Let’s Pretend We Met last Week

Last week we launched Nathaniel G. Moore’s new book of poetry – Let’s Pretend We Never Met – at the Casa del Popolo, “we” being Nathaniel G. himself, Angela Hibbs, Mary Williamson, me, J. R. Carpenter, and some of our closest friends. Perhaps it would have been a good idea to write about this event before it happened, for PR purposes, but things didn’t work out that way. It was a lovely evening thanks to the many sweet friends who showed up minimal prompting.

The first person to thank is Nathaniel, for writing a new book – a new book is always such a good excuse for a reading and a reading is always such a good excuse for hanging out with friends and drinking. A far as I know Nathaniel and I have never pretended that we never met. We’re both Rome junkies. Let’s Pretend We Never Met riffs on the poems and life of Catullus, a Roman poet of the first century BC. Catullus was the first to write about his personal life in the tawdry way we all do nowadays. Nathaniel drags the lusty lovelorn mourning Catullus kicking and screaming, leering and heavy petting into the twenty-first century – or at least into the nineteen-eighties – into a grimly-lit rec-room reality-TV sort of post-pubescent angst. Which sounds awful, but it totally works. Let’s Pretend is a weirdly compelling book – or maybe it’s a concept album? Anyway, pound-for-pound it’s a page-turner.

Another person to thank is Angela Hibbs. Her book is smaller and redder and there’s a girl on the front instead of a guy. Passport is a collection “escape from Newfoundland poems.” I don’t think Ms Hibbs would mind them characterized in this way. They’ve got enough perspective in them to indicate to the reader that the author did indeed escape, but at the same time enough razor-burn rawness to them to indicate that it was a narrow escape, an all-around close call. I would also like to thank Angela for wearing short-shorts, thigh-high stockings and high-heeled cowboy boots.

Third up was Mary Williamson who read a story not presently in a book but bound to be one day. I’d only just met Angela and Mary three nights previous. On that occasion Angela was wearing a blond wig and a gold lame gown and Mary was wearing a redhead wig and a baby blue ball gown and then a red brocaded and fringed flapper number which she kept hiking up to dance flapper-type dances. Given the flapper theme it was all one could do to refrain from yelling: Nice gams! At the reading Mary was reading a story from a boy’s point of view so she was wearing a boy’s cap, undershirt, and jeans found in the garbage. Nathaniel was wearing pants found in the garbage too. Or maybe his were from a yard sale. Mine were.

I was wearing a pair of super skinny jeans bought up the street at a yard sale for three bucks. It’s hard not to buy three-dollar jeans. It’s also hard to sit down in them, these ones anyway. These are my standing up jeans, I kept saying to reading attendees lest they think me pacing nervously. I read some Rome related stuff: Notes On Arrival, a short prose poem culled from the How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome web project; A Timeline of Notable Arrivals in Rome, a new piece written especially for this reading, and Roads Out of Rome, another piece that began as part of Broken Things and was then expanded and adapted and eventually made its way into Geist last winter.

Highlights of the evening included – in no particular order: when, in my reading of A Timeline of Notable Arrivals in Rome, I skipped ahead 1200 years and paused and said – I’m skipping ahead here – and everybody laughed (phew); when friends showed up even though it was summer and Tuesday and a poetry reading no less, and when the afore-mentioned Angela Hibbs showed up in short-shorts.

Nathaniel G. Moore, Let’s Pretend We Never Met
Angela Hibbs, Passport
J. R. Carpenter, How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome
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Responsa: An Overview

Responsa Literature: partial replies to scattered letters
http://luckysoap.com/responsa/

Introduction: confessions of an avid letter writer

Why is it that everyone I know lives in New York?

Part I: Writing is Hard

“Irene left a note on his kitchen table. The spelling was weak and Irene, examining her note, marvelled at how difficult writing things down was compared to saying them. Saying something was as easy as laughing; writing caused you grief, as though you were mourning somebody who had abandoned you too soon.”
Rose Tremaine, Sacred Country

Part II: Writing from Exile

“Is the place any token of the author?”
“indicat auctorem locus?”
Ovid, EX PONTO, I. VII.

Part III: Responsa

“What conditions precipitate the writing of a letter? A physical distance separates the writer from the reader and we write to cover that distance. Wherever we are, when we write, we write from a local position. Time passes between the writing of the letter and the reading of it; more time passes between the reading and the reply. ‘Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of the concept runs meaning.’ [Derrida] From his exile at the edge of the Empire, Ovid writes: ‘“In so long a time why has not they hand done its duty and completed even a few lines?’ The reply embodies another question. ‘Is not the writing of the question, by it’s decision, by its resolution, the beginning of repose and response?’ [Derrida]”
J. R. Carpenter, Responsa

Part IV: Network Communication

Me: Hey, how come this anonmous ftp thing doesn’t work?

Tech: You spelled anonymous wrong.

Me: Again.

Me: I heard about this thing called pine for reading email.
Do you know about that?

Tech: Yeah.

Me: Well, how do I get it?

Tech: Pine is for weenies.

Me: I’m a weenie.

Tech: vi editor rules.

Me: I want pine.

an escerpt from the essay:
“A brief history of the Internet as I know it so far”
J. R. Carpenter 2003.

Part V: Location, Location, Location

When we write, we write from a local position.

“My dear Herr Kappus: I have left a letter of yours long unanswered, not that I had forgotten it – on the contrary: it was of the kind that one reads again when one finds it among other letters, and I recognized you in it as if you were close at hand. It was the letter of May 2nd, and you doubtless remember it. When I read it, as I do now, in the great stillness of this faraway place, your beautiful concern for life moves me even more than I experienced it in Paris, where everything has a different ring and dies away by reason of the monstrous noise that makes all things tremble. Here, where a vast countryside is around me, over which the winds come in from the seas, here I feel that there is nowhere a human being who can answer you those question and feelings which have a life of their own within their depths; for even the best men go astray with words, where these are to express something very gentle and almost unutterable.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, written from ‘Temporarily at Worpswede near Bremen, July 16th, 1903. Letters to a Young Poet

Part VI: Optimism

“Router level Interconnectivity of the Internet looks like a giant, blood-shot eyeball.” from “Digital Crustaceans v.0.2: Homesteading on the Web” and art review by J. R. Carpenter of a show
Ingrid Bachmann at Gallery Articule, Montréal, Québec, April 4 – May 4 2003.

“Pookie” – a biological, digital, quasi-fictional manifestation of Ingrid Bachmann’s imagination – explores a fascinating corner of the web at www.digitalhermit.ca

In Closing:

“Nothing is more occult than the way letters, under the auspices of unimaginable carriers, circulate through the weird mess of civil wars; but whenever, owing to that mess, there was some break in our correspondence, Tamara would act as if she ranked deliveries with ordinary natural phenomena such as the weather or tides, which human affairs could not affect, and she would accuse me of not answering her, when if fact I did nothing by write to her and think of her during those months – despite my many betrayals.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

Related Links:

Nomad Web: Sleeping beauty awakes, by Ingrid Bachmann
http://www.research.umbc.edu/~lmoren/nomadweb.htm

the electronic version of The Virtual Community, by Howard Rheingold
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html

A Vernacular Web, by Olia Lialina
http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/

A little Talk About Reproduction, by J. R. Carpenter
http://luckysoap.com/reproduction/

All this with pictures:
http://luckysoap.com/responsa/


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