aisyalam

When I left to go up to campus today I wasn’t sure where I’d begin, so ended up taking care of some necessary correspondence, then diving back into poetry. Clearly, I’ve become obsessed about the Malaysia poems, and consequently they keep getting better. Today I went back to the four pieces that weren’t up to snuff on last review and ended up beginning to salvage them by removing one half or more of the text and sculpting the pages into new shapes. Many of the poems are about places, and through the process I’m discovering the difficulty of composing discrete (one-off) pieces about specific locations, especially places where I’ve only spent a few days. But this is what I want to do for now—before eventually tackling the Malaysian form of the pantoun—so I’m going to see this series through and present the lot at least a couple of times before leaving here.

Besides working on the poems, and negotiating gigs and getting information via email, continued to map out the MMU performance, particularly figuring out which computer does what, and how I want to present the selected bounty of images that’ll be projected. To that end I found a javascript I want to test out that automatically randomizes/refreshes images, which’ll free-up my hands and make the visuals non-linear. I may opt not to use it, ultimately, and script the images according to the trajectory of the poems, but it is one possibility I’m toying with. I’ve figured out that the first set—with the Flash pieces—is about 20 minutes, and the Malaypoems set can be as long as 35 (according to the duration of the soundtracks I already have), depending on the texts that made the final cut. I made a precise list of tasks that need to be done and should be able to take care of them next week.

Meanwhile in addition to the performance tomorrow night I’ll be working on some sound stuff, including making some more recordings the rest of this week while we are in KL. I’ll be able to online where we’re staying and will probably type in a report or two.