#7cv

Here's my 1937 Citroen Traction Avant, what makes this one special it's actually a surviving Challenger Motors car

7CV is not only diffuse or permeable or porous in the sense that its boundaries [membrane] are non-static, but also in that they allow for intertextual diffusion. 7CV is permeated throughout by other texts via appropriation, allusion, citation, and photocopy. Here, intertextuality surpasses or evades its usual purposes. As with the overabundance of formats and editions, hyperbolic intertextuality destabilizes assumptions about the static nature of the book. Lin says:

My interest with HEATH and 7CV was to treat the book as a distinct medial platform through which a lot of ancillary information passes, much like a broadcast medium like TV or a narrow-cast medium like Twitter or Tumblr.

(Interview with Angela Genusa for Rhizome, Oct. 2012)

Like a TV broadcast or a social media feed, 7CV aggregates a wide variety of information from many sources and authors. This creates a reading experience which is hypertextual and discursive in a way that feels similar to channel surfing or browsing the web.

In one illustrative instance, a passage of dense critical prose analyzing the architecture of Walmart is interrupted with the non-sequitur, “#pilsner is my favourite kind of #beer” (128), set apart not only by its diction and subject matter but also by capitalization scheme and typeface as if it were copy-and-pasted from another source. The hashtags, of course, allude to Twitter, and indeed by causing the reader’s attention to flit momentarily to something completely unrelated, this passage mimics the experience of reading an article on a phone or computer and receiving a notification from Twitter in the corner of the screen. Throughout the book images (mostly photographs and scanned images of book backs and packaging) appear beside text to which they bear no (or indecipherable) relevance, interrupting attention much like popups or other advertisements. To read Lin’s ambient review of Wylie Dufresne’s modernist restaurant WD-50 on page 88 and then happen upon the scanned image of a toothpick package from that restaurant on page 101 feels like stumbling on Google Ads for a product you’ve been recently Googling.

Frequently in his work, and especially in 7CV, Lin encloses words or phrases or absences in [square brackets]. Sometimes they function as parentheses, as in “Warhol understood that a film [every film is the same] is a branding device...” (141). At other points they function more like quotation marks or an underline, pointing out what they enclose—“Today I realized I am [half] in love with my wife” (139). Sometimes they simply interrupt with a buffer of empty space:

The outlook is 2004, a muggy July 6-7 night [     ] when I have the air conditioning [     ] turned off and my apartment windows overlooking the Bowery [       ] are open to the street below [     ]. (138)

Because Lin’s use of square brackets is idiosyncratic, the brackets also tend to cast doubt on what they contain. In his later book, Heath Course Pak, Lin refers to characters using composite pronouns: “she or I began to assemble material written by him or her” (Heath has no page numbers). In an interview about Heath, Lin says, “In Heath, we appear to be in the realm of various linked data structures, i.e. a library, being assembled, where various pronouns haven’t yet codified.” Like the pronouns in Heath, the phrases in square brackets in 7CV feel unresolved, and thus they tend to appear at peripheries as if the material beyond them has yet to render. One paragraph begins with the text, “, [desire is about waiting for nothing]” (108). Elsewhere, a paragraph ends with the unfinished, bracketed phrase, “[As anyone] [who has spent time on the Las Vegas strip] can tell you,” (78).