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Re: Poetry Review [Re: I Met A Traveller With An AmperI was only able to attend on the Wednesday. Besides communicating with Alan for the last few months in various different on-line forums, I finally got to meet him on Saturday night at Margaret Penfold's house. He plays a mean guitar. I don't have a coherent synopsis of my one day there assembled in my head. Very disparate. I remember doing theory, a couple of times: talking about Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy" in relation to information technology and memory, and about "destinerrance" in relation to the inexhaustible exhaustion of fragments. I remember some great presentations, and Alan McDonald being the only person to mention class, and nobody at all mentioning race, and a session on gender which always comes up when it's a question of hypertexts and networks - go figure. Wishing I'd seen Stelarc the day before. Israeli dancing during Bernard Cohen's presentation. Talking to Mike Allison about programming languages, how you might hack something together in Perl then translate it into a language where it could be restated more elegantly; how he liked C because it let you build your own coding idiom or environment out of the most basic elements. Alan Sondheim, bored and frustrated during the final panel session, which gave room to rather a lot of otiose speculation and self-advertisement and not a lot of real discussion of anything. Even then, a real buzz: even when I heard something which annoyed me, it wasn't a deadening, despair-inducing annoyance but a real challenge, something to take up and question and work through. This only failed when the optimism shaded into triumphalism, which only very occasionally happened - at such times you just want to slink away and be part of something else - but as there was always something else happening, this was never a real problem... - Dom ----- Original Message ----- From: cris cheek To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2000 9:08 AM Subject: Re: Poetry Review [Re: I Met A Traveller With An Ampersand...] Hi Dom, sorry not to have met up with you. Yes, I know Alan, were publishing a huge book of his avatarial poetic work (well big for us, about 200 pages). His presentation was a rushing buzz. Great guy too. Maybe you could report on the conference as you experienced it? Did we almost meet? love and love cris --