More photo clearance today with whatever comments come into my head.

I like how the wideangle lens has so much depth of field. That five-sided mirror has always caught my fancy. Almost like something you’d see in a ghost story. There was a time in high-school when I’d seen too many scary episodes of “Outer Limits” that I was scared of things coming out of mirrors. And of disembodied hands.

This is out past Four Mile beach north of Santa Cruz. Wide open. You walk a ways along this cliff and you see a lot of seals.

A very deserted spot, this cliff north of Four Mile. As soon as the seals heard me taking a picture, a lot of them began humping into the water. Love the babies, the size of dachshunds.

This one is quite an old photo, of a table-top steam engine, built for fun or for teaching, spotted in the wonderful and quaint Museum of the History of Scientific Instruments in the Perle Du Lac park by Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

In old Manhattoes in a snowstorm, and the buildings looming.

(This name for Manhattan was in fashion in the late 1880s, see Herman Melville, in Moby Dick: “There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs — commerce surrounds it with her surf.”)

The prickly pear in our backyard cactus garden. I actually brought in a single pad of this cactus after a visit to Maui about eighteen years ago. The pad’s been very slowly growing out new pads, but recently I moved the plant out of a pot and into the garden it’s been going wild. Love that tasty green color in the small pad.

I don’t know if I mentioned that my autobiography, Nested Scrolls, is out in paperback as well as hardback and ebook now. I could use a few more comments on the Amazon page for the book, so if you liked it and have a spare moment…

Just recently I came across a great review of the book by Rob Latham in the LA Review of Books.

Some of son Rudy’s welded college-days artwork on the back porch. These pieces are old friends by now.

You can’t go wrong photographing the Flatiron Building in old Manhattoes. One of my irregular pilgrimages to the offices of Tor Books.

In certain moods, almost anything I look at seems worth photographing. Especially when I’m playing with a new lens!

I’ve accumulated a backlog of photos to blog, but I don’t have any long essay-type thoughts today. All my energy is going into The Big Aha, which is about 80% done. I’m pushing pretty hard on it. During the closing phase of a finishing the first draft of a novel, I sometimes think of a predator who’s wounded his or her prey, and is now crashing through the underbrush, frantic to finish the hunt. Blood-lust writing frenzy.

I got a new wide-angle lens the other day, a Canon 24 mm. I’d been making do with an old Leica lens on my Canon body, but the old lens didn’t have autofocus, nor image stabilization, nor did the automatic metering work with it. I will say that the Leica glass has a certain creamy warm quality that I like. But the Canon lens in incredibly sharp.

So I walk around my house photographing pieces of it. Like this banister. Not that every photo I’m running today is shot with the wideangle lens.

My usual morning regimen, is to do yoga on a mat in the back yard and correct a printout. At full resolution, this text is readable, thanks the new lens’s image stabilization, but maybe not readable in this shrunken rez. Lying in the back yard on a nice morning while crafting some prose is about my favorite activity.

This photo’s taken with the Leica lens, and it has the creamy texture. Every hat is a UFO.

I’m writing all day, and in the evenings I like to get away from the printed word, so we’ve been watching more Netflix than usual, a mixture of streaming and DVD. Finished off the second season of The Hour, a nice BBC show, although I have to turn on subtitles for shows like this, otherwise I miss about 30% of the dialogue. The Lillyhammer series isn’t bad either.

Switched over to a 100 mm zoom lens for this photo last night. As spring rolls on, there’s different cadres of bugs that turn up, all of them hatching at the same time. These guys were on the globes of our street lamp, making me think of astronauts on a moon.

The 100 mm lens is, for reasons I don’t quite understand, categorized as a “macro” lens, meaning you can do super close-ups. Hard to go wrong when you’re shooting a rosebud, although the depth of field is only a few millimeters deep and I have to click at the right moment to catch the image I want, given that my body is never quite still. Love the “bokeh” here, that is, the out-of-focus quality of the background.

The sun comes up really bright these days, blasting flat across Silicon Valley into my garage and bounces great caustic curve light splashes off my car. I looked up how bright the sun is, viewed as a lightbulb, and it’s said to be about 300 or 400 septillion watts. The prefix for septillion is “yotta,” in the same sense that “tera” means trillion. There’s an official committee that decides these things. So the sun is a 300 yottawatt bulb. Or, as a waggish friend commented, one might shop for a energy-saver 60 yottawatt sun.

I try to get out into the hills every couple of days, I never get enough of nature. Free gnarl. I think this is a eucalyptus trunk, they grow with a spiral grain, which makes them stronger I think. Last night it was really windy here, and the eucs were waving like seaweed. Always nice to be reminded that we live at the bottom of an ocean of air.

Sometimes I go hiking with my neighbor Gunnar. He’s originally from Norway and still has quite an accent—you have to know him for awhile in order to easily understand what he’s saying. He’s close to eighty, and is livelier and fitter than me. He never goes to what I could call “a real doctor,” preferring various kinds of Indian or Chinese healers. Seems to be working for him.

Gunnar and I were down at the foot of a waterfall in Castle Rock park, which is only about s twenty minute drive from my house. Incredible that I only go there once every year or two. It’s such a great place. What do I have to do that’s more important than being in the woods?

Oh, yeah, I have to be at home running my machines.

Converting my gauzy N-dimensional dreams into 2D art.

I feel like I’m the only person I know who saw the movie version of Kerouac’s On the Road recently. I liked it a lot, I saw it twice—the first time on it’s release date, which was also my 67th birthday.

[Photo I took on one of our own Wild West road trips, first posted 2010.]

The movie didn’t get much publicity, and it wasn’t in the theaters very long. Hard as it is for this old geezer to believe, most people in the younger movie-going generation haven’t even heard of On the Road, and they have only a hazy notion, if any notion at all, of who Jack Kerouac was. Father Time plows us under.

The movie includes a lovely 1949 Hudson car that Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Luanne Henderson and Ed Dunkel drive from NYC to Algiers, Louisiana to visit William Burroughs, and then on to San Francisco.

As it happens, this very car, the one used in the film, is on display in the Beat Museum in San Francisco, just across Columbus Ave from City Lights Books. You can see the car for free, and if you pay a couple of bucks you can go in and see such Shroud-of-Turin level relics as Jack’s plaid coat.

Thinking about On the Road, I happened to recall a great passage in Chapter 11 where Jack describes him and Neal spending a night sleeping in an all-night movie theater in Detroit. I found the book online as one giant webpage, and searched that to find the key word “osmotic.”

For thirty-five cents each we went into the beat-up old movie and sat down in the balcony till morning, when we were shooed downstairs. The people who were in that all-night movie were the end. Beat Negroes who’d come up from Alabama to work in car factories on a rumor; old white bums; young longhaired hipsters who’d reached the end of the road and were drinking wine; whores, ordinary couples, and housewives with nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to believe in. If you sifted all Detroit in a wire basket the beater solid core of dregs couldn’t be better gathered. The picture was Singing Cowboy Eddie Dean and his gallant white horse Bloop, that was number one; number two double-feature film was George Raft, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre in a picture about Istanbul. We saw both of these things six times each during the night. We saw them waking, we heard them sleeping, we sensed them dreaming, we were permeated completely with the strange Gray Myth of the West and the weird dark Myth of the East when morning came. All my actions since then have been dictated automatically to my subconscious by this horrible osmotic experience.

Love that last sentence.

Onward. These days, as I’ve been mentioning, I’m working on a novel called The Big Aha, and I’m nearing the end. And I want to come up with an explanation of what I mean by the psychic state that I call “the Big Aha.”

What I term the “cosmic mode” in the novel is an intuitive, immediate knowledge of the world — what we might call a mystical grasping of the world in its unity. A characteristic feature of cosmic-mode knowledge is that it avoids distinguishing between the knower and the known, the subject and object. You see the world as One.

In what I call the ”robotic mode”, we have a discursive, analytical knowledge of the world — rational thought. In the robotic mode you stand apart from the thing known. You see the world as Many.

The point is not that mystical, all-is-One, cosmic-mode knowledge is preferable. Both the cosmic and robotic modes of knowledge are real, and both are important. But it is very hard — perhaps impossible — for us to see the world in both ways at once. At any instant we see the world either as One or as Many.

Moving from Many to One tends to be a gradual process, the result of some kind of deliberate calming of the mind. But the passage from One to Many is usually sudden. At a given instant you may be sunk into a complete unity with the world. And then an instant later you are talking about your experience, standing outside yourself, making distinctions. The difficult thing is to catch the instant when you are still between One and Many. I sometimes think of this instant as the slash mark in the One/Many problem, that is the problem of how the world can be both One and Many at once.

[World seen through my legs while doing yoga.]

In his essay, “The Meaning of Satori,” which appears in his book The Field of Zen, the author D. T. Suzuki says this instant is the fleeting enlightenment that Zen calls satori. “The oneness dividing itself into subject/object and yet retaining its oneness at the very moment that there is the awakening of a consciousness — this is satori.”

This sort of satori is fleeting, but not rare. One could almost say that the natural rhythm of thought is an oscillation between One and Many. As you look around the room there are constant microlapses of attention. You reach out and merge with the world, then draw back and analyze. At one instant there is only is-ness, at the next there is a person cataloging his perceptions. One-Many-One-Many … at a rate of, say, three cycles per second.

Here’s a picture of this taken from my nonfiction book Infinity and the Mind, my bestselling book ever. It represents the mind of indicating a person who repeatedly sinks down into blissful union with the One, only, each time, to snap back to ordinary rational consciousness. The points labeled “S” might be the satori points.

There is a sense in which waking up each morning is a satori. On a good day (no alarms, no clock to punch) you float up from sleep into an idle state of is-ness, not even thinking who or where you are. But this is too good to last . . . whisk clickety-click, and you’re planning your day Is it possible to notice the moment of switch-over?

When I was doing my research for book Infinity and the Mind, I came across a guy called Benjamin Paul Blood who was, one might say, one of the first-ever drug-mystic’s in the United States. He would equip himself with a handkerchief soaked in ether, hold it to his face, sink into unconsciousness, and then, as his nerveless hand fell away, he would wake back up. The experience of moving abruptly from artificial trance to normal awareness struck him as central, and he wrote something very interesting about it in an 1874 pamphlet, The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy. In the long quote below, I added three little clause numbers to make it easier to follow what he’s saying:

I think most persons who shall have tested it will accept this as the central point of the illumination: [i] that sanity is not the basic quality of intelligence, but is a mere condition which is variable, and like the humming of a wheel, goes up or down the musical gamut according to a physical activity; [ii] and that only in sanity is formal or contrasting thought, while the naked life is realized only outside of sanity altogether; [iii] and it is the instant contrast of this tasteless water of souls with formal thought as we “come to” that leaves in the patient an astonishment that the awful mystery of Life is at last but a homely and a common thing, and that aside from mere formality the majestic and the absurd are of equal dignity.

Satori, man.

Up until now I have been describing the interface between One and Many as something that one moves back and forth through in time. This is a bit misleading. In Suzuki’s words, “Satori is no particular experience like other experiences of our daily life. Particular experiences are experiences of particular events while the satori experience is the one that runs through all experiences.”

In other words, the One and the Many run about together in and out of every word ever uttered. The world is One and the world is Many. The One/Many split is the heartbeat of the universe, the charged tension that makes things happen.

What happens in my novel The Big Aha is that my characters find a way to “jam open” the switch between the cosmic and the robotic mode, and they stay in cosmic mode for long periods of time, being One with reality, but without losing their ability to function.

And that’s the Big Aha experience that my book’s title is referring to. The Big Aha is that you can remain in cosmic mode and not be flipping out about it.

In writing my novel, I’d had some faint hope of finding a “higher” Big Aha in an alternate world that my characters visit. But I ended up with more of a D. T. Suzuki or Benjamin Paul Blood routine. Although your knowledge of the Big Aha may be sparked by some a unique and a trippy White Light experience, it ends up being being a part of daily life. You recognize the fact that you’re in the cosmic “All is One” mode a lot of the time.

This is all there is. What was I so excited about? What else did I expect?

Coming at this form of the Big Aha from another angle, think of what the great science writer Martin Gardner calls the “superultimate why question” in his essay, “Science and the Unknowable.” You start with, “Why does anything exist?” And, given any answer to that, you can say, “But where did that come from?” So you might as well short-circuit the process. There is no explanation beyond what we’re experiencing here and now.

So….the Big Aha is? Be here now. Mindful. In the now moment.

You figure out the secret of life—fine. But you still have to go ahead and lead the whole rest of your life. Living in the Big Aha.

I had a big SF revelation this week, a breakthrough for my story. Today’s post will include some illustratiave drawings, also some semi-relevant or irrelevant (but nice-looking) photos.

I’m still working on my novel, The Big Aha. I’m about 75% done. Ever since the early chapters, I’ve had these two mysterious glass balls hanging around: the oddball and the dollshead. I wasn’t quite sure what they were going to do for me, but I had a sense that thought ought to be Einstein-Rosen (or “ER”) bridges to a parallel world that I call Fairyland. See my recent post “Four-Dimesional Portals to Other Worlds” for the story on ER bridges.

In the morning I wrote a scene at the start of where something like an elephant is pulled into the dollshead and it disappears. The mental image made me laugh: the fat elephant with trunk outstretched, thick legs star-fished out, thin tail trailing. Passing into and through the little Xmas-tree ball. While the elephant is going through, the ball swells up like a wobbly giant soap bubble, then shrinks back.

Then I went for a lovely and revivifying hike up over St. Joseph’s Hill above our house, the meadows green, the trees bosky, the sky adrift with plump sharp clouds. Lying there, fully at ease, I was wondering how some creature could contain an ER bridge and yet be an animal or monster with a body and a skin and so on. How would that work? I mean, an ER bridge is a wormhole connecting two spaces. How do you wrap a body around that?

I’ve been coughing for six weeks, and I’ve been thinking I might have pneumonia. I took a little nap on some soft long green grass and when I awoke, I felt like I was finally well. And, as an additional gift, I now had an aha moment. I had a vision of a largish creature, maybe as big as a whale, or maybe even bigger. Call him a leviathan. He lives in the parallel world. And the creature has a number of ER bridges within his body. They’re like vacuoles in the body of a paramecium.

I scrawled the two preliminary images below on a manuscript page I’d brought along on my outing. And the next day I drew something more elaborate. I’ll show those later in this post, but first here’s the crude ones.

In order to discuss the situation further, I’ll use special names for two worlds. I’ve been calling them the Universe and Fairyland, but now I’d like to employ a more neutral usage that I coined in Postsingular and Hylozoic: Lobrane and Hibrane. We live in Lobrane, and Hibrane is the parallel world.

The two ends of an ER bridge between two 3D branes or worlds will appear to us like spheres. So, as I’m saying, the Hibrane ends of a group of ER bridges could very well be spherical vacuoles within the leviathan’s body, and these vacuoles connect to oddball-like spheres down here in our Lobrane.

I arrived at this image by thinking of a Flatland model. In the Flatland version we have the two planes with one or more ER wormhole throats connecting them. We draw a big dark glob on the upper plane. The leviathan. And the ER throats are within his body. And—crucial point—his dark flesh extends about 30% or even 90% of the way down each of the throats, holding those throats bulged out. But the flesh doesn’t go all the way down as the leviathan wants to be living primarily in the upper plane.

What happens if a Lobrane person sails in through one of the ER mouths? The leviathan is flexible, possibly even jellyfish-like, so the mouth can freely enlarge. Even an elephant can fit through. Fine. But what happens when you encounter the dark flesh of the leviathan drooping down from the Hibrane?

The traditional panic-mongering SF option is that the leviathan dissolves and absorbs you on contact, subsuming you as food. Or he somehow chews you up and swallows you. And this may sometimes happen. Certainly I’d like to see one of my viallains meet his end this way. Possibly the kindly elephant Darby gets eaten in this fashion as well. Maybe a few of Darby’s bones slide back out or are spit out. Grisly effect in the barn there. Maybe just one big, dramatic bone. The ER sphere burps, and out comes a bloody tibia, three feet long and a foot across.

But we’ll suppose that when my hero and heroine go into one of the leviathan’s ER maws, the creature doesn’t invoke its digestive processes. Perhaps our hero and heroine wallow through the jellied leviathan flesh and emerge from its skin in the Hibrane.

The next day I was thinking about the leviathan as soon as I woke up in the morning, and I thought about it all day, off and on, although in the meantime I had to prepare all my tax papers and bring them to the accountant, also go to the dentist. It was good to have the geometry and topology of the leviathan to think about while I was getting my teeth cleaned. It was as if, for once, I wasn’t really there. Dear Mamma Mathematica!

Anyway, the concept I slowly arrived at is that the leviathan flesh that protrudes down into the ER tunnel can have a mouth in it. On the one hand, the mouth can either lead to a toothed-vagina style channel in which you’re ground up, and then moved by peristalsis into one of the leviathan’s stomachs. On the other hand, the mouth may lead through a channel out to the leviathan’s surface, delivering you via a kind of birth canal into the Hibrane world.

I decided that the likeable oddball should be an ER bridge of the “good” latter kind, a channel to the higher world. And the dollhead ER bridge will be a “bad” one, a route to being devoured.

So below I’ve drawn, on the left, the Flatland images of the two ER balls, and on the right the diagrams of the two kinds of ER bridges involved. The tiny lazy-eight infinity signs inside the two images on the left indicate that really that central region contains the whole endless world of the Hibrane. The images on the left are oddly warped perspective images, but they indicate how a Lobraner would actually see the ER bridges.

Now for more details. When my hero and heroine were handling the oddball in their apartment it didn’t feel like it had a mouth or an opening. It felt like a smooth glassy ball—and I’ve draw it that way in the figure above. We can think of the oddball or dollhead as wearing a rind. A clear outer surface over the actual leviathan flesh. Like a cornea. And when they want to get down to business, they split the cornea, and it drops off like a husk. Or with might better think of the transparent cover of the ball as like a nictitating membrane on the eye of a bird or a reptile. When it retracts, it’s covering, say, only the “back” half of the ball.

Alternately the cover gets soft and you can push through it.

The glassy oddball (with shiny rind still intact) will have a golden brownish sphere in the center, with shiny skin. And in this sphere there’s a puckered slit. After the oddball sheds or opens its rind, the mouth is uncovered. It opens up. Looking inside you’re seeing up along a tube that goes through an ER bridge. The tube may open up into Fairland, in which case you’ll “read” that as seeing a lot of tiny objects inside the mouth.

Fabulous! Eureka! Aha!

I’d been waiting for this series of insights and I wasn’t sure they were going to come, but now the Muse has favored me. Thanks in part to logic and math and weeks of butting my head against the wall and, ultimately, taking a nap on a grassy hillock one California spring day.

Okay, now to watch some Futurama on Netflix. 46 episodes done, and nearly as many to go.

Today’s post is about the photographer Garry Winogrand and wide-angle lens street photos. If you don’t know anything about Winogrand, here’s good lengthy link-laden post by the photographer Eric Kim. Or, even simpler, you can do what I’ve been doing lately, just do a Google image search.

There’s a big Winogrand show at the SFMOMA just now, which is what got me focused on him again. With (here’s links to more Google Image searches) Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus, and Robert Frank, Winogrand was one of the last really renowned black-and-white photographers. In the mid-1970s, William Eggleston flipped the game over to color photography.

Winogrand used a wide-angle lens (I think 28 mm) on a Leica M4 film camera. As it happens, I used Leicas when I shot film in the 1960s – 1990s, and I have a very nice German-built 28 mm Leica lens that, with a slight bit of effort, I can use on my digital Canon full-frame 5D. So for the last week or two, I’ve been shooting “Winogrand” style, using that lens.

With a wide-angle lens, you can stand really close to someone to get their picture. Winogrand was a fairly pushy guy, I think. So I took an ugly picture of myself clutching my new ten-pound-heavy (?) Winogrand catalog. Recently I’ve been trying to make a brand-new ugly face in the mirror before bedtime every day. I’ve got kind of a Lee Harvey Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby thing happening for me here. With a 28 mm lens it’s pretty easy to shoot in a mirror. Not that I’m going to pursue that in any relentless kind of way.

Your average pocket digicam has a 28 mm lens zoom mode of course. But those cameras don’t really pick up the tonal range that you can get with a heavy duty SLR with some quality glass. I’d toyed with the idea of buying a new Canon 28 mm lens. But those things, they weigh over one pound each. And, like I say, I had this lens right here. My camera body has paint on it because one of the main things I use it for these days is getting shots of my paintings—walking about I’m more likely to have my latest pocket-sized digicam. But now I want to do the lugging routine again for awhile. Like in the old days.

This is our friend Paul and his wife Lydia. They helped organize an Easter picnic that I went to with my son and his family today. Paul’s theatrical, an artist, and he emcees in his pink rabbit suit. So San Francisco.

Most of Winogrand’s pictures are of people—really his primo shooting spots were the crowded cross-walks in Manhattan. So many faces going by. Legally you can shoot a stranger’s picture and sell prints of it and put it in a book, as long as you don’t put defamatory comments about the person. I’ve never had the right personality for getting up close to complete strangers and snapping them.

Another issue about Winogrand—which I won’t delve into at length here—is that he was really into getting photos of passing women whom he considered attractive. And photos of down-and-outers. There can be predatory aspect to street photography, and it can become disturbing. This said, photos of people really are interesting.

Diane Arbus took a different approach than Winogrand did. She’d hang around with her subjects, at least for a few minutes, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. Really getting to know them. And in her photos you sometimes have the feeling the subjects are looking at Diane and thinking, “This woman is really strange.”

Winogrand was more about the grab shot—although he said he was never surreptitious about it, he’d be looking through his viewfinder. And he’d try to defuse the tension by smiling at the subject.

When you’re comfortable with it, it easy to grab shots of people with the wide-angle lens. The lens has a large depth of field. You only need to set an approximate distance. (The autofocus feature doesn’t work when you marry an old lens to a new camera like I’m doing.)

Another thing about wide-angle lens photography is that the horizon line becomes less important to you. If you’re using a single-lens-reflex, you’re looking through the lens, turning it this way and that, trying to fit more of the world in, composing you scene. Why is the standard horizontal and vertical so sacred? Let it go. Big inspiration from Winogrand.

People would ask him why his photos were tilted and with a straight face (he was stubborn), he’s insist they weren’t tilted. “That’s how the picture is.”

But, like I say, I’m not going out and shooting strangers. I’m happy with something like the sun on these drops of juice.

It’s kind of disappointment to drop back and do a non-tilted shot. Kind of a Joseph Cornell box thing here. That red rubber thing is the mighty flying Troton, an insufficiently recognized and seldom used beach toy.

Landscapes get a looming, creepy look with the wide lens. This is the brain-wave controller device atop Bernal Hill.

It is of course possible to take bad wide-angle lens pictures. You need to have stuff in them. In the last years of his life Winogrand was living in LA, which unlike NYC, is pretty dead on the streets. And he shot, like, a hundred thousand mostly bad pictures of empty streets with like one person half a block away. Reading between the lines, I get the feeling that he was drinking very heavily at this point. His friendlier critics have struggled for some years to find nuggets in the dross of Winogrand’s later work, and there are a handful. But, hey, sometimes when you’re old, you lose it.

Like this guy…

Today’s post is about the fourth dimension and about the nature of portals between parallel worlds.

As it happens, in the Bay Area this spring there are not one but two classes being taught on the subject of the fourth dimension of space. And I was invited to give guest lectures at both these classes.

People sometimes dismiss the notion of the fourth dimension by saying, “Oh, that’s just time.” But mathematicians and SF writers are interested in a more bizarre kind of fourth dimension—an actual direction of space or, more properly speaking, a direction in hyperspace.

First, as I mentioned in my post of March 11, 2013, I gave a talk at Alan Weinstein’s mathematics of the fourth dimension class at Berkeley. They were using my very first book as a text, Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension, by Rudolf v. B. Rucker. And then I gave a talk at Thomas Banchoff’s freshman level class on the fourth dimension at the University of San Francisco.

I recorded my talk at Banchoff’s class, talking about the fourth dimension of space, Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, and ideas about portals to parallel worlds. The podcast ends with a reading of the second half of my story, “Message Found In A Copy of Flatland,” which you can read online. You can find the recording of the talk at the link below, and I’ll say a bit more about the talk further down.

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

Banchoff has consulted with the artist Salvador Dali about his work. Dali famously included an unfolded hypercube in his painting Christus Hypercubicus, shown below. You can find a video of a full-length lecture by Banchoff on “The Four-Dimensional Geometry and Theology of Salvador Dali” online. Tom is giving a new version of this talk at University of San Francisco on April 18, 2013 at 11:45 am.

Banchoff invented that paper model of the hypercube shown in Dali’s painting. I was discussing this with him at lunch, and he said, “I have a paper model of a six-dimensional hyperhypercube folded up in my suitcase.” So we went to his office where he had the “suitcase” in which he keeps his lecture supplies.

Tom explained this model to me—bascially you use the three extra dimensions (4, 5, and 6) for bending the model around to glue together each of its opposite sides. If I didn’t grasp this as clearly as he did, that’s because he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the model.

“I thought if it while I was folding shirts onto cardboards,” Tom told me. “I made the model and took it to my thesis advisor. He said, ‘You’ve found a gold mine.’”

Such a mathematician-style talk. Looking at that cardboard honeycomb and saying it’s a six-dimensional gold mine.

My talk depended on a timeworn analogy. 4:3 as 3:2. That is, in thinking about the mysterious fourth dimension, it helps to imagine a flat two-dimensional creature trying to imagine a third dimension. The flat creatures we usually talk about are Edwin Abbott’s Flatlanders.

The drawings I’m showing here were done by my artist friend David Povilaitis for my book, The Fourth Dimension, which is currently available in used editions only, but which is due to be reprinted in a new edition in 2014 or 2015. I’m sorry about the small size of the images I’m showing here today, but these are old scans, I didn’t want to rescan them.

One of the specific things I talked about was the nature of a portal to a parallel world. This is a commonplace in fantasy and SF movies—a magic door to another world. Dropping down to Flatland, we can think of the two worlds as being parallel “sheets” of space. The Flatlanders live on the lower world and some other flat creatures—let’s call them Globbers—live in the upper world.

If we want to make the simplest kind of path between the worlds, we fold up a tab from the lower world and glue it to a tab from the upper world. This is what a door-like portal to another world is like. One problem here is that you need to be very careful not to slide off the edges of the path between the world. Or you might dissolve into Nothingness.

The right way to do it is to use what’s called an Einstein-Rosen bridge. You make a wormhole or throat that runs smoothly from one sheet of space to the other. In seeing this picture, people often worry that the Flatlanders who slide through the throat to the alternate world will end up on the “underside” of that space’s sheet. But you want to think of these sheets as having no thickness so that being on one side of the sheet is the same as being as the other. Or think of the sheets as soap-films with the Flatlanders and Globbers as being like colored patterns in the soap.

Moving up to an Einstein-Rosen bridge between two 3D universes, we can think of our 3D spaces as floating in a 4D hyperspace, and having a “bent” region that connects the spaces. And our 3D spaces have no essential 4D hyperthickness.

In The Fourth Dimension, my character A Square wants to go off to a private place with a Flatland woman called Una. She’s married a jealous Hexagon. In the two images above, we see Square and Una hesitating at the mouth of the ER Bridge. And in the second image, they’ve slid through the portal in the land of the Globbers, and a helpful Globber has wrapped himself around the throat of the ER bridge so that A Hexagon can’t see through.

The image above shows how the situation looks to the 2D Hexagon. He views the mouth of the portal as a circle [in our version we’d see a sphere]. Globland lies within the circle, Flatland lies outside. And the point at infinity lies at the seeming center of the ball—that is, a whole endless world fits into the ball with everything getting smaller and smaller as it approaches the center.

In terms of our space, we can visualize an Einstein-Rosen bridge as resembling a shiny Christmas ornament ball, a sphere within which you seem to see whole world. There are two kickers if the “ball” is the mouth of an ER bridge to another world. (a) The world you see inside the ball isn’t the same as our world. (b) The ball doesn’t have a solid surface, it’s zone that you can walk or crawl through.

I describe an ER bridge in my story “The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge,” which is also online as part of my Complete Stories. In the story, my character finds the portal lying in an asparagus field near Heidelberg, Germany.

I also describe an Einstein-Rosen bridge in my novel Realware, which is now in print as part of the four-volume The Ware Tetralogy, including Software, Wetware, Freeware, and Realware.

I’ll reprint a scene from Realware where my character Phil goes through an ER bridge, which he calls a “powerball.” In Phil’s case, what’s on the other side of the bridge is a small hyperspherical world, which is why he sees images of himself at the very end.

The powerball came in across the water, low down at Phil’s level, flying straight at him. Phil braced himself, wrapping his arms tight around his knees. The powerball looked like a big, glowing crystal ball, reflecting and refracting light, though not so smooth as a glass ball, perhaps a bit more like a drop of water.

As it drew closer there was an odd effect on the rest of the world: things seemed to melt and warp, distorting themselves away from the magic ball.

Closer and closer it came, yet taking an oddly long time to actually arrive. It was as if the space between Phil and the ball were stretching nearly as fast as the ball could approach. The ball was like a hole opening up in the world. Everything was being pushed aside by it; the sky and waves were being squeezed out along its edges.

Phil looked back over his shoulder; there was still a little zone of normality behind him—the nearest section of the rocky cliff s looked much the same. But so strong was the space warping of the powerball that the beach to the left and right seemed to bend away from him and, as Phil watched, this effect grew more pronounced. In a few moments it was as if Phil stood out on the tip of a little finger of reality, with the glowing powerball’s hyperspace squeezing in on every side. Back there at the other end of the finger, back in the world, Wubwub and Shimmer were peeking out of their cave entrance watching him, the cowards. He fought down an urge to run at them, and forced himself to turn back to face the engulfing ball. What could he see within the ball? Nothing but funhouse mirror reflections of himself: jiggling pink patches of his skin against a blue background filled with moons and stars—his shirt.

And then, like a mighty wave breaking, the warped zone moved over Phil. He felt a deep shock of pain throughout his body, as if something were pulling and stretching at his insides. His lungs, his stomach, his muscles, his brain—every tissue burned with agony.

“Phil! Phil!”

Phil didn’t dare turn; he felt as if the slightest motion might tear his innards in two. But, peering from his pain-wracked eyes, he realized there was no need to turn, for with the powerball centered on him, his view of the world had changed. The entire world was squeezed into a tiny ball that seemed to float a few feet away from him like a spherical mirror the size of a dinner plate. And there in the little toy world, like animated figurines, were Cobb and Yoke. Running toward him. Phil instinctively reached out towards them but—swish—something flashed past his fingers like an invisible scythe. And then—pop—the little bubble that had been the normal world winked out of view, and Phil was alone in the hypersphere of the powerball.

Phil’s guts snapped back to normal; the pain and its afterimage faded. He found himself comfortably floating within an empty, well-lit space that contained glowing air, his body and seemingly nothing else.

See you on the other side!

[Photo of Anselm Hollo with me in Boulder, Colorado, June, 2004. ]

I just learned that my dear friend and mentor, the poet Anselm Hollo died on January 29, 2013. He’d been ill for nearly a year.

I think of a poem of Anselm’s in which he describes a dream of his dead father. He had the dream three months after his father died. The poem, untitled, appeared in his slim and epic 1972 collection, Sensation, and the poem is reprinted in his tellingly titled autobiographical essay, “Anselm Hollo, 1934-,” which in turn appears in his later collection Caws and Causeries. I’ll quote the last half of the poem here.

…I knew where he lay
went on & entered
the room light & bare
no curtains no books
his head on the pillow
hand moving outward
the gesture “be seated”
i started talking, saw myself from the back
leaned forward, talked to his face
intent, bushy-browed
eyes straining to see
into mine
“a question i wanted to ask you”
would never know what it was
but stood there & was
so happy to see him
that twenty-sixth day of april
three months after his death

“& was / so happy to see him”
Sigh.

I took this photo across from the legendary beat Caffe Trieste in North Beach where my wife and I had coffee with Anselm and Jane Dalrymple some twenty years ago. Anselm not there today.

I first heard of Anselm Hollo in 1972 when my writer friend Gregory Gibson mailed me a copy of that pamphlet-like book or chapbook, Sensation , published by a group calling themselves the Institute of Further Studies, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, traditional home of outrider poets such as Greg himself and of course Charles Olson. Not that Anselm was living in Gloucester. Born and to some extent raised in Finland, he was at this point drifting around the US from one visiting-poet gig to the next.

I read Sensation over and over, fascinated by its colloquial style and by Hollo’s trick of putting more than one twist into each poem—later when I met him he once remarked of some other poet’s work, “Just has one twist at the end, that’s not enough.”

Anselm’s poems are nicely musicked, yet elliptical and hard to pin down. What do they mean? No matter, never mind.

Here’s another poem from Sensation, also untitled. The saying that Anselm attributes to his father has stuck with me for all these years.

it is a well-lit afternoon
and the heart with pleasure fills
flowing through town in warm things

yes what do you know
it’s winter again
but the days are well-lit
what’s more
they’re beginning to stay that way longer

that is a fact
and I am moving
through a town
in a fur hat
the third one in my life
or is it only the second?

the expeditionary force
will have to check up on that
back there in the previous frames

while I move forward
steadily, stealthily
like a feather

I am a father
bearded and warm
and listen to words coming through
the fur hat off a page
in the Finnish language
“when there’s nothing else to do
there’s always work to do”

my father said that
in one of his notebooks
and it’s true

I walk through a town
and up some steps
and through a door

it closes

now you can’t see me anymore

but the lights go on, and you know I’m there
right inside, working out

Naturally you’ll want to read more of Anselm’s poems. At present, the most complete collection of Anselm’s poems is Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: Selected Poems 1965-2000 (Coffee House Press, 2001). You can preview the first 60 or so pages of this book via Google Books. But certainly you should buy it, or get it from your library.

I met Anselm in person in the summer of 1984. My family and I lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, at this point. Some of our new Lynchburg friends invented a semi-imaginary society called the Lynchburg Yacht Club. In the summer of 1984 they organized a big party at the boathouse at Sweetbriar College, about fifteen miles north of Lynchburg.

Sylvia and I were excited about the event, and she even sewed me a new Hawaiian shirt, traffic-yellow with fans and cerise designs, billowing and lovely. At the party we danced to a live jazz band, jabbered, drank and flirted. Some of us rowed in the lake, some jumped in naked.

[Anselm and a woman in a two-dimensional world.]

Kind fate brought Anselm Hollo to the Yacht Club party too. He was in Sweetbriar as a writer-in-residence that year. Although he was a dozen years older than me, we immediately recognized each other as kindred spirits. Fellow beatnik writers. And he’d even read my first couple of SF novels.

Anselm had an encyclopedic knowledge of world literature, and an exquisite mastery of the spoken word. He was wonderfully serious about writing. Whenever I was with him, I felt like I was talking to a sage on Mount Olympus, not that there was anything solemn about him. He’d often break into wheezing laughter while we were batting the ideas around. He had a cosmopolitan accent, having grown up Finnish. Anselm once remarked that every Finn deserved to have a biography written. But Anselm’s short, pungent poems are the most accurate memoirs of all, like X-ray snapshots of instantaneous mental states.

We hung out with Anselm quite a bit over the months to come. Anselm and I enjoyed drinking heavily together and talking about art and reality—and ringing strange changes on the words we heard or used. I remember us taking special delight from a line in Rene Daumal’s book, A Night of Serious Drinking: “I have forgotten to mention that the only word which can be said by carp is art.” Inspired by Anselm’s companionship I self-published a book of my poems called Light Fuse and Get Away, saying it was from Carp Press. [This was a 50-copy Xerox edition, later reprinted in my 1991 omnibus, Transreal!.]

Covers of Rudy and Anselm’s paperback double. Click for a larger version of the image.

When we moved to California in 1986, we saw Anselm a few times. I think he was living in Baltimore part of the time, and then in Salt Lake City. I’d written a scroll-type memoir in the style of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. Ninety feet long. No big publishers would touch it, but I met a poet called Lee Ballentine who ran a small press called Ocean View.

Lee agreed to publish my memoir—it was called All the Visions—back to back with a collection of Anselm’s “science fiction poems” that he called Space Baltic. It came out in a nice “sixty-nine” style format, that is, with the two books bound together upside down relative to each other, so both sides of the book function as a “front cover.” The illo above shows the two covers.

To increase the joy of this event, we got the ultra cool hot-rod underground artist Robert Williams to let us use one of his images as the cover of my half. All the Visions/Space Baltic is out of print, but you can find various editions for sale online, new or used, softcover or hardback. (My own press, Transreal Books, is likely to reprint my half in a new edition this year or the next.)

We saw Anselm for the last time when I was a guest teacher at the Naropa Institute (a.k.a. The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) in Boulder, Colorado, in June, 2004.

We’d been to Naropa years earlier, around 1980, and that time we’d had a chance to hang around a bit with Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Corso. Of course by 2004, the school was less chaotic. But they were keeping it real with Anselm on the permanent faculty/ Anselm was now settled there with his wonderful wife Jane Dalrymple.

The class I taught was about “Transreal SF Writing,” and while teaching the course, I wrote a transreal SF story called “MS Found in a Minidrive”—funny, gnarly, heavy. I worked in transreal stuff about my nostalgia for the days of Burroughs. The storys narrator, is a would-be-writer who’s attending a Naropa writing workshop. You can find the story online as part of my Complete Stories..

I got to read the story at the end of my Naropa week, back to back with Anselm reading some of his latest poems. We had crowd of about 300 people, it was a wonderful night, the best reading I’ve ever been part of, unforgettable. Rocking it with the Master.

On June 12, 2004, I said my last farewell to dear Anselm. We hugged goodbye and he gave me a sharp, sad, knowing look, perhaps the same look I was giving him, both of us aware that one of us might die before we could meet again. He was seventy, and he’d had a quadruple bypass. But he got over that and went on for eight or nine more years. But now it’s over. As Anselm wrote after the death of Allen Ginsberg:

brave old lion
gone out of reach now
through the one door
awaits us all

One more book of Anselm’s to mention, a book of essays and reminiscences, Caws & Causeries, (La Alameda Press, 1999). Anselm is good at stirring up the old “ontological wonder-sickness,” as the philosopher William James termed it. Why does anything exist at all? Why Anselm, why me?

I’ll close with a poem I found reprinted in Caws & Causeries; it’s originally from Anselm’s 1974 poetry collection, Black Book (Walker’s Pond Press). The poem is a remembrance of Anselm living for a few years with his ninety-year-old grandfather Paul Walden in the south of Germany when Anselm was in his early twenties. Walden was an academic chemist with an interest in the history of science.

THE WALDEN VARIATIONS (for Robert Creeley)

White hair
fine fringes
under the brim

old sunshine on twigs

grandpa
a sturdy
alchemist

old sunshine on twigs

*
old sunshine on twigs

& on the pigs
we ate
together
he & i

deaf alchemist
loud grandson

*
ate together

teeth fell out

& died

old sun

Adios, King.

I’ve been writing a lot lately, working on my novel The Big Aha, and on a short story called “Apricot Lane.” I also gave a guest lecture at UC Berkeley and participated in a workshop at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. In today’s post, I’ll catch up on some of this.

In The Big Aha I have these two mysterious spheres kicking around, about the size of softballs. They’re called the oddball and the dollshead, although their actual names might be Alef and Zeee.

They’re otherworldly beings of some kind, and in the books’ final chapters they’ll transfer one or two of my characters to a higher world for some extra adventures. This is a standard move from the Monomyth or Hero’s Journey pattern, which was famously described in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. (Note that, with a few tweaks, you can get a variation on the pattern that works for a Heroine’s Journey as well.)

As I sometimes do when I’m stalled or unsure in a novel, I did a painting of these two beings, and I call it The Two Gods.

“The Two Gods,” oil on canvas, March, 2013, 24” x 324”. Click for a larger version of the image.

They’re like lizards, a little bit, with long tails going off into the beyond. I posted a little about my plans for the oddball before on February 5, 2013, in “The Bogosity Generator Tool in Science Fiction,” and when I wrote that post I was thinking about trying to basing my painting “The Two Gods,” on the start sequence seen in Warner Brothers cartoons of the Merrie Melodies or Loony Toons ilk.

On the art front, my show is still hanging at Borderlands Café on Valencia Street in San Francisco. It’ll be up until March 27, 2013, and I have a video of the show below. I marked the prices of my paintings way down for the show, and I’ve sold four in the last month. More info on my Paintings Page.

Rolling back to earlier this month, as I mentioned, I gave a talk on the fourth dimension at Alan Weinstein’s math class at UC Berkeley. The class is using my very first book as their text, Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension (Dover Publications, 1977). Incredibly this little book is in its seventeenth printing, with over a hundred thousand copies sold.

Above is a scan of one of my older copies. For the class I got into some illos from my novel on the fourth dimension, that is, Spaceland, which was inspired by Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novel Flatland .

Flatland describes higher dimensions in terms of a two dimensional square being, A Square, shown above in my painting of the square and his wife, who is a line segment. In the novel Flatland, A Square is lifted into the third dimension, and gets a view of our world as seen from a higher dimension. There’s a few issues that come up here. If you tug A Square up into 3D space, do his innards spill out? And how can his flat eye with its 1D retina see much of anything in 3D?

I got into these issues in my novel Spaceland. My solution was that, before a 4D being tugs my hero Joe Cube up into 4D space, Joe is “augmented,” that is, he’s given a bit of a 4D hyperthickness, his upper “side” is sealed off with new skin, and he grows himself a hyperdimensional extra eye that projects out into hyperspace from the center of his brain.

The rather complex image shown above depicts these moves in terms of A Square, up in the higher (3D) space looking down at his father, who is a triangle. If the Square tries to use his normal eye, he only sees a 1D cross section of his father. He needs that higher-D eye to get full 2D images on his retina so he can form mental images of 3D objects.

In the same sense, if you try and use your normal eye to see in 4D space, you’ll only see 2D cross sections of things. And what you want is to have a 4D eye with a 3D retina, so you can look at, like a person, and see all of their inner organs at once. Like the way you see your house in your mind, with every closet and drawer open to your inspection.

A little more fun with the higher-dimensional eye. Suppose that the Flatland creatures aren’t simple squares, but are more like organisms with bones and a stomach. Suppose that “Dad” here has been augmented with some thickness and with a higher dimensional eye. So he can see that flat “Mom” is hiding a knife behind her back.

Mom makes her move, but Dad bulges his belly out into a higher dimension!

I always go check out Telegraph Avenue when I’m in Berzerkistan. Been doing that for forty years. These days the Ave is at a bit of a low ebb. The epic Cody’s bookstore is gone, indeed all four corners of that block are deserted, and, at least on the day I visited, the street denizens seemed to have arranged a pair of trucks so as wall off access to People’s Park. Note the edited street sign.

At least Rasputin’s and Amoeba record stores are still there, not that they’re very flush. All kinds of media stores are fading away…books, CDs, DVDs…all dissolved in the digital torrent.

I’m a bit of a connoisseur of images of the Pig Chef—that traitorous being who delights in slaughtering, cooking and devouring his peers—and I saw this well-executed Pig Chef on a truck by People’s Park. If you’ve never read it, do check out my Pig Chef story, “The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club” in my online Complete Stories. Not to give too much away, in my tale, the Pig Chef is a Sta-Hi-type character who ends up BBQ-ing people and feeding them to alien preying mantises…

Another thing I did recently was to attend Institute For The Future workshop on the theme of objects joining the internet. See the IFTF post on “The Coming Age of Networked Matter.” My host was David Pescovitz, who also does some work at IFTF.

IFTF has commissioned me to write a short SF story on networked matter, the story to appear for free on Boing Boing and in other spots—it’ll be Creative Commons licensed. Madeline Ashby, Cory Doctorow, Warren Ellis will be writing stories as well. For now I’m calling my story “Apricot Lane,” and that’s what I’m working on right now.

I wrote about a rather enjoyable world with tagged and even “living” objects in my novels Postsingular and its sequel Hylozoic. And note that a free CC version of Postsingular exists.

But this time around, for the purposes of “Apricot Lane,” I’m thinking that it wouldn’t necessarily be pleasant if the objects around you could talk to you or exchange information with you.

Thinking along these lines, I remembered the “dogsh*t day” scene in Phil Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly. Bob Arctor’s car has malfunctioned. He’s pulled over at the side of a freeway with his freaky and possibly evil friend Barris. He’s hallucinating that his engine block is smeared with dog crap, and Barris somehow knows this and is teasing Arctor, smiling at him from behind his mirrorshades. And then Arctor starts to hear the parts of the engine talking to him and he throws up.

He felt, in his head, loud voices singing: terrible, as if the reality around him had gone sour. … The smell of Barris still smiling overpowered Bob Arctor, and he heaved onto the dashboard of his own car. A thousand little voices tinkled up at him, shining at him, and the smell receded finally. A thousand little voices crying out their strangeness; he did not understand them, but at least he could see, and the smell was going away.

Good old Phil.

My wife and I were in Manhattan for seven days this month, basically just there for a vacation. We stayed at pleasant hotel at 41st St. and Madison Ave, just a block away from the NYC Library on 5th Ave, and close to Grand Central Station. Wonderful to see the perpetual steam-smokestack in the intersection with the slushy taxis doing their thing.

The back of the NYC library after a snowstorm.

We made three trips to the Oyster Bar at the Grand Central Station. Truly the freshest clams and oysters in the world. I graduated this time from littleneck clams to the more-to-chew and almost-too-big cherry stones. Also sampled the legendary “ pan roast,” made in special steel pans-on-hinges behind the counter, and consisting of a pint of piping hot cream with toast and oysters and chili sauce in it—a little overwhelming, but you gotta have it once, although next time I’d get the pricier “oyster clam lobster scallop” version.

As a boy I was fascinated by images of the NYC skyscrapers. The Chrysler is still one of the loveliest of them all. You have to wonder why they can’t make such an interesting building anymore.

The Empire State Building has always been my favorite skyscraper. I love how it pops out at you from around corners if you’re within ten or fifteen blocks of 34th St. Sometimes the Empire poses for you in a perfectly framed photo shot.

I guess I ought to say something about the lost Twin Towers. I always thought they were a little dull to look at, wasn’t crazy about them. I never got around to taking the elevator to their top, I wish I’d done that. I still resent Osama and Al Qaeda for having screwed up the opening decades of the twenty-first century. And I’m glad we’ve got the new tower coming up in the footprint of the old ones. But this trip, we didn’t make it that far downtown there again. We were down at Ground Zero in April, 2012, though, and I posted about it then.

This time we only hit mid-town, uptown, Soho, had a lunch at Sylvia’s soul food restaurant in Harlem, and I made a somewhat abortive solo reconnaissance visit to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where I ended up getting off at the wrong subway stop (twice) and had to walk about ten blocks, guided by the Google Maps beacon of Spoonbill & Sugartown Books, near 5th & Bedford. Bought an intriguing mental-exercises book, D. I. Y. Magic, by Anthony Alvarado, then had a chai across the street, then schlepped to the Marcy St. subway stop and rode back to *ah* the tall buildings of old Manhattoes. Nothing beats being an ant in the cracks of those canyons.

One of the very first things we did in New York was to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here’s the great entrance hall. A secular cathedral.

A random fop in the galleries of the Met. What often happens here is that we have an intention to see, let us say, galleries A, B, and C. But on the way from A to B, we always pass some heretofore unnoticed gallery that’s filled with amazing, unexpected things. The Met is a fractal.

A design gallery showing a ray-gun-like device that was, if I remember correctly, used to spritz bubbles into water.

I rode the bus down Fifth Ave to meet my old Tor editor David Hartwell in the Flatiron building, another great NYC icon. And grabbed this dirty-window shot. My Pop showed it the Flatiron to me when the two of us visited NYC in 1959. I always feel proud when I have a little business to do here.

My favorite views of the skyscrapers are from Madison Square park at 23rd and Madison, not to be confused with Madison Square Garden. One thing I’ve slowly learned over the years is that sometimes a photograph is better if you use a tilted horizon. The iconography of this building is interesting: the giant CLOCK. They inhabitants might have been selling insurance…

I visited the new MOMATH or Museum of Mathematics which is on Madison Square. I wasn’t super impressed with the space—it was small, and too many of the exhibits were simply computer programs on screens. Changing the physical computer controls to “look fun” doesn’t change the fact that you’re looking at a program you could be running at home. But MOMATH does have a few physical displays that are good, especially this tricycle with square (!) wheels. I was allowed to mount it, and it rides very smoothly—because it’s going on a surface made up of inverted catenary curves.

One other nice thing in MOMATH was this Truchet tile pattern on the wall of the bathroom. Can you see what it says?

A big snowstorm hit Manhattan while we where there—the storm was stronger in New England, but even in NYC we got three or four inches. As California tourists with no particular agenda, the snow was simply fun for us. Wonderful to see it tumbling down in the night, we went up onto the roof of the hotel with our friend Eddie Marritz and his wife Hana Machotka.

The morning after the storm, Bryant Park by the NYC Library was full of views. The trees snow-edges among the towers.

A a traditional snow photo, nice to encounter it in real life.

I might have been waiting for a bus here, taking shelter in the entrance way of yet another wonderful old-time skyscraper, it’s portal clad with bronze.

This was near the bus stop on Madison Ave where we’d embark uptown. Although I love subways, you get to see more from busses. The red balloons advertised a luncheonette.

One snow-day we walked up through Central Park past the back of the Met arriving at the Neue Galerie and its Viennese cafe. I like how some of the buildings seen from the park seem like castles.

Walking through the snowy park, the colors of a tunnel’s tiles popped out. Fleshy, in a way, a dragon’s maw.

We came upon an old friend, the Egyptian obelisk known as “Cleopatra’s Needle,” and mounted in Central Park behind the Met. I like the contrast between the rigid obelisk and the snaky tree. Yang and yin.

I’ve always loved the iron crabs supporting Cleopatra’s Needle. The crabs have human faces, though you can’t see that here, and some have Greek letters on their claws.

We met up with Eddie Marritz at the Neue Galerie. What a great cafe they have. The art’s good too, although in the shadow of the Met, every gallery pales. But good to see some German Expressionists. Looking at all the paintings—naturally we hit the (non-math) MOMA too—I thought of a dozen “new” ways I could try to paint.

New F*ckin’ York. I’ll be back. One of the things I love most there is simply the urban architecture, block after block of insanely large buildings, and so many of them are from the 30s and 40s, and encrusted with lovely detail work. The glass box era was a wasteland, but finally they’re turning the corner and putting some interesting facets, beveled corners, polyhedral slants and spike-towers onto the boxes.

The other thing I love most in NYC is the people. The anthill! Being in it, scuttling and bustling, peacefully anonymous, with a freedom to glance at and browse the moving encyclopedia of humanity.

As most of you probably know, filmmakers use the term “MacGuffin” to stand for some object that various characters in the tale are competing for. A secret paper, a formula, a stunning gem, a statue of a Maltese falcon…

In Fantasy and SF novels we have a slightly different convention—a special device or procedure or organism with special powers that affect the flow of the story. The writer very often works backwards, that is, they get some visually or conceptually interesting thing happening in their story, and only then posits a gimmick that will make the effects possible.

There must be some standard generic name for these gimmicks, and if so, I’ve probably heard it, but for whatever reason, I can’t think of a completely apt and standard phrase today. Deus ex machina isn’t quite right, as that’s more specifically a miraculous something that saves your characters. Pixie dust is fairly accurate, but it doesn’t have the technological feel that I’d like. I’ve seen handwavium too, and that’s not bad, but I guess I’d like a new phrase for this.

Let’s call what I’m talking about a bogosity generator. Kind of like a tank of helium, useful for inflating your pretty balloon animals so they can bobble across the ceiling. Or, more obviously, like an electrical generator that sets the great streams of sparks to arcing across your mad-scientist lab.

The rules are that fantasy authors aren’t expected to justify or to explain their bogosity generators, but an SF writer is expected to cobble together some kind of semi-plausible, paralogical, science-like explanation—that’s considered part of the fun of SF. The styles of these hand-waving explanations change with the intellectual fashions of the times. Over the years, preferred bogosity-generator-justifiers have included radio waves, radioactivity, the subdimensions, relativity, psi powers, black holes, quantum mechanics, parallel worlds, nanotechnology, chaos theory, superintelligent AI, an escalating technological singularity, bioengineering, and our dear friend the Higgs particle.

One point that’s worth making over and over is that an SF writer’s explanations for his or her bogosity generators serve a creative purpose. The theory behind your bogosity generator is not idle bullsh*t. Why? Because in the process of making up the explanation, you get ideas for new things to do with the bogosity generator.

When you’re thinking about the explanation, it’s like you’re reading an instruction manual for some cool new device. Admittedly, you yourself are writing the instruction manual at the same time that you’re reading it, but the manual is not a complete fabrication—it’s constrained by having to be logical, concise, intellectually appealing, internally consistent and, to a certain degree, externally consistent with some cherry-picked facts of science.

When you get a really fine explanation for your bogosity generator, it’s no longer the case that your story tells a lie . If the explanation is really cooking, the lie tells your story. Yeah, baby. That’s where you want to be. It’s a variation on a carnie grifter saying: “Don’t run the con. Let the con run you.”

It sometimes happens that an author invents the bogosity generator before deciding what it’s supposed to do. You might dream one up early in a novel simply because you know you’ll be needing some explanatory device sooner or later, even if you haven’t quite yet decided what kind of weirdness you’ll be needing to explain. Or you’ll have a nice mental image for a funky bogosity generator, and you go ahead and describe it without even knowing what it does or how it “works.”

This is the situation that I’m in with my novel-in-progress The Big Aha . About a quarter of the way into the novel, I introduced a bogosity generator called an oddball. It has some of the qualities of a MacGuffin, in that some of characters immediately set to work stealing the oddball from each other like the spies vying for that Maltese falcon. But it’s also meant to be a bogosity generator. I’m expecting great things from my oddball. Only I still have to figure out what those things will be—and what’s the “explanation” for the oddball. And I’m glad I still have to figure these things out, as I need material for the second half of the novel!

Here’s some text from the draft scene, where the oddball is introduced. I might mention that by a “nurb,” I mean a biotweaked plant or animal. In the future era where The Big Aha is set, somewhere near the end of the 21st century, tailored organisms have almost entirely replaced machines. “Teep” is telepathy. “Qwet” means “quantum wetware,” which is a bogosity generator of its own, it provides people with teep and with an ability to get their heads into a high “cosmic” state.

A scratched, glassy object sat upon a carved wooden shelf. It was a sphere the size of a robin’s egg, transparent on the outside, with an opaque core. This central core was dark purple. I’d often studied the object, trying to decipher its origins and its purpose, wondering over the sparks of reflected light that danced within. The deeply maroon central core was a spiky compound assemblage, a stilled explosion that resembled a sea urchin.

The really odd thing about this particular curio was that its appearance continually changed. The calligraphic scratches on its surface tended to wriggle and drift; the central core wobbled and varied in size. Once in a great while, if I’d fiddled with the curio enough, I’d see a stumpy cylinder grow out of the central core and out through the curio’s transparent side. This cylinder was like a smooth, leathery tube, but its outer end gave the appearance of having been roughly severed.

My wife Jane called this little sphere her amazing oddball. She’d picked it up in Manhattan, on the East Village beach that bordered the now-submerged Alphabet City district. Jane liked to claim that the oddball had called her by whispering her name. We’d never quite decided what it actually was. At first we’d taken it for a plastic amulet with an embedded holographic display—but then we’d decided it was biological, probably a nurb. Not that it resembled any nurb that had ever gone into production. Nor did it have any obvious commercial purpose. An abandoned experiment? A wild nurb that had emerged on its own?

I centered myself and took the oddball in my hand. It nestled against my palm, and I seemed to feel a faint glow of teep from it. Not something I’d ever noticed before. Was the curio somehow synching with my qwet mind?

Two months ago, I formed the desperate plan of having my oddball be someone’s severed third eye, to be used in concert with hopping from our world up to a parallel world called fairyland. I described this far-fetched idea in my December 10, 2012 blog post, “Cosmic Fairyland 2: Third Eye”.

That was a useful idea in that it helped me to continue writing. But the whole fairyland and third eye thing is too baroque to maintain. It introduced too many extra story elements into my novel. So I’m downgrading the oddball’s abilities. My character Loulou didn’t actually use the oddball to travel through another dimension to a parallel world and then hurl small green pigs, known as “gubs,” into our world for the other characters to see. (Gubs are described in my post of November, 30, 2012, “Gubs and Raths”.)

Instead, I’m now only requiring that the oddball has the effect of allowing Loulou to (a) make herself invisible without in fact leaving our world, (b) to project images and seemingly solid objects into reality, somewhat in the style of what spiritualists call a “physical medium.”

Fairyland was only Loulou’s hallucination, but the oddball allowed Loulou to become invisible, those around her thought she might be off in fairyland, and her ability to reify her imagined gubs made it seem like she might be off in fairyland tossing gubs into our world.

So now I’m trying to get more specific about what the oddball does, and how it works. I’m thinking I’ll say that contact with the oddball allows telepaths to begin converting normal matter into something I call wacky matter. Of course, wacky matter is merely a subsidiary bogosity generator. But it’s getting closer to something useable. I was already thinking about wacky matter a year ago, see my Jan 16, 2012, blog post, “Future Ads. Fun with Wacky Matter.”

So, repeating what I just said, I’ll assume that people who have access to the oddball can turn objects into wacky matter that they control. And later on, people who merely have an understanding of the powers involved in the oddball can create and control wacky matter too.

Let’s back up and describe wacky matter again. Wacky matter is like psychic Silly Putty. It takes on shapes and patterns to match any outré mind state. Peoples’ houses might change into big shoes or have rooms with ceilings one inch tall, or maybe look like Dogpatch scenes from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner. You might dose your surroundings to make them more vibrant, more cartoony, more congenial. Instead of you getting high, your house gets high! Don’t run your con, let your con run you.

Why do I want wacky matter? The Big Aha is about a future psychedelic revolution that arrives in scientific form. It will be kind of perfect if my qwet, qrude, loofy characters can taint the physical world with wacky matter—thanks to their quantum wetware and their oddball energy. Did Kesey and Leary change the world around them? For awhile. And then the world pushed back. We got hit with Charlie Manson and with disco. Wacky matter became a destructive and repressive force.

Over the past year, I’d forgotten all about wacky matter. But recently I stumbled across the contemporary real-tech notion of “metamaterials”—which reminded me of my fictional concept. Metamaterials are engineered to contain regular lattices of atoms that subject light rays and other electromagnetic fields to transformation optics—a bit like a lens does. Supposedly a metamaterial can become invisible via a so-called electromagnetic cloak or “metamaterial cloaking.” As the Wikipedia article puts it, “The guiding vision for the metamaterial cloak is a device that directs the flow of light smoothly around an object, like water flowing past a rock in a stream, without reflection, rendering the object invisible.”

I don’t want to use the word “metamaterials” more than once in The Big Aha, and then simply as a background justification for wacky matter. The thing is, I can barely understand the Wikipedia explanations of metamaterials, and the factuality of the concept limits me, and I don’t want to be playing catch-up-ball. Better to take a little inspiration from the science, but then be working with a completely bogus concept that I’ve invented, and which will obligingly have any properties that I require. Writing my own instruction book for my bogosity generator. Wacky matter, not metamaterials.

I can straight-up use the metamaterial cloaking routine for oddball/wacky-matter invisibility. And projecting images and objects into wacky matter can be explained with a rap about atoms being quantum computers, and the telepaths’ quantum wetware minds getting entangled with the “minds” of the atoms. You can make insubstantial illusions simply by selectively tweaking the refractive index of the air. And for objects, you go ahead and do a transmutation of matter routine.

But I still need to involve the oddball. How is it letting people make wacky matter? Maybe the oddball is helping with the entanglement part.

And, the payoff part, what can the oddball and the wacky matter do? What’s in the back pages of the instruction manual?

I imagine exploding an object into atoms, but have the atoms remember where they came from so you can play the explosion backwards. Like the atoms were connected to their original locations by rubber-band spacetime threads.

I want my qwet-heads to reach the Big Aha, which might be the light visible between our thoughts, the white light of the Void.

Naturally the oddball and wacky matter will pose a threat to the continued existence of the world. The world is a consensus illusion, and the oddball might nudge everyone/everything out of this illusion. We might lose our balance like a tightrope-walker looking down past the rope to the yawning chasm below.

The oddball will want to reproduce. In its initial state, it was blocked from so doing. Unwittingly my artist character Zad helps it begin to spread. He incorporates the oddball into one of his new sculptural artworks, hoping to enhance his work for a big come-back show at the Idi Did gallery. But then the work eats the gallery—and most of downtown Louisville, Kentucky.

Also I need to limn the origin of the oddball. Possibly a wetware hacker made the oddball, partly by accident. Perhaps it evolved—but could the evolution have been directed by…the Big Aha?

[A visit from the Golden Age computer theorist, Ted Nelson.]

One scene I want to do, it’s the ultimate “spaced friend” scene. My character Junko appears one morning and, thanks to the oddball and wacky matter, she’s altered the dimension signature of the spacetime in her body. Her body has, like, two-dimensional time and two-dimensional space. She slides into the commune’s morning breakfast room, sliding across the floor.

“Rough night, Junko?”

Don’t write the bogosity generator, let the bogosity generator write you.