lapsus linguae

A Reading at Sharpham House – November 3, 2009

Hosted by Alice Oswald

Tuesday, November 3rd 2009 at 19:30 Sharpham Centre.

Alice Oswald will welcome and introduce J R Carpenter, a Canadian novelist, short story writer and web writer based in Montreal. She is the winner of the QWF Carte Blanche Quebec Award (2008), the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition (2003 & 2005), and the Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book for her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, which was published by Conundrum Press in 2008. Her electronic literature has been presented at the Musée de Beaux-arts (Montréal), the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), Jyväskylä Art Museum (Finland), The Web Biennial 2007 (Istanbul), Cast Gallery (Tasmania), and in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume One. She serves as President of the Board of Directors of OBORO, an artist-run gallery and new media lab in Montreal, and is currently the E-Writer-in-Residence at Dartington College UCF.

You are warmly invited to bring a poem to read aloud.
7.30pm in the Octagonal Room, Sharpham House. Donations please
http://www.sharphamtrust.org/
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WordFest: Banff Distinguished Author Reading

I’ll be reading from Words the Dog Knows at WordFest Saturday, October 17, 2009, at The Banff Centre’s Eric Harvie Theatre at 7:00pm, with Emily St. John Mandel and The Distinguished Banff Author, Douglas Coupland. Renowned for his wit and honesty, Douglas Coupland presents his latest work Generation A, once again capturing the spirit of a generation with a social commentary on ever-evolving pop culture. Coupland is joined by debut novelists and online experts J.R. Carpenter and Emily St. John Mandel. This event is sponsored by The Banff Centre.

Tickets are $20.00, $10.00 for students and seniors. Enter to win tickets – call WordFest at 403.237.9068 or click here for more information.

WordFest is an annual readers and writers Festival featuring a broad range of events enhances the interests of the communities WordFest serves. The Festival is complemented by supplementary events throughout the year. WordFest is further committed to an extensive youth engagement program, Book Rapport, as well as to various community outreach activities.
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A Book-ish Novel: Transmediation in Words the Dog Knows at MiT6, April 24, 2009

I will be presenting a paper called “A Book-ish Novel: Transmediation in Words the Dog Knows” at MiT6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, an international conference taking place at MIT April 23-27, 2009. In this paper I will trace the paths that select portions of my first novel, Words the Dog Knows, have traveled: from ear to eye to pen to paper to computer to printer to publisher to video to audio to web to eye to ear and back to pen again, with the novel’s precursive zines and web-based iterations as visual aides.

J. R. Carpenter, A Book-ish Novel: Transmediation in Words the Dog Knows
Friday, April 24, 2009, 2:30-4 room 66-168 (campus map).

MiT6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, MIT April 23-27, 2009.

In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media. Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of transmission, diffusion, connections across space.

Speculating on this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded in the ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economic and social structures, and the arts. Our current era of prolonged and profound transition is surely as media-driven as the historical cultures Innis describes.

His division between the durable and the portable is perhaps problematic in the age of the computer, but similar tensions define our contemporary situation. Digital communications have increased exponentially the speed with which information circulates. Moore’s Law continues to hold, and with it a doubling of memory capacity every two years; we are poised to reach transmission speeds of 100 terabits per second, or something akin to transmitting the entire printed contents of the Library of Congress in under five seconds.

Such developments are simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. They profoundly challenge efforts to maintain access to the vast printed and audio-visual inheritance of analog culture as well as efforts to understand and preserve the immense, enlarging universe of text, image and sound available in cyberspace. What are the implications of these trends for historians who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture?

What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies? How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?

What are the implications of this tension between storage and transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for notions of what is public and what is private?

The first Media in Transition conference was held in 1999 and marked the launch of the MIT graduate program in Comparative Media Studies. Since then, four bi-annual conferences have been held, co-sponsored by CMS and the MIT Communications Forum, with each new conference generating a more internationally diverse audience than its predecessor.

I have presented at two previous Media in Transition conferences:

MiT4: the work of stories (2005)

MiT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age (2007)
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WORDS THE DOG KNOWS wins Best English Book – Expozine Alternative Press Awards

My first novel, Words the Dog Knows (Conundrum Press, 2008), won Best English Book at the Expozine Alternative Press Awards Gala held Tuesday, March 3 at Casa del Popolo, 4873 St-Laurent in Montreal. Six prizes were awarded, recognizing the best English and French books, comics and zines sold at Expozine, Montreal’s annual small press, comic and zine fair.

Expozine 2008 took place on Saturday, November 29 and Sunday, November 30, 2008. By far the largest Expozine ever, this 7th edition saw close to 300 exhibitors and 15 000 visitors. Each exhibitor was asked to submit one publication to the Expozine Alternative Press Awards. 36 titles were short-listed. The short list for Best English Book included some of my favourite people. I’m so glad I was nominated – otherwise I would have been tough deciding whom to root for.

Winners were chosen by an esteemed panel of judges. Here’s what they had to say about Words the Dog Knows:

With fluid, unpretentious prose scattered with humour, Carpenter imparts wisdom about daily life – sometimes between the lines – in this picturesque and gentle novel.

Huge thanks to the judges, to Andy Brown and Maya Merrick at Conundrum Press, and to Lousi Rastilli, Billy Mavreas and everyone else who makes Expozine happen.
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WORDS THE DOG KNOWS Shortlisted for Best English Book – Expozine Alternative Press Awards

The Expozine Alternative Press Awards Gala will be held Tuesday, March 3 at Casa del Popolo, 4873 St-Laurent in Montreal. The Gala starts at 7 pm, awards will begin being presented shortly after 8 pm, and you are all invited to stay and mingle during the DJ night that follows at 10 p.m. Admission is free and beer and liquor specials will be in effect all night.

Come and celebrate the best of the nearly 300 small presses that took part in last fall’s Expozine small press, comic and zine fair! Six prizes will be awarded, recognizing the best book, comic and zine sold at Expozine.

The winners were chosen by an esteemed panel of judges out of the hundreds of publications submitted at Expozine in November. The gala is a rare chance for you to meet and mingle with the most talented up-and-comers of the local publishing scene, as well as purchase copies of the 36 short-listed titles.

The Nominees / Les nominés:

English Book:

Words the Dog Knows, J.R. Carpenter, Conundrum Press, www.conundrumpress.com
The Debaucher, Jason Camlot, Insomniac Press www.insomniacpress.com
The Sunlight Chronicles, Chris Dyer, Divine Life LLC, www.sunlight-chronicles.com
Fear Of Fighting, Stacey May Fowles & Marlena Zuber, Invisible Publishing, www.invisiblepublishing.com
Blert, Jordan Scott, Coach House Books, www.chbooks.com
Jack, Mike Spry, Snare Books, snarebooks.wordpress.com

English Zine:

Four Minutes To Midnight no. 10, www.lokidesign.net/2356
Nailbiter: An Anxiety Zine, www.steemilie.free23.net
Soulgazers, Camilla Wynne, www.endlessbanquet.blogspot.com
Lickety Split no. 7, www.licketysplitzine.com
Mostly True vol.19 issue 7, Bill Daniel, Microcosm Publishing, www.billdaniel.net, www.microcosmpublishing.com
Place Magazine, Winter 08 issue, www.placemag.org

English Comic:

Mourning a lover, Sofeel, myspace.com/sofeel
Welcome to the Dollhouse by Ken Dahl, Microcosm Publishing, www.microcosmpublishing.com
BFF by Nate Beaty, Microcosm Publishing, natebeaty.com, www.microcosmpublishing.com
Hypocrite, Dakota McFadzean, dakota.mcfadzean.googlepages.com
Finding Joy, Luke Ramsey, Anteism Publishing, islandsfold.com
Kieffer #2, Jason Kieffer, jasonkieffer.com

Nominés francophones fanzines :

Trio à emporter, par Kathey Tibo
Gargouillis indigeste #003, www.gargouillis.com
Ffsshmrwlbaouarf par Simon Bossé/ Mille Putois, www.myspace.com/milleputois
Ectropion, collectif de crémation littéraire, www.myspace.com/ectropion
Fanzine sans titre, Geneviève Dumas
Toxico (Fanzine # 3), par Delf Berg, delfberg.blogspot.com

Nominés francophones BD :

Hasemeister : C’était 2007, Frédéric Mahieu, www.hasemeister.com
La terreur noir pâle, C. Reney
Fatima, A. Desmarteaux, Egotrip Productions, www.arthuro.ca
Une aventure de M. Pixel, Étienne Beck, L’Employé du Moi, www.employe-du-moi.org
Chimeris 1: Sirus, Adeline Lamarre, Vaar Éditeur, www.vaar.ca
Humoro Sapiens, Yayo, Les 400 Coups, www.editions400coups.ca

Nominés francophones livres : À venir …

EXPOZINE
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WORDS THE DOG KNOWS excerpted in Geist #71

I love Geist Magazine. And not just because they just published an excerpt of my novel Words the Dog Knows in their latest issue (Winter 2008-2009 #17). No, I love Geist because they picked a particularly odd ball section of the novel to excerpt, a section that speaks to the very core of what the novel is about, a list of rhetorical words the dog-sitter is convinced the dog knows. As they put it over at Geist: “A human interprets the way a dog interprets the world of humans.”

Here are a few words from that list:

home Home is where they keep the kibble. Home is both the origin and the terminus of the walk. Locus of the soundest sleeps, at home all scents are known.

cyberspace The place where people go while dogs are sleeping.

infinity In the time between sleep and waking there is the great nothingness of the nap.

Read the rest on Geist.com: Words Dogs Know

P.S. Another reason why I love Geist is that they published a very short story of mine called Roads out of Rome back in issue #63, two years ago to be precise, that expanded to become one of my favourite sections of Words the Dog Knows. Thanks Geist.
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WORDS THE DOG KNOWS Makes Some Noise

Check out the Montreal Mirror Noisemakers 2009 issue, FREE on news stands all around town January 8-14, 2009. I’m on the front cover, along with lots of other fine folks making noise this year. Finally, all these years of making noise pay off! There’s an awesome write up by Vincent Tinguely on page 35. “J.R. Carpenter comes across as pretty wordy for a fine arts grad,” Tinguely quips. Read the full story here. And check out the smoking hot photo by Rachel Granofsky. Comments on the photo so far include: “You look like you’re going to clobber us and/or take your shirt off,” “Is that your new album cover?” and “You should cultivate that Bollywood look.”

There was a considerably more staid write up of Words the Dog Knows in the Globe and Mail Saturday, January 10, 2008, that’s also available online here.

I’ll be reading from Words the Dog Knows at The Yellow Door Reading Series, Thursday, January 29, 2009.

3625 Aylmer, Montreal (between Pine & Prince Arthur) Tel: 514-845-2600

Doors open 7:00 pm Reading 7:30 pm At the door $5

To purchase Words the Dog Knows visit the Conundrum Press website: http://www.conundrumpress.com/
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WORDS THE DOG KNOWS – Toronto Launch – Monday, November 17, 2008

We invite you to join us in celebration of the publication of Emily Holton’s latest book, Dear Canada Council/Our Starland (Montreal: Conundrum Press) and J.R. Carpenter’s first novel, Words the Dog Knows (Montreal: Conundrum Press). Animations, music, and two beautiful books – take your pick! – they’re all great excuses to come drink too much in Parkdale on a Monday night.

A This Is Not A Reading Series event presented by Pages Books & Magazines, Conundrum Press and EYE WEEKLY.

Monday, November 17, 2008, 7:00pm
Gladstone Hotel Ballroom
1214 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON

J. R. Carpenter’s long-awaited first novel Words the Dog Knows follows the paths of a quirky cast of characters through the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. Theo and Simone set about training Isaac the Wonder Dog to: sit, come, stay. Meanwhile, he has fifty girlfriends to keep track of and a master plan for the rearrangement of every stick in every alleyway in Mile End. He introduces Theo and Simone to their neighbours. He trains them to see with the immediacy of a dog’s-eye-view. Words the Dog Knows isn’t a story about a dog. It’s a story because of a dog. Walking though the the jumbled intimacy of Montreal’s back alleyways day after day, Theo and Simone come to see their neighbourhood and each other in a whole new way. For more information on Words the Dog Knows please visit: http://luckysoap.com/stories/wordsthedogknows.html

Emily Holton’s novella Dear Canada Council is an illustrated plea for plane tickets, in which the narrator details her plans to “found a town”. Complete with Incas, crickets, and a small family of deaf-mutes, her written request doubles as what also might be the craziest love poem you’ve ever read. Awestruck and sleepless in Hamilton, she is haunted by visions of celebrity reporter Brian Linehan, obsessed with a young boy she saw once on the TV news, and just wants to do better, get married, and wear a sash, a red mayor’s sash. Can’t Canada Council help her out? // Emily Holton’s Our Starland is a novella broken into small, dreamy pieces. Flash by flash, its pieces ferry a cast of characters through a season as they navigate the fruit picking diaspora of the Okanagan Valley. Hitchhiking, nightwalking, these characters remember the constellations wrong, leave their daughters alone, and sleep outside, once again, but with a sleeping bag this time. For more information on Dear Canada Council / Our Starland please visit: http://www.conundrumpress.com/nt_holton2.html

J. R. Carpenter: http://luckysoap.com
Emily Holton: http://www.emilyholton.com
Conundrum Press: http://conundrumpress.com
THIS IS NOT A READING SERIES: http://www.pagesbooks.ca/events.php

So many dear friends turned out for the NYC and Montreal launches we can’t wait to take the show on the road. Here’s some of the fun we’ve had so far:

NYC launch at KGB Bar, Thursday October 23, 2008

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008
Maya Merrick at the he Book Table

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008
We love you Andy Brown.

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008
It’s this much fun!
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WORDS THE DOG KNOWS – Montreal Launch – Friday, November 7, 2008

Dear Friends. We invite you to join us for an evening of stories, drawings and music in celebration of the publication of J.R. Carpenter’s first novel, WORDS THE DOG KNOWS (Montreal: Conundrum Press) and Emily Holton’s two novella’s Dear Canada Council / Our Starland (Montreal: Conundrum Press), with readings by J. R. Carpenter and Emily Holton, drawings by J. R. Carpenter, Elisibeth Belliveau and Emily Holton and a presentation of J. R. Carpenter’s recent web-based writing project in absentia (presented by Dare-Dare Centre de diffusion d’art multidisciplinaire de Montréal).

SKY BLUE DOOR
5403B Saint-Laurent (view map)
(south of Saint-Viateur, behind Enterprise Car Rental – enter via alleyway)
Friday, November 7th, 7:00 pm – 11:00 pm (free)

For more information on Words the Dog Knows, including full event listings and purchase information, please visit: http://luckysoap.com/stories/wordsthedogknows.html

J. R. Carpenter’s web-based writing project in absentia addresses issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. By manipulating the Google Maps API, Carpenter creates an interactive non-linear narrative of interconnected “postcard” stories, thus haunting a satellite view of the neighbourhood with the stories of former tenants of Mile End (fictional or otherwise) who have forced out by economically motivated decisions made in their absence. in absentia features new fiction by J. R. Carpenter with invited authors: Lance Blomgren, Andy Brown, Daniel Canty, Alexis O’Hara and Colette Tougas. Some of the stories in in absentia also appear in Words the Dog Knows. To view in absentia online please visit: http://luckysoap.com/inabsentia

For more information on Our Starland / Dear Canada Council please visit: http://www.conundrumpress.com/nt_holton2.html

J. R. Carpenter: http://luckysoap.com
Emily Holton: http://www.emilyholton.com
Conundrum Press: http://conundrumpress.com
Dare-Dare Centre de diffusion d’art multidisciplinaire de Montréal: http://dare-dare.org
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The Pilot Reading Series October Edition

Presented by Matrix magazine, Pop Montreal and the QWF.

J.R. Carpenter
a. rawlings
Darren Bifford
Michelle Sterling
Rebecca Silver Slayter

hosted by Mike Spry
music by Billy Fong Parade

Sunday October 26th
Bar Blizzarts, 3956A St. Laurent, Montreal
doors @ 9 – readings @ 9:30

J. R. Carpenter grew up on a farm in Nova Scotia and has lived in Montreal since 1990. She is a two-time winner of the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition and a Web Art Finalist in the Drunken Boat Panliterary Awards 2006. Her electronic literature has been presented internationally. Her short fiction has been broadcast on CBC Radio, translated into French, and anthologized in Le livre de chevet, Short Stuff, Lust for Life and In Other Words, and has appeared in journals including Geist, The New Quarterly and Matrix. Her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, is published by Conundrum Press (Montreal, 2008). http://luckysoap.com

a.rawlings’ first book, Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006, Alcuin Award recipient, Gerald Lampert Award nominee), documents a night in the life of Northern Ontario. rawlings co-edited Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, 2005), co-organized The Lexiconjury Reading Series (2001-6), and hosted Heart of a Poet (2005). She currently facilitates sound/text/movement workshops for all ages. a.rawlings’ escapist fantasies feature kynlíf með álfum, Ghentish snails, and a theremin; and yes, someday, she will escape.

Darren Bifford currently lives in Montreal, where he teaches philosophy at Champlain College, St. Lambert. He is the reviews editor for Matrix.

Michelle Sterling lives and longs for the nineties in Montreal. She is a member of the Soulgazers writing collective and her work has appeared in Maisonneuve, Islands Fold, $2 Comes With A Mixtape, and The Art of Trespassing by Invisible Publishing.

Rebecca Silver Slayter is an MA student in creative writing at Concordia University and an editor of Brick literary journal. She has published fiction in places like The Antigonish Review and The Hart House Review, and won a Hart House Poetry Prize and a Hart House Fiction prize in 2003 (2nd place in both cases).
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