Writing Coastlines: Estuaries, Islands and Beaches as Liminal Spaces in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop

Earlier in June I presented at a conference called “It must be Nova Scotia:” Negotiating Place in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop, held at University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia June 10-12, 2011.

Bishop Conference

My paper examined instances in the writings of Elizabeth Bishop wherein coastlines are evoked in order to refer to a psychological subjective state – conscious or unconscious – of being on the threshold between places.

In her poem, “The Moose,” Bishop writes a coastline of extreme contrasts to evoke the liminal condition of migration, of being in transition, of being of and in-between places, on a long bus ride along a coastal road stretching between home and away:

home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats’
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets

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A red sea. Mud flats. Lavender water. Bishop uses strikingly similar language to describe a nearby coastline in her short story, In the Village:

There are the tops of all the elm trees in the village and there, beyond them, the long green marshes, so fresh, so salt. Then the Minas Basin, with the tide halfway in or out, the wet red mud glazed with sky blue until it meets the creeping lavender-red water…

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The site of this sight is geographically the furthest point from the epicentre of the story. The evocation of estuarine overlaps, mixtures and contradictions at this moment serves both to enunciate an internal emotional confusion within the narrator, and to project the narration beyond the geographical confines of the village.

We are in the “Maritimes” but all that means is that we live by the sea.

This liminal coastline writes a possible future, a point of departure, a line of flight. If all being “in the Maritimes” means is living by the sea then one can be in or from the Maritimes living by any sea. Indeed, Bishop wrote In the Village in Brazil, a place that reminded her of Nova Scotia but, importantly, most certainly was not.

I grew up in Nova Scotia. I left twenty-one years ago. I live in England now, which reminds me of Nova Scotia, but, importantly, most certainly is not. It was both delightful and terrifying to return to “narrow provinces / of fish and bread and tea” to present an academic paper to a conference of specialists. Good for the confidence, to have it come out well in the end.

For more information about the conference, view the program.

CityFish to be presented at OLE Officinia di Letteratura Electtronica, exhibited at PAN Palazzo Arti Napoli

I am gearing up to present a paper on my most recent work of electronic literature – CityFish – at the OLE Officinia di Letteratura Electtronica Festival / Conference taking place in Naples 20-21 January 2011. The very full program boasts an impressive roster of speakers. I am looking forward to seeing old friends and new work. I especially love how, in a sea of big names and long conference paper titles written in Italian, Spanish, French and English, shot through with colons, semi-colons, dashes and all manner of accentuation, my title is written just like this – “CityFish” – one word, written in its own made-up language, buoyed by quotation marks, impossible to translate, and anyway, there is no reason to. The rest of the paper will be translated, however. All of the papers presented at OLE Officinia di Letteratura Electtronica will appear in Italian translation in a book published by Feltrinelli in Italy. I have the greatest of sympathy for the translators of this odd-ball essay about this quirky work about this talking dead fish.

CityFish is a hybrid word, title of a hybrid work, tale of a hybrid creature. A big fish story swallowing a small tale’s tail. A rhizome, a fable, an urban legend. Like an old wives’ tale, it’s long been told but is never quite finished. In its latest incarnation, CityFish is a web-based hypermedia panoramic narrative. Completed in November 2010, with the support of a new media creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, CityFish was presented in Beta at Archive & Innovate, The 4th International Conference & Festival of the Electronic Literature Organization, at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, June 3-6, 2010. CityFish was also presented as a work-in-progress at Interventions: Literary Practice at the Edge: A Gathering, at The Banff Centre, in Banff, Alberta, Canada, February 18, 2010. The Coney Island videos were shot on location in 2005 and edited during the Babel Babble Rabble: On Language and Art thematic residency at The Banff Centre in 2006. A very, very, very early web-based iteration of CityFish was presented in an exhibition called IßWAS, at the Bavarian American Hotel in Nuremberg, Germany, July 1998. That iteration incorporated a series of photographs shot on 35mm film in Chinatown, Toronto, circa 1996; a line drawing of a fish with a tall building for a tail, drawn at around the same time; and a very short story of the same name written in 1995 from the first-person point of view of a fish.

CityFish is a simple story told by a simple fish, most unhappy about being caught, killed and offered up for sale, piled unceremoniously in a heap on a sidewalk fishmonger’s stall on a hot summer day, on a narrow, crowded street in Chinatown, New York City. “What a fish, once was I,” the fish reminisces. “A fish’s fish, with fish’s thoughts inside my head.” Fish are far from us. Their stories breathe with gills, swim in deep cold water and are never still. They cannot help but seem strange to us. As Henry David Thoreau noted in Cape Cod, a book named after a piece of land named after a fish:

All that is told of the sea has a fabulous sound to an inhabitant of the land, and all its products have a certain fabulous quality, as if they belonged to another planet, from sea-weed to a sailor’s yarn, or a fish-story. In this element the animal and vegetable kingdoms meet and are strangely mingled.

CityFish will be exhibited at PAN Palazzo Arti Napoli for a month after OLE Officinia di Letteratura Electtronica, and may be viewed anytime from anywhere online here: http://luckysoap.com/cityfish

PAN Palazzo Arti Napoli
via dei mille 60, napoli
tel. +39.081.7958604-05
fax. +39.081.7958660
info@palazzoartinapoli.net
www.palazzoartinapoli.net

An article about OLE Officinia di Letteratura Electtronica appeared in the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera 8 January 2011: Arriva la letteratura elettronica

Whisper Wire: A Poetry Generator Transmitting and Receiving Electronic Voice Phenomena Through Haunted Media

Whisper Wire is a new poetry generator by J.R. Carpenter, a text transmitter, a code medium sending and receiving a steady stream of strange sounds, disembodied voices, ghost whispers, distant wails and other intercepted attempts to communicate over vast distances through copper wires, telegraph cables, transistor radios and other haunted media.

From the outset, telegraphy has been associated with otherworldly presences. If intelligence and consciousness could be transmitted independent of the body, surely the dead could speak to the living though electromagnetic means. This perception persisted nearly a century, even as telegraph and telephone networks girdled the globe with cables, signals, switches and stations.

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December 14, 1901, three short sharp clicks skipped this grid. The Morse letter S travelled from Poldu, Cornwall — not troubled at at by the curvature of the Earth or the salt wet and wind of the Atlantic — to Saint-John’s, Newfoundland, where it was received by a telephonic headset held to the highly sensitive receiver of Guglielmo Marconi’s waiting ear.

Was the Morse letter S appended to Saint-John’s that day? Hoax rumours abound. Some suggest that what Marconi heard was actually a harmonic — a connection, yes, but not a transmission. Distance distorts. Distance distends. We hear what we need to. Wireless technology revealed a vast, unfathomable ocean of silence and static. Deep listening into that void can return uncanny results. Whisper Wire generates an unheimlich poem of un-homed messages, a spectrum of strange and unexplainable sounds, hunting the either for a listener, a receiver, a media to haunt.

The source code of Whisper Wire is itself possessed. Whisper Wire is a remix of Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge. Excerpts and source code of another of J.R. Carpenter’s remixes of Taroko Gorge, titled simply GORGE, appear in her new hybrid code narrative book GENERATION[S], published by TRAUMAWIEN.

Whisper Wire will be performed in Edinburgh on Halloween night at Inspace… no one can hear you scream, an evening of language in digital performance presented by the third International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling and New Media Scotland.

Whisper Wire will become a live wire during this 20 minute hybrid performance. Performance writers J.R. Carpenter and Jerome Fletcher will mix generated text, javascript, found sounds and live readings from the works of decadent authors, Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray and others.

“As we stand on the clifftop at Poldhu, watching the wind which roars in off the Atlantic whipping spindrift off the tops of the waves, we are filled with an overwhelming sense of horror. Between here and New York nothing but grotesque tonnages of uncooked haddock swim. Nowhere is Nature present in such profusion, and we have chosen to expose ourselves to it for the next three days!

At this spot a century ago, Guglielmo Marconi set up a circle of masts by which he would transmit the first radio signals beyond the curve of the earth. We too are here to communicate. Not with the Living, however, but with the Dead.”

Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray with Paul Renner, The Hell Fire Touring Club, Oxford: Pharsalia, 2004, page 21.

48 hours | Inspace… no one can hear you scream.
Sunday 31st October 2010, 7.30 for 8pm.
Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB

Inspace

Inspace… no one can hear you scream: an evening of language in digital performance

Sunday 31st October 2010, 7.30 pm, the third International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling and New Media Scotland will present an evening of language in digital performance with works by Martin John Callanan, J.R. Carpenter, Jerome Fletcher, Donna Leishman, Maria Mencia, Netwurker Mez, Stanza and Christine Wilks. The performance event will be held on Halloween. There will be a haunted theme.

48 hours | Inspace… no one can hear you scream.

Sunday 31st October 2010, 7.30 for 8pm.

Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB

ICIDS Conference Program

Inspace

CityFish Beta Launch at AI_ELO June 3-6, 2010

For the past six months I’ve been working on a massive new web-based hypermedia narrative called CityFish. A beta version will be on display at Archive & Innovate, The 4th International Conference & Festival of the Electronic Literature Organization, taking place at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, June 3-6, 2010.

A portion of CityFish was presented as a work-in-progress at Interventions: Literary Practice at the Edge: A Gathering, at The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada, February 18, 2010. Some of the videos in CityFish were edited during the Bable Babble Rabble: On Language and Art thematic residency at The Banff Centre in 2006. A very, very, very early web-based version of CityFish was presented in an exhibition called ISWAS, at the Bavarian American Hotel in Nuremberg, Germany, July 1998. That version was based on a very short story written the year previous, which was based on a drawing I have no recollection of drawing, which I had made into a rubber stamp at least fifteen years ago now. The title, CityFish, refers to the City Mouse, Country Mouse fable written by Aesop in the mid-sixth century BC in ancient Greece. I had hoped to have CityFish finished in time to present it at AI_ELO in full and in person, but having been in the works for twenty-seven centuries already, it may take a few more months to complete.

CityFish || J. R. Carpenter

Part parable, part picture book, CityFish combines contemporary short fiction and hypermedia storytelling forms. A girl named Lynne spends her winters living with her mother in a small fishing village called Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, and her summers visiting her mother’s family in Queens, New York.

Lynne and her mother lived in half a clapboard house that had long ago staggered, stooped and settled where it fell, alongside a salt-parched road that backed up a hill and away from a fishing village called Brooklyn. Not the real Brooklyn; Brooklyn, Nova Scotia. No one fished from the wharf at Brooklyn anymore. No one lived in the other half of the clapboard house. No one Lynne knew had ever been anywhere.
J. R. Carpenter, CityFish [beta]

Also launching at AI_ELO, Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two, edited by Rita Raley, Talan Memmott, Brian Kim Stefans and Laura Borràs Castanyer. I have two works in this collection: Entre Ville, and in absentia, and one work in its predecessor, Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland.

In(ter)ventions – A Note on the Agenda

In case I haven’t mentioned this already, I am really, really, really excited about In(ter)ventions — Literary Practice At The Edge: A Gathering happening at The Banff Centre February 18, 2010 – February 21, 2010. I had the good fortune to be involved in the planning of this event. In December 2008, Steven Ross Smith – Director of Literary Arts at The Banff Centre – invited Marjorie Perloff, Lance Olsen, Fred Wah and me to Banff for a three-day think tank on bringing new practices to the the Literary Arts program. The incredible diversity of practice, knowledge and experience at that table was both humbling and exhilarating. It has been wonderful watching the many names, works, issues and ideas from a vast array of literary practices we discussed coalesce into the dreamboat agenda we have today.

The best part of this agenda is, now we get to go enact it – live in real time in Banff. On Friday, February 19, 2PM, I’m on a panel on Digital Effects – Digital Literary Creation & Dissemination with Stephanie Strickland and Chris Funkhouser moderated by Nick Montfort. Later, at 8PM that evening, I’m doing a reading/performance with Lance Olsen and Erin Moure. Then, on Saturday February 20, at 3:30PM, I’m presenting a screening of digital literature co-curated with Ram Devineni. For the rest of In(ter)ventions I’ll be litstening, watching and reading with rapt attention, catching up with friends and generally resisting the urge to ask everyone for their autographs.

The full In(ter)ventions agenda (pdf): http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/id/0900/925/agenda.pdf


. . . . .

In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice At The Edge

In(ter)ventions — Literary Practice At The Edge: A Gathering is a conference unlike any held previously in Canada. Over the course of four days, thirty six forward-thinking literary artists will create a context for the demonstration and discussion of cutting-edge literary practice. In a mixture of panels, papers, readings, performances, and more, participants will explore digital literature, interactivity, collaboration, cross-disciplinary work, formal innovation, “uncreative” writing, new modes of dissemination, and literary pedagogy.

Within the rapidly changing landscape of literary practice and dissemination, technology has rocketed forward, putting more power into the hands of writers and other artists. New literary modes have appeared and continue to develop, and the ability to share information rapidly across disciplines has resulted in exciting and challenging cross-pollination. In(ter)ventions will explore the edges of literature, where technology, innovation, and literary practice meet.

This conference is open to writers, new media artists, students, critics, educators, and others who want to contribute to, or listen in on, the conversation taking place with regards to innovative modes of literature. Participants will come away from this cutting-edge conference with a better understanding of the future of literary practice and inspiration to further explore emerging trends in the discipline.

In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice At The Edge: A Gathering
The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada
February 18, 2010 – February 21, 2010

Director: Steven Ross Smith
Presenters: Charles Bernstein, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, J.R. Carpenter, Maria Damon, Ram Devineni, Craig Dworkin, Al Filreis, Christopher Funkhouser, Kenneth Goldsmith, D. Kimm, Larissa Lai, Daphne Marlatt, Nick Montfort, Erin Moure, Lance Olsen, Stephen Osborne, Marjorie Perloff, Kate Pullinger, Stephanie Strickland, Steve Tomasula, Fred Wah

Further information || Agenda (PDF)
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MiT5 Endnotes

MiT5 whizzed by in a drizzly blur. As one panellist noted: The weather in New England is a lot like the weather in Old England. Water logged lab rats, we scurried through MIT’s campus maze, almost but not quite able to get where we were going without going outside. The conference theme: “creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age.” There was less talk of ownership than of appropriation. Sadly no amount of creativity or collaboration could rid the digital age of rain.

Speaking of ownership, last month I lost my travel umbrella. Last week I replaced it with a used and improved one, liberated from the Lost and Found of the bar where a friend works. This semi-ill-gotten umbrella dripping at my feet, I squirmed uneasily through more than one academic paper cavalierly condoning remix culture’s five-fingered appropriation of other people’s images texts structures and ideas. The Colbert report got high marks for opening itself up to user editing. Nice advertising for Colbert. Hip-hop was idealized for it’s sampling and remixing of culture. Great for the producers, great for the moguls, but not so hot if you’re an up and comer being told what to sample so it sells, or if you’re an indi-artist getting your beats ripped, or if you’re a consumer tired of the radio play list mix. MiT5 did not seem to be critical of what was being sampled. No place to say: no more songs about guns, bitches and hos.

Me: What nobody’s talking about here is money. Academic: Oh, there are plenty of other environments to talk about money in. Give me a break. Though this view appeared to be the prevalent one, I don’t buy it (no pun intended). I worked in the software industry for so long, my critique is tinged with scepticism. After sifting through executive staff rhetoric, world wide sales projection optimism and the codified concerns of corporate lawyers, the stated themes of MiT5 sounded naïve at times, trite even, when divorced from any economic consideration.

There are economics at play in who gets to attend a conference. Not every panellist was an academic and not every academic was staying in a hotel paid for by his university. One professor told me that as an educator he felt he had to stay to hear that evening’s plenary, but as a human being he couldn’t bear it, and besides, he had a three-hour drive home. Another didn’t have his laptop with him because he was staying at a youth hostel. Instead he spent his evenings reading poetry and walking the streets of Cambridge. Nice. Yet another professor was staying in Allston. Actually, he was a research fellow. But still. He had my respect. Allston, that’s keeping it real.

I remain impressed by and grateful to MIT for keeping the Media in Transition conference series free of charge and open to an incredibly broad spectrum of presenters. That can’t be easy. I was especially pleased to see how many more artists presented at MiT5 than at MiT4. I wish I’d made it to more presentations. 25 people speak at once. Far too often there are four people to a panel. If even one paper runs long – the height of unprofessional rudeness, but sadly the norm – the rest get squeezed, leaving no time for discussion.

Like most of the artists I spoke to, the only way I could afford to attend this conference was by taking the Greyhound down and staying with a friend. At the end of each day, the #1 Bus shuttled me from the pillars and porticos of MIT to cracked-out Roxbury, where my friend Lana lives in a loft next door to a boarded up drug store. She says people used to smoke crack underneath the DRUGS sign, until someone stole the sign. They still smoke crack there but now it’s less ironic.

One morning, a woman with drug-rotten teeth tried to get me to take her kids on the bus for her, to save her the fare. Just picture me and two crack babies busting in on some gamer theory session broadcast live on Second Life.

Sometimes real life, Second Life and conference life just don’t synch up. I missed some early sessions because my hostess doesn’t sleep. One night we stayed up late rewriting all her artist’s statements – not exactly collaboration, but after all the conference talk about authorship and overwiting, I felt it my duty as a guest to earn my keep by translating her garbled visual art speak into actual English. Another night we stayed up late making a movie. She tried to hold the camera steady, tried not to laugh, while I told a long story about how I happened to have two dramatically different maps in my notebook, drawn by two dramatically different girls, both giving directions to a notorious party spot in Banff known as The House of Sin.

The notebook as interface, the non-linear story as tangent engine. Just like Entre Ville, we realized in the morning. http://luckysoap.com/entreville

I like conferences, despite their occasionally glaring disconnection from real life. And I like real life, despite its occasionally disheartening disconnection from how life ought to work in theory. I especially like the occasional blurring of the two. Most of the breakout sessions were held in classrooms. Artists and academics projected web and PowerPoint presentations onto white screens bracketed by black blackboards covered with mathematical equations surely few if any of us could understand. Conference attendees mingled with students in the hall. I got a student discount on lunch one day!

In the Bartos Media Lab audience members watched the conference unfolding in real-time on stage. Some doubled up on the real by following along on their laptops the plenary sessions broadcast live on Second Life. The sound of typing surged whenever something clever was said. Someone stepped up to the mike to comment on our cultural condition of constant divided attention. A flurry of typing followed. A rainfall of fingers keyboard tapping, I wrote in my notebook.

It rained all weekend, typing and the wet stuff. Thanks MIT, for mixing up art and academics, theory and practice, for offering up so much information to such a broad audience in such a short period of time. A lot to soak up. And only time for tip of the iceburg comments here. I’ll be sorting though my notes for a long time.
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Greetings From Entre Ville

Entre Ville is a web art project based on a heat wave poem.

It was commissioned by OBORO, a Gallery and New Media Lab in Montréal. The commission was made possible by the Conseil des arts de Montréal. In 2006, on the occasion of their 50th anniversary, the Conseil solicited commissions of new works in each of the artistic disciplines that it funds. Tasked with selecting the New Media commission, Daniel Dion – Director and Co-Founder of OBORO – felt that a web-based work had the most potential to be accessible to a wide range of Montréaliase for the duration of the anniversary year and beyond. The commission included a four-week residency at the OBORO New Media Lab.

OBORO Studio 3

Entre Ville launched at the Muse des beaux-arts de Montréal on April 27, 2006.

Un 50e anniversaire – En ville et sur l’île
Pierre Vallée – Le Devoir – Édition du samedi 29 et du dimanche 30 avril 2006

On April 27, 2007, exactly one year after its launch, I will present Entre Ville: this city between us at MiT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age, the fifth conference in MIT’s Media in Transition Conference series. MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA. April 27-29, 2007.

This conference paper was a joy to write, a testament to what a pleasure it’s been to represent OBORO and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. I’ve posted a slimmed down presentation version on Entre Ville [click on the Bibliotheque Mile End] or follow this link: Entre Ville: this city between us

Entre Ville

Summer is coming. Step into the heat.
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