lapsus linguae

CityFish – A Coney Island of the Google Maps

I have recently (and admittedly repeatedly) posted about my web-based story CityFish being shortlisted for The New Media Writing Prize 2012. Prior to the shortlist announcement, CityFish had been on my mind for other reasons. CityFish is set in New York City. As the below image indicates, there is a Google Map satellite view of Coney Island embed in CityFish which – for now – shows the beach, boardwalk, amusement park, and bordering residential neighbourhoods in pristine condition. As I hope most people are by now aware, the Coney Island neighbourhood was among those heavily damaged by Superstorm Sandy at the end of October 2012. It will take months if not years for these communities to recover, and just as long if not longer for Google’s satellite images to be updated to reflect the effect of climate change on the eastern seaboard.

CityFish || J. R. Carpenter

Although CityFish is intrinsically about dissonance – between past and present, fact and fiction, home and away – I am not sure yet how to reconcile this new dissonance – between the lines of the story I wrote and the new lines of this coast. In particular, I am concerned with the harsh economic dissonance underlined by the response (or lack there of) by FEMA, the Red Cross, the New York City Housing Authority, the mainstream press, and the general public to those hardest hit by Sandy. According to this article by Daniel Marans posted to the Huffington Post yesterday, 12 November 2012 – Occupy Sandy Volunteer Sounds Alarm on ‘Humanitarian Crisis,’ Near-Complete Absence of Government Aid in Coney Island Projects – 30-40 public housing buildings in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn remain without power, and often without water and necessities in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Accounts of these conditions have been corroborated in the New York Daily News (5 November 2012).

CityFish || J. R. Carpenter

I relate these concerns out of love for and frustration with the city that half raised me, and half made me crazy, a city that – for as long as I’ve known it – has been sharply divided between have and not. It is my understanding, on the basis of the 21 hours or so a day I spend on Twitter, that the #ocupysandy movement is doing great things on the ground in Coney Island, Red Hook, the Rockaways, and other hard-hit coastal neighbourhoods of New York City. To donate to the Occupy Sandy relief effort, visit OccupySandy.org

Pondering an almost sanguine acceptance of a sudden and inconceivable absence

I am Canadian. Both my parents were American. I spent most of my summer vacations with my grandparents in New York City. They lived on the tenth floor of a fifteen-floor co-op apartment building in Queens. The bedroom windows had clear views of the twin towers. The North Tower was completed in December 1972, six months after I was born, and the South Tower was finished the month of my first birthday. I don’t remember a time before them. I don’t remember the view without them. I do remember my grandmother making disparaging remarks about them. Most New Yorkers did. They were harsh, they were brash. The New Yorkers were, I mean. The towers were impervious. Metal and glass. Modern. Gigantic. Purposelessly so, went the argument. Hundreds of commercial and industrial tenants, property owners, small businesses and residents were forcibly evicted to make way for them. And there they stood. Half-empty, at first, from what I understood. My mother had an office job in one of them once. My grandmother took me to the top of the other of them twice. From that square patch of high wind world the whole city seemed to shift and sway.

The evening of September 10, 2001, I decided to resign from the software company I was working at at the time. I was somewhat preoccupied when I arrived at the office the next morning. The one of my co-workers told me. The internet froze. I called my grandparents and couldn’t get through. I called my cousin on Long Island. She knew all about it already, in that way that certain New Yorkers seem to know all about everything already. It was an accident, she informed me. It was an amateur pilot in a small plane, she went on the explain. Turn on the television, I implored her. I stood by my desk in Montreal listening to her listening to her television in her den in her huge empty house on Long Island. She was silent for a while, in a way I’d never heard her be before. And then: It’s that Bin Ladan, she said. He hates us. Pause. I have to go. Click. I didn’t hear from her again that day.

I was still standing by my desk holding the phone when the head of HR walked by. We need some televisions, I said. I need a television right now, I clarified. When I saw it, on television, I said, to whomever was standing next to me: My grandparents can see this from their bedroom window. It was evening by the time I got word from another cousin, stranded on the Jersey side of the Hudson, that my grandparents had spent most of the day in their car in a traffic jam on the BQE. It was slightly more complicated than that, but it was basically that. The circumstances of the day were so extraordinary that for two octogenarians to have spent all day in a car on a gridlocked highway constituted incredibly good news. They were on right side of the closed bridges. By right side I mean home side. They didn’t see the planes hit from their bedroom window. They didn’t watch the towers collapse from their bedroom window. By the time they got home, the towers were rubble and smoke.

The gap my grandparents experienced inside the bubble of their car, inside and yet outside of spectacle even as it was unfolding, may explain in part why, when I finally got hold of my grandmother, she sounded so utterly unfazed by the day’s events. We’re fine, she said. We went to donate blood. But they don’t want it. So we’re donating to charity instead. Not cheerful exactly. But impossibly matter of fact.

A few days later Mayor Giuliani said the best thing anyone could do for New York was spend money in it. I called my grandmother. Of course, you’re always welcome here, she said. I bought a plane ticket. September 19, 2001. We circled once, before our final approach to Laguardia. We banked south west of the still soldering hole. For those of you on left hand side of the plane, the pilot said. I arrived at my grandparent’s apartment at seven in the evening. A warm but somewhat bemused welcome. Now, she said, explain to us again why you’re here? I tried to explain about how I needed to see for myself. There’s nothing to see, she said, in a perfectly normal tone of voice. And anyway, the trains aren’t running. People are walking, I said. I’d seen them on the news, streaming past City Hall in droves. There’s no more City Hall, she said. Slowly, and by slowly I mean painfully, it dawned on me that, even eight days after one of most televised events in history, and despite the fact that she could still see lower Manhattan from her bedroom window, my grandmother, who lived the first thirty odd years of her life below Second Street, seemed to believe and to have calmly accepted that all of lower Manhattan was completely gone.

World Trade Center, August 2010

Ten years on and I still don’t know what to make of this almost sanguine acceptance of a sudden and inconceivable absence. Surely it was shock induced. What do the philosophers have to say on this subject? Has Paul Virilio already written a book about just this sort of thing? I haven’t done much in the way of research. Ten years on and I don’t fully understand how or why or what or whom to mourn. The 2,977 civilians who died as a result of terrorist attacks on American soil; the 4474 men and women of the US military and the over 108,000 Iraqi civilians who have died as a direct result of the invasion and occupation of a nation which had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks of September 11th; the the over $900 billion of US taxpayers’ funds spent or approved for spending on Iraq rather than health care, education, housing, art or deficit reduction; or the sad fact that the executions of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Ladan have not improved the lives of American citizens in any way? All of these things at once. And many others.

My grandmother didn’t die in a terrorist attack. She died in a heart attack. Days before the second US invasion of Iraq. After her funeral, back at her apartment, the family weighed in. Two cousins where for the invasion. One girlfriend agreed. The wife of a relative I’d only just met questioned me closely on the quality of life in Canada. In the event of a draft she intended to send her son north. The hawkish cousins scoffed at this. I pointed out that I was born in Canadian because my father evaded the Vietnam draft. The hawkish cousins insinuated that this proved their point. My grandfather was the only one in the room who had ever been to war. The Great War. The Pacific arena. He witnessed the razing of Manila. But no one sought his opinion. And anyway, he wasn’t listening. For the past few days at intermittent intervals he’d been asking if anyone knew what had become of my grandmother’s rings. He had given them to me himself. I was wearing them. I kept showing him my hands.

New York City Launch – Words the Dog Knows – KGB Bar, October 23, 2008

Dear Friends. We invite you to join us in celebrating the publication of J.R. Carpenter’s first novel, WORDS THE DOG KNOWS (Montreal: Conundrum Press) with an evening of readings from Montreal and New York-area fiction writers that will take you from the swamplands of Florida to the streets of Montreal and onward to points beyond. J.R. will be joined by New Yorker Karen Russell, fellow Conundrum author Corey Frost, and Canadian New Yorker Nora Maynard.

KGB Bar http://kgbbar.com/calendar/
85 East 4th Street, New York City, NY
Thursday, October 23, 2008
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm (free)

J. R. Carpenter’s long-awaited first novel Words the Dog Knows follows the paths of a quirky cast of characters through the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. Theo and Simone set about training Isaac the Wonder Dog to: sit, come, stay. Meanwhile, he has fifty girlfriends to keep track of and a master plan for the rearrangement of every stick in every alleyway in Mile End. He introduces Theo and Simone to their neighbours. He trains them to see with the immediacy of a dog’s-eye-view. Words the Dog Knows isn’t a story about a dog. It’s a story because of a dog. Walking though the the jumbled intimacy of Montreal’s back alleyways day after day, Theo and Simone come to see their neighbourhood and each other in a whole new way.

For more information on Words the Dog Knows, including a full launch event listing and ordering information, please visit: http://luckysoap.com/stories/wordsthedogknows.html or Conundrum Press: http://conundrumpress.com

J.R. Carpenter is a two-time winner of the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition and a fellow of Yaddo, Ucross and The Vermont Studio Center. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and her electronic literature has been presented internationally. Words the Dog Knows is her first novel. http://luckysoap.com

Karen Russell is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, ST. LUCY’S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES (Knopf). Karen’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Zoetrope, among others. She is currently at work on a novel. http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=70463

Corey Frost is the author of MY OWN DEVICES: AIRPORT VERSION (Montreal: Conundrum Press). Corey has performed his stories at Lollapalooza, The Perpetual Motion Roadshow, and at festivals around the world. http://www.coreyfrost.com

Nora Maynard is a winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts Chapter One Competition and a fellow of the Ragdale Foundation, the Millay Colony, Ucross, and Blue Mountain Center. She is a columnist for Apartment Therapy Media’s The Kitchn, and is completing her first novel, BURNT HILL ROAD. http://www.noramaynard.com
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5.5 Days in New York

A Novel in Point-Form With No Names

Despite many blizzard-related delays, I arrive in New York more or less on time for dinner. My Poor Host listens patiently to the long version of the Greyhound Prisoner Release Programme (see previous post). I tell him the story three times. Trying to nail down the dialogue, I explain. Then I sleep, a turning point in the plot, after all those sleepless weeks at Yaddo.

I spend the morning writing out my Escape From Yaddo adventure. In the afternoon I have coffee with a French Painter friend from Yaddo at the apartment of a Turkish Fibre Artist friend from Ucross. They know each other from before. Setting (important for a later scene): a sunny tenement turned charming studio on Spring Street at Bowery.

At 5PM I meet a Russian Novelist friend at Penguin. He introduces me to his coworkers as his cousin. There’s an office party going on. Though we behave like cousins – interrupting and making fun of each other whilst stealing copious amounts of books and wine and cheese – no one believes we are actually cousins. Perhaps we have too much fun to be family. We head to Astoria for dinner.

Two Jews walk into a Czech Bar during Pork Festival Week. Our vegetarian waitress fights the kitchen staff and wins a plain dumpling for us. It’s hard for us during Pork Fest Week, she says. The Russian Novelist says: I did a smart thing – I didn’t fall in love with you. Yes, very clever of you, I agree. Because now we’re good friends. We buy some Bavarian Pilsner and head to his sub-basement apartment where we spend the rest of the evening reading comics. The Russian Novelist also draws, he reminds me, and is a big fan of Thurber. And a gentleman. He sleeps on the couch and I get the bed.

Breakfast is ready, the Russian Novelist says. Turkish coffee in Moldavian glasses. There’ll be a war! I say. But breakfast proceeds peaceably.

We’re late to meet our Croatian Novelist friend for coffee the East Village, his own fault for changing our date to a time too early for us. The Croatian Novelist, having been cast in the father role, offers up this sage advice: You should sell some good books and then come and teach in Saint Petersburg. Oh, such good advice. Thank you, thank you, really, we had not known but yes, now that you mention it, what a good idea, that’s just what we’ll do. He’s good-natured, our Croatian Novelist friend. So we tease him.

A Russian Novelist, a Croatian Novelist and a very short story writer walk into Odessa. The Pirogues are prefabricated. The ceiling is red. The banquette pleather rent. We reminisce about how we met two years ago in Montreal. We drank free beer together in the hospitality suite at a literary conference in a hotel. And look at us now, I say.

The Croatian Novelist heads off into the day. The Russian Novelist and I go used book shopping. He’s still carrying the books he gave me yesterday. They’re heavy but he doesn’t complain. He is a good boy, the Russian Novelist. We buy more books.

New York is so big. The Russian Novelist lives in Astoria. He’s meeting someone in Manhattan at 6:30 and doesn’t have time to go home in between. So our date goes on about four hours too long. Maybe a good editor will know what to do about this.

There’s a hole in the plot here, where I take a nap.

Late that night I have dinner in Chinatown with an old friend from Art School in Montreal, his wife and some friends of theirs. Art School Friend and his wife are late because their babysitter was late. Their friends are late because Pell Street is very hard to find, especially if you’re not from New York. Better late than never. We are all happy to see each other and we have a wonderful meal. The occasion: it’s Art School Friend’s wife’s birthday. It’s also Chinese New Year. Happy Birthday and Happy Year of the Pig.

Sunday I meet a Biographer for brunch in the West Village. She’s not my biographer! We’re just friends. We have an abstract and expressionistic conversation. I tell the Biographer how to set up a blog. She tells me how to buy a house in the country. I tell her Yaddo stories. She says: You seem exhilarated and sleepless at the same time, a neat trick.

I’ve accumulated so many books I have to buy a new bag. I shop in between appointments.

At 5PM I meet my Favourite Short Fiction Writer Friend from Ucross for an early dinner in the East Village. Is this too geriatric an hour to be eating, she asks? She brings me a book. I bring her a photo album. We pore over pictures of Wyoming and tell each other stories non-stop until it’s time to meet her boyfriend for drinks. An audience! We repeat our stories for him. And laugh so hard we cry. We can’t help it. We’re Short Fiction Writer Friends; even we know short stories are better the second time around.

Bag shopping isn’t going very well so Monday I combine it with shoe shopping. I don’t find a bag, but I do find a pair of shoes. I meet Favourite Short Fiction Writer Friend at the Strand. I buy more books. We go for a drink. We cannot understand why we don’t live in the same city. We go to Trader Joe’s. We cannot understand why the line-up circles the store. Favourite Short Fiction Writer Friend says it will move quickly. I almost but don’t quite lose my mind. Somehow we endure this ordeal.

Free at last we hike our wine, bread, blueberries and cheese down to Spring and Bowery for a Ucross reunion at afore mentioned sunny tenement turned charming studio. Only it’s not sunny now because it’s night. More specifically, it’s Ucross Reunion Night! We are: our host the Turkish Fibre Artist, Favourite Short Fiction Writer Friend (who is actually working on a novel now), Canadian Novelist (who has been living in NYC for nine years), Very Tall Composer (originally from Milwaukee?) and me. We agree: we all look the same. We dine on lentil soup, blood orange salad, wine and cheese, and delicious conversation.

And then suddenly time’s almost up. I run around Tuesday, buy a bag, and pack it. Then out again in the evening for a brief visit with another Painter Friend from Yaddo. We meet at the Frick. I don’t recognize her at first, not in her painting clothes. She has free passes. The collection is so familiar to both of us that we talk our way through it, pausing for our very favourites, until there we are out on the street saying: so good to see you again, saying goodbye. On the way home I buy another book.

Somehow I manage to pack thirty or so new books into what bags I have. More the miracle, in the morning I manage to drag them dead weight the eight blocks up to Port Authority. And I have a mercifully uneventful bus ride home.

I’m home now. And my bookshelves are at capacity.
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life on the outside

No trains were running yesterday, but Greyhound said I could get on the 2:40 bus bound for New York City. The Saratoga bus depot is a one-room skank hole. A three-foot high-gloss ceramic statue of a seated greyhound graces one window, a frightening fake tree the other. Man. And you can imagine the cast of characters in there. The key players: An older backwoods looking guy in a tan work jacket. A younger shaved bald kinda lost looking guy, also in a tan work jacket. A large woman in a red jacket, turquoise toque and purple pants. A father and young son duo on their way to Tampa, boor bastards. Two kids waiting out in the car with their mom. And me, fresh out of Yaddo not quite ready for life on the outside.

At 2:40 we learn that the bus will be an hour late. At 3:40, 40 more minutes. We pace around like animals until finally Albany sends up a bus to get The Saratoga Seven, as I now like to think of us. Once on the emergency bus the lost looking tan work coat guy asks me if Port Authority is walking distance to Penn Station. He’s clutching a small sack of books, no other luggage, and I’m thinking: What, did this guy just get out of prison? But I’m thinking it in a fiction writer way, like that would be a good way to describe what this guy looks like. Like he is unused to this world, sent out in brand new ill-fitting clothing and now having a hard time getting to where he wants to go. He wants to go to Long Island. My cousin lives next door to Penn Station. I don’t tell him this, but I do say: You find me at Port Authority; I’ll walk you down to Penn.

So we get to Albany and they’ve got a bus waiting for us, full but for seven seats. We, the Saratoga Seven, board. I’m walking up the isle looking for an empty seat and I’m seeing a lot of big black and brown bald men all wearing new clothes and all holding the same black folder and I’m thinking first America’s draconian drug laws fill up the prisons, and now the Greyhounds. I find a seat in the rear with a skinny girl. Praise the Lord for a skinny girl next to an empty seat. I say: These guys were just released. She says: If they were released they must be fine. She just got into Columbia Law, and that’s her assessment. Christ. I say: Well, they must be in a good mood.

Indeed, it was a very cheerful bus ride. Somewhere in NJ there was smoke break. I saw my boy Saratoga get up to go out with the others. He blended in so well. Of course he just got out of prison. For once my literary imagination was right on the money. But fashion-wise, it was safe to say; he’d been in some other pen. The white boy pen.

We get into Port Authority at 8PM. I find my suitcase and there’s Saratoga waiting for me. Walk down to Penn Station. It’s good to walk, we agreed. Out on the street. Free at last, as it were. He said: Everything’s moving so fast. He’d been sent up for fifteen months on drug charges. Got out yesterday. Out into the post-snowstorm apocalypse. Spent six hours at the Saratoga Springs Greyhound station. Finally got on a homebound bus and finds it full of guys from the inside. I said: They make you? Oh yeah, he said. They give you clothes when you get out, but they don’t fit. Anyone wearing this jacket, he said. I said: I know a lotta guys wear outfits like that, trying to look like they just got out. He said: Longest fifteen months of my life. I bet. Kinda puts my six weeks of insomnia at Yaddo and my one-day snow delay into perspective. So, do you feel reformed? I asked him. Well I’m never doing that again, he said. Meaning drugs I guess. At 8th and 33rd I pointed out Penn Station and sent him on his way.

There are so many morals to this story I don’t know where to begin. Don’t do drugs. Things could be worse. Better late than never. Always talk to strangers. Well, only if you’re a fiction writer. If you can make it TO New York you can make it anywhere. What a way to leave Yaddo. It’s hard, making a new life on the outside. Stay strong kids. Stay in school.
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Two Generations Ago

Look for my very short story, Two Generations Ago, on the streets of Brooklyn this September. Literally. It will be on on a street somewhere near the Williamsburg Bridge.

Rachelle Viader Knowles has included the story in her FORMER RESIDENT PROJECT, which launches during Conflux Festival September 14 – 17, 2006, in Brooklyn NY, USA.

THE FORMER RESIDENT PROJECT explores the city through the narratives of the no-longer resident, people whose lives have been shaped by their experiences of places they no longer inhabit. For many of us, ‘residence’ is a multiple thing, a series of narratives and residues that shift and slip over time. When we leave a place, what do we take? And what do we leave behind? The project includes stories donated by former ‘residents’ of Brooklyn about something that happened in a particular location. Each story has been printed onto a fridge magnet and posted near that location. The the address are listed on the website: http://www.former-resident-project.net

If you don’t happen to be in Brooklyn you can also read my story here:
Two Generations Ago
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