In(ter)ventions - A Note on the Agenda

In case I haven't mentioned this already, I am really, really, really excited about In(ter)ventions — Literary Practice At The Edge: A Gathering happening at The Banff Centre February 18, 2010 - February 21, 2010. I had the good fortune to be involved in the planning of this event. In December 2008, Steven Ross Smith - Director of Literary Arts at The Banff Centre - invited Marjorie Perloff, Lance Olsen, Fred Wah and me to Banff for a three-day think tank on bringing new practices to the the Literary Arts program. The incredible diversity of practice, knowledge and experience at that table was both humbling and exhilarating. It has been wonderful watching the many names, works, issues and ideas from a vast array of literary practices we discussed coalesce into the dreamboat agenda we have today.

The best part of this agenda is, now we get to go enact it - live in real time in Banff. On Friday, February 19, 2PM, I'm on a panel on Digital Effects – Digital Literary Creation & Dissemination with Stephanie Strickland and Chris Funkhouser moderated by Nick Montfort. Later, at 8PM that evening, I'm doing a reading/performance with Lance Olsen and Erin Moure. Then, on Saturday February 20, at 3:30PM, I'm presenting a screening of digital literature co-curated with Ram Devineni. For the rest of In(ter)ventions I'll be litstening, watching and reading with rapt attention, catching up with friends and generally resisting the urge to ask everyone for their autographs.

The full In(ter)ventions agenda (pdf): http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/id/0900/925/agenda.pdf


. . . . .

In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice At The Edge

In(ter)ventions — Literary Practice At The Edge: A Gathering is a conference unlike any held previously in Canada. Over the course of four days, thirty six forward-thinking literary artists will create a context for the demonstration and discussion of cutting-edge literary practice. In a mixture of panels, papers, readings, performances, and more, participants will explore digital literature, interactivity, collaboration, cross-disciplinary work, formal innovation, "uncreative" writing, new modes of dissemination, and literary pedagogy.



Within the rapidly changing landscape of literary practice and dissemination, technology has rocketed forward, putting more power into the hands of writers and other artists. New literary modes have appeared and continue to develop, and the ability to share information rapidly across disciplines has resulted in exciting and challenging cross-pollination. In(ter)ventions will explore the edges of literature, where technology, innovation, and literary practice meet.

This conference is open to writers, new media artists, students, critics, educators, and others who want to contribute to, or listen in on, the conversation taking place with regards to innovative modes of literature. Participants will come away from this cutting-edge conference with a better understanding of the future of literary practice and inspiration to further explore emerging trends in the discipline.

In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice At The Edge: A Gathering
The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada
February 18, 2010 - February 21, 2010

Director: Steven Ross Smith
Presenters: Charles Bernstein, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, J.R. Carpenter, Maria Damon, Ram Devineni, Craig Dworkin, Al Filreis, Christopher Funkhouser, Kenneth Goldsmith, D. Kimm, Larissa Lai, Daphne Marlatt, Nick Montfort, Erin Moure, Lance Olsen, Stephen Osborne, Marjorie Perloff, Kate Pullinger, Stephanie Strickland, Steve Tomasula, Fred Wah

Further information || Agenda (PDF)
. . . . .

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.
. . . . .

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.
. . . . .

Post-Inter-Hyper-Active

Back in Montreal. After a week of wall to wall presentations, performances, pitches and heated discussions in the chill windowlessness of the RICE Television Studio.

Saw every imaginable kind of work (and some unimaginable kinds of work) that works on screens of every size from 800 x 640 to HD to mobile phone. Sold photocopied mini-books to the most digital people. Got pre-cursive with Daniel Canty. And navigated all kinds of interactions, digital and social and nature-related. Hiked the Hoodo trail without the aide of GPS. Bought a touque and stumbled through a string of glittering cold nights. Mingling of new friends and old at sunset BBQs by glacier-fed rivers (two in total), dance parities (impromptu or otherwise), with djs (Mama Fatou or otherwise), live cinema performance from SOLU (Finland via Barcelona), Notsosimpleton Flash art whisked from the wall, Props Pub shenanigans, and whisky in the Leighton Studios. Made it to breakfast all of once, which is one time more than in all of the seven weeks of Babel Babble Rabble, and the construction site outside Lloyd Hall 119 brought new meaning to The Loudest Room.

Clutching a bundle of business cards collected from a cross-country cross-section of business and art world sheer raw talent, and a DVD from the super solid Randy Knott, I left the high sky and hay fever sun sometime yesterday afternoon, in a muddle of loose-end packing, all-at-once good-byes and off campus brunching. Drove to Calgary in a carful (a word like careful, but moving faster down the highway) of some of the best people I know, who I was loath to leave, my dear friends: Girl at Work Sandra Dametto, that Monkey Michael Boyce and Alexis O'Hara of Filthy Lies and movie star eyes. And brand new friend the mad and mighty Clauda, whose name probably isn't spelled that way at all. Flew through a few time-zones with the irrepressible Matt Donnelly for entertainment. Happy to return to rainy Montreal late last night. Stepped out of the mountains into the heat and humid and wet. And slept, and slept, and slept well for the first time in a week.


The Three Wicked Witches of JPL


Feeling the Love, and the dancehall, from Mama Fatou

[both photos from the kooky kamera of Alexis O'Hara]
. . . . .

Interactive Active

It's strange and wonderful to be back at Banff so soon after the Babel Babble Rabble residency. So many memories of so many people in so many unexpected places. I'm am eternally grateful to Emily Page and the BNMI for this opportunity. There are amazing people presenting and performing all day and night and I have to shake my head sometimes to make sure I'm not dreaming, but too hard because a) I don't want any of this stuff I'm learning to fall out, and b) I'm extremely hung over.

Here are some Interactive Screen and other BNMI URLs:

The Banff new Media Institute
http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/

Interactive Screen O.6 Wiki (scroll to bottom for ongoing list of URLs referenced in the conference)
http://iascreen06.wikispaces.com/

Anne Galloway's very up-to-date blog on the event
http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/

PRE-CURSOR (my presentation)
http://luckysoap.com/is06/



photo by SOLU: http://www.solu.org
. . . . .

PRE-CURSOR

It's great to be back at Banff. It feels like I never left, only managed to not eat at the dining hall for a few weeks. Interactive Screen 0.6 - Media: Margins: Migrations is well underway. Saturday evening we meeted and greeted in the bracing mountain air. So many amazing people here. Yesterday was our first full day of think tanking. Yesterday evening I went into town to buy a touque because it's so cold here at night. I presented this AM and am now free to listen, learn and roam. More information on the presentation I just gave and on the conference/think tank in general: http://www.luckysoap.com/is06/
. . . . .

IS 0.6 Abstract

Interactive Screen 0.6 is fast-approaching. The agenda is firming up and abstracts will soon become less so. I present on Monday, August 14, 2006 at 10AM along with Vancouver/New York based artist Kate Armstrong in a session called Creative Commons: Art, Activism, and the Database. Here's the abstract I sent in moments before yesterday's deadline:

Pre-Cursor: A discussion of political and pragmatic aspects of independent production, online publication, fabricating fiction and recycling code. J. R. Carpenter will chase narrative threads across media and trace technological continuities between her hypertext fictions and their precursive forms, which include: the book, the zine, the lab report, the slide show, the guide book, the bulletin board and graffiti.

Sound abstract? Here are some specific examples:

The Zine: Fishes & Flying Things

In 1995 I tried to start making zines with a computer instead of a photocopier and wound up making my first website instead. I still make zines with a photocopier.

The Slide Show: Send More Than Words... EVERYBODY LOVES PICTURES

In 2003 I found this sequence of captioned photos that my uncle took and sent to my grandmother 40 years ago and the forgot about. A borrowed slide-show script brought them back to life.

The Lab Report: The Cape

The images, diagrams and maps in The Cape are culled from a hard copy of an Environmental Geologic Guide to Cape Cod National Seashore published in 1979, which happens to be when the story is set.

The Guide Book: How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome

The cluttered interface of How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome is inspired by the pedagogical style of the modern guide book and a 500 year history of travel writing.

Graffiti: Entre Ville

Entre Ville is an amalgam of the graffiti tags, gardens, garbage and gossip of my back alleyway... You can't make this stuff up.

. . . . .

Interactive Screen

By my calculations I’ve yet to be back from Banff for as long as I was away at Banff for the Babel, Babble, Rabble: On Language and Art residency. And now, thanks to some strange twists of fate, some hustle, and some just plain good fortune, The Banff New Media Institute has invited me to return to participate as a Senior Artist in Interactive Screen, August 13-18, 2006.

Interactive Screen is a new media development think tank now in its 11th year, which is long, in Internet years. Canadian and international new media types converge at Banff each summer to ponder, study, workshop, present, perform, mentor, share, discuss, collaborate and reflect on the current state of new media art and the shape of things to come.

A think tank is not a think tank without a subtitle. This year’s is: Interactive Screen – Margins: Media: Migrations. “Margins can be taken to mean 'profit.' They also point the way to the 'outside'. These terms provide us with a means to turn and twist the meaning of media. Media forms have the power to migrate through the boundaries that define our experience – turning them inside out, and outside in. At the interface, it becomes possible to make 'profit' share in the values that we choose to make ours.”

For more official-sounding writing like this please visit the official-looking website: http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/interactive_screen06/

And a think tank needs to be stocked with every size fish. As an independent producer of mostly free art, I fall within the "outside" meaning of "margin" rather than the "profit" meaning. I am extremely grateful to BNMI and the Banff Centre for inviting me anyway, and for paying my airfare, because otherwise I would never in a million years be able to attend, benefit from, or contribute to such an awesome event.

One of the things I was reminded of during the Babel Babble Residency at Banff is that I make really low tech high tech art, and I persist in doing this for some pretty stubborn yet specific reasons. So at Interactive Screen I’ll attempt to address their general theme: High Tech/Low Tech/New Tech/No Tech: innovating, recycling and sharing technologies in a culture of wealth and waste. I’ll talk about artists and independent orginizations and producers near and dear to my heart; indi-publishing and zine culture; how and why I re-use and recycle found images, found texts, and found code; and how I’ve used the web to remain independent and sometimes circumvent certain cumbersome institutions.

I’ll post more as I sort through the ideas and issues of this theme. In the meantime, here are some of my other Internet Writings on related themes:

"Responsa Literature: Partial Replies to Scattered Questions"
"Ingrid Bachmann: Digital Crustaceans v.0.2: Homesteading on the Web"
"A brief history of the Internet as I know it so far"
"A Little Talk about Reproduction"

. . . . .

Leaving Banff

leaving is hard
especially people and places you love
especially early in the morning

driving away from mountains is hard too
even after you stop looking over your shoulder
they’re still there in the back of your head

there’s nothing fun about an airport
except arriving at your departure gate and
hearing and the half-forgotten accents of home

on the plane I sat next to a guy who had never flown before
he was older, anxious, without English, hands scared, arms brown
and the whole flight I tried to look at everything as if I’d never seen if before

flying over Montréal I spotted our apartment
easy to do as there’s a large, green, copper-domed church near us
and even from the air I could see the Portuguese football fans going crazy

my husband met me at the baggage claim
the baggage took its sweet time, still on mountain time
but all that standing around was nice after four hours on the plane

my mother-in-law is an expert in not paying for parking
brandishing an out-of-date handicap parking pass at the police
she circles the airport, idles in the bus and the taxi-only zones

which is right where we found her, my husband manoeuvring my luggage,
and my dog! panting and drooling and shedding and wagging in the backseat
best of all the welcome-home surprises

between the airport and home
between the dog and the French and the high heat and humidity
we nearly died three times in old-lady related driving incidents

dropping down from Little Italy into Mile End
football fan flags festooned every apartment’s balcony and
my mother-in-law asked me if I missed Saint-Urbain street

even though my husband says I came home on the loudest day of the summer so far
to sick sticky heat and the stink of smog and moving-day mounds of garbage
yeah, I said, I missed Saint-Urbain street a lot

cars honked by with girls leaning out the window waving Portuguese flags
and July first moving-day vans parked at traffic-snarling angles
and in-between families lived out dramas on sidewalks and steps

I forgot how many books I have
and how many hot outfits and cool shoes
and what it’s like to drink vodka fresh from the freezer

we drank martinis from martini glasses
and ate fried calamari from the Terrasse Lafayette
and my husband caught me up on the neighbourhood gossip

the old Greek lady next door got thrown out after twenty-three years
all the while I was away she was packing unloading crap on my husband
now our apartment is full of old textbooks, floral bed sheets and fresh mint

the tacky Anglo girls that have the back-balcony across from ours
have taken to inviting two loud, shirtless Latino boys over
whenever their boyfriends go away for the weekend

our landlord, who lives downstairs,
has divided half his yard into a parking lot and
we’re excited because at least it’s not a swimming pool

while I was away my dog puked in my studio so many times that
my husband threw out huge piles of my stuff and now that it’s gone
I can’t imagine what I was keeping it for

despite this, in case I haven’t mentioned it already,
my dog is the cutest, sweetest, best-behaved dog ever
who snores, and cuddles, and is afraid of thunder

leaving is hard, but coming home is good
and, in case I haven’t mentioned it already,
my husband is the best person I know

. . . . .

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.
. . . . .

Tunnel Mountain Rainbow

Yesterday we climbed Tunnel Mountain.
We were tired and almost didn’t.
We almost said: no, we should work.
But then we said: no, let’s do it.
The trail was only steep in parts.
Switchback weather changed its mind.
Digital cameras can’t gauge distances.
Far-sighted mountains are far too blue.
Rundle’s bald head hid in the clouds.
Breathless from grade we kept talking.
We raced to glimpse the other side.
Gripping grey railing, we peered sheer down.
And found ourselves above a rainbow.
And were sure it was brighter from above.
And wondered if they could see if from below.
And said: wow, we almost didn’t bother.



. . . . .

Here's what I remember:

(...this will only make sense to five or ten people...)

Everyone knows everyone.
The Saint James Gate.
Edmonton up one nothing.
The Embodiment of Idea.
Every other store sells sweets.
Every other store sells fleece.
The wolf T-Shirt.
The liqueur store dwarf.
The house yells at the dogs.
Myron on the phone a lot.
A voice in my ear.
The flash of digital cameras.
Low ceilings.
Lots of pipes.
But not on Flickr.
Front-end, back-end.
All the of kinds of vodka.
Filtered or otherwise.
One air mattress broken.
Sandra burned stuff in the yard.
The smoke got in our eyes.
Michael wrote a book.
I matched the balloons.
Plotted world domination.
Noble wouldn't come over.
Nachoes at his place.
Multi-coloured cupboards.
An amber-coloured beverage.
A young Patti Smith.
We sat on the floor.
We went to the Devil.
Drank in her kitchen.
A naughty Geisha glass.
A pink-coloured beverage.
Michael got lost.
Sandra noticed.
We set out to find him.
Mike dressed up as him.
A girl drew me a map.
We walked in the street.
We found Michael at Myron's.
Most names start with M.
M-A walked me home.
I fell asleep with my boots on.
World domination takes so long.






. . . . .

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.
. . . . .

A Dear John Letter

my name is carpenter
I hardly ever wear overalls, but
construction sites follow me around
I keep extra safety goggles in my purse
and don’t get to town much, because
you can dress a belt-sander up
but you can’t take it anywhere
if my name were rich
I’d still wear work pants, but
I’d ditch the hard hat
an armoured car service
would drive me into town
I’d be a hit at the cash & carry
I’d be a star at the solid gold bar
I’d sing double platinum hits

(happy birthday john richey)
. . . . .

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.
. . . . .

Bear and Tick Season

Our camp is of two camps.
Some fear the bears most.
Just waking up, and hungry.
A bicyclist was mauled.
Recently, and near here.
He might lose his arm.
Everyone’s paying attention.

Fewer fear the ticks.
They’re very small.
They wait in the trees.
They fall on you.
They feed on you.
They lay eggs.
It takes a while.
You could not notice.
You could get lime disease.

Bears have little interest in humans.
There’re lots of ways to avoid them.
The bicyclist had headphones on.
He wasn’t paying attention.

Ticks are actually gunning for you.
They detect mammalian body heat.
They have strength in numbers.
I fear what’s harder to avoid.
. . . . .

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.
. . . . .

The First Day

I sit down to read.
On some steps in some sun.
A tall man passes, sporting sporting attire.
Stops and asks: What are you reading?
A book a friend lent me.
By friend, I mean: You don't know me.
Who’s it by? He strikes a pose.
A racquet over his shoulder.
I hold the book up.
Let him read the cover himself.
By this I mean: Go away.
Is it good?
Yes.
Read me a line.
Now that’s a line.
No.
Just one.
A split-second staring match ensues.
He has sunglasses on and I don’t.
No fair.
I’m too tired, I say.
I mean: Of this.
He twirls his racquet at me.
I go back to reading.
It’s only the first day.
. . . . .

WestJet 667

There is no first class. We board all at once.
The forward toilet abuts the cockpit and is unisex.
13D is an isle seat, no matter what 13E and F say.
The faux-leather grey seats look just like in the commercials.
With a television monitor mounted in the back of every one of them.
It’s not like in the old days, when the in-flight film was free.
The headphones cost one dollar, three dollars for the nice ones.
And what you get is satellite TV. What you get is commercials.
You can’t turn the monitor off. It flies with you, inches from your face.
The default screen is a MapQuest map © 2003. Place names haven’t changed.
Fin Flon has not flip-flopped. Grand Prairie has not shrunk to Petite Prairie.
A white and windowless airplane icon pixel-pushes across the MapQest map.
Left wing grazing the 49th parallel, body long as the width of southern Manitoba.
Our fuselage overshadows Brandon, sets Swift River in its sights.
We cruse at 38,486 feet. Everything is downhill after that.
In Montreal, before take off, the MapQuest map said we sat at 36 feet.
And for a while I thought that’s how high the seats were off the ground.
We arrived in Calgary earlier than I expected.
The city met us at the airport at 3740 feet.
Now that’s first class.
. . . . .

The Earliest Morning Airport

The fastest taxi driver sped through the earliest morning rain listening to the quietest FM radio play the Frenchest jazz chanteuse singing her brokenest heart out. Fastest, earliest, quietest, Frenchest, brokenest.

I arrived at the airport so early that I miss-read my boarding pass, just to kill time. Gate A 49 is not the same as Gate A 4 – 9, and although there were plenty of places to buy a cup of earliest morning Frenchest coffee in the Gate 4, subset 9 area, there was no Gate 4, subset 9. There were no places to buy coffee, Frenchest or otherwise, at Gate A 49, 50 or 51.

In the coffee-less under-construction wing of the earliest morning airport, Saint Germaine played softest moaning and groaning and all alone-ing downest-tempo beats. The newest toilets were motion-sensitive. The cleanest sinks were motion-insensitive. I washed my hands of them.

Gate 49 was not the quietest place to wait, not even in the earliest morning. An orange T-shirted green-tattooed not large but barrel-chest bleach-blond man paced, board of waiting to board. No one left baggage unattended. There were no suspicious packages to report. It was a domesticated flight.
. . . . .

leaving on a jet plane, and also a bus

I'm Banff-ward bound, leaving early Sunday morning. For six weeks I’ll live on a mountainside with thirty other artists from around the world, all our work somehow relating to the theme of: Babel, Babble, Rabble: On Language and Art. Here's the description: http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/program.aspx?id=372

I'll have email access while I'm there, though my spill-chick capabilities will be somewhat reduced. Please also feel free to send me snail mail. It'd make me feel ever so important. Everyone notes a trek up to the mailroom. Send me a postcard... write fiction on it. Here is the way:

J. R. Carpenter
On Language and Art
The Banff Centre
107 Tunnel Mountain Drive
Banff, Alberta
Canada
T1L 1H5
. . . . .