Multi- or at least bilingualism is a given in Quebec, and identifying a common language is often the starting point of an everyday interpersonal exchange—will this person speak English? will this person speak French? what will the implications be of prioritizing one language over the other? And, in contrast, imagine the consistent delight of hearing, speaking, reading, and integrating an international heterogeneity of languages, beyond the official English and French, that reside all around us. While retaining its English-language focus, this brand new, summer 2018 Issue 33 of carte blanche celebrates linguistic diversity, particularly in light of being based in Montreal, Quebec. This issue showcases a handful of exceptional authors’ reactions to relationships between languages—the joys of multilingualism, the creative potential of language slippage, the complexities of language acquisition, the inventive scope of neologism, and much more. Read more →
Yellow Roses
Grow Up, Pedro
Colored blocks on the floor. Childrens’ voices rising and falling. Alphabet posters on the walls. The boy is stimulated by all this newness. He marvels at Rebecca’s platinum blonde hair, the blue of David’s eyes, the pigmentation of Abigail’s skin. These are not the children of his neighborhood. Read more →
from the Egyptian Book of the Dead
1) In it the overseas people code people’s head searched for the nile people’s code despite the burying of the desert strict justice.
2) One wishes that Tehuti, [the strengthened heads of the moon], will remain not forgotten but supported, and a fresh soft cycle of people of mixed blood should be made kings.Read more →
NPC (Non Player Character)
from Tracking Animal (a survival + the tracker’s marginalia)
This poem comes after Jacques Derrida’s essay L’Animal que donc je suis (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2006), while “the tracker’s marginalia” is imagined and glossed from The Oxyrhynchus papyri by Bernard Pyne Grenfell & Arthur Surridge Hunt (London Egypt Exploration Society, 1898), a lengthy exegesis of, among other texts, a fragment of Sophocles’s play Ichneutae (The Trackers). Read more →
The Haunted Macaulay House
Stone
The children are scattered hens
in the November playground,
pecking at the remnants of play.Read more →
Whistle Like the Wind
It starts in true black. Then the song comes in. It reminds me of something from The Shining. Old piano. The light fades up. A stereo plays, nineties Panasonic. A hand reaches in and turns the wrong knob.Read more →
Dissemination
The ocean has a purpose.
Saying The past is the past is useless. Read more →
Bagoong Ni Uncle Dan
Wild Geese Flying West
It’s 3:30 p.m. and the fidgety Korean nine-year-old girl across the desk is telling me that when she grows older she wants to wash dishes because she likes the task. The next second, she tells me she doesn’t like school because her teacher is mean. She tells me this every week. Her English is just like any other young Canadian kid’s, marked by the occasional extra third-person s on first person verbs and things like ‘boughten’ and ‘goed’. Read more →