lapsus linguae

12 or 20 questions with J.R. Carpenter

2009-06-26T11:26:00.003-04:00

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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Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR

2009-06-24T10:15:00.007-04:00

Last week I was hanging out with Nick Montfort in Montreal. He's been working on a series of 1k story generators written in Python. I've never paid any attention to Python before, because it doesn't output to the web. To download and run Nick's 1k story generators in a terminal window, visit: http://grandtextauto.org/2008/11/30/three-1k-story-generators/

This week I'm hanging out with Ingrid Bachmann's hermit crab Pookie. Pookie is a biological, digital, quasi-fictional manifestation of Ingrid Bachmann's imagination. Pookie already has a website: www.digitalhermit.ca. And I've already written about past collaborations between Bachmann and Pookie: Digital Crustaceans v.0.2: Homesteading on the Web. But I've never spent any time alone with a hermit crab before. I started chronicling my adventures with Pookie as sentences written on a blackboard, and then started feeding those sentences into one of Nick's story generators written Python. The generator uses a sequence of (specially written) sentences; all but 5-9 sentences are removed and the remaining text is presented as the story.

To read Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR, download this file to your desktop and unzip: PookieAndJR.py On a Mac or Linux system, you can run the story generator by opening a terminal Window, typing "cd Desktop", and typing "python story2.py". The generator runs on Windows, too, but you will probably need to install Python first: version 2.6. 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 Return a new version of the story will appear. Here are a few examples:

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR:
Previously, Pookie and JR had only ever met at parties.
Pookie hides in his cup when JR is in her cups.
JR is patient; Pookie has to crawl before he can walk.
Pookie is actually pretty social, for a hermit crab.
Every three days or so, JR waters the ferns.
Live and let live, Pookie's nonchalant attitude seems to suggest.
When Pookie digs in the night, he makes quite a racket.
Late one night, Pookie and JR listen to a chained dog's howls.
JR hasn't been sleeping much lately.
To be continued...

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR:
JR has a friend over for drinks and forgets to introduce Pookie.
Pookie only plays in his water dish when he has an audience.
JR changes Pookie's water. Pookie makes a mess of his feeding dish.
Pookie has turned JR off of shellfish for life.
The cafe across the street is only noisy until eleven or so.
Do you hear that? JR asks Pookie.
JR hasn't been sleeping much lately.
JR is in hiding.
To be continued...

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR:
Pookie slowly comes out of his shell, so to speak.
Pookie has many shells to choose from.
JR changes Pookie's water. Pookie makes a mess of his feeding dish.
JR crumbles Pookie's hermit crab food pellets into bite-sized bits.
When Pookie digs in the night, he makes quite a racket.
Pookie keeps his thoughts to himself.
To be continued...
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E-Poetry Festival - Barcelona 2009

2009-05-15T12:13:00.005-04:00

Next week I will present in absentia at the 5th edition of the E-Poetry Festival, which will take place in Barcelona May 24th-27, 2009. Artistic and academic events will take place at key Barcelona venues such as the the University of Barcelona, the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) and the Caixaforum, providing authors the opportunity to present their works to a public curious about new poetry and artistic trends employing technology and communication during the Setmana de la Poesia.

The event is organized by UOC’s research group Hermeneia, with the collaboration of Electronic Poetry Center (University of Buffalo) and the Laboratoire Paragraph (Univ. Paris VIII). Keynote speakers will include Roberto Simanowski (Brown University) and Jean Clément (Université Paris 8).

E-Poetry is an international biennial conference and festival of digital poetry. It is the most significant digital literary gathering in the field, bringing together an impressive roster of Electronic Literature’s most influential practitioners from around the world. Authors and researchers will present the latest research and the newest, most important works of electronic literature will be presented. Presenting at E-Poetry will bring my work to the attention of an influential international audience of critics, academics, practitioners and the public.

For more information or to register, please visit: http://www.e-poetry2009.com/

in absentia is a web-based project that uses fiction, digital images, historical maps HTML, javascript and the Google Maps API to address issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. The result is an interactive non-linear narrative map of interconnected “postcard” stories written from the point of view of former tenants of Mile End. In recent years many long-time low-income immigrant and elderly neighbours have been forced out of their homes by economic decisions made in their absence. The neighbourhood is haunted now, with their stories. Our stories. My building was sold during the production of in absentia. Faced with imminent eviction I began to write as if I was no longer here, about a Mile End that is no longer here. The Mile End depicted in in absentia is a slightly fantastical world, a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but as it could have been. The sterile and slightly sinister "developer’s-eye-view" of the neighbourhood offered by Google Maps satellite imaging has been populated with stories, interrupted with silhouette voids, intimate traces of the sudden disappearances of characters (fictional or otherwise) from the places (real or imagined) where they once lived.

At E-Poetry I will present the piece by giving a brief contextual overview of the work and then read aloud from a number of the stories contained in the work.
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soirée de performances hypermédiatiques bleuOrange

2009-04-29T10:46:00.002-04:00

Vous êtes cordialement invitées, invités à la soirée de performances hypermédiatiques bleuOrange, mettant en vedette J .R. Carpenter, Jason E. Lewis et David Jhave Johnston, trois artistes reconnus pour leurs pratiques d’écriture faisant usage des technologies numériques. Ils seront suivis d’une prestation du groupe Graffiti Research Lab – Canada.

J.R. Carpenter est la récipiendaire du Carte Blanche Quebec Award décerné par la Quebec Writer’s Foundation, elle a remporté deux fois la CBC Quebec Short Story Competition, ainsi que, plus récemment, le Expozine Alternative Press Award dans la catégorie Best English Book pour son premier roman, Words the Dog Knows. Ses œuvres de littérature électronique ont été présentées partout dans le monde. Elle est présidente du conseil d’administration du Laboratoire des Nouveaux Médias OBORO à Montréal.
http://luckysoap.com

Artiste du Web, David Jhave Johnston a débuté sa pratique comme poète avant d’intégrer les outils informatiques et numériques à sa production. Il est engagé dans de nombreuses collaborations, notamment avec le collectif torontois Year01 dans le cadre duquel il agit régulièrement à titre de commissaire. Son travail a été présenté notamment aux Biennales d'art contemporain de Montréal, en 2003, et de Toronto, en 2004. Diplômé de l'université Concordia en 2004 en Sciences informatiques, il a également complété une maîtrise en Arts interactifs à l'université Simon Fraser (Vancouver) en 2005 et est actuellement doctorant à Concordia.
http://www.glia.ca

Jason E. Lewis est un artiste des médias numériques et un designer de logiciels. Il est le fondateur de Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, où il est le directeur des projets de recherche et de création. Leur objet est de trouver de nouvelles manières de produire et de lire des textes numériques, de développer des systèmes permettant un usage créatif de la technologie mobile, d’assurer le design d’interfaces alternatives pour des performances artistiques en direct et d’utiliser des environnements virtuels afin d’assister les communautés aborigènes dans la préservation, l’interprétation et la communication de leur histoire culturelle. Obx Labs est dévoué au développement de nouvelles formes d’expression en travaillant simultanément sur le plan conceptuel, créatif et technique. Les œuvres et les écrits de Jason E. Lewis sur les médias ont fait l’objet d’expositions et de conférences sur quatre continents. Il est présentement professeur associé au département des arts informatiques de l’Université Concordia.
http://www.obxlabs.net

Graffiti Research Lab – Canada. Quand la voix du peuple ne peut se faire entendre par les moyens traditionnels, la population doit opter pour des méthodes subversives. Entraîné dans les profondeurs de la plus grande jungle urbaine de la planète, le Graffiti Research Lab déploie un groupe d’agents canadiens de niveau Splinter Cell élite pour combattre l’establishment et pénétrer la conscience des masses. Extrêmement efficaces dans l’utilisation d’Armes de Défiguration Massive, ces agents dévoyés travaillent à la libération du peuple, et contre la guerre psychologique des agences de publicité. Leurs armes? Peindre avec la lumière et diffuser avec des lasers.
http://www.GraffitiResearchLab.ca

Les performances auront lieu le samedi 2 mai 2009, à 20 heures
à l’Agora Hydro-Québec du Coeur des sciences de l'UQAM
175, avenue du Président-Kennedy, Montréal
Métro Place-des-Arts, accès entre l'UQAM et l'église au toit rouge

Entrée libre
La revue bleuOrange (http://revuebleuorange.org) profitera du colloque international Histoires et Archives, arts et littératures hypermédiatiques (colloque2009.nt2.uqam.ca) pour tenir une soirée de performances d’œuvres hypermédiatiques le 2 mai 2009 à 20 h, et souligner le lancement du second numéro de bleuOrange, revue de littérature hypermédiatique.

bleuOrange est un projet soutenu par le Laboratoire NT2 : Nouvelles technologies, nouvelles textualités et Figura, le Centre de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire, tous deux rattachés au Département d’études littéraires à l’Université du Québec à Montréal.

INFORMATIONS
Alice van der Klei
Rédactrice en chef
bleuOrange, revue de littérature hypermédiatique
514 987.3000 poste 1931
info@revuebleuorange.org
http://revuebleuorange.org

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A Book-ish Novel: Transmediation in Words the Dog Knows at MiT6, April 24, 2009

2009-04-20T13:31:00.006-04:00

I will be presenting a paper called "A Book-ish Novel: Transmediation in Words the Dog Knows" at MiT6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, an international conference taking place at MIT April 23-27, 2009. In this paper I will trace the paths that select portions of my first novel, Words the Dog Knows, have traveled: from ear to eye to pen to paper to computer to printer to publisher to video to audio to web to eye to ear and back to pen again, with the novel’s precursive zines and web-based iterations as visual aides.

J. R. Carpenter, A Book-ish Novel: Transmediation in Words the Dog Knows
Friday, April 24, 2009, 2:30-4 room 66-168 (campus map).

MiT6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, MIT April 23-27, 2009.

In his seminal essay "The Bias of Communication" Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media. Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of transmission, diffusion, connections across space.

Speculating on this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded in the ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economic and social structures, and the arts. Our current era of prolonged and profound transition is surely as media-driven as the historical cultures Innis describes.

His division between the durable and the portable is perhaps problematic in the age of the computer, but similar tensions define our contemporary situation. Digital communications have increased exponentially the speed with which information circulates. Moore's Law continues to hold, and with it a doubling of memory capacity every two years; we are poised to reach transmission speeds of 100 terabits per second, or something akin to transmitting the entire printed contents of the Library of Congress in under five seconds.

Such developments are simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. They profoundly challenge efforts to maintain access to the vast printed and audio-visual inheritance of analog culture as well as efforts to understand and preserve the immense, enlarging universe of text, image and sound available in cyberspace. What are the implications of these trends for historians who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture?

What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies? How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?

What are the implications of this tension between storage and transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for notions of what is public and what is private?

The first Media in Transition conference was held in 1999 and marked the launch of the MIT graduate program in Comparative Media Studies. Since then, four bi-annual conferences have been held, co-sponsored by CMS and the MIT Communications Forum, with each new conference generating a more internationally diverse audience than its predecessor.

I have presented at two previous Media in Transition conferences:

MiT4: the work of stories (2005)

MiT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age (2007)
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OBORO’s 25th Anniversary - April 18 - May 2, 2009

2009-04-16T11:45:00.003-04:00

To celebrate the creative energy that has been flowing through OBORO over the past 25 years and, most of all, to express our deep gratitude to our community, artists and partners, we are organizing a great party with an opening banquet, performances, a garden-exhibition, a day for children, an art auction, an outdoor ceremony and many more surprises.

Let the festivities begin… and continue!

Banquet and Gallery Opening
Saturday, April 18, 2009, at 5pm

You are invited to a banquet launching our 25th anniversary festivities! Join us in celebrating the creative energy that has been flowing through OBORO over the past 25 years as we express our deep gratitude to our community, artists and partners.

Spring winds have breezed into our preparations: on the night of April 18th, OBORO completes its transformation into a lush and cheerful garden. Multicoloured platters will carry succulent fragrances and exquisite morsels as an offering to guests and friends. Throughout the evening, bustling performances, sparks of music and magical winks will flutter by, and each visitor will receive a special edition work created for the occasion.

Masters of Ceremony: Pierre Beaudoin and Claudine Hubert

Opening banquet performers: Yves Alavo and Mehdi Benboubakeur, Choeur Maha, Raf Katigbak, Cheryl Sim, Roger Sinha, Ziya Tabassian

Oboros’ Art Auction
Saturday, April 18, 2009, 5pm to 11pm

The works created for the exhibition will be on auction from 5pm to 11pm on Saturday April 18th. Proceeds of all sales will go towards OBORO’s endowment fund, created so that OBORO can continue its significant support of artists and the art community over the years to come. For a sneak peek of the works you’ll have a chance to bid on, visit: oboros album

Exhibition
Saturday, April 18, 2009 – Saturday, May 2, 2009

From April 18th to May 2nd, the gallery will be transformed into a luxuriant garden, populated with oboros grown from the imagination of more than a hundred artists. While meandering through the exhibition, visitors will discover surprising and engaging works of every stripe and be offered a flavourful cup of hot tea served by no less than the world-famous "Trolley Bus," master of ceremonies of the World Tea Party. And somewhere in the middle of the garden safari, the small exhibition room will await inspired visitors who wish to create their own oboro.

Children’s Day
Saturday, April 25, 2009, at 2pm

On Saturday, April 25, from 2pm to 4pm, parents and children are invited to drop by the workshop and create an oboro in the company of a facilitator. In order to rejuvenate creative perspectives and quicken critical eyes, the children, following their whims, will offer guided tours of the exhibit to the adults.

Performance by Claude-Marie Caron
Saturday, April 25, 2009, at 4pm

Inspired by Lautréamont’s famous words "beautiful as the fortuitous encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table," Beau comme is constructed as an allegorical self-portrait of Claude-Marie Caron as he celebrates 25 years of OBORO. Inventor of the name and member of OBORO’s first Board of Directors, Claude-Marie Caron is a multidisciplinary artist, a performer, a tailor and a master-teacher of Tai-Chi.

Closing Ceremony
Saturday, May 2, 2009, at 3pm
at La Fontaine Park (corner of Rachel and Parc-La Fontaine)

For the Closing Ceremony, OBORO’s garden relocates to Parc La Fontaine, where everyone is invited to join for an outdoor picnic and to attend a planting of a tree in the parc. As an inspiration to future decades and an offering to the community, this tree encompasses OBORO’s mission: to contribute to our collective heritage and to a culture of peace.

Manifestoboro

For the 25th Anniversary, artists and close collaborators of OBORO have banded together to create the Manifestoboro, a collaborative nursery-rhyme/drawing/poem/manifesto for your pleasure and inspiration:

OBORO est un salon
OBORO is peace
OBORO is possibility
OBORO est un souffle
OBORO is an art family
OBORO est alimentaire
OBORO est l’arbre et la forêt
OBORO est un terrain de jeu
OBORO est un processus in process
OBORO is an ocean-in-motion
OBORO is a very old jade plant
OBORO est une tête chercheuse
OBORO is a big table in the sunlight
OBORO is a series of concentric circles
OBORO is living art, looking and listening
OBORO est tout ce qui n’est pas OBORO
OBORO is a bucket of toys waiting for kids
OBORO est un gâteau d’anniversaire rose et jaune
OBORO is a refreshing cup of tea served up in porcelaine
OBORO is food for thought and a feast for the eyes
OBORO is curious, challenging, déroutant et impromptu
OBORO est un « o » entre deux « o », un grand cercle, un oeil
OBORO est le lieu où se décline gracieusement ou furieusement le temps
OBOROBOROBORO
OBORO de vie

Download the Manifestoboro (pdf)

OBORO’S 25th ANNIVERSARY FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN

Make a donation and receive an official receipt for income tax purposes!

For each dollar raised between now and July 30, 2009, OBORO will receive an additional $2,50!
Thanks to the support of the Placements Culture program at the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canadian Arts and Sustainability Program of the Department of Canadian Heritage. All proceeds will go towards OBORO’s endowment fund to help us continue supporting artists and the art community over the years to come.
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Book Launch - Art Textiles of the World: Canada

2009-04-13T12:36:00.003-04:00

A recent essay by J.R. Carpenter entitled "Mapping Multiplicities: A Narrative of Contingences" has just been published in a new art book, launching on Wednesday, April 15, 2009, at the Montreal Centre for Contemporary Textiles, 5800 St-Denis Studio 501, Montréal, at 5 pm.

Art Textiles of the World: Canada features essays by Alan Elder, Sandra Alfoldy, J.R. Carpenter, and Lisa Vinebaum, with a foreword by the Editor. The book is devoted especially to the work of twenty important Canadian artists who have developed a very personal language through their mastery of one or more of the various techniques in the field of textiles. The artists presented in the book are:

Jennifer Angus, Ingrid Bachmann, Sandra Brownlee, Dorothy Caldwell, Lyn Carter, Kai Chan, Barb Hunt, Barbara Layne, Louise Lemieux Bérubé, Marcel Marois, Mindy Yan Miller, Lesley Richmond, Ruth Scheuing, Joanne Soroka, Joanna Staniszkis, Patrick Traer, Barbara Todd, Laura Vickerson, Yvonne Wakabayashi and Susan Warner Keene.

From April 15 to May 22, 2009, the Montreal Centre for Contemporary Textiles (MCCT) will take advantage of the publishing of this prestigious book to bring together in its gallery examples of the work of these artists. The art works are varied: murals, sculptures, installations created through the use of new technologies, of traditional techniques and of unusual materials. It is a must-see inventory of creative contemporary Canadian textile art on show until May 22.

The launching of the book and the exhibition will be held on Wednesday, April 15, 2009, at Montreal Centre for Contemporary Textiles, 5800 St-Denis Studio 501, Montréal, at 5 pm.
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A Slow Reveal... at The Art Gallery at the University of Maryland

2009-04-11T16:41:00.005-04:00

Two of my recent web-based works - Entre Ville and in absentia - have been included in a new exhibition at The Art Gallery at the University of Maryland at College Park. A Slow Reveal... launched on March 25, 2009. Over the course of several weeks, the site will reveal projects developed for the internet that employ a variety of forms: from digital narratives, online gaming, open source programming, and database art, to traditional methods of documentary filmmaking in virtual environments.

The first section in A Slow Reveal… explores how the Internet is transforming narratives, through electronic literature, gaming, mash ups, blogging, and transmedia fiction. In these works, the narrative unfolds in RSS syndication through text, still images, video, animation, and sound. The Internet provides individuals and collaborators opportunities to publish innovative re-imaginings of text and image to a potentially large audience, while reaching the smaller niche audiences some works might attract and never reach through traditional print or video distribution. The internet allows for new level of interactivity, from simple navigation and shaping of text to participating as reader/writer/composer/actor. Through mouse clicks and arrow keys, the experience is more like a performance than viewing a static material object.
- Jennie Fleming, The Art Gallery, Associate Director

So far, A Slow Reveal... has revealed works by Kate Pullinger, Chris Joseph, J. R. Carpenter, Andy Campbell, Judi Alston, Annette Weintraub, Roderick Coover, David Clark, Mark Amerika and Jody Zellen.

View A Slow Reveal...
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NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES & MULTI-MEDIA POETICS AT THE ATWATER LIBRARY

2009-04-01T11:49:00.004-04:00

Early Saturday morning, March 28, 2009, I packed a suitcase full of books and headed down to the Atwater Library to lead a six-hour long workshop on electronic literature. For the record, although the Atwater Library is the oldest lending library in Canada, their computer lab is state of the art. Also worthy of note: even the smallest of suitcases, when full of books, is way too heavy to carry up and down the perverse number of stairs leading in and out of the Montreal Metro.

NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES & MULTI-MEDIA POETICS: AN INTRODUCTION TO ELECTRONIC LITERATURE was a one-day workshop presented by the Quebec Writers' Federation. This being the QWF's first venture into the realm of electronic literature, I had no idea who, if anyone, would sign up. The turnout was excellent, and students' backgrounds extremely varied. Which was both exciting and terrifying. Picture it: A poet, a printmaker, a journalist, a video artist, an installation artist, an anthropologist, a professor of Intermedia and a Pearl programmer walk into a room. And I'm standing there with a suitcase full of books.

It's amazing how quickly six hours can fly by. We covered some but not all of the course outline and discussed many more things besides. I referred excessively to my own work, and pillaged bits and pieces of talks and workshops taught by friends. A subjective chronology of electronic literature from Stuart Moulthrop here, a dash of film history from jake moore there. Victoria Welby's notes on animation and remediation sure came in handy. A remixology writing exercise lifted from Mark Amerika crossed with an intro to HTML led to a re-mix of Nick Montfort's The Purpling, a poem recently published on the Iowa Review Web.

The Purpling has ten pages, each with eight to nine sentences, each sentence linked to a different page. We were nine in the class, so we each re-mixed a page and left the index page the same. The only rules, that the first sentence of the re-mixed page start with the same first two words as the original (to correspond with Nick's file naming system), and that the re-mixed page have the same number of sentences as the original. We took blueing as our theme: blueing of mood, of sky, as whitening agent. And here's what we came up with: The Blueing.

Thanks to all the re-mixers and re-mixees, and to Lori, at the QWF, for bringing e.lit into the mix.
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WORDS THE DOG KNOWS wins Best English Book - Expozine Alternative Press Awards

2009-03-04T17:58:00.003-05:00

My first novel, Words the Dog Knows (Conundrum Press, 2008), won Best English Book at the Expozine Alternative Press Awards Gala held Tuesday, March 3 at Casa del Popolo, 4873 St-Laurent in Montreal. Six prizes were awarded, recognizing the best English and French books, comics and zines sold at Expozine, Montreal’s annual small press, comic and zine fair.

Expozine 2008 took place on Saturday, November 29 and Sunday, November 30, 2008. By far the largest Expozine ever, this 7th edition saw close to 300 exhibitors and 15 000 visitors. Each exhibitor was asked to submit one publication to the Expozine Alternative Press Awards. 36 titles were short-listed. The short list for Best English Book included some of my favourite people. I’m so glad I was nominated – otherwise I would have been tough deciding whom to root for.

Winners were chosen by an esteemed panel of judges. Here’s what they had to say about Words the Dog Knows:

With fluid, unpretentious prose scattered with humour, Carpenter imparts wisdom about daily life – sometimes between the lines – in this picturesque and gentle novel.

Huge thanks to the judges, to Andy Brown and Maya Merrick at Conundrum Press, and to Lousi Rastilli, Billy Mavreas and everyone else who makes Expozine happen.
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WORDS THE DOG KNOWS Shortlisted for Best English Book - Expozine Alternative Press Awards

2009-02-25T23:29:00.003-05:00

The Expozine Alternative Press Awards Gala will be held Tuesday, March 3 at Casa del Popolo, 4873 St-Laurent in Montreal. The Gala starts at 7 pm, awards will begin being presented shortly after 8 pm, and you are all invited to stay and mingle during the DJ night that follows at 10 p.m. Admission is free and beer and liquor specials will be in effect all night.

Come and celebrate the best of the nearly 300 small presses that took part in last fall’s Expozine small press, comic and zine fair! Six prizes will be awarded, recognizing the best book, comic and zine sold at Expozine.

The winners were chosen by an esteemed panel of judges out of the hundreds of publications submitted at Expozine in November. The gala is a rare chance for you to meet and mingle with the most talented up-and-comers of the local publishing scene, as well as purchase copies of the 36 short-listed titles.

The Nominees / Les nominés:

English Book:

Words the Dog Knows, J.R. Carpenter, Conundrum Press, www.conundrumpress.com
The Debaucher, Jason Camlot, Insomniac Press www.insomniacpress.com
The Sunlight Chronicles, Chris Dyer, Divine Life LLC, www.sunlight-chronicles.com
Fear Of Fighting, Stacey May Fowles & Marlena Zuber, Invisible Publishing, www.invisiblepublishing.com
Blert, Jordan Scott, Coach House Books, www.chbooks.com
Jack, Mike Spry, Snare Books, snarebooks.wordpress.com

English Zine:

Four Minutes To Midnight no. 10, www.lokidesign.net/2356
Nailbiter: An Anxiety Zine, www.steemilie.free23.net
Soulgazers, Camilla Wynne, www.endlessbanquet.blogspot.com
Lickety Split no. 7, www.licketysplitzine.com
Mostly True vol.19 issue 7, Bill Daniel, Microcosm Publishing, www.billdaniel.net, www.microcosmpublishing.com
Place Magazine, Winter 08 issue, www.placemag.org

English Comic:

Mourning a lover, Sofeel, myspace.com/sofeel
Welcome to the Dollhouse by Ken Dahl, Microcosm Publishing, www.microcosmpublishing.com
BFF by Nate Beaty, Microcosm Publishing, natebeaty.com, www.microcosmpublishing.com
Hypocrite, Dakota McFadzean, dakota.mcfadzean.googlepages.com
Finding Joy, Luke Ramsey, Anteism Publishing, islandsfold.com
Kieffer #2, Jason Kieffer, jasonkieffer.com

Nominés francophones fanzines :

Trio à emporter, par Kathey Tibo
Gargouillis indigeste #003, www.gargouillis.com
Ffsshmrwlbaouarf par Simon Bossé/ Mille Putois, www.myspace.com/milleputois
Ectropion, collectif de crémation littéraire, www.myspace.com/ectropion
Fanzine sans titre, Geneviève Dumas
Toxico (Fanzine # 3), par Delf Berg, delfberg.blogspot.com

Nominés francophones BD :

Hasemeister : C'était 2007, Frédéric Mahieu, www.hasemeister.com
La terreur noir pâle, C. Reney
Fatima, A. Desmarteaux, Egotrip Productions, www.arthuro.ca
Une aventure de M. Pixel, Étienne Beck, L'Employé du Moi, www.employe-du-moi.org
Chimeris 1: Sirus, Adeline Lamarre, Vaar Éditeur, www.vaar.ca
Humoro Sapiens, Yayo, Les 400 Coups, www.editions400coups.ca

Nominés francophones livres : À venir …

EXPOZINE
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Nuit Blanche Readings from Le Livre de chevet @ theCCA Bookstore

2009-02-24T12:36:00.004-05:00

I will be reading from Les huit quartiers de sommeil at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Saturday February 28, 2009, as part of a Nuit Blanche slumber provoked by Daniel Canty, Haunted by the images of Ms Annie Descôteaux and Mr Pol Turgeon. Graphic Design Feed. Scenography Amuse.

The table of contents presents - in collaboration with the CCA Bookstore and Nuit Blanche - 16 premonitory readings from Le Livre de chevet, and the launch of www.latabledesmatieres.com

Readings by Salvador Alanis, Mathieu Arsenault, Oana Avasilichioaei, Nathalie Bachand, Daniel Canty, J.R. Carpenter, Angela Carr, Renée Gagnon, Louis-Philippe Hébert (Onil M.), Annie Lafleur, Erín Moure, Steve Savage (Desavage), Mélisandre Schofield, Franz Schürch, François Turcot and Jacob Wren

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Can you hear, deep down in sleep, the murmur of books? Le Livre de chevet conveys you into their secret. This collective and more or less practical tome, to be published in the Fall of 2009, is designed to accompany and to alter your slumber.

We invite you, on this All Nighter, into the darkness of the CCA bookstore. From 8 pm to 1 am, 16 authors from the book to come will step up, every 20 minutes, into the ghostly glow of dreams, to give you, at the sound of the alarm, with clocklike precision, a premonitory reading in English or in French.

Over the course of the evening, 16 sleeping places in Le Livre de chevet will also be auctioned off to the highest bidding dreamers.

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Le Livre de chevet
Montréal, Le Quartanier, 240 pages
ISBN 978-2-923400-60-0
To be published in fall 2009
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All-Nighter 2009
Saturday February 28
to Sunday March 1
from 8 pm to 1 am

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CCA Bookstore
1920 rue Baile
Montreal (QC) H3H 2S6
t 514 939-7028

www.cca.qc.ca/Bookstore
. . . . .

NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES & MULTI-MEDIA POETICS: AN INTRODUCTION TO ELECTRONIC LITERATURE

2009-02-12T16:30:00.003-05:00

I am teaching an electronic literature workshop through the Quebec Writers' Federation on Saturday, March 28, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. 1200 Atwater Avenue, Suite 2 (2nd-floor computer lab). This workshop is ideal for experienced writers interested in expanding their existing practices to include web-based forms of non-linear, interactive, intertextual and/or networked literature

The one-day workshop will provide an introduction to reading and writing web-based electronic literature. Electronic literature combines literary and new media practices, resulting in multi-media literary works that couldn’t exist in print form. Consideration of technology at the level of the creation of the text distinguishes electronic literature from e-books, digitized versions of print works, web publishing and other products of print authors ‘going digital,’ none of which will be discussed in this workshop. Unbound by pages and the printed book, electronic literature moves freely across the web, through galleries, performance spaces, and museums, yet does not reside in any single medium or institution. Electronic literature often intersects with conceptual art, web art and sound art, but the reading and writing of electronic literature is situated within the literary arts.

This workshop will begin with a brief historical background of the genre, including a discussion of some of the pre-web literary forms that digital writing evolved from. We will focus on looking at, reading and understanding works of electronic literature. I will show some of my work and explain how it was built, then propose a number of ways for beginners to approach the web medium for the creation and dissemination of texts. In particular, we will look at ways to use existing Web 2.0 structures to create distributive literary works. Writing exercises will include: writing 140-character stories in Twitter and writing postcard stories in Google Maps. There will be some technical discussion of how these works function, but prior knowledge of web programming is not required.

If participants have electronic literature projects in mind, we can discuss strategies for creating these works. Visual and new media artists who use are using text in their work and wish to learn more about the literary aspects of digital writing will also find this workshop useful, as will avid readers of experimental literature from Calvino to Borges, and anyone interested in audio/video mashup, performance, remix culture, etc., who wishes to learn about this exciting new hybrid, hypermedia genre.

A list of links to online resources, further technical resources and venues for reading and submitting electronic literature will be provided. For registration information, please visit: http://www.qwf.org/workshops/spring2009/carpenter.html.

J. R. Carpenter is winner of the QWF's 2008 Carte Blanche Quebec Prize and the 2003 & 2005 CBC Quebec Short Story Competition. Her electronic literature has been presented at Jyväskylä Art Museum (Finland), Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), Electronic Literature Collection Volume One Web Biennial 2007 (Istanbul), Rhizome.org and Turbulence.org. Her short fiction has been anthologized and published widely. Her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, was published by Conundrum Press (Montreal, 2008). She serves as President of the Board of Directors of OBORO New Media Lab in Montreal.
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WORDS THE DOG KNOWS excerpted in Geist #71

2009-02-06T12:10:00.003-05:00

I love Geist Magazine. And not just because they just published an excerpt of my novel Words the Dog Knows in their latest issue (Winter 2008-2009 #17). No, I love Geist because they picked a particularly odd ball section of the novel to excerpt, a section that speaks to the very core of what the novel is about, a list of rhetorical words the dog-sitter is convinced the dog knows. As they put it over at Geist: "A human interprets the way a dog interprets the world of humans."

Here are a few words from that list:

home Home is where they keep the kibble. Home is both the origin and the terminus of the walk. Locus of the soundest sleeps, at home all scents are known.

cyberspace The place where people go while dogs are sleeping.

infinity In the time between sleep and waking there is the great nothingness of the nap.

Read the rest on Geist.com: Words Dogs Know

P.S. Another reason why I love Geist is that they published a very short story of mine called Roads out of Rome back in issue #63, two years ago to be precise, that expanded to become one of my favourite sections of Words the Dog Knows. Thanks Geist.
. . . . .

Which circle of hell does air travel fall into?

2009-02-05T13:35:00.002-05:00

S’s brother was late to pick us up to drive us to the airport because he had to wait for his mother to finish making us a week’s worth of egg salad sandwiches so we wouldn’t starve to death on the plane. Thanks to this mayonnaise-related delay, we arrived at the airport only two hours before our departure time, instead of the airline-recommended three. Miraculously, we still made it to our gate with over an hour to spare. The waiting area was the loudest airport waiting area I’ve ever been in and I’ve been to some damn loud airports over the years. It’s a little too festive in here, I said, scanning the horizon for a teenager-free zone. We retreated a far corner to a single row of seats hidden between the window and the back wall of the last gift shop before Cuba. We tucked into the bag of egg salad sandwiches so we wouldn’t have to carry them onto the plane with us. Pair by pair other child-less couples made their way our way. This will be us in Cuba, I said. Hunting for the quite spot. Hiding out way down at the very far end of the beach.

Our relative peace was abruptly disrupted when another couple sat down on our bench and the woman started talking to S. And kept on talking, and talking. Within minutes we knew her entire vacation itinerary and the full contents of her carry on luggage. A regular Talking Machine. S had to fake a nap to shut her up.

A small group of beer-bellied men gathered at the window in front of us, birds of a feather flocking to the sight of random runway machinery – baggage carts, food service trucks, snowploughs, wing de-icers, big shiny airplanes. You know how they tell you, I said to S, that if you have a fear of public speaking you should try and picture the audience in their underwear? Well it just occurred to me that we’re going to spend all week staring at these people in their bathing suits. S shuddered. We surveyed the waiting area. Not one hot bod in sight.

Most people’s first reaction to the words Air Transat is an involuntary hunching of shoulders. Yes, the seats are narrow. No, there’s no legroom. But why didn’t anyone warn us about the noise? For four hours we were subjected to a level of noise usually found only at Hungarian family reunions or at the back of the school bus on the last day of school before summer vacation. The two sugar-crazed pre-pubescent monsters sitting directly behind us produced a disproportionately high portion of this noise. They screamed, yelled, screeched and hollered non-stop, eight inches from the backs of our heads. They kicked at the backs of our seats while sitting and grabbed at the backs of our seats to stand. The father was in the row ahead of us. The mother and children yelled right through us to get to him. Only, nothing got to him. Not even the daggers shooting out of my eyes at him. He chatted amicably with everyone around him at the top of his lungs while, behind us, his kids fought with each other and called their mother nasty names and she screamed, yelled, screeched and hollered right along with them. The Freaks. We put in earplugs and could still hear them loud and clear.

I am not a praying person. What’s the point? If "There’s Probably No God" is writ large on the sides of Canadian busses, than there isn’t likely to be a God lurking in a small regional airport of a crumbling tropical communist dictatorship. But pray I did, that when the customs official was done flirting with me and all our visas were stamped and suitcases retrieved, we would not board the bus to our resort and find the Talking Machine or the Freaks headed out way. We were spared this torment, but our bus brought new tortures. A tour operator attempted to “animate” us in garbled French via a crackling loudspeaker as we embarked on an hour-long drive through utter darkness. A new Talking Machine sat three rows back. And a new family of Freaks screeched and hollered across the isle from us: Famille de Dan, we called them, as a man named Dan was clearly their ringleader. He regaled the whole bus with stories from his past trips to Cuba while we hurtled along. The bus’s headlights momentarily revealed, then concealed again, strange apparitions: families floating in florescent interiors; television screens glowing in door-less, roof-less roadside shacks; donkey carts waiting alongside Ladas at stop signs as we motored past; lone bicyclists materializing out of blackness and then disappearing again out on the open, pot-holed road; low branches scraping the bus roof; bats smacking the windshield.

Whichever circle of hell air travel falls into, hotel check-in is in there too. Luckily, by then we’d had plenty of practice at tuning out noise, hassle, assholes and the petty injustices that long line-ups breed. When all was signed and done we were quite done in, but there is no rest for the aggravated. We set out again immediately - along a maze of paved pathways through strange foliage-induced rustling sounds, up long flights of twisted stairs - in search of the bar. On a scale of one to hell, the bar was the airport, the airplane, the bus and the hotel lobby combined. Talking Machines and Freaks galore. The Famille de Dan had already staked out a table; they were yakking and boozing and smoking up a storm. There was no mint for a mojito, no tonic for a gin. We wound up with something martini-flavoured that came with ice cubes and a straw. Not the last straw, by any means; the first of the many hundreds of drinks we figured we’d have to drink in order to cope with our fellow tourists. Hell is not hellish because of the location. Hell is hell because of who else is there.

We set out walking again, to escape the bar, and make sure there really was a beach out there somewhere. By the time we sunk our feet in sand it was well past midnight. There were mysterious tire tracks leading we knew not where and a man lurking in the shadows. Security, we hoped. We couldn’t agree on which way north was. It didn’t help that the stars seemed to be all in the wrong places. The moon sent our shadows rushing headfirst, headlong into the Atlantic. A small heard of Quebequois could be heard, but mercifully not seen, skinny-dipping out on the reef.

Sometime hundreds of hours earlier in the morning, back in Montreal, I had packed a new translation of Don Quixote with high hopes of reading it here on this far beach. By bedtime I suspected Dante’s Inferno would have been more apropos.
. . . . .

Brave the Blizzard: Buy the Bikini

2009-01-31T12:27:00.003-05:00

Last summer was cold and wet and a dark cloud of writing deadlines hovered directly over my apartment. I was on the road all the fall – Vermont, New York, Providence, Toronto, Sweden, Banff – the last thing I wanted was another trip. But then winter started early and came on heavy and I was so over-worked and under-rested and sick in bed with a head cold that, one fever-addled day, heading south for a holiday suddenly seemed like a good idea.

I'd never been south in winter before. I’d never even been anywhere tropical before. In the commercials, people hardly wear anything when frolicking on tropical beaches. That, my friends, is false advertising. Abandoning winter for warmer climes is a gargantuan undertaking, which requires considerable outfitting. The day after booking two tickets to Cuba we had a big blizzard, big even by Montreal standards. 25cm of snow fell sideways in a few hours. I always figured it would be hot during the apocalypse, but apparently not. In the spirit of the bizarre inversion of heading south for sun in the winter, blowing snow seemed the perfect weather for heading downtown to buy a bikini. I braved the blizzard and the public transportation (those bus drivers are commandos, man, we should send them over to sort out the situation in the middle east). With a mingling of fear and loathing, I walked into the Bikini Village wearing a parka, Sorel snow boots and a toque.

Body-image-wise, it wasn't as depressing as I thought it would be to try on bikinis with hat-head, ultra-white skin and sock-marked shins. Much to my delight I discovered that most bikini tops are really just highly padded bras. Va-rooom. The prices, however, were shocking. 50 bucks for a bikini bottom and then another 65 for the top! Outrageous. They didn't have a single suit in my size. Either that or the bikinis manufacturers are in cahoots with the porn industry. What’s worse, all these overpriced undergarments were inexplicably dripping in bling - beaded tassels hanging from hips, sequined messages blazoned across barely covered asses, bands of metal brandishing brand names encasing spaghetti straps. What the hell? Who wants to lie in the sun with chunks of gleaming metal burning the Calvin Klein logo directly into your skin?

After trying on every single expensive, ill fitting, bling-laden bra in the Bikini Village, my parka, Sorels and toque and I trudged through the underground mall to the Winners for a dip into discount shopping hell. Their bikinis were considerably less glamorously displayed, but they were also less fraught with sequins, beads and tassels. I grabbed colours I liked in a range of sizes that seemed to cover all the, um, bases. I'd like to have a conversation with the person who designed the lighting in the Winners changing rooms, but whatever. The miracle of the discount store florescent light grey tile mean service clothing on floor style of retail is that by swallowing my pride and humanity I could afford to buy two insufficient bikinis for the price of half of one bikini at the Bikini Village – a skimpy one for tanning in, and a second that I could actually walk around in, should the occasion arise. I pity the woman searching for a suit to actually swim in.

Next stop: the drug store. If the florescent lights of Montreal’s underground shopping malls are to be believed, SPF 30 will not be enough.

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In Search of A New(er) Digital Literature

2009-01-17T15:57:00.003-05:00

Entre Ville is in an new exhibition called In Search of A New(er) Digital Literature curated by Alan Bigelow, which opened in Gallery 108 at Austin Peay State University, Tennessee, USA, January 15, 2009. The exhibition is also online on < terminal > a space sponsored by the department of art and the center for the creative arts at Austin Peay to showcase and examine internet and new media art. As Bigelow writes in his curatorial statement:

the works in this exhibition, and many like them, find their life, and major readership, on the web. The web is not just a quick and expedient way to find an audience for digital literature, a way to self-publish at minimal cost, and a path to self-promotion; it also offers worldwide access to a multimedia platform for which these works can be created, and provides a place for them to thrive.
[read more]

View In Search of A New(er) Digital Literature online.
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WORDS THE DOG KNOWS Makes Some Noise

2009-01-11T13:29:00.006-05:00

Check out the Montreal Mirror Noisemakers 2009 issue, FREE on news stands all around town January 8-14, 2009. I'm on the front cover, along with lots of other fine folks making noise this year. Finally, all these years of making noise pay off! There's an awesome write up by Vincent Tinguely on page 35. "J.R. Carpenter comes across as pretty wordy for a fine arts grad," Tinguely quips. Read the full story here. And check out the smoking hot photo by Rachel Granofsky. Comments on the photo so far include: "You look like you're going to clobber us and/or take your shirt off," "Is that your new album cover?" and "You should cultivate that Bollywood look."

There was a considerably more staid write up of Words the Dog Knows in the Globe and Mail Saturday, January 10, 2008, that's also available online here.

I'll be reading from Words the Dog Knows at The Yellow Door Reading Series, Thursday, January 29, 2009.

3625 Aylmer, Montreal (between Pine & Prince Arthur) Tel: 514-845-2600

Doors open 7:00 pm Reading 7:30 pm At the door $5

To purchase Words the Dog Knows visit the Conundrum Press website: http://www.conundrumpress.com/
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2009 - A Year of Anniversaries

2009-01-11T12:15:00.003-05:00

100 Years Ago
On December 4, 1909, the Montreal Canadians franchise was born, though, of course, as everybody knows, the game of hockey was born at least a 100 years before that, in around 1800 in my old hometown of Windsor, Nova Scotia. There’s no NHL team in the Maritimes. At the Windsor Regional there were two options: Habs or Bruins. Dear Habs. I have loved you since the age of 12. For your 100th season, I personally would like to see a much more aggressive forecheck. Until then, check out these photos from the glory days.

50 Years Ago
On January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro led a band of bearded rebels down from Cuba's eastern mountains, toppled dictator Fulgencio Batista (who was on his way out anyway), set himself up as dictator and proceeded to survive 638 assassination attempts before handing over the reigns of power to his brother. On January 19, 2009, my husband and I are going to Cuba for the first time, to Holguín province, the Castro brother’s birthplace, to bask in the sun and witness first-hand the dilapidated remains of the revolution. Rumour has it that when Christopher Columbus landed on the coast of Holguín in October 1492, he said that this place was the beautiful area ever seen by a human. We’ll see. Here’s the weather report from Santiago De Cuba, birthplace of the revolution.

25 Years Ago
In the spring of 1984, OBORO was co-founded by Daniel Dion and Su Schnee. Founded with the conviction that living transcultural artistic experiences contribute to the betterment of humankind, OBORO is an artist centre that supports creation; encourages innovation, experimentation, the exchange of ideas, and the sharing of knowledge; promotes awareness and dialog within the art world and society at large and contributes to a culture of peace. I am proud to serve as President of the Board of Directors of OBORO as we enter into this 25th year. To mark its 25th anniversary, and to celebrate the future, OBORO is organizing a major exhibition bringing together more than one hundred artists with their own interpretation of “OBORO.” Saturday, April 18, 2009 – Saturday, May 2, 2009. More Info.

10 Years Ago
On July 3, 1999, my husband and I got married at OBORO. It was an artist-run wedding; it was a truly great day followed by 10 great years. We’ll celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary this year amid a mess of moving boxes. We have to move out of our home of 11 years by July 1, 2009. New landlords who took possession of the building December 1, 2008, and promptly sent a bailiff round to ring our doorbell at 7 am to deliver an eviction notice. The new landlords haven’t figured out that I’m a writer yet, and they’re apparently unaware of my most recent web-based electronic literature project, in absentia, which uses the Google Map API to address issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End, our soon-to-be-former neighbourhood of Montreal. We're hoping this eviction results in us living somewhere even better when all this upheaval is said and done. So, 2009, if you're reading this, please send us good apartment finding vibes.

Happy anniversary Stéphane, happy birthday OBORO, Viva la Revolución, and Go Habs Go.
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Reading List 2008

2008-12-30T16:09:00.005-05:00

I got a massive amount of writing done in 2008. That made it made it a strange year for reading. Early on in the year I appear to have had a ghosts and devils fixation. What was I thinking, reading Will Self, How the Dead Live and Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita back to back?

Between January and May I read and re-read a lot of chapters, articles and essays related to the texts I was working with in the Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams electronic literature project. Many books were harmed in the making of that work, some are pictured here, but few of those fragmentary readings are represented in the list below.

I had a great but short lived burst of short story reading in the spring while I was writing the postcard stories for the in absentia electronic literature project, but once that piece was launched I had to focus on finishing writing my first novel, Words the Dog Knows. It was a cold, wet summer, which was fine as I barely left my apartment. To get through the long days of writing toward impossibly short deadlines I soon realized that I couldn't read anything even remotely resembling anything I would ever write. So it was a summer of long post-colonial novels written by American women.

I thought I'd get back to my regular reading habits once Words the Dog Knows went to the printer, but despite a brief window were I got to catch up on a few books written by friends, most of my fall reading was muddled by travel. Between book tours, conferences, lectures and meetings I was on the road non-stop from mid-October to mid-November. All I can say is, Gulliver's Travels makes great sense on trains and airplanes.

My New Year's reading resolution: to read Don Quixote in it's entirety. Toward this end I have booked a one week vacation on a Cuban beach. The things I do for literature!

Here, from last to first, are books read in 2008:

Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Salman Rushdie, ed., Best American Short Stories 2008
Jonathan Lenthem, Girl in a Landscape
Marguerite Duras, Moderato Cantabile
Paul D. Miller, Rhythm Science
Mariko & Jillian Tamaki, Skim
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
Emily Holton, Dear Canada Council / Our Starland
Liane Keightly, Seven Openings of the head
Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine
N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines
Joe Brainard, I Remember
Harold Brodkey, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
Cynthia Ozick, Trust
Maya Merrick, The Hole Show
Kate Pullinger, A Little Stranger
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Leni Zumas, Farewell Navigator
Jason Camlot, The Debaucher
Keri Hulme, The Bone People
Ha Jin, Waiting
Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost
Claire Messud, The Hunters
Joy Williams, State of Grace
Julie Doucet, 365 Days
Barry Hannah, Geronimo Rex
Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
Steven Heighton, The Shadow Boxer
Michael Crummey, Flesh and Blood
Kerstin Ekman, Blackwater
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr
Michale Hoeullebecq, The Elementary Particles
Rick Moody, Demonology
Goethe, Faust
Christopher Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Jeff Parker, The Back of the Line
Etgar Keret, Missing Kissinger
Raymond Carver, Short Cuts
Lorrie Moore, Like Life
Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Eva Figes, Light
Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979
Maureen Adams, Shaggy Muses
Mary Robison, Why Did I Ever
Valerie Joy Kalynchuk, All Day Breakfast
Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonders
Flan O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus
Anya Ulinich, Petropolis
David McGimpsey, Sitcom
Jeff Parker, Ovenman
Will Self, How the Dead Live
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Mark Amerika, META/DATA

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Wired Women Salon # 70 :: Top Chrono

2008-12-17T10:31:00.002-05:00

The time has come for our 2008 TOP CHRONO Salon! Once again, Studio XX will showcase the work of talented women artists who will share sneak peeks of their latest artworks, productions or performances. Audiences will enjoy performance pieces, presentations with images and sound, spoken word, music, video and other magnificent surprises true to our artform. Invited artists will be subject to the playful random rules of the universe : each will have between 4 to 7 minutes to execute their presentation. The lenght will be determined by the cast of the dice!

Join us for a fabulous celebration capping off a prolific year of creative endeavours !

With : Lorella Abenavoli, Beewoo, J.R. Carpenter, Darsha Hewitt, Virpi Kettu, Maroussia Lévesque, Hélène Prévost, Nelly-Ève Rajotte and Victoria Stanton.

Wired Women Salon # 70 [Dec. 18] :: Top Chrono
Thursday, December 18th 2008, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM
@ Geordie Theatre Space:: 4001 Berri St., Ground Floor Montreal
Entrance Fee : 6$, free for Studio XX members.

*** Top Chrono Special : one-night only !
Become a member of Studio XX at the event and receive a complimentary copy of our limited edition xxxboîte : http://www.studioxx.org/en/xxxboite

STUDIO XX
4001 Berri St., Suite 201, Montreal (Quebec) H2L 4H2
Between Roy and Duluth
Sherbrooke Metro, or the 24 bus (Sherbrooke)
http://www.studioxx.org

Information :: 514.845.7934
. . . . .

I'm in Karlsokrona, Sweden.

2008-11-24T04:33:00.001-05:00

It's dark at the moment, and very far from Montreal. It took one taxi, two planes, two passport controls, two trains, eighteen hours and six time zones to get here. The taxi took the best route to the airport. The first plane was empty. It took me to Washington DC. The second plane was full. It took me to Copenhagen. It took eight hours. A long-haul red-eye spent in seat 46B - on the isle in the last row. Right next to the toilet. Which is right next to where the food comes out. I was enraged about this arrangement until I met my seatmate. 46A happened to be a Norwegian novelist named Astrid, a woman around my age who was on her way back from Mexico City. We instantly became Team Last Row and determined to make the best of it. We talked for hours about books and writing, socialism and publishing, travel and translation. I got the low down on the lay of the Scandinavian literary landscape. And an invitation to write an article for a Norwegian authors' website that Astrid edits. Astrid got a copy of my novel. She is going to be the first person in Norway to read Words the Dog Knows. Sadly, none of her three novels have been translated into English yet. We wrote reading recommendations for each other in our matching black notebooks and got extra free wine because we were in such good spirits despite how hard our seats sucked. The flight crew knew enough to be grateful for our good humour.

We parted ways in Copenhagen. I followed my Swedish host Talan's Map and How to Catch a Train instructions to the letter. They were excellent instructions, which included such all important details as which ticket booth will take Canadian cash and the amazing (to someone from Quebec) fact that the conductors on Swedish trains are required by law to speak English. The instructions sort of fell apart when none of the automated ticket machines were working and long lines formed at the ticket booths. I eventually managed to procure a ticket to Karlskrona and soon I was on a train speeding through the Swedish countryside. Technically the train was going to Karlskrona, but not all the way. I wound up waiting for an hour in a freezing cold station somewhere half way between Copenhagen and Karlskrona for another train to take me the rest of the way. Once I figured out where the one hot water heater was hiding in the cavernous cold, and huddled up to it, I was free to be amused by the waiting room cast of small town characters culled from the casts of My Life as a Dog and Mon Uncle. An old man spent the entire hour maticulously washing the flagstone floor by pushing a rag mop along with his boot, for example.

On the second train, a man came by interviewing passengers about their use of the train system. The whole car listened with attention as the questions were translated into English for me. I'm sure I skewed the survey's demographic considerably. Where did you board the train? Copenhagen. What was your point of origin? Montreal. What is your final destination? Karlskrona. What is the purpose of your travel to Karlskrona? To give a lecture. And how often do you use this train service? This is my first time. By this time the whole train car was listening. Soon a second interview ensued, this one from my Swedish seatmate, a gap-toothed affable chap, who found it incredible that I would travel all this way to give one lecture and then go home. Well, I'm giving a workshop too, I explained. He apologized for the cold, lifted my suitcase into the overhead rack for me, lowered the blind so the sun wouldn't blind me, let me sleep for a while, then tapped my knee to say good bye when he got up to leave. Because we were old friends by then I guess.

Speaking of friends, my friend Talan met me at the Karlskrona train station and walked me too my hotel. I have Talan to thank for being here. When he first invited me, over a single malt scotch in a hotel bar in the small town of Vancouver, Washington, I never thought it would actually happen. And then there we were walking through the streets of cold Karlskrona. Once I was checked into my hotel, Talan left me alone to recuperate from my travels. He ran off to a meeting and then home to prepare a welcoming reception for me set to take place at his place later this evening. Which is almost now.

Now I've had a nap and my brain is clearer, though body has no idea what time it is. I'm starving. I'm sucking on a cough drop trying to stay alive the next 50 minutes until Lissa comes to pick me up to take me to the reception at Talan's, being thrown in honour of my having come all this way. Rumor has it there will be smoked baltic salmon and caviar and cheese and crackers and single malt scotch! Come on cough drop, keep me in this thing!
. . . . .

"Wyoming is Haunted" wins the QWF Carte Blanche Quebec Prize

2008-11-20T12:46:00.005-05:00

Last night at the annual Quebec Writers' Federation Awards Gala at the Lion d'Or in Montreal my recent non-fiction story, Wyoming is Haunted, was awarded the Carte Blanche Quebec Prize. Carte Blanche, the literary review of the Quebec Writers' Federation, is published online twice a year. The Carte Blanche Quebec prize is awarded once a year in recognition of an outstanding submission by a Quebec writer. The prize is sponsored by The Quebec Writers' Federation.

Wyoming is Haunted is a nonfiction narrative of some of the adventures fellow fiction-writer Karen Russell and I had while in residence at the Ucross Foundation, an artist in residence program located on a 22,000 acre ranch in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. The piece first appeared Carte Blanche 7 earlier this year. Two other of my short stories have also appeared in earlier issues: Aerial Photograph & Wasn't One Ocean.

Thanks QWF and Carte Blanche, for all you do for English writing in Quebec, even when it's from Wyoming. Thanks CALQ for helping me get out way out west. Thanks Ucross for accepting me and Karen Russell at the same time. And thanks Wyoming for scaring the heck out of us. As this photo clearly indicates, Wyoming is pretty damn haunted.

"As we walked we invented fictional colour-names for things, with Flannery O'Connor's rat-coloured car as our model, though, as Karen noted, makeup colour-names would also be a great source of inspiration. The road was a rawhide strap. The fauns were faun coloured! The Angus cows were so black they looked hollow."

Excerpted from: Wyoming is Haunted, J. R. Carpenter
Winner of the 2008 Carte Blanche Quebec prize

. . . . .

WORDS THE DOG KNOWS - Toronto Launch - Monday, November 17, 2008

2008-11-09T12:07:00.008-05:00

We invite you to join us in celebration of the publication of Emily Holton's latest book, Dear Canada Council/Our Starland (Montreal: Conundrum Press) and J.R. Carpenter’s first novel, Words the Dog Knows (Montreal: Conundrum Press). Animations, music, and two beautiful books - take your pick! - they're all great excuses to come drink too much in Parkdale on a Monday night.

A This Is Not A Reading Series event presented by Pages Books & Magazines, Conundrum Press and EYE WEEKLY.

Monday, November 17, 2008, 7:00pm
Gladstone Hotel Ballroom
1214 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON

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 please visit: http://luckysoap.com/stories/wordsthedogknows.html

Emily Holton's novella Dear Canada Council is an illustrated plea for plane tickets, in which the narrator details her plans to "found a town". Complete with Incas, crickets, and a small family of deaf-mutes, her written request doubles as what also might be the craziest love poem you've ever read. Awestruck and sleepless in Hamilton, she is haunted by visions of celebrity reporter Brian Linehan, obsessed with a young boy she saw once on the TV news, and just wants to do better, get married, and wear a sash, a red mayor's sash. Can't Canada Council help her out? // Emily Holton's Our Starland is a novella broken into small, dreamy pieces. Flash by flash, its pieces ferry a cast of characters through a season as they navigate the fruit picking diaspora of the Okanagan Valley. Hitchhiking, nightwalking, these characters remember the constellations wrong, leave their daughters alone, and sleep outside, once again, but with a sleeping bag this time. For more information on Dear Canada Council / Our Starland please visit: http://www.conundrumpress.com/nt_holton2.html

J. R. Carpenter: http://luckysoap.com
Emily Holton: http://www.emilyholton.com
Conundrum Press: http://conundrumpress.com
THIS IS NOT A READING SERIES: http://www.pagesbooks.ca/events.php

So many dear friends turned out for the NYC and Montreal launches we can't wait to take the show on the road. Here's some of the fun we've had so far:

NYC launch at KGB Bar, Thursday October 23, 2008

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008
Maya Merrick at the he Book Table

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008
We love you Andy Brown.

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008
It's this much fun!
. . . . .

WORDS THE DOG KNOWS - Montreal Launch - Friday, November 7, 2008

2008-11-02T07:48:00.006-05:00

Dear Friends. We invite you to join us for an evening of stories, drawings and music in celebration of the publication of J.R. Carpenter’s first novel, WORDS THE DOG KNOWS (Montreal: Conundrum Press) and Emily Holton's two novella's Dear Canada Council / Our Starland (Montreal: Conundrum Press), with readings by J. R. Carpenter and Emily Holton, drawings by J. R. Carpenter, Elisibeth Belliveau and Emily Holton and a presentation of J. R. Carpenter's recent web-based writing project in absentia (presented by Dare-Dare Centre de diffusion d'art multidisciplinaire de Montréal).

SKY BLUE DOOR
5403B Saint-Laurent (view map)
(south of Saint-Viateur, behind Enterprise Car Rental - enter via alleyway)
Friday, November 7th, 7:00 pm - 11:00 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 full event listings and purchase information, please visit: http://luckysoap.com/stories/wordsthedogknows.html

J. R. Carpenter's web-based writing project in absentia addresses issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. By manipulating the Google Maps API, Carpenter creates an interactive non-linear narrative of interconnected “postcard” stories, thus haunting a satellite view of the neighbourhood with the stories of former tenants of Mile End (fictional or otherwise) who have forced out by economically motivated decisions made in their absence. in absentia features new fiction by J. R. Carpenter with invited authors: Lance Blomgren, Andy Brown, Daniel Canty, Alexis O’Hara and Colette Tougas. Some of the stories in in absentia also appear in Words the Dog Knows. To view in absentia online please visit: http://luckysoap.com/inabsentia

Emily Holton's novella Dear Canada Council is an illustrated plea for plane tickets, in which the narrator details her plans to "found a town". Complete with Incas, crickets, and a small family of deaf-mutes, her written request doubles as what also might be the craziest love poem you've ever read. Awestruck and sleepless in Hamilton, she is haunted by visions of celebrity reporter Brian Linehan, obsessed with a young boy she saw once on the TV news, and just wants to do better, get married, and wear a sash, a red mayor's sash. Can't Canada Council help her out? // Emily Holton's Our Starland is a novella broken into small, dreamy pieces. Flash by flash, its pieces ferry a cast of characters through a season as they navigate the fruit picking diaspora of the Okanagan Valley. Hitchhiking, nightwalking, these characters remember the constellations wrong, leave their daughters alone, and sleep outside, once again, but with a sleeping bag this time.

For more information on Our Starland / Dear Canada Council please visit: http://www.conundrumpress.com/nt_holton2.html

J. R. Carpenter: http://luckysoap.com
Emily Holton: http://www.emilyholton.com
Conundrum Press: http://conundrumpress.com
Dare-Dare Centre de diffusion d'art multidisciplinaire de Montréal: http://dare-dare.org
. . . . .