Pam Lu, Tan Lin, Sueyeun Juliette Lee AAWW event on 4/27

[Amita Manghnani]

Join us for a night of ambient poetics with three experimental writers
who probe the relationship between art- making and found technologies
from parking garage reverberations to the neon glow of TV broadcasts.
Treat your ears to Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt, Pamela Lu’s
Ambient Parking Lot, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Underground National.
Williams College professor Dorothy Wang will moderate and Triple-
Canopy Editor, Lucy Ives, will live-tweet the event.

The recipient of a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant and a Warhol
Foundation Writing Grant, Tan Lin is the author of Seven Controlled
Vocabularies, lauded by Warren Liu as “an utterly, compellingly boring
film--I've already forgotten it in the best way unimaginable." In Tan
Lin’s latest work, Insomnia and the Aunt, a young man’s memories of
visiting his Chinese aunt at her motel, recalled almost as if written
by their TV set. The aunt's memory ghosts her nephew's television
screen, their shared past-time. The aunt “resembles the biography of a
dead person where the dead person has somehow forgotten to die. She
speaks casually, like the speech of a language without a speaker.”
Lin's experimental novella is indexed by photographs, postcards, and
the indicia to an imaginary novel, mimicking the seamless repetition
and reproducibility of images on the television. In Lin’s beautiful
and wonderfully odd elegy, technology acts as an emotive transmitter
engaging the two relatives in erotic simulacra.

Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot profiles a noise music band’s search
for the ultimate ambient sound and is the follow-up to Pamela: A
Novel, an experimental poetry classic and one of SPD’s bestselling
books of the 90’s. They sample revving engines, the parking habits of
the rich and famous, and commercial parking spaces. Reading Ambient
Parking Lot is comparable to “watching an indie webisode spin-off of
‘Behind the Music,’ as Lu tracks the Ambient Parkers’ absolute
mediocrity "in awkwardly-awesome crescendos and geeky-fantastic
loops,” says Jai Arun Ravine of Lantern Review Blog.

The author of That Gorgeous Feeling and Underground National, Sueyeun
Juliette Lee could be the only poet to write about U.S. intervention
in Korea and the dating patterns of K-pop stars. Sueyeun is a
transnational collagist who perverts found documents and replaces
fixed histories of square footage, geographic boundaries, and global
affairs editorials with erasure. In her second book of poetry,
Underground National, Lee remixes celebrity suicides, tourism trends,
and web splices to put forth a subterranean account of Korean culture.

Visit us at http://www.aaww.org/
@Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street, Suite 600
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 suggested donation