Right after his attack, my new novel’s character, Jim Oster, is thinking about sex a lot. Like—sex is one of the very first facts about the world that comes back to him. Zero and one, as it were. He feels a little surprised about reproduction—he can hardly believe the details. His woman friend, Anne Wowesse, says he’s like an id with no ego or superego.
In the first mornings, he sits on the hospital patio with his IV-drip and looks at the clouds in the sky. They drift along, changing shapes, with the golden sunlight on them. The leaves of a potted palm tree rock chaotically in the gentle airs, the fronds are clearly outlined against the marbled blue and white heavens.
Most of the other convalescents fail to notice their natural surroundings, but, be that as it may, the information is coming in from outside Jim. He’s not creating it. And now Jim is struck by the realization that the world will go on without him after he dies.
Or…? He thinks of the participant/observer maxim in quantum mechanics: “No phenomenon is real until it’s observed.” He begins to wonder—or even to hope—that some aspect of reality depends on being seen by Jim Oster. He is, after all, a bit of a writer, and he sometimes imagines that his journals and blog posts are altering reality.
Looking up at the clouds from the couch in his back yard, he sees a high-flying bird—a crane or a gull. Mentally reaching out to contact the fowl he feels he can see through her mind, feeling the rhythm of her wingbeats, enjoying the vast expanse of her view, with the coastline and the Pacific ocean visible. Jim imagines that bird sends him a telepathic message: “Thank you.” She’s grateful to Jim for making her real by seeing her.
But—naaw—if Jim were dead, the birds would still be flying, the Earth would be turning, and the sun would be rising in the sky just the same. He’s of no more lasting significance than a dead leaf scuttering across the patio. He finds this fact to be somehow horrible.
Jim doesn’t feel like his old self. He feels like his mind is a giant warehouse where an earthquake knocked everything off the racks, and he has to reshelve things one by one. “Oh, yes, that’s a steam shovel, that’s a potty, that’s a quartz crystal, that’s my first day of nursery school.” Repeatedly he remembers marrying Anne Wowesse, and how cute she was in her white hat and veil. Repeatedly he remembers that he never married Anne Wowesse at all.
The days and weeks fly by. He doesn’t understand how he used to pass his time. He’s continually ransacking his bookshelves, looking for some old volume to reread. He spends much of his time waiting to go back to sleep. Each day he looks forward to bed time at nine p.m. sharp. And he naps every day. He wants to act normal; when he greets people, he forms his mouth into a smile, as deliberately and artificially as if he were making an “okay” hand-sign. He feels he’s living a lie.
When Jim stares at a neutral-colored object such as the 1940s frosted-glass light fixture on the ceiling in his rented house, he seems to see the tint of the object change in slow waves. Faint pastel hues amp up and down, as if some unseen force were diddling the world’s color balance sliders.
Smells seem much more intense, the odors of drains, of garbage, and of fruit. The meaty, oily scent of the decaying skin fragments in his electric razor is almost unbearable. He’s tempted to stop shaving.
Is the change because he quit smoking after his attack? Or has something been reconfigured in his brain? Maybe there’s a piece of him gone missing. His once-powerful spiritual impulses are weak, and, in a possibly related change, he’s no longer goaded by the impulse to get high.
Slouched on a the lawn chair in his back yard one afternoon, Jim falls into a trance while studying the clouds. When he comes back to focusing on his immediate surroundings, he realizes that he hears the low tapping of fingers on a keyboard. He tries to maintain a calm appearance, but inwardly he panics, thinking that he’s inside a computer program or a video game.
But, whew, it’s just his daughter sitting in a chair behind his head, checking her email on her laptop. He twists his neck so he can look at her, to talk this over. And then he remembers that he doesn’t have a daughter. There’s nobody in the chair. Or, no, wait, he does have a daughter, and she’s visiting him, yeah. She is sitting there after all. Her name is—what?
I’d like for part of the novel to be Jim Oster’s memories of his boyhood, thus allowing me to transrealize some of the remaining unused segments of my autobiography. But for the novel to work as a story, I need some hooks between the old days and the present year (around 2010 ) in which Jim Oster is narrating.
A fan, Andy Valencia, wrote me in response to my blog post, “Nested Scrolls, Alpha Start,” suggesting that Jim Oster be somehow broadcasting his story to other worlds, perhaps by collapsing the info into diamond-weave nanobooks that he launches into space via a rail-gun. Andy also proposed that Jim might find some extraterrestrials’ nanoautobiographies on Earth.
I like the feel of these idea, but in order to give my book a fresh feel, I do want to avoid familiar notions of possible technology—sometimes we forget how unfamiliar the future is likely to be. I see the autobios as being more like biotech growths than like tiny abacus-precise tapestries of atoms. I think of seeds or animalcules that grow into scroll-patterned cultures, akin to lichens on rocks. Or of hive-mind algal blooms. Or of quantum-computing air currents.
We can readily suppose that alien autobios are all around us in these kinds of forms, and always have been. But—until Jim Oster’s breakthroughs—we haven’t been able to read these natural books. Note that natural books aren’t a new concept. For instance, my friend Brian Wallace has, I believe, an ancestor, Alfred Russel Wallace, who was a fringe scientist who said he could read the markings of shale as clearly as the pages of a newspaper.
For that matter, the Book of Mormon is described as originating in some marks on plates that the prophet Joseph Smith deciphered by using a “seer stone” or a pair of “stones of sight” known as Urim and Thummim. What if Jim Oster were to found a new religion based on a natural book that he finds in the form of the shadows of a eucalyptus tree’s leaves, or in the rustling whispers of a palm tree’s fronds?
There’s a bit of the hylozoism notion in the concept of natural books—as we’re talking about ubiquitous, logically deep information. I find it pleasant to suppose that the air is teeming with the biographies of extraterrestrials. Note that these aliens aren’t necessarily from other planets, they might be from the subdimensions or parallel branes. To me it’s always seemed like overkill to drag in aliens from millions of light-years away. Why shouldn’t they be as near as my heartbeat?
In any case, Nested Scrolls—or maybe it’s called The Natural Book—still needs a plot. We’d want to have some impending crisis that might end our world—and the aliens are enlisting Jim Oster to help save our shared reality. Save it from who? From some benighted humans—I might well bring back my favorite villains, the Heritagists. One can readily suppose that Heritagists have a hysterical, superstitious, witch-burning fear of the aliens. And they’re working on a Reality Cleansing Treatment to erase all the ambient alien autobiographies and alien minds.
Opening scene: Jim Oster in the hospital, recuperating from what they’re telling him is a mild stroke, caused by a cerebral hemorrhage. His long-term woman friend Anne Wowesse visits him—these two are both somewhat out of it, along the lines of the characters in Phil Dick’s A Scanner Darkly or William J. Craddock’s Be Not Content. This said, I think it clarifies and simplifies my story if I assume that Jim and Anne are both sober, perhaps even in recovery—this way, it’s more believable that their perceptions of the world’s workings are in fact true.
After visiting hours end, and Anne leaves, Jim is thinking over some of the things she said, and he becomes convinced that his so-called stroke or hemorrhage was in fact a Heritagist attempt to wipe the very scroll-nesting powers of alien empathy that Anne has been teaching him.
He escapes from the hospital in his gown and catches a ride with a not-so-coincidentally passing van of seeming hippie/punk musicians who are, we suspect, aliens. The odd musicians fan Jim’s mental scrolls back into life, and he becomes more and more certain that, yes, the consensus world-view is a lie. The evidence is right there in his memories—and in the tales that the other van members tell, Decameron style, as they motor down the coast to a disorganized hippie/punk festival to be held on the beach near Andrew Molera State Park.
The van band, Monkeybrains, comes on at sunrise, and when they start playing, the aliens and their subdimensional UFOs appear.
So I think I might as well make this new book a novel. I mean, Jack Kerouac didn’t write “memoirs,” nor did Burroughs or Ginsberg. They wrote transreal novels and poems! Some possible themes…
* A state becomes a sunken, glowing hole in the Earth, permanently lost.
* A character has a lasting relationship with an intelligent, humanlike being that he meets in a UFO.
* How it feels from the inside carry out fictional fabulation.
*The meaninglessness/meaningfulness of life, or reality/unreality of death.
As I mentioned before, I’m seeing the title for his novel as Nested Scrolls . I like the phrase because it describes the chaotic, self-organizing, artificially alive artificial life simulations that I love. And “scroll” is good, as it refers to a document or even a sacred text, and if the scrolls are “nested,” that’s fractal and self-referential and heavy.
I think I can get literal with the title, and have the book in the form of a memoir that an aging man is trying to write, and he begins finding extra stuff in the document. Maybe he can somehow zoom in—it’s an electronic document—and he sees stuff that he doesn’t remember writing. And he goes into time-travel flashbacks. And maybe some characters from the past show up. Nested Scrolls.
I have an unreliable narrator named Jim Oster, and a woman (maybe she’s a woman) that he lives with, Anne Wowesse. I like that name better than Weena Wesson; it’s an anagram with a wow.
Usually I put together a fairly thorough outline of a novel before I begin writing the book itself. But maybe this time I could do less of an upfront outline than usual. I have this urge to just dig in and get going. Later I could still do some outlining in any case, especially if I get stuck. And it’s not like the outline is such gospel anyway, I usually end up revising it a dozen or so times during the course of the book. But just for now, let’s try writing an opening scene.
The book starts with Jim Oster reminiscing about his life with Anne Wowesse.
Twenty years ago, I had a few days of publicity for appearing in an online sex video. My partner, Anne Wowesse, was rumored to be a saucer alien. Our video link was everywhere: “New UFO You!” But then the public’s fickle attention moved on.
I do feel it’s possible that Anne is non-human—this is something I periodically think about, as I still live with her. In certain moods, I can visualize her body as a tissue-culture grown from tweaked cow liver cells, and her mind as a holographically implanted alien engram.
Not that just anyone would notice this, whether by talking to her or by having sex with her—which is, I might add, not especially difficult. Live and let live.
Our Surf City neighbors regard Anne and me us as unsavory or even beneath contempt. But I’m dreaming of restoring us to the level of fame that we deserve.
What’s going to make the difference is the “scroll nesting” technique that Anne recently taught me.
Jim Oster wants to write his autobio, well not write exactly, he wants to make a kind of electronic version of his autobio, a pattern of nested scrolls that’s based on what he says or types. The scroll nester isn’t a computer-science kind of thing, it’s more like a cell phone earpiece that you talk to a lot. Jim himself isn’t a techie. For much of his career he worked as an assistant for a guy installing wooden screen doors.
What’s gonna happen with the scroll nester is that Jim Oster stares into the display and gets hypnotized and flashes back into the past.
I’m in the Los Gatos Coffee Roaster, once again. Writing crazy BS. Thinking about Weena Wesson. Recall my mention of this character in my most recent post:
A scene in a UFO, with a bad kid, call him Denny Allaway, frantically humping a chunk of cow liver, imagining that it’s Weena Wesson, the Hollywood love goddess.
It makes me happy to think about a novel project. Actually calling a novel Weena Wesson might be overdoing it—I mean, the novel might not be about that at all. It’s just a phrase to start with.
Last night I had insomnia, and I was reading one of Allen Ginsberg’s biographies, Bill Morgan’s I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. I began imagining writing a transreal SF author autobio novel called, say, A Writer’s Life. That’s what Joyce’s great first novel is, come to think of it—dropping the SF element of course—Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
[Photo of Pablo Picasso, Woman in an Armchair (Jacqueline Roque Picasso), 1960, at a show from the New Orleans Art Museum at the Cantor Art Center in Stanford. Note the two profiles, one light, one dark---it took me a few minutes to pick them out.]
Of course if I put SF in it, then that makes it unreadable for some largish percentage of the people in the world. Oh well!
Can I really put in the part about the cow liver and Weena Wesson? Maybe. The liver is hiding under the boy’s bed. She whispers to him through the mattress. Maybe her “real” name is an anagram. Awnee Swones. Anne Swesewo. Anne Wowesse.
Trolling the Web for irrelevant info, I found the YouTube video shown above, entitled “Weena + Me=Love,” showing two young women goofing around, filmed, I think, on the street by a stranger using a cell phone.
“Oh, mama!” says the woman on the right.
The good news is that people think they saw me making love to the legendary Weena Wesson—the bad news is that my co-star was in fact a cunningly tweaked cow liver.
In any case, I’m thinking it more interesting to cast any memoir-like work into a novelistic format—like I’ve done in the past. Really, all of my novels are transreal—in the sense of having a character who in some sense represents me during some part of my life. I first worked out a correspondence between my life and my novels in some detail in an interview for Hayakawa SF Magazine around 1998 (see page two of my online interviews.)
Just today I realized that I can force all eighteen of my novels into the table.
I see there’s room at the start and the end. Boyhood and dotage. Maybe an old man is recalling his early years. (Speaking of dotage, I think the ages are off for some of the novels, especially Spaceland and Realware. So write a paper about it…)
Okay, fine, so what’s the title if not Weena and Me?
Kentucky. Fallout. Yellow Dust. Maybe A Writer’s Life? That’s right on the transreal border between fact and fiction—which is, nah, too confusing, or even off-putting. And it’s been used a lot.
I’m looking for a title that suggests the quality of what it’s like to become a writer and/or a scientist. The Branecaster is good, but I used up that word in Frek and the Elixir. Daydreamer is nice, but, oh oh, Ian McEwan used that for a kids’ book title in 2000. Dreamlight? No, been used a lot.
Often it’s better to get deeper into my own particular jargon, so as to find title possibilities that aren’t so picked over. I’m thinking of my beloved Belusouv-Zhabotinsky scroll patterns. Turing Patterns. Standing Waves. Nested Scrolls.
I like that last one. Nested Scrolls. Searching Amazon for that phrase, I find it’s not a title, but it does appear in—two of my books: Mad Professor and the Lifebox tome, apparently the same passage in both books, tsk tsk.
I’m writing almost at random in these notes. Which could be a good thing. I’ve heard it said that writers are at their best when they have no idea what they’re doing.
In the last chapter of Nested Scrolls, the (now-dead) hero Tim’s acquaintance (not really a friend) Denny Allaway is thinking about Tim, and Denny realizes that it doesn’t really matter that Tim is dead, any more than it matters when a pinecone falls off a tree, and that if Tim hadn’t saved the world, someone else would have, maybe even Denny himself, if he hadn’t of been so busy humping that 120 pound chunk of cow liver made up to look like Weena Wesson. The cow liver is sitting next to him, sharing a bottle of hard lemonade.
“Muuur.”
“I love you, Weena.”
That’s so commercial…
A Louisville memory. Waiting by the side of Route 42 near Rudy Lane for Barbara T. to pick me up and give me a ride to nursery school in her 1951 Buick Roadmaster with the four little portholes set into the side of the hood. Miss T. wore more lipstick than any woman I’ve ever seen, it was almost like she put it on by eating it. Tidy, well-dressed, but not terribly attractive, she lived with her mother. I liked her, up to a point, as I found her pretty easy to talk to, although not so easy as my own parents. She later gave me a science-fiction/fantasy book that I liked a lot—or maybe I just found it in her house while my parents were having a dinner with her— the book was called Zotz!, by Walter Karig, 1947.
I should mention that, initially, it seemed reasonable and natural to me that the street I lived on would be called Rudy Lane, only later did I realize that it was a coincidence, due to the fact that at some point a family with the last name of Rudy had lived on the road, which was maybe three miles long.
I remember some of my first days at nursery school, or maybe at kindergarten—the two blend together, and it’s hard to be sure which memories come first. I remember a large room called Hilliard Hall, with grayish-black asphalt tiles on the floor, and ordinary sash windows in the walls. We had some really big blocks to play with, maybe two or three feet on a side. You could stack them and make little mazes. They made a hollow boom when they fell down.
We’d play a game where we’d dance around the room with a record playing, and now and then the teacher would lift up the needle and you’d have to freeze in place where you’d been right when the music stopped, and if you didn’t freeze fast enough, you were Out.
I’m still wondering what I might write next. How about two hundred thousand words of kvetching about my life—not. The memoir plan, I dunno, it’s not gelling for me. It feels like work instead of like fun.
Today I’m leaning towards a simple and crystalline SF novel. Something light and irresponsible. How about a UFO novel in the Young Adult mode. I’m imagining a scene with a bad kid, call him Denny Allaway, frantically humping a chunk of cow liver, imagining that it’s Weena Wesson, the Hollywood love goddess. Cute Sue Pohler is laughing at Denny. Our hero, Tim Bruno, helps Denny out of the saucer, shielding him from Sue’s ridicule.
It’s like an after-school special. They learn that the President of the U. S. has sold us out. So they set out to kill him—but are spared the karmic onus of the assassination when Tim reforms the Prez by talking sense to him—that would be a very after-school-special touch. As if you could teach a President anything by talking to him. But in YA-land, you can!
Or a book where a kid goes to visit his dead father in Heaven. I remember a radio play—maybe it was by Norman Corwin, “The Odyssey of Runyon Jones”—about a kid who goes to look for his dead dog in “curgatory,” first broadcast in 1941, I might have heard it as a re-broadcast around 1954. It’s available as part of an out-of-print CD set called Thirteen By Corwin, I’d dig hearing that if I can find it for free online.
I’m really starting to feel like myself again. I keep saying that, and then a week later, I realize I was only kidding myself the week before. Maybe I’m still kidding myself. How can you really tell when you feel like yourself, after all? It’s so subjective.
Writing this particular paragraph that’s magpied into this blog post, I’m sitting on the deck outside Borders Books, one of my favorite spots in Los Gatos—although it’s slightly tainted by the infernal noise of ventilation fans. I have a great view from under a huge live oak of a high, virgin, wooded hill called perhaps Monte Sereno. The shapes of the trees and shrubs along the ridge-line always make me think of the border of a cubic Mandelbrot set.
In this connection, I think of a guy I met at the Almaden IBM research lab near San Jose, around 1988, and we’d been in his office talking, and then we walked outside together and were looking at a wooded ridge-line similar to this one, and he was telling me that the patterns were—I don’t remember exactly what—some manifestation of a type of fractal or Fourier series that he was studying. He thought everything in the world was a reflection of what he was doing in his lab. But he was thinking this with a complete lack of irony, which is dangerous. I wonder what ever became of him.
I gave a great Christmas talk on cellular automata at that same IBM lab, also around 1988. I’d just gotten a CAM-6 cellular automata accelerator card, and I shoe-horned it into an early IBM PC and connected it to this monster projector they had in the lab. Nobody had projectors like this back then, so it was incredibly exciting to be projecting the enormous images.
When I was in the choir at St. Francis in the Fields Church in Louisville, around 1959, this funny boy, Roger, would sometimes sit next to me at rehearsal. He was a real 1950s type, with a burr haircut, heavy glasses frames, and a cocky attitude. His father was, I think, a real estate scam artist, physically resembling the then-famous con-man Billy Sol Estes whom I’d seen on the cover of Time magazine. There was this one hymn we were rehearsing, with the chorus, “Jesus loves you, why not serve him?” And Roger would make his voice sweet and gentle, and sing an obscene variant of the line. What a witty guy.
My wife and I spent the day in Santa Cruz today. It was really nice to be out seeing different stuff. The ocean was a nice aqua color. We ate some nice food, looked at bookstores. I bought a nice sweater on sale. I’m exhausted now, but in a nice way. Lying on the couch with my laptop.
This morning, as soon as I woke up, I felt good. The world outside is so green and lively. I recall a feeling I sometimes have when I’m flustered—less so now than when I was younger—of being in a tunnel, caught up in my worries, deaf and blind to the outer world. It’s all a matter of the attention that you’re able to pay.
The world runs itself without me. It used to baffle me that the world would go on after I die. I understand this better now. It’s like I’m just one particular monitor displaying the reality crunch. The interesting thing is the world itself—as opposed to the interesting thing being my individual mind. This is in some sense obvious, but somehow it’s not a fact that I really internalized until I was older.
I gave my new painting “Collaborators” yet another layer today, July 24, 2008. Draft 3, call it final and move on. Daughter Isabel said their mouths should be open so they look more hyper. I think it’s done now.
["Collaborators," Draft 3, probably final, July 24, 2008.]
On July 22, I painted Draft 2. As you can see, the picture shows two guys sitting on the ground, with unnaturally long, insect-like arms, choking each other. It’s meant to be an image of the collaboration style of two co-authors who argue a lot.
To enhance how the foreground pops out from the background, I moved towards cool desaturated colors in back, and warm saturated colors in front.
July 21’s Draft 1 was more primitive, which is, in its own way, charming, but I had that usual yen to polish it some more. Over the versions, I made their faces better, and clarified the choking hands. But, yeah, it still looks something a guy might have drawn in a rehab program run in a church basement. Not such an easy effect to achieve!
These wires are sort of the same as the the limbs of the two Collaborators…
I was idly thinking about working the Oinkness idea into a story. Not that it’s such an incredibly wonderful idea, but I have nothing better to think about. I sit around the house all day doing nothing, occasionally taking a nap. The email’s been slow.
Today started out all gray and fogged over, but now the sky has a clear, blue, California-summer quality. There’s been fires—a big one in Big Sur in particular—that were overcasting us, but finally they’re dying down. The Big Sur fire is 70% contained as of today.
HIgh Voltage! The pole transformer is a kind of electromechanical pig.
It’s mattering less to me if I actually do write a memoir. All that matters is that I’m writing up notes for—something. My fingers work, my brain, my word-circuits. It might really be more reasonable to write another novel. Or maybe just a couple of stories first. There’s such a powerful “why bother” haze surrounding any plan for a memoir.
“Wiseacring for the swing of thought” is a phrase used by G. I. Gurdjieff in Meetings With Remarkable Men. He used the word wiseacring a lot, meaning something like free intellectual play. Some people spell it as “wiseacreing,” by the way, but “wiseacring” seems to be more common.
Today I actually got a thousand words done on a new story I plan to write with Paul Di Filippo. Working title: “To See Infinity Bare.” It wasn’t too hard. The writing felt good.
I’m in the Los Gatos Coffee Roaster again. On my own. It’s so terrible when people have words appliquéd onto the butts of their sweat pants. Like the back of a van. Like the woman I’m looking at right now. Pale blue sweat pants with “H O L L I S T E R,” in an arc, the name of a small town south of here. But of course, to her, the pants aren’t terrible, they’re cool fashion. All a matter of convention.
If I weren’t going to write a nonfiction memoir, what might I write instead? I could scootch just a bit away from that, and write a novel that’s close to my actual life. A transreal SF memoir, in other words. Go with my fantasies and fears about nuclear fallout as a boy in 1959 at a German boarding school, for instance. And then follow my character back to the US and, whoah, NYC and/or DC are gone. Especially Texas could be gone.
A frikkin’ Texas-shaped hole in the surface of the globe, a thousand-mile deep shaft with a giant orange blup-blup lava lake at the bottom. A fence around the edge, and you can buy little baskets of bread and throw in the Texas-shaped crumbs for the Texas gnomes. Tiny cowhand gnomes down there in half-pint hats, shooting cap pistols. You can rent time on an ion-beam destruction ray and fry the Texas gnomes that you’ve lured out with the Texas-shaped bread crumbs. Gnome cracklins drift up and people munch ‘em down. “Yaar!”
[Yes, yes, I know there are many fine people in Texas, just having a little fun here. I could always change the victimized state to my old home of Kentucky.]
Am I writing crazier than usual? Or is just that this week I give less of a squat? The numerical fact that Hylozoic was my thirtieth book, sets me to thinking about trying something new for #31.
On the other hand, why not another novel. It might be nice to write a really easy novel. Something first person and transreal, like Mathematicians in Love.
I had another SF vision today, of what you might call Oinkness. An alternate world or mindscape that’s made of pig. It’s not like encountering a single pig, it’s pure pigness. Pink skin, ears, perhaps an eye here and there, the stench, the squeal, layer upon layer of skin and meat, an endlessly cloned pig surface, folding back on itself.
Or maybe combine the sunken state with the Oinkness thing, and sure, have the sunken state be my Olde Kentucky Home. It’s the land of Oinkness down there. The older boys are down there wallowing with the pigs. (Note the highlighted rat in the motel swimming pool.)
German fallout, sunken Kentucky, Oinkness in the pit, J. Edgar Hoover attempts to arrest the hero, that is, young Russ, but Russ calls on the force of Oinkness to protect him.
