CV teases at being both a book of aesthetic theory and straightforward stylized autobiography. it is certainly concerned with the meanings of words. and while it concerns topics such as beauty, art, and society, and contains elements of both theory and story, very little of the content is what it seems at first reading. The book does not go after these issues directly, “with hammer and tongs,” as it were. Whenever you think you’re reading in one framework, you’re often actually reading in several others. This book is unlike most of its contemporaries. it doesn’t isolate blocks of sampled text and leave them for the reader to work with, as in much of Conceptual poetry. and it doesn’t employ the typical strategies of post-Language poetry. Most post-Language poetry takes up structures of utterance or idiolects as they are commonly used and places them in relief through juxtaposition or shreds them so that meaning is compromised for the purposes of 94 Gallagher social critique. Lin’s work doesn’t do this. instead, Lin works text as a molecular gastronomist engages in “recombinant cooking based on the analysis of the structure and behavior of molecules” (This 2). or think of a book written by a literary botanist who uses style to cross-pollinate the standard vocabulary systems for organizing information, and in doing so opens new ground for thinking through the reading environments established by those “vocabularies.” This new style of writing produces in the reader a less clear sense of where one vocabulary begins and another ends. it’s not merely about the relationships between things and ideas, but about how we read, and are always reading, often according to methods and guidelines we are not entirely conscious of. Lin has published four books to date, including 7CV. His more recent books have emerged out of sourced or “marginally authorial” writing processes such as collages of material plagiarized from the internet (Heath Plagiarism/ Outsource) and riffs on ambient and electronic music (Blipsoak01). Like Heath and Blipsoak01, the work of 7CV is sampled and written-through, collaborative and democratic, but it does not register as polyvocal. as roland Barthes says, “The text, in its mass, is comparable to a sky, at once flat and smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks” (S/Z 14). The style of 7CV, on the level of sentence and paragraph, is glassy and seamless, insinuating the warmth of statement. it pulls its sources together with results that resemble more airport muzak than hip-hop, less post-Langpo and more something we haven’t seen before. any interruption or seam-rending happens more at the level of the book—between chapters and pages, between the cover, which displays the “front matter” usually consigned to an inside left-hand page and the back of the book, which looks like a front cover. in discussions of his turn toward this kind of work, Lin often talks about wanting to make reading easier, more relaxing, by creating a smoother textual surface than what his readership had become accustomed to with Language poetry. 7CV is his smoothest attempt yet. While this smoothness often induces reading strategies appropriate to popular forms such as the novel, autobiography, or restaurant review, the subject headings of the “Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication data”—descriptors whose job it is to locate...