aisyalam

A small audience attended the lecture for the Kulliyyah Islamic Revealed Knowledge & Human Sciences group at International Islamic University Malaysia, only a dozen or so people, mainly from the English department, but a fine occasion nonetheless [Fauzee Nasir (http://www.manggis.tv/) also came over and made a recording with his video gear, which was very kind]. Little resistance to the ideas and texts I put forth as digital poetry. Only one person asked me why I was calling it poetry, which was fairly easy to do. I was also asked what was more important in these works, the digital or the poetry (both = although certainly there some digital poems couldn’t be without the digital). These folks have already been introduced to deconstruction via one of their faculty members, which I’m sure helped my cause to no small degree.

The strange thing about the session was that there was something odd happening with the electricity and computer. For instance, when I went to open up the Alire CD-ROM to show "Syntext," the computer (unexplicably) tried to open up more than 100 files at once. The same type of thing happened every time I tried to open up something from the desktop or from one of the folders. On top of that, when I typed text, everything came out in CAPS, even though the caps lock key had not been activated (and vice-versa: when I hit caps lock, lower case letters were emitted). Now, I’m on my way home on the train and everything is working just fine. Any ideas? (I’m thinking that when I held down the shift key for a few seconds during Cayley’s “Lens” it triggered some mechanism that created this effect, which gave me a chance to show how patient I’m willing to be with the machine, as eventually everything I wanted to display was shown).

After the Q & A discussion the group requested that I perform some of my own work, which was flattering, so I showed them a couple of pieces from Selections, and the incomplete durian movie. Apparently they liked what they saw, and there is some talk of me returning to IIUM for a performance in July.

It was good to see a new part of the city, take the LRT subway line, and meet a bunch of people who are involved with Malaysian poetry (additional bonus: they treated me to lunch at an extraordinary restaurant, Tamarind Hill, lodged in an old colonial home in a terraced thicket of jungle). I got some names of authors to read, and will head to the Silverfish bookstore in Bangsar (another section of KL) as soon as I can.

Not much else went down. Three lectures in 6 days, whew! Wrote about our trip to Thailand on the KLIA Transit train (too much prose happening, still). Back in the office tomorrow to complete Monday’s lecture, to work on the durian piece, and connect the dots of the CD projects tomorrow…