aisyalam

Today’s lecture, part of the "Tiang Sri/Center Pillar" series at the Muzium & Galeri Seni was a great success, and in some ways the best presentation yet despite the fact that when I arrived at the Muzium I was informed that I would not have internet access during the presentation. Fortunately, I arrive nearly two hours early and had some time—after meeting and talking for awhile with my host, Hasnul (Jamal B. Saidon)—to reconfigure the materials I wanted to show so that essentially no one would know the difference. Incidentally, Hasnul was part of the first group of students in RPI’s iEar program and it turned out that we had quite a few common acquaintances in the US (not to mention many common friends in Malaysia) like Neil Rolnick, Roberto Bocci, Mike Rose, and others as a result of my years at SUNY-Albany. My sense is that Hasnul is an extremely well connected guy—no wonder he’s running a museum in Penang! Anyway, I think the shift in materials was quite serendipitous for a few reasons. I used materials from The Little Magazine Vol. 21 cd-rom (Kostelanetz, the Monica hypertext), a number of pieces from the ALIRE cd-rom compilation, Augusto de Campos’ "Clip-Poemas," the Revista Cortex cd-rom, and showed John Cayley’s riverisland instead of lens. Maybe it was good for me to be talking about (or introducing) an alternative set of materials, who knows—but it worked. Plus, after introducing the basic typologies of digital poetry, I essentially abandoned the script and just used it as an outline, and comfortably ad-libbed the content, which John Hii (who’d heard a similar lecture at MMU and was in the audience today) said worked better. Since there was quite a large audience (at least 100 people, perhaps nearly 150), I didn’t want to drone on and I think the talk was more lively than it has been before. I also digressed into the relationship between poetry and digital poetry spontaneously, and at the end showed both my database project and did a brief demo of the eBook; this combination worked well, because instead of having to answer questions about why the material was digital poetry, we talked about things like process, the politics of the image, and other matters during the Q & A. The whole thing worked well, and it was great to be in such a cool museum (art and cultural artifacts downstairs, science installations—including a workshop on astronomy—upstairs. And before I left I was handed an envelope with some photos from the session, and a modest honorarium (which I wasn’t expecting)…a good day’s work (& at least 50 people took copies of the eBook home with them)…

Otherwise, spent an hour at a cybercafé on Chulia St. this morning, downloading student works and reading course bulletin board messages, then took a tour of the Cheong Fatt Tze mansion near my hotel. Tomorrow morning will head over the the Kek Lo Si temple before getting on an afternoon plane to KL. A very nice, if too brief visit to Penang, made all the better by taking in some laksa and ikan panggang at a hawker stall type street vendor type place thanks to my friend Rama the trishaw driver. Being in Penang this time is making me think the Penang poem a bit—like that it is unbalanced in its view at George Town as a reflection of the island. Coincidentally the poem and the recording I made on a trishaw ride here (with Rama and Stella) came up first when I opened the database; but this re-thinking is OK: if there’s one thing that’s for certain it’s that the cyborgian poem can always be altered, amended, added to, and subtracted from…