lapsus linguae

A Few Views on Interviews

I’ve been interviewed by some really very clever people lately, enough so to prompt me to finally create an INTERVIEWS page for my website. Here are a few highlights:

Last Friday the Montreal-based online journal Lemon Hound published Elvia Wilk in Conversation with J. R. Carpenter, the latest installment in an ongoing conversation Berlin-based writer and editor Elvia Wilk and I have been having since first meeting at In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge at The Banff Centre in 2013. Elvia and I met up in London last autumn to dissect various (misleading) terms in the fields of art, net art, literature, and electronic literature. Our conversation ranged over projects both new and old. We discussed code as performance writing, and ending up on the topic of islands as topos, possible only in literature…

Back in January I answered questions from Andrea Zeffiro for J.R. Carpenter: Object-Oriented Interview by Andrea Zeffiro, an interview published by the Media Archaeology Lab at University of Colorado at Boulder. We called it an object-oriented interview because of its focus on, well, objects – including but not limited to slide projectors, cameras, photocopy machines, Roman ruins, geology, process, pragmatics and more… with many thanks to Lori Emerson and team at the Media Archaeology Lab in Boulder.

In November of last year Illya Szilak interviewed me for Huffington Post Books. Here is the resulting article: Reorienting Narrative: E-lit as Psychogeography.

And here’s a video Interview David Jhave Johnston did with me at The Banff Centre about two years ago as part of the series Conversations with Poets about Technology (CAPTA).

JR Carpenter from David (Jhave) Johnston on Vimeo.

Many thanks to all of these interviewers and publishers. For more see: http://luckysoap.com/interviews.html

I first logged onto the internet 20 years and 22 days ago today

On 93/11/05, in the PAVO lab at Concordia University in Montreal, I logged onto the internet for the first time. My user name was JR_CARP. I remember these details because I still have the ID card from that first account. After a few months of writing fictional posts to alt.arts.nomad and other USNET groups I got a UNIX account and dove into the wonderful worlds of Telnet, Archie, Gopher, FTP, Purple Crayon, LambdaMOO, c-theory, ALT-X, and so on. The rest, as they say, is a syslog file.

JR_CARP

I’ve written about those way back times a number of times in a number of ways over the past twenty years. Here links to a few essays which are still online which I’m not too embarrassed about:

A Little Talk About Reproduction 1997

A Brief History of the Internet as I know it So Far 2003

Getting in on the Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together 2007

A Non-Linear Time Line of 20 Years Online 2013

Collaborations are underway toward marking this anniversary. Berlin-based art critic and code-poet Elvia Wilk is currently slogging through the audio archive of an interview we did in London in October. And I am chipping away at answering questions posed by writer and researcher Andrea Zeffiro for what we’re calling an Object Oriented Interview for the Media Archaeology Lab in Boulder, Colorado.

In the meantime, here is a video interview the brilliant and delightful code-poet philosopher David Jhave Johnston did with me at The Banff Centre in 2012, for the series CAPTA: Conversations with poets about technology, in which, there is much discussion of the olden days of internet of yore.

CAPTA: Conversations with poets about technology

Freaky genius digital poet David Jhave Johnston has been roving around North America engaging practitioners and theorists of digital literature in conversation and uploading the unedited videographic data captured in these sessions to his site: CAPTA: Conversations with poets about technology.

The first conversation in the series is with John Cayley, who reads and discusses his poem PENTAMETERS TOWARD THE DISSOLUTION OF CERTAIN VECTORALIST RELATIONS (which examines the effect of Google on language and poetics) with discursive and conversational interrupts from Jhave. That is a pretty hard act to follow. But that’s okay, because the second CAPTA conversation is with Chris Funkhouser, author of two books on digital poetry: Prehistoric Digital Poetry & New Directions in Digital Poetry. He can hold his own. Pity the poor poet who has to follow those two. Because, alas, it’s me.

Jhave is a lively interlocutor and a lovely human being. The conversation we had was a pleasure in its unfolding, so I’m not too embarrassed to share it with you here.

CAPA #3: J. R. Carpenter

JR Carpenter from David (Jhave) Johnston on Vimeo.

Recorded at the Banff Centre on Feb. 21st 2012.

To view these three conversations, and to sign up for email notifications announcing future conversations with Steve McCaffery, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Christian Bök, Ian Hatcher, D. Kimm, Charles Bernstein, Andrew Klobucar, Fred Wah and Jhave, visit: http://glia.ca/2012/capta/

12 or 20 questions with J.R. Carpenter

On June 18, Rob McLennan posted in interview with me as part of the second series of “12 or 20 questions,” interviews with Canadian and American (etcetera) poets, fiction and non-fiction writers, as a follow-up to the original series that ran from September 2007 to June 2008. The second series includes interviews (so far) with Jason Dewinetz, Matthew Tierney, Sandra Ridley, Jacob McArthur Mooney, Carrie Olivia Adams, Dayle Furlong, Antanas Sileika, Sharon Harris, Ken McGoogan, Daniel Allen Cox, J.R. Carpenter, Anita Dolman, Ray Hsu, Karen Houle, Susan Olding, Jeanette Lynes, Asher Ghaffar and Zachariah Wells.

Interviews are still forthcoming with Peter Norman, Eric Baus, Betsy Struthers, Graham Foust, Steven Mayoff, Mike Spry, Kevin Killian, Charles Bernstein, Forrest Gander, Chris Ewart, Andrew Faulkner, Mary Pinkoski, Rebecca Rosenblum, Arielle Greenberg, Peter Richardson, Eva Moran, Ken Sparling, ross priddle, Michelle Berry, Stephen Henighan, Annabel Lyon, and plenty of others.

The series as a whole, with links to individual interviews (to be updated every day or three over the next six months or so), lives here: 12 or 20 Questions

The interview with me lives here: 12 or 20 questions with J.R. Carpenter
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Sniffing for Stories on Cinq à Six

Tune into Cinq à Six on CBC RadioOne 88.5 FM in Montréal at 5PM this evening to hear an interview Host Patti Schmidt recorded with me earlier this week about In-situ Cité. I read an excerpt from Sniffing for Stories, and then we went on to talk about all kinds of other stuff. So fun. You can also listen online: http://www.cbc.ca/cinqasix/

In-situ Cité takes place next weekend, Saturday September 30 & October 1 between Noon and 5PM. The start-off point is the Casa del Popolo, 4873 boul. St-Laurent. My Entre Ville mini-books will be on sale there and I will be at the Casa for a talkback session with In-situ Cité Director Stephen Lawson Saturday at 4PM. For more information follow the above links and/or to make reservations call: 514.843.3685
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