Reading List 2005

More or less in chronological order, here's what I was reading in 2005.

• Rimbaud, A Season in Hell


• Aristotle, Poetics


• Julian Barnes, England, England


• Mary Gaitskill, Veronica


• Michel Tremblay, La Grosse Femme d'a cote est Enceinte


• Mordecai Richler, The Street


• Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God


• Hesiod, Works & Days


• Theocritus, Idylls


• Virgil, Eclogues & Georgics


• Martialis, Epigrams


• Virginia Woolf, Orlando


• Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry


• Vita Sackville-West, Andrew Marvell


• Irving Layton, Waiting for the Messiah


• Mordecai Richler, Son of a Smaller Hero


• Lise Tremblay, Mile End (La Danse Juive)


• Mavis Gallant, Accross the Bridge


• Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness


• Francis Bacon, Essays & Aphorisms


• Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy


• Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker


• Monique Troung, The Book of Salt


• Lydia Davis, Almost no Memory


• Ben Okri, Stars of the New Curfew


• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness


• Denis Johnson, Fiskadoro


• Mary V. Dearborn, Love in the Promised Land:
  The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey


• Cynthia Ozick, The Pagan Rabbi


• Mario Vargas Llosa, Who Killed Palomino Molero


• Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart


• Barry Hannah, Yonder Stands Your Orphan


• James Joyce, Dubliners


• Nula O'Foalain, Are YOu Somebody?


• Knut Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil


• David Mamet, The Village


• Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment


• Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose


• Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders


• Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House


• John Hawkes, The Beetle Leg


• Joy Williams, Honoured Guest


• Sherwin Tjia, The World is a Hearbreaker


• Grace Paley, Just as I Thought


• Barry Yourgrau, Wearing Dad's Head


• Lawerence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind


• Sheila Heti, Ticknor


• Bohuml Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude


• Josip Novakovich, Salvation and Other Disasters


• Derrida, Writting and Difference


• OVID, Tristia & Ex Ponto


• Alice McDermott, Child of My Heary


• Anais Nin, Under a Glass Bell


• Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte


• V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival


• Lydia Davis, Samuel Johnson is Indignant


• Virginia Woolf, Paper Darts: Illustrated Letters


• Marci Denesiuk, The Far Away Home


• Djuna Barns, Nightwood


• Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living


• Mark Richard, Charity


• Jon Paul Fiorentino,Asthmatica


• Gogol, The Overcoat


• Roland Barthes, Mythologies


• Anne-Marie MacDonald, As the Crow Flies


• Amy Hempel, The Dog of the Marriage


• OVID, The Metamorphoses


• Zadie Smith White Teeth


• Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet


• Margurette Yourcenar, A Coin in Nine Hands


• Ron Carlson, At the Jim Bridger

. . . . .

Saturnalia Time

It’s December – Saturnalia time –
when handkerchiefs and little spoons
are flying around, and wax candles
and writing-paper and withered
Damascus plums in pointed jars.
But I’ve sent you nothing for a present
except my little home-made books.
Don’t think it’s because I’m stingy
or discourteous. The truth is
I dislike the crafty politics
of measuring the gift to the receiver
to get something better in return.
Presents can be like fish-hooks.
Everybody knows how the trout’s
taken in by the fly he gulps
so greedily. Quintianus,
a poor man shows his generosity
whenever he gives a rich acquaintance
nothing at all.

Martial, 1st century Roman poet.
Epigram xviii , Book V.
. . . . .

Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment

Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment, an illustrated essay, appears in the Fall 2005 issue of ARS MEDICA, A Journal of Medicine, Health and the Humanities, a new quarterly literary journal that explores the interface between the arts and medicine, and examines what makes medicine an art.

Writing and healing have always been intrinsically linked. ARS MEDICA seeks to provide the reader with vivid examples. Content includes narratives from patients and health care workers, medical history, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, illustrations and photography.” http://ars-medica.ca/

I began writing Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment as a response to the discourse of disembodiment that was prevalent in early days of the Internet. I never believed that the physical gendered body would be subsumed in an idealized information age. Even in our attempts to externalize and expand upon the processes of the brain through the computational and storage capacities of the computer, the precariousness of the biological body persists. It seems to me that somewhere along the way cultural theory veered away from body politics. In Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment I have tried to examine, from the inside, not just ‘the’ body, but also ‘my’ body in particular. I have focused on the storage and retention of bodily memory in order to explore the relationship and/or disconnect between body and mind that has preoccupied philosophers for generations. In Ethics, Part II: Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind, Spinoza writes: “The human mind is capable of perceiving a great number of things, and … is cable of receiving a great number of impressions… If the human body is affected in a manner which involves the nature of any external body, the human mind will regard the said external body as actually existing… Memory is simply a certain association of ideas involving the nature of things outside the human body, which association arises in the mind according to the order and association of the modifications of the human body… The human mind has no knowledge of the body, and does not know it to exist, save through the ideas of the modifications whereby the body is affected.”

An earlier version of Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment is available for viewing online at: http://Luckysoap.com/notions/

Thank you to: Alison and Ian at Ars Media, for their attention to detail; Elise Moser, for telling me about the journal; OBORO, for supporting the production of the online version; Dave Liss, for including an installation version of the “Nails and Hair” portion in “L’Entrespace II” at the Saidye Bronfman Center; and to Barbara Layne, who instigated the project way back when I was …

“suddenly far from my brain and naked without it”
Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment
J. R. Carpenter, http://Luckysoap.com/notions/


. . . . .

*CARVE Vol. II*

(A little lit mag that prints the good words of Montreal-area writers.)

Featuring…

The poetry of Maxianne Berger, Ian Cant, John Lofranco, Catherine Paquette and Tom Pokinko

Prose by Emily Anglin, J.R. Carpenter and Ilona Martonfi

A tour of Papeterie Saint-Armand by Andrea Belcham

Reviews of David Solway's *The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat*, and Julia Tausch's *Another Book About Another Broken Heart*

And lovely line-drawings of Montreal scenes by Tom Pokinko

…With a snazzy bookmark insert, letter-pressed by the folks at Papeterie Saint-Armand

Pick up your copy today at The Word Bookstore (469 rue Milton), Local 23 (23 rue Bernard O.), Librarie Clio (Pointe-Claire Plaza) or TWIGS Café (85 rue Ste-Anne, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue)

Or… send $7 to Andrea Belcham, 96 Parkdale Ave., Pointe-Claire, Quebec H9R 3Y7 >>>>> carvezine @ gmail . com

*(Copies of Carve Vol. I still available! Includes the fine literary stylings of Katia Grubisic, Maeve Haldane, Angela Leuck, Scott McRae, Dimitri Nasrallah, Catherine Paquette, Sonja Skarstedt and Sherwin Tjia, with pretty pics by Sarah Robinson)*
. . . . .