Reading List 2009

2009 was a year of reading interrupted. It started with an eviction notice. An amazing number of books can accumulate in 11 years. My bookcases and I had a long talk and we decided that a few hundred of our friends would have to go. Many were sold, many more were given away. The rest fit into 32 boxes. Finding a home for those boxes was hell. Two weeks after finally signing a lease on a new apartment, my marriage ended suddenly. As a reader, I didn't see it coming. There was no foreshadowing or anything. As a writer, I would have done things differently.

My books moved without me. My suitcases and I spent the summer living out of other people's bookshelves. It turns out that a friend close enough to put you up in a time of need can also be counted on to have a book collection close enough to your own to make you and your suitcases feel at home without a home. It turns out there are lots of books in the world. We merely move amongst them. Friends, on the other hand, are one-of-a-kind and impossible to replace.

My books and their cases are now housed in a storage locker in Montreal. I miss them very much. Especially the ones written by friends. There are many friends' book in this photo of one of my Saint-Urbain Street bookcases before its dismantling:



On the up side, my suitcases and I are now ensconced in an 18th century Palladian country house situated on a promontory in a bend in the River Dart in South Devon. We're catching up on our England reading. I am glad I saved Wuthering Heights until after visiting a moor, even though it's set on a different moor than the one I went too, and Waterland until after visiting Somerset, even though it's set on the Fens. Next up, Dart, by my new neighbour Alice Oswald, about my new neighbour The River Dart.

Here, in reverse chronological order, are the books I read in 2009:

• Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
• Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
• Graham Swift, Waterland
• Sutherland and Nicolson, Wetland: Life in the Somerset Levels
• Jerome Fletcher, Alfreda Abbot's Lost Voice
• Charles Bernstein, Dark City
• Nicolas Evans, The Divide
• Clarice Lispector, Soulstorm
• Philippe Soupault, Last Nights in Paris
• Stacey May Fowles, Fear of Fighting
• Lisa Moore, Degrees of Nakedness
• Medlar Lucan & Durian Grey, The Decadent Traveler
• Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses
• Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
• Roddy Doyle, Paula Spenser
• Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
• Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet
• Jerome Fletcher, Degringolade
• Kate Pullinger, The Mistress of Nothing
• Edna O'Brein, The Country Girls
• Deborah Eisenberg, Twilight of the SUperheroes
• Steven Ross Smith, Lures
• Anne Simpson, Quick
• Elizabeth Bishop, The Collected Prose
• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
• Oana Avasilichioaei, Feria: a poempark
• Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
• Agota Kristof, The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie
• Nigel Peake, Maps: Fields, Paths, Forests, Blocks, Places and Surroundings
• John Berger, About Looking
• Francis A. Yates, The Art of Memory
• William Gibson, Spook Country
• Mary-Ann Ray, Seven Partly Underground Rooms and Buildings for Water, Ice and Midgets
• Jerome Fletcher, Escape from the Temple of Laughter
• Mark Haddon, The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
• William Gaddis, Carpenter's Gothic
• David Gutterson, East of the Mountains
• A.S. Byatt, Little Black Book of Stories
• Shirley Jackson, The Lottery
• Merce Rodoreda, The Time of the Doves
• Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way
• Daniel Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
• Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife
• Andrew Hood, Pardon Our Monsters
• Arjun Basu, Squishy
• Jacob Wren, Families Are Formed Through Copulation
• Chandra Mayor, All the Pretty Girls
• Harold Hoefle, The Mountain Clinic
• Beryl Bainbridge, Another Part of the World
• Lydia Davis, The End of the Story
• Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
• Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
• Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
• Italo Calvino, Why Read The Classics?
• Alejo Carpentier, The Chase
• Nell Freudenberger, Lucky Girls
• Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity

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Reading Rebooted: Glimpsing the Future of Literature in the Digital Age

Earlier this month, in absentia was included in an exhibition called Reading Rebooted: Glimpsing the Future of Literature in the Digital Age. Reading Rebooted opened its doors on Nov 30, 2009 at 5pm, at the Kipp Gallery, on the campus of Indiana University of Pennsylvania. A project of the Kipp Gallery, IUP Center for Digital Humanities and Culture, and students from the Graduate Program in Literature and Criticism, the exhibit aims to "explore the imaginative engagement of poets and fiction writers with the tools of new media. . . inventing a post-Gutenberg space for literature."

We are interested in thinking about how digital writers engage with the possibilites of public and private, social and individual in their work. And while all of the pieces selected are available on the web (unlike some digital works designed for site-specific installations) and so can be "read" by an individual user on his or her private laptop, in the security of the home, we are placing them in the social space of the gallery.

We wanted to show them in the gallery because we are interested in how visitors to the site will choose to interact with these works. The spatial configuration of the gallery itself is envisioned as offering the visitor significant choices about how to take in these works ... to read, use, play, operate, and spectate...

Fourteen works from twelve digital writers were selected for this exhibition: Chris Ault, Alan Bigelow, Serge Bourchardon, J. R. Carpenter, Roderick Coover, Peter Cho, Andrei Gheorghe, David Jhave Johnson, Maria Mencia, Jason Nelson, Jody Zellen and Brian Kim Stefans.



http://readingrebooted.iupdhc.org/
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Darting Stories Remix

As E-Writer-in-Residence at Dartington College, in Devon, England, this fall, I led a workshop on electronic literature with a concentration on literary mapping with first year Performance Writing Students. Over the course of the workshop students generated short texts for zines, postcards, epitaphs, blog posts and web maps. Though written separately, these texts explored common themes of place, mapping, the River Dart, Dartington and the past occupants (fictional or otherwise) of Dartington Hall. The workshop exercises and the texts they produced are archived on a group blog: Darting Blog. These texts are presented collectively as a final project on a Google Map: DARTING: A Collective Story Map

The last session of the workshop focused on remixing. I created a Darting Stories Remix by taking sentences from the various (and varied) texts archived on the Darting Blog and fed them into one of Nick Montfort's Python story generators. I had used this same method earlier in the year to create Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie and JR.

For the purposes of this Darting Stories Remix, I shortened some of the sentences or selected excerpts from longer sentences to fit into the Python story generator format, and changed them all into the present tense and first person. Otherwise, these remain sentences written separately by separate authors remixed by a Python script to make collectively authored stories.

To read the Darting Stories Remix, download this file to your desktop and unzip: Darting.py On a Mac or Linux system, you can run the story generator by opening a Terminal Window, typing "cd Desktop", and typing "python Darting.py". Hint: look for Terminal in your Utilities folder. This Python story generator runs on Windows, too, but you will probably need to install Python first: version 2.6. Once Python is installed you can double click on the file and it will automatically launch and run in the terminal window. Every time you press Return a new version of the story will appear. For example:



Here are a few more examples of stories generated by this script:

Darting Stories:
How do I write an epitaph about myself in the first person?.
Through the depths of the water I reflect far and wide.
Hadrian's Wall might have mostly come down, but it's there in spirit.
Mad, that's what they call me.
I crave little more than my freedom, my air, and my land.
I will walk directionless, till the unknown end.
Striving to connect with something natural.
To be continued...

Darting Stories:
At the start, I look for the lights.
What do names matter when worlds whirl together?.
I don't live in a house, where they could watch me.
I live along the Dart but not around the towns where they patrol.
I pass out in the dirt-floored cellar most nights.
Sunlight barely reaches the stone floor.
I am a fervent keeper of horses, ponies and barns.
Websta's brother died in the Dart. Had his throat slit.
The sea is a place I understand is rather nice.
Introvert, extravert, ingreen.
This the most achingly beautiful place to come across a little death.
To be continued...



Darting Stories:
Stories run off the Moor with it's river waters.
I stride up hill holding hands with a friend named for the greatest flower.
William, sweet or otherwise, has never been my name.
I scare their dogs by trying to speak with them in their own language.
Graceless truths of tears clutch at the mirage in my room.
The ponies look more listless and less majestic.
It gets so muddy here; no wonder all the cows around here are brown.
The wind gives the landscape something of a facial peel.
Splash water into mud, trip me.
Smouldering timber and melancholy permeate my lungs. I stick to the path.
This the most achingly beautiful place to come across a little death.
To be continued...



Darting Stories:
On this hill the world as we know it collided.
Intoxicating tongues speak of Giants, Merlins, Padfoots and Beasts.
Geoffrey of Monmouth's accounts are unfounded, possibly fabricated.
The clay on the wheel beneath my fingers, whirling a world on its axis.
William, sweet or otherwise, has never been my name.
I crave little more than my freedom, my air, and my land.
I don't live in a house, where they could watch me.
I live along the Dart but not around the towns where they patrol.
I will walk directionless, till the unknown end.
I am a fervent keeper of horses, ponies and barns.
To be continued...

Darting Stories:
Stories run off the Moor with it's river waters.
I will walk directionless, till the unknown end.
Fear and bliss live with me and the room contains me.
Websta's brother died in the Dart. Had his throat slit.
Black looms in the distance, the air thick with distaste.
The Waters of the Dart run across stones fallen from foreign clouds.
Map the most important places around the River Dart.
Exmoor, outmore, out the door, more doors.
More floor, less flaws, less cause, pour, pore, sweat, regret.
Skip over Kandinsky pavement, follow the water.
Flotsam on a tidal river is a strange mixture of oak leaves and seaweed.
To be continued...
. . . . .

DARTING: A Collective Story Map

Over a period of five weeks a collective of writers of the River Dart worked collaboratively on a web-based writing project about the River Dart and the history - fictional or otherwise - of Dartington Hall. A series of short texts were written separately, for zines, postcards and blog posts. These texts were then collected, found texts and images were added, and all were collated onto this Google Map:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&t=h&msa=0&msid=109811778856642161490.00046c5ac479d9ec8655d&ll=50.443513,-3.841095&spn=0.538733,1.454315&z=10




For more information on how the writers of the River Dart came to collectively create DARTING: A Collective Story Map, visit their blog: http://dartingmap.blogspot.com/
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