first_page

Behind the Scenes with David Mandessi Diop

David Mandessi Diop: Coups De PilonOne of the notable benefits of having graduated a UC school is world-class library privileges. You might have heard Jay-Z rap about library privileges on his last joint—you know the one about the light-skinned information desk ladies and shit? When I found the library books to research for “David Mandessi Diop: Les Vautours,” “David Mandessi Diop: To the Bamboozlers” and “David Mandessi Diop: Aux Mystificateurs” the first thing I noticed was how new the books were and how the adhesive lists of previous borrowing dates were empty or marked only once.

The newness of the books means to me that not a single person on the UCLA campus has cared enough about David Mandessi Diop for years. Not a single instructor ordered her students to (literally) check out his books. Not a single curious student found his poems. My little revival of Diop was exciting to me because of this apparent ignorance—because being angry or sad about these burials is just played out… With kintespace.com I could actually do something about remembering David Mandessi Diop on a large scale (as of month 12 (2007), the David Mandessi Diop hits total 7,432).

David Mandessi Diop: Coups De PilonThe problem, though, is that I cannot read French. Even though the picture at left shows my slender, elegant, brown fingers on the page, this is only fake posing as I cannot read a single word (except for Afrique) on that page. And problems like these are one of the many reasons why I really, really enjoy having intelligent friends. Since my political/acting skills are very impotent, I would rather have intelligent friends or no friends at all. So my former live-in mother, the mother of my daughter (mother Tasha Dionne Thomas, a former UCLA student), came to my aid and used her French powers to pull me through.

David Mandessi Diop: Coups De PilonSo the title of this post uses an old Hollywood buzz phrase, “Behind the Scenes,” for some dry chuckles but there are some serious pre-production photos worth mentioning even though we here in the kinté space are not making the definitive David Mandessi Diop feature film. At right you can see the multi-million dollar equipment we used to move the French from the UC Library books to the screen. The two essential tools were Microsoft Word (for its international proofing features) and a book stand. Once the material was in Microsoft Word, my little tool CleanXHTML was used to get it into the offline database driving the static and deceptively old-school pages of kintespace.com.

So, after publishing this article, I fully expect to be invited to the next Worldwide Book Stand Convention (WBSCon) in Barcelona, Spain where I can give my talk on researching and producing material for kintespace.com. Get in contact with Ze Frank about the details. See you there!

Comments

Ed, 2008-01-04 17:21:40

I don't have Office 2003 but what does cleanXHTML does. Do it parse XHTML nodes into XML? Email me directly.

rasx()