Rudy’s Blog

Upcoming event: I’ll be reading “The Birth of Transrealism,” a section from my forthcoming memoir, Nested Scrolls , at 7 PM this Saturday night, January 15, 2011, in San Francisco at the SF in SF gathering in the Hobart Building on Market St. near Montgomery St. and 3rd St. Diana Paxson will be reading as well.

My writing is moving slowly this month. It’s taking some time to ramp back up after the Xmas break. Also I pissed away days and days tweaking my music collection on my computer for my new iPhone, and coming to terms with the obtuse and balky iTunes music management software. And blogging about it, God help me. As an on-going part of the process, I’m “ripping” some vinyl records to files. Converting analog to digital, which is, of course, a good analogue for my lifebox-and-Ware-Tetralogy Digital Immortality kick. I have a brief guide to ripping vinyl at the end of this post.

One cool thing about my novel-in-progress, The Turing Chronicles is that it shows Alan moving against the tide, that is, he’s going from digital computers to analog biocomputations. But the more relevant thing is that it shows something computational (the skugly biocomputation) becoming symbiotic with human life (like people carrying smart phones).

I remain unsure about the over-all plot, which is hanging me up. When I’m lost sat sea in the middle of a book, I fall back on what we used to call “paper-shuffling.” That is, I play with organizational matters. Tidy things up. It’s like—when I lose my wallet, glasses or keys, I can often find them by cleaning up my whole office.

I’ve also been firming up my ever-evolving conceptions about the skugs and their origins, and this involves revisions. It seems a bit much to suppose that the skugs have really strong personalities, as they’re just AI-tweaked networks of biocomputations. I need to keep reminding myself that they’re not alien invaders. This said, I do have the possibility of giving the skugs a hive-mind personality that’s to some extent based on what they pick up over radio and TV signals. This could be a correlative for, e.g., the hive minds you see if you study Twitter or Facebook or Google search results.

Looking ahead, I had been planning to add in a higher level of reality populated by dreamskugs, effectively a second race of odd critters. But yesterday in the car, driving up to Berkeley with my wife, I was telling her about my plans for the book. And when I got to the dreamskugs, she was like, “What!? Don’t do that again, Rudy! One kind of creature is enough. Don’t always overdo it.” And she’s right.

It boggles the mind to think about how many kinds of critters I jammed into each of my last three novels, that is, Postsingular, Hylozoic, and Jim and the Flims. It’s okay and maybe even good that I packed those books with alien eyeball kicks, but it’s a baroque high-SF supercartoon style that I’d like to get away from for The Turing Chronicles. I’d like to see novel one be a more stripped-down. Like a 1950s black and white SF invasion movie. Like Them or the originals of The Fly or The Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers.

But way of opening up my mind to a new conception fo the novel, I moved the second half of my former outline into a new “False Paths” section of my notes for the novel. As I discuss in my free “A Writer’s Toolkit” on my writing page, having this kind of data repository means that I feel less constrained in making brutal cuts and changes to the old outline (or to the text). And thus, today I managed to rewrite my working outline, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for a month. It’s the kind of job that only takes an hour or two when you do it—but getting your head in the right place for the job can take weeks or months.

And now a word from our lord and master, the computer. I’ve been delegated to make a long story short on the subject of ripping vinyl. By the way, the first album I ripped was the first one I ever bought, Go Bo Diddley, purchased fifty years ago when I was 14. “Crackin’ Up.” [Apparently people can post copyrighted songs on YouTube because the users don’t get to keep the song, they only get to listen to it stream from the site.]

(1) You can use a regular (non-USB) turntable, but it’s advisable to have a little pre-amp box about the size of a pack of cigarettes. The turntable sends two plugs into the pre-amp, and you run two lines out of the pre-amp. You need a two-to-one connector to hook the pre-amp to your computer. This can be the same connector that you might use to plug your one-socket iPod or iPhone into the two stereo input jacks of a living-room sound-system amplifier.

(2) You use the two-to-one connector to run from the pre-amp into the “Line In” jack that you can find on the exposed back of your sound card on the back of your desktop computer. Most laptops don’t have a Line In jack. You don’t want to use a “Microphone” jack, as that won’t pass the stereo through.

(3) You get the free software Audacity for Windows , Linux or Mac. You fire up Audacity and click on the round button to start recording. At about the same time you put your needle onto your turntable and let your record play. You can set Audacity to pass sound out to your computer speakers. See the Audacity help files for help on recording a record on your computer.

(4) Tape both sides of the record into a single sound track. You might want to run the Effect | Click Removal and maybe Effect | Normalize to clean up your track. Now to save as separate songs. You have to show Audacity where the breaks between songs are, see the Audacity help on this. The easiest way to do this is by hand, inserting labels. There’s an automatic Analyze | Find Silences control you can use, but it doesn’t work very well because vinyl really never is silent anywhere. So I put the labels in my hand, sometimes looking at the song list on the album to make sure I get the right count. Don’t bother putting song names in the labels, just leave them blank, Audadicty can put in numbers for the labels when you save, which keeps them in the right track order. You save the recording into separate files, one for each song. You can use the “Export Multiple…” command, sending the files into a reasonable directory like Music\Bo Diddley\Go Bo Diddley, as numbered files. And tell Audacity not to ask you about each song. Typically you save them in a fairly high quality MP3 format. Don’t close your Audacity project file until you’re sure that everything exported properly and is in good shape.

(5) Open your newly created directory of (still unnamed) mp3 files with (if you’re a Windows user) the tool mp3tag. You can set the album name and artist for all the files at once yourself. And then you can use the album name and album artist to get mp3tag to look up and install the track name metatags for you. There’s various places to search, sometimes you need to try more than one of them. When you find the right list, mp3tag can copy the web data into your track title metatags. And then you can get it to copy the track titles onto the file names. I don’t know what the best free Mac tool for this is, you can find a list of some apparently free options on Softonic. It doesn’t work very well to ask iTunes to find the track titles for you, it tends to only want to help you with tracks that you bought from their iStore.

(6) Use the File | Add Folder to Library… selection in iTunes to bring your new files into iTunes. You can find a nice album cover with a quick Google image search and paste it into place.

See some of you Sat nite, I hope.

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