a Mahler afternoon

grey rain falls sideways
andante mderato
we do our taxes
. . . . .

What's an insecure sentence?

Agent: Your sentences are insecure.
Me: As am I.
Agent: Well you look like a confident person.
Me: A foot taller than him, with my boots on.
I shrugged.
What I should have said: Never trust a fiction writer.
. . . . .

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome

Announcing the launch of a new web art project by J. R. Carpenter:

"How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome" is a web art project combining historical research, poetics, video and photography collected during an extended stay in Rome. This work reflects upon certain gaps between the fragment and the whole, between the local and the tourist, between what is known of history and what is speculative. Rome is among the largest and oldest continuously occupied archaeological sites in the world. Daily life is complicated, even for the locals. Everything is running late, circuitous, or quasi-rotto. Romanticism and pragmatism must coexist. In my struggles with slang, schedules, and social vagaries, I came to feel that understanding what was happening around me was less a question of acquisition of language, than one of overcoming the dislocation of being a stranger. There were days in Rome that I did not, could not, speak to anyone. Oxford Archaeological Guide and cameras in tow, I tried to capture something of the impossibly elusive and fragmentary nature of language amid Rome‚s broken columns, headless statues and other, often unidentifiable, ruins.

To SVR and Barbarina, le ringrazio molto.

http://luckysoap.com/brokenthings

"How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome" was produced with the support of OBORO, Residency Program, New Media Lab and the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
. . . . .

a jewish vibe

At dinner the other night a woman told me that she didn't get a jewish vibe off of me. What's a jewish vibe? Discussion ensued. Someone at the table described someone else who wasn't at the table as jew-lite. After a while I said: I'm not lite anything. I'm a downloaded crack copy, that's what kind of jew I am.
. . . . .

on arrival

When we travel by plane to a distant place, we travel through time as well as through space.

We sleep, or do not, over the Atlantic. We fly through the restless twisted night, hip to thigh with strangers. We breakfast over the Alps. Diamond lakes glint like lost earrings in long foothills of glacier combed hair.

We land - disgruntled, dishevelled and delayed. We have only just ceased leaving. Arrival takes much longer still.

Our baggage thunks onto the carousel. It inches toward us. It catches up with us.

Outside, there are armed guards and palm trees and no one told us how hot it would be.

We are new, we are strange, we are temporary. We should have known. We have not traveled to a foreign place. We are foreign.

Nothing is as we think it will be.
. . . . .

not so bright

It's bright outside, and getting warm.
I am not so bright, and stuck indoors.
. . . . .

the second black out

Only headlights light Saint-Urbain Street this rush hour.
The power is out at dinnertime for the second time this week.
The leeks are soaking in their sauté oil, cold, on the electric stove.
At least I can’t see the potatoes turning brown in the dusk-kitchen.
I’m on a dial-up, so I could still get on-line on my laptop.
But we can’t watch the video we rented for the evening.
We can’t rent DVDs because our television is too old.
Even my umbrella got busted in the wind on the way home.
I think technology is slipping backwards, just a little bit.
. . . . .

there's a cross on that hill

Once I had a friend visiting me in Montréal and she said:
There’s a cross on that hill! And in unison we all said:
It’s not a hill, it’s a mountain!! Our mountain is a good landmark.
If you’re downtown, the mountain is north, see what I mean?
In Rome, San Pietro works the same way. If someone asked me:
Where do you live? I’d say: Head toward San Pietro and turn right.
Years ago they added coloured lights to the cross on Mount Royal,
so that when the Pope died, we’d all know it. When I lived in Rome,
I thought: Please don’t let the Pope die while I’m here.
My apartment was right behind the Vatican, very close to his.
During the April Fools’ Day comedy special on the radio,
they kept us up to date on the failing health of the Pope.
Then he died during a literary festival, during a rainstorm.
CNN was on in the hotel lobby, but I have yet to see
if the lights have changed on the cross on the mountain.
. . . . .

enough already

It never rains
but it pours
vodka and falls
down drunk.
. . . . .

A Zoo at the Blue Metropolis Bleu

Human cannonballs host book launches.
Traipse Artists sign autographs upside-down.

Do not feed the animals at the Flea Circus.
Do not poke fun at the comic book clowns.

You must be this tall to ride the elevator.
You must clap for the Dancing Russian Bear.

After a feeding frenzy of: So, who are you?
There is no fish left for the trained seals.
. . . . .

SHORT STUFF LAUNCH

My short story "Precipice", 2003 winner of the Quebec Short Story Competition, has been published in Short Stuff, the second anthology of winning stories of the CBC/QWF Short Story Competition.

The launch will be held tomorrow, Saturday, April 2, at 5:30 pm., in the Jeanne-Mance room of Hyatt Regency Hotel (1255 Jeanne-Mance, in the Complexe Desjardins).

This event is free and open to the public. Copies of the book will be on sale onsite at the Blue Met bookstore.

Metropolis Literary Festival-
http://www.blue-met-bleu.com

"Precipice"-
http://luckysoap.com/publications
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