lapsus linguae

The Stones of Halifax

Halifax is one of those cities that used to be great, back when the world was a different place. Back when navel might meant more than nightlife. Back when ships had sails and guns had bayonets, Halifax was one hopping town. Like Carthage, until the Romans burned it to the ground. Like Saint Louis, until… well, I’m not sure what happened to Saint Louis, and I realize it’s inland, but still, walking around Saint Louis you can tell it used to be one heck of a town.

Halifax still has this weird beauty. Part of it is just good genes. Like high cheekbones, they never get old. Halifax has some natural assets that neither time nor the global economy can wear away. The ocean, for one. The deep harbour still comes in handy. As James Salter writes of Barcelona at dawn: “All the great avenues are pointing to the sea.”

Fog has a way of making dilapidation seem intentional. As Ruskin writes of Venice in the final period of her decline: “a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak – so quiet, – so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow.” I had never noticed before how much this portion of NSCAD looks like a Venetian Palazzo.

There are some very hip restaurants in Halifax now, even by Montreal standards. And there are funky clothing boutiques that I can’t afford to buy things in; is that a sign of progress? Condo developments crust the waterfront like barnacles, hastily thrown up and unsightly. Half the storefronts on Barrington Street stand empty, the same as ever. I was in Halifax the day the NFB building burned down. When was that, fifteen years ago? The façade still stands charred and buttressed with timber, the window-plywood heavily postered. Next door the Kyber Art Centre hangs on by a thread. Across the street from these ruins: a restaurant called Chives and a café called Ciboulette. As a Montrealer I find this perplexing. A friend and I meet for tea at Ciboulette. We haven’t seen each other in almost two years but the first thing I want to know is: does everyone know that ciboulette is the French word for chives? Yes, she assures me, Ciboulette and Chives are run by the same people. Phew. We are sitting in the second-floor window. A portion of the interior wall has been removed to reveal a stone volute, part of the building’s original façade. This is a surprise. From the outside the building is nondescript. I love that they’re preserved it, my friend says, but hate knowing it was bricked over in the first place.

In The Stones of Venice Ruskin addresses himself to the task of determining some law of right, “which we may apply to the architecture of all the world and of all time.” He deduces that we require of buildings two practical duties: “acting and talking: – acting, as to defend us from weather or violence; talking, as the duty of monuments of tombs, to record facts and express feelings; or of churches, temples, public edifices, treated as books of history, to tell such history clearly and forcibly.” Certainly, in Halifax, defending us from weather is of utmost importance. The one free day I have to walk around it blows and spits snow fiercely. The virtues of Halifax’s predominantly short squat architecture are clear. The graveyard’s gravestones do seem forcibly expressive though. They say: Get inside you idiot, before you catch your death of cold.

The most beautiful thing about Halifax is that in ten minutes you can be outside it. I don’t mean in the suburbs, I mean completely outside. If you survive the circular logic of the Armdale Rotary, that is. My last day in the city I meet friends for brunch at Jane’s on the Commons. Afterwards, I have about an hour to kill and they have a car. Let’s go somewhere rugged, I say. They say: Chebucto Head, it’s like Peggy’s Cove but a cliff. Perfect! An alarming number of brand new mega-mansions now cling like blue mussels to barren bluffs along the Herring Cove Road. I’d like to think that if I had enough money to buy up the last ocean front property on the continent I’d build something pretty on it, but who’s to say. These houses are mere shells, and, as Ruskin says of shells: “their being mere emptiness and deserted houses, must always prevent them, however beautiful in their lines, from being largely used in ornamentation.”

During World War II Halifax Harbour was the primary fast convoy departure and arrival point in eastern North America. There several battles between Allied surface escorts and Nazi U-boats the waters off Chebucto Head. Those were the days. A concrete hull of the Royal Canadian Navy coastal gun battery built to ward off the U-boat menace is all that remains. The wind is so strong that it’s a struggle to push the car door open. We stand aslant to the blowing snow at the edge of the lighthouse’s ruined parking lot and attempt to distinguish ocean from sky. A foghorn goes off directly behind us, so loud that I scream. I scream so loud that I stumble. When I stumble I discover I’m standing on a patch of black ice. So then I really stumble, and fall face first into my friend. I get my lip-gloss all over her scarf. Damn. Why do all of my Nova Scotia stories end in embarrassment? Fortunately my friend is not standing on black ice. We manage to right ourselves. We don’t fall off Chebucto Head and down into a salt-watery grave to spend eternity with the U-boats. So, a happy ending after all.

. . . . .

A Semiotics of Public Speaking

If folk wisdom and the Internet are to be believed, a surprisingly high number of people fear public speaking more than they fear death. And unless Wikipedia is pulling my leg, the official term for the fear of public speaking is Glossophobia, from the Greek words glōssa, meaning tongue, and phobos, fear or dread. I have never been afraid of public speaking. Or private speaking. Talking is one of my favourite things to do. Rumour has it my first words were a whole sentence. As a toddler I kept up a constant commentary on every single thing I saw, heard, thought, ingested or excreted. In elementary school, Show & Tell was my best subject. In art school I lived for Critiques. It would have made sense to become a Professor, fond as I am of oration and debate. But I took a more independent route. And a quieter one. Most days I sit at home writing, speaking only occasionally to pose rhetorical questions to my dog. But every now and then I feel a bout of Show & Tell coming on. I get an overwhelming urge to talk to a whole room full of people at once and then there’s nothing for it but to start planning PowerPoint presentations in my head. If there is a Greek word for that, I don’t know what it is.

Around this time last year I decided I wanted to revisit some places in Nova Scotia, where I grew up, and that the best way to get there would be to get invited to give an artist’s talk. It seemed like a straightforward plan at the time. I spent most of 2007 pestering and cajoling professors and gallery directors at universities across Nova Scotia to hook me up. By mid-fall I’d talked my way into speaking engagements at Acadia University, Dalhousie Art gallery and NSCAD. But, as the title of this blog may suggest, non-stop talking leads to slip-ups sometimes. Lapsus Linguae is Latin: lapsus, meaning a lapse or a slip, and linguae, meaning tongue. Just days before embarking on this Show & Tell Tour of Atlantic Canada, I came down with a vicious sore throat and promptly lost my voice. I’m pretty sure the Greek word for that is ironia, meaning irony.

I immediately started reading way too much into the situation. Was this loss of voice a premonition of failure to come? Or was it an echo of the voiceless past reasserting itself? Acadia University is in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where I went to Elementary School for grades four and five. I was regularly shushed in and out of class and however much I loved Show & Tell, my exhaustive focus on Tell over Show won me few fans and continues to plague my fiction writing to this day. Either way, I was going to get my voice back.

I stayed in bed for two days. I ate so much raw garlic that I was apologizing for my breath even in emails. Through sheer force of will I refrained from talking. The date of my departure dawned sunny and clear, which I took as a good sign. My chronically late mother-in-law arrived on time to drive me to the airport. Another good sign. I decided that if I could explain the topic of my upcoming talks to her – in French, on the Metropolitan Autoroute, in between divining directions and watching for hidden highway signs – then there was some hope that the talks would go over well. I don’t know if she understood exactly what the talks would be about, but she got it loud and clear that I would be paid for them and this impressed her. We only almost died three times during the twenty-five minute drive, which I took as a blessing from on high as usually her old-lady driving statistics average out much nearer the near-death side. We arrived at the airport early and in one piece. I had no problems at security and the flight was uneventful. I recommend to anyone with a fear of flying, or aerophobia, to get a lift to the airport with my mother-in-law. That will put things into perspective.

My first hour in Nova Scotia was spent in the airport waiting for Jon Saklofske, my colleague from Acadia; his carpool schedule and Air Canada’s did not quite correspond. I bought a coffee from a grim Arrivals area café for the free wireless Internet access with every purchase, but no matter how many times I entered the network key (long as my arm) I could not connect. I took this to be a very bad sign (as I had just been flown in to present Internet-based work) until I realized that no one else in the café could connect either. That cheered me right up. I went to sit near the exit where Jon would soon (fingers crossed) miraculously appear. A spectacularly fuchsia sunset ensued. Beautiful, but vaguely post-apocalyptic. Unsure how to read this sign I decided: When in the Maritimes, aphorize as the Maritimers do. Red at night, sailor’s delight. All good.

Jon showed up right on time – yet another good sign – but there was a funky smell in his van – not good at all. I promised not to post any information on the Internet about this smell, a promise I aim to keep in deference to how much driving me around he and his wife did in the few days I stayed with them. Besides, the smell quickly abated once we ganged up on it and accused it of being a burnt smell rather than a rotten one, thus mechanical in nature rather than satanical as initially suspected. Whoops! I guess I’ve gone and written about the smell after all. Sorry Jon, lapsus linguae.

We drove through the dark. Each green highway sign we passed inducing a wave of place-name nostalgia in me: Hammonds Plains, Bog Road, Nesbitt Street! Jon loves to talk just as much as I do and we had a lot of catching up to do. What little voice I had was soon gone. That night I dreamt I was teaching Jon’s six-year-old son sign language. In the morning Jon’s wife informed that their son already knew sign language, which was a huge relief.

I spent a day wandering around Wolfville, my old hometown, scanning for signs of recognition and scrutinizing signifiers of change, all the while worrying over my voice worse than an opera singer’s understudy. Some things were more exactly the same than others. Somehow I’d completely forgotten about a store called The Market where I used to hang out as a semi-delinquent teen. Walking in I had the closest thing to an acid flashback possible for someone who’s never done acid.

No wonder the secretary at the Wolfville Elementary School seemed highly suspicious of me. I said I wanted to take a look at my old classrooms. She quizzed me: What years were you here? What her skepticism a sign that people never leave here, or that they never come back? Who were your teachers, she wanted to know? I’m so bad with names for a moment I drew a blank, which didn’t help my case. Mr. Thompson? I was guessing. Yes, he’s still here, she said, and grudgingly granted me a visitor’s pass.

I never went to Acadia but when I was about ten my mother did a stint there. As far as all parties were concerned, the vending machines in the Acadia Student Association Building made a perfectly good babysitter. In grade eleven my best friend Dana Cole and I split the cost of a library card at Acadia’s Vaughn Library. We used to drive in regularly from Windsor to check out books. What a bunch of dorks. Paid off though, I guess. She’s a PharmD now and Acadia had just flown me in to give an artist’s talk.

The day of my talk dawned incredibly early. Due to Jon’s cruel and unusual teaching schedule we were at Acadia by 8:30AM. I spent most of the day holed up in his office in the English Department doing my best impersonation of a Romantics Professor. I broke character for about an hour to go speak to Andrea Schwenke Wyile’s Graduate Honours English class, Beyond Words: Graphic Literary Art & The Representation of Ideas. It’s always a bit of an ontological struggle to lecture to a class I wish I were taking, but the students asked good questions and as far as I could tell it went well. I was tuckered out afterward. I had yet to develop a fear of public speaking but was beginning to worry about public sleeping. Narcolepsy, that’s a Greek word too, isn’t it? To be on the safe side I took a power nap on Jon’s office floor.

My talk was scheduled for 7PM in a state of the art auditorium in the K. C. Irving Building, which certainly wasn’t around back in the day. I wonder if my life would have turned out differently if, instead of being left to fend for myself over by the ASA vending machines, I’d been brought up by the K. C. Irving’s fireplace, brass lamps and leather couches. In the upstairs atrium the water falling into stone fountains recessed into the Naples Yellow walls sounded exactly like hundreds of fingers racing over laptop keyboards in the quiet of a darkened lecture hall. Downstairs the auditorium soon reached a respectable capacity and my talk was underway.

For all my worrying over losing my voice, and despite a slight fever and a horribly painful patch of eczema blossoming on my right eyelid, once I got going everything was fine. Did my bit about how I couldn’t wait to get out of rural Nova Scotia and then the minute I got to Montreal I started making work about rural Nova Scotia and everyone laughed. Phew. Said how the interface of The Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls was inspired by those tourist restaurant placemats with maps of Nova Scotia on them and everyone nodded knowingly. All right then. Moved on to the more recent work. The videos in How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome were loading deadly slowly, but whatever, it kind of fit with the ancient themes in the work so I talked around it. I was in full swing, right smack dab in the middle of Entre Ville, when the projector conked out. The screen went black and my mind went blank. What the hell’s the Greek word for that?

A conversation is a journey, and what gives it value is fear. You come to understand travel because you have had conversations, not vice versa. What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.
Anne Carson, The Anthropology of Water

You never really know what your worst nightmare is until you’re in it. I’d been so worried about not being able to speak that it never occurred to me I’d wind up with nothing to show for myself. I tried imagining the audience in their underwear. That was no help. Jon and I pushed all the buttons on the lectern’s consol to no avail. You’d better go call someone, I said. He bounded out of the auditorium. I just stood there. Deer in the headlights, only there was no headlight. Think, I told my brain. Think.

For reasons never previously clear to me I’ve always traveled with printouts of the full texts my electronic literature projects are based on. So, I said to the audience. We were just looking at Entre Ville… I happen to have the poem it’s based on here… How about I read it? And then all of a sudden we had a good old-fashioned poetry reading on our hands. Which was fairly ironic considering it was the English Department that had brought me in. And if there were any sceptics of electronic literature in the room, all their most firmly held conviction had just been proven true.

By the time I’d finished reading Entre Ville Jon had gained access to the control room in the back of the auditorium. I could see him in there frantically talking on his cell phone. Look, I said to the audience, when what I really meant was listen. If anyone wants to storm out right now that’s fine with me. I won’t take it personally. I’ll just blame the projector. But if anyone’s interested in staying, I have some more stories here… No one left. So I started reading Sniffing for Stories and tried not to look toward the control booth where Jon was still on the phone, gesturing frantically, and pushing buttons all over the place in a manner reminiscent of Chewbacca co-piloting the Millennium Falcon. At some point the main projector screen rose up into the ceiling. Okay. A minute later another smaller screen descended. A television show came on briefly – it seemed to be about home renovation – and then that too disappeared. Then – boom – we were back to my web site. I was still reading Sniffing for Stories so I got that text up on screen and kept right on reading.

All things considered, the rest of the talk went exceptionally well considering how horribly wrong that wrong patch went. People stayed and asked questions and came up after and bought mini-books as if nothing humiliating at all had happened. Between the auditorium and Jon’s office he filled me in on the phone conversation he’d been having in the control room. Turns out the one night I’m giving a talk on web-based electronic literature they’re doing maintenance on the bandwidth. No wonder my Quicktimes were loading stone-slow. During the taxi ride home we had elaborated the catastrophic parts into the stuff of legend. And speaking of the Stuff of Legend, our taxi driver was a grizzled old dude with long hair and a long beard and he was playing the most awesome music so finally Jon said, Man! I’ve got to ask, what have you got on in here? The driver smiled beatifically: The Essential Chaka Khan, man. The Essential Chaka Khan.

Okay, so I guess now we know what the soundtrack will be in the scene where Jon and I meet up again twenty years from now in a hotel bar at a conference somewhere and start reminiscing about the time we convinced Acadia to fly me in for a talk and then the Internet went down and the projector bulb blew and a small fire started in the lectern consol and the control room filled with smoke and porn started playing on the big screen and the police came and raided the joint cause the whole audience was in their underwear and then a woman gave birth in the isle.

But at least I didn’t lose my voice.
. . . . .

HAVE YOUR DESTINATION IN MIND

One of my favourite books of all time is The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer. I named one of my favourite cats off all time after the main character, Milo, who didn’t know what to do with himself – not just sometimes, but always. “Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered.” One day Milo comes home from school and finds an enormous package in his room containing the following items: One genuine turnpike tollbooth; three precautionary signs; assorted coins for use in paying tolls; one map, up to date and carefully drawn my master cartographers, depicting natural and man-made features; and one book of rules and traffic regulations, which many not be bent of broken. Having lots of time on his hands and nowhere better to be, Milo assembles the tollbooth, hops in a small electric automobile he just happened to have kicking around in his room, drives through the tollbooth and proceeds to have many clever and pun-filled adventures. He befriends a watchdog named Tock (tic-tock, tic-tock). Together they travel through Dictionopolis to Digitopolis and (I hope I’m not giving too much away) rescue Rhyme and Reason from the Mountains of Ignorance. No one told him it was impossible to do this until after he’d done it!

As a kid in rural Nova Scotia I pretty much always wished I were somewhere else. At school I wished I were home and at home I wished I were outside. Outside there was nothing to do. All school year I waited for summer. Every summer I went to New York City to visit family. New York was a filthy, hot and crime-ridden – and my family lived there! – so and almost as soon as I got there I couldn’t wait to leave.

One of the three precautionary signs that came with the Phantom Tollbooth advised: HAVE YOUR DESTINATION IN MIND. Milo consulted the map, also provided:

It was a beautiful map, in many colors, showing principal roads, rivers and sear, towns and cities, mountains and valleys, intersections and detours, and sites of outstanding interest beautiful and historic.
The only trouble was that Milo had never heard of any of the places it indicated, and even the names sounded most peculiar.
“I don’t thing there really is such a country,” he concluded after studying it carefully. “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway.” And he closed his eyes and poked a finger at the map.

When I was twelve years old decided to move to Montreal. I procured a map of the city and thumbtacked it above my bed. I left home the minute after high school. If you would have told me back then that I’d spend the next fifteen years in Montreal writing about rural Nova Scotia I would have said: Shoot me now! But that’s what happened. Check out this early electronic literature project, circa 1997 – the interface is a map of Nova Scotia: The Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls

In 2006 I was commissioned by the OBORO New Media Lab to create a web project for the 50th anniversary of the Conseil des Arts de Montreal. The resulting work, Entre Ville, was my first big piece about Montreal. Finally! I had figured out how to write about where I actually live. So what did I do? I took Entre Ville on the road. I’ve become habituated to talking about where I live to people who live elsewhere – a side-effect, I suspect, of growing up in a different country than everyone I’m related too.

A year to the day after Entre Ville launched at the Musée des beaux-arts I presented it at a Media in Transition conference at MIT. There I met Jon Saklofske – an English professor at Acadia University. Acadia is in Wolfville, Nova Scotia – one of my old hometowns. I went to Wolfville Elementary School for grades four and five. Jon professed to be a fan of Entre Ville so I immediately started pestering him to wrangle me an invite to do an artist’s talk at Acadia. How perverse. After years of writing about Nova Scotia in Montreal I now all of a sudden I wanted to show my Montreal work in Nova Scotia? How very Milo, always wishing I were somewhere else.

The first thing Milo has to do when he drives through the Phantom Tollbooth is to get Beyond Expectations. Not to conflate my mission to get a free plane ticket out of an academic institution with Milo’s mission to rescue Rhyme and Reason from the Mountain of Ignorance, but a) I’m glad nobody told Jon or me that it was an impossible mission before we embarked on it, and b) I haven’t even got there yet and I’m already grateful to so many people met along the way. There were a few setbacks in the beginning and for a while there my expectations were running low. It was summer, for one thing. So no one was around for Jon to pester on his end. When the school year finally started up again the Acadia faculty went on strike, putting all plans on hold. Happily the strike ended happily. Things started to move more quickly after that. By mid-fall the travel funding was approved and a date was set so I started making inquiries about lining up other talks at other universities. These were immediately met with an outpouring of enthusiasm, generosity, support and offers of couches to sleep on. Thanks to Jon for starting the ball rolling. Get one good thing going and other good things will flock to it. Thanks Andrea Cooper for putting me in touch with Peter Dykhuis at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, Jessica Andrews for putting me back in touch with Trevor and Michele, Trevor for reminding me that Randy Knott taught at NSCAD, Randy for putting me in touch with David Clark at NSCAD and Michael-Andreas for enrolling in that lithography workshop at NSCAD way back when – I can’t wait to see you again old friend.

There is a very funny bit about two-thirds of the way through The Phantom Tollbooth with Milo, Tock and their friend the Humbug (yes, he’s a bug who hums). They’re driving along intent on their mission:

The shore line was peaceful and flat, and the calm sea bumped it playfully along the sandy beach. In the distance a beautiful island covered with palm trees and flowers beckoned invitingly from the sparkling water.
“Nothing can possibly go wrong now,” cried the Humbug happily, and as soon as he’d said it he leaped from the car, as if stuck by a pin, and sailed all the way to the little island.
“And we’ll have plenty of time,” answered Tock, who hadn’t noticed that the bug was missing – and he, too, suddenly leaped into the air and disappeared.
“It certainly couldn’t be a nicer day,” agreed Milo, who was too busy looking at the road to see that the others had gone. And in a split second he was gone also.

The beautiful island beckoningly invitingly was called Conclusions and Milo, Tock and the Humbug had all jumped to it.

I’m not sure what I was thinking when I first started pestering Jon. I haven’t been to Nova Scotia in eight years and I can’t remember the last time I was in Wolfville. When I presented Entre Ville at MIT I started with a map of Montreal and said: I live here. Did I think I was going to swoop down from Montreal and pull off a stunt like that in my old hometown? Fortunately Andrea Schwenke Wyile at Acadia saved me, though perhaps unwittingly, from jumping to Conclusions. She came up with the title for the talk I’ll give there: Mapping a Web of Words. I’ve used maps in many of my electronic literature projects – as images, interfaces and metaphors for long-ago places and pasts that could never be mine. Andrea’s title started me thinking about maps in more practical terms. Digging though my files I found photographic evidence of the large map of Montreal that hung on the cluttered walls of my bedroom throughout junior and senior high. No wonder I wound up in Montreal. For years I’ve had a Geology Map of Nova Scotia hanging on the cluttered wall of my Montreal office. No wonder I keep writing about Nova Scotia. The title, Mapping A Web of Words, underlined this mirror map inversion. The contrariness of it all reminded me immediately of The Phantom Tollbooth so I went to find the book on the shelf. Opening it for again for the first time in a few years I was confounded by the map inside the front cover. How could I have forgotten about this map?

The first time I read The Phantom Tollbooth I was nine years old. I was in the fourth grade at Wolfville Elementary School. I wrote a book report about it on single sheet of foolscap. It’s the only piece of schoolwork I still have from those years:

My book took place in an amaganary world witch you enter through the phantom tollbooth. Its realy like a world in a world.

On the back I drew a map of Milo’s route beyond Expectations, through the Doldrums, into Dictionopolis, past the Sea of Knowledge, onward to Digitopolis and upward into the Mountains of Ignorance to rescue Rhyme and Reason from the prison there. The map I drew in no way resembles the map in the front of the book.

HAVE YOUR DESTINATION IN MIND.

J. R. Carpenter: Mapping a Web of Words

Acadia University, KC Irving Auditorium (Wolfville, NS)
Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 7pm

Dalhousie Art Gallery, (Halifax, NS)
Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 8pm

Noontime talk at NSCAD, (Halifax, NS)
Friday, February 29, 2008 at 12:15pm
. . . . .

The Evolution of the Mini-Book

When I was about six I had a subscription to Owl magazine. In one issue they had a page you cut out, cut up and collated into a mini-book about birds. In 32 pint-sized panels The Owl Mini-Book of Birds introduced twenty-seven orders of birds beginning with the most primitive, flightless birds, and ending with the most advanced, perching birds. I’ve moved house at least 12 times since I was six, but somehow that wee book never got lost in the shuffle. I still have it.

When I was in high school I was painting horrible abstracts in acrylics on canvas board, writing excruciating poetry and studying classical guitar. I can sight-read music, but I’m completely tone deaf so a career in music was out. It was a toss-up between writing and visual arts until, when I was fifteen going on sixteen, I spent a summer in New York studying life drawing and anatomy at the Art Student’s League. There under the tutelage of Nicki Orbach I became simultaneously addicted to drawing and anatomical drawings and decided to apply to art school. If you’ve just Googled yourself and are reading this now Nicki Orbach, know that you changed my life.

When I was seventeen I got into Concordia Fine Arts and soon after got a job at the Concordia Fine Arts Library. There I became simultaneously addicted to the disordered stacks of the now defunct Norris Library and the Fine Arts Slide Library photocopy machine. I used the hell out of that photocopy machine. I carried obscure anatomy books out the library by the armload, photocopied all the diagrams and returned the books unread. There were complaints. I almost got fired a number of times. For more on my tawdry affair with the photocopier, read: A Little Talk About Reproduction.

This was in the early nineties, I should mention, before personal computers came along and made themselves accessible. The drawing classes at Concordia were not quite on par with those at the Art Students’ League. I took a collage class with David Moore. There were photos I didn’t want to cut up. So I photocopied them. There were books I didn’t want to cut up, with anatomical diagrams in them more beautiful than anything I could draw, and there were also diagrams for all my other favourite things: botany, embroidery, analytical geometry, you name it. So I photocopied them, called them “found drawings” and found uses for them.

The first mini-book I made as an adult bore the slightly adult title, Bound For Pleasure. It was based on a poem of the same name and was illustrated with an erratum of diagrams ranging from a garter belt to a bandaged foot. The poems got better over time. The collection of found drawings grew. In art school I made four mini-books: Bound for Pleasure, The Confrontation, The Probability of Mummification, and The Basement Family Pharmacy. They’re no longer in print. Mostly I just gave them all away.

In the fall of 1993 I discovered the Internet, got a Unix shell account and set out to learn everything there was to know about computers. By the fall of 1994 I was no longer working at the Slide Library and thus no longer had illicit access to an after-hours photocopy machine. In the fall of 1995 I did a 10-week thematic residency at the Banff Centre, which was call the Banff Centre for the Arts back then. It turns out that all the big things in life happen in the fall.

The theme of the Banff residency was: Telling Stories, Telling Tales. The first story I told them was that I was a writer, which, as far as I knew, I was not, but they let me in anyway. At Banff I attempted to make a number of mid-sized mini-books using the computer, but they never went anywhere. I made this one book based on a circular story. Because it was a book, when people got to the end they just stopped, because that’s what you’re supposed to do with a book. Then the guy in the next studio over pointed out that if I made it into a web page I could link the last page to the first page so the reader could keep going around and around. So I did. My first ever electronic literature project was designed for Netscape 1.1 and it still works: Fishes & Flying Things. The guy in the next studio over was Velcrow Ripper. If you’ve just Googled yourself and are reading this now Velcrow Ripper, know that you changed my life.

I didn’t even think about making another mini-book for years. Too busy paying off my student loan. Luckily web art led to a few marketable skills. I’ve worked in every aspect of the Internet industry, as artist, designer, programmer, teacher, consultant, and even, once, a three-year stint as the manager of a multi-national web development team. I quit that job in the fall of 2001. Yes, in the fall.

After three years in the corporate world I never wanted to look at the web again. So I began writing a novel. About eight months into that as yet unfinished project I realized how long it would take. Needing to finish something immediately in order to sustain my sanity, all of a sudden I found myself making a mini-book. Not surprisingly, that book, Down the Garden Path was all about how incredibly long it takes to “make a thing which then exists and maybe it is beautiful.”

I’m still working on the novel. And a collection of short stories. Or two. The post-corporate traumatic stress disorder has worn off and I’m back to making electronic literature again. Sometimes I do these things separately, more often all at once. Each new mini-book begins with a piece of writing, a short piece that I can’t get out of my head. Images accrue around it. Sometimes other texts attach themselves to my text and sometimes there are videos too. Three of the most recent mini-books are based on web projects: Entre Ville, The Cape, and How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome. The web is nice, but nothing beats cutting stuff up with scissors.

Look for these and other mini-books in DISTROBOTO machines around town. Or just ask me next time you see me – there are usually some in my purse.
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Excerpts from a Timetable of Noteable Arrivals in Rome

1786 – Goethe rushes to arrive in Rome in time for All Saint’s Day. He anticipates conspicuous general feasting, but finds none. Wherever he walks he comes upon familiar objects in an unfamiliar world. Everything is just as he imagined it would be; yet everything is new.

2002 – I fly into Fiumicino two-hundred-and-twenty years to the day after Goethe rode through the Porta del Popolo. It’s raining. All Saint’s Day is a holiday. Most shops are closed. But the Supermarcato stays open. I have rented an apartment. I have a kitchen. A heavy brass key unlocks a massive green door. I walk out into Rome.

“The bronze statues by the city gates show their right hands worn thin by the touch of travellers who have greeted them in passing.”
LUCRETIUS, The Nature of the Universe – Book I

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Tributaries and Text-fed Streams

a feed-reading of The Capliano Review
a new work of electronic literature by J. R. Carpenter
curated by Kate Armstrong

The Capilano Review, a literary journal based in North Vancouver, has commissioned me to create a new work of electronic literature based on a recent issue dedicated to new writing and new technologies. TCR 2-50 “Artifice & Intelligence,” guest-edited by Andrew Klobucar, included essays by: Andrew Klobucar, Global Telelanguage Resources, Sandra Seekins, Kate Armstrong, David Jhave Johnston, Laura U. Marks, Sharla Sava, Kevin Magee, Jim Andrews, Gordon Winiemko, Nancy Patterson and Darren Wershler-Henry.

Tributaries & Text-fed Streams will be a personal, experimental and playful rereading of and response to these essays. I will explore the formal and functional properties of RSS, using blogging, tagging and other Web 2.0 tools to mark-up and interlink essays and to insert additional meta-layers of commentary in order to play with, expose, expand upon, and subvert formal structures of writing, literature, and literary criticism.

Over a four-month period I will read and re-read the essays, parsing them into fragments, which I will then annotate, mark-up, tag and post. Fed into an RSS stream, the fragments will be re-read, reordered, and reblogged in an iterative process of distribution that will open up new readings of the essays and reveal new interrelationships between them. The result of this process-based approach will be a blogchive – part blog, part archive – at once an online repository for the artefacts of re-reading and a stage for the performance of live archiving.

Streams are both literally and metaphorically the central image of the work. Streams of consciousness, data, and rivers flow through the interface and through the texts. Through this process of re-reading and responding, this textual tributary will feed a larger stream while paying tribute to the original source.

Tributaries & Text-fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review will launch simultaneously on thecapilanoreview.ca (Vancouver) and turbulence.org (New York) in the spring of 2008.
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Getting In On The Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together

In the beginning there were only a few of us. That we knew of. We thought there might be others, but we weren’t sure where to look. We were in a room. It was a small room. If it had a glass ceiling, we couldn’t see it. The point was to share the room, and what was in it. What was in it was a lot of paper and also, a computer. It was our understanding that the computer would replace the paper. We hadn’t got that working yet. We had other, more pressing questions: Where is this place called cyberspace? And who pays for it? We asked around, but no one would tell us anything. Go away, they said. You’re no good at math, they said. Which only made us ask more questions: What are they hiding from us – passwords, codes, equipment? What are we missing – information, networks, power? What don’t they want us to know – that if they can do it we can do it? If they can do it than how hard could it possibly be?

One day we decided we would ask the computer. Computer, do you contain any answers to the many questions you engender? We huddled around it. We only had the one. It was a grey-beige box with a beetle-black glass eye. We knew we had to get past the surface of the thing. We knew that deep down inside our grey-beige box was much larger than it appeared. It was connected to other grey-beige boxes in other rooms. Stashed away inside these millions of boxes there must be billions of answers.

We switched the computer on. There was a click, a whir, and then a steady hum. Soon enough we sat basking in a blue-green glow. A cursor blinked at us. We blinked back. Now what do we do? Expectations were running high. We’d been promised progress, deliverance, another chance. And there was this cursor clearing a path to the command line for us, a clean slate. Before we knew it we were giving it orders: run, kill, execute. This kind of language was hard for some of us to take. Some of us just wanted to: sleep, jobs, stop, exit. Others wanted to know more: list, who, finger, history. Cables coiled at our feet. They snaked out the door. We slipped out with them. So this is how we shed our skin!

We had stumbled into uncharted territory, an outlaw zone where we could be anything, anyone, anywhere. We could be logical. We could be abstract. We could be “it” or “he/she” or we could log in as Guest and cruise anonymous through Archie, Gopher, Telnet and FTP. We wandered around like this for a dog’s age. Which, in Internet years, was just a few days. We still had bodies. Our wrists were sore. And everywhere we went we were: @gender, language thwarting us at every turn.

One day we were minding our own business writing shell scripts on the command line when a bright spec appeared on the horizon. It was a pixel. It was a mass of pixels. The pixels joined forces. Soon they formed a thumbnail, and then a whole jpeg. An image! The next thing we knew no one knew who was issuing commands anymore. We were all clicking away on icons. What we saw was what we got. One thing linking to another, faster and faster, around and around we went.

Now all we have to do is ask, and answers come racing at us. So many answers. What were the questions again? They were merely predictions. They enabled us to move forward. Toward what? We never would have guessed. How many of us there are. How much we do and do not know. How are we going to remember all this? Will our uncertainties be stored online, along with our desires? Maybe we’d better print them out just in case. How necessary is closure? Well, it’s a start anyway.

“Getting in on the Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together,” an essay by J. R. Carpenter, published in xxxboîte, an artifact produced in celebration of the first ten years of Studio XX, a Feminist art centre for technological exploration, creation, and critique.

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les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montréal 1990-2006

a new web map writing project by J. R. Carpenter

les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montréal 1990-2006

I moved to Montréal on the night train. I’ve lived in eight neighbourhoods since and each has had a different quality of sleep. There are eight hours for sleeping in, four quarters in each hour, many more quarters in each city. Some quarters never sleep, or so they say. Others seem to be built for dreaming in. These are les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montréal 1990-2006: Car Crash Sleep, Bamboo Blind Sleep, Waterbed Sleep, Louvered Door Sleep, Purple Parakeet Sleep, Break and Enter Sleep, Gondola Sleep and Greek Sleep.

To navigate these neighbourhoods of sleep, take the night train to Montréal (warning: this method may take 16 years). Or do a Google Maps search for J. R. Carpenter les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montreal 1990-2006 and view the user generated content (warning: this method may return variable results). Or follow a direct link to the Google Map of les huit quartiers du sommeil here: http://luckysoap.com/huitquartiers

A Note on the Type: I wrote the text of les huit quartiers du sommeil during a bout of insomnia at Yaddo, January-February 2007. Thanks everyone at the Yaddo dinner table for listening to the thunks and whirrings of this text coming to life. Thanks CALQ for helping me get to Yaddo. I built the Google Maps and HTML versions of huit quartiers in Montréal May-July 2007. Thanks Sandra Dametto for the brilliant idea, and thanks Michael Boyce and Lisa Vinebaum for the careful readings. The aerial photographs are totally copyright you, Google Earth. Thanks in advance for having a sense of humour. The other images were found using Google Images and then altered using Photoshop filters until they looked like something I would do. Except for the street maps, those I drew by hand as you can probably tell. Merci Daniel Canty, your English is better than mine. Et merci Stéphane Vermette pour tous.

les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montréal 1990-2006
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Let’s Pretend We Met last Week

Last week we launched Nathaniel G. Moore’s new book of poetry – Let’s Pretend We Never Met – at the Casa del Popolo, “we” being Nathaniel G. himself, Angela Hibbs, Mary Williamson, me, J. R. Carpenter, and some of our closest friends. Perhaps it would have been a good idea to write about this event before it happened, for PR purposes, but things didn’t work out that way. It was a lovely evening thanks to the many sweet friends who showed up minimal prompting.

The first person to thank is Nathaniel, for writing a new book – a new book is always such a good excuse for a reading and a reading is always such a good excuse for hanging out with friends and drinking. A far as I know Nathaniel and I have never pretended that we never met. We’re both Rome junkies. Let’s Pretend We Never Met riffs on the poems and life of Catullus, a Roman poet of the first century BC. Catullus was the first to write about his personal life in the tawdry way we all do nowadays. Nathaniel drags the lusty lovelorn mourning Catullus kicking and screaming, leering and heavy petting into the twenty-first century – or at least into the nineteen-eighties – into a grimly-lit rec-room reality-TV sort of post-pubescent angst. Which sounds awful, but it totally works. Let’s Pretend is a weirdly compelling book – or maybe it’s a concept album? Anyway, pound-for-pound it’s a page-turner.

Another person to thank is Angela Hibbs. Her book is smaller and redder and there’s a girl on the front instead of a guy. Passport is a collection “escape from Newfoundland poems.” I don’t think Ms Hibbs would mind them characterized in this way. They’ve got enough perspective in them to indicate to the reader that the author did indeed escape, but at the same time enough razor-burn rawness to them to indicate that it was a narrow escape, an all-around close call. I would also like to thank Angela for wearing short-shorts, thigh-high stockings and high-heeled cowboy boots.

Third up was Mary Williamson who read a story not presently in a book but bound to be one day. I’d only just met Angela and Mary three nights previous. On that occasion Angela was wearing a blond wig and a gold lame gown and Mary was wearing a redhead wig and a baby blue ball gown and then a red brocaded and fringed flapper number which she kept hiking up to dance flapper-type dances. Given the flapper theme it was all one could do to refrain from yelling: Nice gams! At the reading Mary was reading a story from a boy’s point of view so she was wearing a boy’s cap, undershirt, and jeans found in the garbage. Nathaniel was wearing pants found in the garbage too. Or maybe his were from a yard sale. Mine were.

I was wearing a pair of super skinny jeans bought up the street at a yard sale for three bucks. It’s hard not to buy three-dollar jeans. It’s also hard to sit down in them, these ones anyway. These are my standing up jeans, I kept saying to reading attendees lest they think me pacing nervously. I read some Rome related stuff: Notes On Arrival, a short prose poem culled from the How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome web project; A Timeline of Notable Arrivals in Rome, a new piece written especially for this reading, and Roads Out of Rome, another piece that began as part of Broken Things and was then expanded and adapted and eventually made its way into Geist last winter.

Highlights of the evening included – in no particular order: when, in my reading of A Timeline of Notable Arrivals in Rome, I skipped ahead 1200 years and paused and said – I’m skipping ahead here – and everybody laughed (phew); when friends showed up even though it was summer and Tuesday and a poetry reading no less, and when the afore-mentioned Angela Hibbs showed up in short-shorts.

Nathaniel G. Moore, Let’s Pretend We Never Met
Angela Hibbs, Passport
J. R. Carpenter, How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome
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a few reviews

Oh webstats. You’re so informative! Thanks for letting me know that a quite possibly Australian fellow named Bill Bly wrote a lovely blog post about The Cape, which he discovered in the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1. From The Cape he followed links to Entre Ville, which he describes so vivdly in his post that if I didn’t live here I’d move. Thanks Mr. Bly. http://infomonger.com/bbly/blog/2007/05/between-city.html

Webstats also informs me that CIAC’s Electronic Magazine #27/2007 is dedicated to Net Art: heir, aujourd’hui, demain and that it includes a well-written review by Patrick Ellis of the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1. He mentions The Cape and Entre Ville. Thanks Mr. Ellis. http://www.ciac.ca/magazine/en/compterendu.htm

There are links to other reviews of the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1 on the Electronic Literature Organization web site, including an interesting one by Edward Picot in the Hyperliterature Exchange. Also of note, N. Katherine Hayles’s book Electronic Literature: Playing, Interpreting, and Teaching (coming from Notre Dame Press in fall 2007) will include the CD-ROM of the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1. The first chapter, Electronic Literature: What Is It? is also now available on the Electronic Literature Organization’s website. Thanks ELO.

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