lapsus linguae

birthday flowers

Half the year has whizzed by already. I’ve never been so busy in all my life. For a while there I was officially doing a few too many big things at once. Now I’m only doing one big thing at once. What a relief! Well, relatively speaking. My summer writing schedule is insane. I handed in a manuscript draft on July 15th. The editor’s comments are due back July 21st. That leaves six days in between for dental procedures, doctor’s appointments, grant applications and various other overdue paperwork, banking, random socializing and oh I don’t know maybe a bit of summer vacation.

Our friend Adriana has been visiting Montreal from Mexico for four months now and we have barely seen her. She has to leave soon. We made plans to get together. We would have loved to have taken her out of the city to see a bit of countryside but alas we had no time or money or car. But surely there was something somewhere in the city that she hadn’t done yet? She said what she really wanted to do was to go see Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, but she thought I’d probably done that a hundred times already. Nope, I’d never done that in all the 18 years I’ve lived in Montreal!

Pre-excursion research indicated that Buckminster Fuller was born on July 12th 1895. I was not surprised at all to hear that he was kicked out of Harvard twice. We summer birthday folks have a hard time with conventional thinking. Adriana and I went to see the geodesic dome he built for Epxo 67 on July 17th 2008, 113 years and five days after his birthday. My birthday is July 18th. Adriana is leaving town on July 22nd. It all worked out very well, mathematically speaking.

I’ve seen the dome from a distance of course, but never up close and personal. We got so inside the thing as to be able to see how the joints are made. Now we know how to make a geodesic dome of our own. Why I waited 18 years to do this I don’t know. Not only is Bucky’s dome amazing, but it’s also on an island. This means that when you go see it you are magically transported to another world. Parc Jean-Drapeau is quiet and cool. A secret garden, a real marvel, replete with waterfalls and lily ponds traversed with curved footbridges a la Monet and everything. I took dozens of pictures. If Monet had had a digital camera everything would have turned out differently.

Adriana was a marvellous companion. We picnicked under the dome and took whichever footbridges came our way and spent ages peering into the murky shallows of one lily pond after another, admiring the fish and ferns and spiders and red winged blackbirds each with equal wonder. There’s a gigantic Alexander Calder sculpture in Parc Jean-Drapeau. Who knew? There are tree-lined paths along the river that – in the hot and humid haze of summer – look like works of the impressionist pointillist painter Seurat.

It’s great to get out of the city. Even for a few hours. From across the mighty Saint Laurence River Montreal looks far far away. For the price of a metro ticket you can hear the river lapping on the shore and hear the birds in the trees and feel free as one of them. And then, for the price of another metro ticket you can scoot back into town again and go to an art opening. We went to see Reverse Engineering – a first ever exhibition of works on paper by installation and intermedia artist, jake moore. Our Buckminster Fuller research perfectly prepared us for jake’s work.

Tree branches have been central objects in her practice for several years where they stand in for antennae and antlers representing both communication devices of the natural world and a metaphor for a kind of hierarchical learning strategy, “arboreal” referred to negatively by Deleuze and Guattari. Here, the same branches used in earlier installations have been measured, mapped and charted using the tools available in Hexagram Concordia’s rapid prototyping lab. In a somewhat perverse twist, the tools were not used to develop a new 3 dimensional iteration as they are intended but instead the wireframe models have been printed as the final works. They are indexical measures, or a cartography of the skin of these trees. Quite imperfect, as it is impossible to measure every surface of the tree – Shockingly complex, as the delicate linear quality of trees is revealed as a fractal and crystalline surface. They are abstractions made with rational means. jake moore

Even if you don’t have time to go see the geodesic dome first, check out jake more, Reverse Engineering at the fofa gallery at Concordia: http://fofagallery.concordia.ca/

I slept late the next morning, after all that fresh air. I woke up and thought I heard the doorbell downstairs ringing. Then a few minutes later I heard our doorbell, and figured out that the first doorbell had actually been our doorbell only I was asleep and just dreaming that I was a wake. It was Adrian at the door, bringing me birthday flowers. One was shaped exactly like a geodesic dome.

I usually agonize over what to do for my birthday for months in advance and then no matter what I plan it never works out because everyone is always out of town. This year I thought I had that problem solved. Some friends from New York were going to come up and visit us for my birthday but then their travel plans got high jacked by their work schedules. They’re still coming, but not till next weekend. This weekend I had no plans. A few evolved organically. Basically, friends came over for drinks. The 2boys were in town for my birthday for the first time ever! jake moore arrived in a polka dot dress bringing me yet more flowers and an artist’s book as a present. Alexis O’Hara also arrived in a polka dot dress and brought me an art book present. I attribute this coincidence to the full moon, the biggest polka dot of them all.

I’ve known jake moore for at least fifteen years now and have only just discovered that she knows the names of all the flowers. How delightful. How very clever. One of the flowers she brought for my birthday now arches elegantly over a statuette of Michelangelo’s David perched on a stack of books on the shelf above my desk. It truly is a gift to have something so lovely to look at. Even after these flowers fade I’ll have their after-image. Which will come in handy. Any day now the latest manuscript revisions will make their way back to me. I’ll spend the rest of the summer sitting right here staring at this spot.
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in absentia launch party under the Van Horne Viaduct

When Dare-Dare first accepted in absentia for their 2008 season, I was hoping it would launch sometime very late in the season. I had already committed to launching Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams in the spring and Words the Dog Knows in the fall so already 2008 was looking like a crazy year. But, as fate would have it, just as Dare-Dare was sending out notification that they’d accepted my project on gentrification in the Mile End, they received notification of their own eviction from the parc sans nom that has been their home in Mile End for the past few years. They had to be out by July 1st so it made sense to launch my project at the end of June as a farewell to the neighbourhood. When Dare-Dare proposed launching “in absentia” on June 24th, Saint-Jean Baptiste Day, I thought: What the hell – the national holiday thing will distract everyone if the work isn’t quite done.

Stéphane came home from work on Saturday and said: Hey, there are posters with your name on them all over the neighbourhood. Posters, I said. What a good idea. I had proofed a draft of a poster, but it hadn’t quite occurred to me that someone would then post the posters and that people would see them. Dare-Dare has been great to work with. By tacit mutual agreement, we don’t pester each other with details. They do their part and I do my part and somehow it all gets done. Stéphane said: Your event is being billed as the neighbourhood Saint-Jean Baptiste Day party. That’s a big deal, he assured me. One poster was in the exact location of one of the stories in absentia. Many dear friends of mine have lived in the building directly across the street over the years, and all have been evicted now.

Monday afternoon I took the long metro ride east to Pix IV for an interview on CIBL’s 4á6 show. CIBL is also a big deal, according to Stéphane – the last word in community radio in this town. Not only had I never heard of it, somehow I’d managed to live in Montréal for nearly 18 years without ever doing a live radio interview in French. How embarrassing. How terrifying. How did it go? Well, fine I think… but then how would I know? It was fun, at least. And there was a Village des Valeurs next door. After the interview went shopping for an outfit to wear to the launch party and with thrilled to find this four-dollar skirt.

Tuesday’s forecast called for 40% chance of showers. There were showers for 40% of the day. As I was leaving the apartment for tech set up at 2PM I said: It had better rain now and get it over with. It started to rain within seconds. After about twenty minutes it was over with and we had clear skies for the rest of the night.

Arriving at the sans nom the first thing I noticed was that a porto-pottie had been set up next to the Dare-Dare trailer. I was glad that they’d thought of it, I certainly hadn’t. I’ve never had a launch event large enough to require the procurement of a porto-pottie before. This career high was mediated somewhat by the realization that in absentia would be displayed throughout the launch event on two antique iMac computers. “They’re are already in the museum of 20th century design,” Dare-Dare director Jean-Pierre assured me as we set them up on a picnic table outside the Dare-Dare trailer. We had to run network cables out to them, because they were built before wireless networks existed. But the piece ran amazingly well on them, and really, what better computers to withstand nearly 12 hours outdoors in sun, wind, blowing grit and hundreds of beery users?

Hundreds did indeed show up. They came in waves, so at first I didn’t notice how the scale of the thing kept changing. I just drifted from one conversation to the next. The NT2 polka dot crew represented and team OBORO came out in force. “in absentia” guest authors Daniel Canty and Alexis O’Hara were present as were many other dear friends. Over all I only knew a fraction of the people there. The crowd was mixed: kids, dogs, punks, artists, friends, locals and a few friendly local mentally insane folks. I took their presence as a huge complement. If the local mentally insane know that your party is THE Saint-Jean Baptiste Day party to be at you have really made it in this town. Many people were unaware of what the party was for or about other than that it was about having a party, which was certainly one of the things this party was about. Other people were acutely aware of what the work that prompted the party was all about. Stories of evictions from Mile End abounded. Someone on the Dare-Dare selection committee told me that Dare-Dare hadn’t yet been evicted from the parc sans nom when they accepted “in absentia” but he and a number of the other Dare-Dare members had already been forced to move. One guy came up and told me he’d been at home packing when he’d heard about the project and the party on the radio and decided to come check it out. Wow.

The police came three times on account of noise complaints, which totally eclipsed the on-site porto-potties as my new career high. The bicycle cops have the shapeliest legs. The programming director of Dare-Dare gave “in absentia” postcards and I merrily introduced myself to each and every officer as “the artist” which confused the heck out of them. It’s pretty hard to argue with a Saint-Jean block party, especially considering it would be Dare-Dare’s last party every in the parc sans nom. I mean, what were the police going to do, evict us? Everybody remained peaceful, the police left us in peace and people went on dancing until 2AM.

The official cocktail of the evening was the mojito, which was also the official cocktail of my wedding. This was pure coincidence as I had so little to do with the party planning I didn’t even know there would be an official cocktail. All the bartenders were volunteers, as were all the dj’s: Julie d, Tommy T, Rustic, Backdoor, Dirty Boots, papa dans maman, catherine lovecity, alakranx, cristal 45 et FSK1138 & jason j gillingham. FSK1138 & jason j gillingham did some kind of crazy live set using sounds extracted from the blue and red values of photo data taken from images of in absentia. The sound data was extracted using ‘BeepMap‘ a flstudio image synth. A few days later FSK1138 dropped off a CD of these sounds in my mailbox. A few days later FSK1138 popped a CD of these sounds in my mailbox. Thank you guys, so much.

I’m blown away by the generosity of all these volunteers and mightily impressed by the hard work and dedication of the Dare-Dare community. All night the programming director of Dare-Dare worked crowd control with a super grounded zen like calm, negotiating with the police and the locals and the drunks and the crazies and me the artist and picking up empties and taking photos and restocking the bar with beer. At some point I said to someone, “Man, can you imagine being the guy in charge of all this?”

At some other point in the evening I was sitting with a group of friends watching the masses dancing, casting wild elongated shadows on the underside of the Van Horne Viaduct when it hit me that there were more people at this party than there had been in my entire elementary school. I tried to explain how overwhelming this was. Someone said: “What did you go to a Montessori school or something?” No, I just grew up in a place where there were that few people! When I was a kind in rural Nova Scotia most folks scoffed when I said I was going off the big city to study fine arts in university. When I started making art on the Internet most folks scoffed and said: “The Internet’s just a fad, it will never catch on.” So I found it beautiful that a web-based fiction project could bring so many real people together in a physical space.

At some very late point in the evening I was standing on the steps of the Dare-Dare trailer taking night photos each on more surreal than then next yet not quite able to capture the scene when artistic director Jean-Pierre passed by and asked me if I was enjoying my party. My party? “It’s bigger than all of us,” I said. One of the stated aims of in absentia is so “haunt” the neighbourhood with the stories of its former tenants (fictional or otherwise) who have been forced out by gentrification. If my night photos are any indication than yes, I think my plan is working.

in absentia is now online: http://luckysoap.com/inabsentia. I will continue to add new stories over the course of the summer until November 2008. It will take at least that long for all of the ramifications of this project to sink in. If you have stories of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End feel free to add them as comments to this post or summit them via the comment box within the piece.
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in absentia – a new web project by J. R. Carpenter

in absentia is a new web-based writing project by J. R. Carpenter that addresses gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. In this work J. R. Carpenter uses HTML, javascript and the Google Maps API to create an interactive non-linear narrative of interconnected “postcard” stories written from the point of view of former tenants of Mile End forced out by gentrification. This project features new fiction by J. R. Carpenter with guest authors: Lance Blomgren, Andy Brown, Daniel Canty and Colette Tougas. New stories will continue to be be added throughout the summer and into the all of 2008. http://luckysoap.com/inabsentia

in absentia is a Latin phrase meaning “in absence.” I’m drawn to the contradiction inherent in being in absence. In recent years many long-time low-income neighbours being forced out of Mile End by economically motivated decisions made their absence. So far fiction is the best way I’ve found to give voice these disappeared neighbours, and the web is the best place I’ve found to situate their stories. Our stories. My building is for sale; my family may be next. Faced with imminent eviction I’ve begun to write about the Mile End as if I’m no longer here, and to write about a Mile End that is no longer here. By manipulating the Google Maps API, I am able to populate “real” satellite images of my neighbourhood with “fictional” characters and events. I aim to both literally and figuratively map the sudden disappearances of characters, fictional or otherwise, from the places, real or imagined, where they once lived; to document traces people leave behind when they leave a place, and the stories that spring from their absence. in absentia is a web “site” haunted by the stories of former residents of Mile End, a slightly fantastical world that is already lost but at the same time is still fully known by its inhabitants: a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but could have been.

Themes of place and displacement pervade my fiction and electronic literature, yet place long remained an abstract, elusive notion for me. Perhaps because for many years I wrote about long ago places attempting to inhabit pasts that could never be mine. Mapping the minutia of my most immediate surroundings has made my notion of place less abstract and more socially engaged. Writing about my neighbours has made me aware that I write from amongst them, thus engendering a “we” point of view. Increasingly, my work is collaborative. In in absentia (June 2008) I join a cast of writers from my neighbourhood to pen “postcards” to and from former tenants, fictional or otherwise, displaced by gentrification and it’s erasures.

in absentia also marks the end of DARE-DARE’s Dis/location: projet d’articulation urbaine in the Mile End’s parc sans nom. The mobile office will leave the vacant lot that was its home for two years and move towards Montréal’s dowtown, in Cabot Square, corner Sainte-Catherine and Atwater. http://dare-dare.org

J. R. Carpenter 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 novel Words the Dog Knows is forthcoming from Conundrum in the fall of 2008. Her short fiction and electronic literature have been published and exhibited internationally and can be found on http://luckysoap.com.

in absentia projet web de J.R. Carpenter inauguré le 24 juin au parc sans nom
DARE-DARE avec nouvelles oeuvres de fiction signées J. R. Carpenter, avec auteurs invités: Lance Blomgren, Andy Brown, Daniel Canty, Alexis O’Hara et Colette Tougas La réalisation du projet se poursuivra jusqu’au 30 novembre 2008. http://luckysoap.com/inabsentia

in absentia est un projet d’écriture sur le Web qui traite de la gentrification dans le quartier Mile-End de Montréal et des disparitions qu’elle entraîne. J.R. Carpenter utilise le HTML, le JavaScript et les cartes API-Google pour créer une narration interactive non linéaire constituée d’histoires « cartes postales » écrites selon le point de vue d’anciens locataires du Mile-End forcés de quitter leur logement à cause de la gentrification. Le projet débutera le 24 juin et se poursuivra au cours de l’été et de l’automne 2008.

« L’expression latine in absentia signifie “en l’absence de”. Au cours des dernières années, plusieurs de mes voisins à faible revenu qui habitaient le Mile-End depuis longtemps ont été forcés de quitter le quartier en raison de décisions d’ordre économique prises en leur absence. À ce jour, la fiction s’avère le meilleur moyen pour raconter l’histoire de mes voisins disparus et le Web, le meilleur endroit où afficher leur histoire. Notre histoire. L’immeuble que j’habite est à vendre; ma famille et moi subirons peut-être le même sort prochainement. Menacée d’expulsion, j’ai commencé à écrire sur le Mile-End comme si je n’y étais plus et à écrire sur le Mile-End qui n’est plus. En manipulant les cartes API-Google, il m’est possible de peupler de personnages fictifs les “vraies” images satellites de mon quartier et d’inventer des situations. Je cartographie – au sens propre et figuré – la disparition soudaine de personnages fictifs ou non, des endroits où ils ont habité véritablement ou dans l’imaginaire. Je documente les traces que les gens laissent derrière eux lorsqu’ils quittent un endroit ainsi que l’histoire qui émerge de leur absence. in abstentia est un “site” Web hanté par les histoires d’anciens résidants du Mile- End, un univers quasi-fantastique déjà disparu, mais pourtant bien connu de ses habitants: la mémoire commune d’un quartier tel qu’il n’a jamais vraiment été, mais qui aurait pu être. »

« Mes oeuvres de fiction et de littérature électronique baignent dans les thèmes du lieu et du déplacement et pourtant, le lieu est longtemps demeuré un concept abstrait et imprécis à mes yeux. Peut-être parce que j’ai longtemps écrit au sujet de lieux qui n’existaient plus, tentant de m’inscrire dans des passés qui ne pouvaient pas être les miens. »

« Cartographier les menus détails de mon univers immédiat a fait en sorte que je conçois la notion de lieu de façon moins abstraite et avec un plus grand engagement social. En écrivant sur mes voisins, je me suis rendu compte que je me situais parmi eux pour écrire et que, par conséquent, j’adoptais une écriture au “nous”. Je travaille de plus en plus en collaboration. Pour in absentia, je me joins à une équipe d’auteurs de mon quartier pour écrire des “cartes postales” destinées à ou provenant d’anciens locataires, qu’ils soient fictifs ou non, déplacés par la gentrification et les disparitions qu’elle entraîne. »

in absentia marque également la fin du présent volet de Dis/location: projet d’articulation urbaine – ainsi que de la présence de DARE-DARE dans le parc sans nom du Mile-End. La roulotte quittera le site inoccupé où elle était établie depuis deux ans, en route pour le square Cabot au centre-ville de Montréal, à l’angle de Ste-Catherine et Atwater. http://dare-dare.org

J. R. Carpenter est deux fois lauréate du Concours de nouvelles de CBC Quebec et finaliste au volet Web Art pour le prix Drunken Boat PanLiterary 2006. Son roman Words the Dog Knows paraîtra à l’automne 2008 aux éditions Conundrum. Ses oeuvres de fiction et de littérature électronique ont été publiées et présentées ici et à l’étranger et sont disponibles en ligne au http://luckysoap.com.
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in absentia launch party June 24th

Join us for the launch of in absentia – a new web writing project by J.R. Carpenter with guest authors: Lance Blomgren, Andy Brown, Daniel Canty and Colette Tougas. in absentia is presented by DARE-DARE Centre de diffusion dart multidisciplinaire de Montral.

DARE-DARE will host an in absentia launch party on Saint-Jean Baptiste Day, June 24th from 5 – 11PM in the parc sans nom (St. Laurent @ Van Horn). The event is free and open to everyone. There will be DJs and a cash bar and possibly a laser light show, if I have time!

The launch of in absentia marks the end of DARE-DARE’s Dis/location: projet d’articulation urbaine. On July 1st, DARE-DARE’s blue trailer will leave the vacant lot that was its home for two years and move towards Montréal’s downtown, in Cabot Square, corner Sainte-Catherine and Atwater. The launch of in absentia will be the last event held in the Mile End’s parc sans nom, so please come and make it a great one.

in absentia is a web-based writing project that addresses issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. In recent years many long-time low-income neighbours being forced out of Mile End by gentrification. So far fiction is the best way I’ve found to give voice these disappeared neighbours, and the web is the best place I’ve found to situate their stories. Our stories. My building is for sale; my family may be next. Faced with imminent eviction I’ve begun to write as if I’m no longer here, about a Mile End that is no longer here. By manipulating the Google Maps API, I am able to populate “real” satellite images of my neighbourhood with “fictional” characters and events. in absentia is a web “site” haunted by the stories of former residents of Mile End, a slightly fantastical world, a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but as it could have been. The project will launch in Montreal and on-line on June 24, and new stories will continue to be added until November 30, 2008.

DARE-DARE Centre de diffusion d’art multidisciplinaire de Montréal est situé dans un parc sans nom entre Saint-Laurent et Clark, entre Arcade et Rosemont/Van Horne, Montréal. For more information please visit: dare-dare.og
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Visionary Landscapes, Vancouver WA

After five days in Vancouver BC I headed down to Vancouver WA for Visionary Landscapes: The Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2008. This Vancouver convergence was purely coincidental. It was convenient in so far as I doubt I would have made it to the conference were I not already out west, but visiting two Vancouvers in one trip made for some confusing conversations. For example, when I was going through customs in Vancouver they asked me where I was going: Vancouver, I said.

In Vancouver BC they refer to Vancouver WA as “the other Vancouver.” In Vancouver WA it is difficult not to refer to Vancouver BC as “the real Vancouver.” According to tourist propaganda found in the conference hotel, Vancouver WA was founded 30 years before Vancouver BC. The town has done little with this head start.

There seemed to be an inordinately high number of pawnshops per capita. Beauty parlours too. But when a few of us asked where the grocery store was we were laughed out of town. Literally – out of town. The hotel concierge informed us that the closest grocery store was across the bridge in Portland, Oregon. Picture it: Dutch, a Quebecois, a Norwegian and me, a kid from rural Nova Scotia walking across the state line to buy fruit and granola bars and other provisions to sustain us through the conference’s schedule of impossibly early mornings, late lunches, long days and dinners delayed some nights so late that it almost made more sense to skip ahead to straight up drinking.

Every morning at 7:30AM we were loaded onto two yellow school busses for transportation to the conference site, which was so far from the conference hotel in “downtown” Vancouver that the penalty for missing the school bus was a $25 taxi ride. The Washington State University Vancouver campus is beautiful and well-equipped, but oh so tiny. Or maybe it only appeared to be tiny because Mount Saint Helens loomed so large on the horizon.

On one hand it was kind of exciting to ride in a school bus full of the world’s leading experts in and practitioners of electronic literature. On the other hand, if either of these school buses had been in a horrible traffic accident it would have completely wiped out e.lit as a genre.

Electronic literature is a small but international community. The conference had a family reunion feel to it. We all know each other’s names but many of us had never met in person. I had two works in the Media Arts Show was held in conjunction with the conference: Entre Ville and The Cape. I was a little nervous about performing these works in front of such an august crowd, but afterward a surprising number of people came up and told me they’ve been teaching these works. For some reason it never occurred to me that people whose work I’d been admiring online for years might also be aware of my work.

Oh Internet, once again I under-estimate you.

More information on Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Conference 2008: Visionary Landscapes

There was a write up on the Media Art Show a local paper, The Columbian:
Works of Art A Click Away
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Vancouver BC: An Inventory of Mostly Minor Injuries

May 22: My mother-in-law drove me to the airport during rush hour. To avoid the Metropolitan Autoroute she took a crazy back-roads route through neighbourhoods I didn’t even know we had in this city, including a Little India and a warren of apartment buildings that may or may not have been Ville Saint-Laurent. I gasped and clutched the dashboard a number of times, but a civilized conversation was maintained throughout, in French, and no injuries were sustained.

On the plane I sat next to a short fat neurotic woman who reminded me a little too much of certain people I’m related to. Throughout the five and a half hour flight she fiddled endlessly with an enormous handbag, forever foraging in it for candies with crinkly wrappers and discovering other half-eaten stashes of food. When I asked her to let me out to go to the washroom she left this purse and various other packages on the floor in front of her seat. Stepping over them I stumbled and fell into the armrest and by the time I got to the washroom I had a vicious arm-reset shaped bruise on my thigh.

In the washroom, massaging my new bruise, I was confronted with evidence of just how old the airplane was that we were all hurtling across the continent in. There was a metal foldout ashtray built in just below the sink – like the kind that used to come standard in the backseats of Buicks and Caddies and other gigantic valour-upholstered cars of the 1980s. Above the sink there was small horizontal hole in the wall. A diagram of a double-sided razor blade clearly indicated that this was an ideal place for disposing of double-sided razor blades. When this plane was built razor blades and cigarette lighters were allowed through airport security and smoking on board was permitted in rows 39 through 23. Those were simpler times my friends, simpler times.

Our flight arrived in Vancouver early. When does that ever happen? Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams curator Kate Armstrong picked me up at the airport and drove me to my friend Emilie’s where I’d be spending the next two nights. Emilie had sent driving instructions but I had forgot to print them. That’s all right, Kate said, I know where we’re going – I just don’t know the address. That was the only thing I did know: 919 number 9, I said. I may be no good with names or faces or dates or following directions, but I do have a head for numbers.

Emilie and I were roommates during a residency at the Banff Centre in 2006. When we first got there we had The Loudest Room. We joined forces and eventually got moved to a way quieter room, one with a balcony and a mountain view. She stayed at my place in Montreal late summer 2007 and directly thereafter many amazing projects came my way, including Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams, so as far as I’m concerned Emilie is good luck. Her apartment is massive by Vancouver standards. She has a balcony and a mountain view, but her bedroom is even louder than The Loudest Room. Luckily I always travel with earplugs and had an extra pair for her. So much to catch up on yet, one glass of wine and we went right to sleep.

May 23: Jetlag was my friend in the morning when I still had lots of work to do in advance of the impending Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams launch, but jetlag was not my friend later that evening. I went for a walk to clear my head and was amazed to discover that Vancouver has colours we just don’t have in Montreal, and some crazy-looking trees I’ve never seen before. Back at Emilie’s we set about preparing to have a few people over for a Welcome to Vancouver / Reunion with Long-Lost Friends party. It turns out Emilie and I have dozens of long-lost friends in common and they’re all long lost friends of each other. Except for this one random girl, a friend of our friend Sameena who met her on the bus on way over, invited her in and she said sure. That’s when you know it’s a real party: when there’s someone there who doesn’t know anyone else.

As the evening unfolded we traveled back in time. Our stories crisscrossed and doubled back again in our retelling of them. We enacted a performance of remembering, drew maps of the interconnections between us that even we couldn’t follow, amazed ourselves with tales of what we’d been up to since we’d last seen each other and marvelled to find ourselves together again all in one room. Thrilled as I was to see everyone, I was falling asleep by 11PM. Everybody has to leave now, I whispered in Emilie’s ear at midnight. As soon as they were gone I missed them. Even the random girl.

May 24: By the time I woke up Emilie had already washed the kitchen floor – a gargantuan task. How could a dozen Long-Lost Friends make such a mess? I started in on the dishes. All was going fine despite the fact that doing dishes isn’t my sport and neither of us had had any coffee and there was none in the house. We were just discussing how and when to procure coffee when under the sudsy water the stem of a wine glass snapped in half and sliced the inside of my left thumb open. The wound was deep. It bled profusely. In seconds there was blood all over the recently washed kitchen floor and some blood on Emilie’s foot too. The blood didn’t freak her out so much as the steely resolve with which I insisted on rinsing the wound in cold water.

I was in shock. And I was furious. I had been working on Tributaries for six months and The Capilano Review had invited me out to Vancouver to launch it and now what if I couldn’t deliver? I was far from home. I hadn’t had any coffee. I am unused to having no idea what to do. Emilie bandaged me up and insisted I eat some eggs. I ate with my thumb above my head, and tried to sort out how I would know if I would need stitches or not. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever needed stitches before. The thought of spending the whole day in an emergency room enraged me. As did the difficulty of eating eggs over-easy whilst holding one bloody throbbing thumb in the air. At least it was my left thumb.

The phone rang. It was clearly someone Emilie didn’t want to talk to. I can’t talk right now, J.R.’s bleeding, she said, but the caller kept on talking. Finally my wound made itself useful. Blood began seeping out over my band-aid and dribbling down the back of my hand. Dude, I managed to intone, holding my thumb out in my friend’s direction. There’s really a lot of blood, she told the caller and hung up.

As soon as we were done eating Emilie got online and started searching for walk-in clinics. We took a taxi to the first one we found open on a Saturday AM that said they’d do stitches. The next part of the story is quite grizzly, but here are the good parts: We didn’t have to wait. Emilie was allowed into the exam room with me and was willing and able to squeeze the hell out of my other hand during the procedure. The doctor was our age and he had a sense of humour. Stitches were indeed needed, five of them! And a Tetanus shot. This goes into the “good parts” category because at least we weren’t over-reacting. While he was stitching me up the doctor asked me lots of questions to distract me. When he discovered that I was in town to launch a new project that evening and tried to get me to explain what it was about. Emilie admitted she had no idea what Tributaries was about either. I proceeded to fail miserably to explain the poetics of RSS. This goes into the good parts category because at least it got us all laughing. I got a big bandage and free drug samples. The best part was when it was all over we went outside and discovered a French café directly across the street from the clinic. There was a table in the sun on the terrace. We literally ran across the street toward that table in the sun.

Somehow we still had time to take the bus back to Emilie’s place, bathe (awkwardly) pack (sloppily) and haul my stuff downtown to the hotel I’d be staying in for the rest of my stay in Vancouver thanks to The Capilano Review. We made it to the gallery more or less on time for one of the worst technical set-ups I’ve ever been through. The internet connection conked out every time the cordless phone received a signal. The data projector would talk to some laptops and not others and for about an hour there it insisted on projecting upside down. I still in shock from the thumb wound. My brain was not functioning properly. At some point I gave up and went out to find Emilie and our friend Billy who’s artwork was just about the only thing functioning in the gallery at that moment. They were conveniently located in a near by park. I sank down onto the grass in despair. Billy consoled me with a neck rub. The weather was glorious and the view was stunning, all of which helped a lot.

It was hot in the gallery. I was flushed and overwrought. I had a change of clothes with me, but decided to save them for some other day as my BO would only sully them and even two days into this trip I was all about making my fresh laundry last as long as possible. I didn’t dare have a drink, what with the shock and exhaustion and jetlag and pain medication, but fortunately for us all the DJ was one of the most positive, helpful and energetic human beings I’ve ever met and between him and the Long-Lost Friends, who turned out in droves, soon my energy was restored to near functional levels.

All things considered, the event itself went remarkably well. A good crowd came out. The internet connection didn’t conk out once during my performance. After my bit was done, a number of other folks performed riffs on the theme of Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams including my perpetually long-lost but always eventually found again friend Michael Boyce. With profound relief I witnessed the project moving beyond me, out into discourse as it were. Many people came up to me after and admitted that they hadn’t understood the project at all before hand but now they did, which was a load off my mind. The curator and commissioning body all seemed happy and eventually it was over and I had chic boutique a hotel room waiting for me, hurrah!

In an attempt to pull the hotel room window closed for the night I managed to both bang and cut my right elbow, which hurt like hell, but everything is relative after having already had stitches earlier in the day. I took a massive doctor-endorsed pain killer and slept and slept and slept.

May 25: The great thing about sustaining a bloody injury and yet somehow getting through the day is that for days afterward everything else seems lovely in comparison. “The day after” was bliss. Two dear long-lost friends made me breakfast in the morning and organized a beach BBQ in the evening to which many more long-lost friends flocked and there was food and beer and a Frisbee and a dog and a glorious sun set and really the only difficulty we had was that we were too lazy to walk all the way to the restrooms so we waited till we were driving out and by then we thought we might die of needing to pee but of course we didn’t die at all. After availing ourselves of the facilities we amused ourselves by taking pictures the lights of distant Vancouver. Surely it’s a sign of true friendship when we enjoy each other’s company so much that it doesn’t seem strange at all to spend a half an hour taking pictures together in the dark.

May 26: No injuries were incurred on this day. Only some slight confusions. Long-lost Michael and I went for breakfast. He forgot his phone and had to go back for it. Then we went for a long walk. He pointed out that many buildings in Vancouver have nautical elements in their architecture. Down by the waterfront I said: Wow, this building looks like a cruse ship. It actually was a cruse ship! How embarrassing!! And yet what a relief. I mean it would have been pretty strange if every single one of the condo owners in the building had the exact same deck chairs.

Later I went to meet Emilie at the gallery she works. She was going to let me in to see the show for free but I couldn’t find her anywhere. I thought I’d missed her, but then through the magic of text messaging another long-lost friend who works at the same gallery came and found me in the lobby and just then Emilie found us and soon all was well. The exhibition was awesome, but by this time I was dead tired. Luckily there was a movie playing in a darkened room equipped with comfy couches. Let’s face it, there’s hardly ever a comfy couch in the middle of the day in a public place at just the moment when you need a nap.

Later still I went to dinner with a long-lost friend who had been at the Welcome to Vancouver party, the Tributaries Launch and the Beach BBQ. Previous to the Welcome to Vancouver Party we hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years; we still had a lot of catching up to do. We decided to eat at a Thai place with a terrace. We knew it was the right place because my orange and fuchsia top matched the décor. The heat lamp over the terrace was so hot we thought we’d have to move inside but then we came up with a brilliant idea: We asked the waiter to turn off the heat lamp and he did. Every one else on the terrace cheered. Why didn’t any of them think to ask the waiter to turn the heat lamp off, we wondered?

After dinner long-long-lost friend and I went for a long long walk along a beach and took pictures in the dark… I guess this happens fairly often in Vancouver. We walked and walked and talked and talked and wound at pub, which is exactly what we used to do when we knew each other the first time around. The big difference being: the first time around I was twenty and too lonely to notice that I was surrounded by friends. And now, boy, do I know better. No I know that long-lost friends almost always remember things differently than you do. They remember the good things; they have the power to give back pieces of the past to you untarnished and intact.

The present is a gift, as Michael Boyce says.

June 3: Back in Montreal. I took my stitches out myself. The wound appears healed yet it still hurts. The scar is hardcore. The long-lost friends are all lost again but hopefully not for too long. In the meantime, I miss you all a lot.
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Tributaries: Behind the Scenes at the Vancouver Launch Event

Over the course of the six months that I was posting to Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams I had the occasion to explain the project many times to many people, often with little or no success. Some said: Wow, that sounds so cool… But I know they’d never read a word of it. Others smiled and nodded even as their eyes literally glazed over. Only a brave few admitted they had no idea what I was talking about. You few, you are true friends.

None of this bothered me of course. I knew that this exploration of the formal, functional and poetic properties of RSS would be best understood in its natural element (online) and would be most closely read by an online community already habituated to navigating the tributaries of text-fed streams.

So why, from day one, did I insist that the commissioning body, The Capilano Review, go to the trouble and expense to fly me from Montreal to Vancouver for a real-time one-time only launch event?

The more open-ended, circuitous and recursive a project sets out to be, the more necessary closure becomes. I posted the last fragment of text from the “original” source two days before the Vancouver launch. Had not had a plane to catch and a mic to get in front of I could have continued frigging around with the texts of TCR 2-50 indefinitely.

Tributaries curator Kate Armstrong supported the idea of a Vancouver launch event from day one. While she was researching potential launch event venues she sent me this email:

HI JR
Do you by any wild chance know Billy Mavreas?

BILLY MAVREAS is a Greek-Canadian artist and cartoonist living in Montreal. His artwork has been shown internationally. He is the author of The Overlords of Glee (2001) and the upcoming Inside Out Overlap (Timeless Books, 2008), and also the proprietor of his enduring project, Monastiraki, a Mile-End magickal curiosity shoppe and art gallery.

I replied:

> Yeah, he’s my neighbour and dear friend and we were at Banff together
> and so on. Why do you ask? He’s having a show at Helen Pitt around
> the same time I’ll be in Vancouver.

The rest, as they say, took a few more weeks to plan. But in the end, yes, we had the launch event at the Helen Pitt Gallery, where my friend and Montreal neighbour Billy Mavreas was artist in residence and the director Lance Blomgren had just agreed to contribute texts to another electronic literature project I’m working on and all three of us are Conundrum Press authors. Thank you Lance and Billy for letting us take over the Helen Pitt for the evening. Special thanks Billy for physically remixing a print copy of TCR 2-50 and handing out the mini-zine results on the spot, and for making such Tributaries-looking wall art for us to all stand in front of. And extra special thanks Emilie for pouring wine all evening and without whom I might not have made it to the gallery at all that day, but that’s another story.

Many dear friends showed up for the event, including some long-lost ones and some never before met in person ones and some in the “I have no idea what this project’s about” category. The pressure was on!

The Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams project is nowhere near as complicated as it sounds. It’s about reading. I held up my copy of TCR 2-50 for the audience to see all the underlined passages, circled sections, arrows, stars and annotations scribbled in the margins. We all do this when we read, don’t we? We interpret, interrupt, form metal images, take notes, and make associations. As I parsed and posted fragments of the essays of TCR 2-50 I marked them up, into JRML, as Kate Armstrong once quipped.

There are hundreds of different ways to read Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams. One good place to start is with the post: What the Heck is RSS?

A good example of JRML is section of Sandra Seekins’ essay dealing with the metaphors and media of biotechnologies which led to me to quote a sequence of pre-genetic-technology references made in literature and philosophy to “metaphors” of bodies as “composites of replaceable parts” in this excerpt: Metaphors of Biotechnology

An intertextual dialogue between TCR 2-50 authors emerges in the matrix/chora section of Kevin Magee’s poem To Write as Speach.

After showing these ways of reading Tributaries I went behind the scenes to show how the piece actually works. I posted an image to Flickr, commented on it, tagged it and then it appeared on the Tributaries main page through the magic of a Flickr RSS feed. I saved a bookmark to del.icio.us and that too was pulled into the Tributaries interface. I posted a new post to Tributaries: Alternate Readings: The In This Issue Remix, then logged into Facebook as Babble Brook (a character created to aid and abet with the Tributaries project). RSS had already pulled the afore mentioned Flickr image, del.icio.us bookmark and Tributaries post into Babble Brook’s profile and pushed news of them out into the feeds of all her friends. Having fed all that info into the text-fed stream, Babble Brook and I got off the mic and let the experts take over.

In a stroke of pure genius Tributaries curator Kate Armstrong invited three experts on streams to perform at the launch event: Dr. Michael Boyce, expert in stream of consciousness; Dr. Maria Lantin, Director of the Intersections Digital Studios, a research space at Emily Carr and thus an expert in data flow; and Dr. Jeremy Venditti, an expert in river geomorphology, turbulence and sediment transport dynamics in gravel-bedded streams. Now Dr. Boyce I’ve known for fifteen years, but Dr. Lantin and Dr. Venditti I’d never met before. This triumvirate of stream experts gave a brilliantly intermingled reading that riffed on the theme of streams. For example, if anyone is still wondering why on earth one would feed the texts of a print journal into a RSS stream, consider the transformational effects of the stream as outlined in this passage quoted by Dr. Venditti:

The Stream – Along the bottom of every gorge is a stream channel. In it may flow a great river or a brook or only a temporary torrent. The stream is there because the slopes of the land guide the water that way, and the stream may thus be said to exist on account of the channel. But in an equally important way the gorge exists because of the stream, for the stream is in fact the maker of the gorge and is still at work on it, deepening and enlarging. Let us look at the stream…
Grove Karl Gilbert and Albert Perry Brigham, An Introduction to Pyhsical Geography, 1902.

For me – standing in the audience having only just emerged seconds before from six intense months of working on Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams – this intertextual interdisciplinary reading of the work was a gift, and a joy to witness. Thank-you Michael, Maria and Jeremy for your generosity and thank-you Kate from coming up with this idea.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the gallery, throughout the evening TCR 2-50 guest editor and contributor Andrew Klobucar had been feeding portions of the readings into the Global Telelanguage Resources Workbench, which is basically a definition-generating machine. Despite having marked up an essay about this tool in Tributaries, it wasn’t until Andrew read performed the definitions generated in response to the evening’s other performances that I understood how innately hilarious the Global Telelanguage Resources project is! Thank you Andrew!

The performances were followed by a set from DJ Leigh Christie, who had already rocked my world earlier in the day during the tech set up. Even when the internet connection conked out, even when the data projector insisted on projecting upside-down, DJ Leigh kept our spirits running high. Thank you Leigh!

The longer you work on a project the more likely a launch event is to feel anti-climatic, especially an entirely web-based project. In this case, this was not the case. I’m grateful to The Capilano Review for seeing the project through to this conclusion. I was blown away by the turn out for the event, by the emotions of reuniting with long lost friends, by the generosity of all of the contributors and performers and by the responses to the work that the event generated.

Here’s how I know the event was a success: all the people who had told me beforehand that they didn’t get what this work was about came up to me after and said that now they get it. That’s about as climatic as you can get.
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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
. . . . .

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: Curatorial Statement

What are the creative and poetic possibilities of RSS syndication and how might the introduction of omnipresent, iterative publishing processes affect our experience of digital literature? How can a book be transformed and reworked through an exploration of the formal and aesthetic structure of the stream?
TCR Issue 2-50 : Artifice and Intelligence
Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams is a project by J.R. Carpenter, commissioned by The Capilano Review and curated by Kate Armstrong. In this work Carpenter approaches the text of an issue of literary quarterly The Capilano Review (TCR) as a raw material in the creation of a new artwork.

Carpenter draws on a range of strategies and traditions including literary criticism, illustration, blogging, coding, writing, and digital intervention, using these to articulate an experimental space that equates and associates water with text.

The work is an eddy within the internet, a place where information – commentary, image, text, metadata – coalesce for a moment, before flowing back out into and through other channels. The written word mixes and dissolves, never static, not quite discrete. Related imagery circulates within and without the confines of the artwork, raising questions of boundary. We navigate within this work as we would through wild, quiet rivers. Reading is wayfinding. We pass through texts and text fragments, through citations, links, footnotes, self-author, other-author, patches of whimsy. Social media meets scholarly tracemaking. Categories become headwaters: comments, islands. It is a “text-fed stream”, moving with undercurrents and process.

The work extends our experience of the nature of the digital stream and invites new questions about material, temporality, repetition, and the archive in connection with the electronic word.

Kate Armstrong, 2008
Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams
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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
. . . . .