Updates and Changes

August 30, 2010

posted by Caroline Picard

So–as of September 1st, the blog is going to change it’s format. I will no longer be posting as often as I have been. Instead there will be different days for different bloggers. It will (eventually) change it’s name to the Lanter Daily. Like our website, there are a number of changes going on. Which is super exciting. In the meantime, and until Wednesday I’m going to sign  off.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for sorting the often-random excerpts, postings and links that I have so far provided. I’ve loved this aspect of the project. I am nevertheless thrilled about it’s new incarnation. The idea is this new version will only talk about things going on in the space, or tanjential aspects of the space (for instance, we anticipate there being artist interviews, and articles pretaining to them, or to the books we sell etc). So. Hang on to your hats. And stay tuned.

All the best,


These Are Not My Memories

August 28, 2010

posted by Caroline Picard


posted and written by caroline picard


And then they ate the body.




Lydia fled to camp.
She had thick and dirty ankles.
She turned into a bear.
Rar rar RAR!

posted and written by caroline picard

the continuation…

The Witch-craft Substance





posted and written by caroline picard

something i’m working on/messing around with….

When someone dies you adopt what they didn’t finish.

Upon the death of her biological mother, Lydia inherited many ghosts—the ghost of her mother, the ghost of her mother’s mother, the ghosts of her mother’s mother’s mother. The influence of these spirits led to any number of confusing interior sentiments. Upon the death of her biological mother, Lydia was pulled in many invisible directions.

Nevertheless, she had felt the ghosts before her mother died—hanging around like buzzards in the hospital room. As Lydia trimmed her mother’s fingernails, she felt the ghost of her grandmother fanning herself on the spare, plastic chair in the corner. Her grandmother felt to be bored. The aura of her boredom permeated the room in pyschic waves that were, surprisingly, deflected by Lydia’s own physiological impression. Lydia was aware of imprinting something new on her mother’s consciousness—her mother who lay, prone, suffering. The sweet old bat was skeletal beyond recognition with feet too-large and pigeon-toed and numb; her head looked giant in proportion; her belly swollen with lymphatic fluid; her lungs they cried like mawing cats when she breathed, filling as they were every hour with more lymphatic fluid.

Grandmother Ghost sat still in a yellow suit, nyloned legs in black pumps tucked up under, unmoved, chewing gum, ripe with perfume.

Her daughter needed and needed and needed and Lydia saw all the hungry holes in her mother’s heart, riddled as it was with starving toothy mouths, each one whining it wanted to so bad badly. Because the ghost-mother never fed them, not one of those mouths—
no no no
That dear grandmama: instead she had long ago planted the seeds of those many mouths in her baby’s heart. She planted them when Lydia’s mother was a little girl, before Lydia was born.

How? you ask.
When the child has reached the age of two, slice into the lower part of your gut, just above the ovary, in the lower intestine. Cut beyond the epidermal, past the muscle. Collect the pitch blood in a glass jar. Stored in the fridge, it’ll keep many days. Over the course of the child’s second year, you are to put a teaspoon of this coagulated paste in each and every meal.

The paste is full of small parasitic eggs. These eggs travel to the child’s heart and one out of one million will roost there, hatch and graft onto the child’s heart. They are eternally ravenous, impossible to sate. They feed off the bloodstream, intervening at the place between the left hand (where energy is drawn into the body) and the right hand (where energy is put out). They feed off that energy. In feeding they desire more. They shit into the blood stream. Their shit collects in the lower intestine, where, over the years it ferments and bubbles. The residue of that pitch steam intoxicates the interior mind, enhancing intuition and self-deception.
Like her grandmother, her mother had a hungry hungry thing for a heart.

Good thing Lydia had bits of bread in her pocket and she fed the little mouths of her mother’s heart over and over and over again, placing these small bits of bread—a little wet and spongy—she placed them in her mother’s left hand where the body drank them through the epidermal layer, into the bloodstream—to the heart.
Additionally, Lydia sat still, lullabied, pet, spoon-fed, consoled, wiped the sick from the brow of her beloved. Tenderness. Patience. Separation.

Those things she’d learned from the man she visited in the dark room, the one who sat with her as she wept under blindfolds. The secret man. He had given her a purse full of breadcrumbs.

The ghost of Lydia’s grandmother was not tender, but sat in the corner in a yellow dress, younger than Lydia had ever seen her, the ghost sat blowing stray hair out of her face, waiting for her daughter to die. She often sighed, and sometimes disappeared entirely.

When her mother urinated the room went rank with the smell of gasoline.

posted by Caroline Picard

Here is a link to Devin’s reading!

here are some images from two new spaces that we looked at….

and the upstairs….where we might possibly put the gallery space?

and the creepy basement…

Or. The Other Space. With a pre-existing bar (which would be amazing, of course)–

and the other upstairs apartment that would function as the gallery-space (there is also an apartment behind the bar which could, ostensibly, be the bookstore-space)