aisyalam

nosehair thunders at the leader of a massive gnomish army
nosehair stays with an absolute bain
nosehair passes a hairy type monster
nosehair brings in very gross
nosehair stares at blocking my sense of love
nosehair plucks out a narrative made up of a number of poems revolving around the life of jack
nosehair throbs because of in place
nosehair is
nosehair crawls into a great way to show unkeen people all about eu science and photos would
be good for that

Well, I did have a terrific time with Leevi Lehto’s programs today, making no less than nine pieces of various sorts with the Google Poem generator and its counterpart Googlism. Cyborganically, some are of course better than others, but just as with “Your Personal Poet,” described in an earlier post, enough tinkering with the input and parameters can lead to some really interesting and odd things transpiring.

The Fulbright gig is clearly good for me in so many ways (and will be even better for all of us once the baby’s health is completely back to normal). Beyond the cultivation of new knowledge and skills, and otherwise having a great space to work in, also able to make up for lost time in terms of being up-to-date with what’s happening, which will only be useful when it comes time to write the follow-up book to Prehistoric Digital Poetry, which Jorge Luiz Antonio and I have agreed to compose together when the time comes—I’m guessing we’ll make a go of that project in 2007… Once I’ve recovered from this one, which has in many ways kept me out of the contemporary loop to a large degree…

All of the files for Prehistoric are now prepped, reviewed, and ready to be sent. I’m waiting a couple more hours to send ‘em over, in the off-chance that I hear back about a couple of minor dangling matters, like Pedro Barbosa’s approval on the translations of the various Syntext poems. It may be that I’ll have to re-ship a few replacement files in the next few days, but hopefully very few. I was delighted to finally hear from Carole McCauley this morning, recovering from surgery in Greenwich, CT, and will hopefully have her blessings regarding use of a few quotes from her informative 1974 book Computers & Creativity before the night is through. A message also came in from Charles Bernstein, saying that he liked Baldwin’s Preface to the book, that it would be good for the book and the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series to include it. This pleases me immensely, as I really wanted to have a Foreword (or Preface) from a peer to make it complete. Having Sandy be that person is great; he and I met on the first day of my life as a Ph.D. student in an intimate and remarkable seminar led by Pierre Joris (in which the core text for the semester was John Clarke’s From Feathers to Iron). Sandy and I in a lot of ways are not so similar, although we do share some common interests. His background was postmodern theory (I remember Teresa Ebert calling him an “unrepentant deconstructionist” in a theory seminar), mine postmodern practice (and lifestyle). We began to bond after he and his wife attended a crazy performance I gave (with tons of digital and sensory effects) at the now defunct Albany Center Gallery. I lent him Nate Mackey’s Bedouin Hornbook, he laid some CDs on me, and we began to seriously commune with the AWOPBOP collaborative writing group on the Daedalus network system at SUNY-Albany. Shortly thereafter, we formed a splinter faction with Belle Gironda and Eric Douglas, called ourselves Purkinge (listen here), and holed up for a year in the Daedalus room and in recording studios, producing 100s of pages of collaborative texts and recordings before he split for NYU to get his doctorate. Over the years we’ve done some more online writing collaborations and performed together with a T.A.Z. group called 9 Way Mind at E-POETRY 2001. Now he’s the director for West Virginia U’s Center for Literary Computing, has done all sorts of great work (including raising a family with 2 kids), & it just makes a ton of sense to have him build a knowledgeable context for the book at its start (& not just because he is one of about 4 people who have read it all). I surely hope that this last-minute addition meets with the approval of everyone, & wonderful to get a blast of fresh energy at the very end of this decade old project.

MMU was a ghost town all day. In the afternoon, Stella came with me in the office because Amy had to take Aleatory to the hospital because all the clinics were closed for Chinese New Year; diagnosis: bronchitis and thrush, & no fun for anyone. After making art for awhile, and playing with the gecko that was nestled in the bookshelf, Stella got antsy so we wandered over to the library to see if it was open (it wasn’t). Along the way we found some foot-long brown hard pods on the ground, which we then used as drum sticks, tapping on everything we walked by (metal posts, gutters, staircases, etc.): great sounds, especially in the hollow (indoor/outdoor) buildings like the one my office is in. Our parade lasted about ten minutes, and I was sorry that I didn’t have the mini-disc recorder with me. Next time there’s a school break (April, I think) we’ll do our wandering gamelan again, and use it in July’s installation (which I’m starting to brew conceptually already).

Moving onward in the tropical heat. Tomorrow’s opening a newness to look forward to…

interstitial entry, much enjoying Leevi Lehto's Google Poem generator:


feedback assaults at a gift
feedback talks to precious to us
feedback reflects upon welcome at patient community
feedback comes back to not for sissies
feedback swings into never
feedback rises to more effective when?
feedback asks for always welcome
feedback drifts about in always wanted
feedback strides reactive communication
feedback stops matters
feedback speaks to important to us here at womack army medical
feedback knows valuable to us
feedback clutches a
feedback is stirred by important
feedback says to valuable to us at American pearl
feedback brings our letters column
feedback presses valued
feedback is
feedback assaults at important to us at omex technologies
feedback runs critical
feedback sneers to from new customers
feedback foretells the control of a system by reinserting into the
feedback colours greatly appreciated and will help us improve our
feedback brings off cool
feedback takes needed
feedback feels a critical part of the communication process
feedback drowns in important to us
feedback picks up important for us
feedback chooses welcomed
feedback is waiting for important to us you can send e
feedback plants a gift stephen c
feedback leaves appreciated
feedback smoothens with wanted
feedback stops at more effective when?
feedback departs good
feedback peeps out from important please help us with your comments and suggestions as we work to design this new integrated technology services department

feedback powders appreciated and welcomed
feedback stays on in impractical provide auditory feedback
feedback buries keenly awaited
feedback tolls claw
feedback is rippled by back
feedback beats important to us here at womack army medical center
feedback has for leaders too
feedback sets a necessity
feedback covers greatly appreciated
feedback endeavours to engage critical to improving performance
feedback bores never necessary
feedback never speaks to from mostly new customers
feedback sits upon a big deal at great river
feedback sneers to the control of a system by reinserting into the system the results of its performance

feedback sings welcome return to index
feedback strives for crucial
feedback loiters in greatly appreciated and will help us improve our product and service
feedback is drowning in for optimal performance of the workers
feedback looks to too late
feedback displays welcome
feedback is bored by an essential element of learning and improvement

Compiled 1/31/2006 5:49:51 AM GMT by CF

The eve of completion and most everything is falling into place. I just rec’d permission to use Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton’s excellent computer rendering of a 1970s Laurens Schwartz poem, and Sandy Baldwin did a couple of hours ago send a very interesting preface for the book, which I’m about to send over to the editor for his opinion.

Today worked just a couple of hours and finished all but the concluding section and footnotes of ch. 5. Everything has been re-read and is in good shape. I have a couple more footnotes to add tomorrow about contemporary work (PennSound, K. Silem Mohammad, Wilton Azevedo), and then I will electronically ship the files over to Tuscaloosa on time. The only things missing are a couple of permissions for use of images. One is for Cage’s work (Harvard U Press has not yet responded to my fax) and the other is for Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim’s Boolean Image/Conceptual Typewriter piece, which was part of the 1970 SOFTWARE exhibit at the Jewish Museum. It’s a great image, and important to the study, so hopefully I’ll figure out a way to get it in.

Someone pointed me in the direction of a discussion that has been transpiring on the POETICS listserv (Buffalo, archives available via EPC) regarding electronic/digital writing, so I went and looked at the exchanges. Basically B.K. Stefans is teaching a course on e-writing at Brown and was fishing for references to fresh texts to show students. This opened up a small can of worms regarding the definition of digital writing etc., and I was wishing that my book was out – as it would give the various parties involved something more to go on. Hopefully it will be useful to such discussions in the future…

I also noticed that Lori Emerson has proposed an MLA session on Digital Poetry. I’ll be interested to see if this makes the cut. If it were a regular session, I’d think about sending in a proposal, but since inclusion of special sessions on the conference program is iffy, and sending in a proposal is like gambling anyway, and time here is precious, and, and, and, well, I won’t take the chance.

Chinese New Year is happening, otherwise, and very quiet around these parts the past few days, and will be until Wednesday. We have been laying low; took (and posted) a bunch of pictures over the weekend, and shot a bit of video of a Lion Dance this afternoon. I’ve been thinking about picture and text blogging quite a bit, and though not posting here (as usual) on the weekend, read a few and trying to get to know my way around the tech a little better. Thanks to G. Huth, who is coaching me a bit, I have a counter and traffic monitor, which will be informative to watch.

Then what will I do? A grand list is forming: make plans for collaboration and production of works on campus, prepare a few lectures for students, renovate my home page, re-lauch the “Moby-Dick” database poem, create texts for digital performance and experimentation, &ccccccc. So Stay Tuned!

CF

It had to happen eventually, and I don't know a better way to say it than I got Poe'd this week on Jack Kimball's blog. The reference to Poe relates to a project engineered by Ben Friedlander I was involved with many years ago. As detailed extensively in Simulcast: 4 experiments in criticism, in 1995-96 BF usurped some of E. Allan P.’s glorious criticism, and replaced names in the essays with contemporary authors. Much of this work was published in a somewhat irreverent (and wholly refreshing) e-zine I put together at the time called Descriptions of an Imaginary Universe (BF has conveniently posted links to some of the essays at http://www.umit.maine.edu/~ben.friedlander/DIU.htm; issues are archived in their entirety at the EPC).

Anyhow, I don’t know Kimball, except for that he published poems of mine in a NYLA issue of an e-zine called The East Village. Well, blogger that I now (at least temporarily) am, I found his site, Pantaloons: Tykes on Poetry, and was *very* humored to see a recent posting in which I am described as “an applied mathematician at the Imperial Normal School of Myramar” who “is developing a package of algorithms designed to spot specific types of text manipulation” because the FBI is “interested in ways of authenticating digital texts presented in Southeast Asian poetry journals,” which never would had existed if I had just stayed at home with idle fingers: http://pantaloons.blogspot.com/archives/2006_01_01_pantaloons_archive.html#113812188380059865.

I fairly quickly figured out that Kimball had taken an article about digitally altered photographs by Nicholas Wade that ran in that day’s NY Times, titled “It May Look Authentic; Here's How to Tell It Isn't,” and for some reason decided to change it to be about poetry. You go, blogger! (That’s what I get for becoming one, and sharing these activities with the world). How I became a name involved is beyond me, but since no malice is apparent I’m completely charmed, & soon after discovering it shared the spoof with several of my MMU colleagues, who of course have never seen (or imagined) anything of the sort…

I checked out a number of blogs in moments of downtime, digging Patrick Durgin’s especially. I got a kick out of J. Spahr’s blog, but mainly because of Bill Luoma’s (sometimes lengthy) interjections of code. I couldn’t really figure out what it was all about, but thought it was cool anyway. I know Bill has been a programmer for a long time, and while I appreciate his reticence in talking about it I’m always wondering what he’s up to (something interesting, no doubt).

Otherwise, it was another focused sedentary day with the chair, desk, and manuscript, repairing sentences every so often. Only the concluding chapter and appendix to go, then a whole lot of time and space will begin to open up, which will be partially filled by prepping lectures and such but will also enable new multimedia projects. One idea that I had today, which I really want to follow up on, came while I was proofing the 4th chapter (“Alternative Arrangements for Digital Poetry”) which covers “fringe” prehistoric forms of digpo, including audio poems. In that section I mention that, “I have yet to encounter a digital poem in which interactivity is engaged by the viewer’s spoken voice.” So maybe that’s something worth exploring. My daughter Constellation is completely hooked on her recently acquired “Nintendogs” Nintendo game, in which she can train her virtual dog tricks by speaking to it (the dog avatar) repeatedly, so it seems like this sort of thing could be done, given the right technological circumstance. Maybe it could not be done (without explicit instructions) on the WWW (yet), but certainly possible on a stand-alone machine with a properly rigged and registered microphone. There are specialists in both audio and games here, and I’ll have to check in with them about it. Since poetry pretty much began as a spoken form, and continues in some parts to be a vital force as an oralized endeavor, this idea makes great sense to me. If crafted properly, the spoken links/commands would become a type of poem themself. Well, I have some other less involved ideas about poems I want to make using TRAVESTY, and was glad to discover that the MMU library has the OED on CD-ROM, so will get busy with investigations having to do with the prefix “Cyber-” (probably a collaboration with Amy, since we’re now denizens of Cyberjaya), and need to conduct a comparative etymology of the words mosque and mosquito as well. We are absorbed in our surroundings, recording everything possible, reading stories and news from the Muslim world…

Definitely rearing to go on some new schemes, and beginning to envisage them in my brain. The whole country is about to go on a 4-5 day holiday (depending on where you live) for Chinese New Year. By the end of it, a new year—set of years—will be dawning for me as well.

Gong Xi Fa Cai, CF

1/26

:One of Clemente Padín’s early digital visual poems, Noigandres (1992), kindly sent yesterday.

Today was a day of a different kind of work spirit and response to effort altogether. Like a corner was turned and everything was exciting and rejuvenating again. I don’t really know why, either, although it probably has something to do with nearing an end to all these arduous chapters of my life. Up early, dawn run through construction and around the school’s football field, and—thanks to the graces of the extraordinary, selfless, care-giving Amy—in the office by 9:30 after having already done some work at home. Quickly edited the timeline of digital poetry 1959-1995, and then spent the day reading the two longest chapters (text-generation, visual works), 160 pages or so, and finding some problem (including a few major typo-type errors, like a not where none should be, and missing t at the end of though) every five pages or so. I guess what was happening was that reading the whole thing through was exciting. I’ve been saying the past few months that it doesn’t even seem like I wrote this book, given all of the edits that have been made, the down time between writing and reading certain sections, and so on. Weirdly, unexpectedly, I was surprised by the sophistication of some of the observations it contains, and was glad that I was so focused on the project at certain times that certain revelations came through at those points; if I were to have to do it again, or was just starting now and had to do it quickly, surely it wouldn’t be the same. Perhaps this is true for any book of criticism/observation? It’s not that I don’t know the work (I do remember it all vividly) or am not an expert about it (I probably am). But instead of being worn out by it, today I was energized, and didn’t walk back to the apartment in the kind of haze that I’ve been accustomed to lately, even though the work itself was much the same. Well, it’ll be out of these hands in a week, and you (whoever) will have to let me know what you think once it hits the shelves in a year…

Email was quiet, and I didn’t get distracted by all the blogs until a few minutes ago, when I had to go see the latest flix by mongibeddu. Surprisingly, Mr. Jim Behrle (who I was glad to find out is also a Red Sox fan) had already (somehow) found my post from last night, & had posted a comment. Although I’m unashamedly not writing this for any audience, but rather to keep a log for myself (and perhaps the good folks who are my sponsors), I really do like getting comments, just like I really like when some unknown person—who has somehow found the picture at random (I’m not using tags yet)—puts one of my flickr images in their favorite bin. I don’t know quite how these things happen, but am glad when they do…

Wong gave us a copy of the FCM Interface Design book today (sponsored by Nokia), which spells out the professor’s pedagogical and creative views, and showcases top-notch student works. I’ve got to find a way to import some of these students over to NJIT! A very professional collection, and something to aspire towards creating to celebrate the talented students we do have back in Newark.

So, things are sailing now, on schedule, and I’m enthused about the weeks & months to come. Malaysia, despite the kids’ malaises, is treating us well. Great, inexpensive, Indian lunches at the FCM café (Sau Bin joined Amy, Stella, and Alea at the table today), a comfortable monastic office in which to work, excellent clouds and breezes, all very nice; the only annoying aspect to any of it are the damn mosquitoes (and the conscious threat of dengue that accompanies them).

That’s it for now -- CF

1/25

In the thick of reading the book for the last time before indexing/page proofs, which is rather unglamorous and really tiresome. Plus I’ve been up since 4 a.m., so kind of brain dead, with not much to say. Having sick kids is no fun…

Made all of the known fixes that the manuscript needed today (from last week’s notes), and solidified my MMU lecture schedule. Not too much time for anything else, although I did read a few recent entries of Bob Grumman’s Po-X-cetera blog regarding the anthology Writing to be Seen, a humourous blog from a NY poet (I think Jim Behrle is the guy’s name), and even a bit of Silliman’s blog, and just finished writing the travelpod entry for our weekend in KL that I started a couple of days ago.

Funny email from Clemente Padín (Uruguay) today. I’ve been in touch with him recently because one of his images is in my book, and recently panicked upon discovering that the image I had intended to use was from 1998 (the book purports to cover the era 1959-1995). So I asked him to send an earlier piece, to which he replied, “I can’t even remember my name and you expect me to remember the dates of my poems?” Anyhow, we worked it out, and I should be able to get a legitimate image in their (or, alternatively, say the original image was made earlier!).

A few exchanges with Ben F., my photo muse, too, who wasn’t aware of aisyalam until this morning. He was glad to hear about it, but also commented,

It's too bad the blog has killed the listserv. i always did enjoy the give and take of that. i do sometimes write comments for blogs, most recently at Mark Scroggins Culture Industry (http://kulturindustrie.blogspot.com/) some stuff about poetryand philosophy. But the comment fields are not well archived, they tend to disappear with blogger glotches and spam eradication sometimes does 'em in too. Besides which, it's a much more top-down form of dialogue than ye olde listserv.

His nostalgia for listservers was not echoed by another (kinda grumpy) scholar (who I will not name) I’ve been in touch with recently, who sent a note that clearly was not pleased with the route listservs had taken in recent years:

Also, the demise of listserv'slike webartery (which for the last years has been completely dominated bychat-freaks, shameless self-promotors, andwould-like-to-be-but-have-no-chance-in-hell-of-ever-becoming "artists") didn't help to keep up interest. Is there any listserv out there which*is* interesting?

For my own part, given all of the crazy creative & critical activities and other demands of my life, I haven’t been able to maintain a focus on any listserv in years, and have not really missed it. And the broadcast (& potential, but for me minimal for response) dynamic of blogging is alright, although I will admit that this has quickly become an obsession. Like Monday night, no matter how tired I was, I had to post Monday’s entry: it couldn’t wait until Tuesday a.m. Well, we’ll see how it all unfurls in the long run. I was charmed to see – thanks to PJ’s Nomadics blog – that our old friend & co-conspirator Maria Damon now has a blog (Nomad Ink, http://nomadink.blogspot.com/), so it does seem to be a mighty trend, even though quite a few of us are coming to it late, like a second wave.

So, Blog on, you crazy poets (& don’t forget to backup your thoughts somehow because we all know systems crash). Speaking of crashing, I’ve got to. G’night from Cyberjaya, CF

1/24

Just a very quick note this evening, as now as one daughter's health has improved the other (dear Constellation) has a high fever (which could happen anywhere but seems at least a bit more perilous while abroad). We did--without incident--attend her school orientation today, at which a backward incident occurred. The teacher, Ms. Leedham, was introducing all the students in her first grade class, by name, country of origin, and birthdate, and read Stella's b-day as February 9, when in fact it is September 2nd. Whichever one of us filled out the form followed the Western method of numerical dating (which much of the rest of the world doesn't seem to follow).

I finished the bibliography with enough time to spare to spend a good part of an hour exploring the flickr.com site, and have to admit that it is a really brilliant hypertext. I really dig the way the system works, allows tags (which really make the hypertext happen), makes clusters, enables photostreams, etc.) I'm quite glad that Ben Friedlander turned me on to this site, and I'm also enamored by his obsessiveness in posting. I shouldn't forget to mention that there are a lot of stunning photographs up there. I suppose there are people who read blogger.com the same way, but as I'm tiring of reading and writing words all the time, to be flooded with images is welcome refreshment. Just as bad for the eyes, of course.

Interesting out-of-the-blue correspondence from a fellow named Michael Harold, who is interested in ergodic textuality. Apparently he has built some hypertexts with Harvey Bialy's poems, which I haven't but look forward to checking out. Will report on them (and give addresses later).

Crossed paths with Sau Bin today, who tells me that for the first time ever the Documenta exhibition (Germany) curators have come to SE Asia, and tomorrow they will be at R.A.P. gallery. I was surprised at both of these facts, but a good development for Malaysian artists for sure.

Visit from Wong for dinner, lovely to have company at the apartment.

Like I said, quick tonight; time to sleep, CF

1/23

Even though I got off to a really late start (didn’t get back to Cyberjaya from our weekend away until early afternoon), managed to complete another 10 pages of the bibliography this afternoon. By tomorrow afternoon it should be done, & I’ll move on to reading the printout of PDP for the last time before sending it off to the publisher. I’m sure there’ll be a few more little tasks to do after that but presumably nothing major. I need to spend less time looking at little letters on Microsoft Word, as my eyes are puffy and weary even after a weekend offline.

More props to Geof Huth, who read one of the appendices of the book (“Code Works”) over the weekend and sent over some helpful insights from Schenectady. Also, some correspondence back and forth with Sandy Baldwin, who—among his many talents is mastermind behind West Virginia U’s Center for Literary Computing—may very well pen a Forward to the thing. We’ll see…

For those of you who are following the saga, Aleatory is doing fine thanks to the pink liquid antibiotics, and we very much enjoyed our outings in Kuala Lumpur, which included attending an artist’s talk by Kok Siew Wai at R.A.P. (Rumah Air Panas) gallery in the Ayer Penas neighborhood. As mentioned before, one of my colleagues at MMU, Sau Bin, is one of the coordinators of the gallery, and coincidentally he recently met Siew Wei, who has just returned from several years living in upstate New York, and invited her to show her work and speak there. It wasn’t an easy place to find, far off the tourist maps, but we’re glad we made the effort. Siew Wei graduated from Alfred University (where Amy had a residency last year), and also from SUNY-Buffalo’s Media Studies department, where she was a student/acolyte of our friend Tony Conrad. So, beyond our shared interest(s) in experimental art in general, there were some finite personal links as well. For about 90 minutes, Siew Wei showed some footage of performances she had given and exhibits she had taken part in, and talked about the vibrant communal and collaborative spirit of the arts/artist networks upstate. Her motive, in part, I think, was to try and kick-start the same type of spirit here, where the scene seems to be at least a bit disorganized and there is not a lot of institutional support for fringe forms. Well, we enjoyed meeting her, and were sorry we couldn’t stay for the second talk, by Wing (Lim Kok Yoong), who had just returned from England, but the children were getting antsy & it was quite hot in the gallery, which was of the bare-bones/d.i.y. variety. We met a few of the locals, who were quite friendly and engaged, including a Butoh dancer, Lee Swee Keong, who invited us to a private performance he is giving later this week.

The other art high-point was our trip the next day to the Islamic Arts Museum, which is an incredible place, with a remarkable collection of art of all sorts (books, ceramics, weavings, jewelry, etc. Ever since my first visit to the museum in 2001, I’ve been very inspired by Islamic visual artists through the ages, the way they (literally) use many thin-lined frames in their work, and balance word and image, to mention just a couple of the aspects of the work that appeals to me. Serendipitously, the special exhibit on display was titled “Rhythm & Verses” (Irama & Puisi), which featured folios of poems from the 16th-19th centuries, some mind-blowing works for sure. I’ll have to write more about this visit, but not tonight…

Otherwise, I also checked out the “raw” music night at No Black Tie—a great jazz bar in KL—but was surprised that the music was actually not jazz at all but rather more like punk (which would have been much better if it wasn’t so run-of the-mill/retro). I’d seen an ad for the event on a website, which mentioned that a painter would be beside the stage making abstract paintings during the music, which led me to believe it would be more like an “outside” or improve jazz-jam, but instead a very loud and smoky atmosphere. Group names like “They will Kill Us All,” “Teenage Glory for the Wasted” should have been clues, perhaps, but the other groups had more ambiguous titles like “KL Post-Harmonic Quartet,” Akta Angkasa,” and “Rina Shukor ‘n’ Nasir Taff.” I hung out for awhile, sitting as far from the PA as I could, nursing a bottle of San Pellegrino, writing some observations. Siew Wei, who I’d mentioned the event to, had come with another fellow who was at R.A.P. & we commiserated about how the event didn’t match our expectations. But any night out in KL is cool, so who’s complaining!

Well, obviously I’m back online, tired eyeballs & all.

CF

1/20

I’m pleased to say that I was able to complete half of the bibliography formatting today, from Aaresth to Huth, which took about 6.5 hours work time without distraction. Of course I’d be happier to say that I’d finished the thing, but since it is a 24 page document, with a lot of minutiae to deal with (MLA handbook is not prepared to handle all the varieties of digital documents I’m dealing with, so have to be inventive and academically precise simultaneously), it is very time-consuming. For instance, how do you cite something like Sandy Baldwin’s “New Word Order,” an unpublished piece of software he created by usurping the code of a popular computer game? AH! It’ll all be done Soon enough.

Pleased to receive important permissions today, to use works by Jackson Mac Low, Ernesto Melo e Castro, and Baldwin, so the list of unauthorized work is down to four with just over a week to go before everything needs complete. Will be psyched to FedEx all of those letters to Tuscaloosa. My MySQL account at NJIT has been set up and is just sitting out there, waiting to be used…

One thing I forgot to mention earlier in the week is that I made my first (abbreviated) visit to the MMU library, to check out books that Amy might use for some art work; she asked me to pick up books on Malay architecture and gardens. I’d been in the library briefly before, with the rest of the family, but had never delved into the stacks. Searching for books is a bit complicated by the fact that the holdings of the library contain publications not only in English but also Malay and Chinese (each of which apparently has its own section?). The fact of the matter is that a large majority of the books focus on computers, so few books were available for the subjects Amy had asked me for. When I did a catalog search for architecture, 95% of the titles had to do with systems architecture! In any case, I decided—as is my wont in any library—to try and find a couple of specific Dewey decimal references, then scour the shelves to the left, right, above, and below that title for interesting books. Well, the books I was after (for which I’d only written down the number, and not the title), were not available, but as usual using this process I was able to find quite a few interesting books nonetheless(and discover a few surprises too). Instead of a book on gardens, I found a book on Malay ferns, which were near the animal reference books, where I found a kids book on pond life for Stella. Then, looking for books on buildings I ended up near the art and music books. I did obtain a couple of great illustrated books on Islamic art & architecture, and skimmed through the music books enough to want to know the process by which books are chosen and acquired. I was looking for books on Malaysian music and was shocked to find only books on Western music, including obscure titles like M. Stipe’s photo-documentary of Patti Smith, and books on the Velvet Underground and Sex Pistols, which was pretty strange. There were plenty of cool art books, which I’m sure we’ll go back to later. Had I had more time I would have just wandered up and down all of the stacks just to see what was there. Alas, since school is not in session the building closes at 5 p.m., and I’d arrived at 4:30 or so, so this investigation will be continued another time.

Short meeting today to further deliberate about the lectures I’ll be giving to students and campus community, and things seem to be working out to the satisfaction of everyone. Interestingly, one of the charges that emphasized today was the need for me to lecture to grad students about conducting research, which surprised me a bit. I take for granted that everyone uses a combination of WWW and book research, and that such leads to the production of text, but forget that not everyone has had the nearly two-decades of university meanderings that I have. So, because the students (and apparently faculty) are not producing a lot of pages, they want me to share my insights as to how to transform interest and ideas into solid writing. This should be an interesting task, to articulate my free-wheeling, intuitive research methods, and one that shouldn’t be too much of a problem once I put my mind to it, since if there is one thing I have done during the past decade, it is research.

Well, we’re heading to KL tomorrow for some more exploration and hopefully some relaxation too. I’ll transmit again when I have a chance.

CF

1/19

Good news from Alabama is that a preliminary evaluation of the quality of the illustrations that Ben Polsky and I prepared was positive. My editor still has to run them by his production chief, but I am encouraged by his initial response. Now if only I can get the rest of the permissions, and remain clear headed enough to formalize the bibliography and re-read the whole thing one last time I’ll be ready to move forward into new realms.

I'm in the right place for that. Today I attended seven different portfolio presentation sessions of the FCM, and though weary by the end, an instructive set of hours in terms of seeing how the different programs within the FCM function. I was impressed by how clearly the different areas of study are unique and defined (for the most part), and the quality of student work was remarkable. Profoundly struck by the reality that MMU is, without question, a really high-tech art school, with extremely high standards. The first year students (“foundation” level) begin with the basics: learning about color, “temperature” of image, space, order & balance, & about the different types of expression (i.e., “isms”) that artists have historically used. They practice, to begin with, by painting, drawing, making sandcastles, and other analog forms. The teachers make them do “character” studies by taking an everyday object and personifying them with traits of people they know. At the next level, students have the option to do more painting, 3-D sculptural modeling, make crafts, and other types of mixed media (analog) work. Then, a leap happens into technology, and students begin to do all sorts of CAD works, 3D modeling, digital signage, animations, all pretty much directed toward marketing, branding, and promotion of products (keep in mind that MMU was initially set up (in many ways) as a “feeder” school for businesses in Malaysia’s so-called Multimedia Super Corridor.

The projects assigned to the upper-class students are quite intensive, elaborate, and demanding. For the most part they are very well handled, although one professor commented to me that he feels like he sees the same type of aesthetics year-after-year. Despite this, the work on display (and the processes involved with it) goes far beyond the level of sophistication I usually encounter at home. But of course I teach at a public tech school and not a futuristic private art academy. Although it is difficult for me to qualify fairly what I experienced today, the VR and Interface Design projects were really astonishing. The VR students are using 3 different platforms to produce work: VRML (virtual reality modeling language), 3D RAD, and Virtools; 24 different projects were produced, where students created environments such as: driving simulators, virtual campus tours, a virtual Haj, football training, virtual makeup shop, time travel simulator, Batu caves tour, virtual homes, a zoo fo extinct animals, virtual rock concerts, shipwrecks, rainforests, haunted house, philharmonic hall, and human heart simulator. Each project involved a short paper, web page, sketchbook, A1 (oversized) boards, and pre-concept billboard. They each involve multiple subjects, levels, or users. A lot of work goes into researching, ideation, modeling, prototyping, and presentation; 5 principles are used: environment, contact, character, interaction, and integration. Focus, emotion, space/form, and orientation are emphasized. The Interface Design students are also subjected to rigorous standards, also with further emphasis on the treatment and submission of ideas. The skills of concept visualization are wildly demanding, as is the programming they are required to do in AutoCAD and 3D Max (not to mention Flash, which is of course compulsory). And not only are they required to design interfaces that are suitable for presentation on the WWW, but also on PDA – which really throws a wrench into the works, as the interface is so much smaller. This involves inventing new types of data input mechanisms, etc. But design is only part of it: functionality and usability are also stressed. The Digital Media students, who perhaps operate under the most undefined (or amorphous) rubric, are expected to practice accurate, entertaining, interactive design. Creating powerful visual expression and workable installations are the demands put on this group. The real task is to choose and configure, from all of the possibilities for expression available, a combination of different elements, and that is what the professors are teaching them to do. Perhaps the most interesting of all the projects I saw during this group’s session was a new type of DJ booth that one student (with a welding background) had devised: a one-piece metal stand to which a one piece dual turntable was affixed). The problems facing the professors, as it turns out, was to prevent the students from making impractical objects/installations. Most of them were rather large in scale, and would be difficult to easily produce (which becomes their charge in the coming semester). Well, to summarize I have to say that the rigor required of the students was eye-opening, and I was also impressed that all of the professors in the faculty take a day, trudging from studio to studio, to review each others’ student’s works; that the Dean of the FCM also cared enough to attend as many of the sessions as he could, and was stern in his commentary (“we have to be very critical”) was also notable. All in a day’s work, apparently, at Multimedia University.

Back to bibliographizing tomorrow, then a couple of days rest. Aleatory has come down with strep throat, and since we’re all running ragged at this point some down time is needed before the final push on the research project that I’ve been working on forever. OK, mas tardes, CF

1/18

Though today was without question my most productive yet, I have not much to report. Some appropriate correlation there, I’m sure. With few distractions presented (besides being up with Aleatory, who had a fever, for an hour in the middle of the night), I was able to get through all but the final chapter and the bibliography in terms of manuscript prep. There’s a small list of sections that have to be further reviewed, and I am awaiting the publisher’s evaluation about the diagrams, but otherwise all is A-OK. I am getting the hang of all of the formatting foibles and things are going quite smoothly. So I should be able to begin to focus on other endeavors before long.

The only extracurricular activity I engaged with at all was helping Richard Loranger submit his recently published We Press title to a several poetry contests back in the states (Paterson, Devil’s Kitchen, Binghamton). We Press is the poetic arts group that I co-founded with Ted Farrell in 1986, and over the years we’ve published Richard’s work in magazines, on CD, chapbooks, and video. Poems for Teeth, a hefty and potent book of poems (one for each tooth in Richard’s mouth), was a project we worked on for a couple of years that finally saw the light of day last fall. It is a tremendous book that, for some odd reason, has thus far received absolutely no critical attention in print (you can find a few mentions in other blogs if you look hard enough, and Bob Holman did list it as being one of the top 10 poetry books of 2005 on his WWW site). Though we tried to play by all of the rules for a change, such as sending out advance copies to industry reviewers (like Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal) months before the book was publicly available, and also sent out at least three dozen review copies to other poetry/media outlets, not a single word of response has been uttered in print. I wouldn’t be so dismayed by this if it was an average book, but it is far from that. To share my subjective view on the title, here’s what I wrote as a description of the book in the press release: “In addition to extraordinary poems, the book contains calligraphic representations of each poem prepared by the author and visual artist Eric Waldemar; it also contains musical scores and notations for songs within the poems. A diagram that charts the identity of each tooth appears at the outset, so that the book functions hypertextually as well. The volume, while lacking a CD-ROM, is nonetheless what poetry should be: a multimedia tour de force.” Not that sales of the book are lagging, mind you—Loranger is an awesome performer who always captivates an audience, who then want to take the words home with them—that’s not what this digression is about; we’re actually already making money on the book (how many small press titles can boast that?). I just wonder why no reviews? Are potential reviewers too busy writing poems? I think not, as journals seem to keep printing reviews. Perhaps they are confused about what to say about such an onslaught of language (which sometimes gets really weird)? Tell me, what does it take to get reviewed these days? How about a public plea: if anyone who reads this is interested in seeing the book and would consider writing a review, please drop me a line and I’ll get a copy to you. ‘Nuff said…

Tomorrow a.m. will sit in on the MMU FCM portfolio reviews, which should be interesting, then will continue plowing through the project at hand. Interesting conversation tonight with Amy, as we plot how I spend my time intellectually/artistically integrating here.

I’ll have more to say anon, for sure. Ciao, CF

1/17

Well, the good news is that I (seemingly miraculously) managed to make contact with Jasia Reichardt (via fax, thanks to an unnamed friend of John Cayley’s), and this morning rec’d permission to use materials from Cybernetic Serendipity in my book. REichardt, like a few others before her, questioned use of the term “Prehistoric,” which I suppose is reasonable. I have a section in the intro that talks about this nomenclature, which basically says that the work under investigation lays the groundwork for the masterpieces that do not quite yet exist (though the work unveiled in the study is certainly regarded as important). What I do not say, although hopefully it is read between the lines, is that prehistoric=historic in many ways. But I’m really not inclined to frame it that way at this juncture of the genre’s development. The WWW – the now primary delivery mechanism for digital poetry – is posited as a firm point of demarcation, so now a historical view is possible, and a prehistoric period can be identified. Hard to condense a few pages of deliberation on the matter into just a few sentences, but that’s the gist of it.

Also, through the publisher of one of her recent books, I may have a conduit to reach Carole Sperrin McCauley. But all attempts to track down Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim (or his estate) have come up empty, and kind of perplexed as to how to get permission to re-present “The Boolean Image/Conceptual Typewriter” in the book. There is absolutely no publication information in the SOFTWARE exhibition catalog (1970), so maybe contact the Jewish Museum (NYC), where the exhibit was launched, and see if I have their blessing? That might be good enough. Otherwise, I’m glad to report that I’m almost completely out of the woods as far as that part of the process goes…

Jim Andrews and Geof Huth supplied valuable clarifying information for me via emails: thanks, guys! On schedule with the ms review, just a few more days to go…

This morning I met with Dr. Raffi, chair of the FCM, and enjoyed a couple of hours of dialog with him, which began with a couple of Powerpoint presentations about MMU and the FCM. Facts learned: MMU has 16,348 undergrads and 1,812 grad students (from a total of 76 countries) on its 2 campuses (one here and one in Melaka). The school offers 108 courses in its 5 “Faculties” (Engineering/Hardware, Infotech/Software, Management, Creative Multimedia, Language/Communcation). The defined areas of the FCM are Digital Art, Media Innovation, Film & Animation, Interface Design, Virtual Reality, and E-Learning. MMU is 100% private and receives no gov’t funding (though the government suggests grants that the school should apply for). About 12 corporate sponsors are responsible for providing necessary resources. The university is involved with intensive international collaborations, particularly with universities in South Africa, Iran, Thailand, Japan, Singapore, and Vietnam. The faculty is not only expected to publish papers but also to produce award winning works. Raffi also showed me a couple of amazing animations made by MMU students, which are currently the benchmark for quality of production in the school—and probably will be for a couple more years at least.

We are charting out my activities while I’m in residence, and beyond the campus-wide lecture series on the history of digital poetry, I will also be presenting weekly talks to a range of students on a variety of topics during February, March, & April (details to be worked out during the next week or so). Then, on top of the research I’ll be immersed in, I will begin to lecture on a national and regional level, and, as I think I mentioned previously, my stay here will culminate in some sort of grandiose performance on campus. So, these months will be an intensely busy time (i.e., no partying with movie stars on pineapple islands; not that I ever thought it would be that).

Not much else transpired besides the doldrums of work, though Khong and Wong kindly took the whole family out for lunch at the Ericsson corporation headquarters here in Cyberjaya—a bright, shiny place where we encountered (and consumed) “Western” food for the first time in weeks. Though we love the Indian/Muslim café we usually take our lunches at during the week, it was a pleasant diversion from that routine. The place reminded me of Lucent’s campus in NJ, where I did a consultancy a few years back.

Well, the video de Campos sent last night was short and sweet – if he sends his approval perhaps I’ll post it up on the WWW somewhere. He also sent a picture of the holographic poem that he did with Julio Plaza in ’85. Holographic poetry is such a trip—too bad that it is so difficult to handle and impractical. But as the technology evolves, this may become less so. I know that the avant-garde students at MMU are quite interested in using holographic interfaces and imaging, so perhaps we’ll see more poems like this in the future. In my book I have an Appendix that discusses holography—Eduardo Kac, Richard Kostelanetz, etc., but not a lot has been done since the initial surge of work in the ‘80s. I suppose because the machinery is so inaccessible.

Well, that’s the report from here. Send news anytime, OK, CF

1/16

Another day on the Malaysian cyber-ranch, and word-by-word, byte-by-byte, moving closer to having a completed manuscript for Alabama. On deadline now (1/31), and working away on it during every possible moment: resolving issues of permissions, accuracy of quotations, and correct format. By the time Chinese New Year arrives, on the 29th, which is a major 3-day national holiday here, hopefully all will be finished (for the time being, anyway).

My distractions today came in the form of meeting some of the VIPs at Multimedia U. In the early afternoon, my colleagues Khong and Wong accompanied me to a meeting with the president of the University, Dr. GHAUTH JASMON, who interrupted his busy day for a brief lunchtime discussion and exchange of pleasantries. I conveyed to him my pleasure of being here, and was surprised to receive a nice gift from him (a carved wooden butterfly in a frame). He was in a hurry to have lunch with the school’s chancellor, so did not get to talk very much, but will hopefully cross paths again sometime. Later in the afternoon I was escorted by K & W to meet Dr. Chuah Hean Teik, who is Vice President 1 (R & D and Academic Development), Dean, Faculty of Engineering, and Director of the Centre For Research and Postgraduate Programmes at MMU. He’s a very jovial fellow who spent time in Arlington, Texas, as a Fulbright scholar, who was happy to tell tales of his road trips in the US, and tell me about various places he thought I should see in Malaysia. I almost had to interrupt him in order to explain what I plan to be working on while I am here (which I thought he would – and he did – find interesting). I had been prepared by my colleagues here to expect a series of formal meetings with the higher-ups, and that’s part of what’s happening this week. Tomorrow morning it continues, as I meet with Dr. Ahmad Raffi, who is Dean of the Faculty of Creative Multimedia (FCM, my department here). I anticipate that this meeting will involve more business than pleasure, but I welcome all discussions at this point.

Funny responses to my new look around campus (i.e., shorn head, pants and a tie), the look of shock of the FCM secretary (and our friend Leza), Dr. Ian Chai exclaiming (with some humor in his voice) that I no longer looked like a poet but an MMU faculty member, and (most humorously) Wong saying that I no longer looked like me, but perhaps like someone who my brother (which is exactly what Stella says to me every time I get a hair cut – but she knows my brother!). Well, believe it or not, I’m the same person, and in the long run it’s really not what you look like but what you do that defines you. Odd, though, how much looks really seem to count both at home and abroad.

Another long day comes to an end on a high note in the form of a sweet email (including permissions to quote) just in from Augusto de Campos. A movie, POESIA É RISCO (Poetry is Risk), taken from a laser exhibition of his poems in an open space (Avenida Paulista in São Paulo), is attached. Very cool!

amanha, amigos, GBSA, CF

1/15

Lucio Agra sent an interesting email after yesterday’s post (which he tried to, but couldn’t for some reason, send to the blog), regarding the word travesty in Portuguese:

“It is probably funny to know that in Portuguese the word Travesty may be easily mixed up with what in English could be expressed by "transvestite". There is virtually no other meaning for the word "travesti" in Portuguese than that who sends to someone who dresses up with the clothes of the opposite sex (mainly men with female clothes). The word has a noble origin in portuguese, initially meaning the simple metamorphosis of a persona dressed up with clothes or couverture from other person or animal. In "O Lobisomem" (The Werewolf) from Decio Pignatari (40s/50s), one of his first poems, the word is used to mean a man who lost his skin and borrow one from a dog. One more thing about Travesty. The same Decio Pignatari made some experiments on this kind of "stochastic text" in a time when Max Bense was doing the same in Germany... At last they came to the conclusion that the more a text have a great information rate, the less it is interesting as a result from this kind of combination. It seems that this tool is from great use as a way to discover virtual possibilities of a text (I, myself, made an experiment with one of my poems and the results where good as a source to another text) or reveal some hidden rhetorical aspects (as it is in Constitutional Texts, probably from all countries)…”

For those of you who don’t know his work, Lucio, a poet-professor in São Paulo, is a great performance artist and percussionist who has done some marvelous work with Powerpoint (of all programs). I notice that his WWW site is down, but you can find an example at http://arteonline.arq.br/museu/poesiadigital/agra/poemc.ppt.

I’ve also been having some valuable dialog the past few days with Pedro Barbosa, one of the great pioneers of digital poetry in Portugal. Pedro authored one of the first book-length studies about cyber-literature, A Ciberliteratura: Criação Literária e Computador (1996), which has a strong focus on poetry. I learned quite a bit by reading it (unfortunately it has never been translated into English). One of the programs that Barbosa’s book pointed me towards (he discusses it quite a bit) was a funny little program called “Your Personal Poet,” which will write little occasional poems after prompting you (the user) for a few bits of information. Of course the poems are generally of the Hallmark card variety, but as Barbosa shows in his book, one can subvert the typical purposes of the program by entering unconventional data. Or, if someone’s feeling lazy and needs a poem for a valentine’s day card, it works that way too. I’ve made little funny poems for my daughter Constellation with it, and she, in turn, at age 5, made a card for Amy & my 7th wedding anniversary last summer. Pictures of those poems I have posted at the top and bottom of this entry. The program used to be available on a WWW site called Shareware Bonanza that is no longer extant, but I have posted a .zip file of it (that I’ve used in my Digital Poetry courses) at http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/2005/403/POET.zip

Anyway, Pedro is helping me to improve the translations of poems I made with the terrific SYNTEXT program that he and Abílio Cavalheiro put together more than a decade ago. The program was initially published in an edition of the important French hypermedia journal Alire and was also included with PB and AC’s book Teoria do Homem Sentado. Now there is a version you can play with on the WWW at http://cetic.ufp.pt/sintext.htm. I also wanted to mention Barbosa’s most recent project, «Alletsator/RotaStella» which is also sounds very interesting, although I have not yet seen the DVD.

From a review by Emanuela Oliveira:

“Alletsator is an opera in hypermedia format which, for its authors, can best be
defined as a quantum opera, i.e. a game - interactive, three-dimensional - where
the real and the virtual are intertwined. Alletsator represents a hypermedia
hybrid, where the viewer is challenged (in an environment that aims to be
cosmic, magical, fantastic, onirical...) to tread the surface of a sequence
established only by him/herself. In fact, engaged in an endless journey, it is
an on-line narrative generated by an interface that allows potentially infinite
combinations. From the dramaturgy on which it is based we could foresee the
metaphor that best translates this work: a space ship of diverse routes, of
unexpected multilinear roads in potency. «Alletsator» is also a new media
artistic object, both product and agent of a cyberculture that promises to
revolutionize the world as we know it.

«Alletsator», a name that derives from the mirror projection of RotaStella
(route of the stars), shows us an intergalactic XPTO spaceship that transports
the survivors of humankind in search of a new inhabitable planet in the cosmos
(ORUTUF ORP) after the Earth has exploded. Alletsator breaks with the past. A
window that expands the real, in a global, complex, disperse perspective,
altering the orthodox form of work reception, by presenting itself as a
cybernetic technology, interactive, dynamic, hypertextual, stage of a
performance where the internaut is the protagonist, and where reality extends
itself towards the myth. Anaximandro Macromedia, a robot that paves the way to
the oracle, synthesizes the combinations of words randomly generated and
combined, thus altering the course of events. Alletsator is in the future; for
the moment, we have the promise of "Alletsator-XPTO.Kosmos.2001"", the
"original", in DVD-ROM, forthcoming in several university presses.”

see:
http://www.po-ex.net/alletsator/
http://www.po-ex.net/stella/

* * * * *

Well, a fairly quiet weekend here in the state of Selangor, but such was much needed. I did some professional work, nothing really worth reporting, enjoyed correspondence from the aforementioned folks as well as Don Byrd, Pierre Joris, and a few other friends and family. Got a chance to relax (instead of work) a few hours here in Cyberjaya, and take a trip over to Batu Caves in KL for the beginning of the Thaipusam festival (see the flix on flickr). We’ve been living here nearly four weeks now, and am compelled to say, finally, that Malaysia is a totally incredible place. The air, sky, light, people, food, birds, chameleons, technology: all wonderful! We’ve absorbed and learned so much in such a short time, a completely powerful experience in all ways. So far we’ve been lucky that our health has remained strong, and now knocking on cyber-wood that it stays that way. At least one recent case of dengue fever – a really serious affliction – on the Multimedia U campus has us all on our toes, mindful of every mosquito that buzzes by. Well, nothing to be done except to be aware, and careful, so that’s how we’re being these months…

OK, til next time, thanks for reading, CF

1/14

1/13

These days of clerical work are exhausting, and are quite frankly – though the end is (sort of) in sight –wearing me out (& can’t imagine that reading about the completely unglamorous routines of a scholar is all that interesting to anyone). Today, like so many others during the past two weeks, spent reviewing the manuscript, checking quote formation, &c.: not what I came here to (and will) do, which is creative multimedia. I found two or three more “fact checking” type problems that I had to hit up friends back in the states to assist me with. Pedro Barbosa reports that the translations of his & other works from the great anthology/program SYNTEXT have to be redone, etc. Fortunately, I was able to get through 4 (of the shorter) chapters of the book over the course of the week, which means I have about 6 to go; the bibliography will be toughest…

This should not be read as complaint, even if it sounds like that’s what it is. I’m/we’re blessed to be here, and are being treated very well in all respects. Another point of perspective: Today we had to make a quick trip back up to Stella’s school, to pick up her gear and deliver a check, and on the way home we passed by a terrible motorbike accident on the highway near Putrajaya, someone covered up dead by the side of the road, his friend weeping, and that type of agony is real pain (even if, in the Buddhist sense a release from suffering, as Allen Ginsberg was always quick to say).

A great email from Lucio Agra did come in, as did some other wonderful, friendly notes. Agra had finally received, and promptly reviewed, the CD-ROM that is going to be included with Technopoetry Rising, which I sent to him many weeks ago before our departure. He said it was weird to be getting a letter that was pre-Malaysia and commented on “how snail snail is” (which was quite coincidental since the clothing store I shopped at yesterday at Mines was called Snail, not to mention that such a pace is about how fast I seem to be moving much of the time). Anyway, his comments were encouraging and helpful. I was glad to hear him say that some of the audio files (perhaps my forté) had “busted me out,” and his opinions about what should be removed (particularly the lengthy interview and lecture that are in English) were spot-on. About a year ago at this time I put together a small pamphlet of poems while we were in Brazil (kindly translated by Marcus Salgado) called God Bless South America, and I meant it!

So, it will be nice to settle in to a sound studio, begin to mix some media files, and get on with database exploration. The back and forth between so many of the artists whose works are discussed in the book is cool, but I’m itching to make something new. One aspect of all the correspondence is the 13 hours time difference between where we are now and “home.” I’m writing, you/they are sleeping, & vice versa. And since the clock on my computer and web browser haven’t been reset, time strangely confused. But hey, the title of this (b)log is aisyalam, after all. Our life is not at all backwards here but it is full of (non-oppositional) opposites. And, somehow, turned at least on its side, if not upside down: more than I can say at the moment is different, skewed, reversed (and beautifully so).

I did post the Pangkor entry on travelpod, and must admit that doing the blogs is a great way to communicate and document what we’re up to here. This pursuit it is new ground for me, and a discipline unto itself which I am enjoying. Though it seems (sometimes more than) a bit self-indulgent, at least I’ll be able to easily recall what happened on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis. I’ve always liked broadcasting, making nets of action/activity, and so on, & I’m sure maintaining these documents will prove to be worth the effort.

Well, it is about to be the weekend here & that means a little downtime. We’re still awaiting the arrival of George T., which seems a bit up in the air but I’m hopeful. I’ll be glad if the mysql access issue is resolved by then Maybe Sunday, if it is clear we’ll go out to Batu Caves or up to the top of the communications tower in KL for a different point of view.

Cheers, friends: time to sign off and sleep, CF

1/12

Today went at about the same pace as yesterday (even though I had a bit more sleep). Only able to work half as much, though, because we had to pay a visit to Stella’s school (the Australian International School of Malaysia) for paperwork, introductions, and uniform fitting. The school is north of here in City of Mines, about a half hour drive away. Fortunately we’re familiar with the area, because due to construction (much of this area is in a state of construction) the roads are congested, chock full of U-turns, etc., and if we hadn’t stayed near there during our first week here we would have been very lost. Since that project ate up half the afternoon, we took advantage of our location to visit the Mines “Shopping Fair” (i.e., Mall), where I got my haircut, bought some academically acceptable threads, and ate Thai food for dinner…

In the morning got some work done in the office, nothing particularly progressive, mostly writing a few more letters related to permissions, faxing out a few requests that had to be faxed (including one to Reichardt), emailing friends for favors (i.e., scanning pages of books I need in order to proofread excerpts of poems), etc. Posted some image files to the web so that they could be reviewed by artists involved with the book. Problem solved previously discussed citation issues with the help of R. Kendall and Davida, the saint-like librarian I mentioned yesterday (both solved!). One day soon, all such tasks will be a thing of the past, and a little dance will be done. This book project, already 10+ years in the making, almost seems like it will never end. & since I’m planning to eventually launch an online database of prehistoric digital poetry, perhaps it never will. But a book is a book, and this one needs to be out the door, according to the contract, in 19 days.

Speaking of databases, today I’ve also been ironing out the details of getting my “mysql” account going at NJIT, which I need in order to revive “MOBY-DICK” (George T. is supposed to be here tomorrow) and to prepare/present the multimedia work I want to engage with here. This may involve a total renovation of my web server space at NJIT, which may not be the worst thing to have happen. The university’s new computing ID system insists that all of my accounts are managed using one ID. At this point, the IDs I currently have for WWW (cfunk) and for email (funkhouser) differ from my official computing ID (funkhous), so in order to get the mysql account it is possible that all of the ~cfunk web pages may have to be scrapped. Maybe not, we’ll see. Such a reconstruction could be fortuitous – it’s good to clean house once in awhile – but it’ll take a good bit of time to rebuild…

Glad to see Pierre Joris’ Nomadics Blog is going again, and also tickled to learn that Nicole Peyrafitte, Pierre’s partner, was voted #1 performance artist in NY’s capital district this year. No doubt about that!

Tonight sat at our wooden table in Cyberjaya and wrote/typed the entry about Pangkor for our travel blog, but don’t have the stamina to post it this evening so it’ll have to wait til tomorrow.

Til tomorrow, that’s it, CF

1/11

Pretty slow going in the Funk-i-verse today. Up late last night writing for permissions, then up with Aleatory Zoon Heep Funkhouser (age 4.5 months) before dawn…

Happy to find about 20 approvals had arrived in between, some of which led to further correspondence. For instance, Eric Vos rightly chided me for some polemical statements I’d made regarding an essay he published a decade ago (which actually led me to remove my naïve essay from the WWW), and Brian Stefans pointed me in the direction of some of his early computer poems & reminded me that one of the essays in his book was modeled after a piece of writing by T.S. Eliot, which I’d forgotten to note, &c. For the most part, the critics were surprised that I’d even bothered to ask for permissions, & perhaps doing so was not necessary but I figured better to cover all bases (I asked anyone who I’d quoted more than 100 words from; I’m new to academic publishing for the most part, so wanted to play this aspect of the work as safely as I could). Taking on this process was also a good excuse to get into contact with a lot of amazing people & begin to spread the word about the book beyond a fairly small inner circle of close colleagues.

Made it to the office around 10, and took care of some clerical work, then began to “cut-into” the MLA-izing of the manuscript. Of course, thwarted immediately by not having all of the information necessary to complete citations for an esoteric 1996 Robert Kendall posting to ht_lit and somehow overlooked the title of a Michael Noll essay in a 1973 anthology put out by Praeger (even though I had spent 10 days fact-checking the manuscript before leaving the states). AH – the drawbacks of working 9,000 miles away from our solar-powered studio/library in Frelinghuysen! No complaints, though, and hopefully Kendall and NJIT reference librarian Davida Scharf are going to be able to come to my rescue…. In any case, I’ll be quite busy the next couple of weeks getting the book into final form. The amount of data that I’m managing is crazy: the bibliography is 17 pages, and nearly 30 pages of footnotes in addition to 370 manuscript pages.

Still trying to track down Jasia R., Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim, and Carol Sperrin McCauley.

Interesting meeting in the afternoon with MMU faculty of creative multimedia (Khong CW, Sau Bin, and Tengku Sabri) over tea and carrot juice. We mapped out my lecture schedule, which will consist of 2 lectures per month from February to May on the history of Digital Poetry. I’ll also collaborate with various faculty to present a multimedia performance and installation in July. These are events I much look forward to producing. I’ll have a chance to begin to get to know my colleague's work better soon, as every professor has to do a portfolio presentation during an all day session next thursday.

Extracurricularly speaking, I played with some rhymes today, and had some fun looking at a few pictures on Ben Friedlander’s Flickr site (taking in his series of photos of Bay Area poets in the ‘80s: the young Andy Schelling, everyone in oversized circular glasses, Stephen Rodefer’s outrageous duds, Ben looking like a young Allen Ginsberg; see http://www.flickr.com/photos/mongibeddu/). Forgot to mention yesterday that I’d had some fun reviewing Adele Aldridge’s WWW-based NOT POEMS (a continuation of the concretesque graphical works she was doing in the ‘70s, see http://www.adeleart.com/NOTPOEMS/notpoems.html)

Too many emails to mention, and Khong joined us at the apartment for dinner and found a way to gently inform me that the students would not take me seriously if I continued to wear shorts around campus.

That’s it for now. Paz e felicidade, friends, CF

1/10

1/5

Too busy on campus to write something up, so now doing so sitting with on the couch in our apartment, on a table that is lower than knee-high, possibly the worst place I could possibly be typing. But I digress…

Today finished identifying all of the quotes in the Prehistoric book, and there are a lot of them. Fortunately, for me, most of them I think will fall into the “fair use” category, although I will write to publishers and authors whose work(s) I quote extensively, just to be sure.

After a three hour break spent absorbing some of the MMU Interface Design student’s “minor” presentations (which involved creating an interactive kiosk for one of the many shopping malls around KL), I began to collect email addresses for the artists/publications whose images I will need permissions for in the book. I thought I could get this taken care of today, but the task proved more difficult than I had imagined. For instance, the first two images from the book come from the 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibit held in London, and I spent close to an hour trying to track down the email address of the curator/editor of the catalog, Jasia Reichardt, since the publisher (Studio International) is long out of business as far as I can tell. No luck! (If anyone out there reading this happens to know how to contact JR, I’m all ears). What to do? I sent Lev Manovich – who republished an essay by JR a couple of years ago - an email is search of the info. Then I though to try and contact the artists whose work interested me directly (Margaret Masterman and Robin McKinnon-Wood), but from what I can tell they have passed away. I know Marc Adrian is still alive, and I should be able to contact him but the hour was getting late & I was due home, so had to put off the chore until next week. Dan Waterman had warned me that this part of the process was going to be time consuming, and I can tell he is right!

Fortunately, many of the other poets whose works will visually appear are people I have been in touch with during the past year, and finding them shouldn’t be too hard. For those of you who are curious, here is the lineup of folks who have illustrations in the book: Masterman/Wood, Cage, And, Valentine/Rogers, Adrian, Flarsheim, Mezei, Alrdrige, Schwartz/Knowlton, Daniels, De Souza, Monach, Padín, Andrews, Polkinhorn, Melo e Castro, Pestana, Bootz, Sondheim, Balpe, Kendall, Rosenberg, Györi, Dutey, Cayley, Huth, Larsen, Karpinska, Baldwin, Beiguelman, Mencia, Kearns, Donald, Vallias, Kac, Kostelanetz. If you’re on that list, or I’ve quoted you a lot, you will be hearing from me soon…

Posted some more pictures taken around campus on flickr today, and also launched our travelpod blog (which is private – if you’d like to read it, send me an email & I’ll send the password. We start traveling around the country tomorrow – heading to Pulau Pangkor first – so that blog will begin to grow as well (as will, hopefully my collection of a/v documents).

Emails with/from: Waterman, Andrews, Grenville, Huth (thanks for the plug, Geof), Antonio, Agra.

Vamos, so that’s it til Monday, CF

1/4/06

Late start this morning due to domestic/logistical chores. Once in the office, about an hour before lunch, began to focus in earnest on the preparation of the Prehistoric book format, reviewing the U Alabama P guidelines and editing the eleven files that comprise the book (acknowledgements, intro, ch 1-5, 2 appendices, bibliography, timeline) at the same time. I remember this tedious/laborious formatting chore from the dog days of writing my dissertation, but managed to format the ms to Alabama’s particular specs in about 3 hours (though a few questions arose that will need to be answered before this end of it is totally finished). Began to actively pursue permissions and will soon put the whole thing into MLA Style. The bad news from my contact at the press, Dan Waterman, was that the 50 illustrations that will be included in the book, which I sent to him Priority Mail on 12/17 (as printouts and in digital form) have not yet arrived in his office. To FedEx them to him from Malaysia will be costly, so here’s hoping that they show up.

Met with Rozi to problem solve the minidisc adapter situation, and he offered to lend me his unit while we’re here. He also let me know that I can use MMU’s sound studio, so I will take a look at that next week. I ran into a sound engineer/film producer named Ashley Grenville at No Black Tie in KL the other night, and he suggested that I explore using the program Sampletude to mix sound and video; apparently it is available at MMU and I will take a look at it, once I have some collected some footage and sound files to work with. Building ideas for multimedia poems…

Today’s emails: Grenville, Suzanne Tamminen (re: permissions for Cage’s I-VI), Bob Lynch (my chair at NJIT), J.L. Antonio, Waterman, Kimmelman, & Geof Huth.

Working away the days is so familiar, yet a different atmosphere altogether (even though I’ll be in need of a chiropractor soon, as always, for sure).

OK, more soon…

CF

1/3/06

First blog entry. Ever. I’ve decided to set this space up to chronicle (broadcast?) my research related activity during my residence at Multimedia University (in Cyberjaya, Malaysia) from January-July 2006.

I’ve also set up a travel narrative (not yet active) and photoblog (http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_funks), which are just getting going. We’ve only been in Malaysia for about 15 days, and have just now settled into our apartment on the MMU campus. It took a few days to sort some of the technological aspects of our existence out, like power cables (Malaysia’s electricity is twice as “hot” as that in the USA), Ethernet connection/firewall issues (I got a virus – hacktool.rootkit – within 30 minutes of my first login at the apartment; fortunately now fixed, thanks to MMU IT), and other such matters.

Thanks to my colleagues and the staff here, I’ve been set up with an office/studio, a cellphone (call from the USA is, I think 011-60-13-2480460), printing resources, etc. I am extremely grateful to everyone on the staff of the Faculty of Creative Multimedia (where I am stationed), especially Khong, Rozi, Leza, and Wong, who have made our transition to Malaysian academic life both easy and a pleasure.

In case you are wondering how I ended up in Malaysia, it is pleasure to relay the story (especially since it gives me a chance to transmit a few well deserved appreciations).

If Loss Pequeño Glazier had not taken the initiative to organize E-POETRY 2001: An International Festival of Digital Poetry, I almost certainly would not be here. Further, I really wonder what trajectory my life and work would have taken if this particular event had not transpired. At the Festival I met many people who I’d never encountered face-to-face before, like Jim Andrews, David Daniels, Jennifer Ley, Reiner Strasser, and Komninos Zervos; among those gathered in Buffalo I also met two Malaysian artists, Nazura Rahime (Malaysia’s first digital poet), and Fauzee Nasir (a video artist and now Nazura’s husband), whose presence on my radar most directly led me to where I am at today. I also encountered some Brazilian digital poets (Lucio Agra, Wilton Azevedo, and Giselle Beiguelman), which consequently resulted in four research trips to Brazil, many university lectures in that country, and as of last month a contract for publication of a bi-lingual collection of essays (& CD-ROM of artworks) that will be translated by Jorge Luiz Antonio and published by Musa Editora in São Paulo in 2006. After one of the E-POETRY events, I noticed Fauzee was standing around by himself, putting away his video gear (he was documenting all of the sessions), so I struck up a conversation with him. It was his first trip to the USA and he seemed a little timid, but we talked, and he told me that he was a student at MMU, etc. A few months later, when I received an invitation to speak at a conference in Beijing, I contacted Fauzee, and he arranged for me to have also a week’s residency at MMU, where I gave a lecture, performance, and led a workshop of local student digital poet/artists. This was a terrific set of days, in which I was able to produce a two-screen multimedia (one video, one animation) poem (never published, only performed) about 9/11 (which had happened a month earlier). I’d brought 60 pages of related poetry, 15 minutes of video footage, and several dozen images with me. Fauzee and I put them together in his office here; the work was received positively by students, faculty, and administration. Nazura and I also gave presentations at Malaysia’s Literary Agency, Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, that week. These days were a tremendous experience, and vowed to return to the country for a longer period, and that period is now. It is amazing how a single event and chance encounters can play a significant role in life, and E-POETRY 2001 made a profound impact on mine. Though I have great respect for many of his digital works and the ongoing production of the Electronic Poetry Center, I would not characterize my association with Loss Glazier as a particularly strong one. Nonetheless I do wish to acknowledge publicly the influence of his organizational efforts, praise them, and express my gratitude to him for what he does on behalf of digital poetry on a global level. While I’m at it, I should also give props to Fauzee, Nazura, and Khong CW - my initial contacts at MMU. Without these folks, I wouldn't be having this tremendous cultural exposure I'm now experiencing, which includes what Amy calls "fusion living" (as well as the popular notion of "courtesy of choice"); instead, I’d be slogging through another bitter winter in New Jersey.

My Fulbright proposal involved engineering multimedia databases, which is something that is not being done very much at this juncture but is something I am very curious about and wish to be involved with during the next couple of decades. Of course, the reason it isn’t being done results from its high degree of difficulty. In general, writing multimedia code is always challenging, but using a program such like mysql to design poems and synthesize media is incredibly demanding. At this point, my objective is to document as much of my visceral experience in Malaysia as possible, build databases of disctinct media (pictures, video, sound, text) and then see what I can do to unite them. Thus, the photo blogs, travel blogs, incessantly making recordings, etc. Minor setback in that I blew out the AC adapter for my minidisk recorder by plugging it into a socket in a Kuala Lumpur hotel the other day (thankfully the MD player did not get destroyed as well), one of the perils a globetrotting digital poet / documentarian faces, I suppose. I will also be exploring other multimedia programs and processes while I am here. Instead of writing prose, which has taken up the bulk of my time during the past several years, I intend to make poems and art as I record our movements (I am traveling with my wife Amy and daughters Constellation and Aleatory) through the country.

Nonetheless, I am still finalizing the manuscripts for the two books I have under contract. The aforementioned bi-lingual volume (with CD-ROM), Technopoetry Rising: Essays and works 1993-2005/O surgimento da tecnopoesia: ensaios e poesias digitais (1993-2005) is essentially complete, although I will probably add a little bit to the introduction and to the CD-ROM (which includes audio tracks of poems, lectures, and animated poems). Marcus Salgado, one of my musical collaborators in Brazil, has been doing some new mixes of materials we recorded in Rio (Jan. ’05) and São Paulo (June ’05). You can hear one of them (“SP”) at http:// www.tramavirtual.com.br/artista/tomguru. The other book, which I researched for more than a decade, Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms 1959-1995, has already been through a series of serious revisions, and will be published in the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series curated by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer at University of Alabama Press in about a year. Essentially, all that’s left to do is put the thing into MLA format and obtain permissions for some of the work that is included in the book, so I ought to be able to get the manuscript back to Tuscaloosa by the end of this month and keep on schedule. I was hoping to attend to these matters done this week, but it will take more time than I have to spare during the next few days, as I’m acquainting myself with a new campus, staff, and students. For instance, today instead of working on the formatting of the book I opted to sit in on MMU Interface Design majors’ final year presentations (and glad that I did because I saw some fantastic ideas being presented). Anyhow, I spent 10 days or so before leaving the US getting all the citations of the book verified and in order, so the rest I should be able to handle in a couple of days of focused work…

So, this blog is going to report on my work and research as it continues, now in Malaysia. Today I moved into my office at MMU, sent emails to Jorge Luiz Antonio, Burt Kimmelman, Lee Ann Brown, Lucio Agra, Katie Yates, and attended to some matters regarding the website I manage for Amiri Baraka. I printed copies of my books to review for my formatting chores (and to share with colleagues at MMU), printed and signed contracts for publications in England (an essay titled “Digital Poetry” that’s being published in a volume titled A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Ray Siemans and Susan Schreibman) and for Technopoetry Rising. And, obviously, launched this blog!

Cheers to anyone who finds it,

CF