Broken Things in Mexico

Mexican arts orginization Laberintos has included my web project "How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome" in their online project - nuevas geografias (new geographies).

"laberintos.org, in collaboration with betabelle.org, summons to web artists to participate in the generation of on-line works that reflect, meditate and analyze the problems and definition of new geographies. those new geographies are understood as relations generated from a globalized society (mobility, space, territory, emergent geographies, ubiquity, temporality, frontiers, and connected crowds)."

Vist nuevas geografias (new geographies)

Visit How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome


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From Cabot Plains, Vermont

Literary naturalism best describes my current condition. The wind has shifted. Now we smell the spruce stand beyond the pond instead of the shit from the horse field. These horses here are nothing but trouble. They escape - who ever hear of such a thing! Then people from all up and down the road call to say There are some horses in my field, are they yours? There is a horse on my front porch, do you know anything about it? But the horses are not ours, they are only renting. The dog is a wild animal. It tries to round up the horses. It tries to round up the cars passing. The dog is no help to anyone and one day it is going to get itself killed. The cat, on the other hand, is a great proponent of literary naturalism: it climbs on me while I am writing, is on me right now in fact, and is useful for knocking over the great stacks of used books I've collected in Boston and Montpellier - the cat thinks I'm thinking too much about the order I'm reading things in and has dedicated itself to shaking things up. Yesterday: Hrabal, Too Long a Solitude (or too Loud? I've forgotten already) and Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte (again, I am paraphrasing with titles and spelling in general). Today: Beckett and or Lish. Have to see what the cat says. Trying to tidy up the MIT paper for a call for final submissions for possible publication in a book on the conference. No way my paper will get in with all the brainiac essays, but what the heck. But I can only stand an hour or two of footnote tweeking before I dive right back into the novel. And then at night I drink and eat and talk with my friends. Last night Marge uncovered a stack of first edition autographed limited print run books by Anis Nin, with hand printed images by Ian Hugo from 1944. I've long known that this whole house is a library. The fiction section spans two floors. There are walls of all German books down in the basement, and stack of periodicals dating back to before I was born. But I did not know there was a rare book section. Okay, the cat suggests I should get back to work.
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From Cabot Plains, Vermont

Boston did not sleep - rainy wind and cold.
I am in Vermont at last, and so is the sun.
Reading, with a view of the white mountains.
Cats and dogs and bugs and birds and horses.
Tactors' desiel engines struggle up the crest.
What freaks the horses? A certain kind of wind.
The winds sends whiffs of horseshit scent my way.
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Responsa: An Overview

Responsa Literature: partial replies to scattered letters
http://luckysoap.com/responsa/



Introduction: confessions of an avid letter writer

Why is it that everyone I know lives in New York?

Part I: Writing is Hard

"Irene left a note on his kitchen table. The spelling was weak and Irene, examining her note, marvelled at how difficult writing things down was compared to saying them. Saying something was as easy as laughing; writing caused you grief, as though you were mourning somebody who had abandoned you too soon."
Rose Tremaine, Sacred Country

Part II: Writing from Exile

"Is the place any token of the author?"
"indicat auctorem locus?"
Ovid, EX PONTO, I. VII.

Part III: Responsa

"What conditions precipitate the writing of a letter? A physical distance separates the writer from the reader and we write to cover that distance. Wherever we are, when we write, we write from a local position. Time passes between the writing of the letter and the reading of it; more time passes between the reading and the reply. 'Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of the concept runs meaning.' [Derrida] From his exile at the edge of the Empire, Ovid writes: '“In so long a time why has not they hand done its duty and completed even a few lines?' The reply embodies another question. 'Is not the writing of the question, by it’s decision, by its resolution, the beginning of repose and response?' [Derrida]"
J. R. Carpenter, Responsa

Part IV: Network Communication

Me: Hey, how come this anonmous ftp thing doesn't work?

Tech: You spelled anonymous wrong.

Me: Again.

Me: I heard about this thing called pine for reading email.
Do you know about that?

Tech: Yeah.

Me: Well, how do I get it?

Tech: Pine is for weenies.

Me: I'm a weenie.

Tech: vi editor rules.

Me: I want pine.

an escerpt from the essay:
"A brief history of the Internet as I know it so far"
J. R. Carpenter 2003.

Part V: Location, Location, Location

When we write, we write from a local position.

"My dear Herr Kappus: I have left a letter of yours long unanswered, not that I had forgotten it – on the contrary: it was of the kind that one reads again when one finds it among other letters, and I recognized you in it as if you were close at hand. It was the letter of May 2nd, and you doubtless remember it. When I read it, as I do now, in the great stillness of this faraway place, your beautiful concern for life moves me even more than I experienced it in Paris, where everything has a different ring and dies away by reason of the monstrous noise that makes all things tremble. Here, where a vast countryside is around me, over which the winds come in from the seas, here I feel that there is nowhere a human being who can answer you those question and feelings which have a life of their own within their depths; for even the best men go astray with words, where these are to express something very gentle and almost unutterable."
Rainer Maria Rilke, written from ‘Temporarily at Worpswede near Bremen, July 16th, 1903. Letters to a Young Poet

Part VI: Optimism

"Router level Interconnectivity of the Internet looks like a giant, blood-shot eyeball." from "Digital Crustaceans v.0.2: Homesteading on the Web" and art review by J. R. Carpenter of a show
Ingrid Bachmann at Gallery Articule, Montréal, Québec, April 4 - May 4 2003.

"Pookie" - a biological, digital, quasi-fictional manifestation of Ingrid Bachmann's imagination - explores a fascinating corner of the web at www.digitalhermit.ca

In Closing:

"Nothing is more occult than the way letters, under the auspices of unimaginable carriers, circulate through the weird mess of civil wars; but whenever, owing to that mess, there was some break in our correspondence, Tamara would act as if she ranked deliveries with ordinary natural phenomena such as the weather or tides, which human affairs could not affect, and she would accuse me of not answering her, when if fact I did nothing by write to her and think of her during those months - despite my many betrayals."
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

Related Links:

Nomad Web: Sleeping beauty awakes, by Ingrid Bachmann
http://www.research.umbc.edu/~lmoren/nomadweb.htm

the electronic version of The Virtual Community, by Howard Rheingold
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html

A Vernacular Web, by Olia Lialina
http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/

A little Talk About Reproduction, by J. R. Carpenter
http://luckysoap.com/reproduction/

All this with pictures:
http://luckysoap.com/responsa/


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MIT4: The Work of Stories

Responsa Literature: partial replies to scattered letters
J. R. Carpenter
Abstract: The term "responsa literature" refers to all written rulings made by rabbis under Jewish law, in response to questions submitted to them in writing, throughout the post-Talmudic period. Initially, the great distances that separated Diaspora Jewry from the scholars of Babylon necessitated this type of question and response law making. Montréal poet Anne Carson has written: “People in exile write so many letters.” She speaks of Ovid who, nightly, “puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.” I was, in effect, born in exile. A first generation Canadian, I spent much of my early life writing letters to my grandmother, trying to piece together a story for her of who I was and to elicit from her some idea of where I had come from. She rarely wrote back. When she died I found that she had saved my letters, stuffed in no apparent order, into books and piles and drawers. I have since become fascinated with collections of letters. In this paper, I will draw on letters, literature and historical sources to discuss ways in which contemporary forms of diaspora, as may result from divorce, emigration, or economic migration, alter family narratives. I will explore some of the ways in which media and communication technologies have forever altered the responsa form. Letter writing has re-emerged, in the form of email. Does the immediacy of this question and response mode of communicating bring us any closer to piecing together an idea of who we are and where we come from?

Presentation Friday May 6, 2005
Call Session 2, 5 - 6:30
Room 56-167, MIT
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MIT4: The Work of Stories

The fourth Media in Transition conference explored storytelling as a cultural practice, a social and political activity as well as an art form.
May 6-8, 2005 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cambridge, MA, USA
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit4/
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Cape Cod

My Grandmother Carpenter lived in Cape Cod. The only time we ever went there it was winter, but we walked on the beach anyway.

While we were there I tried to get my uncle to teach me how to make that loud kind of whistle sound that you can make by putting two fingers in your mouth.

My Grandmother Carpenter told us: Young ladies do not put their fingers in their mouths. I asked my uncle to teach me how to spit instead.

Later I learned that The Cape, as they call it, is a narrow spit of land.

I do not have a photograph of my Grandmother Carpenter. If I did, I would insert it here.
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