THE CAPE on BathHouse

My web/ art/ narrative/ project, THE CAPE, has been included in the Spring 2006 issue of BathHouse, online now.

Edited by current Creative Writing graduate students at Eastern Michigan University, BathHouse promotes interdisciplinary and hybrid arts with a special emphasis on language and innovation in art that blurs the lines of conventional form and genre.

BathHouse takes its name from the 19th-century sanatoriums, bathhouses, and mineral water wells that flourished in Ypsilanti, Michigan, until truth in labeling laws were passed. The “foul smelling” waters of the Atlantis well, in the vicinity of the current Jones-Goddard dorm on the EMU campus, were bottled and shipped nationwide as a cure for 33 disorders of the blood.

http://www.emich.edu/studentorgs/bhouse/main.html

Artists in the Spring 2006 issue of BathHouse are: Mark Amerika, J. R. Carpenter, Joe Clifford, Mark Cunningham, Christopher Garlington, Diane Greco, Mary Kasimor, Braxton Soderman, Lynn Strongin.

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
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Lust for Life Launch Tonight

I’ll be reading “The Prettiest Teeth” tonight at the Montreal launch of Lust for Life: Tales of Sex and Love at the Sergent Recruteur (4801 St-Laurent, corner Villeneuve).

The event will begin at 7:30 p.m., and will feature readings by contributers: Matthew Anderson, J.R. Carpenter, Tess Fragoulis, Harold Hoefle, Nairne Holtz, Neil Kroetsch, Mark Paterson, Neil Smith, and Barry Webster.

See you there!
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The Prettiest Teeth

One of my short stories called “The Prettiest Teeth” has been published in the anthology Lust for Life, edited by Claude Lalumière and Elise Moser and published by Véhicule Press, January 2006.

“The Prettiest Teeth” is not about boys or girls or love or lust or sex or sexuality. It’s really all about the teeth. Here’s the opening paragraph:

“Beth Wharton sits across the aisle from me. She has the prettiest teeth in the sixth grade. My teeth are a mess. One eyetooth is misshapen and the other one never came in; one front tooth pokes through my lips if I smile, so I try not to. I try to keep my mouth shut altogether, but it’s a losing battle. I can’t stop myself. I crack lame joke after lame joke on the off chance that Beth Wharton will crack a smile.”

For the whole story, drop by the Toronto and/or Montreal launch events or visit: http://luckysoap.com/publications.html
Lust for Life - The Prettiest Teeth
The Toronto launch will take place on Saturday, February 11th in the upstairs pool room at Rivoli (334 Queen Street West) at 7:00 and will feature readings by: Nalo Hopkinson, Barry Webster, J.R. Carpenter and Harold Hoefle.

The Montreal launch will take place on Monday, February 13th at Sergeant Recruteur (4801 St-Laurent) at 8:00 and will feature readings by: Matthew Anderson, J.R. Carpenter, Tess Fragoulis, Harold Hoefle, Nairne Holtz, Neil Kroetsch, Mark Paterson, Neil Smith and Barry Webster

Véhicule Press says: Lust for Life is a smart, witty, and fascinating anthology celebrating the diversity of the human sexual experience. These stories are daring, playful, funny, romantic, genderbending, sensual, mysterious, and sexy, and explore and celebrate love and sex in all its forms. It includes stories from Matthew Anderson, Catherine Lundoff, Neil Kroetsch, Robin Evans, Mark Paterson, Ashok Banker, Dan Rafter, Scott D. Pomfret, Neil Smith, Tess Fragoulis, Vic Winter, Harold Hoefle, Joel Hynes, Nalo Hopkinson, Nairne Holtz, Barry Webster, Ray Vukcevich, Holly Phillips, J.R. Carpenter, Maya Stein, and Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia.

For more information about the anthology visit: Véhicule Press
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Searching for Volcanoes

Search for my poem Searching for Volcanoes, recently published in Future Welcome: The Moosehead Anthology X, edited by Todd Swift (Montréal: DC Books, 2005).

Future Welcome comes 50 years after 1955. In his introduction to the anthology editor Todd Swift notes: “1955 saw: the opening of Disneyland; the publication of Lolita; ultra-high frequency waves produced at M.I.T.; Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment; the introduction of the first fluoride toothpaste, Crest; the International Air Pollution Congress (held in New York City); the debut of Scrabble; B-52s put into service; Ray Kroc’s acquisition of McDonald’s; Elvis’s TV debut; Salk’s polio vaccine; a time bomb on United DC-6 flight; Glenn Gould’s “Goldberg Variations”; Eisenhower’s upholding of the right to use nuclear weapons in defence; US Congress ordering all American coins to read “In God We Trust”; the deaths of James Dean, Wallace Stevens and Albert Einstein; and the birth of Bill Gates.”

Where are we now? Certainly not where we thought we’d be. Swift writes: “I wanted poems and prose both of our moment, and yet imbued with the same sense of retro-kitsch that popularly defines the 50s–works about the future, robots, space travel, technology, and sci-fi terror.”

Searching for Volcanoes tells the not-quite-sci-fi-terror tale of trying to do Internet research on a dial-up connection. It’s hard to believe that the Internet didn’t exist in 1955 and yet, in 2005, a 56k connection is utterly antiquated. Volcanoes are a good analogy. As my brilliant friend Norman T. White pointed out to me: “Funny thing about erupting lava – it’s brand new, but it’s also ancient.”

Here’s an excerpt from searching for Volcanoes:

56k
takes forever to fill
collapsed craters
with blue-screen-blue
caldera lakes.

Line by line
the sky downloads:
progressive jpeg descends
a strafe of cloud dithers,
geological time passes –
falls toward mountain…

Future Welcome includes new writing from David Wevill, Sina Queyras, Raymond Hsu, Robert Minhinnick, Annie Freud, bill bissett, Patrick Chapman, Meredith Quartermain, Jason Camlot, Liane Strauss, Todd Colby, Jennifer K. Dick, John Hartley Williams, Louise Bak, Hal Sirowitz, Adeena Karasick, Mike Marqusee, Kavita Joshi, Stan Rogal, Tammy Armstrong, Richard Peabody, Jenna Butler, Ali Riley, Jon Paul Fiorentino, David Prater, J. R. Carpenter, David McGimpsey–plus many more.

For more information on or to order Future Welcome vist DC Books

For more information on editior Todd Swift visit his web sites: http://www.toddswift.com/ and http://toddswift.blogspot.com/
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Con-Textilizing Critical Language

Surfacing - Con-Textilizing Critical LanguageMy essay, Con-Textilizing Critical Language, appears in the winter 2006 issue of Surfacing Journal, a publication of the Textile Artists & Designers Association.

In this essay I suggest that less time be spent worrying about what does or does not pass for criticism, and much more time be spent on thinking about what to say, where and how to say it, and to whom. I contend that the critical decisions made by fibre artists in their work that more than qualifies them as critical voices:

High art, low art, craft or trade – the artist’s ontological position is established through the active generation of “material” language. The choices made – between riotously sexy velvet, florid fuchsia fun fur or deliberately domestic damask – speak volumes. If the vernacular is not official, or correct, or refined, or even immediately recognizably critical – so much the better, I say. Content is more critical than criticism. If the story is a good one, it will get read. So let’s focus on deciding what story to tell and how best to tell it – in fluid script discharged from printed fabric, in re-programmable circuits woven into cloth, in loaded statements laboriously crocheted from continuous thread – and forget for a while about what is or is not said about the story after the fact. Fibre Art, adept as it already is at working in the margins, has its very elusiveness at its disposal in its quest for critical language… the language of Fibre Arts can choose to include the fragmentary, the inconclusive and the digressive. It can be interlaced with texts. It can be something you can’t quite put your finger on, like the tip of a needle. It can also be as cerebral as the head of a needle. Head and point and eye, looking for just the right place to push the point… out, and out loud.

J. R. Carpenter, Con-Textilizing Critical Language, Surfacing Journal, Toronto, WInter 2006.

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Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment

Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment, an illustrated essay, appears in the Fall 2005 issue of ARS MEDICA, A Journal of Medicine, Health and the Humanities, a new quarterly literary journal that explores the interface between the arts and medicine, and examines what makes medicine an art.

Writing and healing have always been intrinsically linked. ARS MEDICA seeks to provide the reader with vivid examples. Content includes narratives from patients and health care workers, medical history, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, illustrations and photography.” http://ars-medica.ca/

Ars Medica - Notions of the Archival in Memory and DeportmentI began writing Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment as a response to the discourse of disembodiment that was prevalent in early days of the Internet. I never believed that the physical gendered body would be subsumed in an idealized information age. Even in our attempts to externalize and expand upon the processes of the brain through the computational and storage capacities of the computer, the precariousness of the biological body persists. It seems to me that somewhere along the way cultural theory veered away from body politics. In Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment I have tried to examine, from the inside, not just ‘the’ body, but also ‘my’ body in particular. I have focused on the storage and retention of bodily memory in order to explore the relationship and/or disconnect between body and mind that has preoccupied philosophers for generations. In Ethics, Part II: Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind, Spinoza writes: “The human mind is capable of perceiving a great number of things, and … is cable of receiving a great number of impressions… If the human body is affected in a manner which involves the nature of any external body, the human mind will regard the said external body as actually existing… Memory is simply a certain association of ideas involving the nature of things outside the human body, which association arises in the mind according to the order and association of the modifications of the human body… The human mind has no knowledge of the body, and does not know it to exist, save through the ideas of the modifications whereby the body is affected.”

An earlier version of Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment is available for viewing online at: http://Luckysoap.com/notions/

Thank you to: Alison and Ian at Ars Media, for their attention to detail; Elise Moser, for telling me about the journal; OBORO, for supporting the production of the online version; Dave Liss, for including an installation version of the “Nails and Hair” portion in “L’Entrespace II” at the Saidye Bronfman Center; and to Barbara Layne, who instigated the project way back when I was …

“suddenly far from my brain and naked without it”
Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment
J. R. Carpenter, http://Luckysoap.com/notions/


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*CARVE Vol. II*

(A little lit mag that prints the good words of Montreal-area writers.)

Featuring…

The poetry of Maxianne Berger, Ian Cant, John Lofranco, Catherine Paquette and Tom Pokinko

Prose by Emily Anglin, J.R. Carpenter and Ilona Martonfi

A tour of Papeterie Saint-Armand by Andrea Belcham

Reviews of David Solway’s *The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat*, and Julia Tausch’s *Another Book About Another Broken Heart*

And lovely line-drawings of Montreal scenes by Tom Pokinko

…With a snazzy bookmark insert, letter-pressed by the folks at Papeterie Saint-Armand
Carve - The Cape
Pick up your copy today at The Word Bookstore (469 rue Milton), Local 23 (23 rue Bernard O.), Librarie Clio (Pointe-Claire Plaza) or TWIGS Café (85 rue Ste-Anne, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue)

Or… send $7 to Andrea Belcham, 96 Parkdale Ave., Pointe-Claire, Quebec H9R 3Y7 >>>>> carvezine @ gmail . com

*(Copies of Carve Vol. I still available! Includes the fine literary stylings of Katia Grubisic, Maeve Haldane, Angela Leuck, Scott McRae, Dimitri Nasrallah, Catherine Paquette, Sonja Skarstedt and Sherwin Tjia, with pretty pics by Sarah Robinson)*
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Hennessey’s High Pasture

The New Quarterly has accepted my short story Hennessey’s High Pasture for publication. It will appear in Issue #97 (due out January 2006).

“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, Hennessey’s High Pasture


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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.
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Saint-Urbain Street Heat

A new poem, “Saint-Urbain Street Heat”, appears in the August edition of Nth Position.

Some of you who have never been to Montréal in the summer don’t believe how hot it gets here. Those you who live here, well, you know. Set on the same block as Saint-Urbain’s Horsemen but more like Balconville only shorter and poetry and contemporary and completely different really, “Saint-Urbain Street Heat” will leave you sweating in your undershirts. Here’s an excerpt:

Alters of clutter,
hanging gardens of sound –
the back balconies buckle
under the weight of
high summer
Saint-Urbain Street heat.

All the kitchen
back doors stand open –
sticky arms flung open –
imploring, a heat-rashed prayer:

Deliver us unto
the many gods
of Mile End.

Read the rest of “Saint-Urbain Street heat” on NthPostion.com

Nth Position is a free online magazine/ezine based in Europe with politics & opinion, travel writing, fiction & poetry, reviews & interviews, and some high weirdness from around the world. Read, subscribe, submit: nthposition.com
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