lapsus linguae

Air Holes

In 2006 my short story “Air Holes” was one of the three winners of the CBC/QWF Quebec Short Story Competition. The competition called for short stories under 1200 words, my favourite category. “Air Holes” weighs in at a wee 930 words or so. The story was broadcast on Cinq à Six CBC RadioOne July 2006.

In 2007 the competition changed its name and rules and regulations. Now now short fiction, travel writing and memoir all fall into one category, which seems like a cruel and unusual thing to do to short fiction. Oh well. Every three years Véhicule Press still publishes an anthology of winners and honourable mentions. “Air Holes” appears in the most recent of these anthologies, In Other Words: New English Writing from Québec, launched last weekend at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal. Here is the opening paragraph:

“The tide will go out at two today. The kids and I will go down to the beach. Between the tidemarks, beneath our feet, tight-lipped steamer clams will burrow sandy deep. But we’ll find them. Their air holes will give them away.”
J. R. Carpenter, “Air Holes”

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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

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It was a dark and stormy exquisite corpse

The 10th annual Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival begins April 30 and runs until May 4, 2008. During the festival I will teach two workshops on electronic literature as part of the Blue Metropolis Student Literary Programme. The programme is designed for traditional authors to read from their work, discuss writing as an occupation, explore a literary genre with the students and then lead them in practical writing exercises in that genre. The students are then invited to read their creations and discuss them together. There will be between 30 and 50 students in each class. For most this will be their first introduction to electronic literature. For the past few weeks I’ve been wracking my brains trying to figure out how to lead 50 high school students at a time through a two-and-a-half hour hands-on writing workshop in electronic literature with only one computer in the room.

We will begin at the beginning, by looking at pre-internet pre-digital forms of writing that helped put the hyper into the hypertext markup language we know today. Among the printed texts most often cited as being hypertextual: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, at least half of Joyce, most of Calvino and Borges and just about all of Blake. I doubt any of those authors are covered in high school English – they certainly weren’t in my day.

The “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books inspired my early hypertext work: Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls. But that genre came and went before most of the students in school now were born. And besides, non-linear narrative structures are complex to create individually, let alone in a group. The vision of 50 16 years trying to decide if our hero should take a trip to petition the territorial legislature for better laws and enforcement (turn to page 96) or decide to get other sheep ranchers together and enforce the law herself (turn to page 110) put me in mind of the game Broken Telephone. A re-enactment of the lossy-ness that occurs when data moves through networks would certainly underline a basic Internet principal, but it wouldn’t necessarily count as a writing exercise. Fortunately, thinking about Broken Telephone immediately reminded me of the game Exquisite Corpse.

Exquisite corpse is a method of collective writing invented by Surrealists in 1925. It’s similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun”) or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed. The resulting text is known as an exquisite corpse or cadavre exquis in French. The name comes from the phrase that resulted when Surrealists first played the game:

“Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.”
The exquisite cadaver shall drink the new wine.

So we will attempt to write an exquisite corpse together, and then we will attempt to put it online together. A sudden rainstorm last night gave me a great opening line:

It was a dark and stormy night…

This, the quintessential opening line, is now so synonymous with a style of writing characterized by self-serious attempts at dramatic flair, the imitation of formulaic styles, an extravagantly florid style, redundancies, and run-on sentences that it becomes a neutral starting point for us.

One of the interesting things about the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night” in the context of a workshop on electronic literature is how many times it has been altered and adapted to new contexts and new literary forms – including electronic ones, as we shall see.

The phrase “It was a dark and stormy night” was originally written by Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It was the opening sentence of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Dark and stormy nights are a common cliché in horror and suspense films. Mad scientists always prefer to perform their experiments under cover of a storm. In Mary Shelly’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, chapter 5 begins:

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

In a number of English translations of Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 novel The Three Musketeers, chapter 65 begins with the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night.” In the original French, the opening line of the chapter is C’etait une nuit orageuse et sombre.

Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time also opens with this line. A Wrinkle in Time remains one of my favourite novels of all time. The main character, Meg, is a teenage girl regarded by her peers and teachers as a bad-tempered underachiever. She and a misfit collection of characters travel through the galaxy by means of tesseract, a fifth dimensional concept similar to folding the fabric of space and time. They save the universe of course. It may also be inspiring for aspiring young writers to note that, this award-winning internationally best-selling sci-fi classic was rejected at least 26 times before it was finally accepted for publication.

Charles M. Schulz made the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night” famous in a 1965 comic strip in which Snoopy lugs a typewriter up to the roof of his dog house and writes this novel:

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night, by Snoopy

Part I

It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed.
Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!
While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

Part II

A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.
At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.
Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates?

The intern frowned.
“Stampede!” the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves. A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch
was saved.
The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the coffee shop. he had learned about medicine, but more importantly, he had learned something about life.

THE END

The ever versatile “It was a dark and stormy night” was adapted once again by hip-hop artist Erykah Badu in the opening line of her 1997 song Apple Tree, from the album Baduizm.

It was a stormy night
you know the kind where the lightning strike
and I was hangin’ out wit some of my “artsy” friends
ooh wee ooh wee oooh
The night was long the night went on
people coolin’ out until the break of dawn
incense was burnin’ so I’m feelin right — ah’ight

See I picks my friends like I pick my fruit
& Ganny told me that when I was only a youth
I don’t go ’round trying to be what I’m not
I don’t waste my time trying ta get what you got
I work at pleasin’ me cause I can’t please you
and that’s why I do what I do
My soul flies free like a willow tree
doo wee doo wee do wee

And if you don’t want to be down with me
You don’t want to pick from my appletree

Erykah Badu – Baduizm – Appletree (Live at the Jazz Cafe)

“It was a dark and stormy night” is much maligned as the worst opening line ever and there is in fact a Edward Bulwer-Lytton competition for the worst story written from that beginning. But there’s something wonderfully liberating in the knowledge that culturally iconic characters as diverse as Snoopy and Erykah Badu can both start narratives with the same line and move off into completely different directions.

The theme of the over-blown literary cliché is taken up in this video exquisite corpse collaboration, Greatest Story Ever Told:

Each collaborator added to this story in sequence, only being allowed to see THE END of what the previous person contributed.

Our process will be similar. Will be in a hotel conference room with a borrowed computer with Internet access and a web browser but little or no other software. If all goes well we will post our exquisite corpse as a blog. And since blog posts always wind up being read in reverse chronological order – i.e. the first post written appears last on the page – we might attempt to write our narrative in reverse order. Whether we decide to open with it or close with it, with such a rote line as our starting point we know that we can improve upon it.
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Out of the Box: Adventures in Electronic Literature

Since the computer was invented, writers have been using it to forge new literary forms. This year the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival moves into the cutting-edge field of Electronic Literature. Join us for an exploration of topics ranging from the early days of hypertext fiction to the latest in narrative gaming with an all-star panel of authors who write beyond the book and way outside the box:

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.

Jeff Parker is the author of the novel Ovenman and the short story collection The Back of the Line, a collaboration with artist William Powhida. His work in and on hypertext has appeared in The Electronic Book Review, The Iowa Review Web, The Believer, and other publications. He is the Acting Director of the M.A. Program in English in the Field of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto.

Jason E. Lewis is a poet, digital media artist and software designer. His creative work has been featured in exhibitions internationally. He conducts experiments in visual language, text and typography at his research studio www.obxlabs.net.

Alice van der Klei holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature on hypertext as a site of memory practices. She hypothesized that hypermedia because of its rhizomatic nature allows the reader to become aware of the workings of memory and of cultural institutionalisation better than any other cultural practice. She is currently working at the NT2 Laboratory and a lecturer in Études littéraires at the Université du Québec à Montréal. www.nt2.uqam.ca.

This event will be hosted by Nora Young of Spark, CBC Radio’s audio blog of smart and unexpected trendwatching: http://www.cbc.ca/spark/

Saturday, May 3 at 7PM
Room: Régence A.
Delta Centre-ville Hotel, 777 University Street (metro Square Victoria).
You can buy tickets at ADMISSION by telephone at 514-790-7245 or 1 800 361-4595 or on their website, www.admission.com.

The 10th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival will take place April 30 to May 4, 2008. For more information visit www.bluemetropolis.org.
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Blue Metropolis Foundation is a non-profit organization located in Montreal. Its core purpose is to bring people of different cultures together to share the pleasures of reading and writing in English, French and other languages. To this end it produces a range of literary activities, educational and literacy programmes, including the multilingual Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. Blue Metropolis Foundation plays a leadership role in the literary, educational and literacy community in the Montreal area as well as nationally and internationally.
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The Stones of Halifax

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Semiotics of Public Speaking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But at least I didn’t lose my voice.
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HAVE YOUR DESTINATION IN MIND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HAVE YOUR DESTINATION IN MIND.

J. R. Carpenter: Mapping a Web of Words

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

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

Noontime talk at NSCAD, (Halifax, NS)
Friday, February 29, 2008 at 12:15pm
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The Fruit Man and Other Poems

Next month the Montreal chapbook press WithWords will publish The Fruit Man and Other Poems, by Jason Camlot, illustrated by me, J. R. Carpenter. Not only do Jason and I have the same initials (JC), as you can see, our names (Camlot and Carpenter) are quite close alphabetically. If we had gone to grade school together I would have sat behind Jason in class. If I had gone to grad school, Jason might have been one of my professors. But neither of these is the case. I’m not quite sure how we actually met, but I do know that before we ever met our poems appeared sequentially in a number of alphabetically ordered anthologies including: 100 Poets Against the War (Salt) and Future Welcome: The Moosehead Anthology X (DC Books), both edited by Todd Swift.

When Jason first asked me to consider illustrating The Fruit Man and Other Poems, I was a little worried that he might have me confused with an illustrator. My background is in Fine Arts, and I vaguely remember studying Life Drawing and Anatomy at the Art Students’ League of New York way back in the Pre-Cambrian Epoch, but I hadn’t done any drawing for a very long time. In my “mini-books” I use many small single images to punctuate the text rather than illustrate it (in so far as illustrations tend toward the emblematic, whereas my use of images tends toward the diagrammatic). But for The Fruit Man I’d have to come up with something more original. Drawing is not exactly like riding a bike. As my friend Camilo, who draws everyday, said before embarking on a round of etchings recently: I am rusty as old german submarines in the deep underwaters of the atlantic.

Another thing to consider: Jason is a Victorianist – that’s a pretty daunting era in book illustration. Think Beardsly’s Salome. Not to mention all that Art Nouveau stuff. But I agreed to illustrate The Fruit Man and Other Poems anyway, because I love the poems. Anyone who knows me will immediately know why when they read them. They are filled with small things: thimbles and pocket combs, mice and china cups. They reference big systems of thinking: the list, the collection, the cabinet of curiosities, phrenology, “the new technology in underclothes,” and Ruskin. I have a real soft spot for Ruskin. The title piece is a long poem modelled on Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (which was illustrated by D.G. Rossetti back in the day). Here is an excerpt from “The Fruit Man” followed by my cover illustration:

When I asked the foreman if he’s seen
a fruit man selling apples, green,
like the one in my hand,
he brought me to his cabinet
of cardboard drawers
stuffed with buttons and safety pins,
butcher’s paper, razor blades,
and numberless scraps of animal skin.
In a pantry for needles,
behind a sewing machine,
the foreman kept his apples,
green, like the one in my hand,
brought weekly to him
by the same Fruit Man.

Jason Camlot, The Fruit Man

J. R. Carpenter, cover image: The Fruit Man and Other Poems, by Jason Camlot
The Fruit Man and Other Poems cover illustration by J. R. Carpenter

The Fruit Man and Other Poems will launch in March. Check back here in a week or two for dates. Or try the WithWords Press website: http://www.withwordspress.com/
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Slip into the Text-Fed Stream

I’ve officially started posting to Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review. What the heck is a Feed-Reading? What on earth is a Text-Fed Stream? I’m so glad you asked!

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review is a personal, experimental and playful re-reading of and response to thirteen essays published in a recent issue of The Capilano Review that was dedicated to new writing and new technologies. In this work I am exploring the formal and functional properties of RSS, using blogging, tagging and other Web 2.0 tools to mark-up and interlink these essays and to insert additional meta-layers of commentary in order to play with, expose, expand upon, and subvert formal structures of writing, literature, and literary criticism.

For the next four-months I will be reading and re-reading the essays and parsing them into fragments, which I will then annotate, mark-up, tag and post. Fed into an RSS stream, the fragments will be re-read, reordered, and reblogged in an iterative process of distribution intended to open up new readings of the essays and reveal new interrelationships between them.

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

The result of this process-based approach will be a web site that is part blog and part archive – an online repository for the artifacts of re-reading as well as a stage for the performance of live archiving. The final version of Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review will launch simultaneously on The Capilano Review website (Vancouver) and on Turbulence.org (New York) in May 2008.

But why wait until then? You can slip into this text-fed stream at any time via the web site, where you can post comments: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca and/or you can subscribe to the RSS feed and have the posts come to you: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca/feed/.

There’s also a facebook group: Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams. I’ve started a collection of literary quotations referring to rivers, streams, writing and the flow of information. If you have any to share, please send them along via a comment to this post, or to a post on http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca, or on the facebook group’s wall. Hope to see you somewhere down river soon …

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams is curated by Vancouver-based artist and writer Kate Armstrong and commissioned by The Capliano Review – a literary journal based in North Vancouver with a long history of publishing new and established Canadian and international writers and artists who are experimenting with or expanding the boundaries of conventional forms and contexts. Now in its 35th year, the magazine continues to favour the risky, the provocative, the innovative, and the dissident. TCR 2-50 “Artifice & Intelligence” was guest-edited by Andrew Klobucar and included essays by: Andrew Klobucar, Global Telelanguage Resources, Sandra Seekins, Kate Armstrong, David Jhave Johnston, Laura U. Marks, Sharla Sava, Kevin Magee, Jim Andrews, Gordon Winiemko, Nancy Patterson and Darren Wershler-Henry.

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca
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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 >>>
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