lapsus linguae

A New Year of Wind

For the whole of 2018 I posted a new poem at the start of every month to my web-based work, This is a Picture of Wind, a weather poem for phones. These monthly poems were based on weather observations made two centuries ago by Luke Howard. A Quaker, chemist, and amateur meteorologist, Howard is perhaps best known as the author of the essay On the Modifications of Clouds, in which, he gave the clouds the Latin names we still use today. Hendecasyllabic fragments of that essay made their way into my my web-based work The Gathering Cloud. For This is a Picture of Wind, I consulted a later volume by Howard: Barometrographia: twenty years’ variation of the barometer in the climate of Britain, exhibited in autographic curves, with the attendant winds and weather, and copious notes. This large, beautifully printed folio was published in London in 1847. It can be found in the British Library at Shelfmark Tab.817.a.

Detail from Luke Howard, Barometrographia, 1847

Some readers may have noticed as the year progressed, that lurking below these new posts was a second row containing a full year of poems. Those poems were written first. The form the core impetus for the piece. They were written in response to the conveyor-belt of storms which battered southwestern England in 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall at Dawlish, near where I live in Devon. For 2019 I’ve moved that year of poems up to the top row for greater visibility.

This is a Picture of Wind || J. R. Carpenter

Initial research for This is a Picture of Wind was made possible with the support of the Dot Award for Digital Literature. The finished work was one of three web-based works by Canadian women commissioned for #IOTADATA by IOTA Institute in 2017 with the support of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. In December 2018 IOTA released a free e-publication about the #IOTADATA project containing an introduction by David Clark, a three-way interview between the artists, and an essay about each artist’s work. I am deeply indebted to IOTA curator Mireille Bourgeois for commissioning this work in the first place and all the more so for convincing Johanna Drucker to write about it.

By choosing a calendar grid to organize the presentation of observations in This is a Picture of Wind, Carpenter puts the dialogue between the phenomenal world and its connection to human frameworks of perception into immediate, graphical view […] the wind cannot be caught in calendar frameworks any more than the waters of the sea are held in a net. The wind rushes through the rational structure, even as it leaves behind, in this case, a residue of poetic notes, observations formulated in relation to fleeting sensations of the volatile atmosphere.

~ Johanna Drucker, DYNAMIC POETICS: JR CARPENTER’S THIS IS A PICTURE OF WIND

Drucker’s full essay is available for free download. It begins on page 20 of this PDF.

In 2018 This is a Picture of Wind won the Opening Up Digital Fiction Competition People’s Choice Award 2018 and was shortlisted for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature 2018.

In 2019 I will be presenting the work at Land Lines: British Nature Writing, 1789-2014.

Twitter users can follow a remix of the work as it unfolds year-round. Fragments of text from the project are blown about but a Twitter bot posting variable poetics of wind into new configurations every six hours through this account: @apictureofwind

On Sea Birds, Castaways, and Phantom Islands off the Coast of Newfoundland

As a Visiting Fellow at the Eccles Centre for North American Studies at the British Library in London over the past few months I’ve been chasing fleeting references to phantom islands in cartographic and literary depictions of the New World during the sixteenth century. Since the first voyages to the cod-fishing grounds off Newfoundland, there have been reports of an Island of Demons in the region, reputedly inhabited by a curious mixture of wild animals, mythological creatures, evil spirits, and demons. These might sound like tall tales, but in 1542 a young French noblewoman was cast ashore on an island off Newfoundland bearing many of these characteristics, and lived to tell the tale.

In August I gave a talk about this research at the Summer Scholars Seminar Series at the British Library. An expanded version of that talk has been published on the British Library’s American Collection blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/americas/2015/10/sea-birds-castaways-and-phantom-islands-off-newfoundland.html

Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow in North American Studies at the British Library

I’ve been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Eccles Centre for North American Studies at the British Library. Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowships are intended to help support scholars wishing to visit London to use the British Library’s collections relating to North America and are basically a rare book and old map lover’s dream come true.

the region of Atlantic Canada where I was born, in Champlain’s map of 1607

I am applied for an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship in order to undertake further research into the writing (and erasing) of Atlantic Canadian coastlines toward the publication of a monograph tentatively titled ‘Writing Coastlines: On the Composition of Atlantic Canada’.

By ‘Writing Coastlines’ I refer both to cartographic and textual writing about coastlines, and to the writing and erasing of physical coastlines through erosion and accretion, wave actions and storm events. Rather than presenting a historiographical narrative in which the coastlines of the ‘New World’ emerge through a linear progression of discoveries, I aim to frame the writing of these coastlines as an ongoing compositional process. To demonstrate this argument, I intend to draw upon a wide variety cartographic, archival, and literary materials held at the British Library, with an emphases on foundation documents of Canadian history produced in England and France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This research will build upon portions of my recently completed PhD thesis, Writing Coastlines: Locating Narrative Resonance in Transatlantic Communications Networks. During this research I made extensive use of the Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Maps collections at the British Library. This Visiting Fellowship will allow me to spend more time with the documents I have already consulted and, critically, will allow me to identify and study secondary sources including lesser-known maps, sea charts, ship’s logs, cosmographies, diaries, letters, arguments, treatises, and discourses for discovery. Through a comparative cartographic and textual analysis of these material texts I aim to show how the coastlines of Atlantic Canada have been written and re-written, drawn and re-drawn, formed and transformed, altered and erased by successive generations of fishers, sailors, explorers, settlers, soldiers, captains, navigators, cartographers, politicians, journalists, and literary authors. These coastlines have been composed through centuries of dead-reckoning, careful surveying, and sounding, as well as less than perfect navigation and charting techniques; through willful misrepresentation of dangers and distances; through the transposition of European place and family names onto places which already had names, whether assigned by earlier explorers or by native peoples; through subsequent mishearings, misspellings, translations, and adaptations of these names over the course of centuries of habitation; and though literary re-imaginings of first encounters with the natives, animals, and climatic conditions of these coasts.

During the Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship I will begin work on a new chapter, ‘Arguments to Prove a Passage,’ focused on distortions of Atlantic Canadian coastlines perpetrated in material texts written to elicit support for voyages Northwestward, traces of these voyages written in place names (Davis Inlet, etc), and arguments made to prove a Northeast Passage.