aisyalam

Eric Curkendall writes in an email that today is the Buddhist celebration Makka Bucha – which I’ve just learned happens on the full moon of the third lunar month (Feb.). In Thailand it is a national holiday commemorating a sermon of Buddha to 1,250 enlightened monks who had gathered on their own to hear him (an event highlighted by candle-light processions around the main chapel of every Wat in the land)…

I spent the morning refining the website and scripting tomorrow’s lecture, only to find out in the afternoon that it may be postponed until April! Chinese New Year, as great as it is here, seems to play havoc on institutional communication and planning. A change in schedule is fine for me, in any case, and the presentation is now ready for whenever…

After a few days of analysis and thought (my old UVa professor Mark Edmundson was always tried to teach me the value of brooding, which I didn’t appreciate until many years later), this afternoon stripped down my NJIT homepage so that it now contains most of the basic information I want to include, although I haven’t done much in terms of design yet (except for demolish the out-of-date chaos that was there). http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous. I need to re-install the Ginsberg sound file, which somehow got lost in the renovation, fix some of the colors, and am considering adding a section of links to pages that reference my work (info that I compiled while putting together my tenure dossier). Hopefully whatever audience is out there will find it more organized, links working, etc. What’s missing is some form of visual communication, and perhaps decoration, which I will continue to brood about. Any feedback is welcome, of course…

Email from Wilton Azevedo, with an invitation to participate in the FILE POETRY, which is part of the annual FILE festival (Festival International Language Electronic) in São Paulo. I participated in FILE (and its sound-performance counterpart, Hipersonica) in 2003 (in fact the first link on my website, above, is to my extensive documentation of that research trip). Though I won’t be able to get down to SP until later in the year or early ’07 (for my book launch), I’d recommend FIL as an excellent event, well organized, hip, and smart; the general announcement about it is at http://www.file.org.br/file2006entries/eng

That’s what’s going at the moment…