Rudy’s Blog

Starting Tuesday, October 2, 2007, you can get my new novel, Postsingular! Why not order a copy on Amazon right now?

If you’re waffling, read more about the book on my Postingular web page, including reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, and Interzone.

It’s my seventeenth novel. Life rolls on. I started it in July, 2005, finished the main writing in September, 2006, with revisions and copy edits continuing till April, 2007.

Looking at my notes for the book, I find this summary of the goals I had for the book starting out:

• Come to terms with the ubiquitous presence of cell phones, cameras, and computers, increasingly connected into a seamless wireless web.
• Delve into the notion of the technological Singularity likely to occur when the artificial intelligence of networks overtakes that of the human race.
• Write an novel that can serve as a foundation for a series of novels.
• Write something flashy and contemporary, somewhat in the old cyberpunk manner.
• Call it Postsingular; that title’s mersh, man — “mersh” being Bruce Sterling’s word for “commercial.”

After finishing the Bosch chapter 5 of Hylozoic I took some time off for other things, like visiting the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose with my cousin Hedwig, visiting from Luneburg in Germany. And making my first animated GIF. I love the Rosicrucian museum, we used to go here every month when we first moved to San Jose, I remember a photo of the baboon statue with my father, my son, and I. Egyptian style!

I finished painting my Hylozoic triptych, and rearranged it with the subbie dancers on the left and the vine on the right. I like the little flying people a lot. That’s Jayjay with the brush, Thuy with the pigtails, and the alien Hrull manta ray Duxy, heading for the point at infinity, the castle on the beanstalk where the aktuals live.

Tor is helping me orgainize a show of my paintings at Live Worms Gallery in the North Beach part of San Francisco, November 9-11, 2007, as part of the Postsingular publicity. I’m scared to death.

I finished another picture for the show, “Prickly Pear Cactus.”

And, as mentioned in my previous post, I put together a new issue of Flurb, #4. I decided to make Flurb just be semi-annual, it’s so much work. A chunk of Chapter 5 went in as my story in Flurb #4, called “Hieronymus Bosch’s Apprentice.” I just used the middle part, with Bosch onstage. Our Flurb hits were pretty good, we got almost 4,000 unique visitors in the first week. Not that many of them are *sob* bothering to post a comment…

And now I’m ready to get back to writing Hylozoic, the novel. Sort of ready. I’m kind of avoiding the writing, still. So I’m compulsively revising the outline of the next three chaps, over and over and over. But I know from experience that’s not actually a waste of time. The more detailed the outline gets, the easier the chapter is to write.

I got the newly published edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: The Original Scroll. I was reading his great dynamic description of downtown L. A. tonight. Thinking it would be nice to have my Chapter Six start out like that, with Chu and Glee seeing all sorts of stuff going on in San Francisco right after the Hrull crash. The eternal dream of writing like Jack…

A cityscape—with silps. That is, a city where every object is alive.

There’s a fiftieth anniversery Kerouac boom all of a sudden, the scroll edition is reviewed by high-lit mandarin Louis Menand in the New Yorker, more sympathetically than I expected. Menand makes some interesting points, such as (a) before On the Road, there weren’t any men like this ever depicted in fiction, which is why TV and movies even now have trouble presenting “beats,” and (b) On the Road proposes that you can find God right outside, just go look for him, and this, too, was something new.

At the end of the long review, Menand even breaks out with a capable and heartfelt Kerouac pastiche. He’s like: “I can’t keep up this stuffy prof front anymore. I’m a beatnik, too!”

I had insomnia from an aching tendon last night, and hauled out Visions of Cody, too, and was rereading it a little. That’s the hard-core alternate version of Road, with lots more pot-smoking, obscenity, and passages that were clearly written zonked and never revised, also direct transcriptions of drifty conversations with Neal. Completely unpublishable, a thumb in the eye of propreity. I could hardly believe this book when I was reading it in the early seventies (Cody was only published in 1972), it was like an induction notice/manifesto/call to arms/instruction manual that couldn’t be refused. I never really got over it, it’s almost creepy looking into the book again, I identified with it so much that it emotively feels like I wrote some of the sentences myself; the prose and the legend implanted in me like false memories that I’m irrationally nostalgic for.

I was so enchanted by the Road and Cody pair that I wrote a pair of books something along these lines. First I wrote a ninety-foot single-spaced scroll on an electric typewriter, All the Visions, and then I turned that into a transreal SF novel, The Secret of LIfe, about realizing I was a UFO alien while growing up in Louisville and going to college at Swarthmore. Both are out of print, but available in used or electronic form; more info on my books page.

A talk on “Life as a Gnarly Compuation, or, Is a Fluttering Flag Alive?” at a “What is Life?” conference honoring Yukawa’s dream, sponsored by Kyoto University, in Kyoto, Japan.

View an online PDF of my PowerPoint slides: “Life is a Gnarly Computation, or, Is a Fluttering Flag Alive?” online.

As part of the launch for his new book, Postsingular, Tor Books is helping Rudy Rucker stage a three-day exhibition and sale of his paintings at the Live Worms Gallery in San Francisco.

The show will run November 9 - 11, Friday through Sunday. Stop by anytime on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday to talk to Rudy, who will be manning the gallery himself.

* Opening night party Nov 9, Friday night, 7 pm - 11 pm.

* Reading Saturday afternoon 4 pm - 6 pm with Kage Baker and Rudy Rucker. Hang around and schmooze afterwards; we’ll have some refreshements, and you can buy our books from a table manned by Borderlands Books.

The gallery is at 1345 Grant Avenue between Green St & Vallejo St (see map). Approximate hours of opening (including events):
Nov 9, Friday: 2 pm - 11 pm
Nov 10 Sat: 11 am - 7 pm
Nov 11 Sun: 11 am - 4 pm

Parking can be tough in North Beach; try the public Vallejo St. garage on Vallejo St. across Columbus Ave, a block west of Stockton, which usually has room. It’s funky, but safe, as it’s next to a police station!

Flurb #4 is live at www.flurb.net!

It’s another fat and juicy issue, including stories and essays by:

Charlie Anders, Kathleen Ann Goonan, John Kessel, Marc Laidlaw, Kim Stanley Robinson;

also my meeting with Hieronymus Bosch;

also pieces by three newer writers: David Agranoff, Gord Sellar, and Penlope Thomas;

also a group-written jam by “Gustav Flurbert”!

We’re doing all this for free, simply to make the world a bit more interesting.

Please post comments on the issue here.

I was so buffaloed about how to depict Bosch, and then, somehow I was able to write him. He’s a mix of Kurt Gödel, my mother, and me. Maybe my father, too.

The chapter came out quite fast; nearly 15,000 words in about two weeks. White heat. I’d outlined a lot. The pitchfork showed up, I like the pitchfork.

The day after I finished I started feeling sick: weak and feverish. Maybe it’s a virus. Or maybe I depleted myself working on this so hard. I really dug down deep into my psyche. Or maybe it’s not so healthy a thing to twink a dead genius like Bosch. In effect, I conjured him up, and I’ve been dancing with his shade, not being all that respectful to him, either. Teasing him, arguing with him, trying to rile him up.

Today I couldn’t write anymore, and I was painting. I started the missing left panel of my Hylozoic triptych. And, without realizing this was what I’d do, I ended up drawing a giant beanstalk that has an arabesque curve like the plant in Bosch’s Saint John the Baptist, which plays a big role in the chapter: Jayjay sneaks into the cathedral and paints that plant over an image of donor that Bosch has fallen out with. Bosch was giving Jayjay lessons on how to paint this vine. And now he’s giving me the lessons. Hi, Yeroon.

I now see the the triptych is telling me what to put in the last three chapters, from right to left

• Chap 6: The subbies under the ground. They’re actually seen by Chu, and not Thuy as depicted, but the picture stays that way as Thuy is so iconic. They’re in the Lobrane where our space is being totally rotted out by Peng runes.

• Chap 7: The Hrull coming to save Jayjay and Thuy with Thuy inside. That’s Jayjay holding the brush, and those glowing dots are hylozoic eddies in the air.

• Chap 8: The beanstalk shooting up through the sea between the worlds and mounting clear to heaven/infinity. Jayjay sees that on the (triumphant) flight back from Hibrane to the victorious cleansing of the Lobrane.

I should mention that in the Hibrane version of the Saint John the Baptist painting, that will be a cuttlefish down on the right, rather than a lamb, as over there, the cuttlefish is the symbol of the Savior Jude Christ who died on the triangle for our redemption.

I used to think John the Baptist is a boring picture, but now I really see it, and it’s just as wild and rich as a Hell picture. Check out those bizarro insects (locusts!) hanging on the plant. (I think John the baptist lived on honey and locusts, no?)

I love John’s face. I figure Bosch might have had this expression sometimes. Alert.

For the longest time, I couldn’t get into Bosch’s world, and now I’m inside it. It was like one of shiny seedpods, and after some 45 years of buzzing around it, I finally found the hole. The seeds intoxicatingly sweet on my mandible mouth-parts.

I’m sad to be done with the chapter, I loved being in that world and feel like I’m just getting to know Bosch now. Well, I can come back to him in Chapter 7, from Thuy’s point of view. But now—unless I change my plan—I have to jump back to be with Chu on Earth.

And for the last chapter, Bosch is telling me to put in a giant beanstalk, they see it on their way back to Earth. It fits as Jayjay dreamed about a giant beanstalk in Chapter One. It wasn’t really a dream, it was a precog vision.

It’ll be very vibby to instantiate the beanstalk at the book’s end. I’ve been obsessed with Jack’s beanstalk my whole life, I saw a cartoon of it in a movie theater when I was a kid and imprinted on it forever. Looking on the web, I find a a 1933 Ub Iwerks animation of the tale which is could the be one I remember. Everything is alive, it’s so hylozoic, maybe the old cartoons are what got me onto this kick. And the Magic Harp is there too. Ub Iwerks — what a name! — also designed Mickey for Walt Disney. And, how cool, you can Google search for video to find a whole bunch more Ub Iwerks cartoons online. I’m gonna watch them all…

There was in fact a later version of “Jack and the Beanstalk” with Donald, Mickey and Goofy, we had it in our house in Geneseo, NY, on a Fisher Price plastic crank-it-yourself cartoon viewer when the kids were small.

I almost put the beanstalk in White Light, and I hinted around the beanstalk in Spaceland, but now I can really do it.

The beanstalk will shoot up through the sea between the worlds, yes, running from the subbies clear to the transfinite.

And the cool thing is, I didn’t know I could do it until I started painting it today. Thanks to Jeroen gibbering over my shoulder.

“You may get some better, but you’ll never be well no more.” — Skip James.

When I worked for John Walker at Autodesk in late 80s and early 90s, John would occasionally get into a creative state where he’d single-handedly turn out a very large and well-designed bunch of computer code in an incredibly short time—for instance our Cellab program (which can find on Walker’s huge web site or on mine , in slightly different versions), or a “fractal forgeries” landscape generator for our Chaos program, complete with a graphical user interface. He referred to this state of extreme focus and obsession as a “bloodlust hacking frenzy.”

I’ve been in that mode on my novel Hylozoic the last couple of weeks, writing my chapter “Hieronymus Bosch’s Apprentice.” I finished the first draft of the chapter today. I’ll post a couple of tastes here for today’s blog entry.

By the way, it really helped that I visited Bosch’s home town this spring.

Today’s illos include a couple of scans from this nice new book I got, edited by Larry Silver, Hieronymus Bosch — although the image immediately below shows the shoes of the owner of chihuahua depicted further below, spotted where else but the Los Gatos Sunday market.

Jayjay and Thuy followed Azaroth up a staircase to a sunny studio in the front of the house. As it happened, the windows gave directly onto the great triangular marketplace and its articulated hubbub. The room sounded with a hundred conversations, with vendor’s cries, the scuff of shoes and the clack of hooves—all this overlaid by the vile drone of an incompetently played bagpipe.

A cluttered work table sat in the middle of the studio, and beyond that was Jeroen Bosch, standing before the window, brush in hand, the light falling over his shoulder onto a large, square oak panel.

“Aha!” he exclaimed. “Azaroth brings fresh wonders.” His face was lined and quizzical; his mouth and eyebrows were alive with the shadows of his fleeting moods. He looked to be in his mid forties.

Jayjay looked around the studio, fascinated. The work table held seashells and eggshells, drawings of cripples, a bowl of gooseberries, a peacock feather in a cloudy glass jar, and a variety of dried gourds. Upon the wall were a cow skull and a lute, also a stuffed heron and owl perched upon shelves. Two nearly completed paintings leaned against the wall, panels half the width of the big square one that Bosch was working on. The panels were easily four times Jayjay’s height, each of them a mottled microcosm, brimming with incident and life.

“I’m nearly done decorating the harp,” said Jeroen. “But she’s locked up in the attic. She’s too valuable to uncover with so many people about.” He made a gesture towards the bustling marketplace.

“I can’t see her?” said Azaroth, incredulous.

The painter set down his brush and walked over to them, keeping an eye on Jayjay and Thuy. He accepted the dogfish from Azaroth, set it on his work table and propped its mouth open with a porcupine quill. “Hello,” he said to the dogfish, making his voice thin. “Do you bring a message from the King of Hell?”

Bosch was playing—seeking inspiration by enacting a little scene that he might paint. To ingratiate himself, Jayjay responded as if speaking for the fish, flopping his tongue to make his words soft and slimy. “The pitchfork wants to strum the harp,” he said, nothing better popping into his head. “The pitchfork is God.” He reached out with is hand and waggled the fish’s gelatinous brown tail.

Bosch nodded, appreciating the mummery, if not taking the words seriously. He was studying the singular objects on his table, nudging them this way and that with the tip of his delicate, ochre-stained finger—as if composing a scene. “Would it be heresy to say all things have souls?” he said, suddenly fixing his eyes on Jayjay.

… “The Antonite brothers nurse the victims of St. Anthony’s Fire,” said Jayjay. “Do you know that condition is caused by a fungus in brown bread? I had an experience of it last night. I spent part of the night hallucinating in the Antonites’ courtyard.”

“And drinking wine,” said Bosch, with a telling sniff. “Gluttony. The Holy Fire is caused, like any physical affliction, by sin. God abandons the sinner and the devil attacks like the wolf bringing down a wayfarer. Brown bread is the Lord’s wholesome gift to the lower classes. The bread’s essence is pure in and of itself.”

“I want to know if you’ve been inspired by hallucinations from brown bread.”

“Were your drinking companions painting triptychs?”

This was leading nowhere. Studying the picture in progress, Jayjay admired Bosch’s facility at turning realistically rendered objects into bizarre beasts. Here was a jug that was a horse, a tree that was a man, a ship that was a headless duck. “Everything’s alive,” he said, returning to their common ground.

“Yes,” said Jeroen busy with his brush again. “Few understand this. I’m glad we share the knowing.”