Rudy’s Blog

This weekend, I’m going to LA for the LA Times Festival of Books.

I’m on a panel in on Sunday, April 30, at 10:30 AM - Noon, “Science Writing: Physics and Metaphysics,” held at the Fowler Museum Lenart Auditorium, moderated by Margaret Wertheim, and including Sandra Blakeslee and K.C. Cole as well as me. I'm there to promote The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

Yesterday I was biking on Saint Joseph’s Hill above Los Gatos. This fallen rock made me think of the Robert Johnson song, “Stones in my Pathway.”

Once I told a fried I’d like to take a picture of every single gnarly thing I ever see. I’m getting’ there! Oaks grow slower than other trees, and “think” more about where to go, thus their more convoluted trunks (= spacetime trails = worldlines).

The wildflowers are fixing to bust loose quite soon. Maybe next weekend.

This one part of Saint Joseph’s Hill reminds me of the Shire where the hobbits live. Cozy nature.

I always relate to the lone trees on the mountain slopes.

And here’s one more shot from that hilltop I climbed near Fresno.

When I read in SF last week someone mentioned a “Mundane SF” movement. They had a website, but it’s down, although you can see their not-entirely-serious manifesto in the Google cache. I think they were motivated by a desire to write SF that’s in some way more immediately about our world — their bete noir could perhaps be Star Trek or by extension any kind of FTL alien-laden Space Opera. I can relate to this, although, as I’ve said before, what bugs me more than FTL or aliens is stories where the main characters are military personnel / hereditary nobles. Whatever. It’s always good for a writer to have some kind of group to belong to. It’s too lonely otherwise.

Thinking about Mundane SF set me to reminiscing about the “Freestyle SF” barely-a-movement that I talked about with Marc Laidlaw and Richard Kadrey back in 1987, right after I moved to California. Michael Blumlein and Pat Murphy were co-conspirators in 1987, and by now I’d certainly include John Shirley, Terry Bisson, Paul Di Filippo and Bruce Sterling as Freestylists as well (what these last authors have in common is that I have co-authored stories with them, ergo they must be Freestylists!)

I got a surfboard in December, 1986 — which I never really learned to use — and Marc and I were brimming over with surfin’ analogies to writing. We were heavily studying surf magazines.

Here’s one quote we dug: “Life on the edge measures seekers, performers, and adventurists.” Marc started writing me letters in the surf-magazine style. “There it is, Rude Dude. The Freestyle antifesto. No need to break down the metaphors — an adventurist knows what the Ocean really is. No need to feature matte-black mirrorshades or other emblems of our freestyle culture — hey, dude, we know who we are. No need to either glorify or castrate technology. Nature is the Ultimate. We’re skimming the cell-sea, cresting the waves that leap out over the black abyss …” Marc was reacting against cyberpunk a bit there. The eternal dialectic.

Marc started publishing a neat zine called Freestyle, but it only went through three issues, and then, I dunno, he moved and it fell apart.

(This last picture I found in the same part of the photo albums I was scanning today, it’s Dennis Poague, a.k.a Sta Hi Mooney, hero of the Wares.) I kind of feel like refurbishing the Freestyle concept. As its meaning was always pretty vague, maybe I can just make up a meaning as I see fit. How about this for a start: the primary mission of SF need not be futurology. Certainly it’s interesting and valuable to write “thought experiment” style stories to tease out the possible aspects of imagined worlds. But even here, the writer isn’t constrained to make the SF assumptions be at all technologically likely as seen from the possibly blinkered viewpoint of the early 21st Century. You can do a thought experiment starting with any assumptions you like. Back to the main thread, I think a lot of SF is the sensual pleasure that lies in what I call Power Chords, about playing good patterns — and about Transrealism, that is, using the SF tropes as ways to delve deeper into the psychic nature of the day-to-day world. My main desideratum is, as ever, that it be Gnarly.

I gave a talk on “Gnarly Computation” to the math department at Fresno State University this week. That’s an actual tree gnarl in the picture above, that is, the original meaning of a “gnarl” is a lump like that. I saw the tree in the Sierra foothills the day after the talk. You can get a podcast of the talk at the button below.

You can click the following link to view the Powerpoint slides of my talk.

I soared into Fresno State about ten years ago to speak on, I imagine, cellular automata. Nobody here remembered my visit, nor the person who’d invited me then. But I recognized the buildings.

Fresno feels like Middle America, although more ethnic. I felt remote there. Like a robotically operated Martian lander. This picture shows a train of Chinese goods moving in containers, with a car wearing “God Bless the USA” ribbons. The same administration that's destroying our economy with tax cuts for the rich and paying the bills with loans from China wants us to be patriotic. Don't get me started. Thinking about poltics these days is so alienating. I comfort myself by remembering that even if we have a perhaps illegitimate (due to election irregularities) leader, it really isn't Nazi Germany here, and the Smirking Chimp really isn't a dictator. And, you know, we survived Nixon — although getting out and demonstrating against him did make a difference. It's curious how acquiescent the public has become.

The next few pictures are from a drive I took Route 180 east from Fresno towards the Sierras. I stopped near some orange groves and then I wandered around some cow-pasture foothills covered with big chunks of granite. I saw ground sqirrels, turke vultures, cows, Monarch butterflies, quail and really big black shiny lizards.

My hosts were the age of my children, mid-thirties. They were cute and smart and quirky, as math profs are. I love mathematicians. Some of them asked me a few questions from the audience, and I couldn’t tell if they were teachers or grad students. I’m getting so old. Not that I feel old, it’s more like I’m living in a different world from the young people starting their careers. Really, my math prof stint was two careers ago.

The talk went fine, but the whole exercise felt a little pointless. I no longer have any career interest in promoting myself to math departments; I’m never gonna be looking for an academic job again. And at this point, I’ve somewhat lost interest in promulgating the Wolframite belief that reality is made of gnarly computations. I still think it’s true, but I’m tired of pointing it out.

I drove down to Fresno in my new racing-green BMW 325i, which handles really nicely. I’m still beating down concerns that I might have selected the wrong brand, model, options or color — second-guessing my decisions is a neurosis of mine. But I am growing fond of what I ended up with. Of course on a big highway it doesn’t make all much difference what kind of car you’re in. It’s just driving. The handling excitement only kicks in when you’re on a two-lane twisty road. I stopped at the San Luis reservoir, which was full for once.

On the longer and more heavily trafficked than expected drive, I listened to iPod shuffle of the eight hundred or so songs from old CDs of mine that I’ve ripped. Sometimes a song takes me away; sometimes using the iPod is almost like being high, particularly when I bike or walk around with the earbuds in — high in that sense of not thinking about useful things, of idly spinning your mind. A downside of iPod is that it can feel like constant consuming, and my thoughts are to some extent shackled or slaved to the digital input instead of free to roam. This can be an upside, in that often my thoughts roam into lacertating or fruitless loops.

I filmed a nice moment hearing a song from the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, my car parked under a tree by the King River. Click here to view movie (43 Meg). Nature rolls on.

I had my reading with John Shirley in SF last night. John led off with a beautiful performance: excerpts of his apocalypse novel The Other End, coming out this summer. I read my story “Chu and the Nants” which will be in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine in June. The story is also part of the first chapter of Postsingular, my novel-in-progress.

The gentlemen on the left are Adam Cornford, who teaches at the New College, and Terry Bisson, fellow SF writer. Bisson and Cornford are working to set up a monthly session of SF readings, next month will be Terry and Pat Murphy.

I taped my reading as a 32 meg MP3 file and posted it on my Gigadial station (click the Feedburner button above).

As I mentioned before, John Shirley and I are reading in SF today, Tuesday, 7 PM, New College Theater, 777 Valencia St. near 19th, Parking lot on 21st near Valencia. That's NOT a map of SF below, that's Fresno State because…

On Thursday I’ll be giving a talk on “Gnarly Computation” as a guest of the Math Department at Fresno State College. The talk will be will be in the University Business Center (attached to the Peters Business Building) from 4 to 5PM.

“H.P. Lovecraft’s Seafood Cart”, ©1993 Todd Schorr. I love this picture; it's the cover of a book of comix based on H. P. Lovecraft stories. For lots more great Todd Schorr pictures, see his home page.

Can't look at just one Todd Schorr picture. Rembember I mentioned my fear of Mr. Peanut the other day? Here he is in Todd's picture, “A Goober and a Tuber in an Exchange of Fisticuffs.” ©1998 Todd Schorr.

I’ve been thinking about cuttlefish and Cthulhu lately — Cthulhu being the H. P. Lovecraft alien whose face is covered with tentacles. I got the New American Library edition of H. P. Lovecraft for my birthday, and read “The Call of Cthulhu,” and then my friend Paul Di Filippo lent me a cool movie of the story, a low-budget but very clever production by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

I’m planning to have Pharaoh cuttlefish play a role in Postsingular; they squirmed into Spaceland and Frek and the Elixir as well.

On Easter, my cousin told me about a new variation on the Mandelbrot set called the Buddhabrot. There’s a variant called the Nebulabrot as well.

Oddly enough, the Nebulabrot looks exactly like a cuttlefish larva!

On Easter the rain ended and we saw a rainbow.

“…and now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow c*ck driven down out of the pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural…” Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 626 old edition, p. 638 new edition.

The rainbow led to pirate flag on the other side of our valley.

I’m gonna dig up gold.

Don’t forget my “Dread Lords of Cyberpunk” reading on Tuesday, with John Shirley, at 7 pm APRIL 18 at “SF in SF: A Monthly Series of Science Fiction Readings and Discussions at New College of California in San Francisco Curated by Adam Cornford and Terry Bisson,” New College Valencia Theater, 777 Valencia St., San Francisco ($4 at the door, free to New College community). I’ll be reading my short story “Chu and the Nants,” which is part of the first chapter of Postsingular, and which will appear in Isaac Asimov’s SF magazine in June.

One more varation on the notion of a metanovel from my Chapter Three.

{Begin Postsingular novel excerpt.}

Intense, lipsticked, nail-biting Carla Standard had used what she called a simworld approach in creating her metanovel You’re a Bum! Her virtual characters were artificially alive, always in action, and somewhat unpredictable, a bit like the non-player-characters in an old-school videogame. Rather than writing story lines, Carla endowed her characters with goals and drives, leaving them free to interact like seagulls in a wheeling flock.

You’re a Bum! was experienced through a single character’s point-of-view, this protagonist being a homeless young woman who was enlisting people to help her unearth the truth about the mysterious disappearance of her kiqqie boyfriend. There was some chance that he’d been abducted by aliens. The heroine was bedeviled both by her mother’s attempts to have her brought home, and by the advances of a predatory pimp. Backing her up were an innocent younger-brother figure, a potential new boyfriend, a mysterious federal agent, a wise old junkie, and a cohort of hard-partying lesbians. For the You’re a Bum! dialogue and graphics, Carla had her beezies patching in data from the day-to-day world: conversations of kiqqies in Mission bars, shops, apartments and alleyways.

Each user’s You’re a Bum! experience was further tailored with data drawn from the user’s personal meshes and social situations. In other words, you saw something vaguely resembling your own life you accessed Carla’s metanovel. Thuy’s two sessions with You’re a Bum! had proved painful, even lacerating.

First she’d relived the moment last spring when she and Jayjay stood under a flowering plum tree off Mission Street, Jayjay shaking the tree to make the petals rain down on her, Jayjay’s eyes melting with love. And then she’d seen their breakup, but more objectively than before: Thuy hung-over from the Big Pig, her leg-warmers in disarray, hysterically screaming at Jayjay in a mural-lined alley, and poor Jayjay’s trembling fingers nervously adjusting his coat and hat.

Thuy nursed the irrational suspicion that Carla had deliberately made Jayjay more sympathetic than her, and that Carla had done this as an oblique way of flirting with Jayjay — Thuy thought this even though, at another level, she realized that Carla had absolutely no fine-grained control over individual users’ emergent experiences with You’re a Bum! Yes, she was losing it. Why did she have to miss Jayjay so much?

{End Postsingular novel excerpt.}

Sylvia and I were up in SF this week, staying at the Hotel Tropicana on Valencia Street in the Mission. It was cheap and clean, though the service is kind of vague, as are the rates. Great to wake up here every day. And convenient to try living in the middle of the novel I'm writing.

I like this neighborhood a lot, it’s what North Beach was in the 40s and the Haight was in the 70s. Great murals here and there, like the Women’s Building.

Dread Lord of Cyberpunk Richard Kadrey came to our room and let me photograph his tatts.

An art gallery had a picture of those same two twins I always see in Union Square, looking raucous in this environment.

On the sidewalk I saw, like a message from the cosmos, the affirmation of an SF story I’m working on with Terry Bisson. More shall be revealed…

X21 is the greatest upscale junkstore ever. Statue of Mr. Peanut who used to scare the sh*t out of me as a boy. That imperious, rapping cane.

Rainy day after rainy day. We passed some time in the Dolores Mission.

Hit the greenhouse in the park, admiring the water lilies.

We saw something seriously gnarly in the Tibet section of the Asian Art Museum: trumpets made of human thigh bones, and a ewer made of a pair of skull caps.

Sunnier denizens of museum included Parvati and Ganesh.

I hit the Tartine Bakery on Guerrero at 18 St. once or twice a day. One day I picked up an ingot of lemon meringue cake to take to Paul Mavrides’s house.

A reverent silence as the initial incision is made.

Paul has this amazing collection of plastic toys, a veritable Bosch-hell of them, click here to see a bigger image. He also has a large collection of toys like this that he’s doctored in various surreal and dada ways, but those images are classified for now.

{Begin novel excerpt}

Bouncy Linda Loca was working on a metanovel entitled George Washington, depicting the world as seen from the point of view of a dollar bill; Linda had gotten the idea from an exercise she’d been assigned in a high-school writing class. What lent her work its piquancy was how literally she’d managed to execute the plan: perusing George Washington, you felt flat and crinkly, you spent most of your time in a wallet or folded in a pocket, and when you came out into the air the main thing you saw was counter-tops and people’s hands. The beezies had worked their magic by providing Linda with extensive records of real, orphid-meshed bills. Of course the user could rapidly scroll past the dull patches, but it gave the work heft and seriousness to have them there. When, once in a great while, Linda’s happy dollar changed hands, the bill did a good job at moving the story along, buying drinks, influence, or sex, and thereby sketching out the rise and fall of a young cop whom Linda had playfully named George Washington as well. Young officer Washington became corrupted due to his sexual attraction for a promiscuous older woman named Donna, who talked him into executing a hit on her landlord, who turned out to be George’s biological father, this fact being unknown to George until too late.

For a time, Linda had blowback issues with her George Washington character because, to round him out, she’d made him an aspiring writer. Problem was, he began pestering Linda with messages about the metanovel –— dumb suggestions, by and large, for the George Washington character George Washington was, after all, only a beezie simulation of a human, and not a true artist. He failed to grasp, for instance, the dark, claustrophobic beauty of such scenes as four hours consisting of the slow shifting of the dollar within a felt-applique wallet stuffed into the tight pocket of Donna’s jeans as she trolled up and down Mission Street, or that the invigorating convex pressure of the virtual Washington’s butt-cheek upon the walleted dollar during a full day’s stint as witness in courtroom hearings might be more interesting to Linda Loca than a transcription of what virtual George told a virtual judge. Weary of arguing with virtual George, Linda edited out his love of writing, and made him a bowler instead; and just to show who was boss, she patched in ten hours of bowling-ball-point-of-view.

{End novel excerpt}