A General History of the Air

In the blur that was March 2020 the Ottawa-based above/ground press published some new work from me in a single-poem pamphlet called A General History of the Air. The launch was meant to coincide with my appearance at the 10th annual VERSeFest in Ottawa, March 24-29, 2020. Though the festival has been postponed due to Covid 19, the chapbook is available for order online (details below).

J. R. Carpenter, A General History of the Air. Ottawa: above/ground press, March 2020
J. R. Carpenter, A General History of the Air. Ottawa: above/ground press, March 2020
the first page of A General History of the Air
The first page of A General History of the Air, J. R. Carpenter, 2020

The cover image and all of the text comes from a book called The General History of the Air, Designed and Begun by the Honourable Robert Boyle Esq., Printed for Awnsham and John Churchill, at the Black Swan in Pater-noster-Row, near Amen-Corner, June 29, 1692. I consulted a first edition held at the British Library in London, UK, Shelfmark 1651/1033.

The General History of the Air, Robert Boyle, 1692.
The General History of the Air, Robert Boyle, 1692.

After some months at sea, my author copies have now arrived in the UK and are available for order via PayPal paypal.me/jrcarp. £8 for shipping within the UK, £10 for elsewhere in Europe. These prices include postage, packaging, and PayPal fees. North Americans would do better to order directly from the publisher.

The Pleasure of The Coast: A Hydro-graphic Novel

I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new bilingual web-based work of digital literature today, Bastille Day. In English the work is called The Pleasure of The Coast: A Hydro-graphic Novel. In French, Le plaisir de la côte : une bande dessinée. It’s a story of the western mapping of the South Pacific, rather too big for most phones. Best viewed on a laptop or tablet. It’s available here: http://luckysoap.com/pleasurecoast

The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter, 2019
The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter, 2019

This work was commissioned by the « Mondes, interfaces et environnements à l’ère du numérique » research group at Uinversité Paris 8, supported by Labex Arts-H2H (now merged with ArTeC), in partnership with the Archives Nationales in Paris. It was presented as a work in progress at « Des machines imaginantes médiatrices de fiction ? » 11-13 décembre 2018 à l’Université Paris 8. The (more or less) completed work will officially launch at Electronic Literature Organization Conference & Media Arts Festival 15-17 July 2019 at University Collage Cork in Ireland.

An ocean of thanks to Arnaud Regnauld and Pierre Cassou-Nogues at Université Paris 8; to Françoise Lemaire, Nadine Gastaldi, and Clothilde Roullier at the Archives nationales; and to Robert Sheldon and Stelios Sardelas for ground support in Paris.

larecherche2

For anyone unfamiliar with French naval history, some background information may be useful. In 1785 King Louis XVI appointed Lapérouse to lead an expedition around the world. The aim of this voyage was to complete the discoveries made by Cook on his three earlier voyages to the Pacific.

On the 1st of August 1785, Lapérouse departed Brest with no less than ten scientists aboard. On the 10th of March 1788, Lapérouse departed the English Colony at new South Wales, Australia. He was never seen by European eyes again.

To the English ear, the name Lapérouse sounds a lot like the verb ‘to peruse’ — to scan or browse, to read through with thoroughness, to survey or examine in detail. The dictionary cautions, the word ‘peruse’ can be confused with the verb ‘to pursue’ — to follow in order to overtake, to strive to gain, to seek to attain, to proceed in accordance with a method, to carry on or continue. The English word ‘pursue’ sound a bit like the French word ‘perdu’ — disposable, ruined, lost.

On 25 September 1791, Entrecasteaux departed from Brest in search of the lost Lapérouse. One of his two 500-ton frigates was named La Recherche. On board was a young hydrographer, Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré (1766-1854), a close contemporary of the English hydrographer Francis Beaufort (1774-1857). Beaufort is perhaps most famous for the wind scale named after him, for measuring the force of the wind. Beautemps is an auspicious name for an ocean-going person, in need of fair winds. Once at sea, however, beau pré are few and far between.

Finished sea charts are designed to be uniform in appearance, as precise as possible. The Archives nationales in Paris holds hundreds of sheets of drafts of charts made by Beautemps-Beaupré aboard La Recherche, and boxes of sketchbooks. A mix of drawing, writing, and numbers. The active marks of a practicing hand. Oak gall ink on rough paper. Liquid lines of inquiry. Drawn onwards by a moving ship.

The title and much of the text in this work borrows from Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973). The word ‘text’ has been replaced with the word ‘coast’. This détourned philosophy is intermingled with excerpts from Beautemps-Beaupré’s Introduction to the Practice of Nautical Surveying and the Construction of Sea-Charts (1808). Artistry, philosophy, hydrography — what’s missing. Ah, yes, fiction. And women. This gap is filled by Suzanne, the first-person narrator of Suzanne et le Pacific. In this early novel by Jean Giraudoux, published in 1921, a young French woman wins a trip around the world. She becomes shipwrecked, and survives alone on a Pacific island in roughly the same region surveyed by Beautemps-Beaupré.

I have appropriated, exaggerated, détourned, corrected, and corrupted both the original French and the English translations of these texts. Who, then, is the author of this work? The author is not dead. The author is multiple: multimedia, multilingual, poly-vocal. “Which body?” Barthes asks, “We have several.” Imagine if Barthes were the bastard love child of Giraudoux but grew up to be a hydrographer instead of a philosopher. Or if Beautemps-Beaupré had secretly written a symbolist novel from the point of view of a female castaway. But for the web…

The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter
The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter, 2019

In French, the term ‘bande dessinée’ refers to the drawn strip. What better term to describe the hydrographic practice of drawing views of the coast from the ship? In English, the term for ‘bande dessinée’ is ‘graphic novel’. I’m calling this work a hydro-graphic novel.

The images in this work are a combination of my own photographs and digitisations generously made for me by the Archives nationales. More information on the text sources can be found within the work itself. Finally, I would note that this work is imperfectly bilingual. All errors in translation, transcription, and interpretation are my own.

http://luckysoap.com/pleasurecoast

Upcoming Events in Montreal

I’m heading Montreal next week for the first time in 2.5 years. I’m doing two public events: a performance lecture at the HTMlles Festival hosted by feminist artist-run centre Studio XX, and a book launch at L’Euguélionne, a feminist bookstore. I look forward to seeing friends old and new. For more details about both events, read on…

On Thursday 1 November 4-5:30 at OBORO (4001 Berri, 2nd floor), twenty-one years after participating in the first HTMlles Festival, I am delighted to return for this 13th edition. Beyond the # — Failures and Becomings looks at the role of digital technologies in this new space of expression, the reclaiming of voice, as well as obstacles and ways to successfully move forward.

I will present a performance/lecture called Things Rarely Turn Out the Way I Intend Them To. Social media has exponentially expanded the audience for web-based art and writing, but the hashtag operates largely within proprietary zones of the internet governed by neoliberal corporations. What does it mean to write into spaces we don’t own? When does success constitute a failure? Will the new ever get old? Things Rarely Turn Out the Way I Intend Them To reflects with humour on failures and becomings engendered by women web artists and writers over the past quarter of a century or so. It prompts us to think about how far we’ve come, to figure out how far we have yet to go.

The festival launch event will take place immediately after my event at Studio XX, just across the hall. Full Festival Calendar.

An Ocean of Static || J. R. Carpenter
An Ocean of Static || J. R. Carpenter, Penned in the Margins, 2018
Friday 9 November at 18:30 will mark the North American launch of my debut poetry collection An Ocean of Static (Penned in the Margins 2018). This event will take place at L’Euguélionne, a feminist bookstore at 1426 Beaudry, Montreal, Quebec H2L 3E5. I will be joined by Montréal poet, Deanna Radford. Books will be available for purchase at the event.

An Ocean of Static was highly commended for the Forward Prize 2018. An excerpt from the book has been published in The Forward Book of Poetry 2019 (Fabre & Fabre). More info on that here. For more information about the book itself, to read reviews, to download a sample, or to order online, visit the publisher’s website.

An Ocean of Static

The launch of my debut poetry collection will take place at the British Library in London on Friday 27 April 2018, 19:30. Join us for an evening of digital projection, live performance, and a conversation with Peter Jaeger. The event is hosted by Penned in the Margins and the Eccles Centre for American Studies. It’s FREE but booking is essential. RSVP now to reserve your place.

Published in paperback by the ever-excellent Penned in the Margins, with silver cover foiling and French flaps, An Ocean of Static, will be available for purchase 24 April 2018.

Pre-order 9-20 April for £9.99. (regular price £12)

An Ocean of Static || J. R. Carpenter
An Ocean of Static || J. R. Carpenter, Penned in the Margins, 2018

From the late 15th century onwards, a flurry of voyages were made into the North Atlantic in search of fish, the fabled Northwest Passage, and beyond into the territories purely imaginary. Today, this vast expanse is crisscrossed with ocean and wind currents, submarine cables and wireless signals, seabirds and passengers, static and cargo ships.

This book transforms the dense, fragmented archive of the North Atlantic into a sea of fresh new text.

What surfaces in An Ocean of Static are arrays of language, “arguments” that can be read as a chorus of subtle alternatives or sometimes like confused cries in a nautical crisis, along with records of journeys from centuries apart. J. R. Carpenter draws language through the icy passage of code’s style, gripping the rigging with a performative voice developed in many presentations of this work. The book that results is in the ancient form of the cento (literally, a patchwork), but one that fits together like whole cloth, functioning as a sail, allowing air, human effort, and machinery to work together to carry us along.

–Nick Montfort, author of The Truelist

This book is made of other books. The poems in this book are composed of facts, fictions, fragments, and codes collected from accounts of voyages undertaken over the past 2,340 years or so, into the North Atlantic, in search of the Northwest Passage, and beyond, into territories purely imaginary. The poems in this book are intended to be read on the page and to serve as scripts for the live performance of a body of web-based works.

Portions of this work first appeared, often in very different forms, in a wide range of print, digital, and live performance contexts. A full list of links and references is available here.

The Gathering Cloud

The Gathering Cloud is a new hybrid print and web-based work by J. R. Carpenter commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival, which takes place in Dundee, UK, 9-13 November 2016.

This work aims to address the environmental impact of so-called ‘cloud’ computing through the oblique strategy of calling attention to the materiality of the clouds in the sky. Both are commonly perceived to be infinite resources, at once vast and immaterial; both, decidedly, are not.

Fragments from Luke Howard’s classic “Essay on the Modifications of Clouds” (1803) as well as more recent online articles and books on media and the environment are pared down into hyptertextual hendecasyllabic verses. These are situated within surreal animated gif collages composed of images materially appropriated from publicly accessible cloud storage services.

The Gathering Cloud
The Gathering Cloud – a new hybrid print and web-based work by J. R. Carpenter

The cognitive dissonance between the cultural fantasy of cloud storage and the hard facts of its environmental impact is bridged, in part, through the constant evocation of animals: A cumulus cloud weighs one hundred elephants. A USB fish swims through a cloud of cables. Four million cute cat pics are shared each day. A small print iteration of “The Gathering Cloud” shared through gift, trade, mail art, and small press economies further confuses boundaries between physical and digital, scarcity and waste.

The Gathering Cloud
The print iteration of The Gathering Cloud

The Gathering Cloud was commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival, Dundee, UK, 9-13 November 2016. Many thanks to the curators Sarah Cook and Donna Holford-Lovell. Portions of this text were first performed at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution during the South West Poetry Tour, 1-8 August 2016. Thanks and curses to Annabel Banks for sugesting the hendecasyllabic constraint. Thanks to Kay Lovelace, Rachel McCarthy, Michael Saunby, and the fine folks at the Informatics Lab at the Met Office for tips, tricks, and discussions on code and the weather. And thanks to Jerome Fletcher for everything else.

Further reading: NEoN speaks with JR Carpenter

View the work online here: The Gathering Cloud

The Broadside of a Yarn: A Situationist Strategy for Spinning Sea Stories Ashore

Announcing The Broadside of a Yarn, a new hybrid print-digital-performance-writing work by J. R. Carpenter, commissioned by ELMCIP for Remediating the Social, launching at Inspace in Edinburgh 1 November 2012.

In theory, The Broadside of a Yarn is a multi-modal performative pervasive networked narrative attempt to chart fictional fragments of new and long-ago stories of near and far-away seas with naught but a QR code reader and an unbound atlas of hand-made maps of dubious accuracy. In practice, this project is, in a Situationist sense, a willfully absurd endeavour. How can I, a displaced native of rural Nova Scotia (New Scotland), perform the navigation of a narrative route through urban Edinburgh (Old Scotland)? How can any inhabitant of dry land possibly understand the constantly shifting perspective of stories of the high seas?

The Broadside of a Yarn

The Broadside of a Yarn remediates the broadside, a form of networked narrative popular from 16th century onward. Broadsides were written on a wide range of topical subjects, cheaply printed on single sheets of paper (often with images), widely distributed, and posted and performed in public. During the Remediating the Social exhibition (Inspace, Edinburgh, 1-25 November 2012), The Broadside of a Yarn will be posted as a grid of A3-sized square maps, and freely distributed as broadside-sized sheet (while supplies last).

Like the printed broadside ballads of old, the public posting of The Broadside of a Yarn signifies that it is intended to be performed. Embedded within the highly visual cartographic space of this printed map are QR codes which link mobile devices to a collection of separate yet interrelated web pages containing computer-generated narrative dialogues. They may propose imprecise and possibly impossible walking routes through the city. Or they may serve as scripts for poli-vocal performances.

The Broadside of a Yarn

The Broadside of a Yarn will be performed in four or possibly five voices (microphone availability depending) Thursday 1st November 20.00 in the Sculpture Court of Edinburgh College of Art. For more information, please see the Remediating the Social program.

A comprehensive overview of the Remediating the Social conference and exhibition has bee posted on Electronic Literature Authoring Software by Judy Malloy: ELMCIP Invites Scholars and Artists to Remediating the Social, Edinburgh, November 1-3, 2012

For more information – including a bibliography of the wide range of maps and literary works cited in The Broadside of a Yarn – and to view more images of the print maps to be installed at Inspace, please visit Luckysoap.com.

GENERATION[S] Book Launch and Performance Event at Cabaret Fledermaus, Vienna, December 14, 2010

My new code narrative book, GENERATION[S], and all the other awesome books in TRAUMAWIEN Edition Schema 2, will launch at Cabaret Fledermaus in Vienna, Tuesday the 14th of December. Or, Dezember, as they spell December in Vienna. Or, Vien, as they spell Vienna in Vienna. I love being part of a production I can’t even read the PR for! I can’t wait to return to Vienna, where all the buildings look like cakes. And I really can’t wait to see the Cabaret Feldermaus. The original was opened in 1907. The interior was designed by Josef Hoffmann. Several other well-known artists of the Viennese Art Nouveau, including Gustav Klimt, contributed to the design of the stage and furniture, as well as posters, postcards, pins and cutlery. Those days are over, alas. The TRAUMAWIEN launch event will be held in the new Cabaret Feldermaus, founded in 1967, and basically unchanged since, despite it’s recent transformation into a disco club. In different places in Europe “disco” means different things. In this case, I sincerely hope there’s a disco ball, to mirror the glittering mosaics of the Feldermaus of old.

In any case, it seems fitting that GENERATION[S] will launch in a venue that has seen many generations come and go. The paradoxes of this setting also seem to be in keeping with those embraced by GENERATION[S] Vienna-based publisher TRAUMAWIEN. As TRAUMAWIEN editor Luc Gross writes, “TRAUMAWIEN considers the paradox of transferring late-breaking digital aesthetics into book form, as new media narrative snapshots of literary genres otherwise quickly lost in the immense output produced by web every second.”

GENERATION[S] is one such snapshot: a book collecting sentences written in Twitter, pulled into Facebook, commented upon, rewritten, retweeted, recommented, rewritten, collated into arrays, parsed by Python scripts, output as short stories in terminal windows, copied and pasted into a Word doc, spaced, placed and paginated, transformed into a book by TRAUMAWIEN’s brilliant designer Julian Palacz. In the book, the digital process are reordered. The output stories come first. They are interspersed with Facebook screenshots showing the first instances of certain of the sentences they contain. The source code follows the stories it generates. Download instructions are offered. One sentence at a time. Wash, rinse, repeat.

For more info on GENERATION[S], TRAUMAWIEN and all the other awesome books launching in Edition Schema 2 visit: http://www.traumawien.at/preview/

Purchase GENERATION[S] online: http://www.amazon.com/Generation-s-J-R-Carpenter/dp/3950291032/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2

TRAUMAWIEN Schema 2 Launch Poster

Präsentation der Edition Schema 2
J. R. Carpenter, Montreal
Ivan Monroy Lopez, Mexico City
Audun Mortensen, Oslo

Präsentation der Edition Hybrid 1
Philip Hautmann, Wien

Coups
Barbara Anna Husar, Wien
Olivia Kaiser, Wien
Brian Larosche, Oslo

Tanzmusik
Schellackplatten – Otto Jekel
othon.jekel.at

Dienstag, 14. Dezember 2010, 19 Uhr OPEN END!
Cabaret Fledermaus
Spiegelgasse 2, 1010 Wien

http://traumawien.at/

CityFish Beta Launch at AI_ELO June 3-6, 2010

For the past six months I’ve been working on a massive new web-based hypermedia narrative called CityFish. A beta version will be on display at Archive & Innovate, The 4th International Conference & Festival of the Electronic Literature Organization, taking place at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, June 3-6, 2010.

A portion of CityFish was presented as a work-in-progress at Interventions: Literary Practice at the Edge: A Gathering, at The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada, February 18, 2010. Some of the videos in CityFish were edited during the Bable Babble Rabble: On Language and Art thematic residency at The Banff Centre in 2006. A very, very, very early web-based version of CityFish was presented in an exhibition called ISWAS, at the Bavarian American Hotel in Nuremberg, Germany, July 1998. That version was based on a very short story written the year previous, which was based on a drawing I have no recollection of drawing, which I had made into a rubber stamp at least fifteen years ago now. The title, CityFish, refers to the City Mouse, Country Mouse fable written by Aesop in the mid-sixth century BC in ancient Greece. I had hoped to have CityFish finished in time to present it at AI_ELO in full and in person, but having been in the works for twenty-seven centuries already, it may take a few more months to complete.

CityFish || J. R. Carpenter

Part parable, part picture book, CityFish combines contemporary short fiction and hypermedia storytelling forms. A girl named Lynne spends her winters living with her mother in a small fishing village called Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, and her summers visiting her mother’s family in Queens, New York.

Lynne and her mother lived in half a clapboard house that had long ago staggered, stooped and settled where it fell, alongside a salt-parched road that backed up a hill and away from a fishing village called Brooklyn. Not the real Brooklyn; Brooklyn, Nova Scotia. No one fished from the wharf at Brooklyn anymore. No one lived in the other half of the clapboard house. No one Lynne knew had ever been anywhere.
J. R. Carpenter, CityFish [beta]

Also launching at AI_ELO, Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two, edited by Rita Raley, Talan Memmott, Brian Kim Stefans and Laura Borràs Castanyer. I have two works in this collection: Entre Ville, and in absentia, and one work in its predecessor, Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland.

Story Generation(s) Launching at PW10, Arnolfini, Bristol

Sotry Generation(s) - J. R. CarpenterI am pleased to announce the launch of Story Generation(s) at PW10 Performance Writing Weekend at Arnolfini, Bristol, May 8-9, 2010. Story Generation(s) are a series of short fictions generated by Python scripts adapted (with permission) from two 1k story generators written by Nick Montfort: http://grandtextauto.org/2008/11/30/three-1k-story-generators/ .

I began tinkering with these story generators in June 2009. There are currently three stories in the series: Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR, I’ve Died and Gone to Devon and Auto-Autobiography. This will be their first public exhibition.

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR documents my adventures with Ingrid Bachmann’s hermit crab Pookie, also known as Pookie 14, during June of 2009. Of Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR, Nick Montfort writes:

“J. R. Carpenter, author of Words the Dog Knows, Entre Ville, The Cape, and other fine works of e-lit, print, and xerography, has delightfully re-purposed one of my 1k story generators to have it tell stories involving her and a hermit crab named Pookie. The program has grown to about 2k, but it uses the same simple (and surprisingly effective) method as my first generator does: It simply removes all but 5-9 sentences from a sequence, eliding some of what’s been written. Sometimes the reader is left to wonder who the hermit is.” Nick Montfort, http://nickm.com/post/2009/07/story-generation-with-pookie-and-jr/

In July 2009, NYC-based artist/programmer Ravi Rajakumar ported the Python script into Javascript to create this web browser friendly version of the Chronicles of Pookie & JR: http://luckysoap.com/pookieandjr/index.html

Here’s a screenshot from the Rajakumar iteration:

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR

DOWNLOAD PookieAndJR.py

I’ve Died and Gone to Devon re-purposes the same Python script as Excerpts from theChronicles of Pookie & JR to tell (and retell) the story of an arrival and first impression of Devon. Most of the sentences in this story were adapted from Twitter posts written during a five-week visit to Devon, August – September, 2009.
Here is one example of a story generated byI’ve Died and Gone to Devon:

I’ve died and gone to Devon.

In North America, roads this narrow wouldn’t even count as driveways.

If this is the wrong side of the road, I don’t care what’s right.

If this is the driveway, then I can’t wait to see the house.

We can’t hear the river from the house, but we can see it.

Everybody insists we’re by the seaside. I can smell but not see the sea.

Flotsam on a tidal river is a strange mixture of oak leaves and seaweed.

This is an achingly beautiful place to come across a little death.

DOWNLOAD Devon.py

Auto-Autobiography adapts a different Python story generator script by Montfort to generate a quasi-autobiographical story by segments. This script chooses sentences from pools of stock autobiographical statements: “I was born…” I come from…” “In retrospect…” This format was suggested to me by a passage from Anne-Marie MacDonald’s novel, As The Crow Flies:

“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.

The notion of autobiographical veracity is undermined in Auto-Autobiography, by leaving key gender signifiers such as Mother/Father to computational chance.
Here is one example of a story generated by Auto-Autobiography:

Here is my story:

I was born in wedlock – for some reason, this surprises me.

I come from a war that brought my parents together.

My mother had a long memory and a short fuse.

I live in a wonderful house.

I work hard at not having to work too hard.

I wish I’d said that differently.

My best friend kept insisting I learn to play guitar.

In retrospect, she read way too many Russian novels.

I love it when we lie in bed plotting the downfall of our enemies.

Next year, let’s forget every single thing we learned this year.

In future, we will know many beginnings and no ends.

DOWNLOAD autobio.py

Viewing Instructions:

Download the python file to your desktop and unzip. On a Mac or Linux system, you can run the story generator by opening a Terminal Window, typing “cd Desktop”, and typing “python filename.py”. Hint: look for Terminal in your Utilities folder. These Python story generator runs on Windows, too, but you will probably need to install Python first: version 2.6.5. Once Python is installed you can double click on the file and it will automatically launch and run in the terminal window. Every time you press ENTER a new version of the story will appear.

LANCEMENT – LE LIVRE DE CHEVET

If I were in Montreal tomorrow evening, Wednesday, November 11, from 5 pm to midnight, I would be at Librairie Le Port de Tête (262 Mont-Royal E) for the long awaited launch of Le Livre de Chevet. In English, this book might go by the name The Bedtime Book of Falling Asleep. In it are gathered powerfully hypnotic, narcotic and somnambulic texts from 24 writers. I have contributed a text called Les huits quartiers de sommeil. Those of you already familiar with La Table de Matières productions (design by Feed) will have an inkling of how gorgeous this book is. www.latabledesmatieres.com

Le mercredi 11 novembre prochain, de 17h00 à minuit, LE LIVRE DE CHEVET, troisième et ultime ouvrage de la collection La table des matières, apparaîtra de ce côté ci du sommeil, au Port de tête, librairie sise au 262, Avenue du Mont-Royal Est. Il est publié à l’enseigne du Quartanier.

Vous êtes conviés à son lancement, qui est aussi celui de deux ouvrages amis, et anglais, EXPEDITIONS OF A CHIMAERA, livre bicéphale de Oana Avisilichioaei et Erin Moure, et THE ROSE CONCORDANCE, d’Angela Carr, tous deux publiés par l’éditeur torontois BookThug. Si LE LIVRE DE CHEVET était anglais, il s’intitulerait THE BEDTIME BOOK OF FALLING ASLEEP, mais non.

Quelques précisions et encouragements: il y a deux années et demi que je travaille à la réalisation, avec mes complices du studio FEED, du LIVRE DE CHEVET. L’ouvrage, qui fait suite à CITÉ SELON, sur la ville (il faut bien habiter quelque part) et LA TABLE DES MATIÈRES, sur la nourriture (il est mieux de manger quelque chose) est encore une fois consacré à un sujet véritablement universel, accessible à tous, grand public et tout : dormir. Les deux ouvrages précédents se sont mérités quelques trophées de design, ce qui aide ou n’aide pas les ventes, on ne le sait pas vraiment.

Lorsqu’elle se penche sur des sujets d’intérêt public comme le sommeil, la littérature, contrairement à ce que l’élite populiste voudrait nous faire croire, apparaît comme l’affaire de tout le monde. Vous entendez le langage passer en vous? Maintenant, voyez comme il peut avoir fière allure, lorsque vous vous y attardez un peu plus. D’ailleurs, le conseil d’administration de La table des matières croit fermement que tout le monde, et surtout les insomniaques, peut trouver son compte dans LE LIVRE DE CHEVET: le livre, dont le papier est doux comme la lumière d’une veilleuse, plaira même à ceux qui préfèrent ne pas lire.

LE LIVRE DE CHEVET, comme une princesse de conte, a sommeillé longtemps, s’additionnant peu à peu la substance rêvée de 24 textes, librement associés à 12 collages (Annie Descôteaux) et 12 dessins (Pol Turgeon), 2 paysages improbables (Annie D et Pol T), 2 schémas, 4 photos (Daniel Canty) et 24 calligraphies (Léon Lo), le tout distribué sur 240 pages dont la substance emprunte à celles du jour et de la nuit. Vous verrez. Les littérateurs vous l’avaient dit: la nuit est parfois d’encre. Et on verra, grâce au LIVRE DE CHEVET, qu’elle sait tomber partout, même entre les pages d’un livre. Les fantasmes d’un pornocrate sans emploi, dans un cahier à la tranche scellée, étanche à la curiosité infantile (sauf si l’enfant est habile et sait manier le couteau), complètent le tout.

LE LIVRE DE CHEVET ressemble à un livre pour enfant qui aurait grandi, mais qui se souvient, oh se souvient, des nuits passées à rêver la vie à venir, à la lumière d’une lampe de poche.

La lumière est comme de l’encre.
Tout ce que je dis est vrai.
Vous êtes des dormeurs.
Soyez des nôtres.

//Lancement//

LE LIVRE DE CHEVET
EXPEDITIONS OF A CHIMAERA
THE ROSE CONCORDANCE

De 17h à minuit, le mercredi 11 novembre,
au Port de Tête, 262, Mont-Royal est
Lectures entre 19h et 20h
Concert de fin de soirée: 44 Ensemble

Visitez www.latabledesmatieres.com


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