aisyalam

Back in Cyberjaya for a few days after a weekend in the luscious Highlands of Malaysia, hanging out (“getting religious”) in amazing tea plantations and other verdant environs (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_funks for a slew of images). I didn’t do a lot of digital poetry work, but wrote a little, captured a lot of images, played some music (flute), had a healthful time with the family in a captivating place, and read about half of the book about Kuala Lumpur (which is really interesting and informative).

Today in the A.M. mainly caught up on correspondence, making arrangements to meet colleagues on campus and setting up lectures both locally and elsewhere. It looks like I’ll be making presentations in Penang at some point, possibly early July. Also decided to bow out of the proposed lecture on information literacy in KL, since that’s not a topic about which I have a lot of expertise (except as it pertains to digital *literature*). Downloaded a track that Eric Curkendall had mixed of one of my piano recordings, posted on his site (http://www.soundclick.com/shemduhpenman), which he tells me has somehow made it into the top ten poetry downloads on the SoundClick filesharing site. I’m particularly impressed by this because there are no words in this “poem,” and am definitely looking forward to recording and performing with him last week. The last time Eric and I were together he performed with thelemonade at Komotion in San Francisco (a set I remember Victor Krummenacher calling “very disturbing”), and a few weeks before that we had done an impromptu performance at the Poetry Project in New York. I see next our meeting next week in Bangkok as somewhat of a continuation of that activity, and am getting pretty excited about going up there and hanging out with him.

The P.M. was much more technically oriented. I decided (as I think I said I would last week) to spend a few hours working with javascript. Using images captured over the weekend, I made a couple of web pages using techniques I’ve never tried before. To warm up, I borrowed (then modified) a script from Loss Glazier’s Electronic Poetry Center author page, which presents (randomly) a new image every time the page is refreshed. Then I decided to use a different approach, whereby the image changes (again, randomly) when it is clicked on. This process involved several stages, and was actually quite different (in terms of code placement) than the first trail. I was able to find the basic script at a site called “The JavaScript Source,” which I modified to function with my own materials. This is not terribly complex work, of course, since I already know .html, but presented a few problems I had to solve, and all the while making me think how I could use the techniques effectively in the presentation of creative work. Java it isn’t, but I’ll be getting to that, if all goes well, soon enough. What I put together is up at http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/2006/js/test2.htm

Tomorrow will be largely spent with written language (prepping/editing next week’s lecture, formatting the MMU lectures for the eBook, and who knows what else). But an anxiousness to be programming, designing and building databases is definitely in me, so need to keep after that objective as well; a meeting with the MMU database masters is scheduled for Friday morning, and I want to be as ready as possible for it…