The Authorship of Heath Ledger in the New Reading Environment; On Tan Lin’s Heath: Plagiarism/Outsource

Tan Lin’s Heath: Plagiarism/Out-source is a book meant to be viewed as much as read. As the son of an artist and an English teacher, Lin has seemed, in his books and artwork, very much at home blurring the distinction between visual art and writing, but nowhere has this been more apparent than in the current book. Heath is a text and image environment, but even with regard to the text, the visual component is a major feature of how readers will apprehend the book’s meaning. Even at first glance, it is quite obvious that most of the text has been cut and pasted directly from Web sources. There is a lot of unformatted text, reminiscent of a typical student plagiarized paper: chunks of prose copied from the Web and pasted directly into MS Word, producing irregular line breaks and showing up in Courier. The use of Courier in the book’s design is particularly striking, because printers have long considered it to be the ugliest font, simply not made for use in book environments.

Additionally, the pictures in Heath are not “beautiful” accompaniments to the words, but present the kinds of images we have come to take for granted when reading on the Web, such as the advertising that leaps forward in pop-up messages and perpetually renews itself just inside the frame of every page. Some images in Heath even include the frame of the website from which they were lifted. The overall effect is a book highly performative in its design: brazen, clumsy, and unattractive to anyone accustomed to the page arrangement and artist book formatting typically found in small-press poetry. Its appearance throws the reader out of context, throws the content back into the context its title equivocally suggests: Plagiarism/Outsource. But there is substance that reaches beyond what, for some, will appear at first to be a reckless anti-aesthetic gesture; its import becomes clear as one reads on. For one, in this work Lin is flying in the face of poetry as a staging ground for the expressive originality or the studiously politicized critical acuity of the author. It is clear that Lin doesn’t intend to be read as the author and is even actively discouraging it, referencing instead something about the textual condition of the Web and the variety of engagements with language and image to be found there. All told, this is one of the most exciting books I have read in years. Provocative on issues of reading, writing, publishing, literacy, and identity, Heath: Plagiarism/Outsource can inspire the full range of dialogue the emerging environment of Web 2.0 requires. This new reading-writing-publishing environment is not going away, and the challenges it brings to literature, literacy, and teaching are presenced here in rich complexity.

Readers should not be surprised to find that Heath challenges not only the traditional standards of poetry-book production but what it even means to be a book. On the second or third page (it’s hard to say which page not only because the book does not include page numbers, but also because the front matter and the colophon blend without distinction into the opening sequence) there is a description of an electronic book copied directly from Project Gutenberg, referring to ASCII as the “format in which the following text will appear.” This reference sets the stage for the space of Heath, and so some history of ASCII will be helpful. ASCII means that no font is specified: a “plain” code for the appearance of the Western alphabet on computers, readable to all machines at any level. As Project Gutenberg originator Michael Hart explains, it has come to be known as “plain vanilla” text and is the least discriminatory in terms of who, in computer-code-reading terms, will be able to access it. As Hart says, ASCII “addresses the...