The fourth Media in Transition conference explored storytelling as a cultural practice, a social and political activity as well as an art form.
May 6-8, 2005 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Cambridge, MA, USA
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit4/
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My Grandmother Carpenter lived in Cape Cod. The only time we ever went there it was winter, but we walked on the beach anyway.
While we were there I tried to get my uncle to teach me how to make that loud kind of whistle sound that you can make by putting two fingers in your mouth.
My Grandmother Carpenter told us: Young ladies do not put their fingers in their mouths. I asked my uncle to teach me how to spit instead.
Later I learned that The Cape, as they call it, is a narrow spit of land.
I do not have a photograph of my Grandmother Carpenter. If I did, I would insert it here.
. . . . .
grey rain falls sideways
andante mderato
we do our taxes
. . . . .
Agent: Your sentences are insecure.
Me: As am I.
Agent: Well you look like a confident person.
Me: A foot taller than him, with my boots on.
I shrugged.
What I should have said: Never trust a fiction writer.
. . . . .
Announcing the launch of a new web art project by J. R. Carpenter:
“How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome” is a web art project combining historical research, poetics, video and photography collected during an extended stay in Rome. This work reflects upon certain gaps between the fragment and the whole, between the local and the tourist, between what is known of history and what is speculative. Rome is among the largest and oldest continuously occupied archaeological sites in the world. Daily life is complicated, even for the locals. Everything is running late, circuitous, or quasi-rotto. Romanticism and pragmatism must coexist. In my struggles with slang, schedules, and social vagaries, I came to feel that understanding what was happening around me was less a question of acquisition of language, than one of overcoming the dislocation of being a stranger. There were days in Rome that I did not, could not, speak to anyone. Oxford Archaeological Guide and cameras in tow, I tried to capture something of the impossibly elusive and fragmentary nature of language amid Rome‚s broken columns, headless statues and other, often unidentifiable, ruins.
To SVR and Barbarina, le ringrazio molto.
http://luckysoap.com/brokenthings
“How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome” was produced with the support of OBORO, Residency Program, New Media Lab and the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
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At dinner the other night a woman told me that she didn’t get a jewish vibe off of me. What’s a jewish vibe? Discussion ensued. Someone at the table described someone else who wasn’t at the table as jew-lite. After a while I said: I’m not lite anything. I’m a downloaded crack copy, that’s what kind of jew I am.
. . . . .
When we travel by plane to a distant place, we travel through time as well as through space.
We sleep, or do not, over the Atlantic. We fly through the restless twisted night, hip to thigh with strangers. We breakfast over the Alps. Diamond lakes glint like lost earrings in long foothills of glacier combed hair.
We land – disgruntled, dishevelled and delayed. We have only just ceased leaving. Arrival takes much longer still.
Our baggage thunks onto the carousel. It inches toward us. It catches up with us.
Outside, there are armed guards and palm trees and no one told us how hot it would be.
We are new, we are strange, we are temporary. We should have known. We have not traveled to a foreign place. We are foreign.
Nothing is as we think it will be.
. . . . .
It’s bright outside, and getting warm.
I am not so bright, and stuck indoors.
. . . . .
Only headlights light Saint-Urbain Street this rush hour.
The power is out at dinnertime for the second time this week.
The leeks are soaking in their sauté oil, cold, on the electric stove.
At least I can’t see the potatoes turning brown in the dusk-kitchen.
I’m on a dial-up, so I could still get on-line on my laptop.
But we can’t watch the video we rented for the evening.
We can’t rent DVDs because our television is too old.
Even my umbrella got busted in the wind on the way home.
I think technology is slipping backwards, just a little bit.
. . . . .
Once I had a friend visiting me in Montréal and she said:
There’s a cross on that hill! And in unison we all said:
It’s not a hill, it’s a mountain!! Our mountain is a good landmark.
If you’re downtown, the mountain is north, see what I mean?
In Rome, San Pietro works the same way. If someone asked me:
Where do you live? I’d say: Head toward San Pietro and turn right.
Years ago they added coloured lights to the cross on Mount Royal,
so that when the Pope died, we’d all know it. When I lived in Rome,
I thought: Please don’t let the Pope die while I’m here.
My apartment was right behind the Vatican, very close to his.
During the April Fools’ Day comedy special on the radio,
they kept us up to date on the failing health of the Pope.
Then he died during a literary festival, during a rainstorm.
CNN was on in the hotel lobby, but I have yet to see
if the lights have changed on the cross on the mountain.
. . . . .