lapsus linguae

The Cape: The Back-Story

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.

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in absentia launch party under the Van Horne Viaduct

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.
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in absentia – a new web project by J. R. Carpenter

in absentia is a new web-based writing project by J. R. Carpenter that addresses gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. In this work J. R. Carpenter uses HTML, javascript and the Google Maps API to create an interactive non-linear narrative of interconnected “postcard” stories written from the point of view of former tenants of Mile End forced out by gentrification. This project features new fiction by J. R. Carpenter with guest authors: Lance Blomgren, Andy Brown, Daniel Canty and Colette Tougas. New stories will continue to be be added throughout the summer and into the all of 2008. http://luckysoap.com/inabsentia

in absentia is a Latin phrase meaning “in absence.” I’m drawn to the contradiction inherent in being in absence. In recent years many long-time low-income neighbours being forced out of Mile End by economically motivated decisions made their absence. So far fiction is the best way I’ve found to give voice these disappeared neighbours, and the web is the best place I’ve found to situate their stories. Our stories. My building is for sale; my family may be next. Faced with imminent eviction I’ve begun to write about the Mile End as if I’m no longer here, and to write about a Mile End that is no longer here. By manipulating the Google Maps API, I am able to populate “real” satellite images of my neighbourhood with “fictional” characters and events. I aim to both literally and figuratively map the sudden disappearances of characters, fictional or otherwise, from the places, real or imagined, where they once lived; to document traces people leave behind when they leave a place, and the stories that spring from their absence. in absentia is a web “site” haunted by the stories of former residents of Mile End, a slightly fantastical world that is already lost but at the same time is still fully known by its inhabitants: a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but could have been.

Themes of place and displacement pervade my fiction and electronic literature, yet place long remained an abstract, elusive notion for me. Perhaps because for many years I wrote about long ago places attempting to inhabit pasts that could never be mine. Mapping the minutia of my most immediate surroundings has made my notion of place less abstract and more socially engaged. Writing about my neighbours has made me aware that I write from amongst them, thus engendering a “we” point of view. Increasingly, my work is collaborative. In in absentia (June 2008) I join a cast of writers from my neighbourhood to pen “postcards” to and from former tenants, fictional or otherwise, displaced by gentrification and it’s erasures.

in absentia also marks the end of DARE-DARE’s Dis/location: projet d’articulation urbaine in the Mile End’s parc sans nom. The mobile office will leave the vacant lot that was its home for two years and move towards Montréal’s dowtown, in Cabot Square, corner Sainte-Catherine and Atwater. http://dare-dare.org

J. R. Carpenter 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 novel Words the Dog Knows is forthcoming from Conundrum in the fall of 2008. Her short fiction and electronic literature have been published and exhibited internationally and can be found on http://luckysoap.com.

in absentia projet web de J.R. Carpenter inauguré le 24 juin au parc sans nom
DARE-DARE avec nouvelles oeuvres de fiction signées J. R. Carpenter, avec auteurs invités: Lance Blomgren, Andy Brown, Daniel Canty, Alexis O’Hara et Colette Tougas La réalisation du projet se poursuivra jusqu’au 30 novembre 2008. http://luckysoap.com/inabsentia

in absentia est un projet d’écriture sur le Web qui traite de la gentrification dans le quartier Mile-End de Montréal et des disparitions qu’elle entraîne. J.R. Carpenter utilise le HTML, le JavaScript et les cartes API-Google pour créer une narration interactive non linéaire constituée d’histoires « cartes postales » écrites selon le point de vue d’anciens locataires du Mile-End forcés de quitter leur logement à cause de la gentrification. Le projet débutera le 24 juin et se poursuivra au cours de l’été et de l’automne 2008.

« L’expression latine in absentia signifie “en l’absence de”. Au cours des dernières années, plusieurs de mes voisins à faible revenu qui habitaient le Mile-End depuis longtemps ont été forcés de quitter le quartier en raison de décisions d’ordre économique prises en leur absence. À ce jour, la fiction s’avère le meilleur moyen pour raconter l’histoire de mes voisins disparus et le Web, le meilleur endroit où afficher leur histoire. Notre histoire. L’immeuble que j’habite est à vendre; ma famille et moi subirons peut-être le même sort prochainement. Menacée d’expulsion, j’ai commencé à écrire sur le Mile-End comme si je n’y étais plus et à écrire sur le Mile-End qui n’est plus. En manipulant les cartes API-Google, il m’est possible de peupler de personnages fictifs les “vraies” images satellites de mon quartier et d’inventer des situations. Je cartographie – au sens propre et figuré – la disparition soudaine de personnages fictifs ou non, des endroits où ils ont habité véritablement ou dans l’imaginaire. Je documente les traces que les gens laissent derrière eux lorsqu’ils quittent un endroit ainsi que l’histoire qui émerge de leur absence. in abstentia est un “site” Web hanté par les histoires d’anciens résidants du Mile- End, un univers quasi-fantastique déjà disparu, mais pourtant bien connu de ses habitants: la mémoire commune d’un quartier tel qu’il n’a jamais vraiment été, mais qui aurait pu être. »

« Mes oeuvres de fiction et de littérature électronique baignent dans les thèmes du lieu et du déplacement et pourtant, le lieu est longtemps demeuré un concept abstrait et imprécis à mes yeux. Peut-être parce que j’ai longtemps écrit au sujet de lieux qui n’existaient plus, tentant de m’inscrire dans des passés qui ne pouvaient pas être les miens. »

« Cartographier les menus détails de mon univers immédiat a fait en sorte que je conçois la notion de lieu de façon moins abstraite et avec un plus grand engagement social. En écrivant sur mes voisins, je me suis rendu compte que je me situais parmi eux pour écrire et que, par conséquent, j’adoptais une écriture au “nous”. Je travaille de plus en plus en collaboration. Pour in absentia, je me joins à une équipe d’auteurs de mon quartier pour écrire des “cartes postales” destinées à ou provenant d’anciens locataires, qu’ils soient fictifs ou non, déplacés par la gentrification et les disparitions qu’elle entraîne. »

in absentia marque également la fin du présent volet de Dis/location: projet d’articulation urbaine – ainsi que de la présence de DARE-DARE dans le parc sans nom du Mile-End. La roulotte quittera le site inoccupé où elle était établie depuis deux ans, en route pour le square Cabot au centre-ville de Montréal, à l’angle de Ste-Catherine et Atwater. http://dare-dare.org

J. R. Carpenter est deux fois lauréate du Concours de nouvelles de CBC Quebec et finaliste au volet Web Art pour le prix Drunken Boat PanLiterary 2006. Son roman Words the Dog Knows paraîtra à l’automne 2008 aux éditions Conundrum. Ses oeuvres de fiction et de littérature électronique ont été publiées et présentées ici et à l’étranger et sont disponibles en ligne au http://luckysoap.com.
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in absentia launch party June 24th

Join us for the launch of in absentia – a new web writing project by J.R. Carpenter with guest authors: Lance Blomgren, Andy Brown, Daniel Canty and Colette Tougas. in absentia is presented by DARE-DARE Centre de diffusion dart multidisciplinaire de Montral.

DARE-DARE will host an in absentia launch party on Saint-Jean Baptiste Day, June 24th from 5 – 11PM in the parc sans nom (St. Laurent @ Van Horn). The event is free and open to everyone. There will be DJs and a cash bar and possibly a laser light show, if I have time!

The launch of in absentia marks the end of DARE-DARE’s Dis/location: projet d’articulation urbaine. On July 1st, DARE-DARE’s blue trailer will leave the vacant lot that was its home for two years and move towards Montréal’s downtown, in Cabot Square, corner Sainte-Catherine and Atwater. The launch of in absentia will be the last event held in the Mile End’s parc sans nom, so please come and make it a great one.

in absentia is a web-based writing project that addresses issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. In recent years many long-time low-income neighbours being forced out of Mile End by gentrification. So far fiction is the best way I’ve found to give voice these disappeared neighbours, and the web is the best place I’ve found to situate their stories. Our stories. My building is for sale; my family may be next. Faced with imminent eviction I’ve begun to write as if I’m no longer here, about a Mile End that is no longer here. By manipulating the Google Maps API, I am able to populate “real” satellite images of my neighbourhood with “fictional” characters and events. in absentia is a web “site” haunted by the stories of former residents of Mile End, a slightly fantastical world, a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but as it could have been. The project will launch in Montreal and on-line on June 24, and new stories will continue to be added until November 30, 2008.

DARE-DARE Centre de diffusion d’art multidisciplinaire de Montréal est situé dans un parc sans nom entre Saint-Laurent et Clark, entre Arcade et Rosemont/Van Horne, Montréal. For more information please visit: dare-dare.og
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Visionary Landscapes, Vancouver WA

After five days in Vancouver BC I headed down to Vancouver WA for Visionary Landscapes: The Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2008. This Vancouver convergence was purely coincidental. It was convenient in so far as I doubt I would have made it to the conference were I not already out west, but visiting two Vancouvers in one trip made for some confusing conversations. For example, when I was going through customs in Vancouver they asked me where I was going: Vancouver, I said.

In Vancouver BC they refer to Vancouver WA as “the other Vancouver.” In Vancouver WA it is difficult not to refer to Vancouver BC as “the real Vancouver.” According to tourist propaganda found in the conference hotel, Vancouver WA was founded 30 years before Vancouver BC. The town has done little with this head start.

There seemed to be an inordinately high number of pawnshops per capita. Beauty parlours too. But when a few of us asked where the grocery store was we were laughed out of town. Literally – out of town. The hotel concierge informed us that the closest grocery store was across the bridge in Portland, Oregon. Picture it: Dutch, a Quebecois, a Norwegian and me, a kid from rural Nova Scotia walking across the state line to buy fruit and granola bars and other provisions to sustain us through the conference’s schedule of impossibly early mornings, late lunches, long days and dinners delayed some nights so late that it almost made more sense to skip ahead to straight up drinking.

Every morning at 7:30AM we were loaded onto two yellow school busses for transportation to the conference site, which was so far from the conference hotel in “downtown” Vancouver that the penalty for missing the school bus was a $25 taxi ride. The Washington State University Vancouver campus is beautiful and well-equipped, but oh so tiny. Or maybe it only appeared to be tiny because Mount Saint Helens loomed so large on the horizon.

On one hand it was kind of exciting to ride in a school bus full of the world’s leading experts in and practitioners of electronic literature. On the other hand, if either of these school buses had been in a horrible traffic accident it would have completely wiped out e.lit as a genre.

Electronic literature is a small but international community. The conference had a family reunion feel to it. We all know each other’s names but many of us had never met in person. I had two works in the Media Arts Show was held in conjunction with the conference: Entre Ville and The Cape. I was a little nervous about performing these works in front of such an august crowd, but afterward a surprising number of people came up and told me they’ve been teaching these works. For some reason it never occurred to me that people whose work I’d been admiring online for years might also be aware of my work.

Oh Internet, once again I under-estimate you.

More information on Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Conference 2008: Visionary Landscapes

There was a write up on the Media Art Show a local paper, The Columbian:
Works of Art A Click Away
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Tributaries: Behind the Scenes at the Vancouver Launch Event

Over the course of the six months that I was posting to Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams I had the occasion to explain the project many times to many people, often with little or no success. Some said: Wow, that sounds so cool… But I know they’d never read a word of it. Others smiled and nodded even as their eyes literally glazed over. Only a brave few admitted they had no idea what I was talking about. You few, you are true friends.

None of this bothered me of course. I knew that this exploration of the formal, functional and poetic properties of RSS would be best understood in its natural element (online) and would be most closely read by an online community already habituated to navigating the tributaries of text-fed streams.

So why, from day one, did I insist that the commissioning body, The Capilano Review, go to the trouble and expense to fly me from Montreal to Vancouver for a real-time one-time only launch event?

The more open-ended, circuitous and recursive a project sets out to be, the more necessary closure becomes. I posted the last fragment of text from the “original” source two days before the Vancouver launch. Had not had a plane to catch and a mic to get in front of I could have continued frigging around with the texts of TCR 2-50 indefinitely.

Tributaries curator Kate Armstrong supported the idea of a Vancouver launch event from day one. While she was researching potential launch event venues she sent me this email:

HI JR
Do you by any wild chance know Billy Mavreas?

BILLY MAVREAS is a Greek-Canadian artist and cartoonist living in Montreal. His artwork has been shown internationally. He is the author of The Overlords of Glee (2001) and the upcoming Inside Out Overlap (Timeless Books, 2008), and also the proprietor of his enduring project, Monastiraki, a Mile-End magickal curiosity shoppe and art gallery.

I replied:

> Yeah, he’s my neighbour and dear friend and we were at Banff together
> and so on. Why do you ask? He’s having a show at Helen Pitt around
> the same time I’ll be in Vancouver.

The rest, as they say, took a few more weeks to plan. But in the end, yes, we had the launch event at the Helen Pitt Gallery, where my friend and Montreal neighbour Billy Mavreas was artist in residence and the director Lance Blomgren had just agreed to contribute texts to another electronic literature project I’m working on and all three of us are Conundrum Press authors. Thank you Lance and Billy for letting us take over the Helen Pitt for the evening. Special thanks Billy for physically remixing a print copy of TCR 2-50 and handing out the mini-zine results on the spot, and for making such Tributaries-looking wall art for us to all stand in front of. And extra special thanks Emilie for pouring wine all evening and without whom I might not have made it to the gallery at all that day, but that’s another story.

Many dear friends showed up for the event, including some long-lost ones and some never before met in person ones and some in the “I have no idea what this project’s about” category. The pressure was on!

The Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams project is nowhere near as complicated as it sounds. It’s about reading. I held up my copy of TCR 2-50 for the audience to see all the underlined passages, circled sections, arrows, stars and annotations scribbled in the margins. We all do this when we read, don’t we? We interpret, interrupt, form metal images, take notes, and make associations. As I parsed and posted fragments of the essays of TCR 2-50 I marked them up, into JRML, as Kate Armstrong once quipped.

There are hundreds of different ways to read Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams. One good place to start is with the post: What the Heck is RSS?

A good example of JRML is section of Sandra Seekins’ essay dealing with the metaphors and media of biotechnologies which led to me to quote a sequence of pre-genetic-technology references made in literature and philosophy to “metaphors” of bodies as “composites of replaceable parts” in this excerpt: Metaphors of Biotechnology

An intertextual dialogue between TCR 2-50 authors emerges in the matrix/chora section of Kevin Magee’s poem To Write as Speach.

After showing these ways of reading Tributaries I went behind the scenes to show how the piece actually works. I posted an image to Flickr, commented on it, tagged it and then it appeared on the Tributaries main page through the magic of a Flickr RSS feed. I saved a bookmark to del.icio.us and that too was pulled into the Tributaries interface. I posted a new post to Tributaries: Alternate Readings: The In This Issue Remix, then logged into Facebook as Babble Brook (a character created to aid and abet with the Tributaries project). RSS had already pulled the afore mentioned Flickr image, del.icio.us bookmark and Tributaries post into Babble Brook’s profile and pushed news of them out into the feeds of all her friends. Having fed all that info into the text-fed stream, Babble Brook and I got off the mic and let the experts take over.

In a stroke of pure genius Tributaries curator Kate Armstrong invited three experts on streams to perform at the launch event: Dr. Michael Boyce, expert in stream of consciousness; Dr. Maria Lantin, Director of the Intersections Digital Studios, a research space at Emily Carr and thus an expert in data flow; and Dr. Jeremy Venditti, an expert in river geomorphology, turbulence and sediment transport dynamics in gravel-bedded streams. Now Dr. Boyce I’ve known for fifteen years, but Dr. Lantin and Dr. Venditti I’d never met before. This triumvirate of stream experts gave a brilliantly intermingled reading that riffed on the theme of streams. For example, if anyone is still wondering why on earth one would feed the texts of a print journal into a RSS stream, consider the transformational effects of the stream as outlined in this passage quoted by Dr. Venditti:

The Stream – Along the bottom of every gorge is a stream channel. In it may flow a great river or a brook or only a temporary torrent. The stream is there because the slopes of the land guide the water that way, and the stream may thus be said to exist on account of the channel. But in an equally important way the gorge exists because of the stream, for the stream is in fact the maker of the gorge and is still at work on it, deepening and enlarging. Let us look at the stream…
Grove Karl Gilbert and Albert Perry Brigham, An Introduction to Pyhsical Geography, 1902.

For me – standing in the audience having only just emerged seconds before from six intense months of working on Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams – this intertextual interdisciplinary reading of the work was a gift, and a joy to witness. Thank-you Michael, Maria and Jeremy for your generosity and thank-you Kate from coming up with this idea.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the gallery, throughout the evening TCR 2-50 guest editor and contributor Andrew Klobucar had been feeding portions of the readings into the Global Telelanguage Resources Workbench, which is basically a definition-generating machine. Despite having marked up an essay about this tool in Tributaries, it wasn’t until Andrew read performed the definitions generated in response to the evening’s other performances that I understood how innately hilarious the Global Telelanguage Resources project is! Thank you Andrew!

The performances were followed by a set from DJ Leigh Christie, who had already rocked my world earlier in the day during the tech set up. Even when the internet connection conked out, even when the data projector insisted on projecting upside-down, DJ Leigh kept our spirits running high. Thank you Leigh!

The longer you work on a project the more likely a launch event is to feel anti-climatic, especially an entirely web-based project. In this case, this was not the case. I’m grateful to The Capilano Review for seeing the project through to this conclusion. I was blown away by the turn out for the event, by the emotions of reuniting with long lost friends, by the generosity of all of the contributors and performers and by the responses to the work that the event generated.

Here’s how I know the event was a success: all the people who had told me beforehand that they didn’t get what this work was about came up to me after and said that now they get it. That’s about as climatic as you can get.
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Tributaries & Text fed Streams: Launch Event

If you happen to be in Vancouver on Saturday May 24th at 7:30PM, come on down to the Helen Pitt Gallery for the launch of Tributaries & Text fed Streams. I’ve been working on this project for just over six months now and am thrilled to see it nearing completion. I’m also thrilled to be heading to Vancouver for this launch. I have so many dear friends in that fair city yet have spent next to no time there. Looking forward to seeing you all – you know who you are!

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams is commissioned by The Capilano Review and curated by Kate Armstrong. The work explores the poetic, formal and functional properties of RSS using the text of an issue of literary quarterly The Capilano Review as raw material raw the creation of a new artwork. Since January I have reading and re-reading the essays, parsing them into fragments, annotating them, marking them up, tagging them and posting them. Once fed into an RSS stream, the fragments are re-read, reordered, and reblogged in an iterative process of distribution that opens up new readings of the essays and reveals new interrelationships between them.

At the launch event I will read from the piece and perform a guided tour of the various streams feeding into and flowing out of it. In addition, curator Kate Armstrong has put together a programme of experimental readings by practitioners in disparate fields such as quantum physics, geography, and poetics, arranged to explore ideas of streams, seriality, or flow. Participants in the launch event will include Maria Lantin, Michael Boyce, Jeremy Venditti, Global Telelanguage Resources, and me, J.R. Carpenter.

The work will be simultaneously launched on Turbulence.org.

Launch Event:
Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 7:30pm
Helen Pitt Gallery, 102-148 Alexander Street, Vancouver, BC.

A reception will follow.

For those of you who can’t make it in person, here are some URLS:

Tributaries & Text- Fed Streams: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca/
The Capilano Review: http://www.thecapilanoreview.ca/
TCR Issue 2-50 : “Artifice and Intelligence”: http://www.thecapilanoreview.ca/archive.php?id=series2/2_50
J.R. Carpenter: http://luckysoap.com/
Turbulence: http://www.turbulence.org
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Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: Curatorial Statement

What are the creative and poetic possibilities of RSS syndication and how might the introduction of omnipresent, iterative publishing processes affect our experience of digital literature? How can a book be transformed and reworked through an exploration of the formal and aesthetic structure of the stream?
TCR Issue 2-50 : Artifice and Intelligence
Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams is a project by J.R. Carpenter, commissioned by The Capilano Review and curated by Kate Armstrong. In this work Carpenter approaches the text of an issue of literary quarterly The Capilano Review (TCR) as a raw material in the creation of a new artwork.

Carpenter draws on a range of strategies and traditions including literary criticism, illustration, blogging, coding, writing, and digital intervention, using these to articulate an experimental space that equates and associates water with text.

The work is an eddy within the internet, a place where information – commentary, image, text, metadata – coalesce for a moment, before flowing back out into and through other channels. The written word mixes and dissolves, never static, not quite discrete. Related imagery circulates within and without the confines of the artwork, raising questions of boundary. We navigate within this work as we would through wild, quiet rivers. Reading is wayfinding. We pass through texts and text fragments, through citations, links, footnotes, self-author, other-author, patches of whimsy. Social media meets scholarly tracemaking. Categories become headwaters: comments, islands. It is a “text-fed stream”, moving with undercurrents and process.

The work extends our experience of the nature of the digital stream and invites new questions about material, temporality, repetition, and the archive in connection with the electronic word.

Kate Armstrong, 2008
Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams
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It was a dark and stormy exquisite corpse

The 10th annual Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival begins April 30 and runs until May 4, 2008. During the festival I will teach two workshops on electronic literature as part of the Blue Metropolis Student Literary Programme. The programme is designed for traditional authors to read from their work, discuss writing as an occupation, explore a literary genre with the students and then lead them in practical writing exercises in that genre. The students are then invited to read their creations and discuss them together. There will be between 30 and 50 students in each class. For most this will be their first introduction to electronic literature. For the past few weeks I’ve been wracking my brains trying to figure out how to lead 50 high school students at a time through a two-and-a-half hour hands-on writing workshop in electronic literature with only one computer in the room.

We will begin at the beginning, by looking at pre-internet pre-digital forms of writing that helped put the hyper into the hypertext markup language we know today. Among the printed texts most often cited as being hypertextual: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, at least half of Joyce, most of Calvino and Borges and just about all of Blake. I doubt any of those authors are covered in high school English – they certainly weren’t in my day.

The “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books inspired my early hypertext work: Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls. But that genre came and went before most of the students in school now were born. And besides, non-linear narrative structures are complex to create individually, let alone in a group. The vision of 50 16 years trying to decide if our hero should take a trip to petition the territorial legislature for better laws and enforcement (turn to page 96) or decide to get other sheep ranchers together and enforce the law herself (turn to page 110) put me in mind of the game Broken Telephone. A re-enactment of the lossy-ness that occurs when data moves through networks would certainly underline a basic Internet principal, but it wouldn’t necessarily count as a writing exercise. Fortunately, thinking about Broken Telephone immediately reminded me of the game Exquisite Corpse.

Exquisite corpse is a method of collective writing invented by Surrealists in 1925. It’s similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun”) or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed. The resulting text is known as an exquisite corpse or cadavre exquis in French. The name comes from the phrase that resulted when Surrealists first played the game:

“Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.”
The exquisite cadaver shall drink the new wine.

So we will attempt to write an exquisite corpse together, and then we will attempt to put it online together. A sudden rainstorm last night gave me a great opening line:

It was a dark and stormy night…

This, the quintessential opening line, is now so synonymous with a style of writing characterized by self-serious attempts at dramatic flair, the imitation of formulaic styles, an extravagantly florid style, redundancies, and run-on sentences that it becomes a neutral starting point for us.

One of the interesting things about the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night” in the context of a workshop on electronic literature is how many times it has been altered and adapted to new contexts and new literary forms – including electronic ones, as we shall see.

The phrase “It was a dark and stormy night” was originally written by Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It was the opening sentence of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Dark and stormy nights are a common cliché in horror and suspense films. Mad scientists always prefer to perform their experiments under cover of a storm. In Mary Shelly’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, chapter 5 begins:

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

In a number of English translations of Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 novel The Three Musketeers, chapter 65 begins with the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night.” In the original French, the opening line of the chapter is C’etait une nuit orageuse et sombre.

Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time also opens with this line. A Wrinkle in Time remains one of my favourite novels of all time. The main character, Meg, is a teenage girl regarded by her peers and teachers as a bad-tempered underachiever. She and a misfit collection of characters travel through the galaxy by means of tesseract, a fifth dimensional concept similar to folding the fabric of space and time. They save the universe of course. It may also be inspiring for aspiring young writers to note that, this award-winning internationally best-selling sci-fi classic was rejected at least 26 times before it was finally accepted for publication.

Charles M. Schulz made the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night” famous in a 1965 comic strip in which Snoopy lugs a typewriter up to the roof of his dog house and writes this novel:

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night, by Snoopy

Part I

It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed.
Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!
While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

Part II

A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.
At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.
Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates?

The intern frowned.
“Stampede!” the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves. A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch
was saved.
The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the coffee shop. he had learned about medicine, but more importantly, he had learned something about life.

THE END

The ever versatile “It was a dark and stormy night” was adapted once again by hip-hop artist Erykah Badu in the opening line of her 1997 song Apple Tree, from the album Baduizm.

It was a stormy night
you know the kind where the lightning strike
and I was hangin’ out wit some of my “artsy” friends
ooh wee ooh wee oooh
The night was long the night went on
people coolin’ out until the break of dawn
incense was burnin’ so I’m feelin right — ah’ight

See I picks my friends like I pick my fruit
& Ganny told me that when I was only a youth
I don’t go ’round trying to be what I’m not
I don’t waste my time trying ta get what you got
I work at pleasin’ me cause I can’t please you
and that’s why I do what I do
My soul flies free like a willow tree
doo wee doo wee do wee

And if you don’t want to be down with me
You don’t want to pick from my appletree

Erykah Badu – Baduizm – Appletree (Live at the Jazz Cafe)

“It was a dark and stormy night” is much maligned as the worst opening line ever and there is in fact a Edward Bulwer-Lytton competition for the worst story written from that beginning. But there’s something wonderfully liberating in the knowledge that culturally iconic characters as diverse as Snoopy and Erykah Badu can both start narratives with the same line and move off into completely different directions.

The theme of the over-blown literary cliché is taken up in this video exquisite corpse collaboration, Greatest Story Ever Told:

Each collaborator added to this story in sequence, only being allowed to see THE END of what the previous person contributed.

Our process will be similar. Will be in a hotel conference room with a borrowed computer with Internet access and a web browser but little or no other software. If all goes well we will post our exquisite corpse as a blog. And since blog posts always wind up being read in reverse chronological order – i.e. the first post written appears last on the page – we might attempt to write our narrative in reverse order. Whether we decide to open with it or close with it, with such a rote line as our starting point we know that we can improve upon it.
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Out of the Box: Adventures in Electronic Literature

Since the computer was invented, writers have been using it to forge new literary forms. This year the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival moves into the cutting-edge field of Electronic Literature. Join us for an exploration of topics ranging from the early days of hypertext fiction to the latest in narrative gaming with an all-star panel of authors who write beyond the book and way outside the box:

J. R. Carpenter’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 novel Words the Dog Knows is forthcoming from Conundrum in the fall of 2008. Her short fiction and electronic literature have been published and exhibited internationally and can be found on http://luckysoap.com.

Jeff Parker is the author of the novel Ovenman and the short story collection The Back of the Line, a collaboration with artist William Powhida. His work in and on hypertext has appeared in The Electronic Book Review, The Iowa Review Web, The Believer, and other publications. He is the Acting Director of the M.A. Program in English in the Field of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto.

Jason E. Lewis is a poet, digital media artist and software designer. His creative work has been featured in exhibitions internationally. He conducts experiments in visual language, text and typography at his research studio www.obxlabs.net.

Alice van der Klei holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature on hypertext as a site of memory practices. She hypothesized that hypermedia because of its rhizomatic nature allows the reader to become aware of the workings of memory and of cultural institutionalisation better than any other cultural practice. She is currently working at the NT2 Laboratory and a lecturer in Études littéraires at the Université du Québec à Montréal. www.nt2.uqam.ca.

This event will be hosted by Nora Young of Spark, CBC Radio’s audio blog of smart and unexpected trendwatching: http://www.cbc.ca/spark/

Saturday, May 3 at 7PM
Room: Régence A.
Delta Centre-ville Hotel, 777 University Street (metro Square Victoria).
You can buy tickets at ADMISSION by telephone at 514-790-7245 or 1 800 361-4595 or on their website, www.admission.com.

The 10th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival will take place April 30 to May 4, 2008. For more information visit www.bluemetropolis.org.
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Blue Metropolis Foundation is a non-profit organization located in Montreal. Its core purpose is to bring people of different cultures together to share the pleasures of reading and writing in English, French and other languages. To this end it produces a range of literary activities, educational and literacy programmes, including the multilingual Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. Blue Metropolis Foundation plays a leadership role in the literary, educational and literacy community in the Montreal area as well as nationally and internationally.
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