A Dear John Letter

my name is carpenter
I hardly ever wear overalls, but
construction sites follow me around
I keep extra safety goggles in my purse
and don’t get to town much, because
you can dress a belt-sander up
but you can’t take it anywhere
if my name were rich
I’d still wear work pants, but
I’d ditch the hard hat
an armoured car service
would drive me into town
I’d be a hit at the cash & carry
I’d be a star at the solid gold bar
I’d sing double platinum hits

(happy birthday john richey)
. . . . .

The Loudest Room

We live in the loudest room.
Our walls are made of sudden noises.
Other people’s showers rain down on us.
Far off phones ring extra loud so we can hear them.
People will talk to a telephone about just about anything.
All the doors travel down the hall to shut near our door.
Our door is in love with the door next door.
The door next door posted private information about us on the Internet.
Now everyone knows there’s a shortcut right though our room.
Outside voices don’t wipe their feet when they come in.
Pieces of passing conversations hang out in our closet.
Housekeeping knocks through the wall to give us fresh towels.
The window is too small to let a breeze through.
But large enough to let the construction crew through.
And the laundry truck’s full arsenal of beeps and groans.
The security guards have top-secret meetings at our desk.
They use up all the coffee whitener and leave the seat up.
The jazz musicians think we think they’re entertaining.
We see through them, passing practice off as serenade.
We don’t know why they need to rehearse.
All they do is improvise.
And hog the bed.
A tenor sax warms up near our heads.
A standing bass strings us along.
We live in suspense, in the loudest room.
Suspended in sleepless animation.
. . . . .

Bear and Tick Season

Our camp is of two camps.
Some fear the bears most.
Just waking up, and hungry.
A bicyclist was mauled.
Recently, and near here.
He might lose his arm.
Everyone’s paying attention.

Fewer fear the ticks.
They’re very small.
They wait in the trees.
They fall on you.
They feed on you.
They lay eggs.
It takes a while.
You could not notice.
You could get lime disease.

Bears have little interest in humans.
There’re lots of ways to avoid them.
The bicyclist had headphones on.
He wasn’t paying attention.

Ticks are actually gunning for you.
They detect mammalian body heat.
They have strength in numbers.
I fear what’s harder to avoid.
. . . . .

Telling Stories, Telling Tales

Babel, Babble, Rabble, On Language and Art is my second thematic residency at The Banff Centre. Ten Years ago I attended a residency called: Telling Stories, Telling Tales. I was 22 when I applied, and had never written and artist’s statement before. Given the theme, I thought a quasi-fictional tone would be appropriate. Here’s what I sent them:

I could tell you stories. Like the time I was three, and they brought my brother home from the hospital. My uncle ran out into the driveway with an afghan over his head. I could take you to Nova Scotia and show you the afghan. My mother still has it. Then would my story be true? I could take you to North Carolina and we could ask my uncle, but I think his mind’s gone soft with drink. I don’t know, he never writes…

Then when I was five I got in trouble with my teacher for saying that Jupiter had a ring like Saturn. She told my mother I was telling stories.

These stories build and feed and build and feed upon themselves and meet up with themselves around certain corners and repeat themselves and make less and less sense.

I told the story of Chanukah about 8,000 times to the Christian school children of rural Nova Scotia. No one ever believed me.

I train language around the obstacle course of truth, fiction, image and word. I position myself between reading and writing, between pulp fiction and cultural theory. In strange twists of the body, I hold myself between the theoretical convictions of Daily Life Montreal, the rural convictions of Childhood Nova Scotia, and the critical convictions of Grandmother New York. Just today I was a storyteller, a gossip, a theoretician, a geologist and a great fan of analytical geometry.

I could tell you stories about the first time I fell in love. I performed a comedia delle arte retinue of stories, a different one each night, but she didn’t want to hear them. I tried to bake them into a cornbread, but she wouldn’t eat it. So I let the long cool silences of late September afternoons speak for me. I lay in her bed and said nothing. The text left my face and became soft and my teeth melted around her nipple. I woke up in January and realized that she had not understood a word I had not said. I told her I was running away from home, leaving for the mountains, but that I would write her a letter everyday. She laughed at me. She said I was telling stories.
. . . . .

The First Day

I sit down to read.
On some steps in some sun.
A tall man passes, sporting sporting attire.
Stops and asks: What are you reading?
A book a friend lent me.
By friend, I mean: You don't know me.
Who’s it by? He strikes a pose.
A racquet over his shoulder.
I hold the book up.
Let him read the cover himself.
By this I mean: Go away.
Is it good?
Yes.
Read me a line.
Now that’s a line.
No.
Just one.
A split-second staring match ensues.
He has sunglasses on and I don’t.
No fair.
I’m too tired, I say.
I mean: Of this.
He twirls his racquet at me.
I go back to reading.
It’s only the first day.
. . . . .

WestJet 667

There is no first class. We board all at once.
The forward toilet abuts the cockpit and is unisex.
13D is an isle seat, no matter what 13E and F say.
The faux-leather grey seats look just like in the commercials.
With a television monitor mounted in the back of every one of them.
It’s not like in the old days, when the in-flight film was free.
The headphones cost one dollar, three dollars for the nice ones.
And what you get is satellite TV. What you get is commercials.
You can’t turn the monitor off. It flies with you, inches from your face.
The default screen is a MapQuest map © 2003. Place names haven’t changed.
Fin Flon has not flip-flopped. Grand Prairie has not shrunk to Petite Prairie.
A white and windowless airplane icon pixel-pushes across the MapQest map.
Left wing grazing the 49th parallel, body long as the width of southern Manitoba.
Our fuselage overshadows Brandon, sets Swift River in its sights.
We cruse at 38,486 feet. Everything is downhill after that.
In Montreal, before take off, the MapQuest map said we sat at 36 feet.
And for a while I thought that’s how high the seats were off the ground.
We arrived in Calgary earlier than I expected.
The city met us at the airport at 3740 feet.
Now that’s first class.
. . . . .

The Earliest Morning Airport

The fastest taxi driver sped through the earliest morning rain listening to the quietest FM radio play the Frenchest jazz chanteuse singing her brokenest heart out. Fastest, earliest, quietest, Frenchest, brokenest.

I arrived at the airport so early that I miss-read my boarding pass, just to kill time. Gate A 49 is not the same as Gate A 4 – 9, and although there were plenty of places to buy a cup of earliest morning Frenchest coffee in the Gate 4, subset 9 area, there was no Gate 4, subset 9. There were no places to buy coffee, Frenchest or otherwise, at Gate A 49, 50 or 51.

In the coffee-less under-construction wing of the earliest morning airport, Saint Germaine played softest moaning and groaning and all alone-ing downest-tempo beats. The newest toilets were motion-sensitive. The cleanest sinks were motion-insensitive. I washed my hands of them.

Gate 49 was not the quietest place to wait, not even in the earliest morning. An orange T-shirted green-tattooed not large but barrel-chest bleach-blond man paced, board of waiting to board. No one left baggage unattended. There were no suspicious packages to report. It was a domesticated flight.
. . . . .

leaving on a jet plane, and also a bus

I'm Banff-ward bound, leaving early Sunday morning. For six weeks I’ll live on a mountainside with thirty other artists from around the world, all our work somehow relating to the theme of: Babel, Babble, Rabble: On Language and Art. Here's the description: http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/program.aspx?id=372

I'll have email access while I'm there, though my spill-chick capabilities will be somewhat reduced. Please also feel free to send me snail mail. It'd make me feel ever so important. Everyone notes a trek up to the mailroom. Send me a postcard... write fiction on it. Here is the way:

J. R. Carpenter
On Language and Art
The Banff Centre
107 Tunnel Mountain Drive
Banff, Alberta
Canada
T1L 1H5
. . . . .

DISTROBOTO

DISTROBOTO machines are former cigarette machines which no longer sell cigarettes, but instead, little books, crafts, comics, cassettes, mini-CD-R's (of music or video), fridge magnets, novelties, etc. all for only $2 each!

Look for my mini-books at a DISTROBOTO machine near you:

Pharmacie Esperanza, 12 St. Viateur O. (coin St. Laurent)
Casa del Popolo, 4873 St. Laurent (métro Mont-Royal)
Le Petit Campus, 57 Prince Arthur E. (métro Sherbrooke)
Le Divan Orange, 4234 St. Laurent (métro Mont-Royal)
La Salla Rossa, 4848 St. Laurent (métro Mont-Royal)

Locations are subject to change, but at the moment, "How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome" is at the Casa, "Evening" is at the Salla Rossa and "Searching for Volcanoes" will be stocked at Esperanza soon.



DISTROBOTO locations will increase, as cigarette machines become available after the ban on smoking in bars comes into effect May 31, 2006. For more information about the DISTROBOTO project, including details on how to participate, please contact:

Archive Montreal,
C.P. 1232, Place d'Armes,
Montréal, Québec,
CANADA H2Y 3K2

Or visit: http://www.distroboto.archivemontreal.org/
. . . . .

Hennessey's High Pasture

My short story, Hennessey's High Pasture, appears in The New Quarterly, #98, Waterloo, ON, Spring 2006. This story used to be called The Bayley-Hazen Road. I began writing in 1996, and submitted it to at least a dozen journals since then. I am grateful to every editor who had the good sense to reject it before it was ready. My thanks to the Trautz family, for helping start the story off; to Jenn Goodwin, first reader; Amy Hempel, generous reader; and Kim Jernigan, The New Quarterly editor who turned up at end of the old Bayley-Hazen Road.

Excerpt from Hennessey's High Pasture:

"Most nights the dogs and I walk up to Hennessey's high pasture. You can see the whole King's County from up there. Even when it's dark you feel it, the earth curving away from you. But I'm not ready yet. I smoke a cigarette. No matter which way I hold it, the smoke blows toward Earl."

J. R. Carpenter
. . . . .

Contre Ville

this just in: my neighbour, the old greek lady, star of << Entre Ville >>, yes that old greek lady of "the old greek lady and I go about our business" fame, and of "foul-mouthed for seventy" fame, has been booted out of her apartment after 23 years. there goes the neighbourhood.
http://Luckysoap.com/entreville
. . . . .

The Cape Caper

THE CAPE is also now listed on function:feminism in the New Works, 2006: http://www.functionfeminism.com/2006.html The other artists listed are: Juliet Davis, Marika Dermineur, Karen Hibbard, Tamara Lai, Barbara Lattanzi, Cat Mazza, and Evelin Stermitz.

function:feminism is created in conjunction with The Feminist Art Project, at Rutgers University, New Jersey (USA): http://feministartproject.rutgers.edu/

Note that the 1996 foundation of Studio XX is listed in the function:feminism cyberfeminist timeline. Happy Xth Birthday Studio XX!

I'm not quite sure how THE CAPE made its way to function:feminism. I may well have submitted it myself and forgot. If anyone knows more about this than I do, please send me an email with the Subject: The Cape Caper

Warning: Cape Cod is a real place, but the events and characters of THE CAPE are fictional. The photographs have been retouched. The diagrams are not to scale. http://Luckysoap.com/THECAPE
. . . . .