lapsus linguae

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 >>>
. . . . .

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.

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.

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!
. . . . .

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
. . . . .

“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
. . . . .

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.
. . . . .

More or less in chronological order, here’s what I was reading in 2005.

• Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
• Aristotle, Poetics
• Julian Barnes, England, England
• Mary Gaitskill, Veronica
• Michel Tremblay, La Grosse Femme d’a cote est Enceinte
• Mordecai Richler, The Street
• Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God
• Hesiod, Works & Days
• Theocritus, Idylls
• Virgil, Eclogues & Georgics
• Martialis, Epigrams
• Virginia Woolf, Orlando
• Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
• Vita Sackville-West, Andrew Marvell
• Irving Layton, Waiting for the Messiah
• Mordecai Richler, Son of a Smaller Hero
• Lise Tremblay, Mile End (La Danse Juive)
• Mavis Gallant, Accross the Bridge
• Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness
• Francis Bacon, Essays & Aphorisms
• Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
• Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker
• Monique Troung, The Book of Salt
• Lydia Davis, Almost no Memory
• Ben Okri, Stars of the New Curfew
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Denis Johnson, Fiskadoro
• Mary V. Dearborn, Love in the Promised Land:
  The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey
• Cynthia Ozick, The Pagan Rabbi
• Mario Vargas Llosa, Who Killed Palomino Molero
• Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
• Barry Hannah, Yonder Stands Your Orphan
• James Joyce, Dubliners
• Nula O’Foalain, Are YOu Somebody?
• Knut Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil
• David Mamet, The Village
• Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
• Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
• Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
• Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House
• John Hawkes, The Beetle Leg
• Joy Williams, Honoured Guest
• Sherwin Tjia, The World is a Hearbreaker
• Grace Paley, Just as I Thought
• Barry Yourgrau, Wearing Dad’s Head
• Lawerence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind
• Sheila Heti, Ticknor
• Bohuml Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude
• Josip Novakovich, Salvation and Other Disasters
• Derrida, Writting and Difference
• OVID, Tristia & Ex Ponto
• Alice McDermott, Child of My Heary
• Anais Nin, Under a Glass Bell
• Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte
• V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival
• Lydia Davis, Samuel Johnson is Indignant
• Virginia Woolf, Paper Darts: Illustrated Letters
• Marci Denesiuk, The Far Away Home
• Djuna Barns, Nightwood
• Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living
• Mark Richard, Charity
• Jon Paul Fiorentino,Asthmatica
• Gogol, The Overcoat
• Roland Barthes, Mythologies
• Anne-Marie MacDonald, As the Crow Flies
• Amy Hempel, The Dog of the Marriage
• OVID, The Metamorphoses
• Zadie Smith White Teeth
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
• Margurette Yourcenar, A Coin in Nine Hands
• Ron Carlson, At the Jim Bridger

. . . . .

My short story “Precipice”, 2003 winner of the Quebec Short Story Competition, has been published in Short Stuff, the second anthology of winning stories of the CBC/QWF Short Story Competition.

The launch will be held tomorrow, Saturday, April 2, at 5:30 pm., in the Jeanne-Mance room of Hyatt Regency Hotel (1255 Jeanne-Mance, in the Complexe Desjardins).

This event is free and open to the public. Copies of the book will be on sale onsite at the Blue Met bookstore.

Metropolis Literary Festival-
http://www.blue-met-bleu.com

“Precipice”-
http://luckysoap.com/publications
. . . . .. . . . .

The Eye

My bad grandfather wouldn’t feed us.
He turned the lights out when we tried to read.
He sat alone in the invisible room
in front of the hearth, and drank. He died
when I was seven, and Grandma had never once
taken anyone’s side against him,
the firelight on his red cold face
reflecting extra on his glass eye.
Today I thought about that glass eye,
and how at night in the big double bed
he slept facing his wife, and how the limp
hole, where his eye had been, was open
towards her on the pillow, and how I am
one-fourth him, a brutal man with a
hole for an eye, and one-fourth her,
a woman who protected no one. I am their
sex, too, their son, their bed, and
under their bed the trap-door to the
cellar, with its barrels of fresh apples, and
somewhere in me too is the path
down to the creek gleaming in the dark, a
way out of there.

Sharon Olds, from The Dead and the Living

. . . . .

“If you move around all your life, you can’t find where you come from on a map. All those places where you lived are just that: places. You don’t come from any of them; you come from a series of events. And those are mapped in memory. Contingent, precarious events, without the counterpane of place to muffle the knowledge of how unlikely we are. Almost not born at every turn. Without a place, events slow-tumbling through time become your roots. Stories shading into one another. You come from a plane crash. From a war that brought your parents together.”
Anne-Marie MacDonald, As The Crow Flies, Toronto: Knopf, 2003. page 36.
. . . . .

Rilke says:
“Do not let yourself be misled by outward appearances; in the depths everything becomes law.”
From “Letters to a Young Poet” July 16th 1903.
. . . . .