lapsus linguae

in-situ Cité so far

1. first steps

I borrowed a mic from a friend who has a one-year-old

the kid kept grabbing the mic so we gave him a toy mic

then we gave him a toy ball

we rolled the ball down the hall and he chased it

when we tried to record our dog running in the alley

the dog thought the mic was a stick with a ball on the end

he grabbed the foam wind guard and ran off with it

in the early stages, children and dog are quite alike

2. by my calculations

if our dog is eight-and-a-half

than we’ve lived in our five-and-a-half for a dog’s age

we walk our dog other places besides our alley but let’s say we don’t

eight-and-a-half years of three times a day up and three times a day down

that’s eighteen thousand six hundred and fifteen lengths of alley

writing for one length of alley is harder than I thought it would be

it takes five minutes to walk from Fairmount to Saint Viateur

six if you walk slowly

seven if you walk as if intent on studying every scent

eight-and-a-half years if you walk as if sniffing for stories

. . . . .

This summer I’ve been working on an audio narrative walking tour project that will be presented by the Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal during Les Journées de la Culture, September 30 – October 1, 2006. Here’s what the PWM website says:

PWM is proud to present In-situ Cité, five short original environmental theatre pieces, organized as an audio walking tour of the Mile End. Directed by Stephen Lawson, In-situ Cité will showcase the works of of J.R. Carpenter, Nathalie Derome, Skidmore, Geeta Nadkarni, and Rosella Tursi.

From the outset I’ve thought of my piece as a continuation of Entre Ville, with our neighbours as characters and the back alleyway as the terrain. The alleyways of Mile End are a world known and shown to us by our dog. The week we thought Isaac the Wonder Dog was dying (see August posts) I had a massive anxiety attack about In-situ Cité. In the long hours spent sitting and waiting on the concrete floors of vets and animal clinics my whole idea of neighbourhood and community and humanity underwent some major revisions.

Isaac walks us up and down the alleyway three times a day. He introduces us to our neighbours and befriends children – things we would never do of our own volition. We’re not crazy about our neighbours. We’re dog people, not children people. But we make the best of things. We try and look at things from the dog’s eye point of view. Which is how I am now aproaching my In-situ Cité piece.
. . . . .

The Greyhound Eulogy

I’m back from Banff, caught up on sleep, reacclimatized to high heat and humidity and happy to announce that my short story The Greyhound Eulogy appears in Matrix Magazine #74, in stores now, in Montreal at least.

I can’t remember who, but someone said – Gordon Lish maybe, or John Gardner – that it’s impossible to write an unsentimental story about your grandmother. Even though The Greyhound Eulogy is about writing my grandmother’s eulogy on a Greyhound bus bound for NYC, it’s hardly depressing at all thanks to the unsentimental readers: Amy Hempel, Ibi Kaslik, Lilly Kuwashima and Kate Sheldon. Much thanks also to Matrix editors Rob Allen and Jon Paul Fiorentino.

Here’s an excerpt of The Greyhound Eulogy:

“In the town of Glens Falls, N.Y., the Greyhound passes through a protest in progress. On one street corner, amid a cluster of hand-printed placards one small sign stands out: ‘Another veteran against the war.’ On the other side of the street, a wind-warped banner reads: ‘America is worth fighting for.’ I write: ‘Always the optimist, she brought humour to every situation,’ and try to remember her favourite burning Bush joke.”

J. R. Carpenter, The Greyhound Eulogy, Matrix #74, Montreal QC, Summer 2006.
. . . . .

Some Thoughts on Letter Writing

“Writing a letter today, I was struck by the fact that I had been here only three weeks. Three weeks elsewhere, in the country for example, would be like a day; here they seem like years. And I mean to write no more letters. What’s the use of telling anyone that I am changing? If I am changing then surely I am no longer the person I was, and if I am something else than heretofore, then it is clear that I have no acquaintances. And to strange people, to people who do not know me, I cannot possibly write.” Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. M. D. Herter Norton, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1949. Page 15.

“I see him there on a night like this but cool, the moon blowing through black streets. He sups and walks back to his room. The radio is on the floor. Its luminous green dial blares softly. He sits down at the table; people in exile write so many letters. Now Ovid is weeping. Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing. In his spare time he is teaching himself the local language (Getic) in order to compose in it an epic poem no one will ever read.” Anne Carson, On Ovid, from “Short Talks” in Plainwater, NY: Vintage 1995. Page 32.
. . . . .

into the thin air

the thin air has made thieves of us.
homeless and breathless and dry-eyed,
we steal through the night.

through the night our skin thins and flakes,
elbows ashen and ankles arid enough to
scratch the surface of our illicit food dreams.

illicit food dreams feature fillets of fish flying
into our purses. deserts disappear in droves
and wherever we go crumb trails follow.

crumb trails follow us into the forest.
we gnash at snatched sandwiches
and feast on our forbidden fruit.

our forbidden fruit fills us with careful cunning.
into a stash of stolen moments we disappear,
thieves into the thin air.
. . . . .

The Loudest Room

We live in the loudest room.
Our walls are made of sudden noises.
Other people’s showers rain down on us.
Far off phones ring extra loud so we can hear them.
People will talk to a telephone about just about anything.
All the doors travel down the hall to shut near our door.
Our door is in love with the door next door.
The door next door posted private information about us on the Internet.
Now everyone knows there’s a shortcut right though our room.
Outside voices don’t wipe their feet when they come in.
Pieces of passing conversations hang out in our closet.
Housekeeping knocks through the wall to give us fresh towels.
The window is too small to let a breeze through.
But large enough to let the construction crew through.
And the laundry truck’s full arsenal of beeps and groans.
The security guards have top-secret meetings at our desk.
They use up all the coffee whitener and leave the seat up.
The jazz musicians think we think they’re entertaining.
We see through them, passing practice off as serenade.
We don’t know why they need to rehearse.
All they do is improvise.
And hog the bed.
A tenor sax warms up near our heads.
A standing bass strings us along.
We live in suspense, in the loudest room.
Suspended in sleepless animation.
. . . . .

Telling Stories, Telling Tales

Babel, Babble, Rabble, On Language and Art is my second thematic residency at The Banff Centre. Ten Years ago I attended a residency called: Telling Stories, Telling Tales. I was 22 when I applied, and had never written and artist’s statement before. Given the theme, I thought a quasi-fictional tone would be appropriate. Here’s what I sent them:

I could tell you stories. Like the time I was three, and they brought my brother home from the hospital. My uncle ran out into the driveway with an afghan over his head. I could take you to Nova Scotia and show you the afghan. My mother still has it. Then would my story be true? I could take you to North Carolina and we could ask my uncle, but I think his mind’s gone soft with drink. I don’t know, he never writes…

Then when I was five I got in trouble with my teacher for saying that Jupiter had a ring like Saturn. She told my mother I was telling stories.

These stories build and feed and build and feed upon themselves and meet up with themselves around certain corners and repeat themselves and make less and less sense.

I told the story of Chanukah about 8,000 times to the Christian school children of rural Nova Scotia. No one ever believed me.

I train language around the obstacle course of truth, fiction, image and word. I position myself between reading and writing, between pulp fiction and cultural theory. In strange twists of the body, I hold myself between the theoretical convictions of Daily Life Montreal, the rural convictions of Childhood Nova Scotia, and the critical convictions of Grandmother New York. Just today I was a storyteller, a gossip, a theoretician, a geologist and a great fan of analytical geometry.

I could tell you stories about the first time I fell in love. I performed a comedia delle arte retinue of stories, a different one each night, but she didn’t want to hear them. I tried to bake them into a cornbread, but she wouldn’t eat it. So I let the long cool silences of late September afternoons speak for me. I lay in her bed and said nothing. The text left my face and became soft and my teeth melted around her nipple. I woke up in January and realized that she had not understood a word I had not said. I told her I was running away from home, leaving for the mountains, but that I would write her a letter everyday. She laughed at me. She said I was telling stories.
. . . . .

Hennessey’s High Pasture

Hennessey's High Pasture
My short story, Hennessey’s High Pasture, appears in The New Quarterly, #98, Waterloo, ON, Spring 2006. This story used to be called The Bayley-Hazen Road. I began writing in 1996, and submitted it to at least a dozen journals since then. I am grateful to every editor who had the good sense to reject it before it was ready. My thanks to the Trautz family, for helping start the story off; to Jenn Goodwin, first reader; Amy Hempel, generous reader; and Kim Jernigan, The New Quarterly editor who turned up at end of the old Bayley-Hazen Road.

Excerpt from Hennessey’s High Pasture:

“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
. . . . .

Earthquake Weather

My favorite paragraph of fiction on the topic of earthquake weather was written by Amy Hempel, formerly of Claifornia (see below). My favorite paragraph of non-fiction on on the tipic of earthquake weather was written by John McPhee in his book Assembling California:

“People who live in earthquake country will speak of earthquake weather, which they characterize as very balmy, no winds. With prescient animals and fluctuating water wells, the study of earthquake weather is an a category of precursor that has not attracted funds from the national Science Foundation. Some people say that well water goes down in anticipation of a temblor. Some say it goes up. An ability to sense imminent temblors has been ascribed to snakes, turtles, rats, eels, catfish, weasels, birds, hares, and centipedes. Possible clues in animal behaviour are taken more seriously in China and Japan than they are in the United States, although a scientific paper was published in California Geology in 1988 evaluating a theory that ‘when an extraordinarily large number of dogs and cats are reported in the ‘Lost and found’ section of the Sand Jose Mercury News, the probability of an earthquake striking the area increases significantly.’”

John McPhee, Assembling California, NY: FSG,1993, page 260.

. . . .

The Paragraph 101

Here is my favorite paragraph from one of my favorite stories of all time. Amy Hempel says that In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried is the first story she ever wrote. That’s either very inspiring or very depressing, depending on what kind of writing day you’re having.

“What seems dangerous often is not – black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence. While things that just lie there, like this beach, are loaded with jeopardy. A yellow dust rising from the ground, the heat that ripens melons overnight – this is earthquake weather. You can sit here braiding the fringe on your towel and the sand will all of a sudden suck down like an hourglass. The air roars. In the cheap apartments on-shore, bathtubs full themselves and gardens roll up and over like green waves. If nothing happens, the dust will drift and the heat deepen till fear turns to desire. Nerves like that are only brought off by catastrophe.”

Amy Hempel, In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried, Reasons to Live, NY: Harper Collins, 1985.
. . . . .

Category: writing