lapsus linguae

The Year in Book(stores)s

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

Yaddo Authors Library

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

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

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

running short on shelf space

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

Back in September DARE-DARE – an artists-run centre founded in Montreal in 1985 – put out a call for submissions: Dis/location: projet d’articulation urbaine 2008. A fitting theme as DARE-DARE abandoned the white cube gallery ages ago. For the past few years they’ve been operating out of a sky-blue trailer parked in a Mile End park with no name under an overpass about three blocks from my apartment. In keeping with these circumstances their stated mandate is to support interdisciplinary projects that engage the social and physical realms of the city, its public spaces, its commercial, industrial and residential areas.

I submitted a proposal for project called “in absentia” – a web-based electronic literature project about gentrification and its erasure in the Mile End. I write dozens of proposals a year, but this one was different. First of all, I totally identified with the theme. Our apartment building went up for sale over the summer and we were feeling dislocated indeed. Secondly, I’d never encountered an application process quite like the one DARE-DARE proposes. In the first round you tell them who you are, what you do, what you want to do and why you want to do it with them. If they like where you’re coming from then they invite you to elaborate on where you’re going. This makes a lot of sense for projects that don’t exist yet. My project made it through to the second round. I found it a lot easier to write a more detailed proposal knowing that they were already interested.

In the end, DARE-DARE accepted “in absentia” for their 2008 season. It turns out they have a special affinity for the topic of gentrification – they’re being evicted from their Mile End parking spot July 1st. “in absentia” will launch late in June – DARE-DARE’s farewell to the neighbourhood. Now all I have to do is make the thing. More about that later.

More on DARE-DARE: http://www.dare-dare.org/
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Electronic Literature Workshops Online

This winter I’ll be giving five electronic literature workshops through Blue Metropolis’s Teleliterature Program. This series of on-line writing workshops is aimed at helping to develop students’ literary interests and creativity, to enrich the educational and cultural life of students in remote regions and to promote Quebec literature. Many well-known Québec authors have participated over the past five years. This will be the program’s first foray into the realm of electronic literature. It’s an exciting twist to this already Internet-based program. What better way to introduce students to electronic literature than via the Internet?

Each workshop lasts an hour. The teachers are asked to introduce the author, the pedagogical guide and to try some exercises before the session, so this week I’ve been writing lesson plans. Here kids, try this at home:

Introduction to Electronic Literature: Putting Your Postcard Stories On the Map

This one-hour workshop will introduce students to electronic literature, a genre of web-based writing that combines literary and new media practices. The workshop objectives are two-fold: to engage students in reading new and experimental literature online, and to encourage them to experiment with creating and sharing their own stories online.

Using examples from my own work, I will introduce possibilities for using the web creatively to tell stories, and discuss ways to use the web to reach a broad audience. Many of my web-based works combine short fiction with photography and maps to tell stories about places that are important to me. In one recent project, Entre Ville, I use poetry, photography and Quicktime video to tell stories about my back alleyway. In my most recent work, Les huit quartiers du sommeil, I use Google Maps to tell stories about the eight different Montreal neighbourhoods I’ve lived in.

I will invite the students to participate in the workshop by asking them bring with them to class a very short, 250-words or less, “postcard” story about a place that’s important to them. I will demonstrate how to use Google Maps “My Maps” to literally put their stories on the map. The students may choose to continue to experiment with Google Maps once the workshop is done. For example, they might create one map containing all their stories, and/or they might like to add photos to their maps. I will also provide links to many other works of electronic literature for the students to read/view.

For those of you following along at home, here are a few of the recommended readings:

Electronic Literature Organization
The Electronic Literature Organization was established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature. The ELO works to assist writers and publishers in bringing their literary works to a wider, global readership and to provide them with the infrastructure necessary to reach one another.

Electronic Literature Collection Volume One
The Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, published on the web and on CD-ROM, is intended to provide for reading, classroom use, sharing, and reference on and off the network. Anyone can request a free CD-ROM from: Electronic Literature Organization / Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) / B0131 McKeldin Library / University of Maryland / College Park, MD 20742.

Electronic Literature: What is it? By N. Katherine Hayles
This essay surveys the development and current state of electronic literature, from the popularity of hypertext fiction in the 1980’s to the present, focusing primarily on hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, “codework,” generative art and the Flash poem.

Drunken Boat – Online Journal
Issue 8 contains the Drunken Boat Panliterary Awards & links to other online journals.

Born Magazine
An experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media. Original projects brought to life through creative collaboration between writers and artists.
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The Evolution of the Mini-Book

When I was about six I had a subscription to Owl magazine. In one issue they had a page you cut out, cut up and collated into a mini-book about birds. In 32 pint-sized panels The Owl Mini-Book of Birds introduced twenty-seven orders of birds beginning with the most primitive, flightless birds, and ending with the most advanced, perching birds. I’ve moved house at least 12 times since I was six, but somehow that wee book never got lost in the shuffle. I still have it.

When I was in high school I was painting horrible abstracts in acrylics on canvas board, writing excruciating poetry and studying classical guitar. I can sight-read music, but I’m completely tone deaf so a career in music was out. It was a toss-up between writing and visual arts until, when I was fifteen going on sixteen, I spent a summer in New York studying life drawing and anatomy at the Art Student’s League. There under the tutelage of Nicki Orbach I became simultaneously addicted to drawing and anatomical drawings and decided to apply to art school. If you’ve just Googled yourself and are reading this now Nicki Orbach, know that you changed my life.

When I was seventeen I got into Concordia Fine Arts and soon after got a job at the Concordia Fine Arts Library. There I became simultaneously addicted to the disordered stacks of the now defunct Norris Library and the Fine Arts Slide Library photocopy machine. I used the hell out of that photocopy machine. I carried obscure anatomy books out the library by the armload, photocopied all the diagrams and returned the books unread. There were complaints. I almost got fired a number of times. For more on my tawdry affair with the photocopier, read: A Little Talk About Reproduction.

This was in the early nineties, I should mention, before personal computers came along and made themselves accessible. The drawing classes at Concordia were not quite on par with those at the Art Students’ League. I took a collage class with David Moore. There were photos I didn’t want to cut up. So I photocopied them. There were books I didn’t want to cut up, with anatomical diagrams in them more beautiful than anything I could draw, and there were also diagrams for all my other favourite things: botany, embroidery, analytical geometry, you name it. So I photocopied them, called them “found drawings” and found uses for them.

The first mini-book I made as an adult bore the slightly adult title, Bound For Pleasure. It was based on a poem of the same name and was illustrated with an erratum of diagrams ranging from a garter belt to a bandaged foot. The poems got better over time. The collection of found drawings grew. In art school I made four mini-books: Bound for Pleasure, The Confrontation, The Probability of Mummification, and The Basement Family Pharmacy. They’re no longer in print. Mostly I just gave them all away.

In the fall of 1993 I discovered the Internet, got a Unix shell account and set out to learn everything there was to know about computers. By the fall of 1994 I was no longer working at the Slide Library and thus no longer had illicit access to an after-hours photocopy machine. In the fall of 1995 I did a 10-week thematic residency at the Banff Centre, which was call the Banff Centre for the Arts back then. It turns out that all the big things in life happen in the fall.

The theme of the Banff residency was: Telling Stories, Telling Tales. The first story I told them was that I was a writer, which, as far as I knew, I was not, but they let me in anyway. At Banff I attempted to make a number of mid-sized mini-books using the computer, but they never went anywhere. I made this one book based on a circular story. Because it was a book, when people got to the end they just stopped, because that’s what you’re supposed to do with a book. Then the guy in the next studio over pointed out that if I made it into a web page I could link the last page to the first page so the reader could keep going around and around. So I did. My first ever electronic literature project was designed for Netscape 1.1 and it still works: Fishes & Flying Things. The guy in the next studio over was Velcrow Ripper. If you’ve just Googled yourself and are reading this now Velcrow Ripper, know that you changed my life.

I didn’t even think about making another mini-book for years. Too busy paying off my student loan. Luckily web art led to a few marketable skills. I’ve worked in every aspect of the Internet industry, as artist, designer, programmer, teacher, consultant, and even, once, a three-year stint as the manager of a multi-national web development team. I quit that job in the fall of 2001. Yes, in the fall.

After three years in the corporate world I never wanted to look at the web again. So I began writing a novel. About eight months into that as yet unfinished project I realized how long it would take. Needing to finish something immediately in order to sustain my sanity, all of a sudden I found myself making a mini-book. Not surprisingly, that book, Down the Garden Path was all about how incredibly long it takes to “make a thing which then exists and maybe it is beautiful.”

I’m still working on the novel. And a collection of short stories. Or two. The post-corporate traumatic stress disorder has worn off and I’m back to making electronic literature again. Sometimes I do these things separately, more often all at once. Each new mini-book begins with a piece of writing, a short piece that I can’t get out of my head. Images accrue around it. Sometimes other texts attach themselves to my text and sometimes there are videos too. Three of the most recent mini-books are based on web projects: Entre Ville, The Cape, and How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome. The web is nice, but nothing beats cutting stuff up with scissors.

Look for these and other mini-books in DISTROBOTO machines around town. Or just ask me next time you see me – there are usually some in my purse.
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Expozine Sunday

Expozine Sunday was only slightly less insane than Expozine Saturday. Plenty insane for six hours sitting in a church basement selling mini-books.

A mini-book is one-sixteenth of 8.5 x 11. I had six. I laid them out in a grid to make it look like I had more. That’s what I like, lots of small things. Five rows of six and every time someone bought a book, I replaced it. Nature hates a gaping hole. I’m not obsessive compulsive, I’m not obsessive compulsive, I kept saying. At first I thought I wasn’t selling very many. Because I was sitting next to Sherwin Tija’s wildly popular Scrabble pins. So many people leaning over my table to look at his. What the heck, I figured. It’s a good day to study belt buckles. There were some very cool ones. My favourite: a monogrammed painting of a tractor. Only two zippers spotted down.

By my initial calculations, by the end of the day I’d sold 35 mini-books. Not bad. On closer inspection my cash tally indicated I’d sold 42 mini-books. So much for my careful record keeping. I must not be obsessive compulsive after all. 42 books in 6 hours works out to 7 books an hour, one every 8.5 minutes. Insert Count Dracula laughter please.

Of course the best part of Expozine is running into people, hanging out with friends, having random semi-profound and/or silly encounters, drinking beer and of course buying zines. I bought a zine called The Last Thumbnail Picture Show by a guy named Adam Thomlison for this line in it: “Ignoramus. (that’s French for regret).” I bought a zine called Bela Lugosi is Speaking from The Unkindness of Ravens Press because the drawings are as relentlessly beautiful as the text is wry: “if you look long enough it becomes hard to tell vampires from unicorns and unicorns from vampires.” Unicorns hardly ever come up in vampire-themed stuff. Impressive. I bought a bunch of nudie postcards from Textanuedes and a zine called Culture and Other Shocks from All Thumbs Press because the girls at the table were drinking a fifth of Canadian Club in a self-professed attempt to buy local. I’d tell you about this other zine I bought called My First Trip to Florida, Which Was Mostly Spent in a Boatyard, by Michelle Sayer, but it’s going to be a present for someone who reads this blog regularly.

My friend Freda Gutman gave me a beautiful little book about her recent exhibition, Notes From the 20th, which was at the Cambridge Galleries earlier this year. My friend Howard gave me some zines cause last time I saw him I gave him a zines. I quite liked his Farmer Farmerstein explanation of the origin of the expression “Fuck the Earth” but, he complained, some find his stuff offensive. Everything’s relative. One guy sat at a table across from me for five hours and then came over to tell me I made my shirt look good. Whatever. I refrained from telling him to fuck the earth. On a way more hopeful note, I traded two copies of my How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome mini-book for two copies of Ms. Elisabeth Belliveau’s lovely Italy zine, Draw Around you and Hope because those two go so well together. Elisabeth’s new book-book, The Great Hopeful Someday, is launching at the amazing-but-true new Drawn & Quarterly bookstore on Sunday, December 2 at 7PM. 211 rue Bernard ouest, Montreal.
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Mini-Books at Expozine

I spent the better part of the afternoon zine shopping and socializing at the 6th annual Expozine. It was PACKED. Kind of overwhelming. In a good way. Glad I got my browsing in today ’cause I’m going to have a table tomorrow and won’t be able to wander aimlessly around and around and around. I’ll be selling mini-books. Including such favorites as:

Entre Ville
The Cape
How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome
Down the Garden Path
Evening
Searching for Volcanoes
and The Amazing Real Life Adventures of Auntie V and Isaac the Retorical Wonder Dog

$2 each. Come on down.

Expozine
Sunday, November 25, 2007, from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.
5035 St-Dominique (Église Saint-Enfant Jésus, between St-Joseph and Laurier, near Laurier Métro).
Free admission.
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Lapsus Linguae in a+b=ba?

a+b=ba? [art+blog=blogart?] a showcase of blog art curated by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne, launched this week on JavaMuseum, a Forum for Internet Technology in Contemporary Art based in Cologne, Germany as part of NewMediaFest 2007 a festival of The Network [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]:||cologne.

a+b=ba? includes this blog, Lapsus Linguae:

Lapsus Linguae is a Latin phrase, meaning a ‘slip of the tongue’. I have a lot of those. Some of my favourite works starts with that spark that happens when saying the wrong thing comes out just the right way. Lapsus Linguae began as writing exercise of sorts, an attempt to note these slips of the tongue. Then, as I began thinking of the bolg as place to publish, I would force myself to act on these seemingly small ideas while they were still fresh in my mind. Generally I work very slowly. Lapsus Linguae has helped me generate a massive amount of new writing on a wide variety of topics, and to get it into a state finished enough to post in a short amount of time. I have become more alert to the stories lurking in the every day. I used to use Lapsus Linguae to post information about my publications and events, but increasingly I find other people so much more interesting to write about. On occasion I also post responses to things happening in the news. The blog is turning me into a social archivist. See, it looks like I mean to say social activist, but really I mean social archivist. A slip of the tongue indeed.

Also launching during NewMediaFest 2007, JIP – Javamuseum Interview Project, now featuring more than 85 interviews (including one with me) and AND – Artists Network Database. AND was initially set up for internal use as a central place for organizing the data related to the artists who are participating in The Network, like JavaMuseum, VideoChannel, SoundLAB, Cinematheque and many others. AND is now open with free access to all users, allowing direct access to and information about these artists, their works and the connected project environments.

LINKS:
a+b=ba?: http://www.javamuseum.org/2007/a_and_b/
JavaMuseum: http://www.javamuseum.org/
NewMediaFest 2007: http://www.newmediafest.org/
AND – Artists Network Database: http://www.nmartproject.net/artists/
JIP – Javamuseum Interview Project: http://jip.javamuseum.org/jipblog/
The Network [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]:||cologne
http://www.nmartproject.net
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Excerpts from a Timetable of Noteable Arrivals in Rome

1786 – Goethe rushes to arrive in Rome in time for All Saint’s Day. He anticipates conspicuous general feasting, but finds none. Wherever he walks he comes upon familiar objects in an unfamiliar world. Everything is just as he imagined it would be; yet everything is new.

2002 – I fly into Fiumicino two-hundred-and-twenty years to the day after Goethe rode through the Porta del Popolo. It’s raining. All Saint’s Day is a holiday. Most shops are closed. But the Supermarcato stays open. I have rented an apartment. I have a kitchen. A heavy brass key unlocks a massive green door. I walk out into Rome.

“The bronze statues by the city gates show their right hands worn thin by the touch of travellers who have greeted them in passing.”
LUCRETIUS, The Nature of the Universe – Book I

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Tributaries and Text-fed Streams

a feed-reading of The Capliano Review
a new work of electronic literature by J. R. Carpenter
curated by Kate Armstrong

The Capilano Review, a literary journal based in North Vancouver, has commissioned me to create a new work of electronic literature based on a recent issue dedicated to new writing and new technologies. TCR 2-50 “Artifice & Intelligence,” guest-edited by Andrew Klobucar, 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 will be a personal, experimental and playful rereading of and response to these essays. I will explore the formal and functional properties of RSS, using blogging, tagging and other Web 2.0 tools to mark-up and interlink 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.

Over a four-month period I will read and re-read the essays, 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 that will open up new readings of the essays and reveal new interrelationships between them. The result of this process-based approach will be a blogchive – part blog, part archive – at once an online repository for the artefacts of re-reading and a stage for the performance of live archiving.

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.

Tributaries & Text-fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review will launch simultaneously on thecapilanoreview.ca (Vancouver) and turbulence.org (New York) in the spring of 2008.
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Getting In On The Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together

In the beginning there were only a few of us. That we knew of. We thought there might be others, but we weren’t sure where to look. We were in a room. It was a small room. If it had a glass ceiling, we couldn’t see it. The point was to share the room, and what was in it. What was in it was a lot of paper and also, a computer. It was our understanding that the computer would replace the paper. We hadn’t got that working yet. We had other, more pressing questions: Where is this place called cyberspace? And who pays for it? We asked around, but no one would tell us anything. Go away, they said. You’re no good at math, they said. Which only made us ask more questions: What are they hiding from us – passwords, codes, equipment? What are we missing – information, networks, power? What don’t they want us to know – that if they can do it we can do it? If they can do it than how hard could it possibly be?

One day we decided we would ask the computer. Computer, do you contain any answers to the many questions you engender? We huddled around it. We only had the one. It was a grey-beige box with a beetle-black glass eye. We knew we had to get past the surface of the thing. We knew that deep down inside our grey-beige box was much larger than it appeared. It was connected to other grey-beige boxes in other rooms. Stashed away inside these millions of boxes there must be billions of answers.

We switched the computer on. There was a click, a whir, and then a steady hum. Soon enough we sat basking in a blue-green glow. A cursor blinked at us. We blinked back. Now what do we do? Expectations were running high. We’d been promised progress, deliverance, another chance. And there was this cursor clearing a path to the command line for us, a clean slate. Before we knew it we were giving it orders: run, kill, execute. This kind of language was hard for some of us to take. Some of us just wanted to: sleep, jobs, stop, exit. Others wanted to know more: list, who, finger, history. Cables coiled at our feet. They snaked out the door. We slipped out with them. So this is how we shed our skin!

We had stumbled into uncharted territory, an outlaw zone where we could be anything, anyone, anywhere. We could be logical. We could be abstract. We could be “it” or “he/she” or we could log in as Guest and cruise anonymous through Archie, Gopher, Telnet and FTP. We wandered around like this for a dog’s age. Which, in Internet years, was just a few days. We still had bodies. Our wrists were sore. And everywhere we went we were: @gender, language thwarting us at every turn.

One day we were minding our own business writing shell scripts on the command line when a bright spec appeared on the horizon. It was a pixel. It was a mass of pixels. The pixels joined forces. Soon they formed a thumbnail, and then a whole jpeg. An image! The next thing we knew no one knew who was issuing commands anymore. We were all clicking away on icons. What we saw was what we got. One thing linking to another, faster and faster, around and around we went.

Now all we have to do is ask, and answers come racing at us. So many answers. What were the questions again? They were merely predictions. They enabled us to move forward. Toward what? We never would have guessed. How many of us there are. How much we do and do not know. How are we going to remember all this? Will our uncertainties be stored online, along with our desires? Maybe we’d better print them out just in case. How necessary is closure? Well, it’s a start anyway.

“Getting in on the Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together,” an essay by J. R. Carpenter, published in xxxboîte, an artifact produced in celebration of the first ten years of Studio XX, a Feminist art centre for technological exploration, creation, and critique.

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