aisyalam

I spent the first hour of the day in a lengthy discussion with my friend Ali, who continued (respectfully) to let me know just how disappointing (even boring) he thought my performance was. Naturally I agreed with much of what he said, and countered with plenty of reasonable, friendly, defensive rationale. The major difference of perspective boils down to the fact that my emphasis in preparing for it was on the content of the poems and the synergy of poetry and media elements whereas he and his cronies wanted more spectacular media; in part this is a generational issue, and a healthy one at that. What was most important for me, ultimately, was that I learned a lot from both the event and all of the feedback that has come (both negative and positive) since then. Then next time I present the materials I will do so differently, in part because Ali and a friend of his are going to re-version the images in a more animated mode. We’re also conspiring to make a collaborative movie out of my raw materials, which could be very interesting. To that end, I’ll be in the recording studio tomorrow morning recording all of the poems and he’ll be there making a videotape of me reading them.

In the afternoon I spent some time preparing the syllabus for an NJIT graduate course (Elements of Visual Design) that begins in two days, and talking briefly with Sau Bin about our upcoming art exhibit in KL. Then I spent two hours in a dialog with Sau Bin’s Creative Studies students, many of who were collaborators (by way of making installations) at the performance. This turned out to be mostly a discussion of my process, much of which I have told in this blog (although I went in to more detail about how the poems were constructed in a cyborgian fashion by making use of the Google Poem Generator). I also made the first public demonstration of the database project in the session. The students came up with some good questions about retaining inspiration (write it down, I said, and develop a discipline, etc. etc.). Despite the fact that I ended up doing too much of the talking, it was a good session.

This evening we (Amy, ConStellation, Aleatory, & I) went to a gala party thrown by the US embassy in Kuala Lumpur, to mark the 230th anniversary of “our” “independence” from England. It was a rare occasion, and probably the least Malaysian thing we’ve done in seven months, but we had a very nice time. Many of the other Fulbright scholars were there, we met the vice president of MMU, Amy chatted it up with the US ambassador, and so on. The event wasn’t held at the embassy but at a swanky hotel, and although our kids were the only children there I didn’t get any sense that they weren’t welcome; Amy explained that we’ve just finished reading a bunch of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books with Stella and 4th of July was a family event so we had to bring them. I passed out a few copies of the eBook and enjoyed the good vibes and food.