Sniffing for Stories In-situ

Want to go for a walk?
If you were a dog that would be a great opening line.

Want to go for an interdisciplinary audio walking tour of Mile End? If so, head over to the Casa del Popolo this weekend to partake in In-situ Cité, an ensemble audio piece created by five Montreal-based artists.

My contribution to In-situ Cité is called Sniffing for Stories. It's a prose poem. It's one block long. It's a long block. It's a walk we walk every day. Here's an excerpt:

We take other walks besides this one, but lets say we don't.
Let's say our dog walks us up and down this alleyway three times a day.
That's eight-and-a-half years of up and eight-and-a-half years of down.
Nine thousand three hundred laps of toenails clicking on cracked concrete.
Trail zigzagging, long tail wagging, long tongue lolling, dog tags clacking.
Ears open, eyes darting, nose to the ground.
READ THE REST OF SNIFFING FOR STORIES >>>

To hear Sniffing for Stories in-situ head over to the Casa del Popolo between 12 & 5PM on Saturday September 30 or Sunday October 1, 2006. I will be at the Casa from 4PM on the Saturday for a talk-back session with the director, Stephen Lawson.

The tour is free. It lasts about an hour. You'll be equipped with a map of the route and a CD player. For further such logistical information visit: http://luckysoap.com/statements/sniffingforstories.html

Sniffing for Stories in In-situ Cité
Casa del Popolo, 4873 boul. St-Laurent.
September 30 & October 1, 2006
Between 12 & 5pm

INFO & RESERVATIONS: 514.843.3685

In-situ Cité is presented by Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal in collaboration with Les Journées de la Culture, OBORO & CKUT.
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Two Generations - Abridged

Rachelle Viader Knowles has written an article about her FORMER RESIDENT PROJECT for the online journal GLOWLAB - recommended reading for those I’ve inexpertly explained the project to in recent weeks.

Although I have yet to see photographic evidence, Rachelle assures me that my short story, Two Generations Ago, is now printed on a fridge-magnet affixed to the Williamsburg Bridge. The story is most certainly online, along with those of the other participants: Charlotte Barker, David Khang, Adriene Jenik, Carol Weliky, Kim Morgan, Jenny Levison, Marlena Corcoran, Jessica Greenberg, Myron Moss, Jane Deschner, Rupert Hartley, Suzanne Lindgren and Michelle Jacques.

Thanks Rachelle, for allowing my tenuous former resident of Brooklyn status. I hope I also sort of used to live wherever you set your next FORMER RESIDENT PROJECT.
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Sniffing for Stories on Cinq à Six

Tune into Cinq à Six on CBC RadioOne 88.5 FM in Montréal at 5PM this evening to hear an interview Host Patti Schmidt recorded with me earlier this week about In-situ Cité. I read an excerpt from Sniffing for Stories, and then we went on to talk about all kinds of other stuff. So fun. You can also listen online: http://www.cbc.ca/cinqasix/

In-situ Cité takes place next weekend, Saturday September 30 & October 1 between Noon and 5PM. The start-off point is the Casa del Popolo, 4873 boul. St-Laurent. My Entre Ville mini-books will be on sale there and I will be at the Casa for a talkback session with In-situ Cité Director Stephen Lawson Saturday at 4PM. For more information follow the above links and/or to make reservations call: 514.843.3685
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Glass Psalms

Jonathan Garfinkel’s Glass Psalms found their way into my mailbox yesterday.
A bright-grey Monday.
My borrowed wireless connection down.
My apartment drowning in construction site sounds.
In a procrastination stained undershirt I lay down to read.
A fat housefly droned a monotone davvening route around the room.
Prayed at the closed window for summer not to be over.
The Saint Urbain Street trees leaned toward red.
The noon-hour traffic stop-and-go windshield glare.
Wrote dry leaf shadow scripts across the cracked walls of my salon-double.
The week before Rosh Hashanah.
The last few pages of the year ink-smudged and dog-eared.
And me impatient for something new.
Glass Psalms found their way into my mailbox.

Garfinkel writes:

On Rosh Hashonah it is written

The universe
a Gothic Romance
God carries around
in Her pocket.

God the novelist,
ventriloquist and invisible
comic. We
the ink,
slip carefully
toward the page…

Thank you Jonathan, for Psalms at just the right time.
l'shanah tova, JR
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Drunken Boat Panliterary Awards

Finally! Drunken Boat # 8 is now online!

This fat new issue features winners and finalists of the inaugural Drunken Boat Panliterary Awards, including my web art project How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome - a finalist in the Web Art Category.
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Two Generations Ago

Look for my very short story, Two Generations Ago, on the streets of Brooklyn this September. Literally. It will be on on a street somewhere near the Williamsburg Bridge.

Rachelle Viader Knowles has included the story in her FORMER RESIDENT PROJECT, which launches during Conflux Festival September 14 - 17, 2006, in Brooklyn NY, USA.

THE FORMER RESIDENT PROJECT explores the city through the narratives of the no-longer resident, people whose lives have been shaped by their experiences of places they no longer inhabit. For many of us, 'residence' is a multiple thing, a series of narratives and residues that shift and slip over time. When we leave a place, what do we take? And what do we leave behind? The project includes stories donated by former 'residents' of Brooklyn about something that happened in a particular location. Each story has been printed onto a fridge magnet and posted near that location. The the address are listed on the website: http://www.former-resident-project.net

If you don't happen to be in Brooklyn you can also read my story here:
Two Generations Ago
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POETS FOR RED CROSS: 9/11 FIVE YEARS ON

Nearly 90 poets from around the world have contributed to Babylon Burning: 9/11 five years on, an anthology of poems reflecting on direct and indirect consequences of 9/11. These poems aim for more than pious hand-wringing. The anthology is free to download, but readers are requested to donate to the Red Cross.

nthposition, the London-based website behind the anthology, has listed Babylon Burning on iTunes as a PDF in hopes of maximising the money raised . Poetry editor Todd Swift notes: "Auden said that 'poetry makes nothing happen', but we think it can, and we'd like to prove it."

Contributors to Babylon Burning are: Ros Barber, Jim Bennett, Rachel Bentham, Charles Bernstein, bill bissett, Yvonne Blomer, Stephanie Bolster, Jenna Butler, Jason Camlot, J R Carpenter, Jared Carter, Patrick Chapman, Sampurna Chattarji, Maxine Chernoff, Tom Chivers, Alfred Corn, Tim Cumming, Margot Douaihy, Ken Edwards, Adam Elgar, Elaine Feinstein, Peter Finch, Philip Fried, Leah Fritz, Richard Garcia, Sandra M Gilbert, Nathan Hamilton, Richard Harrison, Kevin Higgins, Will Holloway, Bob Holman, Paul Hoover, Ray Hsu, Halvard Johnson, Chris Jones, Jill Jones, Kavita Joshi, Jonathan Kaplansky, Wednesday Kennedy, Sonnet L’Abbé, Kasandra Larsen, Tony Lewis-Jones, Dave Lordan, Alexis Lykiard, Jeffrey Mackie, Mike Marqusee, Chris McCabe, Nigel McLoughlin, Pauline Michel, Peter Middleton, Adrian Mitchell, John Mole, David Morley, George Murray, Alistair Noon, D Nurkse, John Oughton, Ruth Padel, Richard Peabody, Tom Phillips, David Prater, Lisa Pasold, Victoria Ramsay, Harold Rhenisch, Noel Rooney, Joe Ross, Myra Schneider, Robert Sheppard, Zaid Shlah, Henry Shukman, Penelope Shuttle, John Siddique, Goran Simic, Hal Sirowitz, Heather Grace Stewart, Andrew Steinmetz, John Stiles, William E Stobb, jordan stone, Sean Street, Todd Swift, Joel Tan, Nathaniel Tarn, Mark Terrill, Helên Thomas, Vincent Tinguely, Rodrigo Toscano, John Tranter and John Welch. All gave their work for free.

Download Babylon Burning: 9/11 five years on: http://www.nthposition.com/babylonburning911.php
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in-situ Cité so far

1. first steps

I borrowed a mic from a friend who has a one-year-old

the kid kept grabbing the mic so we gave him a toy mic

then we gave him a toy ball

we rolled the ball down the hall and he chased it

when we tried to record our dog running in the alley

the dog thought the mic was a stick with a ball on the end

he grabbed the foam wind guard and ran off with it

in the early stages, children and dog are quite alike

2. by my calculations

if our dog is eight-and-a-half

than we’ve lived in our five-and-a-half for a dog’s age

we walk our dog other places besides our alley but let’s say we don’t

eight-and-a-half years of three times a day up and three times a day down

that’s eighteen thousand six hundred and fifteen lengths of alley

writing for one length of alley is harder than I thought it would be

it takes five minutes to walk from Fairmount to Saint Viateur

six if you walk slowly

seven if you walk as if intent on studying every scent

eight-and-a-half years if you walk as if sniffing for stories

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in-situ preview

This summer I’ve been working on an audio narrative walking tour project that will be presented by the Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal during Les Journées de la Culture, September 30 – October 1, 2006. Here’s what the PWM website says:

PWM is proud to present In-situ Cité, five short original environmental theatre pieces, organized as an audio walking tour of the Mile End. Directed by Stephen Lawson, In-situ Cité will showcase the works of of J.R. Carpenter, Nathalie Derome, Skidmore, Geeta Nadkarni, and Rosella Tursi.

From the outset I’ve thought of my piece as a continuation of Entre Ville, with our neighbours as characters and the back alleyway as the terrain. The alleyways of Mile End are a world known and shown to us by our dog. The week we thought Isaac the Wonder Dog was dying (see August posts) I had a massive anxiety attack about In-situ Cité. In the long hours spent sitting and waiting on the concrete floors of vets and animal clinics my whole idea of neighbourhood and community and humanity underwent some major revisions.

Isaac walks us up and down the alleyway three times a day. He introduces us to our neighbours and befriends children – things we would never do of our own volition. We’re not crazy about our neighbours. We’re dog people, not children people. But we make the best of things. We try and look at things from the dog's eye point of view. Which is how I am now aproaching my In-situ Cité piece.
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