aisyalam

Melaka is a great, small, completely historical and transcultural city, and despite the fact that the kids were not functioning at 100% we had an excellent trip. Two days was not enough, especially since we had to take it kind of slow. Posted about 200 pictures from the weekend on the flickr site, and asked Amy to do some “drive by” video on the road out of town. In contrast to the general liveliness and historical aspects of the place, one of the high points for us was a visit to a new tea house on the fringe of the central area which our friend (and gracious host) Wong (a Melaka native) knew about. After we’d been there awhile I was overcome by the impulse to have deep philosophical conversation and write haiku. I’m sure it sounds corny, but it is true! Quite a few lines came out, and later I got to thinking about the possibility of creating an interactive and ergodic haiku generator. As I discuss in my book (Prehistoric Digital Poetry), many of the early computer poetry programs wrote haiku, and there are various reasons for this. The ergodic acrostic program that George Taylor and I have worked on (“Moby-Dick”) was fairly easy to do because it is not hard to ask the program to identify the letter a word begins with. But asking a program to determine the syllabic content of a line on its own seems pretty difficult (in the previously mentioned programs the database is typically set up in advance by the author of the program). Anyway, clearly I can’t quite ever escape digital considerations of anything, even when zenned out…

Today, though not the heaviest work day, got a few things done. I started to prepare my first MMU lecture, on the “Origins of Multimedia art in the US,” which I’ll give to a large group of new students (i.e., freshmen) next week. Basically I’ll be introducing them to the motivations of Black Mountain College artists, Fluxus, and Kaprow, and stressing that the whole multimedia thing – no matter analog or digital – is mostly about process and materials. I’m sure I’ll end up emphasizing, as I do in the Intro to Technopoetry Rising, the necessity of collaboration. It has been practically a decade since I did my intensive research in this area (as a grad student), but fortunately have access to quite a bit of the writing I did on the subject (NPF conference paper ‘96, MLA paper ’97). For both essays I made hypertext versions, which I have the files for – although I’d say less than 10% of the links now function. I did a more extensive update on these projects in ’00, with a slightly higher success rate in terms of functionality. How ephemeral are WWW sites? Very! Of course with Google I was able to find several new and terrific sites for references, examples, and so on. Buddha bless the search engines.

Things really came up Creeley today. Prepping the lecture I came across his simple but very important observation that "poets particularly need to be heard, need an active and defining presence, need physical sound and sight," which he wrote in the Intro to one of the Poetry in Motion CD-ROMs. Coincidentally, as I was working on this, Ben Friedlander sent me the draft on the intro he has written for the volume of Creeley’s Collected Poems he has been editing (which includes a few illustrations). While I though all of Ben’s views and paragraphs were fascinating, one sentence of his in particular really hit me: “Attending to sound, then, becomes a way to construct new paths for meaning in language.” Yes – this is so true – again, in both the analog & digital. Amidst the 9 illustrations was a link to a series of photos by Elsa Dorfman that I hadn’t see before http://www.granarybooks.com/books/dorfman/dorfman2.html. Well, amazing to be in touch with all these people and materials, to say the least.

I spent a good while mulling over and making a list of questions regarding WWW design issues. This is a subject I teach, and have been involved with for a long time, but now trying to approach it from a new angle. I teach my students the basics and fundamentals, but tend myself to disregard convention and be more freewheeling. But now I want to try and design with an artful but somehow more professionalized eye. In the past I have almost never thought this way, and when I do a whole can of snakes (in the form of question marks) opens up: how to image, how to organize, what’s important, etc. etc. etc. So I’m stepping into professorial mode in the analysis of my own work, which is really weird. But I think something good will come out of it, and a couple of my colleagues in the Interface Design program at MMU (who are very professionally minded) have said that they are willing to consult with me (i.e., hold my hand as I try on a new look).

The other interface design project that I am about to embark on is the CD-ROM interface for Technopoetry Rising, which in its prototype is entirely textual, basic, and barely acceptable as such. This project may have more than one application, as I’m also considering making a very similar manuscript that I’m trying to get publishers in Malaysia and Singapore interested in into an “e-book” (scrapping paper altogether and putting all of the essays and media files onto one disc. This would be a great project to collaborate on with my new associates, the ID experts at MMU.

To that end, I saw and spoke with several colleagues today about getting their input (Wong, John, Khong), and also met with Rozi to discuss some of the events that will happen a few months down the line (regional lectures and elaborate performances). Everyone was back on campus today after a couple of weeks off, and it was good to see them.

Continued my email exchanges with Eric Curkendall as well, which I’ve been enjoying immensely, and will end this entry by sharing a passage from his last message (hope he doesn’t mind). In a recent message I was celebrating the glories of Malaysian cuisine, to which—as a point of comparison—he passed along his impressions of Thai food as he experiences it in Bangkok:

Yeah, Malaysia is the best place in Asia that I've
been to for food. Thailand is not really so hot as
food goes, though the peppers certainly are, damn! In
fact a lot of real Thai food will make you wanna throw
up just smelling or seeing it, lots of fermented fish,
herbs that smell like the toilet has backed up,
coagulated pigs blood soup, maggot cakes, pulverized
tarantula salad. Termites are not bad, a nicel
emon-lime and cilantro flavor, wood beetles taste
like bacon, but I'd advise eating them in a dark room
so that can't see what looks like a big cockroach that
you're sticking into your mouth. I think Screamin jay
Hawkins must have been in Thailand when he wrote the
song "Alligator Wine" and "There's Somethin Wrong With
You." Of course there's more normal food too, such as
chitlins, tripe, dried squid, green papaya and
fermented land crab salad usually with enough chillies
to kill you if the stomach destroying rice vinegar and
dirt encrusted bitter green beans don't. I've lived
with my wife for six years and there's still no end to
the hitherto never before seen bizzarre, mostly
inedible things that end up on the table. Its great
anthropology but thats about it…

Chow down, everyone…