lapsus linguae

I'm in Karlsokrona, Sweden.

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:33:00 +0000

It's dark at the moment, and very far from Montreal. It took one taxi, two planes, two passport controls, two trains, eighteen hours and six time zones to get here. The taxi took the best route to the airport. The first plane was empty. It took me to Washington DC. The second plane was full. It took me to Copenhagen. It took eight hours. A long-haul red-eye spent in seat 46B - on the isle in the last row. Right next to the toilet. Which is right next to where the food comes out. I was enraged about this arrangement until I met my seatmate. 46A happened to be a Norwegian novelist named Astrid, a woman around my age who was on her way back from Mexico City. We instantly became Team Last Row and determined to make the best of it. We talked for hours about books and writing, socialism and publishing, travel and translation. I got the low down on the lay of the Scandinavian literary landscape. And an invitation to write an article for a Norwegian authors' website that Astrid edits. Astrid got a copy of my novel. She is going to be the first person in Norway to read Words the Dog Knows. Sadly, none of her three novels have been translated into English yet. We wrote reading recommendations for each other in our matching black notebooks and got extra free wine because we were in such good spirits despite how hard our seats sucked. The flight crew knew enough to be grateful for our good humour.

We parted ways in Copenhagen. I followed my Swedish host Talan's Map and How to Catch a Train instructions to the letter. They were excellent instructions, which included such all important details as which ticket booth will take Canadian cash and the amazing (to someone from Quebec) fact that the conductors on Swedish trains are required by law to speak English. The instructions sort of fell apart when none of the automated ticket machines were working and long lines formed at the ticket booths. I eventually managed to procure a ticket to Karlskrona and soon I was on a train speeding through the Swedish countryside. Technically the train was going to Karlskrona, but not all the way. I wound up waiting for an hour in a freezing cold station somewhere half way between Copenhagen and Karlskrona for another train to take me the rest of the way. Once I figured out where the one hot water heater was hiding in the cavernous cold, and huddled up to it, I was free to be amused by the waiting room cast of small town characters culled from the casts of My Life as a Dog and Mon Uncle. An old man spent the entire hour maticulously washing the flagstone floor by pushing a rag mop along with his boot, for example.

On the second train, a man came by interviewing passengers about their use of the train system. The whole car listened with attention as the questions were translated into English for me. I'm sure I skewed the survey's demographic considerably. Where did you board the train? Copenhagen. What was your point of origin? Montreal. What is your final destination? Karlskrona. What is the purpose of your travel to Karlskrona? To give a lecture. And how often do you use this train service? This is my first time. By this time the whole train car was listening. Soon a second interview ensued, this one from my Swedish seatmate, a gap-toothed affable chap, who found it incredible that I would travel all this way to give one lecture and then go home. Well, I'm giving a workshop too, I explained. He apologized for the cold, lifted my suitcase into the overhead rack for me, lowered the blind so the sun wouldn't blind me, let me sleep for a while, then tapped my knee to say good bye when he got up to leave. Because we were old friends by then I guess.

Speaking of friends, my friend Talan met me at the Karlskrona train station and walked me too my hotel. I have Talan to thank for being here. When he first invited me, over a single malt scotch in a hotel bar in the small town of Vancouver, Washington, I never thought it would actually happen. And then there we were walking through the streets of cold Karlskrona. Once I was checked into my hotel, Talan left me alone to recuperate from my travels. He ran off to a meeting and then home to prepare a welcoming reception for me set to take place at his place later this evening. Which is almost now.

Now I've had a nap and my brain is clearer, though body has no idea what time it is. I'm starving. I'm sucking on a cough drop trying to stay alive the next 50 minutes until Lissa comes to pick me up to take me to the reception at Talan's, being thrown in honour of my having come all this way. Rumor has it there will be smoked baltic salmon and caviar and cheese and crackers and single malt scotch! Come on cough drop, keep me in this thing!
. . . . .

"Wyoming is Haunted" wins the QWF Carte Blanche Quebec Prize

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:46:00 +0000

Last night at the annual Quebec Writers' Federation Awards Gala at the Lion d'Or in Montreal my recent non-fiction story, Wyoming is Haunted, was awarded the Carte Blanche Quebec Prize. Carte Blanche, the literary review of the Quebec Writers' Federation, is published online twice a year. The Carte Blanche Quebec prize is awarded once a year in recognition of an outstanding submission by a Quebec writer. The prize is sponsored by The Quebec Writers' Federation.

Wyoming is Haunted is a nonfiction narrative of some of the adventures fellow fiction-writer Karen Russell and I had while in residence at the Ucross Foundation, an artist in residence program located on a 22,000 acre ranch in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. The piece first appeared Carte Blanche 7 earlier this year. Two other of my short stories have also appeared in earlier issues: Aerial Photograph & Wasn't One Ocean.

Thanks QWF and Carte Blanche, for all you do for English writing in Quebec, even when it's from Wyoming. Thanks CALQ for helping me get out way out west. Thanks Ucross for accepting me and Karen Russell at the same time. And thanks Wyoming for scaring the heck out of us. As this photo clearly indicates, Wyoming is pretty damn haunted.

"As we walked we invented fictional colour-names for things, with Flannery O'Connor's rat-coloured car as our model, though, as Karen noted, makeup colour-names would also be a great source of inspiration. The road was a rawhide strap. The fauns were faun coloured! The Angus cows were so black they looked hollow."

Excerpted from: Wyoming is Haunted, J. R. Carpenter
Winner of the 2008 Carte Blanche Quebec prize

. . . . .

WORDS THE DOG KNOWS - Toronto Launch - Monday, November 17, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:07:00 +0000

We invite you to join us in celebration of the publication of Emily Holton's latest book, Dear Canada Council/Our Starland (Montreal: Conundrum Press) and J.R. Carpenter’s first novel, Words the Dog Knows (Montreal: Conundrum Press). Animations, music, and two beautiful books - take your pick! - they're all great excuses to come drink too much in Parkdale on a Monday night.

A This Is Not A Reading Series event presented by Pages Books & Magazines, Conundrum Press and EYE WEEKLY.

Monday, November 17, 2008, 7:00pm
Gladstone Hotel Ballroom
1214 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON

J. R. Carpenter’s long-awaited first novel Words the Dog Knows follows the paths of a quirky cast of characters through the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. Theo and Simone set about training Isaac the Wonder Dog to: sit, come, stay. Meanwhile, he has fifty girlfriends to keep track of and a master plan for the rearrangement of every stick in every alleyway in Mile End. He introduces Theo and Simone to their neighbours. He trains them to see with the immediacy of a dog’s-eye-view. Words the Dog Knows isn't a story about a dog. It's a story because of a dog. Walking though the the jumbled intimacy of Montreal’s back alleyways day after day, Theo and Simone come to see their neighbourhood and each other in a whole new way. For more information on Words the Dog Knows please visit: http://luckysoap.com/stories/wordsthedogknows.html

Emily Holton's novella Dear Canada Council is an illustrated plea for plane tickets, in which the narrator details her plans to "found a town". Complete with Incas, crickets, and a small family of deaf-mutes, her written request doubles as what also might be the craziest love poem you've ever read. Awestruck and sleepless in Hamilton, she is haunted by visions of celebrity reporter Brian Linehan, obsessed with a young boy she saw once on the TV news, and just wants to do better, get married, and wear a sash, a red mayor's sash. Can't Canada Council help her out? // Emily Holton's Our Starland is a novella broken into small, dreamy pieces. Flash by flash, its pieces ferry a cast of characters through a season as they navigate the fruit picking diaspora of the Okanagan Valley. Hitchhiking, nightwalking, these characters remember the constellations wrong, leave their daughters alone, and sleep outside, once again, but with a sleeping bag this time. For more information on Dear Canada Council / Our Starland please visit: http://www.conundrumpress.com/nt_holton2.html

J. R. Carpenter: http://luckysoap.com
Emily Holton: http://www.emilyholton.com
Conundrum Press: http://conundrumpress.com
THIS IS NOT A READING SERIES: http://www.pagesbooks.ca/events.php

So many dear friends turned out for the NYC and Montreal launches we can't wait to take the show on the road. Here's some of the fun we've had so far:

NYC launch at KGB Bar, Thursday October 23, 2008

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008
Maya Merrick at the he Book Table

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008
We love you Andy Brown.

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008
It's this much fun!
. . . . .

WORDS THE DOG KNOWS - Montreal Launch - Friday, November 7, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:48:00 +0000

Dear Friends. We invite you to join us for an evening of stories, drawings and music in celebration of the publication of J.R. Carpenter’s first novel, WORDS THE DOG KNOWS (Montreal: Conundrum Press) and Emily Holton's two novella's Dear Canada Council / Our Starland (Montreal: Conundrum Press), with readings by J. R. Carpenter and Emily Holton, drawings by J. R. Carpenter, Elisibeth Belliveau and Emily Holton and a presentation of J. R. Carpenter's recent web-based writing project in absentia (presented by Dare-Dare Centre de diffusion d'art multidisciplinaire de Montréal).

SKY BLUE DOOR
5403B Saint-Laurent (view map)
(south of Saint-Viateur, behind Enterprise Car Rental - enter via alleyway)
Friday, November 7th, 7:00 pm - 11:00 pm (free)

J. R. Carpenter’s long-awaited first novel Words the Dog Knows follows the paths of a quirky cast of characters through the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. Theo and Simone set about training Isaac the Wonder Dog to: sit, come, stay. Meanwhile, he has fifty girlfriends to keep track of and a master plan for the rearrangement of every stick in every alleyway in Mile End. He introduces Theo and Simone to their neighbours. He trains them to see with the immediacy of a dog’s-eye-view. Words the Dog Knows isn't a story about a dog. It's a story because of a dog. Walking though the the jumbled intimacy of Montreal’s back alleyways day after day, Theo and Simone come to see their neighbourhood and each other in a whole new way.

For more information on Words the Dog Knows, including full event listings and purchase information, please visit: http://luckysoap.com/stories/wordsthedogknows.html

J. R. Carpenter's web-based writing project in absentia addresses issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. By manipulating the Google Maps API, Carpenter creates an interactive non-linear narrative of interconnected “postcard” stories, thus haunting a satellite view of the neighbourhood with the stories of former tenants of Mile End (fictional or otherwise) who have forced out by economically motivated decisions made in their absence. in absentia features new fiction by J. R. Carpenter with invited authors: Lance Blomgren, Andy Brown, Daniel Canty, Alexis O’Hara and Colette Tougas. Some of the stories in in absentia also appear in Words the Dog Knows. To view in absentia online please visit: http://luckysoap.com/inabsentia

Emily Holton's novella Dear Canada Council is an illustrated plea for plane tickets, in which the narrator details her plans to "found a town". Complete with Incas, crickets, and a small family of deaf-mutes, her written request doubles as what also might be the craziest love poem you've ever read. Awestruck and sleepless in Hamilton, she is haunted by visions of celebrity reporter Brian Linehan, obsessed with a young boy she saw once on the TV news, and just wants to do better, get married, and wear a sash, a red mayor's sash. Can't Canada Council help her out? // Emily Holton's Our Starland is a novella broken into small, dreamy pieces. Flash by flash, its pieces ferry a cast of characters through a season as they navigate the fruit picking diaspora of the Okanagan Valley. Hitchhiking, nightwalking, these characters remember the constellations wrong, leave their daughters alone, and sleep outside, once again, but with a sleeping bag this time.

For more information on Our Starland / Dear Canada Council please visit: http://www.conundrumpress.com/nt_holton2.html

J. R. Carpenter: http://luckysoap.com
Emily Holton: http://www.emilyholton.com
Conundrum Press: http://conundrumpress.com
Dare-Dare Centre de diffusion d'art multidisciplinaire de Montréal: http://dare-dare.org
. . . . .

Guest Lecturer at de Montfort University, Leicester, UK

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:58:00 +0000

The week of November 3rd, 2008, I'll be a Guest Lecturer at de Montfort University. De Montfort is in Leicester, UK. But I'll be in my office in Montreal. And the students will be tuning in from the UK, Gambia, and Canada. How is this possible? De Montfort offers an online MA in Creative Writing and New Media.

The Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media is designed for writers interested in experimenting with new formats and exploring the potential of new technologies in their writing. This 95% distance learning course has a unique commitment to the connections between writing and new media and offers an excellent online experience combined with one week's intensive study at the De Montfort campus. The course is designed by Professor Sue Thomas, writer and former Artistic Director of the trAce Online Writing Centre, and Kate Pullinger, acclaimed novelist and new media writer. It has extensive links with important initiatives including DMU's Institute of Creative Technologies, research into digital narratives and new media writing, and the creative, digital and publishing industries.

This degree is informed by contemporary thinking on transliteracy, meaning the ability to read, write and interpret across a range of media from orality through print and film to networked environments. Creative Writing, indeed the very nature of text itself, is changing. No longer bound by print, there are many opportunities for writers to experiment with new kinds of media, different voices and experimental platforms, both independently and in collaboration with other writers or other fields and disciplines. Not only is writing evolving, but writers themselves are developing broader expectations and aspirations. Novelists are learning about the potential of hypertext and multimedia to change the ways in which a story can be told. Journalists are finding that blogs and wikis are radically affecting their relationships with their readers. Community artists are discovering powerful collaborative narratives. And the commercial world is finding new and creative ways to interact with its employees and customers in the fast-growing attention economy of the internet. While digital media have altered the way we disseminate and gather information, readers – both online and offline – still hunger for compelling narratives. As readers, we want to be told stories; we want complex and interesting ideas and characters; we want vivid pictures in our heads. As writers we want to communicate. We need good stories well-told, whatever our choice of delivery platform. The MA in Creative Writing and New Media provides an opportunity to focus on developing work at the cutting edge of the new technologies and enables new ways of thinking about narrative.

To visit the current students' course website and to see examples of the guest lecturers on the programme and successful applicant profiles visit: http://www.creativewritingandnewmedia.com

To read the lecture I've prepared for the MA in Creative Writing and New Media visit: Mapping a Web of Words.

I packed my rucksack with socks, canteen, pencils, three empty notebooks. I took no maps, I cannot read maps - why press a seal on running water? After all, the only rule of travel is, Don't come back the way you went. Come a new way. Anne Carson, "The Anthropology of Water," in Plainwater, NY: Vintage, 1995, page 123.

. . . . .

in absentia in Finland - Live Herring 08

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:38:00 +0000

Live Herring ´08 Media Art Exhibition will be in shown at Jyväskylä Art Museum October 29 - November 23, 2008, in The Lower Gallery, Holvi. Opening hours: Tue-Sun 11-18. Free entrance to The Lower Gallery. http://www.liveherring.org/

Live Herring ´08 media art exhibition presents media art as diverse phenomenon, with a concentration on new media art. The exhibition space will be filled with reflections and sounds. At the same time as interactive art works invite visitors to participate, in the Net dot lounge visitors can explore net art in privacy. In the exhibition there are pieces from nine artists living in Nordic countries. For Net dot lounge and Flash lounge there was an open call for submission for artists from all over the world.

Artists in the exhibition (selected from submissions):
Heidi Aho (Finland), Päivi Hintsanen (Finland), Tomi Knuutila (Finland), Mari Keski-Korsu (Finland), Antti Laitinen (Finland), Jone Skjensvold (Norway), Video Jack (Portugal/SFinland), Bjørn Wangen (Sweden), Nora Westerberg (Finland)

Net dot Lounge presents following artists:
Chris Basmajian (USA), Jeroen van Beurden (Netherlands), Filip Bojovic & Vladimir Manovski (Russia), Martin John Callanan (UK), J. R. Carpenter (Canada), Annabel Castro (Mexico), David Clark (Canada), Juliet Davis (USA), Andy Deck (USA), Jason Freeman (USA), Sami Heikkinen (Finland), Päivi Hintsanen & Noora Nenonen (Finland), Yael Kanarek (USA), Sara Milazzo (Finland), Adam Nash & Mami Yamanaka (Australia), Jason Nelson (Australia), Oskar Ponnert (Sweden), Rafael Rozendaal (Germany/Brazil), Silas FONG Sum-yu (Hong Kong//China), Sérgio Tavares (Brazil), Martin Wattenberg (USA), Ant Ngai Wing-Lam (Hong Kong/China)

Live Herring ‘08 exhibition net artworks (via submission + invited) can be viewed from:
http://www.liveherring.org/08_web/net_exhibition.htm

Flash Lounge, animations from following artists:
Anni Kinnunen (Finland), Jonna Markkula (Finland), Aku Meriläinen (Finland), Santeri Piilonen (Finland), Petri Tiainen (Finland), Väsyneistö (Finland)

The Exhibition expands outside of the museum building when the artist Antti Laitinen continues his art project Walk the Line in Jyväskylä. Laitinen will realize this self-portrait for the first time as a live performance. He will walk at the streets of the city with the GPS –navigator. The performance will start on October 27th, 2008 at 12 p.m. Helsinki time (gmt +02:00) / 10 a.m. London time (gmt +00:00) and it can be followed on the internet. The link for this performance will be announced on the Live Herring website on October 24th. The outcome will be his self-portrait drawn with the help of navigator into the map of the Jyväskylä. This work will be exhibited in the exhibition along with the other pieces from this series.

Another guest artist of the exhibition is media artist Mari Keski-Korsu. She will arrive for afternoon tee to Jyväskylä on Nov 7th at 4.30 p.m. She will tell about her work Mega with which she is participating to the exhibition, but also about art project Mikropaliskunta.

Live Herring ´08 will be visible also in outside of the museum building. As a part of the exhibition there will be also short screenings of media art from the window of Jyväskylä Art Museum to the Kauppakatu each Wednesday and Friday at 5 p.m. In November Live Herring visits The Arctic & Fabulous film festival and House Games exhibition.

If you have questions about media art or you want guiding to exhibition, we invite you to meet “Live Herring media art adviser” who is on a call on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday afternoons at exhibition. Public guiding will be also organized on Saturday Nov 15th and on Sunday Nov 23rd at 2 p.m.

Live Herring working group is cooperating for the exhibition with local enterprises. Exhibition has been supported by AudioCenter, GPS-seuranta and Kopijyvä. For exhibition cooperation is also done with University of Jyväskylä, Department of Art and Culture Studies. Live Herring ´08 exhibition has been financially supported by Arts Council of Finland and The Finnish Cultural Foundation.

The name Live Herring comes from the Online Net Art Gallery Spirited Herring - the first Finnish open-to-all net art gallery, online since 1997.

http://www.liveherring.org/
. . . . .

in absentia on Six-years.com

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:20:00 +0000

Keep it simple. Will it work? Keep it very [very] simple. Will it still work? Could less [still] be more?

This week's issue of http://www.six-years.com features work by J. R. Carpenter. Six-years.com is a project that is trying to make it work. [Simple.] It is an attempt to un-design the over-designed medium of the Internet. Initially conceived as a parasite to Carlos Motta's online magazine artwurl.org, six-years.com developed into a creature of its own. Every week one individual from this flock of emerging critic/curator hybrids will put up four pages of images, audio, video, or text cycling to a virtual dead-end. Like it?[1]

Imagine one of those nights that starts with a [dense] talk at, let's say, Night School[2], then leads to drinks in Park Slope[3] (and everything else that naturally[4] comes with it). Getting home just about the time when they stop selling beer in gas stations[5], laying over the kitchen table, you don't feel like reading the rest of Irit Rogoff's "smuggling", but you still want to stay awake. In this case, the editors of six-years.com invite you to visit this website stripped down of curatorial rhetoric with the promise that you will forget about it all in the morning, late for work.

Montreal-based artist J. R. Carpenter has reinterpreted an existing web-based writing project for the Six Years site. Originally commissioned by media and distribution center Dare-Dare, Carpenter's In Abstentia injects creative writing in her web-representation of a gentrified Montreal neighborhood. For more information on the artist and about In Abstentia, visit the artist’s website http://luckysoap.com/. This Six Years webproject will be active from October 24 –October 31, 2008, and is organized by Mireille Bourgeois.
______________________

[1] Why not?
[2] Or whatever.
[3] Whatever.
[4] Play it safe.
[5] 4 am.
. . . . .

The Pilot Reading Series October Edition

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 16:44:00 +0000

Presented by Matrix magazine, Pop Montreal and the QWF.

J.R. Carpenter
a. rawlings
Darren Bifford
Michelle Sterling
Rebecca Silver Slayter

hosted by Mike Spry
music by Billy Fong Parade

Sunday October 26th
Bar Blizzarts, 3956A St. Laurent, Montreal
doors @ 9 - readings @ 9:30

J. R. Carpenter grew up on a farm in Nova Scotia and has lived in Montreal since 1990. She 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 electronic literature has been presented internationally. Her short fiction has been broadcast on CBC Radio, translated into French, and anthologized in Le livre de chevet, Short Stuff, Lust for Life and In Other Words, and has appeared in journals including Geist, The New Quarterly and Matrix. Her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, is published by Conundrum Press (Montreal, 2008). http://luckysoap.com

a.rawlings’ first book, Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006, Alcuin Award recipient, Gerald Lampert Award nominee), documents a night in the life of Northern Ontario. rawlings co-edited Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, 2005), co-organized The Lexiconjury Reading Series (2001-6), and hosted Heart of a Poet (2005). She currently facilitates sound/text/movement workshops for all ages. a.rawlings' escapist fantasies feature kynlíf með álfum, Ghentish snails, and a theremin; and yes, someday, she will escape.

Darren Bifford currently lives in Montreal, where he teaches philosophy at Champlain College, St. Lambert. He is the reviews editor for Matrix.

Michelle Sterling lives and longs for the nineties in Montreal. She is a member of the Soulgazers writing collective and her work has appeared in Maisonneuve, Islands Fold, $2 Comes With A Mixtape, and The Art of Trespassing by Invisible Publishing.

Rebecca Silver Slayter is an MA student in creative writing at Concordia University and an editor of Brick literary journal. She has published fiction in places like The Antigonish Review and The Hart House Review, and won a Hart House Poetry Prize and a Hart House Fiction prize in 2003 (2nd place in both cases).
. . . . .

New York City Launch - Words the Dog Knows - KGB Bar, October 23, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:43:00 +0000

Dear Friends. We invite you to join us in celebrating the publication of J.R. Carpenter’s first novel, WORDS THE DOG KNOWS (Montreal: Conundrum Press) with an evening of readings from Montreal and New York-area fiction writers that will take you from the swamplands of Florida to the streets of Montreal and onward to points beyond. J.R. will be joined by New Yorker Karen Russell, fellow Conundrum author Corey Frost, and Canadian New Yorker Nora Maynard.

KGB Bar http://kgbbar.com/calendar/
85 East 4th Street, New York City, NY
Thursday, October 23, 2008
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm (free)

J. R. Carpenter’s long-awaited first novel Words the Dog Knows follows the paths of a quirky cast of characters through the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. Theo and Simone set about training Isaac the Wonder Dog to: sit, come, stay. Meanwhile, he has fifty girlfriends to keep track of and a master plan for the rearrangement of every stick in every alleyway in Mile End. He introduces Theo and Simone to their neighbours. He trains them to see with the immediacy of a dog’s-eye-view. Words the Dog Knows isn't a story about a dog. It's a story because of a dog. Walking though the the jumbled intimacy of Montreal’s back alleyways day after day, Theo and Simone come to see their neighbourhood and each other in a whole new way.

For more information on Words the Dog Knows, including a full launch event listing and ordering information, please visit: http://luckysoap.com/stories/wordsthedogknows.html or Conundrum Press: http://conundrumpress.com

J.R. Carpenter is a two-time winner of the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition and a fellow of Yaddo, Ucross and The Vermont Studio Center. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and her electronic literature has been presented internationally. Words the Dog Knows is her first novel. http://luckysoap.com

Karen Russell is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, ST. LUCY’S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES (Knopf). Karen’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Zoetrope, among others. She is currently at work on a novel. http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=70463

Corey Frost is the author of MY OWN DEVICES: AIRPORT VERSION (Montreal: Conundrum Press). Corey has performed his stories at Lollapalooza, The Perpetual Motion Roadshow, and at festivals around the world. http://www.coreyfrost.com

Nora Maynard is a winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts Chapter One Competition and a fellow of the Ragdale Foundation, the Millay Colony, Ucross, and Blue Mountain Center. She is a columnist for Apartment Therapy Media’s The Kitchn, and is completing her first novel, BURNT HILL ROAD. http://www.noramaynard.com
. . . . .

Interrupt IRQ

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:45:00 +0000

Interrupt is a festival celebrating writing and performance in digital media in Providence, Rhode Island, Friday October 17th - Sunday the 19th. Events are hosted by Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. Participating artists will share work that in some way addresses the theme of the festival: Interrupt.

Why “Interrupt”? In computing, a hardware interrupt request or IRQ is used to prioritize the execution of certain processes over others. It is a command sent to the processor to get its attention, signaling the need to initiate a new operation. A series of IRQ roundtables will promote the maximum possible open discussion amongst all those attending. There will be a number of prominent, named critics, theorists, and artists who will have been asked to speak, but they will not give papers or even 'panel-style' presentations. Instead they will prepare an IRQ. I have been asked to speak. Being invited to interrupt is a rare opportunity. Here is my IRQ:

When I first heard the theme of the Interrupt festival I thought: Perfect! I’m a champion interrupter; everyone says so.

One of my earliest memories is of my mother telling me to stop interrupting. I remember standing next to her, waiting for it to be my turn to speak. There was never a break in the conversation. At first I thought this was because my mother was loquacious, from the Latin: loqu, to speak. But interlocution is speech between two or more persons, I reasoned. Surely, eventually, my turn would come.

An interlocutor is someone who takes part in a conversation. An interloper, in my experience, is someone who would like to take part in a conversation but who is unable to interpret the complex laws of interlocution.

Gradually I realized that my mother’s imperative that I stop interrupting arose from her disavowal of the interruption inherent in interlocution. The word “interlocution” is the past participle of interloqu.

inter + loqu = to interrupt + to speak.

My mother’s preferred modus loqui was the soliloquy.

solus + loqu = alone + to speak.

It was never going to be my turn to speak. So I learned to write instead.

My most recent electronic literature project, in absentia, hacks the Google Maps API to interrupt a sterile satellite view of my neighbourhood with short stories of displacement written from multiple points of view, by multiple authors, in multiple languages. In recent years many of my long-time, low-income neighbours have been forced out by gentrification. The neighbourhood is haunted now, with their stories. Our stories. Our building is for sale; we may be next. Faced with imminent eviction, and once again excluded from the official conversation, my only recourse is to interrupt. With silhouette voids, cryptic signage and quick glimpses. Some one has to say something. These small details of our daily lives are not visible from space and are all too soon to be erased.

Here is one excerpt from in absentia:

Our building is for sale. Our landlord has been making us crazy with renovations that we don't want, superficial fixes that surely won't fool anyone. Last weekend he decided he didn't need to warn us in advance that he'd be replacing the front steps to our second-floor apartment because, technically, the repairs weren't inside our apartment. Likewise, this week he didn't warn us that he'd be painting the new steps, and the cast-iron fence out front, and all day we were trapped inside while the rust-proof-paint fumes wafted through our rooms. Yesterday morning he over-heard me calling him a fucking moron. I'm warning you, he shook his fist like a sitcom villain. This morning he affixed a NO BIKES sign to the freshly painted front fence in the exact same spot where I've been locking my bike for the past ten years. I guess he means business. I guess this means war.
J. R. Carpenter || in absentia

. . . . .

Response to English 214's Questions on The Cape

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 18:33:00 +0000

Here are my responses to the questions posed by the English 214 Question Collective after their class discussion of my guest blogger post, THE CAPE: THE BACK STORY, on CultureNet @ CapilanoU on Friday, October 10, 2008:

English 214 Question Collective: As you stated in your “Back Story” guest blog, physical photographs possess a certain authority. As the transformative process of selecting a medium for publication moves “The Cape” from print-text to hypertext, does the message/meaning of your story change?

J.R. Carpenter: Yes. In every retelling, every story changes slightly. In oral story telling, it is the storyteller who wilfully alters and hones her details and delivery based on the immediacy of audience response. I came to writing through spoken word and performance. I still struggle with the finality of print publication. Once something is published in print it is fixed in time, and, like a physical photograph, cannot easily be altered. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing – I’m saying I struggle with it. The web is infinitely more fluid, flexible, updateable, and alterable. I’m not saying that’s a good thing – I’m saying that I’m more comfortable with publishing when I know I have the possibility of adjusting any part of the text, images or code in response to audience reaction. These slight editorial changes do not always change the message or meaning of they story, but they can influence the reader response in subtle ways.

The real question is: Is the print iteration of “The Cape” different from the hypertext iteration, and how? As I wrote in “The Cape: The Back-Story,” I spent a long time trying to expand “The Cape” into a “real” short story. It was hard for me to believe that a story could be so short. In print, the story passes by very quickly. An attentive reader will realize this, slow down, and take the time to fill in the blanks.

In the web iteration of “The Cape” there are only ever one, two, or three sentences on a page. The white space around the sentences, the entrespace created between the text and the images, the meta information to be read in the images (including additional text, in some of the diagrammatic images), the pause created by duration of the moving images, and the time lapse between clicking from one page to the next – all these hypertext elements serve to expand the terrain of story. On the other hand, given the visual-centric tendencies of the general web-viewing audience, the visual elements could potentially overshadow the text. Some may read the sentences as merely captions.

My favourite iteration of the “The Cape” is the mini-book version. In this small (approx 2 x 2.75inches), inexpensively reproduced, intimate format, the images and the text carry equal weight, being so close in size. The act of turning the page after every sentence adds time and reflective space to the story. And the miniature scale of the book refers subtly to childhood and the children's book. It is my dream to publish a children’s book iteration of “The Cape” one day.

English 214 Question Collective: You mentioned that the Geological Guide photographs interest you more than your own family history. Do you find using fact with fiction allowed you to create a more authentic story?

J.R. Carpenter: Yes. True and false are binaries, opposites. Fiction both contains and confounds the either/or of truth and falsehood. This, to me, is more representational of real life than any idealized notion of either historical accuracy or pure fantasy. “The Cape” addresses certain presuppositions - that we all have fond childhood memories of our grandmothers, that little girls want certain things and behave in certain ways, and that Cape Cod is a lovely place to visit - by conflating observations to the contrary of those statements with other irrefutable facts: I never learned to Whistle. I wish I’d asked my uncle to teach me how to spit instead. The Cape, as Cape Cod is often called, is, as you may know, a narrow spit of land.

Writing a first-person child narrator is always tricky. No one takes a serious kid seriously. Arming the child narrator of “The Cape” with facts and charts and maps was the least I could do for her. Not that it does her much good. That no one is listening to her is what makes it an authentic story. The older we get, the more we convince ourselves that our memories are true. Why do we trust our own memories of childhood, yet doubt the perceptions of children? These are questions best left to fiction.

“Life as described in fiction … is never just life as it was lived by those who imagined, wrote, read, or experienced it but rather the fictional equivalent, what they were obliged to fabricate because they weren’t able to live it in reality and, as a result, resigned themselves to live only in the indirect and subjective way it could be lived: in dreams and in fiction. Fiction is a lie covering up a deep truth: it is life as it wasn’t, life as the men and women of a certain age wanted to live it and didn’t and thus had to invent.”

Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist, trans. Natasha Wimmer, NY: Picador, 2002, page 8.

English 214 Question Collective: As the work is entitled “The Cape”, the importance of place and memory - as you imply - are highlighted by the imagery in the erosion of the Maritime shorelines and how memories dissipate. This seems to create a strong sense of sublimity within your work. Is this something you have reflected on?

J.R. Carpenter: Yes. Notions of place have long pervaded my fiction writing and electronic literature works. In my web-based work the images of place are literally images. Maps figure prominently – operating, often simultaneously as images, interface, metaphors for place, and stand-ins for non-existent family photographs. My parents were immigrants. I grew up in a different country than everyone I was related to. We moved around a lot when I was a kid. I think my early adoption of the internet was due in part to my attraction to it as a placeless place. Many of my works may be read as web “sites” of longing for belonging, for home.

The sense of sublimity you mention emerges most strongly when I am writing about long-ago places, and pasts that could never be mine. I barely knew my grandmother Carpenter and can lay no ancestral claim to being “from” Cape Cod. I don’t even know if she was from there. Maybe she just retired to there. Somehow, historical aerial photographs of the coastal erosion of the Cape Cod National Seashore seemed to be the perfect, most sublime representation of this elusive, tenuous, quasi-fictional relationship.

For another example, take a look at one of my earliest works of electronic literature: Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls [1996]. Mythologies is a non-linear narrative about a first crush as experienced by two children left to their own devices while the grown-ups are presumably busy elsewhere. A map of Nova Scotia operates as the interface and central image of the piece. I used geological images and terminology to further distance myself from rural Nova Scotia, and childhood in general. In this case, plate tectonic theory seemed to best represent the cataclysmic, renting split between the end of childhood obliviousness and the beginning of adult knowing.

At fault, as it were, seemed to be the sea,
always the sea, putting another meter between
Africa and the Americas every hundred years,
pushing Europe further and further away from
the Canadian Maritimes, in dutiful geology.

I will also suggest, for a print example of the evocation of the sublime through intertwined images of memory and place in my fiction, the very short story Precipice [2003]:

A habitual stomach-sleeper, she dreams of falling. Face down, the falling is more like flying; she never hits the ground. Often in her dreams of falling there is a precipice: a clearly defined line before which, perhaps for acres on end, grow grassy, sloping fields of thistle, pock-marked by dry caked dung. And after? Arriving at the precipice all fields and fences end abruptly and fall away. Forty feet below, there lies a beach of stones; a vague sense of bottom. And beyond: an inordinate amount of ocean.

In closing, let me thank you once again for your close reading of “The Cape” and you’re your thoughtful questions. It has been a pleasure. Very best, from Montreal,

J.R. Carpenter || Luckysoap & Co.
. . . . .

The Cape: The Back-Story

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:58:00 +0000

I was thrilled when Aurelea Mahood wrote to me back in September to say she’d be teaching my piece, The Cape, in her E-literature class at Capilano University, on Friday, October 10th, 2008. I would have come into the class to speak about the work in person, but Capilano University is in North Vancouver, British Columbia and I am in Montreal, Quebec. To bridge this vast distance, Aurelea came up with a creative solution: she invited me to be a guest blogger in her class.

In this blog post to CultureNet @ CapilanoU, I will present some background information about the creation of the work that wouldn’t necessarily be apparent from viewing/reading it. The students will then discuss and pose questions via blog comments, which I will attempt to answer in a timely manner. Here, then, is (one version of) the back-story of The Cape.

I built the web iteration of The Cape over the course of 10 days in August 2005, but some of the sentences in The Cape have been kicking around in my brain since the early 1990s. When I started writing the text of The Cape I was studying Studio Art, with a concentration in Fibres & Sculpture, at Concordia University in Montreal. At the time, I had no idea what to do with such seemingly simplistic yet somehow ponderous sentences as: My grandmother Carpenter lived on Cape Cod in a Cape Cod House. My uncle also lived on Cape Cod, but not in a Cape Cod House.

I was quite preoccupied with the conjoined notions of memory and place at the time. In the mid 1990s made a number of installations, interventions and artist’s books containing some of the same sentences that now appear in The Cape. This body of work, collectively entitled, “The Influence of a Maritime Climate,” was based on a passage from Michel Foucault’s Madness & Civilization:

"In the classical period the melancholy of the English was easily explained by the influence of a maritime climate, cold, humidity, the instability of the weather; all those fine droplets of water that penetrated the channels and fibers of the human body and made it lose its firmness, predisposed it to madness.”

Michel Foucault, Madness & Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard, NY: Vintage, 1988, pages 12-13.

I grew up in a maritime climate, in rural Nova Scotia. My father ran a Cape Islander (fishing boat) in the Bay of Fundy. He was English. He left when I was eight and I never saw him or his mother, my grandmother Carpenter, again. I don’t have a photograph of my grandmother Carpenter. If I did, I would insert it here. It’s true that I don’t have a photograph of my grandmother Carpenter, but I do have a photograph of her house, which is indeed a Cape Cod house. In the days before digital photography, a physical photograph had a certain authority - especially if it happened to be the only extant souvenir of a relative disappeared. I realized, when I wrote the above quoted sentence, that I had come to think of the photograph of my grandmother’s house as a photograph of her.

I hadn’t given my paternal grandmother’s English-ness, and thus my own English-ness, much thought. I was much more preoccupied with my maternal grandmother, a Jewish, Hungarian, Yiddish-speaking, first-generation American immigrant to the Lower East Side of New York City, with whom I had spent every summer, when I was growing up. Since moving to Montreal I had been attempting to put my rural, maritime origins behind me. Foucault’s phrase “the influence of a maritime climate” and the preposterous notion that “all those fine droplets of water that penetrated the channels and fibers of the human body” would predispose me - a half-English former Maritimer - to madness, opened the door, for me, to the possibility of writing fiction.

This was excellent timing as I had just discovered the Internet. I got my first Unix account in 1993, and promptly began posting fictional accounts of myself and my alternate pasts to various alt.arts USENET groups. For more about the many hours I spent in the Concordia University Unix lab, surrounded by computer science students, making stuff up off the top of my head, and how that led to a three-year stint managing a web development team for a multi-national software company, see: A Brief History of the Internet as I Know it So Far [2003]:

The Internet was totally textual back then. It had no interface. The joke of the day was, On the Internet no one knows you're a dog. Everyone was talking about gender politics and how, on the Internet, you could role-play and construct your own identity. At the same time that everyone was obsessed with sexuality they were all claiming disembodiment, which seemed like a contradiction, even then.

"A brief history of the Internet as I know it so far," J. R. Carpenter, Fish Piss, Vol. 2, No. 4, Montreal, QC, Fall/Winter 2003/2004.

Around the same time as I was reading too much Foucault for my own good, turning my paternal grandmother into a fictional entity and logging into MUDs and MOOs to tell nonsensical stories to total strangers, I came across a used copy of: Stephen P. Leatherman, Editor, Environmental Geologic Guide to Cape Cod National Seashore; Field Trip Guide Book for the Eastern Section of the Society of Economic Paleontologists & Mineralogists, National Park Service Cooperative Research Unit, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mass., 1979.

My Family Album

The Geologic Guide contained many photographs of Cape Cod. I had only had the one photo of my grandmother’s house. The Guide was published in 1979, around the time of my one and only brief visit to Cape Cod. The only time we went to visit it was winter but we walked on the beach anyway. It occurred to me immediately to use the Geologic Guide photographs, charts, graphs and maps as stand-ins for non-existent family photos, and the Guide itself as a surrogate family album. This was much more interesting to me than the truth of what ever my family history had been. If only there was some way to put pictures on the Internet!

I was attracted to the black and white aesthetic of the Environmental Geologic Guide to the Cape Cod National Seashore. Before computers were readily available, I worked extensively with photocopiers. For more about how I almost got fired from my job in the Concordia University Fine Arts Slide Library for abusing their photocopy machine for artistic purposes, see this (only slightly) tongue-in-cheek essay: A Little Talk About Reproduction [2004]:

I can't say that I woke up one morning and found myself in bed with the computer. My love affair with art was a youthful thing, impractical and highly idyllic. But my tryst with the photocopier was fully sordid and adult. We met at the office. The photocopier made itself invaluable to me by enlarging, reducing and reproducing endlessly. I would tell my friends that I had to work late. I would stay for hours after closing, making collages seemingly out of nothing, liberated in no uncertain terms, or so I thought, from physicality and from preciousness. Guilty of white lies, laziness and copyright infringement, I would scrub my toner stained hands before leaving the office.

“A Little Talk About Reproduction," Fish Piss, Vol. 3, No. 1, Montreal, QC, Fall 2004.

It was winter but we walked on the beach anyway.

I graduated from art school in 1995, and made my first web project later that year at a residency at The Banff Centre for the Arts (as The Banff Centre was called back then). Many of my early web projects were in black and white because that’s what colour photocopies come in. The images in Fishes & Flying Things [1995], Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment [1996] and Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls [1996] were all scanned from my massive collection of photocopies of diagrams and maps.

Although I have since made many works in colour, The Cape [2005] returns to the black and white aesthetic of those early works. This is in part because the Geologic Guide is entirely black and white, and in part because I had actually begun the project at the same time as those works. The Cape visually resembles those earlier works, but uses code elements that did not exist in 1995, such as IFRAMEs and DHTML timelines. The small, moving images you see on some pages of The Cape – on the Sound carries, especially in winter, page, for example - are actually large, still images being pushed behind a small IFRAME window by a long DHTML script. This means, in effect, that the text is moving the image. The use of DHTML timelines produces a silent, jumpy, staggering effect reminiscent of a super-8 film, which is how home movies would have been made in 1979.

The main reason it took me so long to create the web iteration of The Cape was not a technical one at all. It was, rather, a literary conundrum. I didn’t know how to make sense of those deceptively simple sentences. What a boring story this is. I revisited The Cape as a short story many times over the years. For a long time I thought the story had to be longer. Then I finally realized it had to be shorter. The shorter a story is, sometimes, the longer it takes to write. In the spring of 2005 an editor invited me to submit a very short story to a very small magazine. I sent The Cape, along with some diagrams from the Geologic Guide.

Print Copy of The Cape

After a decade of editing, the story finally seemed finished when I saw it in print. I immediately set to work on the electronic version. Months after the launch of The Cape, I created a mini-book version – a small, photocopied zine containing the text of The Cape and images from the Geologic Guide. The mini-book iteration of The Cape is exactly the sort of thing I would have made in art school. Finally, the work had come full circle.

3 Mini-Book Iterations of Electronic Literature Works

The Cape has been included in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, the Rhizome ArtBase, BathHouse, function:feminism and, most recently, an exhibition in Tasmania called Hunter/Gatherer. I’ve had a wide range of responses to the work. Some people are convinced it’s a true story, because it’s in the first person. Some are convinced I am an American, because Cape Cod is such an iconic American landmark. One reviewer recently wrote with great conviction that I had lived on Cape Cod, and I was a nostalgic for writing about it. I am nostalgic for lots of places, but not for Cape Cod. Cape Cod may well be a real place, but as far as I am concerned, The Cape is fictional.

I thank you for this opportunity to think back to these sentences of The Cape first entered my head and how they have shifted over time. And I thank your for your interest in and close reading of the piece. I will leave you now with this write-up of The Cape from Scot Cotterell, curator of Hunter/Gatherer:

Hunter/Gatherer: curatorial essay by Scot Cotterell
Hunter/Gatherer: Search Theory or Data Bodies in X.s.

J.R.Carpenter's The Cape seeks to convolute fact and fiction by taking us on a user-controlled journey of fragmented narrative. The combination of formal, informal and sometimes seemingly inconsequential information activates an in-between state, a suspension of sorts where information seems ordered in meaningful ways, but we are never quite sure. For example, 'Cape Cod is a real place, but the events and characters of THE CAPE are fictional. The photographs have been retouched. The diagrams are not to scale' appears alongside anecdotal familial histories, 'My grandmother Carpenter lived on Cape Cod, in a Cape Cod House. My uncle also lived on Cape Cod, but not in a Cape Cod house'. Using field trip guide books and environmental guides, old maps, diagrams, and collected source code filtered through a low-tech aura The Cape gracefully addresses the tension between the knowing of and mapping of place and memory by bringing together the connotative powers of fact and fiction.

. . . . .

Interrupt Festival at Brown - October 17-19, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:52:00 +0000

Early next week I’ll interrupt my Words the Dog Knows book tour before it’s even started by heading down to Providence, Rhode Island to participate in Interrupt at Brown.

Interrupt is a festival celebrating writing and performance in digital media, busting onto the scene in Providence from Friday October 17th through Sunday the 19th. Events are hosted by Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. The festival is continuing in the tradition of Brown's E-Fest, but is expanding/augmenting it, and also streamlining into Pixilerations.

Participating artists will share work that in some way addresses the theme of the festival: Interrupt. In computing, an interrupt is a command sent to the processor to get its attention, and indicates a need for change. We understand "interruption" as a useful metaphor for imagining the role of digital arts practices in contemporary society. The festival is being organized with the aim of showcasing arts practices hybridized not only by digital mediation, but by a spectrum of cultural practices including electronic poetry, information design, net art, video art, interactive music, and performance art.

On Friday October 17th at 1:30 pm in the McCormack Family Theatre, I’ll present in absentia – an electronic literature project that hacks the Google Maps API to haunt the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal with postcard stories to and from tenants (past or present, fictional or otherwise) who have been effected by gentrification and it’s erasures.

On Friday October 17th at 4:30 pm in the McCormack Family Theatre, I’ll be one of four named speakers in an IRQ ROUNDTABLE. Here, in theory, is how the IRQ ROUNDTABLE sessions will work: At each roundtable session, four or five of the named speakers will have the right - using their IRQ - to interrupt the discussion, at any time, and hold the floor for a maximum of five minutes (no minimum). All attendant-participants will together choose one of the named speakers to either begin the roundtable discussions with an intervention - thus using up their IRQ - or to nominate another speaker to begin. Once a speaker has completed their interruption, discussion is open to all attendant-participants, including IRQs. Discussion will be strictly chaired: all interruptions of all kinds must pass through the CPU. The remaining speakers with IRQs are asked to attend carefully to the discussion and, rather in the manner of an old-school, no-ritual Quaker meeting, listen for the moment when their prepared IRQ would be most beneficial to the discussion processes. A named speaker will begin the roundtable discussions with an intervention, and so use up their IRQ. They will be chosen either by a straw-poll of all attendant-participants or by chance operation. If the chosen IRQ does not wish to begin discussions, they may nominate another IRQ.

Of Interrupt, one of the festival’s organizers, John Cayley, writes:

The Pounding neo-Beat of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and their Flash-languaged jazz world; Alan Sondheim's misdirections of abject 'second life' languaging into the avatar dance of Foofwa d'Imobilité; Laetitia Sonami's alternative controller sculpted music theatre; Eugenio Tisselli's web-based hacks, cutting and pasting, plugging and hiding gobbets of real life and death into our glossy Facebooks; Marko Niemi coding Concrete for the screen. These are the initial provocations that we will interrupt and ask to interrupt us. Interrupt chooses to present digital art work that is, in some sense, language-driven. While in active cooperation with other disciplines — music, cultural studies, performance — Interrupt's organization and curation emanates from Brown University's Literary Arts Program. For some time now we have been confronted with questions of where 'the literary' will be found in practices of digital art. Now we ask, "Can we interrupt these practices in ways that will leave us with forms in which the literary can live and die? Can we create events to formally interrupt practices that we already value as art, and allow them to reveal their necessary forms, but do so without harm to new cultures that these practices offer?" We no longer want to bring them to book, but to see whether on not they hold out forms for a book to come.

After Interrupt, I’ll head down to New York City to launch Words the Dog Knows on Thursday, October 23, 2008 at KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, 7-9 pm (free). I’ll be joined on stage and possibly interrupted by my dear friends. Karen Russell, Nora Maynard and Corey Frost. For more information on this event, view the KGB Bar Calendar.
. . . . .

Words the Dog Knows

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 18:20:00 +0000

Words the Dog Knows, J. R. Carpenter
conundrum press (Montreal)
October 2008
978-1-894994-34-7
Novel
5x7 inches, 168 pages
$15 CDN / US

Words the Dog Knows is now available in many fine bookstores including some of my favorites: Pages, in Toronto, and the Drawn & Quarterly store on Bernard Street in Montreal. The best place to order the book online is from the conundrum press website.

Words the Dog Knows isn't a story about a dog. It's a story because of a dog.

Words the Dog Knows Launch Events:

NYC - Thursday October 23, KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street, 7-9 pm
with readings by Karen Russell, Nora Maynard and Corey Frost
more info

Montreal - Friday November 7, Sky Blue Door
5403 B Saint-Laurent, 7-11 pm
also launching: J. R. Carpenter, in absentia
in association with Dare-Dare

Montreal - Sunday November 9, Blizzarts
3956A Saint-Laurent, 8 pm
with Harold Hoefle and Katia Grubisic.

Toronto - Monday November 17, This Is Not A Reading Series
Gladstone Ballroom, 1214 Queen Street West, 7:30 pm
also launching: Emily Holton, OUR STARLAND/DEAR CANADA COUNCIL
more info
. . . . .

in absentia at Greasy Goose Salon

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:07:00 +0000

Wednesday, September 24, 2008, I'll give a brief presentation of in absentia at the Greasy Goose Salon - a monthly community lecture series. in absentia is a web-based writing project about gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End presented by DARE-DARE Centre de diffusion d'art multidisciplinaire de Montréal. It launched on June 24th, 2008, with a block party in Mile End's parc sans nom. I have been adding new stories to the project over the summer. The in absentia closing party will be held in conjunction with the launch of my new novel, Words the Dog Knows, on November 7th, 2008, at Sky Blue Door, 5403 B Saint-Laurent, 7-11pm.

[screenshot from in absentia, J. R. Carpenter]

Greasy Goose Salon -- MEMORY
Wednesday, September 24, 8pm
Cafe Cagibi (St. Laurent corner of St. Viateur)

Featuring, in no particular order:

Stephen Glasgow -- Where is My Brain?
Jocelyn Parr -- Music as Monument, or How Rock Stars Revived Memory of the Argentine Dictatorship
JR Carpenter -- in absentia - a web-based writing project about gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End
Stephanie Rogerson -- Without Words You Spoke: early snapshot photography and queer representation

The Greasy Goose Salon is a monthly community lecture series. Our aim is to provide a forum for people to present their work or ideas in a friendly, community-minded atmosphere. Each event is based around a broad theme and features four speakers approaching the topic from various perspectives: academic presentations, artist talks, political lectures, literature readings, public speaking, short workshops, etc., etc. We are always interested in hearing your ideas for future themes or presentations. Please get in touch! http://thearchive.ca/greasygoose
. . . . .

Words the Dog Knows is at the printer

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:30:00 +0000

At long last my first novel, Words the Dog Knows, is finished. Written, edited, copy edited, laid out, illustrated, proof read, proof read again and sent to the printer. All in just under 10 months! Word on the street is Words will be back from the printer sometime late September / early October. Launch event details are listed below.

Words the Dog Knows is published by conundrum press (Montreal). Here's what the catalog had to say about it:

J. R. Carpenter’s long-awaited first novel Words the Dog Knows follows the crisscrossing paths of a quirky cast of characters through the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. Simone couldn’t wait to get out of rural Nova Scotia. In Montreal she buries her head in books about far off places. Her best friend Julie gets her a job in the corporate world. Traveling for business cures Simone of her restlessness. One summer Julie’s dog Mingus introduces Simone to Theo. They move in together. Theo is a man of few words. Until he and Simone get a dog, that is. They set about training Isaac the Wonder Dog to: sit, come, stay. Meanwhile, he has fifty girlfriends to keep track of and a master plan for the rearrangement of every stick in every alleyway in Mile End. He introduces Theo and Simone to their neighbours. He trains them to see the jumbled intimacy of Mile End’s back alleyways with the immediacy of a dog’s-eye-view.

Carpenter writes with humour and directness, melding the emotional precision of her award-winning short fiction with the narrative ingenuity of her pioneering works in electronic literature. The result is a fresh and accessible first novel written and illustrated in the vernacular of the neighbourhood. Cooking smells, noisy neighbours and laundry lines criss-cross the alleyway one sentence at a time.

Words the Dog Knows isn't a story about a dog. It's a story because of a dog. Walking with their dog though the same back alleyways day after day, Theo and Simone come to see their neighbourhood – and each other – in a whole new way.

Launch events:

NYC - Thursday October 23, KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street, 7-9 pm
with readings by Karen Russell, Nora Maynard and Corey Frost
more info

Montreal - Friday November 7, Sky Blue Door
5403 B Saint-Laurent, 7-11 pm
also launching: J. R. Carpenter, in absentia
in association with Dare-Dare

Montreal - Sunday November 9, The Green Room
5386 St Laurent, with Harold Hoefle and Katia Grubisic.

Toronto - Monday November 17, This Is Not A Reading Series
Gladstone Ballroom, 1214 Queen Street West, 7:30 pm
also launching: Emily Holton, OUR STARLAND/DEAR CANADA COUNCIL
more info
. . . . .

Words the Dog Knows – Reading at The Yellow Door

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:48:00 +0000

This has been the most indoor summer ever, but boy has it been productive. I've written a novel. I'm as surprised as you are! It's called, Words the Dog Knows. It’s not really about the dog. It’s because of the dog. Because of the dog the characters come to see their neighbourhood – and each other – in a whole new way.

It's almost, almost, almost, but not quite finished, but I'll be reading excerpts from it anyway at The Yellow Door later this week. Once the book is actually printed, there will launches in Montreal, New York and Toronto. Information about those events will be posted soon. Meantime, here’s the Yellow Door info:

The Yellow Door
POETRY AND PROSE READING
http://www.yellowdoor.org
3625 Aylmer, Montreal (between Pine & Prince Arthur) Tel: 514-398-6243

Thursday, August 28, 2008
Doors open 7:00 pm Reading 7:30 pm At the door $5

J.R. Carpenter is a two-time winner of CBC/QWF Quebec Short Story Competition. Her novel, Words the Dog Knows, is forthcoming from Conundrum Press, fall 2008.

Hugh Hazelton is a poet and translator. His third book of poems, Antimatter, was published with CD by Broken Jaw Press in 2003.

Liam Durcan is a Montreal writer whose novel, Garcia's Heart, was published in 2007 by McClelland & Stewart.

Rita Donovan Author of six novels & one non-fiction. Her novels have won several awards, among them: CAA/Chapters Award for Fiction, Landed.

Saleema Nawaz's fiction has been published in Prairie Fire, Grain, & PRISM. Mother Superior (Freehand Books, 2008) is her first short story collection.

Ken Kalman is a poet, playwright, and novelist. Among his publications are a novel, Jesus Loves Me, a play, Defenceless, and Poetry of the Jews.

Laura Golden is author of a poetry book, Laura's Garden, 1978-2007. Artist, Reiki master, art therapist. From Now On, and Loneliness (Baico Publishing).

Tony Robinson-Smith is author of Back in 6 Years (Goose Lane Editions, 2008): In his first book, adventurer Tony circles the planet by land and sea.

Milton Dawes was one of the seven drummers who started the Tam-Tam drumming on the mountain.

. . . . .

Wyoming is Still Haunted

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:46:00 +0000

Late in 2006 I spent six weeks in residence at the Ucross Foundation in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. I was supposed to be working on a collection of short stories set mostly in rural Nova Scotia, but in no time Wyoming's big sky and high plains were demanding most of my writing attention. It didn't help that the deeply funny Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves, was in the studio down the hall from mine. Every few days we'd go for a walk, which sounds harmless enough, but all of our walks turned into epic adventures. Whenever something happened to us out there in the wild Karen would say: Man, I can't wait to read about this tomorrow on your blog! I've never had such a dedicated audience before.

Now, finally, at long last, the Amazing But True Real Life Wild West Adventures of J. R. Carpenter and Karen Russell have been published for all the world to read. Published somewhere other than on my blog, that is. Carte Blanche, the literary review of the Quebec Writers' Federation, has included a condensed version of our adventures in their latest issue: Wyoming is Haunted.

. . . . .

birthday flowers

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 15:50:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

in absentia launch party under the Van Horne Viaduct

noreply@blogger.com (J. R. Carpenter) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:04:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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