Rudy’s Blog

Just back from hike-in camping with my wife, Sylvia, at the Point Reyes National Seashore Coast Camp. It’s a two mile hike in, not too bad, and you end up in a site right by the Limantour Beach. I never manage reserve campsites in advance—it’s just too big a hassle and too much thinking ahead—but if you show up at the Bear Valley Visitor center shortly after 9 a.m. on a weekday, you can normally get a site. Not that managing this is easy, but every couple of years I can.

When I visit these wild, deserted beaches, I sometimes think of the publicity photo of Raquel Welch for the 1966 film, One Million Years B.C.

It was foggy in the morning, but got sunny around noon on one day and 2 p.m. on the other.

I’m always so impressed with how intricately and beautifully nature arranges things when humans more or less leave her alone. The little rectangles of park and yard that we have in cities aren’t really the same kind of thing.

[On “Sculptured Beach” a mile south of the Coast Camp.]

I’m still thinking about this Alan Turing story I want to write, possibly with an eye to getting up enough momentum to charge ahead with a novel that has the working title The Turing Chronicles.

[Protosentient pre-fetal green goo.]

I’ve been reading this very long Turing biography from 1983, Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma. The book really rounds out Turing’s character, and I’m internalizing some of this stuff. There’s always a danger, when writing about historical figures, to settle for a cartoon version of them.

[In the hamlet of Pt. Reyes Station. The Bovine Bakery is a must.]

I feel like in some ways I was like Turing myself as a boy and young man. Like Turing, I always had huge problems with my writing pen, often got ink on myself, and tended to get low grades simply because my papers were so messy. And, like Alan, when filling out official forms, I’d pondered every answer, thiking about the optimal strategy. It was always clear that the authorities were my enemies.

[My friend Bill explains his method of luring a swarm of bees from their lair by building a fake hive outside their entrance.]

Turing had an odd way of speaking. His voice was somewhat high-pitched, he had a grating laugh, and he emphasized words by raising his pitch still higher on them. Hodges has a quote from an American scientist who remembers Alan telling him a dream as follows: “I had a dream last night. I dreamt I was walking up your Broadway carrying a flag, a Confederate flag. One of your bobbies came up to me and said, ‘See here! You can’t do that,’ and I said, ‘Why not? I fought in the War between the States.’”

Turing did a lot after his 1936 paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” written when he was 24, and the source of his seminal formulation of an abstract computer as a “Turing machine.”

In World War II, he was in the thick of the British efforts to break the German army’s Enigma and Fish codes. He was said to be the top cryptanalyst in the United Kingdom, and Turing’s group made a key difference in the war’s outcome.

As the war died down, Turing got hold of “a twenty-five cent handbook on electronics, the RCA Radio Tube Manual, and invented a new way of enciphering speech.” The cipher was called Delilah, basically you needed a box of electronics at the sender’s phone and matchinb box at the receiver’s phone. The cipher worked by overlaying random noise on phone message. A cool, modernistic and Wolframesque feature of this is that Turing used a deterministic but chaotic circuit in order to generate the “noise.” The sender’s and receiver’s boxes could be set to generate exactly the same pseudorandom patterns.

Listening to a Delilah message was maybe like listening to Turing himself. It was overlaid by a noisy background buzz and a 4000 Hz whistle. Talk to me, Alan.

I’m working on my third short story about Alan Turing. In the back of my mind I’m hoping that these stories can congeal into a novel with the working title, The Turing Chronicles. If the new story works, I may push on ahead with this.

Some SF writers have written Turing stories, but my feeling is that it hasn’t been done quite right. The guy really had something of the beatnik and the rebel about him.

In 2006, I put up a longish post on my initial findings “Alan Turing” , while working on my first Turing story.

This first Turing story, “The Imitation Game” appeared in Interzone and in the Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories edited by Ian Watson and Ian Whates. There’s a link to a podcast of me reading “The Imitation Game” at the blog post, “My Alan Turing Story”

In 2008, I wrote my second Turing story, and posted about the process “Starting ‘Tangier Routines’ ”. The story itself appeared in Flurb # 5.

I’d like to work the Happy Cloak into the third Turing story. I often recall this line from William Burroughs’s The Soft Machine, and chuckle. “You win something like jellyfish, meester. Or it win you.” I write about the Happy Cloak quite a bit in my four Ware Tetralogy novels.

While traveling through Micronesia, I think I wrote the following paragraph in my journals as a pastiche of Burroughs.

Walking into his hotel room, Bradley saw something high in one corner of the ceiling, a gauzy veil, like the mucus casing that a parrot fish exudes to cocoon itself in when sleeping. The shape fell down upon Bradley faster than he could form a complete thought; it slid inside his shirt collar, down inside the band of his trousers and underwear, down his legs and inside his sandals. He felt a sexual burning in every nerve. The boy who’d spoken to him in the street, appeared in his doorway, his lips as bright red with betel nut as if he were a vampire.

Burroughs’s notion of the Happy Cloak is lifted wholesale from SF-writers Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, Fury, 1947, see excerpt on Google Books.

A culture catering to hedonism has its perversions of science. And Blaze could pay well. More than one technician had been wrecked by pleasure-addiction; such men were usually capable — when they were sober. But it was a woman Blaze found, finally, and she was capable only when alive. She lived when she was wearing the Happy Cloak. She wouldn´t live long; Happy Cloak addicts lasted about two years, on the average. The thing was a biological adaptation of an organism found in the Venusian seas. It had been illegally developed, after its potentialities were first realized. In its native state, it got its prey by touching it. After that neuro-contact had been established, the prey was quite satisfied to be ingested.

It was a beautiful garment, a living white like the white of a pearl, shivering softly with rippling lights, stirring with a terrible, ecstatic movement of its own as the lethal symbiosis was established. It was beautiful as the woman technician wore it, as she moved about the bright, quiet room in a tranced concentration upon the task that would pay her enough to insure her death within two years…

The woman, swimming in anticipated ecstasy, managed to touch a summoning signal-button. Then she lay down quietly on the floor, the shining pearly garment caressing her. Her tranced eyes looked up, flat and empty as mirrors. The man who came in gave the Happy Cloak a wide berth.

Burroughs actually uses some of the above text in The Ticket That Exploded , (see Google Books) and he does in fact credit the quote. He uses the Kuttner-Moore stuff after his great line:

“Skin like that very hot for three weeks and then—” the guard snickered “—wearing the Happy Cloak…”

It’s not so well-known that in his final years, Alan Turing was into biological computing systems. I see Alan making a Happy Cloak and wearing it. I haven’t written enough about Happy Cloaks yet…

I finished two paintings in the last couple of weeks. As always, you can buy quality art prints of my paintings at Imagekind. And you many of my originals are for sale at my Paintings site.

“Buddha and the Mouse”. Oil on canvas. 18″ by 24″. July, 2010.
I took a photograph of an interesting statue of a twelve-armed Buddha in a small Asian art museum in Pasadena, California. The somewhat sinister pattern of the arms and shadows interested me. So when I got home, I painted the image, and I added a mouse to give the picture a bit of a narrative quality.

Above is the original photo, which appeared in an earlier post as well.

“Davenport Cave”. Oil on canvas. 24″ by 18″. July, 2010.

This one started as an en plein air painting atop a cliff in Davenport, California. I was there with my wife Sylvia and my painter friend Vernon. It was a windy day, so I didn’t work on the picture for very long at the site. I was struck by a little sea cave in the side of the cliff and by the towers of a shut-down cement plant to the right. Back home I worked on the painting for another week, adding a man, a woman, and a shadowy crab-like shape inside the cave. I like that the cliff shape looks a little like the head of an elephant.

Above is the actual scene that I was looking at.

And here’s the thing in the cave. Representing the man’s psyche? Does he know the crab thing is there? Is it an alien? What is the man’s relationship to the woman? Do they live in the cave? Is the crab their friend? I like pictures to be like ambiguous and indecipherable parables.

The cement plant at Davenport is being closed down, it has a certain rough industrial charm.

“Fractal Skate Posse”. Acrylic on canvas. 24″ by 18″. May, 2010.

While I was at it, I recently retouched this painting that I did in May. I hadn’t been quite happy with the lower right-hand corner. I wanted to get it right for use in the illustrated free ebook version Billy’s Picture Book that I made with Terry Bisson last week.

My brother Embry recently shipped me a family painting of our great-great-grandmother, Sarah Elizabeth Harris Rucker (1814-1895). I remember looking at this painting at all of our mealtimes as a boy—Sarah hung in our dining-room. As boys we thought the picture was dark and stern, but now, seeing her again, Sarah looks quite pleasant, with a hint of a smile. As you can see in this detail, the paint is cracking and flaking a bit—it’s oil on a wooden panel—and I’m looking into having it restored.

In our never-ceasing quest to shock and enlighten the world at large, Terry Bisson and I are releasing illustrated print and ebook Lulu editions of Terry’s incredible collection of tales, sometimes known as Billy’s Book, but now transmogrified into Billy’s Picture Book, thanks to some painted illos I created for it.

Billy’s Picture Book contains Terry Bisson’s thirteen off-kilter tales about an eager lad named Billy—including “Billy and the Spacemen,” “Billy and the Ants,” “Billy and the Talking Plant,” and more. The tales are like Zen parables, with an odd, rollicking humor. Rounded out by my surreal painted illustrations, Billy’s Picture Book is the book your inner child needs.

You can still buy the original, non-illustrated PS Books edition as well.

Geek and ye shall find.

By the way, some took exception to our use of the Comic Sans font…so as of September 22, 2011, we’ve caved and replaced it with the more comfortable Georgia font.

I’ve been reading parts of David Lipsky’s book-length interview of the writer David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Tragically, Wallace (1962-2008) suffered from depression, and he hung himself at the age of 46.

The interviews in this book were done back in 1996, when Wallace was only 34, and at a high-point, having just published his thousand-page novel, Infinite Jest. Originally the interviews were going to serve as source material for a long profile in Rolling Stone, but the article got cancelled.

Lipsky’s lines of questioning don’t always seem perfectly perceptive, but, hey, the interviews were done on the fly, and Lipsky wins Wallace’s confidence and gets him to talking. See the New York Review of Books review for some critical thoughts. Some of interviews could just have well been edited out—Lipsky had to stretch his material to get a book out of it. But I found a lot of good stuff. In his afterword, Lipsky does the signal service of giving us a real sense of sympathy for Wallace’s final struggles to stave off his depression and stay alive.

Wallace has always interested me—in 1987, I was one of the reviewers who praised his early novel, The Broom of the System. His magnum opus Infinite Jest changed my life—even though I skimmed over the sections about tennis. And years later, in 2004, I wrote a harsh review of his nonfiction book Everything and More, which was about Georg Cantor and infinity. There were in fact some good things even in that book, but for me it was spoiled by factual errors and by a rushed ending that fails to pick up on what I consider to be the most interesting aspects of Cantor’s work. A better editor might have been able to save the book.

There’s a lot more of my thoughts about Wallace and his writing in my earlier post, “David Foster Wallace, Oblivion”.

One of Wallace’s stylistic innovations was his use of a casual slacker’s spoken-English tone in much of his prose. He wasn’t the first to do this—the use of a street-voice-narrator plays a part in the success of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and this kind of tone also pervades Philip K. Dick’s Scanner Darkly. I often like to use this style myself, and it’s not as easy as it looks.

The passage in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself that popped out hard at me is where Wallace is discussing his reaction to David Lynch’s movie, Blue Velvet, and his subsequent thoughts on realist and surrealist literature, which are a very close fit for my own thoughts along these lines when I talk about transreal science-fiction (as in my recent podcast). I’ll just quote some Wallace excerpts here (taken from pp. 170-172 of the Lipsky book).

And there was somethin’ about…it was my first hint that being a surrealist, or being a weird writer, didn’t exempt you from certain responsibilities. But in fact it upped them. And the magic of Blue Velvet was that it so clearly—I mean I’ve got this whole theory that you don’t want to hear about. That Lynch is really an expressionist in the way that like Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is expressionist. Or that he’s very much about manifesting his inner states on the film, and it’s actually a very sick thing that drives him to make films.

… it’s just one of those little off things in every frame, that instead of seeming gratuitous or stupid or pretentious, actually makes those frames mean a whole lot. It was my first realization that there was a way to get at what those realist guys were saying, that was via the route of the surreal and expressionist.

And I think one of my—I mean, I’d always used sort of dreamy stuff. But I had never as a young writer realized that you still had an obligation to make a kind of narrative. That really the goals of realism and the goals of surrealism are exactly the same. And they’re indescribable. But they’re two completely different highways that have the same destination.

Adios, King.

So I’m back from Pasadena where I was a Guest of Honor at a small science-fiction convention called Westercon.

I was busy as an idol with twelve hands at the con, they had me give a lot of talks…more than I’d expected. One talk was on Transrealism, starting with a reading of my brief 1983 “Transrealist Manifesto”. The other talk on “New Futures in SF.” I’d outlined what I planned to say in this talk and posted it on my blog last week. But my actual talk was somewhat different. To hear my two talks, click the button below to go to my podcast station.

(Note that Feedburner only shows my most recent podcasts. For older podcasts, see my archive on Gigadial, which runs back to 2005.)

I’d forgotten my handy digital mini-recorder. Instead I borrowed a big microphone from the Westercon a/v guy, plugged it into my computer, and used the free Audacity software to turn my computer into a tape-recorder. Audacity rocks.

I took quite a few photos in Pasadena. When all else fails in terms of subject matter, I often take a photo of my bare foot. A human foot is, if you let its familiarity drain away, really quite odd-looking. We’re gnarlier than we realize.

One of the fans at the con was wearing an interesting hat which suggests an infinite regress, an endlessly branching binary tree. Or if the horns were to try and grab each other, you’d get something called Alexander’s Horned Sphere.

Here’s a picture of the Horned Sphere that I remember from a math textbook in college. Was the book by Kelly maybe? Here’s a video of it, too.

Speaking of interesting shapes, my wife and I spent some time in the Huntington botanical gardens near Pasadena, looking at the extensive succulent holdings. We were with Ernesto Hogan and his wife Emily Devenport (a.k.a Maggy Thomas a.k.a. Lee Hogan), all of these personae being writers. Ernesto is a cool guy, I’ve known him via letters and email for years.

This little row of cacti reminds me of a crowd of people. Maybe they’re gathered to listen to the cut-off bit of cactus in front.

I hung some prints of my paintings in the art-show at the con, and sold three of them, which was satisfying. Note that you can buy prints at anytime online from rudy.imagekind.com. Sell it, Ru!

We had two kinds of views out of our hotel window. Looking in the middle distance we could see a very cool Christian Science church against a backdrop of these amazingly dramatic and steep mountains.

Looking closer, we could see this immense and insanely noisy roof fan connected to the HVAC system of the hotel. When did it become acceptable to put such noisy fans everywhere?

Sylvia and I made it down to the Pasadena Rose Bowl on the eve of Independence Day to see the “largest fireworks show on the West Coast.” It was an awesome spectacle, about half an hour of blasts, with a number of intricate rockets that were new to me. Crackling cascades of spark dust. Wriggly twirlers. It was cool being in such a huge, diverse crowd of SoCal people. The traffic was such that we had to walk the two or three miles back to the hotel.

One complaint is that it seems to have become de rigueur to play hideous, loud, corny, “patriotic” music at unheard of volumes at fireworks shows, thus saturating the audiences’ sensory inputs so much that it’s difficult to even perceive the fireworks themselves. I think the worst song they played was called, “Let Freedom Ring,” (but not the version I linked to here). When they stuck to Ray Charles or Bruce Springsteen it wasn’t so bad. I think they showed a video of Reagan too. But no picture of Obama.

Going around Pasadena, we made our way into somewhat louche restaurants, like a combined sushi-place and bar. They had a great red staircase to the restrooms.

Back at the con, I ran into the kilt-wearing Klingon, Sqottie MacKlingon. Somehow he and I had gotten into a debate about my opinion that the US military draws its members disproportionately from low-income and disadvantaged citizens, and Sqottie now produced a link to an article on the conservative Heritage Foundation site that seems to show that I could be wrong in my belief.

Statistics are a jungle. In any case, I’m better at talking about escape literature than debating political points. Getting deeper into the subdimensions or some other kind of new SF future.