aisyalam

As I was driving onto campus this morning after dropping Stella off at her bus and working out, I noticed a sign posted at the MMU entrance that announced that Abdullah bin Laden, head of the Saudi bin Laden group would be visiting campus today. No surprise that this would catch my eye, right? This is the half-brother of Osama (who also has 55 other siblings, btw), and the guy that recently gave Harvard 2 million dollars to bolster their Islamic studies department. So, keeping good company we are here.

Finished up the essay I was working on yesterday, then programmed the lecture interface, which is now up at http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/mmu/1, which may be changed a bit but that's the gist of it. The best thing I discovered while gathering materials was a site a programmer had put together for Cage’s Indeterminacy, which is at http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/. Also visited with some other (semi-nostalgic) pages that you can look at too if you go to the lecture page. Began to put together (via outline and free writing) the next lecture, on the 27th, titled “Electronic Creative Writing,” which will probably be a little more interesting in terms of content (although the first gig will introduce completely unknown materials to the students and will thus be valuable). A web search on the topic mainly brought forth some Australian sites for a (largely hypertext) course that’s being taught there, as well as (I think) a journal with that name. Most of the other hits were for electronic creative writing _portfolios_ for creative writing classes (i.e., students post their page-based work on a website). Anyway, to me there’s a lot more to the subject than hypertext. The first types of digital writing ever developed were algorithmically based: programs that were written that used various procedures to automatically produce writing. Such practices certainly continue today. This has to be viewed as a form of ECW. Graphically based visual poems and other sorts of writings that are produced using software certainly should be considered a form of ECW, as should animated works that include language in motion. How could this not be a type of writing, even if it is videographic? I’ll show demonstrate some programs, some vispo, and so on (as well as discussing hypertext). The more d-iffy-cult area that I’ll delve into is “writing” that does not include language (i.e., André Vallias, Maria Mencia, Giselle Beiguelman). One strategy that can be used to argue for this possibility is that writing code is writing!

Not much else to report. After lunching together, Sau Bin showed me a huge book about the Vienna school, which was mostly filled with concrete poetry; the thing was so heavy I could barely lift it!

Big monsoon storm practically eliminated outdoor visibility in the late afternoon.

I’ll leave off with a piece of Electronic Creative Writing I made yesterday, a poem about Paris Hilton, of all people:

Ticket

These while
from story there
Ticket go
saw must.

Let all
also Ticket
there did
under could
write live.

While but
like good
Ticket man
round her...