Judy Powers Malloy
Poet on Crutches

Archive of Images

Winter/Spring Bay Area trails visual book
composed with 17 watercolors created during hikes on crutches in Northern California
from October 2008 - April 2009.

where every luminous landscape
was recently featured at:
The Future of Writing, University of California Irvine, Nov 2008
Cover to Cover on KPFA radio in Berkeley in Dec 2008
the E-Poetry Festival, Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, May, 2009
and Biennale Internationale des poetes en Val de Marne, France, May 2009
where it was short-listed for the Prix poesie-media 2009

A second edition of its name was Penelope is in progress, and my new work
when the foreground and the background merged is now available.

recalling memories of hiking in the woods - images from last winter's hikes
I once made an office inbox that was filled with translucent
paintings of the woods on rice paper. It seemed like something that would be nice
to have on one's desk, recalling memories of hiking in the woods.

November 14, 2009

Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Gary Snyder's
Riprap -- a safe trail in the mountains -- and I went to the Morrison
Library at Cal to hear him read from Riprap and talk about his life.

How in the mountains he read Chaucer in the original Middle English;
the coming together in his work of Chaucer's language and Chinese poetry.

The celebration was a memorable occasion. Large crowd.

Michael McClure told the story of the legendary "Six Poets at Six Gallery"
in 1955; read Snyder's "A Berry Feast".

Cal poets Robert Haas, Cecil Giscombe, and Lyn Heijinian read, spoke
of the influence of Riprap on everyone who has read it.

Gary read Piute Creek, Riprap, Hay for the Horses, and
Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout that includes these lines:

"drinking cold-snow water from a tin cup
looking down for miles
through high still air."

and I remembered hiking through snow in Colorado to get drinking water from
the pump. Icicles on the pump. The taste of cold water.

Fifty years later, Riprap is carried by rangers and guides in the High Sierra
and read in camp in the evenings.

Packed my paints and headed for Marin this morning. One of the most beautiful hikes
of the year. Fallen leaves on the trail, the sound of water, yellow fall color against
the dark green of the pines. New grass. I made three sketches to finish at home.

Also this week made draft title page for the entire paths of memory and painting trilogy,
continued to write this work.

Worked on some interviews for the Authoring Software resource, continued a quest for
archive funding, and made a remembrance page for Southern California-based art librarian
and artist books curator and critic, Judith Hoffberg

November 3, 2009

California musicians and composers are featured this month on the Art California Web Portal,
hosted in partnership with the UC Berkeley California Studies Association. It is a pleasure
to work on promoting the central role of artists in California. The site is in progress;
suggestions for additions are welcome.

Finally a beginning draft of the opening pages of paths of memory and painting is online.
This work has begun slowly. The composing process of the Trail Books has influenced my way of
writing/composing and the writing is progressing in a less structured way than the first two parts
of this trilogy. By which I mean that, as I also did to a certain extent in its name was Penelope,
each lexia is written without a clear idea of its placement in the work, but at the same time, I'm
pretty sure it will eventually fit, although a lot of rewriting, arranging and rearranging will have
to be done to make it work.

October 25-26, 2009

"Sometimes it is just one painting
one piece of music that makes a difference.
But you have to see or hear it.

Like the brief wild sound of thunder
signifying an unexpected storm,
and the music of Dora Penny's gentle laughter.
Lovely, joyful
Emerging from a painterly background of sound
in Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations. "

-- when the foreground and the background merged

I sat in the woods today, varying my approach to the problem of sketching
layers of dense foliage, (where the laurel meets the redwood, and there are many
trees of indeterminate variety in the background) thinking that I wished to
be instead on the Berkeley campus listening to Davitt Moroney's marathon
performance of Bach's Well Tempered Clavier.

I thought about the fine idea of playing all 96 pieces in this incredible work;
Bach's lifetime of creating/revising until the work was in his mind perfect;
how the performance reminded the Berkeley community of the importance of
individual musicians; that one musician can make a difference in our lives.

But it would have been discourteous to get up and leave if the long performance
was too much for my leg. So instead, I was sitting in the woods, using a pen more
than paints, usually a sign of unease.

I had heard Davitt play earlier this year, heard him lecture on Saturday.
Sitting by myself, I remembered the compelling music of the harpsichord,
the picture he gave of the Bach family, Bach's relationships with his students,
his search for perfection in his music. Davitt's own quest for and discovery
of Alessandro Striggio's lost 40 part Mass. Those are gifts, I thought,
and I will not wish for more.

At home, I looked on Amazon to see if Moroney had recorded the
Well Tempered Clavier and found that he had recorded the work
on Harmonia Mundi. The recording was expensive for my present situation.
However, Amazon had provided 48 sound clips. Don't usually like to listen
to music in this way, but this time I did.

Amazingly the small samples of each prelude or fugue sounded well together
-- as if (the process is familiar) Bach, and Moroney also because of the
intuitive understanding with which it was played, had heard how every part
of each prelude or fugue worked not only by itself but also with each other
piece and they knew that however every listener or musician approached The Well
Tempered Clavier, it would work

It is past midnight, and I am still listening.

Someday perhaps I will hear Davitt Moroney play the entire work, or even just
a few complete pieces, I thought in the morning, but then I will better
appreciate the music.

It was time to stop considering what Bach's student's learned from the playing
of The Well Tempered Clavier, because a colleague wanted some images of my
Card Catalogs for a book chapter based on a talk he had given in Germany, and I
needed to look at my old slides. Spent such a long time creating each of these
works, I remembered, making the collection of words and images exactly what I wanted,
but by the time I had done this for years, I knew how to write for the computer screen.

October 21, 2009

The text for paths of memory and painting is accumulating; the interface is taking
shape, but it will probably be another month or so before it is ready to be posted on the Internet.

Years Ago, in 1986, before the World Wide Web, when I created Uncle Roger on Art Com
Electronic Network, I posted the story as I wrote it, including with each post the link
words so that readers could create their own version using database software, and I also
created published versions with UNIX shell scripts and BASIC. The Web is quite different
from the 1986 online community of the WELL, but I still like to put up my work as I write it,
as soon as this is possible. I like the idea of new media poetic narrative told in the
Homeric way on the Internet.

I wrote about this process in a paper, saying:

"Like the changes in a continually tended and planted public garden, the changes and
additions that I made in The Roar of Destiny were probably not always obvious to the observer.
The reader did not encounter a series of chapters of a serialized story, but rather was
continually aware of a changing environment."

Eventually, for the sake of scholarship, a work is finished, or so I remind myself as
I rework the timing of when the foreground and the background merged.

Beginning to work on a new visual book - October, 2009
The image on the left is a detail of a sketch of a trail that on that day led to a place of
fog on the pines in Marin. The sketch on the right was made on an adjacent trail a week later.
The book will probably be comprised of about 16 images.

The sketches for the trailbooks are created as individual parts of a whole. Thus the style
of each sketch may vary, reflecting both the place and the mood of the painter. It sometimes
takes quite a while to put the sketches together so that they work together, conveying the whole
of the experience, but that is a part of the process.

Sketching this place where the sun was on the trail where I had just walked, I thought that when
I headed home on this trail, I would once again pass places where the view across the hills led to
blue ocean in the distance, there was a small meadow that would be a nice place to have a picnic,
and just before the trail ended, a redwood forest where I would stop and rest, before heading home.

October 14, 2009

A trip to Marin and the first painting for a new Fall Winter trails book -- begun
on a day of fog on the beautiful mountain trees

And as often happens a few months later when I've had time to think about it, I returned to
when the foreground and the background merged and made the page design
and the documentation a little better.

At Xerox PARC, Rich Gold liked to talk about how artists developed their work from the
influences of surrounding culture -- the situating of art making in the culture from which
it evolves. Art audiences don't always see these influences, the converging paths of Johann
Christian Bach and Mozart in London. for instance, as set forth in last week's Composer
of the Week on the BBC.

Recollecting the surrounding cultures that influenced my nonsequential naratives, I think
about the Photography and Language school and in particular the work of Lew Thomas. I looked at
my copy of Lew's Photography and Language. (where I also first saw John Gutmann's
also influential photographs. In the thirties, Gutmann photographed black and white rows
of text; it is interesting how his photos conjure up web text) Then, a postcard from Lew
-- he was in New Orleans at the time as curator for the Contemporary Art Center --
fell out of my copy of his Structural(ism) and Photography. He's answering a note
I had written him mentioning the influence of his work, that I had quoted his words at a Modern
Language Association conference. On the postcard, He riffs on clouds
-- writing about how he created the evocative conceptual landscape photography series,
Grass, Sand & Clouds.

Chaired by Terence Harpold, that 1992 MLA panel on "Hypertext, Hypermedia: Defining
a Fictional Form" in New York City was the first time I met fellow Eastgate authors Michael Joyce
and Stuart Moulthrop. Earlier that year, Carolyn Guyer had come to visit me in New Hampshire.

And I remember that Carolyn and I sat outdoors on a fine New Hampshire day and
talked about our work.

Detail from Summer/September Trails Book

Lately I have followed trails, like the trail I sketched in this array that leads
into the hills -- sitting beside these trails with my notebook, writing paths of
memory and painting.

Summer/September Trailbook - draft layout (32" x 20")
Some of these images need a little more work, but I am looking at the whole before
I continue to work on separate images.

Created with 16 watercolor images made on hikes on crutches on Northern California trails,
the book represents a series of mid Summer expeditions. Looking at this work,
I remember where each painting was made, how I hiked to that place, the surrounding scenery
that is not in the painting. Summer in Northern California.

October 11, 2009

Worked on the interface for paths of memory and painting. I have simplified
somewhat the where every luminous landscape array -- using one larger text box for the
main narrative and two to four surrounding lexias for parallel narratives.

Created a cover page for Dorothy Abrona McCrae -- have been meaning to
do this for a long time.

Last Monday, at Berkeley's Art Culture and Technology Colloquium, I heard
recent MacArthur fellowship winner Camille Utterback speak about her work.
I like the idea of a new media artist who creates work for public
spaces; interactive art encountered unexpectedly; the passerby's discovery
of how to interact with the work.

Writing on the Internet is somewhat like this. You don't know how the reader will
arrive at the work. Because of Internet search applications, the reader might
arrive in the middle of the work, or some place unexpected.

Last Wednesday, I went to the lively opening of the Domestic Disturbances
at the Worth Ryder Gallery on the Berkeley Campus. The exhibition was put together by
new gallery curator, Anuradha Vikram, and includes work by David Bestue & Marc Vives,
Abigail Feldman, Kara Hearn, Desiree Holman, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Emily McLeod,
Sonya Rapoport, and Stephanie Syjuco. Enjoyed seeing so many interesting video art
works that utilized innovative camera work and structure, performance art influences,
and it was good to see Sonya Rapoport's Kiva Studio created on continuous feed
computer paper with drawings, diagrams and writing. I had seen this work (years after it
was created) unfolded as an artists book in Sonya's studio but was surprised by the
correlations between the "tracks" evident when it was installed on the wall. It was
created in 1978, the year that I showed my first card catalog and a landscape scroll
on continuous feed paper in the Location project at a branch of the
San Francisco Public Library.

Sonya and I first met in 1980 at the opening of her Objects on My Dresser exhibition
at Langton Street. In the following years, we spent many hours talking about
our work and the work of other new media artists, although our paths diverged
somewhat in 1986 when Sonya was focusing on large scale interactive installation,
and my work began to focus on new media poetry and hypernarrative.

Last week I also finished the layout for the Summer/September trails book and was pleased
to be reminded of early work, thinking about parallel creativity. 1978: Sonya documenting the
environment of her artist's life in a layered and correlated progression; I in the East Bay hills
creating maps, continuous drawings and poetic nonsequential narrative.

October 2, 2009

Writing in my notebook on a trail on which I had never been before. I had stopped
because the trail above me was steep, slippery with newly fallen leaves, and the
area seemed seldom traveled. Hiking alone on crutches one must make such decisions.
I had left my paints at home and brought only my notebook. Below me was a procession
of trees, logs, moss, and ferns on the yellow-brown leaf covered trail.

If the trail was a diversion from the main path, in an area where there were many
such narrow, less travelled trails, so were the paths my writing had taken, always
returning to Dorothy's iconic painting of herself, sitting in her new studio,
reading her namesake's Pointed Roofs.

A poet may have many unseen ideas, keep many written words for a rainy day, while
only a few are revealed to the public, yet the conceptual travelling of idea/word paths,
even if not visible, informs the shaping of the narrative. Today, they were
the three separate yet occasionally intersecting paths of the writers Dorothy Richardson,
James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, as they wrote the interior monologues of the lives
of artists, of men and women so differently and so wonderfully.

And then there was the surprise on page four of Dorothy Richardson's
Pointed Roofs.

"The organ was playing 'The Wearin' o' the Green'.
It had begun that tune during the last term of school, in the summer."

She does not seem to know that it is a song for Irish Independence.
Or does she? It was probably 1913 in London when she began Pointed Roofs,
the first volume of Pilgrimage, but she was writing about an earlier time.
All these times were the era of the fight for Home Rule. Who I wondered was
playing the song?

And I thought about Irish born James Joyce writing far away in Italy or Switzerland.
"He takes me, Napper Tandy, by the hand."

Impossible to forget the way the words play in Ulysses or Mrs Dalloway.
But this week, background reading permeating my thoughts about paths of memory and
painting, I had been thinking that sometimes the recitative overwhelms the aria in
Dorothy Richardson's work, yet the aria is all the more welcome when it finally appears.

Sitting in the woods with my notepad, I remembered writing beside a small lake
in New Hampshire, discovered by following an unmarked trail. I remembered writing
what would become The Roar of Destiny beside a mountain river on the Western slopes
of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, I remembered stopping to write in my notebook about
the work of new media poets (for an article for Microtimes) as I hiked a
desert trail in Arizona; the diverging paths I took, the starkly beautiful landscape.

In those days I did not need crutches, and a steep hillside was not such an
obstacle. Yet here I was writing in the woods.

I will return with my paints to the same trail when the rains start, and the landscape
turns greener, I thought as I put my notebook in my backpack, attached my crutches
to my arms and walked down the trail.

Went on a painting trip to the Sierras. After a somewhat difficult descent on
crutches, I found a place to paint the view across a mountain lake. I took a short swim,
staying near the coast and not using my left leg. The water was cold and clear; the view lovely.
Had a lunch of cheese and crackers. Enjoyed the hike back, stopping often to look at the blue
and green colors of the mountains and trees and water -- to paint in the future.

September 26, 2009

Writing. In paths of memory and painting, Dorothy is sitting in her new studio,
surrounded by books, paints, brushes, paper, canvas, sketchbooks, photographs,
paintings. Space on the wall for her new work. She is reading the first book of her
namesake Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage; thinking about painting Dorothy
Richardson, but first she will paint herself, with the book open on the table and
her drawing pad beside her.

I'm also working on the new trails book Summer, September. At the moment, it looks
like a tapestry or, because some Northern California trails are like that in the late
summer, as if Renaissance musicians might enter at any moment and begin to play and sing.

So I went to the Noon Concert at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Music and heard soprano
Susan Gundunas' All the World's a Stage, a performance of Shakespearean songs with
Daniel Lockert, harpsichord and piano and Irish-born harpist Diana Rowan. Renaissance composers
beginning with Robert Johnson's "Where the Bee Sucks"; Baroque and classical composers
beginning with Purcell's "If Music be the Food of Love"; opera composers including Verdi's
"Ave Maria"; and contemporary composers, concluding with Alva Henderson's "Sigh No More
Ladies". Susan Gundanas' lyrical operatic voice -- unexpected in the Renaissance songs,
building in the program to a fine finale in the contemporary version of "Sigh No More Ladies"
-- her stage presence, the innovative program she created, were memorable and thought provoking,
a way of differently experiencing the music and lyrics.

__________________

June Northern California Trails Book

The "book" is created by making plexiglass and wood framed slots and then arranging
the hand painted images on strips of paper and putting the strips into the slots. It
is a flexible process which gives it a narrative yet painterly look, not unlike -- although the
subject matter is very different -- the Sienese alterpeices that are the subject of
discussion in scene one of when the foreground and the background merged. But it is a
performative work in that the viewer follows the paths of a poet as she hikes
Northern California trails. I have to use crutches so the experience may reflect
my vision of the scene after the difficulty of getting there.

In this work, there are three strips of images. The work could also be displayed in a
plexiglass carrying case that stacked the three separate parts.

Working with these visual books is similar to putting together works of new media
literature. For instance, in the visual books, there are many paths that you could
imagine following as you look at the work. I paint small images. I write with lexias,
screen-sized blocks of text. Each lexia, each painting works by itself. However, how
they work together is what shapes the final work, and a lot of editing is needed to
create the final work.

September 17, 2009

Continuing to write paths of memory and painting.

If the story of Dorothy Abrona McCrae begins in 2000 like The Iliad on a note of anger,
it moves to the long awaited reunion of Odysseus and Penelope, as Dorothy and Sid
meet again and reconcile. Over the years since I began to tell the Dorothy stories,
the simmering anger expressed in her first narrative has softened, and in where every
luminous landscape in the recollected return to her background as a landscape painter,
she sees the past somewhat differently. Now in my draft for paths of memory and painting,
she is experiencing the energy of the new figurative work that Elmer Bischoff painted
while he was teaching in the Yuba Valley, while at the same time she is creating her own body
of figurative work.

As I write Dorothy's voice, I recollect what it was like in the Bay area in
the late 1980's when an extraordinary group of artists was brought together by
Carl Loeffler at Art Com; how we exchanged ideas, yet each developed our own approach.
I remember the energy of audience response in 1986 when moving from the keyed molecular
narratives I had created in the card catalogs, I told Uncle Roger in keyed hyperlink serial form
live on Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) and created the program to publish it on
the ACEN menu.

At a party to celebrate the online publication of our works, I met John Cage, whose
First Meeting of the Satie Society was published on ACEN. He told me how there
were people who did not speak to him after 4'33". The work was misunderstood. How
hard it was for him. Yet at the time we were talking, everyone wanted to talk with John.

September 10, 2009

I have begun the draft of Paths of Memory and Painting. It will take a while
before I can put this online because I need to write the beginning lexias of each path
in the array before it can be displayed.

On labor day weekend, I sat in a peaceful cafe near the University -- just as Dorothy
does as the story begins. She is drawing, remembering a work she saw in David Park's
studio in 1950: The Rehearsal, a painting of the studio 13 jazz band. Among those
who played in this group were Douglas MacAgy, Director at the California School of Fine Arts
(now the San Francisco Art Institute) on drums; Charlie Clark, Clarinet; John Schueler, bass;
David Park on Piano; Elmer Bischoff, Trumpet and others. Oh to hear them play,
as Dorothy once did and now recalls.

The first two files of the trilogy of the same name, Paths of Memory and Painting,
are reflective, poetic. But in this file, I am striving to recreate the art energy of the time
Dorothy is remembering -- the energy and centrality of art making that began in New York City,
the new directions in Northern California.

On Tuesday, I went on a painting trip to the coastal range and felt better. PTSD noise stress
has been a problem. It helps to go on an expedition, hike, paint.

I now have about twelve images for the Summer trails book. Would like to put up an
image of what this looks like so far. But for some reason, I can't get my camera to
transfer the files to my computer. Working on this...

August 31, 2009

"I am -- with no regrets -- a poet, one of the seminal figures in new media
literature. But there has always remained a sense of loss in my life, that I
was not primarily a painter. Thus I decided that I would write about a woman who
became who I had originally set out to be.

To separate our lives, she is older than I am and comes from a different era."
-- from the notes for when the foreground and the background merged

Nine years ago, in 2000, I created Dorothy Abrona McCrae, partially to relive my own life
in the way I had originally envisioned, as a painter. In the past two years, her struggle
with the development of contemporary personal vision has been documented in the where every
luminous landscape trilogy.

Dorothy's work parallels the work of David Park and Elmer Bischoff, among many others.
She shares East Coast origins with David Park, whose father was a Unitarian minister
in Boston. She shares a World War II background with Elmer Bischoff, who was a Major in
intelligence with the US Air Force in England.

But Dorothy Abrona McCrae is a fictional character, who has developed her own vision
in her own way.

I am ready to start writing paths of memory and painting, the third part of the
Dorothy trilogy that also includes where every luminous landscape
and when the foreground and the background merged.

_______________________

On the trail in Northern California, there is a fine contrast between dense woods
and the arrival at lake, stream, or ocean beach. This contrast may be more noticeable to me
because I hike more slowly on crutches, and it is this contrast that creates the effect
I strive for in the trail books.

August 27, 2009

The death of Senator Edward Kennedy has left me with a deep sadness, bringing
back my roots, growing up near Boston. I looked for the photo of Teddy with my
mother, (I think when she was Managing Editor of the Somerville Journal;
the Cambridge Chronicle; and the Watertown Press) but could not find it --
as if that too was gone -- along with Teddy's brothers and sisters, John F. Kennedy,
Joseph Jr., Kathleen, Robert, Eunice, and Rosemary, whose life inspired Kennedy family
funding of the school where Nuns taught my autistic brother to read music and play the
clarinet.

And now Teddy, who dedicated his life to honorable public service in the US Senate,
is dead.

I went for a remembrance walk in the woods. Drew redwood trees and a view to the hills.

August 20, 2009

It has been an editing week, mainly immersed in the second edition of the
collaborative fiction Forward Anywhere, but yesterday I finished
my part and sent it to co-author Cathy Marshall. (formerly at Xerox PARC now at
Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley)

At first it was difficult to look at the time period when Forward Anywhere was
written, but in the end, the editing helped me through the rough parts, and it felt
like a new beginning. The life I was leading before the accident -- traveling around
the country writing and programming new media poetry, staying with family in New Hampshire,
while I wrote in the mountains and edited Leonardo's seminal online publications, working
as an artist in residence and on community networking in the mountains of Colorado,
documenting the work of installation and video artists in Arizona, for Arts Wire visiting
the offices of Atlatl in Phoenix, where Native American artists were among the first groups
to build community online, spending time in the Computer Science Lab in Xerox PARC in Palo Alto
-- was very different from my life now. But -- while I continue to write new media poetry --
now I am painting in the hills, exploring contemporary authoring software, and resuming the
creating of handmade books.

Returning to working on paintings and artists books after many years of interface
systems analysis and the writing and editing of new media poetry has brought new respect also
for the work of visual artists. Painters, for instance, may sometimes make thousands of brushstrokes
in one work and they face many decisions -- color, placement of imagery, etc. We don't
always realize how complex this process is.

Last week, I made two sketches near a stream in the woods,
and I have been working on the completing first one. There are quite a lot of details
in these small paintings, so it has been a slow process. I'm also doing some final work on the images
in the June trails book. And I now have about ten sketches for a Summer trails book.

August 11, 2009

"Statement by Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Passing of His Sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver "

Reading about the Hudson River School for two reasons -- one is the approach to landscape
and the other is to look at the core contributions of artists with disabilities in this
school, including Frederic Church, Alexander Helwig Wyant, Fitz Hugh Lane,
Homer Dodge Martin, and George Inness.

The sharing of disability experience is important not only in bringing ourselves courage to face
our lives but also in showing the world what people with disabilities have contributed, that our
viewpoints and lives are important -- the difficulties, the heroism -- and that we need to be more
integrally included.

I think about Homer Avila dancing on one leg. If you haven't been where he was it is easy
to forget that he could no longer dance the renowned Avila/Weeks repertory, that all
he could do was dance on one leg, how difficult that was, that he was in pain. It's important
to remember this while at the same time we celebrate his heroism, how -- with such elegance
and bravery -- he danced on one leg.

He had once cheered me up with his courage when I was writing a story for NYFA Current
that included his dancing. And I thought about him sometimes when I was struggling with crutches.

After his leg was amputated, Homer Avila danced with Alonzo King, Ballet Frankfort, Victoria Marks,
the Florida Dance Festival and at the Kennedy Center. It was a such a loss when he died.

Continuing background reading for part three of the Dorothy trilogy. Restless.
Rather be writing.

Considering how to create an online artists book that contains some of the images and text
in this blog. Thinking in terms of an underlying scroll that is accessed in different
ways. This is somewhat in line with my classic hyperfiction work, where basically there is
an underlying scroll of text lexias. although often, that is not how the reader experiences
the work.

In my visual books, I sought to create works in which neither was the text a description
of the work nor were the images illustrations of the words. In a sense, this has been part
of the flow of this blog, but I would like to incorporate that into a more formal
work that still retains these elements. The things I want to emphasize are the interplay
of the painting of the images and the creation of new media poetry, the experience
of disability, the performative nature of the work, and the intersection of new media
literature, artists books, and narrative art.

watercolor sketches of East Bay scenes

A few weeks ago, I had hiked quite a ways on crutches on a back trail through a
redwood forest without finding a place I wanted to sit and paint. I reached a main
trail that began four miles away to the West. It was a high ridge trail that
overlooked East Contra Costa. I could see Mount Diablo through the trees, but there
were quite a few hikers, and there was nowhere private to sit and paint.
Finally, I arrived at a small glade with a view to a forested ridge. I sketched
for a while, thinking that sometimes you can be walking along and suddenly there
is a place where there is a view to remember. It might not always be be spectacular
like the mountain lakes or the coastal range, but it is a place where you can spend a
pleasant hour, looking at the view, painting.

August 8, 2009

Went to the Hearst Gallery at St Mary's College in Moraga and saw the exhibition California
in Relief: A History in Wood and Linocut Prints. Artist/Curator Art Hazelwood has done
an excellent job of creating a narrative of California artists who work in this diverse field
-- in the same exhibition including the work of the Labor movement and the Chicano Movement,
the influence of Japanese prints, and the historical and continuing work of California landscape
artists.

A few works that I liked are Tom Killion's scene of a tree-surrounded high meadow near
the Santa Cruz Coast; Emmanuel Montoya's homage to legendary border singer Lydia Mendoza;
Rachael Bell Romero's homage to Pablo Neruda; and Gordon Mortensen's soft-color layered woodcut
of the Sioux River. I see in the brochure catalog that Emmy Lou Packard's Artichoke Picker
is also included. Particularly like her work, but somehow missed seeing it in the exhibition.

In the William Keith room in the back of the gallery, there are some paintings of Western mountains
that I hadn't seen -- and some I had seen. Studied the extraordinary way he painted the light on the trail,
the mountains in the distance. Every time I go to the Hearst Gallery, I sit in the Keith room
and read some of the biography that Brother Cornelius of St Mary's wrote of Keith. (only available copies too expensive for me to buy, originally published in 1942, the year I was born) This time,
I read the narrative of Keith's studio on Pine Street in San Francisco.

August 3, 2009

Cathy Marshall and I have begun working on the new edition of Forward Anywhere,
the collaborative hyperfiction we created as part of the PAIR program at Xerox PARC.

As I read our words, I am reminded that they were written when the Internet and the World
Wide Web were beginning to become more important in people's lives, although both Cathy
and I had been working online for years.

1993-1995. It was a time when browsers were making the Web more accessible and the Internet was
becoming glamorous. My son was working at Hotwired, Wired's online magazine.
At PARC, I had finished working with Pavel Curtis in LambdaMoo, and in California, Arizona, and
Colorado, I was working for Arts Wire and with MFA students.

In July 1994, I was preparing to spend August in Palo Alto, so that I could work with Cathy at PARC.
In the introduction to Forward Anywhere, Cathy notes that she sent out an email in early July
-- asking for housing for me Palo Alto for August. "Ironically it was the day before Judy's
accident in Phoenix".

Because of the accident, I could not spend a month actually working at PARC, and for the
most part, we finished the project online. It was a big disappointment because I had enjoyed
the time I spent in Computer Science Lab and was very much looking forward to working in
Cathy's lab.

I remember walking up Page Mill Road, the horse chestnut tree, lunch with researchers,
shared excitement about the future of the Internet and the document of the future, lectures
in the bean bag room, the incredible work stations and the rooms full of printers.

But Cathy and I are working to prepare a new Eastgate edition of Forward Anywhere.

And I look forward....

August 1, 2009

It is Jerry Garcia week, and I have been thinking about how much the music
of the Grateful Dead and the community and fellowship they created have contributed
to California culture, particularly in the Bay Area.

July 26, 2009

I have added bios for

Stuart Moulthrop
Jim Rosenberg
Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
Sue Thomas
Joel Weishaus
Nanette Wylde
among many others,
including writer and musician Ian Hatcher, who composes for a Chicago-based dance company

to the Authoring Software resource. Writers' lives, the tools
writers use can be of interest in understanding the work they create, particularly in
a field where the work may incorporate new writer-reader strategies.

There are some interesting developments in authoring software across the country,
including Noah Wardrip-Fruin's work at UC Santa Cruz, Nick Montfort's work at the MIT
Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, and Juan Guiterrez' adaptive hypertext system
Literatronica. And this Fall, Authoring Software will be interviewing Eastgate founder
Mark Bernstein about his pioneering work in this field.

As I begin to work on the next stage of this project, I note the many and varied approaches
to the creation of new media literature and would like to emphasize that in this field, where
the software can be as core in the realization of the work as was/is the printing press,
it is good that both writers and readers are familiar with the tools new media use, but at
the same time it is important that our work be considered literature and/or (since there are
some in this field who approach it as a screen-based visual medium) art.

The artists books are meant to convey a progression of scenes from hikes on crutches on
Northern California trails. Each sketch is a detail of a larger whole, and as
if I am the narrator of a continuing story of hiking and painting outdoors, you would
have to see how it fits into the array to truly experience the work.

There is a legend that the spirit of Virginia Dare became
a white deer. The story is told in different ways.
But I envisioned her running free and alive in the Marin Headlands.

And then I don't know why --
except that the trail I was following was symbolic --
I followed John Muir on his thousand mile walk from Indiana to Florida
and then on his walk across the Central Valley to the Mountains of California.
The morning that he first saw the Sierra Nevada.

Somehow I felt an ancestral memory of those mountains.
The trees that encircle wet mountain meadows at sunrise.
The light green grass, the wildflowers.
In my dreams walking though the woods alone
in search of a view of a lake.

Judy Malloy -- from the arioso in The Wedding Celebration of Gunter and Gwen

July 20, 2009

The work of plein air artists, is not, in some cases, so very different from the work of
performance artists, although it is usually not thought of in this way. What I mean is
that there are elements of adventure and of sharing personal vision of the
environment in the work of artists who explore and paint outdoors to convey landscape.

I have been thinking, while planning a sketching hike, that I may be one of the few
poet artists who has not only created work as a performance artist in the 80's
milieu of Bay area punk clubs and alternative art spaces, but who also as a young
artist painted landscapes in New Hampshire and the North Shore of Massachusetts.
I bicycled around Ipswich, painted the beaches and the marshes and exhibited my work
with other local artists. I don't have much of this work left because I sold most of it.

Writer John Updike, who lived in the same town, was a fine example of an artist who was
part of the community. His wife at that time was a painter who sometimes showed her
work locally, and I greeted him walking downtown, as did everyone else in town.
I remember that once in a wild snowstorm, I passed him on the hill at night
and we said hello, as we walked alone in opposite directions.

______________

If you want to explore the vision of photographers, in particular the work created by two very
different black and white photographers, visit the Mumm Napa gallery to see George Rose's
photographs of musicians and Hollywood actors and in an adjacent gallery, the work of Ansel Adams.
I saw these exhibitions a few weeks ago and also had a glass of champagne and looked out at the
view of the valley.

______________

July 19, 2009

Celebrating the Life and Work of Distinguished Spanish Poet Carmen Conde,
The Caregena Project is included in Drunken Boat's Anniversary Issue

I note that some of the works from the The Caregena Project are included in
Drunken Boat's Anniversary issue, celebrated at the SoHo20 Chelsea Gallery
on July 10th, 2009.

It is great that this project, that was created in commemoration of the distinguished
Spanish Poet Carmen Conde and originally housed on a website in Cartagena, Spain,
has found a welcoming home, so that her life and work continues to be celebrated. An excellent
introduction by Alejandro Delgado Gomez describes the collection.

I was pleased that the 2006 edition of my Concerto for Narrative Data, was exhibited
in the The Cartagena Project in Spain.

The expanded 2008 version of Concerto for Narrative Data was published
in The Iowa Review Web last year.

And I look forward...

______________

Rereading books about Bay Area Figurative painting:

The Art of Joan Brown by Karen Tsujimoto and Jacquelynn Baas
Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945-1980 by Thomas Albright
Elmer Bischoff - The Ethics of Paint by Susan Landauer
among others.

I will probably begin writing Part III of the Dorothy in Berkeley trilogy in August
or September, but in the meanwhile, I am looking at the art and reading about the
lives of San Francisco Bay Area artists in the 1950's.

In the lives of artists, there are certain times when everything comes together, and you
know/see that this is what you have been trying to do, that this is the fulfillment of your
vision you have been searching for. It is this period in the narrator's life and
work that I now address in Part III. It will be of interest to contrast this with the more
reminiscent/recollective aspects of her earlier career which shape the narratives of Part I:
where every luminous landscape and Part II: when the foreground and the background merged.

In the actual writing, I generally don't use very much of what is an extensive amount
of background reading. However, the reading helps shape the growth and actions of the
characters, as well as the parallel lives of real artists and the era in which the
narrative exists.

When I first began writing about the life of Dorothy Abrona McCrae,
I concentrated on Dorothy herself. Now I return to the time when her work matured --
the 1950's -- and in the background texts will look also at the art and artists of that era.
This approach reflects Dorothy's own path in the understanding of her life and work.
She is the fictive narrator, and in the years since her story was begun, there have been changes
in her life, in her understanding of her own work, and in her understanding of the lives of other artists.

I'm thinking about the interface for this work. Currently I plan to use the interface
I designed and created for where every luminous landscape - possibly with some design
changes to make the total effect somewhat more organic looking.
The central interface I used for where every luminous landscape
works well when I want to create a background of the era and of the lives of other artists
from which the narrator's voice emerges as the primary voice, but it is quite difficult to write
to this interface because, as if it were a piece of music, all the parts must cohere.

It has been interesting in the Trail Books to return to working with the visual equivalent
of lexias and to work on these books in parallel with new media writing. In some ways in my
work, the painting is also narrative poetry, an artist's poetic reaction to time and place.
So, although the medium and process are quite different, it does not seem very different to
me to create an interface into which lexias of poetry are placed in such a way that they
interact in different ways and to create an artists book that is composed of many small
sketches and paintings, each representing a moment of vision of landscape.

July 12, 2009

Last week I left a main trail and hiked on a path where I had never been. I sat down with my
watercolors in the shade of a pine forest, looking out in contrast at green-leafed trees and a
framed view of hills and trees. I was thinking about a better future as I painted.

A few days later, I set out on a familiar trail that I hadn't hiked for a while, There were some
things that happened last week on the anniversary day of the accident that I do not want to talk
about here, and I was not feeling very good. While I was walking up the trail, I remembered that
some years ago, I had been struggling with walking with a disability on that very trail when from
somewhere in the distance, I heard the sound of bagpipes.

And for a moment I thought I was walking the hills in Scotland.

hiking in the hills, remembering the sound of bagpipes - watercolor sketches of the East Bay hills

Last week, as I hiked up the trail on crutches, the view was so beautiful that I wondered why
I did not hike this trail more often. I went a ways up the hill and then returned in search of
a place to paint. I followed a narrow path I had discovered in the Winter. Sitting on the
hillside, I began to paint the vista in front of me, thinking -- as with the magic of paint
and brush, the scene took shape on the paper -- that it was important not only look at those hills,
trees, and fields of yellow flowers from a distance but also to walk on the trails in the woods,
meadows, and hillsides.

Today I went to the opening of Michael Horse's ledger paintings and jewelry at Gathering Tribes.
As always, I enjoyed talking with Michael -- this time about the paintings
on old documents and ledger books done by imprisoned Native Americans.
His continuing work in the field has inspired interest in the historical work,
as well as interest by young people in creating ledger paintings.

In his own painting, he celebrates Native American lives of the ledger painting era
-- in this exhibition looking at love and courtship with humor, imagination, and understanding.
The work is visually compelling, and it also has an interesting conceptual aspect
in that there is sometimes a relationship between the painted narratives and the
found texts -- from wedding certificates to railway documents.

Gathering Tribes owner Pennie Opal Plant has been writing stories to go with
Michael's paintings for the creation of a book they are working on together.
We talked for a while about writing -- the difficult moments when it doesn't
seem to work, how it finally all comes together.

Yesterday I went to the Scottish Highland Games on the grounds of Dunsmuir House in Oakland.
I heard Celtic music, including the fine singing of The Browne Sisters and George Cavanaugh.

The pipers marched by, playing in the Opening Ceremony.
There were the Prince Charles Pipe Band, the Bushmills San Francisco Irish Pipers,
the City of Sacramento Pipe Band, the MacIntosh Pipe Band, and I thought there was
nothing in the world like that music.

At the gate, I watched the entrance of Mary Queen of Scots, heard the blessings
for the Celtic nations and on my way out was entranced by the perfect tableau of Mary and her retinue.
Instinctively -- as if for a moment I was the ghost of a legendary family ancestor, Maid Lilliard
-- I stopped unseen outside the Royal court and curtsied on my crutches.

I headed home, where I worked on the notes for when the foreground and the background merged

July 5, 2009

As July begins, even 15 years later, it is hard time for me. I relive the accident.
that happened in Arizona -- the pain, terrible weeks in the hospital, the feeling
that I had lost so much of what was important to me in my life. Other people
who have suffered such accidents have told me that they too have a difficult time
on the anniversaries of their accidents.

On July 9, 1994, I was in a crosswalk walking my bicycle when a 15 year old with no
drivers license ran directly into my leg. I'm lucky that the ambulance came quickly
because in addition to the mashed leg, the 13 breaks, the bones sticking out, I had a
severed artery. They told me in the ambulance that they would have to take off my leg,
but instead, they did some experimental skin and muscle grafting, an arterial bypass and
a lot of operations. Given that I led an active life, I'm not sure it wouldn't have been
better to take off my leg. I don't remember that they asked me. I think I lost consciousness.

After I had returned home to California and moved to El Sobrante in 1996, I was slowly
regaining some of the use of my leg. By January 2000, I had mostly transferred to a cane
and was looking forward to reclaiming my formerly active life. In December 1999, a website
I had designed -- an experimental hybrid of online conferencing, hypertextual
documents, and archives that addressed the question: "As we begin a new Millennium,
what is the role of gender/gender identity in shaping the convergence of art, science
and technology?" -- had been a SemiFinalist in the very prestigious
Global Information Infrastructure Awards. I had been to a gala Awards Ceremony at the
Westin, St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, and was feeling like my old self.

I was tweaking the interface for The Roar of Destiny and had enjoyed writing about
the role of the arts in the new millennium for Arts Wire Current when in mid-January 2000,
while walking on a path, I fell on the hill below where I live. Somehow, my leg bent under me,
and my femur broke where it was pinned to a rod from what had been a very severe break in
my thigh. Part of my femur fell into my knee cap.

I was in terrible pain and did not think I could move. It was getting dark. I yelled for help,
but no one came. Finally, I began to drag myself up the hill. When I neared the top,
a neighbor saw me and came to help.

My California doctor was out of town. Because what had been done to my leg in Arizona was
so complex, no one else knew how to fix it, so for several days, I had to wait in the hospital
in serious pain, my leg uncasted and in a weird position before they could set it. It is not
an experience I will forget.

The resultant problems meant I was thrown back to crutches. As the millennium began, I had
thought I would be able to mostly resume my life as it had been, but this was not to be.

Today as I write this, I am shell-shocked from prolonged firecracker noisemakers outside
my door last night. There are funding proposals to write. (and rejections to deal with)
It is not easy to feel optimistic.

But the array for the June trails book is beginning to look very good, and I am starting
the background reading for part three of the where every luminous landscape trilogy.
At the end of July, Cathy Marshall and I will be doing some editing in preparation
for the Second Edition of Forward Anywhere, the work we created together for the
Xerox PARC PAIR program.

I have already finished the editing and new introduction work for the Second
Edition of its name was Penelope and sent them to my publisher,
Mark Bernstein at Eastgate.

And I look forward...

I use watercolors in tubes, a paint tray, and a selection of brushes that I carry in my
backpack along with watercolor paper and small bottles of water. It is not easy to walk
with crutches and carry things in my hands, so I attach the painting to the backpack
when I hike back down the trail. I can use a cane for short distances but need crutches
if I'm walking more than a few blocks.

After looking at the patterns of the baskets and the textiles in the Hearst Museum,
I reaaranged the images in the June trails book so that the dense paintings are framed by
lighter paintings. It doesn't look like what I saw, but sometimes looking at how other
artists create helps see one's own work in a different way.

______________

July 4, 2009

Last week I sat under the trees and sketched the woods not far from where
Jerry Garcia used to live. Filling in color at home, I began to imagine
a picnic in the forest, the sound of Jerry's guitar, the writing of new songs,
the words I wrote in Concerto for Narrative Data:

"My sorrow is for the halted sound of Mozart's musical laughter,
for the painters who were killed in accidents.
I will never see the unfinished canvases in their studios.
My tears are for the poets who died in poverty,
for Frida Kahlo, her entire life spent in pain.
My sorrow is for the lost live sounds
of Glenn Miller's band and Jerry Garcia's guitar,
the lost voices of Bessie Smith, Janis Joplin, and Roy Orbison,
for Carole Lombard's lost life, the films she never made,
for the entire 1961 US Skating Team
killed in a plane crash, their burnt skates in the rubble.
My tears are for the stilled feet of the dancers who died of AIDS."

I also remembered scibe's aria from The Wedding Celebration of Gunter and Gwen.

On this Independence Day, I have been thinking about the work that I wrote in 2004 and
(many edits later) finished a few years later -- Revelations of Secret Surveillance

I wrote this work because there were things I had encountered working for an arts journalist
and in my own life that I thought should be explored. Because I had at one time also worked
as an information specialist for defense and NASA-funded industries, I had the skills to do
the research. Thus, using exploratory fiction, poetry and research, I began what was to be the
harrowing process of writing Revelations of Secret Surveillance, a narrative that
looks at the potential for technology-mediated repression in situations where governments
encourage intelligence agency and informant stalking of civilian populations.

One of the impacts of surveillance that has not been adequately understood is what happens
when people are given covert access to the lives of other people. And I think it is something
we need to look at in the climate of surveillance since 911 -- not only in what such
secret access to their lives may have done to people in the creative community (which is my
focus) but also what it may have done to the lives of all people who may have been put
under surveillance.

I would like to note that after I began writing Revelations of Secret Surveillance,
many difficult things happened in my own already eventful life. But hiking, writing, painting,
creating new media poetry and visual books; viewing, reading, listening to the work of other
artists; helping to create an equal place in society for people with disabilities are what I would
like to focus on in this blog -- that in itself has helped me reclaim my own life -- so I do not
today want to here detail the impact on my life of writing a work that was critical of intelligence
agencies and covert Department of Defense-funded Research.

I am still working to get the print version of Revelations of Secret Surveillance published.
But Concerto for Narrative Data was published in the The Iowa Review Web last fall and
The Wedding Celebration of Gunter and Gwen was featured at Visionary Landscapes,
the exhibition of the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference.

______________

Today I have created a title page for when the foreground and the background merged

It uses elements of the intermezzo that last week I decided not to use; they include the
"lines" from scenes two and three. But then, rather than appear on the title page, the
"lines" from scene one are the entryway to scene one, and there the reader can either let
the overture lines of poetry play out, or click on "scene one" to begin the actual narrative.

And I look forward...

thinking about Summer in the mountains
details of watercolor sketches from an onsite drawings in the Sierras

Before the accident, for two years I spent summer months in the mountains of
Colorado, hiking, writing and helping art students get online and make art online.
At that time -- before the World Wide Web -- it was also an adventure to get online.
We worked in LambdaMoo, (I had been working with Pavel Curtis at Xerox PARC)
helped set up a local community-centered BBS and communicated with other artists
all around the world.

July 1, 2009

Spent some time adding links to Arts Wire Current coverage on the
Memories of Arts Wire page.

I am always amazed at what all of us at Arts Wire accomplished when I revisit
Arts Wire's history and am particularly proud of our role in bringing artists and arts
organizations online, beginning in 1992 in the days before the World Wide Web.
We helped the creative community learn to communicate online, and we played an
important role in making arts information available online -- from hosting discussions
of how to deal with the Culture Wars that had so decimated national arts funding to
providing tech help and/or server space to artists, musicians, writers and arts
organizations -- from the Native Arts Network Association to the American Music
Center to the Joyce Theater to the Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College
to Art Without Boundaries, a project of the states of Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota,
South Dakota, and Wyoming to the Western States Arts Federation to Out North in Alaska.

Many of the issues of the Art Wire Current (later NYFA Current) that I wrote
and edited are still interesting. And this job was a godsend for me after I was
run down in 1994. I very much appreciated being able to work on a decently paid job at home.
Thank you Arts Wire and the New York Foundation for the Arts!

A program of the New York Foundation for the Arts, Arts Wire was a National organization
run from a virtual online "office", where from all over the country, we "met" to
discuss our work.

I remember thinking after September 11 that it would be difficult to cover from
my home in El Sobrante, California, but that turned out not to be the case. Via phone and email,
I talked with many people to provide Current's in depth coverage of the impact of September 11
on the arts community, including the tragic death of Jamaican American sculptor
Michael Richards whose studio was near the top of Tower One.

Current's 911 reporting was highly praised and widely distributed in the arts community.
I think this shows what people with disabilities can do when given the chance.

______________

June 28, 2009

The fog was settled deep in the Berkeley Hills when I set out on my green crutches to hike
and paint a few days ago. I was glad I had packed a sweater and a rain jacket. When I got
to the place where I wanted to paint, the fog began to lift. I was there for quite a while,
enjoying the painting of trees and grass and sky as the sun came out. Later at home, I did a
little more painting on this scene near a favorite trail.

It is now in the upper left-hand corner of the June trails book.

June 26, 2009

painterly background of sound
sound of a string quartet playing Mozart
blue water of the harbor
Sunset. The restaurant we were in
on the hillside the emphatic suggestion
late one Summer before I was married
shared meals and art talk
background, foreground, linked
in the array of painted panels

Sometimes you can work for several days on something, and it just isn't right.
So it was this week with a "lines" intermezzo that I wanted to use as a title page
for when the foreground and the background merged
In the end, by revisiting the existing pages, I improved what I already had
and ended up (at this point) not using the intermezzo. But I liked the way
it allowed the reader to read the whole "lines" progression at once.

rectangular rocks leading out into
the choppy dark blue green sea
happier than I thought I should be
the beaches he once painted
pervasive feeling of intimacy
intimate experience of painting the woods
soft complex sound
tangential places in our lives
the same year
some unknown mystery, some aura
it wasn't until that very moment
the significance of the date
Deep blue. Aquamarine. Gold and red.
A sea of gold haloes
treasure of the Templars
in candle light procession

The "lines" are a few words or a phrase from each lexia (screen of text) that when
combined create a poetic path through the subject matter of each lexia:

pictures of the early days of the game
green field waiting for the players to arrive
music of the band marching into the stadium
in the air, the football in play
the moment when it is caught

I have used this way of creating an interface poem in my fictional first person
narratives since the proto-blog early days of the World Wide Web in 1994.
In l0ve0ne, (1994) for instance, the "lines" create a poetic path through a work
in which in the body of the text, rather than use underlined links, I preceded each
hyperlinked word with a linked dash. It was the year I was run down and some of the
time I was in a wheelchair; the light and darkness of the time transposed in a different story.

L0ve0ne was the first work in the Eastgate Web Workshop. The photo
on the cover of this work was taken many years ago when I was on a camping
trip to the Rivera with my (now ex) husband, who was at the time a Private
in the US Army stationed near Nürnberg. I lived on Dürerplatz, a few
blocks from the house that was the home of the Reformation artist Albrecht Dürer.
When on leave, (I worked for the Library on the base) we traveled all around
Europe in an old Volkswagon painted black and gold. I particularly remember boat trips up
and down the Rhine where the vineyards lined the banks of the river, and the white wine
tasted like summer.

But the story in L0veOne is not about this. As is the way of artists I have written
another story and set it in places I remembered.

slow buildup of intense color
the wine was good. I drank it slowly
back and forth motion of the paintbrush
saturated with intricate detail
the book of Irish mythology that he gave me
he responded to the expression on my face
following the paths of memory and painting

June 21, 2009

Yesterday I went to the opening of Clayton Bailey's work at the Richmond Art Center
-- the first time I had seen so many of his robot sculptures together. Impressed
with the sculptural elegance of each work. Enjoyed talking with him about how his
website has created interest in his work.

On the gallery walls, the color-pencil drawings by Betty Bailey create
a continuing narrative of her life, of their life together, and of their
friends and their art world adventures.

In the same exhibition, I also particularly liked Kurt Wold's video sound work --
a dream of playing bicycle instruments.

Later I went to the Hearst Museum of Anthropology and looked at Native American baskets
and textile narratives. (from the highlands of Guatemala)

And then did some volunteer work in Berkeley helping to feed the homeless. I really like
doing this even though it is a little hard to do. (I use one crutch for this) because all
the people -- both those who serve and those who come to eat are so nice, and I am happy
to be able to help out.

______________

The Art California Web Portal was featured on the the University of California's Institute
for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) mailing list, and I got a lot of email from artists
and arts institutions -- both praising the resource and wanting to be adding. I also
added a few of the artists who participated in this Year's Pro Arts Open Studios in
the East Bay.

Am working on the Dance pages. Delighted to see that there are over 65 participants at this years
Celebrate Dance Festival in San Diego!

The Poet on Crutches Blog was included in the National Arts and Disability Center (NADC) Arts and Disability Web Tour.

And I look forward...

June 17, 2009

The draft version of scene three of
when the foreground and the background merged
has been written and is now online. The next thing I need to do
is create the "lines" opening, do some editing, work on the notes
and then work on the opening pages for this entire Interlude.

And now, (a day later) the draft "lines" opening is completed, so scene three begins here.
I think it is good. It is time to edit and visually shape the entire work.

In this same morning, I rearranged somewhat the images in the new trails book.
It is better, but I won't post what it looks like since it is likely to change again soon.
The work as a whole does not look complete until there is an image for every place
in the array, and I have worked on the painting of each image, so that the interplay of
light, dark and color and sense of place are coherent and visually satisfying.

Sue Thomas will be interviewing me about the Poet on Crutches Blog
for her excellent The Wild Surmise Project which is about cyberspace and nature.

Writer/new media writer Sue Thomas founded the seminal trAce Online Writing Centre in 1995.
It was great to to meet her some years ago at the Electronic Literature Organization
Symposium, that was hosted by UCLA.

And I look forward....

______________

June 14, 2009

Sunday. Planning to go to a family party and then Choral Evensong at St. Marks later today.

Working on the Authoring Software Project. I added bios for Robert Kendall
and Deena Larsen and to the Project. For Authoring Software, Deena writes about
her Pines at Walden Pond, created with Trellix.

Also included in the Authoring Software Project, new media poetry by my former classics
professor William Harris.

Took a trip to the mountains last week. Was disappointed when it began
to rain, just when I reached my destination, but nevertheless the
trail was beautiful in the soft gray rain. Patches of snow on the mountains,
and there were brief moments of sunshine. The rocky path along this lake is
quite challenging on crutches, but I very much miss hiking this kind of trail,
and as I was walking along, I was thinking about Snowshoe Thompson
going up and down these hills in winter, delivering the mail on skis.
It was a few days after the Middlebury College reunion in Vermont. I can't
usually travel that far, so didn't go but was remembering the downhill
racing course my freshman year at Middlebury when I was on the ski team.

I made my way -- with difficulty on crutches -- down towards the lake, where I painted this
watercolor, until it began to rain harder. On the way back, I was able to make three pen
and ink sketches.

______________

June 9, 2009

I have finished laying out the interface for scene three of
when the foreground and the background merged
For consistency, the interface is mostly the same as scene one, so this work,
which is in itself an interlude, moves from a conceptual open book
where the two pages you see change magically and are contrapuntal,
to an artists book interlude where one page is text and the other page is
a text slide show of related information and memories. And then back
to the open book format of scene one.

The draft writing is mostly done, and I am beginning to put the words
in the DHTML framework. This is one of the best parts of writing new media literature --
that moment when the writing and the interface come together.

June 8, 2009

You would never know
what it was I was trying to say on the canvas that day
unless I was able to convey
the essence of a certain experience
in the evidence of multiple brush strokes
or the slow buildup of intense color.

At this time of year you can walk down almost any trail in California
and see fields of blue or yellow lupine, fields of white daisies,
yellow daisies. California poppies. And the forty shades of green in
Johnny Cash's song: "I'd walk from Cork to Larne to see those Forty Shades of Green".

It is difficult to imagine the wildflowers if you do not live here.
On my home trail, I painted a row of white flowers along the trail,
and before I put in all the details, they looked like snow spread out
beneath the pine trees. In my visual books, I like to intersperse
the wildflowers and green hills with darker images of pine forests and fog,
approximating the experience of hiking in Northern California.

If you go for walks in the high country, take along
The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada (Heyday)
John Muir Laws went to the mountains with watercolors and painted over
2700 images of birds, animals, flowers, and trees to create this book.

Last week, I heard Kim Shuck (Tsalagi, Sauk/Fox, Polish) read at
Gathering Tribes. Bought a copy of her Smuggling Cherokee (The Greenfield Review Press)
I would describe it, but devorah major does it better on the back cover
"...Read it aloud so you can hear its notes falling from your tongue,
some held and others released quickly, some trilling in the wind of your
voice..." There is more... I also wanted to read more of devorah's poetry
after I read her generously wonderful description of Kim Shuck's work.

I hope to get to Novato in the next few weeks to see Michael Horse's
ledger paintings at the Marin Museum of American Indian.

The event at Gathering Tribes was a part of Albany's new First Friday
openings and art events -- another sign of the resurgence of the arts
in the East Bay, and I look forward....

______________

June 6, 2009

On this anniversary of D-Day, I am remembering my father W. Langdon "Ike" Powers
(1911-1969) who fought in Normandy in the second wave of the D-Day operation. He served
with the US Army, fighting in France and Germany until he was wounded I believe during
the Battle of the Bulge, attaining the rank of Lt-Colonel in the U.S. Army and receiving
a bronze star and a purple heart. He was a trial lawyer as well as Assistant District
Attorney, Middlesex County, MA; Assistant District Attorney, Suffolk County, MA;
Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts; and lecturer at Boston University Law
School and Suffolk School of Law.

My Dad played football for Dartmouth and hockey for a professional team in Boston
and was selected to go to the Olympic trials, although he was not able to go. He
died at age 55, when I was living in the mountains of Colorado.

I have begun writing the third scene of when the foreground and the background merged
It will probably be a few weeks before it is ready to go online. As it has been
for me, born in the shadow of World War II, D-Day is a part of narrator's life,
and I have been listening to the radio broadcast of Roosevelt's prayer on June 6, 1944.

______________

June 2, 2009

The E-poetry Festival in Barcelona is over and I look forward to
hearing more about the event. The CD version of where every luminous landscape
was exhibited during the Festival at the Center of Contemporary
Culture of Barcelona. The Festival has been hosted in Buffalo, Virginia,
London, Paris and this year in Barcelona. A major gathering for those of us who work at the conjunction of literature and digital arts!

As I add bios to the Authoring Software Project, I am impressed by the creative
uses of software, the poetry and fiction, and the interesting lives of all of us
who create electronic literature.

Begun in conjunction with the 2008 Electronic Literature Conference in Vancouver, WA
and featured at the Computers and Writing 2009 Online Sessions, hosted by UC Davis,
Authoring Software is transitioning to an in depth resource. I plan to expand the project
to include more comprehensive statements; interviews with writers, writers who are
exploring code, and with software developers; reviews and commentary; and more links to
relevant software.

Additionally in order to feature and foster more diversity in the field and to suggest
new approaches, the project will conduct interviews with visual artists, dancers
and musicians who use narrative strategies that are of interest to creators
of new media writing.

Authoring Software currently contains documentation of work by new media writers and
story-tellers from all over the World including New York, Chicago, Colorado, California,
Washington State, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maryland, rural Ohio,
rural Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Canada, Australia, England, Belgium and Switzerland.

The many new media writers from rural and small town areas and from universities in rural
and small town areas who are represented in this project are an indication of the importance
of this field in fostering the use digital media and learning throughout the country.

Because of my disability, I can no longer travel to many of the events in my field,
so the Authoring Software Project is particularly important to me, also.

Adding color and more complex counterpart to the top page of
when the foreground and the background merged Have envisioned
what it will be like when I'm finished, but am working on it in increments.

______________

May 31, 2009

Trying unsuccessfully to think about my new writing amidst the constant noise.
I have been thinking about the PTSD that I acquired in 1994
after I was run down. In the ambulance, they told me they would have to take off
my leg. It was broken in 13 places, bones were sticking out, leaving untreatable
fragments, requiring massive skin grafts, and I subsequently endured 6 or 7
surgeries.

In many ways I have learned to manage the PTSD, just as I have learned to manage
my weak and mangled leg, but I still have problems with prolonged noise in my
environment. Sometimes it seems like torture. Have been looking for a new place to
live, but the circumstances are difficult.

PTSD is an honorable syndrome from which many Veterans also suffer.

In this Memorial Day time of year, I wish that peace, happiness, and a long good life
be with all our Veterans, who as a result of their service to our country,
suffer as I have suffered from PTSD.

a nice place to hike and paint

slow buildup of intense color
the wine was good. I drank it slowly
back and forth motion of the paintbrush

May 30, 2009

Spent time with family.

Worked on the June top page for Art California.

Looked at art: the MFA show at the Berkeley Art Museum. Impressed by
the variety of approaches to contemporary art, how good the work was.
The uses of narrative - written, installed, spoken, video-taped,
drawn-animated in the works of Lydia Greer and Ginger Wolfe-Suarez.
Aaron Maietta's watercolors of drawing water, real or imagined, from
the Rio Grande at the US Mexico border. Painting: Sara Bright;
painting machines: Laura Britt Greig. Communicated, shared symbols
in the work of Farley Gwazda.

The layers of information I want to convery in scene three of
when the foreground and the background merged
are complex/difficult, and in a short series of screens there will also
be a juxtaposition of different times in the narrator's life. The past:
1944 in the days before the D-Day invasion; and the 21st century.
Unexpected meetings in both time frames. I have been thinking about
how to do this, outlining the conversations and events.

______________

May 25, 2009

Working on the link portal The Lives of Leaders, Artists, Athletes, Scientists, and Soldiers

Remembering the over 70 British poets killed in World War I many of whom,
Anne Powell so eloquently memorialized in
Deep Cry: First World War Soldier-Poets Killed in France and Flanders.

Beginning with Walter Blackburn, lead architect of the
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, who died of cancer
before the Center was completed and ending with Ed Roberts, "The Father
of Independent Living", who died at age 55, The Lives is a resource
that I compiled in conjunction with Revelations of Secret Surveillance
and Concerto for Narrative Data (The Iowa Review Web, 2008)

On this Memorial Day, I also remember:

Glenn Miller. The Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band had played 800 performances
for soldiers during World War II, when he died on the way from the UK to Paris.
He was on the way to play for the soldiers who had liberated France.

Franz Marc and August Macke, the artists of Der Blaue Reiter, who were
killed in action in World War I.

and the 135 photojournalists who died while covering the Vietnam era Wars

The Lives also includes Revolutionary War hero Brigadier General Daniel Morgan,
who rallied his men before the battle of Cowpens by showing them the scars
from the 499 lashes the enemy had given him and then defeated the British
at Cowpens despite serious back problems.

______________

Working on scene two of when the foreground and the background merged.
Almost ready to begin writing the third scene of this Interlude between
where every luminous landscape and the final part of the trilogy,
in which the painter Dorothy Abrona McCrae's work evolves into the
Bay Area Figurative style for which she is known.

As I wrote in the notes:

"Although the effect is somewhat more Minimalist than the work she
is studying, the interface and design of scene one and scene two
of when the foreground and the background merged
reflect the influence of art in the era after World War II on the
narrator's work. The whole is a record of an artist's quest to situate
her work in her era while at the same time exploring art history and
maintaining her own vision."

Saturday. Cold dark day. Hiked up a steep trail in the Berkeley Hills.
Sat down in the grass to paint the flowers and trees beside the trail.
As soon as I got out my brushes and mixed paints in the paint tray,
it began to drizzle rain. Holding the paper vertical, I managed to paint enough
so that I could continue to work on it at home. It was a kind of a nice walk back
through the wet woods.

In the making of each painting used in the the arrays of images,
there is a story that is not written in the work itself. Yet the
narrative detail -- what is seen hiking on crutches on Bay Area trails --
is a reflection of an experience that by the magic of visual
art is sometimes conveyed to the viewer.

Contingently, when I have completed scene three of when the foreground and the
background merged, the three scenes will be tied together
with an "overture" that uses lines from the lexias to convey a larger meaning.
For example, I created Concerto for Narrative Data,
beginning by writing the individual lexias that carry the narrative.
Then I composed a series of pages that lead the reader into the work.

______________

May 19, 2009

E-Poetry 2009 opens on Sunday May 24 in Barcelona and runs until May 27.

This International Festival is one of the most important new media literature
exhibitions and gatherings of the year and features panels, lectures,
installations, and performances by

Laura Borras, (Spain) J.R. Carpenter,(Canada) John Cayley,(USA)
Jean Clement,(France) Caterina Davino, (Italy) Caitlin Fischer,(Canada)
Loss Pequeno Glazier,(USA) Juan Gutierrez,(USA) Judy Malloy, (USA)
Talan Memmott, (USA) Maria Mencia,(UK) Judd Morrissey,(USA)
Jason Nelson,(Australia) Ottar Ormstad,(Norway) Jorg Piringer, (Austria)
Jim Rosenberg, (USA) Jose Carlos Silvestre, (Brazil) Stephanie Strickland,(USA)
Eugenio Tiselli,(Mexico, Spain) Patrizia Tomaszek, (Germany)
and Jody Zellen, (USA) among many others.

where every luminous landscape is being exhibited as an installation at
the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona.

And I look forward....

I was very pleased to find out that last week where every luminous landscape
was included in Prix poesie-media 2009 at the
Biennale Internationale des poetes en Val de Marne, France, May 15-16, 2009

______________

I'm working on the notes for when the foreground and the background merged. About the main character, Dorothy Abrona McCrae, I wrote:

"Since Dorothy first made her appearance, she has been a part of many of my
works -- a favorite character. Writing her voice has often been a pleasure.
It has even brought painting back into my life. Yet as a poet,
I continue to write about the lives of artists -- expressing experience
in the art world with narrative poetry. I still have many stories to tell."

Poet on Crutches Archive - Spring 2009

Often while hiking and painting in the Sierras, a scene is so beautiful that I stop
on the trail or beside a lake to make a watercolor sketch. I try to
remember the colors, the way the pine trees looked across the water,
so that I can work on the picture when I get home.

About Judy Malloy

Born and raised in New England, Judy Malloy is a California-based
poet who works at the conjunction of hypernarrative, magic realism,
landscape and information. Her work has been exhibited and published
internationally including the 2008 Electronic Literature Conference,
San Francisco Art Institute, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, Sao Paulo
Biennial, the Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston
Cyberarts Festival, The Walker Art Center, Visual Studies Workshop,
Environmental Film Festival Ithaca, NY, Eastgate Systems,
E.P. Dutton, Tanam Press, Seal Press, MIT Press,
The Iowa Review Web, and Blue Moon Review.

Malloy's early work included landscape documentation projects,
artists books and electronic books.

A pioneer on the Internet and in electronic literature,
she followed a vision of hypertextual narrative that she
began in the 1970's with experimental artist books created
in card catalog and electro-mechanical structures, and
in 1986 she wrote and programmed the seminal hyperfiction
Uncle Roger. In the ensuing years she created a
series of innovative hypernarratives works published
by Eastgate and on the Internet, including its name
was Penelope (Eastgate Systems) and l0ve0ne, the
first selection in the Eastgate Web Workshop.
In 1993, she was invited to Xerox PARC where she worked
in Computer Science Laboratory as the first artist
in their artist-in-residence program. In 1994,
she created one of the first arts websites,
Making Art Online. (currently hosted on the
website of the Walker Art Center)

As an arts journalist and Internet information developer, she has
worked most notably as Editor of The New York Foundation for the
Arts sponsored NYFA Current, (formerly Arts Wire
Current) an Internet-based National journal on social, economic,
philosophical, and political issues in the arts and culture.
She is currently the host of the Art California Web Portal in
partnership with The California Studies Association.

She is the editor of Women, Art & Technology, (MIT Press. 2003)
and the Authoring Software Project, begun in 2008 in
conjunction with the Electronic Literature Conference.

Her recent work includes Concerto for Narrative Data,
Iowa Review Web, 2008 The Wedding Celebration of
Gunter and Gwen, (exhibited in Visionary
Landscapes, North Bank Artists Gallery, as part of the 2008
Electronic Literature Conference) and Revelations of Secret
Surveillance, a complex work of hypernarrative, magic realism,
and information art that employs metaphor, history, narrative,
and annotated references to disclose the potential for harassment,
control, and covert censorship inherent in covert surveillance
and contemporary techno-surveillance.

Judy Malloy's where every luminous landscape, 2008 was
featured at the E-Poetry Festival, Center of Contemporary
Culture of Barcelona, May, 2009, the future of Writing,
University of California Irvine, Nov 2008, and was short listed for the
Prix poesie-media 2009, Biennale Internationale des poetes
en Val de Marne.

She has had a mobility disability -- complicated by accidents
in 2000 and 2005 -- since a car ran directly into her leg
in 1994.

words and images are copyright 2009 Judy Malloy

Walking in the hills with my
paintbox the way I used to do, is
a kind of bringing back of lost
freedom. I still remember the
feeling that I would never again
be able to lead the life I had led
before. So it is with pleasure that
I have resumed the making
of artists books.

The performative actions of trail
hikes using crutches and
painting/drawing are a welcome
interval in the work of composing the
counterparted texts that comprise
my new media poetry. The structures
of my poetry inform the structures
of my visual books, and at the
same time, it is helpful to be using
paint and brush while I am writing
about the life of a painter.

A California-based poet who
works at the conjunction
of hypernarrative, magic realism,
landscape, and information,
I am every day inspired by
the marvelous possibilities
of digital narrative while
at the same time I continue
to create with paint and paper.

I have been hiking on crutches
for over ten years and am
comfortable on trails and in
mountain situations that might
not be safe for all people with
mobility disabilities. But my left
leg is very disabled, and I can't
hike as far as I could before.

Know your own limits
and Happy Trails!

Judy Malloy

Contact me at
jmalloy@mail.well.com

Poet on Crutches
Archive
--Spring 2009

Summer/September Trailbook

celebration for
Gary Snyder's
Riprap

Surprising view
from a side trail
in the East Bay hills

Davitt Moroney's
marathon performance
of The Well Tempered
Clavier

Rich Gold,
photography and language;
hyperfiction pioneers
meeting Carolyn Guyer

a week of new media at Cal;
Sonya Rapoport

soprano Susan Gundunas:
All the World's a Stage

painting trip to the Sierras

paths of memory and painting

contrast between dense woods
and the arrival at lake, stream

a view to remember

hyperfiction with Cathy Marshall

sketching in Marin

June Trails Book

greeting John Updike
in a snowstorm

Spanish poet
Carmen Conde

the Dorothy trilogy

the sound of bagpipes
in the hills

Michael Horse
at Gathering Tribes

the woods not far from where
Jerry Garcia used to live

summer in the mountains,
Arts Wire

fog in the Berkeley hills

a trip to the mountains

the forty shades of green in
Johnny Cash's song,
Laws' Field Guide
Native American poet Kim Shuck

E-poetry Festival
in Barcelona

Berkeley Hills Trail

mountain landscapes
at St Marys

mountain lake
in the Sierras

Michelle Obama
at UC Merced

new music
at Cal

backpack painting

The Football Players

Elgar on
"Composer of the Week"

walking in the hills
with my paintbox;
bringing back lost
freedom

slow buildup of
intense color

Artists, Writers,
Musicians, Dancers
with Disabilities

Itzhak Perlman

Dale Chihuly

Cale Kenney

Jill Kinmont Boothe

Katherine Sherwood

Judith Smith
and AXIS Dance Company

Kitty Lunn

Riva Lehrer - Circle Stories

Ian Eliott

Ron Kovic

George Shearing

Art Tatum

Spalding Gray

Barbara Jordan

Dorothea Lange

Carson McCullers

Alfred Hertz

Emanuel Leplin

Joanne de Longchamps

Frederic Church

Homer Dodge Martin
__ Hudson River School

Fitz Hugh Lane

Alexander Helwig Wyant

George Inness

Douglas Tilden

Anna Althea Hills
where every luminous landscape
__ Anna Althea Hills (1882-1930)

Granville Redmond

__ Homer Avila
__ Homer Avila, In Memoriam
__ Congressional Hearings for Artists on Health Care

Marjorie Lawrence

Christopher Reeve

Family Heroes

Family Heroes

Walter Huston Lillard

Hiram Powers

Maid Lilliard

my father

Memories of Arts Wire

Memories of Art Com and La Mamelle

Remembering Judith Hoffberg

Between the Narrator and the Narrative

Judy Malloy: recent work

where every luminous landscape

when the foreground and the background merged,

Concerto for Narrative Data
published in
The Iowa Review Web, 2008