lapsus linguae

Reading List 2009

2009 was a year of reading interrupted. It started with an eviction notice. An amazing number of books can accumulate in 11 years. My bookcases and I had a long talk and we decided that a few hundred of our friends would have to go. Many were sold, many more were given away. The rest fit into 32 boxes. Finding a home for those boxes was hell. Two weeks after finally signing a lease on a new apartment, my marriage ended suddenly. As a reader, I didn’t see it coming. There was no foreshadowing or anything. As a writer, I would have done things differently.

My books moved without me. My suitcases and I spent the summer living out of other people’s bookshelves. It turns out that a friend close enough to put you up in a time of need can also be counted on to have a book collection close enough to your own to make you and your suitcases feel at home without a home. It turns out there are lots of books in the world. We merely move amongst them. Friends, on the other hand, are one-of-a-kind and impossible to replace.

My books and their cases are now housed in a storage locker in Montreal. I miss them very much. Especially the ones written by friends. There are many friends’ book in this photo of one of my Saint-Urbain Street bookcases before its dismantling:

On the up side, my suitcases and I are now ensconced in an 18th century Palladian country house situated on a promontory in a bend in the River Dart in South Devon. We’re catching up on our England reading. I am glad I saved Wuthering Heights until after visiting a moor, even though it’s set on a different moor than the one I went too, and Waterland until after visiting Somerset, even though it’s set on the Fens. Next up, Dart, by my new neighbour Alice Oswald, about my new neighbour The River Dart.

Here, in reverse chronological order, are the books I read in 2009:

Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Graham Swift, Waterland
Sutherland and Nicolson, Wetland: Life in the Somerset Levels
Jerome Fletcher, Alfreda Abbot’s Lost Voice
Charles Bernstein, Dark City
Nicolas Evans, The Divide
Clarice Lispector, Soulstorm
Philippe Soupault, Last Nights in Paris
Stacey May Fowles, Fear of Fighting
Lisa Moore, Degrees of Nakedness
Medlar Lucan & Durian Grey, The Decadent Traveler
Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses
Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
Roddy Doyle, Paula Spenser
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet
Jerome Fletcher, Degringolade
Kate Pullinger, The Mistress of Nothing
Edna O’Brein, The Country Girls
Deborah Eisenberg, Twilight of the SUperheroes
Steven Ross Smith, Lures
Anne Simpson, Quick
Elizabeth Bishop, The Collected Prose
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Oana Avasilichioaei, Feria: a poempark
Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
Agota Kristof, The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie
Nigel Peake, Maps: Fields, Paths, Forests, Blocks, Places and Surroundings
John Berger, About Looking
Francis A. Yates, The Art of Memory
William Gibson, Spook Country
Mary-Ann Ray, Seven Partly Underground Rooms and Buildings for Water, Ice and Midgets
Jerome Fletcher, Escape from the Temple of Laughter
Mark Haddon, The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
William Gaddis, Carpenter’s Gothic
David Gutterson, East of the Mountains
A.S. Byatt, Little Black Book of Stories
Shirley Jackson, The Lottery
Merce Rodoreda, The Time of the Doves
Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way
Daniel Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife
Andrew Hood, Pardon Our Monsters
Arjun Basu, Squishy
Jacob Wren, Families Are Formed Through Copulation
Chandra Mayor, All the Pretty Girls
Harold Hoefle, The Mountain Clinic
Beryl Bainbridge, Another Part of the World
Lydia Davis, The End of the Story
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Italo Calvino, Why Read The Classics?
Alejo Carpentier, The Chase
Nell Freudenberger, Lucky Girls
Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity

. . . . .

Reading List 2008

I got a massive amount of writing done in 2008. That made it made it a strange year for reading. Early on in the year I appear to have had a ghosts and devils fixation. What was I thinking, reading Will Self, How the Dead Live and Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita back to back?

Between January and May I read and re-read a lot of chapters, articles and essays related to the texts I was working with in the Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams electronic literature project. Many books were harmed in the making of that work, some are pictured here, but few of those fragmentary readings are represented in the list below.

I had a great but short lived burst of short story reading in the spring while I was writing the postcard stories for the in absentia electronic literature project, but once that piece was launched I had to focus on finishing writing my first novel, Words the Dog Knows. It was a cold, wet summer, which was fine as I barely left my apartment. To get through the long days of writing toward impossibly short deadlines I soon realized that I couldn’t read anything even remotely resembling anything I would ever write. So it was a summer of long post-colonial novels written by American women.

I thought I’d get back to my regular reading habits once Words the Dog Knows went to the printer, but despite a brief window were I got to catch up on a few books written by friends, most of my fall reading was muddled by travel. Between book tours, conferences, lectures and meetings I was on the road non-stop from mid-October to mid-November. All I can say is, Gulliver’s Travels makes great sense on trains and airplanes.

My New Year’s reading resolution: to read Don Quixote in it’s entirety. Toward this end I have booked a one week vacation on a Cuban beach. The things I do for literature!

Here, from last to first, are books read in 2008:

Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Salman Rushdie, ed., Best American Short Stories 2008
Jonathan Lenthem, Girl in a Landscape
Marguerite Duras, Moderato Cantabile
Paul D. Miller, Rhythm Science
Mariko & Jillian Tamaki, Skim
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
Emily Holton, Dear Canada Council / Our Starland
Liane Keightly, Seven Openings of the head
Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine
N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines
Joe Brainard, I Remember
Harold Brodkey, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
Cynthia Ozick, Trust
Maya Merrick, The Hole Show
Kate Pullinger, A Little Stranger
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Leni Zumas, Farewell Navigator
Jason Camlot, The Debaucher
Keri Hulme, The Bone People
Ha Jin, Waiting
Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost
Claire Messud, The Hunters
Joy Williams, State of Grace
Julie Doucet, 365 Days
Barry Hannah, Geronimo Rex
Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
Steven Heighton, The Shadow Boxer
Michael Crummey, Flesh and Blood
Kerstin Ekman, Blackwater
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr
Michale Hoeullebecq, The Elementary Particles
Rick Moody, Demonology
Goethe, Faust
Christopher Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Jeff Parker, The Back of the Line
Etgar Keret, Missing Kissinger
Raymond Carver, Short Cuts
Lorrie Moore, Like Life
Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Eva Figes, Light
Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979
Maureen Adams, Shaggy Muses
Mary Robison, Why Did I Ever
Valerie Joy Kalynchuk, All Day Breakfast
Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonders
Flan O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus
Anya Ulinich, Petropolis
David McGimpsey, Sitcom
Jeff Parker, Ovenman
Will Self, How the Dead Live
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Mark Amerika, META/DATA

. . . . .

Words the Dog Knows

Words the Dog Knows, J. R. Carpenter
conundrum press (Montreal)
October 2008
978-1-894994-34-7
Novel
5×7 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
. . . . .

Words the Dog Knows is at the printer

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

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.

. . . . .

Reading List 2007

Gordon Lish, Dear Mr. Capote
Peter Carey, My Life As A Fake
N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message
Emily Holton, Little Lessons in Safety
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Bernard Cooper, Maps to Anywhere
Andy Brown, The Mole Chronicles
Zoe Whittall, Bottle Rocket Hearts
Lance Blomgren, Walkups
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Gail Scott, My Paris
Melissa A. Thompson, Dreadful Paris
Jorge Louis Borges, Ficciones
Angela Carr, Ropewalk
David Markson, Reader’s Block
Jonathan Lethem, Men And Cartoons
Ellen Ullman, The Bug
James Salter, Dusk
Steve Almond, My Life in Heavy Metal
Dave Eggers, How We Are Hungry
Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe
Amiee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
Margaret Atwood, Power Politics
Corey Frost, My Own Devices (Airport Version)
Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi
Elizabeth Hay, Small Change
Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day
Aleksandar Hemon, The Question of Bruno
Martin Amis, The Information
Gregory Maguire, Wicked
Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners
Petronius, The Satyricon
Machiavelli, The Prince
Colin McAdam, Some Great Thing
Sam Shepard, Cruising Paradise
Nathaniel G. Moore, Let’s Pretend We Never Met
Angela Hibbs, Passport
Don DeLillo, End Zone
Aimee Bender, An Invisible Sign of My Own
Shapard & Thomas, eds., Sudden Fiction International
Paul Virilio, Ground Zero
Sean Dixon, The Girls Who Saw Everything
Elisabeth Billiveau, Something to Pet the Cat About
Janet Kauffman, The Body in Four Parts
Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café
Danzy Senna, Symptomatic
Lynda Barry, Cruddy
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Larissa Lai, Saltfish Girl
Linn Ullmann, Stella Descending
Tobias Wolff, Old School
Nicole Brossard, Notebooks of Roses and Civilization
Alejo Carpentier, The Chase
Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics
Lorrie Moore, Self-Help
Charles Baxter, A Relative Stranger
Stanly Elkin, Van Gogh’s Room at Arles
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Christia Wolf, Cassandra
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Iris Murdoch, The Italian Girl
Barry Yourgrau, Haunted Traveller
Shulamis Yelin, Stories from A Montreal Childhood
Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History
Mark Anthony Jarman, 19 Knives
Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Heather O’Neill, Lullabies For Little Criminals
Mary Gaitskil, Bad Behaviour
Denis Johnson, Jesus’s Son
Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
Junot Diaz, Drown
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance
Eudora Weltly, The Wide Net
Hortense Calisher, In the Absence of Angels
Lynn Freed, The Curse of the Appropriate Man
Truman Capote, A Tree of Night & Other Stories
Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
Jane Mayhall, Sleeping Late on Judgement Day
Eleanor Clark, Rome and a Villa
Hortense Calisher, Saratoga, Hot
Jonathan Ames, Wake Up, Sir!
Steven Heighton, Flight Paths of the Emperor
Alan Gurganus, The Practical heart
Joy Williams, Escapes
Jay Rogoff, How We Came to Stand on That Shore
Joy Williams, Taking Care
Langston Hughes, The Best of Simple
Steven Millhauser, Enchanted Night
Alison Smith, Name All the Animals
Joan Leegant, An Hour in Paradise
Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel
Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
Janet Frame, The Reservoir
Janet Frame, Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun
Carolyn Beard Whitlow, Vanished
Carolyn Beard Whitlow, Wild Meat
Robert Lowell, Lord Weary’s Castle
Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
Mary Robison, Days
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Merce Rodoreda, Camellia Street

Reading List 2006 >>>

Reading List 2005 >>>
. . . . .

The Year in Book(stores)s

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

Yaddo Authors Library

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

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

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

running short on shelf space

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

Reading List 2006

2006 was a wonderful year for reading thanks in large part to the small but focused libraries of The Banff Centre and The Ucross Foundation and to S. W. Welch and The Word, my two favourite bookstores in Montreal.

“In the crush of a lightning technology that slams out computerized volumes stuck together with a baleful glue, it is good now and then to be reminded of a book as something worthy of body-love. The nostrils also read.” Cynthia Ozick

Here’s a not quite chronological list of the books my nostrils and I read in 2006:

Robert Allen, The Encantadas
Samuel Beckett, Watt
Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor & Memory
Louise Steinman, The Souvenir
Roy Parvin, The Longest Road in America
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro & Other Stories
Annie Proulx, Heart Songs
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
George Saunders, Civil War Land in Bad Decline
Alan Garganus, Plays Well With Others
Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
Stacey Richter, My Date With Satan
Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
Annie Proulx, Bad Dirt
Ron Carlson, The Hotel Eden
George Saunders, Pastoralia
Mary Oliver, White Pine
Honor Moore, Red Shoes
Annie Proulx, Close Range
Karen Russell, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
Julian Barnes, The Lemon Table
Gore Vidal, Burr
André Gide, Lafcadio’s Adventures
Marguerite Yourcenar, Coup de Grace
Catullus, The Poems of Catullus
Tracy Emin, Strangeland
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
John McPhee, Rising from the Plains
Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
Doris Lessing, The Sweetest Dream
H. M. van den Brink, On the Water
Jonathan Garfinkel, Glass Psalms
Barry Hannah, Bats Out of Hell
Amy Hempel, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Guy Davenport, The Death of Picasso
Alexis O’Hara, (more than) Flithy Lies
William Kennedy, Ironweed
Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining Room Floor
Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
Kenzaburo Oe, A Personal Matter
Richard Ford, A Multitude of Sins
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Project for a Revolution in New York
Simone de Beauvoir, When Things of the Spirit Come First
Michael Boyce, Monkey
Ali Smith, Hotel World
Tracy Chevalier, Girl WIth A Pearl Earing
Victoria Glendinning, Electricity
Iris Murdoch, A Word Child
Zsuzsi Gartner, All the Anxious Girls on Earth
David Bergen, The Time In Between
Sharon Olds, The Gold Cell
Don McKay, Another Gravity
Kunt Hamsun, Hunger
Greg Hollingshead, The Roaring Girl
Mavis Gallant, Home Truths
Sharon Olds, Satan Says
Joey Dubuc, Neither Either Nor Or
Rainer Maria Rilke, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories
Julia Darling, Crocodile Soup
Carole Angier, Jean Rhys
Mary V. Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Lousie Bryant
Djuna Barnes, New York
Ali Smith, The Accidental
Sheila Heti, The Middle Stories
Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
André Gide, Strait is the Gate
Tobias Wolff, In the Garden of North American Martyrs
Robert Allen, Standing Wave
Germaine de Stael, Corinne, or Italy
Tennessee WIlliams, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone
Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller
Montaigne, Travel Journal
Karen Connelly, The Lizard Cage
Mary Robison, Believe Them
Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment
Golda Fried, Nellcot is my Darling
Adrian Michael Kelly, Down Sterling Road
Nicole Brossard, The Blue Books
Todd Swift, ed., Future Welcome
Lalumiére & Moser, eds, Lust for Life
Barbara Gowdy, The Romantic
Alister Macleod, No Great mischief
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners
Dorothea Straus, Virgins and Other Endangered Species
Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good
Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer & Le bateau ivre

Reading List 2005: http://luckysoap.com/lapsuslinguae/2005/12/reading-list-2005.html
. . . . .

Reading Gide

“Fiction there is – and history. Certain critics of no little discernment have considered that fiction is history which might have taken place, and history fiction which has taken place. We are, indeed, forced to acknowledge that the novelist’s art often compels belief, just a reality sometimes defies it. Alas! there exists and order of minds so skeptical that they deny the possibility of and fact as soon as it diverges from the commonplace. It is not for them that I write.”
André Gide, Lafcadio’s Adventures, 1914
. . . . .

Exited thoughts now long to travel

We had a flurry of out of town visitors this fall. All those folks who said they were coming Montréal this summer left it to the last minute. And they all came at once. We didn’t quite get to spend time with everyone who passed through town in the past few weeks. But we really enjoyed those we did see. The spare futon is folded up for winter now. In less than a week I hitch up the horses and head west to Wyoming.

iam mens praetrepidans auet uagari,
iam laeti studio pedes uigescunt.

Exited thoughts now long to travel;
Glad feet now tap in expectation.

Catullus, XLVI

I pulled my suitcase from the closet so my dog would get used to seeing it around. But so far I’ve put nothing in it. It’s hard to pack for six weeks in a place you’ve never been before. What to wear in Wyoming in November? Correspondence with the Ucross Foundation indicates that the weather will be highly unpredictable save in this one fact: there will be wind, lots of wind.

Where is Ucross? People keep asking me. It’s in Wyoming, in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. Where’s that? You know in the movies, when the wagon trains are slowly advancing westward across the plains and then finally some mountains appear in the near distance? That’s my idea of where Ucross is: on the ranch just before the mountains begin.

USGS Topographical map of Ucross, WY

Aerial Photograph of Ucross, WY

The Ucross Foundation website offers up this historical narrative:

The Ucross Foundation occupies a cluster of buildings collectively known as Big Red. The Ranch House is one of the oldest standing houses in the area and tepee rings on the hills hint at a much earlier history as first nation hunting grounds. Built in 1882, the Big Red Barn was a former Pony Express stop, and was on the stagecoach route that serviced Buffalo to Clearmont from 1891-1911. Having missed the last coach by 95 years, I’ll fly into Sheridan on Big Sky Airlines out of Denver. And now that the Internet has put the Pony Express out of business, I’ll rely on wi-fi for communication with the outside world.

The village that grew up around Big Red went through several name changes, eventually settling on Ucross, named after the original Pratt & Ferris brand. Here is a photograph of ranch hands taking a break at the Big Red Ranch in 1898:

American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming

So far, this is the only photographic indication I have of what to wear in Wyoming. See the seated guy with the beard on the bottom right? That’s the look I’m going for. Minus the beard though.
. . . . .