Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl

Announcing Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl, a brand new work of web-based computer-generated digital literature created especially for “Avenues of Access: An Exhibit & Online Archive of New ‘Born Digital’ Literature,” curated by Dene Grigar & Kathi Inman Berens. The exhibition will be held in conjunction with the MLA 2013 Convention in Boston, 3-5 January 2013, but the website – containing links to 30 new born digital works and a plethora of resources pertaining to born digital literature – is online now: Avenues of Access: An Exhibit & Online Archive of New ‘Born Digital’ Literature

J. R. Carpenter || Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl [detail]

Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events, persons, places or texts is entirely intentional. Details from many a high sea story have been netted by this net-worked work. The combinatorial powers of computer-generated narrative conflate and confabulate characters, facts, and forms of narrative accounts of sea voyages into the unknown North undertaken over the past 2340 years. At the furthest edge of this assemblage floats the fantastical classical island of Ultima Thule and the strange phenomenon known to the Romans as sea lung. The main characters are sprung from Edward Leer’s Victorian nonsense poem, The Owl and the Pussycat. A lazy and somewhat laconic owl and a girl most serious, most adventurous, most determined, have set sail toward this strange sea in a boat of pea-, bottle-, lima-bean- or similar shade of green. The cartographic collage they voyage through collects the particularities of a number of fluid floating places – as described or imagined in sources as diverse as Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries and the children’s poem Wynken, Blynken and Nod – and reacontextualizes them in an obviously awkward assemblage of discontinuous surfaces pitted with points of departure, escape routes, lines of flight.

For more information on the source texts, maps, and codes pillaged for this work, please see Notes on Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl.

MIT4: The Work of Stories

Responsa Literature: partial replies to scattered letters
J. R. Carpenter
Abstract: The term “responsa literature” refers to all written rulings made by rabbis under Jewish law, in response to questions submitted to them in writing, throughout the post-Talmudic period. Initially, the great distances that separated Diaspora Jewry from the scholars of Babylon necessitated this type of question and response law making. Montréal poet Anne Carson has written: “People in exile write so many letters.” She speaks of Ovid who, nightly, “puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.” I was, in effect, born in exile. A first generation Canadian, I spent much of my early life writing letters to my grandmother, trying to piece together a story for her of who I was and to elicit from her some idea of where I had come from. She rarely wrote back. When she died I found that she had saved my letters, stuffed in no apparent order, into books and piles and drawers. I have since become fascinated with collections of letters. In this paper, I will draw on letters, literature and historical sources to discuss ways in which contemporary forms of diaspora, as may result from divorce, emigration, or economic migration, alter family narratives. I will explore some of the ways in which media and communication technologies have forever altered the responsa form. Letter writing has re-emerged, in the form of email. Does the immediacy of this question and response mode of communicating bring us any closer to piecing together an idea of who we are and where we come from?

Presentation Friday May 6, 2005
Call Session 2, 5 – 6:30
Room 56-167, MIT
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