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The United States of Wind documents a free-spirited journey through the American Midwest and on to the woods of Pennsylvania.
Table des matières
Prologue of the Wind
Chapter One
Flight
Montreal, Philadelphia, Cincinnati
Chapter Two
Northwest
Cincinnati to Indianapolis
Chapter Three
North-Northwest
Indianapolis to Chicago
Chapter Four
East
Chicago to Elkhart
Chapter Five
East
Elkhart to Cleveland
Chapter Six
East-Northeast
Cleveland to Lake Pymatuning
North-Northeast
Lake Pymatuning to Warren
Chapter Seven
East
Warren to Williamsport
Chapter Eight
South
Williamsport to Harrisburg
Chapter Nine
Flight
Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Montreal
A propos de l'auteur
Daniel Canty is a Montréal-based writer and film director who works in literature, film, theatre and design, and new media. Canty collaborated with the pioneering multimedia studio DNA Media in Vancouver, and directed the inaugural issues of
Horizon Zero, the Banff New Media Institute's website on the digital arts in Canada.
Canty's first book,
Êtres Artificiels (Liber, 1997), explores the cultural history of automatons in American literature. He is also the author of the genre-bending novel
Wigrum (La Peuplade, 2011; translated by Oana Avasilichioaei, Talonbooks, 2013) and has devised several award-winning collaborative books:
Cité selon (2006),
La Table des Matières (2007), and
Le Livre de Chevet (2009), reflecting on urban life, gastronomy, and sleep. From 2002 to 2005, he co-directed the poetry magazine
C'est Selon.
His film work includes the oneiric
Cinema for the Blind (2010) and
Longuay (2012), which blends the gaze of an ancient French abbey with that of a tablet computer. He also conceives poetic interfaces for the web and live installations, including Bruire (2013), a voice-activated poetry-reciting machine, and the libretto for Operator (2012), an alphanumeric automaton by Mikko Hynninen.
Canty has held residencies at Green College (UBC), Passa Porta (Brussels), and Simon Fraser University. He currently teaches dramatic writing at the National Theatre School of Canada and event design at Université du Québec à Montréal.
Résumé
Raise the windsock. Read the compass. Ride where the wind wills it.
Late 2010. From the end of fall to the beginning of winter, Daniel Canty becomes a wind seeker. Aboard the Blue Rider, a venerable midnight-blue Ford Ranger crested with a weathervane and a retractable windsock, he surrenders himself to the fluidity of air currents. The adventure leads him and artist driver Patrick Beaulieu from the plains of the Midwest up to Chicago, the Windy City, into the wind tunnel linking the Great Lakes, through the cities of lost industry of the Rust Belt, only to veer off into Amish pastoralia, and to the forests of Pennsylvania, Civil War land, where fracking is stirring up the ghosts of the first oil rush.
Canty creates a gentle road book, a melancholy blue guide written in an airy, associative prose, where images coalesce and dissipate, carried away through the outer and inner American landscape. The book, mixing the tropes of road narrative, poetic fabulation, and philosophical memoir, reaches towards images on the horizon of memory, to find out where they come from, while coming to the foreordained realization that, wherever memory may lead us, its images will be long gone when we get there and most probably were never even there at all. The book’s through-line is about this emotional reality of images, the ways in which they take hold upon us and carry us back to the deep narrative of self. Clocking in at 160 pages, most readers don’t realize that the adventure spans only ten days, and that The United States of Wind is, in a very real way, a journey through a fold in time.
“I read this book as an essay, a method of thought. Canty doesn’t propose as much a theory of wind as a map of reflections on what emptiness holds, on what the imperceptible space between us occupies … The true object of this book’s love, or quest, is not a weather phenomenon, but rather something more akin to the American soul.”
– Valérie Lefbvre-Faucher, Revue Liberté
