Reading at Hypertext and Hypermedia Lab, Carlton University

I'm headed to Ottawa for a few days to do a reading and to check out StoryTrek system at the Hypertext and Hypermedia Lab, a new Digital Humanities research facility at Carleton University. Hypermedia Lab members collaborate on research projects related to digital text and narrative, game studies, theatre, film and new media cultures.

StoryTrek: A System for Itinerant Hypernarrative is a new hypertext system for mobile computing that adds fine-grained locational functionality to the "live hypernarrative" system, an adaptive, online e-literature engine that builds stories on-the-fly from data mined in real time from the internet. With funding from SSHRC's Image, Text, Sound and Technology (ITST) program, the folks at Hypermedia Lab are integrating textual interfaces with GPS and digital mapping tools for the delivery of site-specific information in narrative form, allowing authors to create narratives that are geospatially sensitive and location-specific.

Tuesday, March 9th, 4 pm, I'll read from recent work at Carlton University, 2017 Dunton Tower, wherever that is. Hopefully someone with GPS and digital mapping tools for the delivery of site-specific information in narrative form will guide me to the venue. The reading is presented by The Department of English and The Hypertext and Hypermedia Lab. A reception will follow. It's all free and all are welcome!
. . . . .

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


. . . . .

Reading List 2009

2009 was a year of reading interrupted. It started with an eviction notice. An amazing number of books can accumulate in 11 years. My bookcases and I had a long talk and we decided that a few hundred of our friends would have to go. Many were sold, many more were given away. The rest fit into 32 boxes. Finding a home for those boxes was hell. Two weeks after finally signing a lease on a new apartment, my marriage ended suddenly. As a reader, I didn't see it coming. There was no foreshadowing or anything. As a writer, I would have done things differently.

My books moved without me. My suitcases and I spent the summer living out of other people's bookshelves. It turns out that a friend close enough to put you up in a time of need can also be counted on to have a book collection close enough to your own to make you and your suitcases feel at home without a home. It turns out there are lots of books in the world. We merely move amongst them. Friends, on the other hand, are one-of-a-kind and impossible to replace.

My books and their cases are now housed in a storage locker in Montreal. I miss them very much. Especially the ones written by friends. There are many friends' book in this photo of one of my Saint-Urbain Street bookcases before its dismantling:



On the up side, my suitcases and I are now ensconced in an 18th century Palladian country house situated on a promontory in a bend in the River Dart in South Devon. We're catching up on our England reading. I am glad I saved Wuthering Heights until after visiting a moor, even though it's set on a different moor than the one I went too, and Waterland until after visiting Somerset, even though it's set on the Fens. Next up, Dart, by my new neighbour Alice Oswald, about my new neighbour The River Dart.

Here, in reverse chronological order, are the books I read in 2009:

• Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
• Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
• Graham Swift, Waterland
• Sutherland and Nicolson, Wetland: Life in the Somerset Levels
• Jerome Fletcher, Alfreda Abbot's Lost Voice
• Charles Bernstein, Dark City
• Nicolas Evans, The Divide
• Clarice Lispector, Soulstorm
• Philippe Soupault, Last Nights in Paris
• Stacey May Fowles, Fear of Fighting
• Lisa Moore, Degrees of Nakedness
• Medlar Lucan & Durian Grey, The Decadent Traveler
• Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses
• Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
• Roddy Doyle, Paula Spenser
• Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
• Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet
• Jerome Fletcher, Degringolade
• Kate Pullinger, The Mistress of Nothing
• Edna O'Brein, The Country Girls
• Deborah Eisenberg, Twilight of the SUperheroes
• Steven Ross Smith, Lures
• Anne Simpson, Quick
• Elizabeth Bishop, The Collected Prose
• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
• Oana Avasilichioaei, Feria: a poempark
• Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
• Agota Kristof, The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie
• Nigel Peake, Maps: Fields, Paths, Forests, Blocks, Places and Surroundings
• John Berger, About Looking
• Francis A. Yates, The Art of Memory
• William Gibson, Spook Country
• Mary-Ann Ray, Seven Partly Underground Rooms and Buildings for Water, Ice and Midgets
• Jerome Fletcher, Escape from the Temple of Laughter
• Mark Haddon, The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
• William Gaddis, Carpenter's Gothic
• David Gutterson, East of the Mountains
• A.S. Byatt, Little Black Book of Stories
• Shirley Jackson, The Lottery
• Merce Rodoreda, The Time of the Doves
• Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way
• Daniel Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
• Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife
• Andrew Hood, Pardon Our Monsters
• Arjun Basu, Squishy
• Jacob Wren, Families Are Formed Through Copulation
• Chandra Mayor, All the Pretty Girls
• Harold Hoefle, The Mountain Clinic
• Beryl Bainbridge, Another Part of the World
• Lydia Davis, The End of the Story
• Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
• Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
• Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
• Italo Calvino, Why Read The Classics?
• Alejo Carpentier, The Chase
• Nell Freudenberger, Lucky Girls
• Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity

. . . . .

E-Writer in Residence, Dartington Campus, UCF

This fall I am the Performance Writing E-Writer in Residence at University College Falmouth's Dartington Campus, located on the Dartington Hall Estate, a 1,200 acre mixture of arable and pastoral farmland, woodland, residential and commercial accommodation. Written records of this site do not begin until the thirteenth century, but there is evidence of considerable activity in the area during the Roman occupation and the manor of Dartington is mentioned in a Royal Charter of 833 AD. The buildings and structures situated on the estate range in age from Deer Park Wall and Earth Works at North Wood which date from the Bronze and Iron Ages, to the main Hall which was built in 1388, to those properties which were built by the Elmhirsts in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The site has been continuously occupied for well over a thousand years, but this is the last year that Performance Writing will be located here, so I feel most fortunate to be here at this time.



My duties at E-Writer in Residence mostly involve sitting in my office, working on my work. The above photo is not a view from my office, thankfully, or I'd be too busy staring out the window to get any work done. One of my favourite things about the campus is how, to get from one side of it to the other, you have to walk across part of a cow pasture with actual cow pats in it (not pictured). I do this sometimes just to go to the library to visit the copy of my novel that they have there. I'm also leading an electronic literature workshop with the Performance Writing undergraduates, with a concentration on literary mapping. And I'll do a public reading on the Dartington Campus Thursday 3 December, 7.30pm in Studio 3 (free). This will be the last in a series of three performances dedicated to readings featuring innovative and dynamic writers. For more information on this event, visit The Arts at Dartington.
. . . . .

A Reading at Sharpham House - November 3, 2009

Hosted by Alice Oswald

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

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



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

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.
. . . . .

Book Launch Tonight: Leonard Cohen You're Our Man

I have a poem in this fine book. If I were in Montreal I'd be reading at the launch tonight. If you happen to be in Montreal, check it out.

7:30 PM
Thursday, Sept. 17, 2009
Westmount High School Auditorium
4350 Ste. Catherine St. West
Westmount/Montreal, Quebec
Tickets are $5 and available at the door.
Doors open at 7 P.M.

Poets reading tonight include:

Ann Weinstein, Jason Camlot, Ann Lloyd, David Solway, Donna Yates-Adelman, Michael Mirolla, Jeffrey Mackie, Angela Leuck, John Fretz, Grace Moore, Meredith Darling, Rona Feldman Shefler(a classmate of Cohen's,) Sue Borgersen(arriving today from Nova Scotia,) erika n. white, Sandra Sjollema, Ryan Ruddick(Westmount High teacher,) Brian Campbell, and Eleni Zisimatos, Ehab Lotayef, Lesley Pasquin, and standing in for Margaret Atwood will be Westmount High Student, Elisha Hill, reading Atwood's poem, "Setting Leonard to Music."

Proceeds from this event will support the Foundation for Public Poetry's "Leonard Cohen Poet-In-Residence" program at Westmount High(Cohen's old high school.) This initiative is a collaboration between Westmount High School, the Foundation for Public Poetry, and the Westmount High Alumni Association.

Books are $25 and will be available for sale and signing.

More info: http://publicpoetry.wordpress.com/
. . . . .

Next Stop, SappyFest!

Literary types of all stripes will invade SappyFest this year. Thursday, July 30, I'll pack a suitcase full of zines and novels and join the migration eastward.

SappyFest is a little independent music festival produced annually in partnership with the Ok.Quoi?! Contemporary Arts Festival, Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre. The festival takes place July 31 - August 2, 2009, in Sackville, New Brunswick, the centre of the universe.

If you happen to be in the centre of the universe that weekend, come visit me at the Zine Fair, Saturday August 1, 12 to 4 PM at the United Church. There will be participants from across Canada, a kids workshop, a presentation by Andy Brown (Conundrum Press) and readings by Jeffrey Makie, Jaime Forsthythe and Dawn-Aeron Wason.

Sunday, August 2, 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM, check out the The Vogue Writers Block, a multi-media event at The Vogue Theater (Sackville's art deco movie theater) featuring The Joe, Catherine Kidd, J.R. Carpenter, Lezlie Lowe, Andrea Dorfman, Ian Roy, and Thesis. I'll reading a section of my novel, Words the Dog Knows, that traverses three different electronic literature projects (How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome, Entre Ville, and in absentia).

Now a registered non-profit organization, SappyFest Incorporated, the festival was founded in 2006 by the good people of Sappy Records, Julie Doiron, Jon Claytor and Paul Henderson.

Ok.Quoi?! is an interdisciplinary festival of contemporary art, focusing on video, audio, new and independent music produced by Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre in partnership with SappyFest. The works of over 50 artists will be presented over 6 days in a variety of screenings, installations, concerts, broadcasts and performances. Alongside exciting international and national work, Ok.Quoi?! features new and innovative projects from local and regional artists. All events save for the Last Chance for Summer Romance concert and barbecue are free, and open to all ages.

More info: SappyFest & Ok.Quoi?!


. . . . .

Vallum Cafe/Culture Reading Series - July 23, 7pm

I will be reading some of my most poem sounding prose in Montreal this Thursday when Vallum: contemporary poetry reading series Cafe/Culture returns with fantastic lineup of Oana Avasilichioaei, J.R. Carpenter, Holly Luhning and Anne Cimon grace the ultra-cool Le Zigoto Cafe, 5731 du Parc (just below Bernard). Door prizes and a surprise musical guest! It all starts at 7 p.m. on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009.


. . . . .

Nuit Blanche Readings from Le Livre de chevet @ theCCA Bookstore

I will be reading from Les huit quartiers de sommeil at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Saturday February 28, 2009, as part of a Nuit Blanche slumber provoked by Daniel Canty, Haunted by the images of Ms Annie Descôteaux and Mr Pol Turgeon. Graphic Design Feed. Scenography Amuse.

The table of contents presents - in collaboration with the CCA Bookstore and Nuit Blanche - 16 premonitory readings from Le Livre de chevet, and the launch of www.latabledesmatieres.com

Readings by Salvador Alanis, Mathieu Arsenault, Oana Avasilichioaei, Nathalie Bachand, Daniel Canty, J.R. Carpenter, Angela Carr, Renée Gagnon, Louis-Philippe Hébert (Onil M.), Annie Lafleur, Erín Moure, Steve Savage (Desavage), Mélisandre Schofield, Franz Schürch, François Turcot and Jacob Wren

-
Can you hear, deep down in sleep, the murmur of books? Le Livre de chevet conveys you into their secret. This collective and more or less practical tome, to be published in the Fall of 2009, is designed to accompany and to alter your slumber.

We invite you, on this All Nighter, into the darkness of the CCA bookstore. From 8 pm to 1 am, 16 authors from the book to come will step up, every 20 minutes, into the ghostly glow of dreams, to give you, at the sound of the alarm, with clocklike precision, a premonitory reading in English or in French.

Over the course of the evening, 16 sleeping places in Le Livre de chevet will also be auctioned off to the highest bidding dreamers.

-
Le Livre de chevet
Montréal, Le Quartanier, 240 pages
ISBN 978-2-923400-60-0
To be published in fall 2009
-
All-Nighter 2009
Saturday February 28
to Sunday March 1
from 8 pm to 1 am

-
CCA Bookstore
1920 rue Baile
Montreal (QC) H3H 2S6
t 514 939-7028

www.cca.qc.ca/Bookstore
. . . . .

WORDS THE DOG KNOWS Makes Some Noise

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



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

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

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

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

To purchase Words the Dog Knows visit the Conundrum Press website: http://www.conundrumpress.com/
. . . . .

Reading List 2008

I got a massive amount of writing done in 2008. That made it made it a strange year for reading. Early on in the year I appear to have had a ghosts and devils fixation. What was I thinking, reading Will Self, How the Dead Live and Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita back to back?

Between January and May I read and re-read a lot of chapters, articles and essays related to the texts I was working with in the Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams electronic literature project. Many books were harmed in the making of that work, some are pictured here, but few of those fragmentary readings are represented in the list below.



I had a great but short lived burst of short story reading in the spring while I was writing the postcard stories for the in absentia electronic literature project, but once that piece was launched I had to focus on finishing writing my first novel, Words the Dog Knows. It was a cold, wet summer, which was fine as I barely left my apartment. To get through the long days of writing toward impossibly short deadlines I soon realized that I couldn't read anything even remotely resembling anything I would ever write. So it was a summer of long post-colonial novels written by American women.

I thought I'd get back to my regular reading habits once Words the Dog Knows went to the printer, but despite a brief window were I got to catch up on a few books written by friends, most of my fall reading was muddled by travel. Between book tours, conferences, lectures and meetings I was on the road non-stop from mid-October to mid-November. All I can say is, Gulliver's Travels makes great sense on trains and airplanes.

My New Year's reading resolution: to read Don Quixote in it's entirety. Toward this end I have booked a one week vacation on a Cuban beach. The things I do for literature!

Here, from last to first, are books read in 2008:

Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

Salman Rushdie, ed., Best American Short Stories 2008

Jonathan Lenthem, Girl in a Landscape

Marguerite Duras, Moderato Cantabile

Paul D. Miller, Rhythm Science

Mariko & Jillian Tamaki, Skim

Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time

Emily Holton, Dear Canada Council / Our Starland

Liane Keightly, Seven Openings of the head

Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine

N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines

Joe Brainard, I Remember

Harold Brodkey, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

Cynthia Ozick, Trust

Maya Merrick, The Hole Show

Kate Pullinger, A Little Stranger

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Leni Zumas, Farewell Navigator

Jason Camlot, The Debaucher

Keri Hulme, The Bone People

Ha Jin, Waiting

Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost

Claire Messud, The Hunters

Joy Williams, State of Grace

Julie Doucet, 365 Days

Barry Hannah, Geronimo Rex

Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

Steven Heighton, The Shadow Boxer

Michael Crummey, Flesh and Blood

Kerstin Ekman, Blackwater

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr

Michale Hoeullebecq, The Elementary Particles

Rick Moody, Demonology

Goethe, Faust

Christopher Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Jeff Parker, The Back of the Line

Etgar Keret, Missing Kissinger

Raymond Carver, Short Cuts

Lorrie Moore, Like Life

Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Eva Figes, Light

Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979

Maureen Adams, Shaggy Muses

Mary Robison, Why Did I Ever

Valerie Joy Kalynchuk, All Day Breakfast

Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonders

Flan O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus

Anya Ulinich, Petropolis

David McGimpsey, Sitcom

Jeff Parker, Ovenman

Will Self, How the Dead Live

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Mark Amerika, META/DATA

. . . . .

WORDS THE DOG KNOWS - Toronto Launch - Monday, November 17, 2008

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

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

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



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

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

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

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


NYC launch at KGB Bar, Thursday October 23, 2008


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


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


Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008


Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008
It's this much fun!
. . . . .

The Pilot Reading Series October Edition

Presented by Matrix magazine, Pop Montreal and the QWF.

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

hosted by Mike Spry
music by Billy Fong Parade

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



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

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

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

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

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

New York City Launch - Words the Dog Knows - KGB Bar, October 23, 2008

Dear Friends. We invite you to join us in celebrating the publication of J.R. Carpenter’s first novel, WORDS THE DOG KNOWS (Montreal: Conundrum Press) with an evening of readings from Montreal and New York-area fiction writers that will take you from the swamplands of Florida to the streets of Montreal and onward to points beyond. J.R. will be joined by New Yorker Karen Russell, fellow Conundrum author Corey Frost, and Canadian New Yorker Nora Maynard.

KGB Bar http://kgbbar.com/calendar/
85 East 4th Street, New York City, NY
Thursday, October 23, 2008
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm (free)



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


For more information on Words the Dog Knows, including a full launch event listing and ordering information, please visit: http://luckysoap.com/stories/wordsthedogknows.html or Conundrum Press: http://conundrumpress.com

J.R. Carpenter is a two-time winner of the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition and a fellow of Yaddo, Ucross and The Vermont Studio Center. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and her electronic literature has been presented internationally. Words the Dog Knows is her first novel. http://luckysoap.com

Karen Russell is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, ST. LUCY’S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES (Knopf). Karen’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Zoetrope, among others. She is currently at work on a novel. http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=70463

Corey Frost is the author of MY OWN DEVICES: AIRPORT VERSION (Montreal: Conundrum Press). Corey has performed his stories at Lollapalooza, The Perpetual Motion Roadshow, and at festivals around the world. http://www.coreyfrost.com

Nora Maynard is a winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts Chapter One Competition and a fellow of the Ragdale Foundation, the Millay Colony, Ucross, and Blue Mountain Center. She is a columnist for Apartment Therapy Media’s The Kitchn, and is completing her first novel, BURNT HILL ROAD. http://www.noramaynard.com
. . . . .

Words the Dog Knows

Words the Dog Knows, J. R. Carpenter
conundrum press (Montreal)
October 2008
978-1-894994-34-7
Novel
5x7 inches, 168 pages
$15 CDN / US

Words the Dog Knows is now available in many fine bookstores including some of my favorites: Pages, in Toronto, and the Drawn & Quarterly store on Bernard Street in Montreal. The best place to order the book online is from the conundrum press website.

Words the Dog Knows isn't a story about a dog. It's a story because of a dog.

Words the Dog Knows Launch Events:

NYC - Thursday October 23, KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street, 7-9 pm
with readings by Karen Russell, Nora Maynard and Corey Frost
more info

Montreal - Friday November 7, Sky Blue Door
5403 B Saint-Laurent, 7-11 pm
also launching: J. R. Carpenter, in absentia
in association with Dare-Dare

Montreal - Sunday November 9, Blizzarts
3956A Saint-Laurent, 8 pm
with Harold Hoefle and Katia Grubisic.

Toronto - Monday November 17, This Is Not A Reading Series
Gladstone Ballroom, 1214 Queen Street West, 7:30 pm
also launching: Emily Holton, OUR STARLAND/DEAR CANADA COUNCIL
more info
. . . . .

Words the Dog Knows – Reading at The Yellow Door

This has been the most indoor summer ever, but boy has it been productive. I've written a novel. I'm as surprised as you are! It's called, Words the Dog Knows. It’s not really about the dog. It’s because of the dog. Because of the dog the characters come to see their neighbourhood – and each other – in a whole new way.

It's almost, almost, almost, but not quite finished, but I'll be reading excerpts from it anyway at The Yellow Door later this week. Once the book is actually printed, there will launches in Montreal, New York and Toronto. Information about those events will be posted soon. Meantime, here’s the Yellow Door info:

The Yellow Door
POETRY AND PROSE READING
http://www.yellowdoor.org
3625 Aylmer, Montreal (between Pine & Prince Arthur) Tel: 514-398-6243

Thursday, August 28, 2008
Doors open 7:00 pm Reading 7:30 pm At the door $5

J.R. Carpenter is a two-time winner of CBC/QWF Quebec Short Story Competition. Her novel, Words the Dog Knows, is forthcoming from Conundrum Press, fall 2008.

Hugh Hazelton is a poet and translator. His third book of poems, Antimatter, was published with CD by Broken Jaw Press in 2003.

Liam Durcan is a Montreal writer whose novel, Garcia's Heart, was published in 2007 by McClelland & Stewart.

Rita Donovan Author of six novels & one non-fiction. Her novels have won several awards, among them: CAA/Chapters Award for Fiction, Landed.

Saleema Nawaz's fiction has been published in Prairie Fire, Grain, & PRISM. Mother Superior (Freehand Books, 2008) is her first short story collection.

Ken Kalman is a poet, playwright, and novelist. Among his publications are a novel, Jesus Loves Me, a play, Defenceless, and Poetry of the Jews.

Laura Golden is author of a poetry book, Laura's Garden, 1978-2007. Artist, Reiki master, art therapist. From Now On, and Loneliness (Baico Publishing).

Tony Robinson-Smith is author of Back in 6 Years (Goose Lane Editions, 2008): In his first book, adventurer Tony circles the planet by land and sea.

Milton Dawes was one of the seven drummers who started the Tam-Tam drumming on the mountain.

. . . . .

Tributaries & Text fed Streams: Launch Event

If you happen to be in Vancouver on Saturday May 24th at 7:30PM, come on down to the Helen Pitt Gallery for the launch of Tributaries & Text fed Streams. I've been working on this project for just over six months now and am thrilled to see it nearing completion. I'm also thrilled to be heading to Vancouver for this launch. I have so many dear friends in that fair city yet have spent next to no time there. Looking forward to seeing you all - you know who you are!

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams is commissioned by The Capilano Review and curated by Kate Armstrong. The work explores the poetic, formal and functional properties of RSS using the text of an issue of literary quarterly The Capilano Review as raw material raw the creation of a new artwork. Since January I have reading and re-reading the essays, parsing them into fragments, annotating them, marking them up, tagging them and posting them. Once fed into an RSS stream, the fragments are re-read, reordered, and reblogged in an iterative process of distribution that opens up new readings of the essays and reveals new interrelationships between them.

At the launch event I will read from the piece and perform a guided tour of the various streams feeding into and flowing out of it. In addition, curator Kate Armstrong has put together a programme of experimental readings by practitioners in disparate fields such as quantum physics, geography, and poetics, arranged to explore ideas of streams, seriality, or flow. Participants in the launch event will include Maria Lantin, Michael Boyce, Jeremy Venditti, Global Telelanguage Resources, and me, J.R. Carpenter.

The work will be simultaneously launched on Turbulence.org.

Launch Event:
Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 7:30pm
Helen Pitt Gallery, 102-148 Alexander Street, Vancouver, BC.

A reception will follow.

For those of you who can't make it in person, here are some URLS:

Tributaries & Text- Fed Streams: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca/
The Capilano Review: http://www.thecapilanoreview.ca/
TCR Issue 2-50 : “Artifice and Intelligence”: http://www.thecapilanoreview.ca/archive.php?id=series2/2_50
J.R. Carpenter: http://luckysoap.com/
Turbulence: http://www.turbulence.org
. . . . .

WOMEN'S ART: TAKING OVER THE WEB

Studio XX launches MATRICULES: Canada's largest public online archive of digital artwork by women and one of the world's largest online archives of women's digital art. Created with invaluable support from Heritage Canada's Canadian Culture Online Program and hosted by Studio XX, Mobile Media Lab and the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Matricules will launch on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM at Hexagram Concordia, 1515 Ste-Catherine West (corner Guy) on the 11th floor.

Matricules is an electronic documentary herstory spanning eleven years of research, creation and exploration at Canada's one-of-a kind Studio XX. Mingle with some of Montreal's most celebrated new media artists on a spectacular terrace overlooking Montreal and enjoy a performative reading by J.R. Carpenter, two-time winner of CBC's Quebec Short Story Competition. Prominent interdisciplinary artists Caroline Martel and jake moore will offer their take on the website's creation process and Matricules Project Director Stephanie Lagueux will give audiences a private tour of this remarkable new digital archive.

The xxxboîte, a limited edition artifact comprised of original texts and a DVD produced in celebration of Studio XX's first decade will also be presented and available for purchase as an important addition to any contemporary art collection.

Founded in 1996 with the goal of ensuring a defining presence for women in cyberspace and in the development of the digital arts, Studio XX is Canada's foremost feminist digital art centre for technological exploration, creation and critique. Committed to establishing women's access to technology, with a strong focus on Open-Source software, Studio XX offers artist residencies, monthly performance salons, an electronic magazine, a weekly radio show and HTMlles: an international biennial cyberarts festival.

"Matricules is a privileged gateway to dazzling integral digital artworks" comments Paulina Abarca-Cantin, Studio XX's Director General. "This electronic treasure box offers the public live works by greats like Shawna Dempsey, Chantal DuPont, Deborah VanSlet, Women with Kitchen Appliances, Suzanne Kozel, Isabelle Choinière and AGF to name but a very, very few of the best of the best."

Matricules was made possible through generous support from The Canada Council for the Arts, The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, Mobile Media Lab and the Koumbit network. Studio XX wishes to thank its members, volunteers and visionary funding partners including Canadian Heritage's Canadian Culture Online initiative.

http://www.studioxx.org
. . . . .

The Pilot Reading Series May Edition

If you’re still in town and still standing after five days at the Blue Metropolis, come on down to Blizzarts Sunday night for the Pilot Reading Series. I'll be reading from Words the Dog Knows, a novel forthcoming from Conundrum Press (Fall 2008) and Chandra Mayor will be launching her new collection, All the Pretty Girls (Conundrum Press, Spring 2008):

Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 9:00pm at Blizzarts 3956A St. Laurent.

Matrix Magazine, the QWF, and Pop Montreal present
The Pilot Reading Series May Edition

featuring:

Chandra Mayor
JR Carpenter
Gil Filar
JpKing

hosted by Mike Spry
music by a very special guest DJ

doors @ 9pm
readings @ 9.30
FREE


. . . . .

Reading List 2007

Gordon Lish, Dear Mr. Capote
Peter Carey, My Life As A Fake
N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message
Emily Holton, Little Lessons in Safety
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Bernard Cooper, Maps to Anywhere
Andy Brown, The Mole Chronicles
Zoe Whittall, Bottle Rocket Hearts
Lance Blomgren, Walkups
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Gail Scott, My Paris
Melissa A. Thompson, Dreadful Paris
Jorge Louis Borges, Ficciones
Angela Carr, Ropewalk
David Markson, Reader's Block
Jonathan Lethem, Men And Cartoons
Ellen Ullman, The Bug
James Salter, Dusk
Steve Almond, My Life in Heavy Metal
Dave Eggers, How We Are Hungry
Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe
Amiee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
Margaret Atwood, Power Politics
Corey Frost, My Own Devices (Airport Version)
Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi
Elizabeth Hay, Small Change
Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day
Aleksandar Hemon, The Question of Bruno
Martin Amis, The Information
Gregory Maguire, Wicked
Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners
Petronius, The Satyricon
Machiavelli, The Prince
Colin McAdam, Some Great Thing
Sam Shepard, Cruising Paradise
Nathaniel G. Moore, Let's Pretend We Never Met
Angela Hibbs, Passport
Don DeLillo, End Zone
Aimee Bender, An Invisible Sign of My Own
Shapard & Thomas, eds., Sudden Fiction International
Paul Virilio, Ground Zero
Sean Dixon, The Girls Who Saw Everything
Elisabeth Billiveau, Something to Pet the Cat About
Janet Kauffman, The Body in Four Parts
Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café
Danzy Senna, Symptomatic
Lynda Barry, Cruddy
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Larissa Lai, Saltfish Girl
Linn Ullmann, Stella Descending
Tobias Wolff, Old School
Nicole Brossard, Notebooks of Roses and Civilization
Alejo Carpentier, The Chase
Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics
Lorrie Moore, Self-Help
Charles Baxter, A Relative Stranger
Stanly Elkin, Van Gogh's Room at Arles
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Christia Wolf, Cassandra
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
Iris Murdoch, The Italian Girl
Barry Yourgrau, Haunted Traveller
Shulamis Yelin, Stories from A Montreal Childhood
Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History
Mark Anthony Jarman, 19 Knives
Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Heather O'Neill, Lullabies For Little Criminals
Mary Gaitskil, Bad Behaviour
Denis Johnson, Jesus's Son
Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
Junot Diaz, Drown
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance
Eudora Weltly, The Wide Net
Hortense Calisher, In the Absence of Angels
Lynn Freed, The Curse of the Appropriate Man
Truman Capote, A Tree of Night & Other Stories
Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
Jane Mayhall, Sleeping Late on Judgement Day
Eleanor Clark, Rome and a Villa
Hortense Calisher, Saratoga, Hot
Jonathan Ames, Wake Up, Sir!
Steven Heighton, Flight Paths of the Emperor
Alan Gurganus, The Practical heart
Joy Williams, Escapes
Jay Rogoff, How We Came to Stand on That Shore
Joy Williams, Taking Care
Langston Hughes, The Best of Simple
Steven Millhauser, Enchanted Night
Alison Smith, Name All the Animals
Joan Leegant, An Hour in Paradise
Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel
Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
Janet Frame, The Reservoir
Janet Frame, Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun
Carolyn Beard Whitlow, Vanished
Carolyn Beard Whitlow, Wild Meat
Robert Lowell, Lord Weary’s Castle
Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
Mary Robison, Days
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Merce Rodoreda, Camellia Street

Reading List 2006 >>>

Reading List 2005 >>>
. . . . .

The Year in Book(stores)s

2007 was a great year for reading. It started off at Yaddo where for six weeks I dined every evening in the Yaddo Authors Library. It was sometimes difficult to follow the thread of so many different dinner conversations going on at once between so many brilliant writers, painters, film and video makers and composers. Not least of all because we were surrounded on four sides by floor to ceiling shelves of books of Yaddo authors past and present dating back a hundred years. These humbling and motivating surroundings enabled a frenzied period of writing and reading impossible to sustain in the outside world.



Over the course of the spring I had occasion to travel to New York, Boston, Montpellier and Toronto for various different reason reasons. These cities are home to some of my favourite bookstores so I stocked up. In New York, in additions to the prerequisite trips to the Strand, a friend in publishing snuck me into his place of employ to peruse their impressive book room. I made out like a bandit. Bliss. In Boston/Cambridge the MIT Press bookstore and the Harvard Co-Op are favourites, in Montpellier Rivendale is an old friend and in Toronto, though Type is new and exciting, Pages can’t be beat.

I don’t know what they’re talking about in the media when they say: summer reading. It was a long hot slow loud disruptive unproductive and generally aggravating summer chez nous. There were lots of days when I couldn’t work at all. My idea of “not working” is reading. Does that count as summer reading? When there’s too much heat, humidity, construction and/or neighbour noise to read, I go for a walk. My idea of going for a walk is walking to the bookstore. One of the highlights of the summer was the move of S. W. Welch bookseller from the Main up into Mile End. If you’re trying to find me and I’m not home, look for me there: 225 Saint-Viateur West.

I also bought lots of new books in the fall on account of every single person I know in Montreal came out with a new book. For a few weeks in September/October there were launches and/or a readings 3, 4, even 5 nights a week. Happily, many of these events happened in bookstores. Nothing I love more than a bookstore jam-packed with people buying books and drinking booze. Some new favourite bookstores: Port de Tête Bookstore at 262 Mount-Royal Avenue East and the Drawn & Quarterly bookstore at 211 Bernard West.



The fall brought some exciting new writing projects my way. Each shifts the direction of my reading slightly. For “Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams” I am brushing up on my hypertext theory. For “in absentia” I’m delving into short French fiction. And I continue to be obsessed with very short English fiction. I’m happy to report that I’m working on a collection with Conundrum Press for fall 2008. So in addition to all this reading, I’d better get some writing done too!
. . . . .

privacy being of the utmost importance

I wonder if Jonathan Ames is any relation to Elizabeth Ames, first Executive Director of Yaddo, who’s house I’m living in at the moment. Jonathan Ames’s novel, Wake Up, Sir! is set at an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. He calls his not even thinly disguised Yaddo The Rose Colony. Katrina Trask loved roses, as manifest in rose colours, carvings, windows and sconces all over the mansion, and, of course, Yaddo’s famous rose gardens, open to the public in season.

"The track and the colony were on Union Avenue, and separating the two was a stretch of dense forest, and in the middle of these woods was the rather secretive entrance to the Rose, privacy being of the utmost importance for artists, since you don’t want the tax-paying public to know about the creative process – how much napping and procrastinating are involved – because otherwise what little funding there is would be cut immediately." Jonathan Ames, Wake Up, Sir!

Apparently the entrance to Yaddo was originally just south of the track on Nelson Ave. It’s now east of the track on Union. Opps! Pay no attention, tax-paying public. You didn’t hear that from me.


. . . . .

The Best of Simple

American poet Langston Hughes was a guest at Yaddo in the early sixties. The Yaddo Authors’ library has four or five volumes of his short stories. I didn’t even know he wrote short stories. I’ve been reading The Best of Simple. Simple is a wisecracking Harlem rooming house living workingman night owl barstool philosopher. Funny, fast-talking and street-smart, these stories have got me started calling people daddy-o. In honour of the one glass of whiskey I drank at the open studio last night, one being enough to fuzz my head, here’s an excerpt from “Vacation” in which, Simple has just returned to Harlem having cut short a vacation in Saratoga Springs:


“What’s on the rail for the lizard this morning?” my friend Simple demanded about 1 A.M. at 125th and Lenox.

“Where have you been all week?” I countered, looking at the dark circles under his eyes.

“On my vacation at last,” said Simple.

“You look it! You appear utterly fatigued.”

“A vacation will tire a man out worse than work,” said Simple.

“Where did you go?”

“Saratoga – after the season was over and the rates is down.”

“What did you do up there?”

“Got bug-eyed.”

“You mean you drank liquor?” I enquired.

“I did not drink water,” said Simple.

“I though people went to Saratoga Springs to drink water.”

“Some do, some don’t,” said Simple, “depending on if you are thirsty or not. There is no water on Congress Street, nothing but bars…”

Langston Hughes, “Vacation” in The Best Of Simple, NY: Hill & Wang, 1961, p 34.

. . . . .

the smell of the sun

I was delighted to discover that New Zealand author Janet Frame was a guest at Yaddo in the late sixties. All the eight or so of her books in the Yaddo Author’s library are signed. Authentically, I think. The spectre of the post-mortem Plath autograph still haunts me. And speaking of haunting… here are the first paragraphs of The Reservoir, a short story which originally appeared in The New Yorker:

It was said to be four of five miles along the gully, past orchards and farms, paddocks filled with cattle, sheep, wheat, gorse, and the squatters of the land who were the rabbits eating like modern sculpture into the hills, though how could be know anything of modern sculpture, we knew nothing but the Warrior in the main street with his wreaths of poppies on Anzac Day, the gnomes weeping in the Gardens because the seagulls perched on their green caps and showed no respect, and how important it was for birds, animals and people, especially children, to show respect!

And that is why for so long we obeyed the command of the grownups and never walked as far as the forbidden Reservoir, but were content to return “tired but happy” (as we wrote in our school compositions), answering the question, Where did you walk today? with a suspicion of blackmail, “Oh, nearly, nearly to the Reservoir!”

The reservoir was the end of the world; beyond it, you fell…

Janet Frame, “The Reservoir” in The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches, NY: George Braziller, 1963, pages 1-2.

It's hard to say why I love this story so much without giving the ending away. In the end, nothing happens! They all come out of it unscathed. And this is thrilling. A shock, after all the build-up. If I remember correctly, one of Frame’s sisters drowned in a reservoir. If that’s true, it makes the story all the more chilling. If it’s not true, it’s a testament to how chilling the story really is that I’m now convinced that someone drowned even through in the story no one did.

On a lighter note, Yaddo also has a beautiful illustrated children’s book by Frame: Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun, in which: “Once upon a time, not long ago, almost now, there was a young House Ant called Mona Minim who was preparing to make her first journey out of the nest.” Here’s what Mona Minim wants to know: “What is the smell of blue when you are flying in the sky and the smell of the sun and of the wind that never blows close to the grass and earth? What is the smell of the sun?” Having already ruined the ending of one story I won’t divulge the answers to these very good questions.

Janet Frame, Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun, NY: George Braziller, 1969.
. . . . .

happiest days

A few days before I left for Yaddo my friend poet Todd Swift reminded me that Sylvia Plath was once a guest at Yaddo. Ariel was among the first books I sought out in the Yaddo Authors Library.

These poems, written in the months before she stuck her head in the oven, send a chill down my spine. Take these lines from Lady Lazarus:

Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.

In distressing contrast is the handwritten inscription inside the front cover, which can't be real as the dates are all wrong:

The talented but notoriously unstable poet Robert Lowell wrote the forward to this edition of Ariel. In early 1949 Lowell was a guest at Yaddo, and quite happy about it too, until he got wind of a rumour that long-time Yaddo resident Agnes Smedley was a Soviet spy. He believed this to be true in part because the New York Times said it was. In an elegantly savage harangue Lowell demanded the dismissal of Yaddo director Elizabeth Ames. One of Lowell’s biggest supporters in this campaign was fellow Yaddo resident Flannery O’Connor, though she had also been very happy at Yaddo until the communist controversy arose. February 14, 1949 she wrote:

We have been very upset at Yaddo lately and all the guests are leaving in a group on Tuesday – the revolution. I’ll probably have to be in New York for a month or so and I’ll be looking for a place to stay… All this is very disrupting to the book [Wise Blood] and has changed my plans entirely as I won’t be coming back to Yaddo unless certain measures go into effect here.

Smedley, though a committed communist, was not a spy. Ames stayed on as director. Lowell had a nervous breakdown. O’Connor was invited back to Yaddo, but never returned. She finished writing Wise Blood in a room in a NYC YWCA, which, she noted: “smelled like an unopened Bible.” Yaddo’s copy of Wise Blood, sadly, is not signed. I took it back to my studio anyway, to remind myself to stay away from political plots hatched by unstable poets lest I wind up demoted from Yaddo to the Y.
. . . . .

Reading List 2006

2006 was a wonderful year for reading thanks in large part to the small but focused libraries of The Banff Centre and The Ucross Foundation and to S. W. Welch and The Word, my two favourite bookstores in Montreal.

"In the crush of a lightning technology that slams out computerized volumes stuck together with a baleful glue, it is good now and then to be reminded of a book as something worthy of body-love. The nostrils also read." Cynthia Ozick

Here’s a not quite chronological list of the books my nostrils and I read in 2006:

Robert Allen, The Encantadas
Samuel Beckett, Watt
Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor & Memory
Louise Steinman, The Souvenir
Roy Parvin, The Longest Road in America
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro & Other Stories
Annie Proulx, Heart Songs
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
George Saunders, Civil War Land in Bad Decline
Alan Garganus, Plays Well With Others
Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
Stacey Richter, My Date With Satan
Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
Annie Proulx, Bad Dirt
Ron Carlson, The Hotel Eden
George Saunders, Pastoralia
Mary Oliver, White Pine
Honor Moore, Red Shoes
Annie Proulx, Close Range
Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
Julian Barnes, The Lemon Table
Gore Vidal, Burr
André Gide, Lafcadio's Adventures
Marguerite Yourcenar, Coup de Grace
Catullus, The Poems of Catullus
Tracy Emin, Strangeland
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
John McPhee, Rising from the Plains
Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
Doris Lessing, The Sweetest Dream
H. M. van den Brink, On the Water
Jonathan Garfinkel, Glass Psalms
Barry Hannah, Bats Out of Hell
Amy Hempel, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Guy Davenport, The Death of Picasso
Alexis O'Hara, (more than) Flithy Lies
William Kennedy, Ironweed
Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining Room Floor
Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
Kenzaburo Oe, A Personal Matter
Richard Ford, A Multitude of Sins
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Project for a Revolution in New York
Simone de Beauvoir, When Things of the Spirit Come First
Michael Boyce, Monkey
Ali Smith, Hotel World
Tracy Chevalier, Girl WIth A Pearl Earing
Victoria Glendinning, Electricity
Iris Murdoch, A Word Child
Zsuzsi Gartner, All the Anxious Girls on Earth
David Bergen, The Time In Between
Sharon Olds, The Gold Cell
Don McKay, Another Gravity
Kunt Hamsun, Hunger
Greg Hollingshead, The Roaring Girl
Mavis Gallant, Home Truths
Sharon Olds, Satan Says
Joey Dubuc, Neither Either Nor Or
Rainer Maria Rilke, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories
Julia Darling, Crocodile Soup
Carole Angier, Jean Rhys
Mary V. Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Lousie Bryant
Djuna Barnes, New York
Ali Smith, The Accidental
Sheila Heti, The Middle Stories
Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
André Gide, Strait is the Gate
Tobias Wolff, In the Garden of North American Martyrs
Robert Allen, Standing Wave
Germaine de Stael, Corinne, or Italy
Tennessee WIlliams, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone
Italo Calvino, If On A Winter's Night A Traveller
Montaigne, Travel Journal
Karen Connelly, The Lizard Cage
Mary Robison, Believe Them
Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment
Golda Fried, Nellcot is my Darling
Adrian Michael Kelly, Down Sterling Road
Nicole Brossard, The Blue Books
Todd Swift, ed., Future Welcome
Lalumiére & Moser, eds, Lust for Life
Barbara Gowdy, The Romantic
Alister Macleod, No Great mischief
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners
Dorothea Straus, Virgins and Other Endangered Species
Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good
Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer & Le bateau ivre

Reading List 2005: http://luckysoap.com/lapsuslinguae/2005/12/reading-list-2005.html
. . . . .

Wyoming IS Haunted!

The ice path across the Clear Creek went soft before we had a chance to cross it. So we set out on one of our hills walks, but shorter. We cut through Deb’s yard, said soft hellos to her yellow Lab – some guard dog – asleep in the sunroom window.

We set our path up a twisted sage bush hill, set our hearts on the clinker red top. Feet sinking into the Eocene, we comb the volcano-ash-soft beach sand for seashells and find plenty. Snails mostly, not yet agatized, not yet fossilized, their epochs old shells empty curlicue recesses in the sedimentary rock. Some things are very difficult to photograph: in the grainy twilight, a slab of snail shell stone split and gripped by a thick grey gnarled sage bush trunk. And some gifts are very difficult to explain. “I’m already planning my defence,” Karen says, her fists full of snail shell stone Christmas presents.

We slip and slid up a steep slope, setting off loose red rock showers, saying: Be careful! You be careful too. Okay. Ack. Perhaps this isn’t the best route. Switchback!

Funny how it’s only once you’re at the top that you see the easy route up. And that you haven’t taken it.

Just when we thought we’d seen it all, hill-wise, the hill behind Deb’s house instantly becomes our newest most favourite hill, with our newest best vista ever. Karen says, “Like how every new thing we see makes all the other stuff we’ve seen look like crap.”

The sun’s setting in every direction. I’m changing film fast, squeezing off iffy, high-contrast shots. We know better than to linger, what with Nora’s jogging adventure fresh in our minds: It was getting dark so she took a short cut that seemed like a straight line but then there was a creek to cross, some fences to climb, so many obstacles between Nora and the road. Plus, we’ve been reading and rereading Donna Tartt’s Secret History; we know what happens to scholars when time speeds up during late night back woods bacchanals. We don’t know any ancient Greek, but still, we’d hate to wind up killing a Vermont farmer on our way back to the ranch.

Instead of going back the way we came, we decide to follow the ridgeline home. Our sightline runs right down Big Red Lane to the Big Red barn. There’s a trail. “That’ll be our excuse,” I say. “When some rancher come out of nowhere with a shotgun… we say: But there was a trail!” Karen’s been reading Hemingway’s safari stories. She warns me not to sleep with the white hunter guide: “Like how in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, I kill you way out here were there are no witnesses and then pretend it was an accident?” She says this in a singsong little kid voice which makes it sound all that much more sinister. “Remind me to take that Hemingway away from you.”

We come down off the ridge into a wide shallow flat that slopes down toward Ucross. The sky’s quite dark now, with only an orange rind of light left along the western ridges. Grateful for the flattening terrain and the rising moon, we lope along talking Donna Tartt again. My favourite thing about the bacchanal is how barely it’s described, how none of the characters will talk about it after. Karen says, in the horror movies the scariest parts are before you even see the monsters, when they’re just alluded to.

We stop short. There’s a pelvis bone in our pathway. Robert Johnson sings: “I’ve got stones in my pathway and my road seems dark as night.” But a pelvis in our pathway? We pick it up; hold it high, big, clean, and white against the dark night hills. We’ve seen plenty of small animal bones on our walks, but nothing like this. What do you think? Deer? Or cow? Seems big for deer. The mule deer are bigger than the whitetail. I don’t know. Maybe cow. Karen says: See, if this were a horror movie this one bone would be the stand in for all kinds of terrifying things.

At that moment we turn. Out of some dumb animal premonition. We turn our heads to the right and see, glimmering dull white amid the twisted night-black sagebrush, a field of bones. And, I’ll never forget this, the hulking massive back of some downed beast.

I grab Karen’s wrist. She drops the pelvis. We scream! And start running. And keep screaming and keep running. Until finally our editorializing instincts kick in: Okay, did you see that too? Yes!!! Wait, what did you see? Bones! Oh my god me too. Did you see the carcass? What carcass? Never mind, there was no carcass. Was it a deer or a cow? I don’t know. I’m pretty sure I saw duplicate bones. Like there’s more than one animal. Way more. How long does it take for bones to get all white like that? Those bones have been there a while. But the carcass is fresh. Was it… all in one piece? The head was… at an angle. But if animals had killed it they would have eaten it, right? Right. Why would multiple large animals keep dying in the same place? Did they trip? Is there a sinkhole? A portal? Clearly that field is haunted. Well, it is a bone field after all.

By now we’ve slowed to a winded trot. We keep looking over our shoulders.

Isn’t it ominous how that event perfectly dovetailed with our conversation?

Notice how it appeared so suddenly, just like in the movies.

Notice how it’s the full moon and everything.

Even these bails of hay look creepy.

Yeah! How come we never noticed the hay’s haunted before?

We’re coming up to the road, right where we intended to, when I step on something; it sticks to the bottom of my shoe. I try shaking it off, scrapping it off, thinking it’s a clod of dirt or dried shit or something, but it won’t come off. Oh man, now my shoe is haunted! I stop to examine this latest development. It’s some kind of saddle decoration – a silver circle attached to a leather circle. It’s a haunted cowboy thing! It found you! By sticking itself into my shoe. With a nail! I like how it stuck itself into your shoe but not into your foot. Yeah, I like how it didn’t give me tetanus!

The short stretch of US14 from Big Red Lane to the schoolhouse is a bewildering sequence of orange, yellow, red lights; high-speed passing gusts, gearshifts, and tires whining past us. All haunted.

A last low swath of fuchsia sky sets up shop behind the cottonwoods.

The trees are taller than usual, wouldn’t you say?

How are we going to explain this to the others?

The first thing we have to do is wash the haunt off our hands.

I hope there’s no red meat for dinner.

There’s buffalo meat for dinner. Not the best night for it. Luckily Deb's there; she knows all about the bone field. It’s a dump, she says. That makes sense. A cow dies in the field and the rancher has to put it somewhere. Or else the other cows become demoralized. I imagine. This perfectly reasonable explanation does allow one to sleep at night. But it doesn’t mean the bone field isn’t haunted. It totally is.

Some stories have, in their retelling, diminishing returns. Karen and I keep telling the story of the bone field to each other because we know how scary it is.

She came into my studio for lunch today, saw my spread of snail shell rocks and said: “A museum of yesterday!”

I read her a paragraph from The Snows of Kilimanjaro. She just read that story, but still she said: “Did you just write that?” See why Karen’s my favourite? Hemingway wrote this in 1927, but it’s obviously about haunted yesterday:

“What about the ranch and the silvered grey of the sage brush, the quick, clear water in the irrigation ditches, and the heavy green of the alfalfa. The trail went up into the hills and the cattle in the summer were shy as deer. The bawling and the steady noise and slow moving mass raising a dust as you brought them down in the fall. And behind the mountains, the clear sharpness of the peaks in the evening light and, riding down along the trail in the moonlight, bright across the valley. Now he remembered coming down through the timber in the dark holding the horse’s tail when he could not see and all the stories that he meant to write.”
Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, 1927
. . . . .

Reading Gide

"Fiction there is - and history. Certain critics of no little discernment have considered that fiction is history which might have taken place, and history fiction which has taken place. We are, indeed, forced to acknowledge that the novelist's art often compels belief, just a reality sometimes defies it. Alas! there exists and order of minds so skeptical that they deny the possibility of and fact as soon as it diverges from the commonplace. It is not for them that I write."
André Gide, Lafcadio's Adventures, 1914
. . . . .

Glass Psalms

Jonathan Garfinkel’s Glass Psalms found their way into my mailbox yesterday.
A bright-grey Monday.
My borrowed wireless connection down.
My apartment drowning in construction site sounds.
In a procrastination stained undershirt I lay down to read.
A fat housefly droned a monotone davvening route around the room.
Prayed at the closed window for summer not to be over.
The Saint Urbain Street trees leaned toward red.
The noon-hour traffic stop-and-go windshield glare.
Wrote dry leaf shadow scripts across the cracked walls of my salon-double.
The week before Rosh Hashanah.
The last few pages of the year ink-smudged and dog-eared.
And me impatient for something new.
Glass Psalms found their way into my mailbox.

Garfinkel writes:

On Rosh Hashonah it is written

The universe
a Gothic Romance
God carries around
in Her pocket.

God the novelist,
ventriloquist and invisible
comic. We
the ink,
slip carefully
toward the page…

Thank you Jonathan, for Psalms at just the right time.
l'shanah tova, JR
. . . . .

Monkey See... Do See Monkey

Monkey is the debut novel of Michael Boyce, who lives in Calgary at the moment, not that that has anything to do with anything. As for Monkey. That Monkey.

Monkey's not like a lot of other novels that I read. At first that's kind of irritating. I like fewer words. So I'm overwhelmed with words words words and wondering when Monkey will get moving, get to the point. And then biff baff, a kung-fu fight on a rooftop. Because that's the fastest way to get to know someone. That makes perfect sense to me, because a) I'm aggressive, and b) I've seen at least a hundred and fifty kung-fu movies. And around then it just happened that I started thinking about Monkey in a different way. I started to see the kung-fu movie structure underneath all that monkey chatter, and then Monkey starts to see it too! To learn things. About himself. Now that's interesting. A young guy learning. About himself, his thoughts, his feelings, learning to be alone with himself. Learning that neither good nor evil is all that interesting. That's really interesting.

So what this Monkey makes me think is that most novels are only novels. They're made of novels, made to be the most novel they can be. Monkey's made of other things besides. Made of movies to be sure, much more like a movie than a novel really. But also made of real like things. People. How they do things, how they think. The words words words drives me a little crazy but that's really more how we think. Most of us. We're slow learners. I don't like slow, but it's true. Monkey thinks out loud and it takes as long as it takes and doesn't skip ahead or jump around or know things as yet unknown. Which is what a lot of novels do. I think it's good to know a lot about novels and a lot about other things besides. And mix them all up. Good good. Now what? Now what will that Monkey Michael Boyce do?

http://monkeyreadings.com
. . . . .

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.
. . . . .

Dear writer-friend,

Dear writer-friend [insert name here]:
I planned to go to your reading all week.
I even washed my hair this morning, but
it doesn’t look like I’m going to make it.
It’s too complicated to explain in an email,
and no matter what I say it will sound like
I’m just making excuses, but here goes:
I’ve got two deadlines at once this week.
And an absentee husband, on account of
there’s a high-end audio tradeshow in town.
I’ve got to walk the dog and I haven’t yet.
And then I’ve got to take something over
to someone who's inconveniently leaving
town tomorrow and needs this thing by then.
Stupidly, I haven't eaten anything all day.
It's almost 6:30 already in Mile End and
your reading starts at 7 downtown.

Sorry.

Good lick tonight. I mean good luck.
Some typos just have to be left in.

JR
. . . . .

The Very Short Story 101

So two fiction writers walk into a bar. That’s not the opening line of a joke, that’s just what fiction writers do. They walk into a bar. Now if they haven’t slept with each other yet they might engage in some witty flirting. If they have slept with each other already or are sleeping with a friend of a friend or secretly hate each other or each other’s writing or have written reviews of each other’s work, some awkward editorializing might be required. But basically, two fiction writers walk into a bar, they drink an alarming amount, there’s chemistry or there’s competition, and eventually one will turn to the other and ask: So, who have you been reading lately?

In January 2006 Mike Bryson, editor of the Toronto-based web journal The Danforth Review, asked 27 Canadian writers what curriculum they would bring to class, if they were asked to teach an introductory level course, The Short Story 101. I’ve never taken an introductory level course on the short story let alone taught one, so I don’t know what makes a good curriculum. Not all of the 27 lists listed on TDR read like curriculum. Some seem like maybe they were compiled to impress fiction writers in bars. But maybe that’s just me.

I used to hate to read short stories. Then I found out I write very short stories, which isn’t quite the same. Anyone signing up for "The Very Short Story 101" would probably be better off just reading poetry. Chances are I’ll never be an English teacher, not with that attitude. But the next time I walk into a bar with a fiction writer, here are some of the authors, stories, or groups of stories that I’ll try and squeeze into the conversation:

Franz Kafka, "The Metamorphoses"
Isaac Babel, "Red Calvary"
Gogol, "The Overcoat"
Chekov, "The Kiss"
James Joyce, "The Dead"
Angela Carter, "The Bloody Chamber"
Haruki Murakami, "The Elephant Vanishes"
Flannery O’Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find"
Grace Paley, "The Small Disturbances of Man"
Cynthia Ozick, "The Shawl"
Amy Hempel, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried"
Barbara Gowdy, "We so Seldom Look on Love"
Anne Carson, "Short Talks"
Lydia Davis, "Almost No Memory"
Mark Richard, "Strays"
Joy Williams, "Honored Guest"
Ron Carlson, "Towel Season"
Lisa Moore, "Open"
Greg Hollingshead, "The Roaring Girl"

So, who have you been reading lately?
. . . . .

Green Thoughts

Who better, on Saint Patrick’s Day,
than Andrew Marvell? Someone Irish
perhaps, but I’m not thinking
of ethnicity, only green with poetry.

"… the mind, from pleasures less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas,
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green through in a green shade."

Andrew Marvell, The Garden (excerpt)
. . . . .

Beware The Ides of March

Here is a mourning Rome, a dangerous Rome,
No Rome of safety for Octavius yet.

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

. . . . .

Reading List 2005

More or less in chronological order, here's what I was reading in 2005.

• Rimbaud, A Season in Hell


• Aristotle, Poetics


• Julian Barnes, England, England


• Mary Gaitskill, Veronica


• Michel Tremblay, La Grosse Femme d'a cote est Enceinte


• Mordecai Richler, The Street


• Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God


• Hesiod, Works & Days


• Theocritus, Idylls


• Virgil, Eclogues & Georgics


• Martialis, Epigrams


• Virginia Woolf, Orlando


• Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry


• Vita Sackville-West, Andrew Marvell


• Irving Layton, Waiting for the Messiah


• Mordecai Richler, Son of a Smaller Hero


• Lise Tremblay, Mile End (La Danse Juive)


• Mavis Gallant, Accross the Bridge


• Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness


• Francis Bacon, Essays & Aphorisms


• Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy


• Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker


• Monique Troung, The Book of Salt


• Lydia Davis, Almost no Memory


• Ben Okri, Stars of the New Curfew


• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness


• Denis Johnson, Fiskadoro


• Mary V. Dearborn, Love in the Promised Land:
  The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey


• Cynthia Ozick, The Pagan Rabbi


• Mario Vargas Llosa, Who Killed Palomino Molero


• Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart


• Barry Hannah, Yonder Stands Your Orphan


• James Joyce, Dubliners


• Nula O'Foalain, Are YOu Somebody?


• Knut Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil


• David Mamet, The Village


• Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment


• Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose


• Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders


• Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House


• John Hawkes, The Beetle Leg


• Joy Williams, Honoured Guest


• Sherwin Tjia, The World is a Hearbreaker


• Grace Paley, Just as I Thought


• Barry Yourgrau, Wearing Dad's Head


• Lawerence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind


• Sheila Heti, Ticknor


• Bohuml Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude


• Josip Novakovich, Salvation and Other Disasters


• Derrida, Writting and Difference


• OVID, Tristia & Ex Ponto


• Alice McDermott, Child of My Heary


• Anais Nin, Under a Glass Bell


• Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte


• V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival


• Lydia Davis, Samuel Johnson is Indignant


• Virginia Woolf, Paper Darts: Illustrated Letters


• Marci Denesiuk, The Far Away Home


• Djuna Barns, Nightwood


• Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living


• Mark Richard, Charity


• Jon Paul Fiorentino,Asthmatica


• Gogol, The Overcoat


• Roland Barthes, Mythologies


• Anne-Marie MacDonald, As the Crow Flies


• Amy Hempel, The Dog of the Marriage


• OVID, The Metamorphoses


• Zadie Smith White Teeth


• Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet


• Margurette Yourcenar, A Coin in Nine Hands


• Ron Carlson, At the Jim Bridger

. . . . .

Reading Martial

When I’m invited to dinner
these days, I don’t get paid
the way I used to. So why
don’t you serve me the same dinner
you eat? You get oysters, fattened
in Lake Lucrine. I cut my mouth
sucking a mussel from its shell.
Mushrooms for you. Pig’s fungus
for me. You’re busy with turbot,
I with brill. You stuff yourself
with a golden turtle dove’s
fat rump. I’m served a magpie
that died in its cage. Why is it,
Ponticus, when I dine with you,
I dine alone? Now the dole’s gone,
you owe me the courtesy
of letting me share your dinner.

Martialis, Epigram lx, Book III
. . . . .

Reading Anne-Marie MacDonald

“If you move around all your life, you can’t find where you come from on a map. All those places where you lived are just that: places. You don’t come from any of them; you come from a series of events. And those are mapped in memory. Contingent, precarious events, without the counterpane of place to muffle the knowledge of how unlikely we are. Almost not born at every turn. Without a place, events slow-tumbling through time become your roots. Stories shading into one another. You come from a plane crash. From a war that brought your parents together.”
Anne-Marie MacDonald, As The Crow Flies, Toronto: Knopf, 2003. page 36.
. . . . .

Still Reading Rilke

Rilke says:
"Do not let yourself be misled by outward appearances; in the depths everything becomes law."
From "Letters to a Young Poet" July 16th 1903.
. . . . .

Reading Rilke

Rilke writes:
"Nobody can advise and help you, nobody."
The best advice I've had in ages.
But hey, don't listen to me.
. . . . .

Still reading Ovid

Ovid turns many men to birds and beasts.
But mostly women, it seems, make like trees and leave.

Daphne, fleeing Phoebus, wind flowing in her dress,
“Called ‘Father, if your waters still hold charms
to save your daughter, cover with green earth
This body I wear too well,” and as she spoke
A soaring drowsiness possessed her; growing
In earth she stood, which thighs embraced by climbing
Bark, her white arms branches, her fair head swaying
In a cloud of leaves; all that was Daphne bowed
In the stirring of the wind, the glittering green
Leaf twined within her hair and she was laurel.”

Dryope did not ask for her tree-grown prison.
She picked a bright lotus at the stilled edges of a lake.
A cursed flower, the body of another chased woman,
Lotis, who turned to plant to escape naughty Priapus.
Dryope turned to run, but “her feet were caught,
Held into earth and grass, and as she swayed,
Only her arms and shoulders were swung free.
Rough bark crept up her legs, her thighs,
And as she felt it creep, she tore her hair,
Only to find her fingers full of leaves.”
A lotus tree her last fair disguise, she pleads:
“Let neither steel nor tooth break though these boughs,
nor senseless cattle eat away my leaves.”

After Orpheus lost Eurydice the second time,
he turned to singing and preferred the love of boys.
“The songs that Orpheus sang brought creatures round him,
All beast, all birds, all stones held in their spell.
But look! There on a hill that overlooked the plain,
A crowd of raging women stood, their naked breasts
Scarce covered by strips of fur. They gazed at Orpheus
Still singing, his frail lyre in one hand.
Her wild hair in the wind, one naked demon cried,
‘Look at the pretty boy who will not have us!’
And shouting tossed a spear aimed at his mouth.”
“The screams of women, clapping of hands on breasts and thighs,
The clattering tympanum soon won their way
Above the poet’s music; spears found their aim,
And stones turned red, streaked by the singer’s blood.”

Guess the punishment for the murder of Orpheus:
Lyaeus captured the Thracian madwomen
“Who saw him die, trussed them with roots,
And thrust their feet, toes downward, into earth.
As birds are trapped by clever fowlers in a net,
Then flutter to get free, drawing the net still tighter
Round wings and claws, so each woman fought,
Held by quick roots entangling feet and fingers,
Toenails in earth, she felt bark creeping up her legs,
And when she tried to slap her thighs, her hands struck oak;
Her neck, her shoulders, breasts were oak-wood carving;
You’d think her arms were branches – you’re not wrong.”
. . . . .