aisyalam

I’ve never lived in a country where a Buddhist holiday was celebrated as a national event, so today—Wesak Day—was a first. I’ve been interested in Buddhism for more than 20 years (first as a student of its art and literature at UVa, subsequently learning about it as a life form as a student at Naropa circa 1986, and finally took it up as a discipline that involves daily sitting practice in 1992), so it only made sense that today would be out of the ordinary, and it was. I did go up to the office this morning, but only to pick up some papers that I left there yesterday. Campus was pretty much empty but as it turns out, the walk itself was productive—I began to think about making hybrid texts with the Google generator, and what potential there is in such cyborg texts: a blend of personal observation and sensibility with automatically generated text. Various artists have used programs to make texts, and then edited them according to their own predilections (or whims). I was thinking about how this type of work was really “modulated machine” work, rather than “machine modulated” work, as John Cayley refers to it. I began to realize that if I am going to use such techniques then I better gear up to write some sort of essay on the subject sometime soon.

Anyhow, instead of working on the national holiday, we got in the car and drove up to the Brickfields in Kuala Lumpur to pay a visit to the Maha Vihara temple, which was jam packed with people paying respects to everything under the sun (and also spirits who no longer were). The temple had also organized a blood donation drive, organ donor drive (and was giving away free food). It was hot and beautiful. One of the most incredible sights was seeing probably 10,000 oil lamps lit in the name of “peace in happiness.” Stella and I got blessed by a couple of monks, too. We spent a couple of hours absorbing the atmosphere. Then, since we are in Malaysia, did what many Malaysians do on a holiday: we went shopping. First we went out for lunch at an organic restaurant in Bangsar, then went to Silverfish Books, a great bookstore we’d been meaning to check out for a long time, and it was very cool. The proprietor, TRR Raman, was very friendly and helpful, and we picked up a few interesting titles: Raman’s The Wedgwood Ladies Football Club, Cecil Rajendra’s Rags & Ragas (poems), Robert Raymer’s Lovers and Strangers Revisited, Farish Noor’s From Majapahit to Putrajaya, Orwell’s Burmese Days, a pamphlet published by a Malay press (Citizens International) by David Noble called Digital Diploma Mills: Technology and the Business Takeover of Higher Education, and a DVD of movies by a Malay artist named James Lee. Not much more than that, just good family time. We made it home in time for dinner and a little reading (Robert Fisher’s Buddhist Art and Architecture and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter).

I was thinking of doing some work on texts this evening but it doesn’t look like it will happen. Instead, I’ll take a half-day tomorrow to make sure all the circuits are correctly connected in the eBook, then we’ll get together with Fauzee, Fishie, and Ilham over in Putrajaya.