lapsus linguae

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.
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Reading Martial

When I’m invited to dinner
these days, I don’t get paid
the way I used to. So why
don’t you serve me the same dinner
you eat? You get oysters, fattened
in Lake Lucrine. I cut my mouth
sucking a mussel from its shell.
Mushrooms for you. Pig’s fungus
for me. You’re busy with turbot,
I with brill. You stuff yourself
with a golden turtle dove’s
fat rump. I’m served a magpie
that died in its cage. Why is it,
Ponticus, when I dine with you,
I dine alone? Now the dole’s gone,
you owe me the courtesy
of letting me share your dinner.

Martialis, Epigram lx, Book III
. . . . .

Broken Things on Drunken Boat

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome has been named a finalist in the Drunken Boat PanLiterary Awards – Web Art Section. The final results of the competition will be announced later this fall. Broken Things will appear in the next issue regardless. DrunkenBoat.com is an international online journal for the arts featuring poetry, prose, photography, video, web art, and sound.

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome was created between 2002 and 2005 in Rome and Montréal with the generous financial support of the Oboro New Media Lab artist in residency programme and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Milli gazie again to Barbara Catalini in Rome and Stéphane Vermette in Montréal.
. . . . .

Broken Things in Mexico

Mexican arts orginization Laberintos has included my web project “How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome” in their online project – nuevas geografias (new geographies).

“laberintos.org, in collaboration with betabelle.org, summons to web artists to participate in the generation of on-line works that reflect, meditate and analyze the problems and definition of new geographies. those new geographies are understood as relations generated from a globalized society (mobility, space, territory, emergent geographies, ubiquity, temporality, frontiers, and connected crowds).”

Vist nuevas geografias (new geographies)

Visit How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome

. . . . .

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome

Announcing the launch of a new web art project by J. R. Carpenter:

“How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome” is a web art project combining historical research, poetics, video and photography collected during an extended stay in Rome. This work reflects upon certain gaps between the fragment and the whole, between the local and the tourist, between what is known of history and what is speculative. Rome is among the largest and oldest continuously occupied archaeological sites in the world. Daily life is complicated, even for the locals. Everything is running late, circuitous, or quasi-rotto. Romanticism and pragmatism must coexist. In my struggles with slang, schedules, and social vagaries, I came to feel that understanding what was happening around me was less a question of acquisition of language, than one of overcoming the dislocation of being a stranger. There were days in Rome that I did not, could not, speak to anyone. Oxford Archaeological Guide and cameras in tow, I tried to capture something of the impossibly elusive and fragmentary nature of language amid Rome‚s broken columns, headless statues and other, often unidentifiable, ruins.

To SVR and Barbarina, le ringrazio molto.

http://luckysoap.com/brokenthings

“How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome” was produced with the support of OBORO, Residency Program, New Media Lab and the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
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