I’ll be reading “The Prettiest Teeth” tonight at the Montreal launch of Lust for Life: Tales of Sex and Love at the Sergent Recruteur (4801 St-Laurent, corner Villeneuve).
The event will begin at 7:30 p.m., and will feature readings by contributers: Matthew Anderson, J.R. Carpenter, Tess Fragoulis, Harold Hoefle, Nairne Holtz, Neil Kroetsch, Mark Paterson, Neil Smith, and Barry Webster.
See you there!
. . . . .
Show-And-Tell was my favorite subject in grade school. I especially loved the unprepared kids who took whatever they had in their knapsack – like an apple, or a hairbrush – and made a really great show out of it. In University I worked in the Visual Arts Slide Library -170,000 tiny pictures of art, and my job was to find and file them. Heaven! So, as you can imagine, I got pretty excited when Studio XX in Montreal invited me to give a presentation at: 
Salon Femmes Br@nchées #61 :: ART.chives : art, archives, & databases.
“In this era of sampling and access to «public» information archives increasingly represent a source of artistic material. Studio XX invites you to a «5 à 7» for informal discussions with artists whose work makes diverse artistic use of archives and databases… Featuring presentations from: Aesha Hameed, J. R. Carpenter & Projet Matricules.”
Thursday, February 16th, 2006
5pm-7pm, Studio XX
Strata of Data: Digging Through A Dozen Years On Line: J. R. Carpenter got her first Unix account in 1993 and has been making web art projects since 1995. She constructs her online fictions with Internet flotsam and jetsam: found images, found audio, found data, and found scripts. Carpenter lurks in listserves, prowls developer-sites, copy and pastes and habitually Views Source. She collects old textbooks in the alleyway and photographs other people’s graffiti. She alters slick blocks of CSS, and tweaks cheesy javascript effects for narrative purposes. Her web projects retain a low-tech aura. She uses a lot of black and white images (because that’s what colour photocopies come in), uses DHTML when Flash would do nicely, avoids software solutions, embraces cross-browser/cross-platform vagaries, and aims for scalability and graceful fails. In this presentation she’ll lead us on a tangential tour through her archive of web art projects, pointing out the “borrowed” bits along the way.
If you can’t make it on Thursday, that’s okay. You can dig through my data any time, at: http://Luckysoap.com
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Founded in 1996, Studio XX is Montreal’s foremost women’s digital resource centre. Through a variety of creative activities and initiatives, the Studio works with women to demystify digital technologies, to critically examine their social aspects, to facilitate women’s access to technology, and to create and exhibit women’s new digital art.
STUDIO XX
338 Terrasse Saint-Denis, Montréal (Québec) H2X 1E8
À deux pas au sud de l’intersection Sherbrooke et St-Denis.
Métro Sherbrooke, ou autobus 24 (Sherbrooke) ou 125 (Ontario).
(514) 845-0289 / http://www.studioxx.org
. . . . .
THE CAPE has been included in: THE FIRST INDEPENDENT FREE INTERNET ART GALLERY – a cultural non-profit association operating between Turin, Milan and Venice promoting international art.
Cape Cod is a real place, but the characters and events of THE CAPE are fictional.
“The Cape, as Cape Cod
is often called,
is, as you may know,
a narrow spit of land.” [JRC]
I built THE CAPE out of Internet flotsam and jetsam: found images, found audio, found data, and found scripts.
Visit THE CAPE: http://luckysoap.com/THECAPE
. . . . .
One of my short stories called “The Prettiest Teeth” has been published in the anthology Lust for Life, edited by Claude Lalumière and Elise Moser and published by Véhicule Press, January 2006.
“The Prettiest Teeth” is not about boys or girls or love or lust or sex or sexuality. It’s really all about the teeth. Here’s the opening paragraph:
“Beth Wharton sits across the aisle from me. She has the prettiest teeth in the sixth grade. My teeth are a mess. One eyetooth is misshapen and the other one never came in; one front tooth pokes through my lips if I smile, so I try not to. I try to keep my mouth shut altogether, but it’s a losing battle. I can’t stop myself. I crack lame joke after lame joke on the off chance that Beth Wharton will crack a smile.”
For the whole story, drop by the Toronto and/or Montreal launch events or visit: http://luckysoap.com/publications.html 
The Toronto launch will take place on Saturday, February 11th in the upstairs pool room at Rivoli (334 Queen Street West) at 7:00 and will feature readings by: Nalo Hopkinson, Barry Webster, J.R. Carpenter and Harold Hoefle.
The Montreal launch will take place on Monday, February 13th at Sergeant Recruteur (4801 St-Laurent) at 8:00 and will feature readings by: Matthew Anderson, J.R. Carpenter, Tess Fragoulis, Harold Hoefle, Nairne Holtz, Neil Kroetsch, Mark Paterson, Neil Smith and Barry Webster
Véhicule Press says: Lust for Life is a smart, witty, and fascinating anthology celebrating the diversity of the human sexual experience. These stories are daring, playful, funny, romantic, genderbending, sensual, mysterious, and sexy, and explore and celebrate love and sex in all its forms. It includes stories from Matthew Anderson, Catherine Lundoff, Neil Kroetsch, Robin Evans, Mark Paterson, Ashok Banker, Dan Rafter, Scott D. Pomfret, Neil Smith, Tess Fragoulis, Vic Winter, Harold Hoefle, Joel Hynes, Nalo Hopkinson, Nairne Holtz, Barry Webster, Ray Vukcevich, Holly Phillips, J.R. Carpenter, Maya Stein, and Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia.
For more information about the anthology visit: Véhicule Press
. . . . .
At our house
every day is
the year of the dog.
. . . . .
Search for my poem Searching for Volcanoes, recently published in Future Welcome: The Moosehead Anthology X, edited by Todd Swift (Montréal: DC Books, 2005).
Future Welcome comes 50 years after 1955. In his introduction to the anthology editor Todd Swift notes: “1955 saw: the opening of Disneyland; the publication of Lolita; ultra-high frequency waves produced at M.I.T.; Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment; the introduction of the first fluoride toothpaste, Crest; the International Air Pollution Congress (held in New York City); the debut of Scrabble; B-52s put into service; Ray Kroc’s acquisition of McDonald’s; Elvis’s TV debut; Salk’s polio vaccine; a time bomb on United DC-6 flight; Glenn Gould’s “Goldberg Variations”; Eisenhower’s upholding of the right to use nuclear weapons in defence; US Congress ordering all American coins to read “In God We Trust”; the deaths of James Dean, Wallace Stevens and Albert Einstein; and the birth of Bill Gates.”
Where are we now? Certainly not where we thought we’d be. Swift writes: “I wanted poems and prose both of our moment, and yet imbued with the same sense of retro-kitsch that popularly defines the 50s–works about the future, robots, space travel, technology, and sci-fi terror.”
Searching for Volcanoes tells the not-quite-sci-fi-terror tale of trying to do Internet research on a dial-up connection. It’s hard to believe that the Internet didn’t exist in 1955 and yet, in 2005, a 56k connection is utterly antiquated. Volcanoes are a good analogy. As my brilliant friend Norman T. White pointed out to me: “Funny thing about erupting lava – it’s brand new, but it’s also ancient.”
Here’s an excerpt from searching for Volcanoes:
56k
takes forever to fill
collapsed craters
with blue-screen-blue
caldera lakes.
Line by line
the sky downloads:
progressive jpeg descends
a strafe of cloud dithers,
geological time passes –
falls toward mountain…
Future Welcome includes new writing from David Wevill, Sina Queyras, Raymond Hsu, Robert Minhinnick, Annie Freud, bill bissett, Patrick Chapman, Meredith Quartermain, Jason Camlot, Liane Strauss, Todd Colby, Jennifer K. Dick, John Hartley Williams, Louise Bak, Hal Sirowitz, Adeena Karasick, Mike Marqusee, Kavita Joshi, Stan Rogal, Tammy Armstrong, Richard Peabody, Jenna Butler, Ali Riley, Jon Paul Fiorentino, David Prater, J. R. Carpenter, David McGimpsey–plus many more.
For more information on or to order Future Welcome vist DC Books
For more information on editior Todd Swift visit his web sites: http://www.toddswift.com/ and http://toddswift.blogspot.com/
. . . . .
My essay, Con-Textilizing Critical Language, appears in the winter 2006 issue of Surfacing Journal, a publication of the Textile Artists & Designers Association.
In this essay I suggest that less time be spent worrying about what does or does not pass for criticism, and much more time be spent on thinking about what to say, where and how to say it, and to whom. I contend that the critical decisions made by fibre artists in their work that more than qualifies them as critical voices:
High art, low art, craft or trade – the artist’s ontological position is established through the active generation of “material” language. The choices made – between riotously sexy velvet, florid fuchsia fun fur or deliberately domestic damask – speak volumes. If the vernacular is not official, or correct, or refined, or even immediately recognizably critical – so much the better, I say. Content is more critical than criticism. If the story is a good one, it will get read. So let’s focus on deciding what story to tell and how best to tell it – in fluid script discharged from printed fabric, in re-programmable circuits woven into cloth, in loaded statements laboriously crocheted from continuous thread – and forget for a while about what is or is not said about the story after the fact. Fibre Art, adept as it already is at working in the margins, has its very elusiveness at its disposal in its quest for critical language… the language of Fibre Arts can choose to include the fragmentary, the inconclusive and the digressive. It can be interlaced with texts. It can be something you can’t quite put your finger on, like the tip of a needle. It can also be as cerebral as the head of a needle. Head and point and eye, looking for just the right place to push the point… out, and out loud.
J. R. Carpenter, Con-Textilizing Critical Language, Surfacing Journal, Toronto, WInter 2006.
. . . . .
Oh, she said.
God, she thought.
Why, she wondered.
Me, she concluded.
. . . . .
More or less in chronological order, here’s what I was reading in 2005.
. . . . .
It’s December – Saturnalia time –
when handkerchiefs and little spoons
are flying around, and wax candles
and writing-paper and withered
Damascus plums in pointed jars.
But I’ve sent you nothing for a present
except my little home-made books.
Don’t think it’s because I’m stingy
or discourteous. The truth is
I dislike the crafty politics
of measuring the gift to the receiver
to get something better in return.
Presents can be like fish-hooks.
Everybody knows how the trout’s
taken in by the fly he gulps
so greedily. Quintianus,
a poor man shows his generosity
whenever he gives a rich acquaintance
nothing at all.
Martial, 1st century Roman poet.
Epigram xviii , Book V.
. . . . .