Tuesday, January 31, 2006
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…
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…
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 6:24 AM 
