Monday, March 20, 2006
Today’s lecture (http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/mmu/6) was much better, partly thanks to Sau Bin’s tactics of taking roll at the end, and partly because this group of students seemed willing to engage more seriously with the materials. Or, perhaps the materials were more compelling to them, who knows. It was a relaxed affair, anyway, as I decided to let the poems do the talking and offer just a bit of commentary. For the last half-hour I sat in a chair in the middle of the stage and held a dialog, prompted by their questions and observations (Are we expected to understand any of this? Is any of this stuff ever arranged? Is this material surreal for the sake of being surreal? This stuff is too far outside the box—it bombs the box). I felt very calm, the discussion was good, and the session went very well.
Otherwise, tangled with Flash, continually organizing the eBook: the usual relatively mundane but necessary activities that take up so many hours.
One significant but relevant diversion on this very stormy night: drove to KL with Sau Bin to go to a reception at Galeri Seni Maya in Bangsar, an event sponsored by the British Council here in Malaysia, a reception for Geraldine Collinge (director of a group/network called Apples & Snakes in the UK). Treated to short readings by a few local poets, my first exposure to local writers (Bernice, Jerome, Shan), and felt kind of like I was sitting at the Nuyorican perhaps 15 years ago (with slightly less edge and without all the smoke). I enjoyed a conversation with Sunitha Janamohanan, British Council art rep in KL, who was grilling me about digital poetry. Glad to check it out, see a new part of the city, and learned a few things.
Other news: my essay “Irregular Solid: John Cayley’s Cybertextually Engineered Poetry” has just been published online by EnterText in the UK (Brunel University). Essentially it is an excerpt from the Prehistoric book, refined as a result of editorial intervention. See http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~acsrrrm/entertext/issue_5_3.htm for the table of contents…
Otherwise, tangled with Flash, continually organizing the eBook: the usual relatively mundane but necessary activities that take up so many hours.
One significant but relevant diversion on this very stormy night: drove to KL with Sau Bin to go to a reception at Galeri Seni Maya in Bangsar, an event sponsored by the British Council here in Malaysia, a reception for Geraldine Collinge (director of a group/network called Apples & Snakes in the UK). Treated to short readings by a few local poets, my first exposure to local writers (Bernice, Jerome, Shan), and felt kind of like I was sitting at the Nuyorican perhaps 15 years ago (with slightly less edge and without all the smoke). I enjoyed a conversation with Sunitha Janamohanan, British Council art rep in KL, who was grilling me about digital poetry. Glad to check it out, see a new part of the city, and learned a few things.
Other news: my essay “Irregular Solid: John Cayley’s Cybertextually Engineered Poetry” has just been published online by EnterText in the UK (Brunel University). Essentially it is an excerpt from the Prehistoric book, refined as a result of editorial intervention. See http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~acsrrrm/entertext/issue_5_3.htm for the table of contents…
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 7:30 AM 
