lapsus linguae

The Pleasure of The Coast: A Hydro-graphic Novel

I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new bilingual web-based work of digital literature today, Bastille Day. In English the work is called The Pleasure of The Coast: A Hydro-graphic Novel. In French, Le plaisir de la côte : une bande dessinée. It’s a story of the western mapping of the South Pacific, rather too big for most phones. Best viewed on a laptop or tablet. It’s available here: http://luckysoap.com/pleasurecoast

The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter, 2019

This work was commissioned by the « Mondes, interfaces et environnements à l’ère du numérique » research group at Uinversité Paris 8, supported by Labex Arts-H2H (now merged with ArTeC), in partnership with the Archives Nationales in Paris. It was presented as a work in progress at « Des machines imaginantes médiatrices de fiction ? » 11-13 décembre 2018 à l’Université Paris 8. The (more or less) completed work will officially launch at Electronic Literature Organization Conference & Media Arts Festival 15-17 July 2019 at University Collage Cork in Ireland.

An ocean of thanks to Arnaud Regnauld and Pierre Cassou-Nogues at Université Paris 8; to Françoise Lemaire, Nadine Gastaldi, and Clothilde Roullier at the Archives nationales; and to Robert Sheldon and Stelios Sardelas for ground support in Paris.

For anyone unfamiliar with French naval history, some background information may be useful. In 1785 King Louis XVI appointed Lapérouse to lead an expedition around the world. The aim of this voyage was to complete the discoveries made by Cook on his three earlier voyages to the Pacific.

On the 1st of August 1785, Lapérouse departed Brest with no less than ten scientists aboard. On the 10th of March 1788, Lapérouse departed the English Colony at new South Wales, Australia. He was never seen by European eyes again.

To the English ear, the name Lapérouse sounds a lot like the verb ‘to peruse’ — to scan or browse, to read through with thoroughness, to survey or examine in detail. The dictionary cautions, the word ‘peruse’ can be confused with the verb ‘to pursue’ — to follow in order to overtake, to strive to gain, to seek to attain, to proceed in accordance with a method, to carry on or continue. The English word ‘pursue’ sound a bit like the French word ‘perdu’ — disposable, ruined, lost.

On 25 September 1791, Entrecasteaux departed from Brest in search of the lost Lapérouse. One of his two 500-ton frigates was named La Recherche. On board was a young hydrographer, Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré (1766-1854), a close contemporary of the English hydrographer Francis Beaufort (1774-1857). Beaufort is perhaps most famous for the wind scale named after him, for measuring the force of the wind. Beautemps is an auspicious name for an ocean-going person, in need of fair winds. Once at sea, however, beau pré are few and far between.

Finished sea charts are designed to be uniform in appearance, as precise as possible. The Archives nationales in Paris holds hundreds of sheets of drafts of charts made by Beautemps-Beaupré aboard La Recherche, and boxes of sketchbooks. A mix of drawing, writing, and numbers. The active marks of a practicing hand. Oak gall ink on rough paper. Liquid lines of inquiry. Drawn onwards by a moving ship.

The title and much of the text in this work borrows from Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973). The word ‘text’ has been replaced with the word ‘coast’. This détourned philosophy is intermingled with excerpts from Beautemps-Beaupré’s Introduction to the Practice of Nautical Surveying and the Construction of Sea-Charts (1808). Artistry, philosophy, hydrography — what’s missing. Ah, yes, fiction. And women. This gap is filled by Suzanne, the first-person narrator of Suzanne et le Pacific. In this early novel by Jean Giraudoux, published in 1921, a young French woman wins a trip around the world. She becomes shipwrecked, and survives alone on a Pacific island in roughly the same region surveyed by Beautemps-Beaupré.

I have appropriated, exaggerated, détourned, corrected, and corrupted both the original French and the English translations of these texts. Who, then, is the author of this work? The author is not dead. The author is multiple: multimedia, multilingual, poly-vocal. “Which body?” Barthes asks, “We have several.” Imagine if Barthes were the bastard love child of Giraudoux but grew up to be a hydrographer instead of a philosopher. Or if Beautemps-Beaupré had secretly written a symbolist novel from the point of view of a female castaway. But for the web…

The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter, 2019

In French, the term ‘bande dessinée’ refers to the drawn strip. What better term to describe the hydrographic practice of drawing views of the coast from the ship? In English, the term for ‘bande dessinée’ is ‘graphic novel’. I’m calling this work a hydro-graphic novel.

The images in this work are a combination of my own photographs and digitisations generously made for me by the Archives nationales. More information on the text sources can be found within the work itself. Finally, I would note that this work is imperfectly bilingual. All errors in translation, transcription, and interpretation are my own.

http://luckysoap.com/pleasurecoast

On Sea Birds, Castaways, and Phantom Islands off the Coast of Newfoundland

As a Visiting Fellow at the Eccles Centre for North American Studies at the British Library in London over the past few months I’ve been chasing fleeting references to phantom islands in cartographic and literary depictions of the New World during the sixteenth century. Since the first voyages to the cod-fishing grounds off Newfoundland, there have been reports of an Island of Demons in the region, reputedly inhabited by a curious mixture of wild animals, mythological creatures, evil spirits, and demons. These might sound like tall tales, but in 1542 a young French noblewoman was cast ashore on an island off Newfoundland bearing many of these characteristics, and lived to tell the tale.

In August I gave a talk about this research at the Summer Scholars Seminar Series at the British Library. An expanded version of that talk has been published on the British Library’s American Collection blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/americas/2015/10/sea-birds-castaways-and-phantom-islands-off-newfoundland.html

A Handmade Web

I’m headed to Bath Thursday 26 March 2015 to participate in a one-day symposium on Slow Media hosted by the Media Futures Research Centre at Bath Spa University’s Corsham Court campus. I will be speaking about a A Handmade Web. The term ‘handmade’ usually refers to objects made by hand or by using simple tools rather than machines. The result may be homely — as in a child’s clay ashtray — or exquisite — as in a pair of bespoke brogues. I will evoke the term ‘handmade web’ throughout this presentation to refer to web pages coded by hand rather than by software; web pages made and maintained by individuals rather than by businesses or corporations; web pages which are provisional, temporary, or one-of-a-kind; web pages which challenge conventions of reading, writing, design, ownership, privacy, security, or identity.

I’ve made a hyperlinked version of my presentation available online here: http://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html

Fishes & Flying Things || J. R. Carpenter, 1995

The above image is from Fishes & Flying Things, my first web-based project, Fishes & Flying Things, made entirely by hand in 19995.

For more information on Slow Media, see: The Origin of Slow Media: Early Diffusion of a Cultural Innovation through Popular and Press Discourse, 2002-2010, by Jennifer Rauch (2011).

Slow Media, Thursday 26th March 2015, Bath Spa University, UK

Slow Media Symposium Draft Programme (PDF)

#slowmediabathspa

Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow in North American Studies at the British Library

I’ve been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Eccles Centre for North American Studies at the British Library. Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowships are intended to help support scholars wishing to visit London to use the British Library’s collections relating to North America and are basically a rare book and old map lover’s dream come true.

the region of Atlantic Canada where I was born, in Champlain’s map of 1607

I am applied for an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship in order to undertake further research into the writing (and erasing) of Atlantic Canadian coastlines toward the publication of a monograph tentatively titled ‘Writing Coastlines: On the Composition of Atlantic Canada’.

By ‘Writing Coastlines’ I refer both to cartographic and textual writing about coastlines, and to the writing and erasing of physical coastlines through erosion and accretion, wave actions and storm events. Rather than presenting a historiographical narrative in which the coastlines of the ‘New World’ emerge through a linear progression of discoveries, I aim to frame the writing of these coastlines as an ongoing compositional process. To demonstrate this argument, I intend to draw upon a wide variety cartographic, archival, and literary materials held at the British Library, with an emphases on foundation documents of Canadian history produced in England and France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This research will build upon portions of my recently completed PhD thesis, Writing Coastlines: Locating Narrative Resonance in Transatlantic Communications Networks. During this research I made extensive use of the Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Maps collections at the British Library. This Visiting Fellowship will allow me to spend more time with the documents I have already consulted and, critically, will allow me to identify and study secondary sources including lesser-known maps, sea charts, ship’s logs, cosmographies, diaries, letters, arguments, treatises, and discourses for discovery. Through a comparative cartographic and textual analysis of these material texts I aim to show how the coastlines of Atlantic Canada have been written and re-written, drawn and re-drawn, formed and transformed, altered and erased by successive generations of fishers, sailors, explorers, settlers, soldiers, captains, navigators, cartographers, politicians, journalists, and literary authors. These coastlines have been composed through centuries of dead-reckoning, careful surveying, and sounding, as well as less than perfect navigation and charting techniques; through willful misrepresentation of dangers and distances; through the transposition of European place and family names onto places which already had names, whether assigned by earlier explorers or by native peoples; through subsequent mishearings, misspellings, translations, and adaptations of these names over the course of centuries of habitation; and though literary re-imaginings of first encounters with the natives, animals, and climatic conditions of these coasts.

During the Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship I will begin work on a new chapter, ‘Arguments to Prove a Passage,’ focused on distortions of Atlantic Canadian coastlines perpetrated in material texts written to elicit support for voyages Northwestward, traces of these voyages written in place names (Davis Inlet, etc), and arguments made to prove a Northeast Passage.