The new novel title is definitely Mathematicians in Love. I got the first chapter done last week, modulo a few web-path maze-doors that I’ll inevitably have to carpenter in later on. I hardly saw or talked to anyone last week, other than Sylvia. Somewhat claustrophobic, not having the job at SJSU anymore. I’m still coming to terms with being retired from being a professor.

Having no life, I was blogging a lot, which meant I had all the more reason to stay *ugh* indoors. In one of his interviews, Bill Gibson remarks that he fears blogging drains off some divine essential energy that might otherwise go into writing. Takes the edge off.

But, on the other hand, could be as basically positive as warming up in my journal. Though blogging takes longer, both because you get into wrestling with the ever-refractory computer tech, and because bogging is seductively multimedia. Like I painted the dining-room pink this week, and now, saying that, I have to go and digitally photograph it and upload it, wah-la. Come to think of it, that's another reason I didn't get out much this week. The painting took three days.

By the way, the oil painting on the left is by Isabel, and the one on the right by Georgia.

***

Saturday night we saw a great band, Wilco. I’d never heard them, just bought the ticket on the guess that they’d be good. Saw them in a nice venue, the Frank-Lloyd-Wright style Performing Arts Center in my dear San gets-no-respect Jose. Tix were sold out, but I tried Ticketmaster again in the afternoon and lo and behold, we got two seats in the middle of the ninth row. As usual, Sylvia and I were the oldest people at the concert.

These guys rocked in an interesting way. No hair, no costumes, no spit. The workmanlike musician thing, kind of like the Zappa bands. The drummer looked great and ecstatic, his arms up in happy spider arcs. They’d play this simply catchy ballads and then wipe this great smear of sound across it, like an earthquake. Or pile up huge riffs and loops so that the big hall became an aural funhouse. Everyone was standing up after awhile, and then I was tired and I was sitting down, letting the music wash over me, my eyes closed, turning my head slowly, savoring how the sounds came in differently as I moved my ears. Each person there is hearing something slightly different. The soundscape is like a 3D cellular automaton filling the room, amazing how quickly it updates, amazing how it stays in synch (somewhat) with the twitches and twiddles of the musicians’ picks and knobs.

I’d been kind of brooding over being lonely and isolated this week, also worrying about what goes into Chapter Two of Mathematicians in Love, but sitting there, letting the great sounds of “Spider” wash over me, I was able to open up and let go of my gerbil-wheel concerns. To imagine that God was speaking to me. If I used to be able to believe such a thing when high, why not now believe it sober? The chaos, the big aha, the noise in the sky, the synchronistic universe funneling me the exact impulses that I need to figure out the next chapter of my novel about guys who funnel impulses to alter the universe. The cosmos dancing with me.

Peering deep into the sounds, examining their ragged edges, gnarly as the borders of the Mandelbrot set. Dappled sound. And for the next few days, listening to any sound at all, I realize that I can do the same thing, notice the little patterns. Sounds are like ripples, standing waves in a stream, chaotic enough to be universally computing. The origin of the universe was that one big Om, it's said, though better are the interfering overlapping beat-sounds of the throat-singing monks. But, again, all that creative wealth is everywhere, even in the tapping of my keyboard, the ringing in my ears, the hum of my computer, well maybe not in the hum, I don't think 60 Hz sounds can have much soul, any more than a drum machine or a leaf-blower, it's gotta have that raggedness to it. Why oh why don't drum machines do slightly chaotic beats? It would take like two lines of code, or one extra feedback wire in the processor.

Orpheus was said to play the lyre in such a way that animals would gather around, trees would lean over, and even the rocks would get softer. I’m imagining going a step past that, imagining a science-fiction guitar that's an analog process capable of emulating the universe. Can predict any phenomenon by playing it. “Hum a few bars and I’ll fake the rest of it.”

Somewhat unrelated thought. I remember a, I think it was Bugs Bunny, comic years ago, where he gets a tuba-like Horn of Plenty, and all kind of food comes out of it. Carrots. And then Elmer Fudd jumps up and down on the magic tuba, and it comes apart, and Bugs puts it back together wrong, and when he sqwonks it again, things break and disappear, and he says, oh-oh, it’s a Horn of Nothing.

The Surrealists used to play a game called Exquisite Corpse. You take a strip of paper and fold it into, say, six. Think of each of the strips between folds as a “tile.” Pass the folded strip around the table (of course you're doing this in bar, a cafe, or after dinner at one of your Surrealist dens), and each person draws part of a human figure in a tile. The group works its way down the strip, tile by tile. The constraint is that you only see your blank tile, along with a few stubs of lines that the previous artist drew to overlap the fold. And you overlap a few lines across the fold into the tile below yours, for the next artist to hook into.

Now, what with this being the 21st century, suppose that your “tiles” are digital paintings. One possibility here is to hook the tiles togtether along their edges, like patches of a quilt. There's this way-cool art group called iCE which enables digital artists to collaborate in such “quilts” over the web.

The most astonishing quilt I've seen yet is a zoom quilt. I print two frames of the zoom quilt below.

Now if you zoom into the little central region, you see this…

And that goes into a landscape and on and on through about a dozen levels, eventually wrapping back to where you started.

There are various ways to view the thing, I found the Flash version worked the smoothest, if you use the HTML view, you have to keep clicking and you progress in jumps instead of smoothly.

The zoom quilt seems to be the work of German artists — wunderbar.

I'd like to turn my circular scale novel Spacetime Donuts into a zoom quilt.

Another SF Art link today is to a show at the

gallery of the New York Academy of Sciences on 63rd St. in Manhattan. Included are some nice images by the Wayne Barlowe, a demon at inventing aliens, also the author of a couple of coffee table books.

“I'm very squid to meet you.”

This is a painting I worked on for about six months. It's another possible vision of what Bela, Paul and Alma will find when they go to La Hampa. That name, I should explain, is Spanish for “the underworld” in the gangland sense. But I'd like it to be more like a Disney Alice in Wonderland. Signs pointing to, like, “Last Week.”

I wanted the duck to look like Valantin le Desosse in the famous Lautrec poster, not that I can draw a figure properly, and on the right, that's like a limo with a star arriving. I had a lot of trouble making the green potato guy not look like Puffy Combs.

To try and get a non-premeditated image, I based the design of this picture on a cellular automaton image I had, of Belousov-Zhabotinski scrolls, made with my Capow software. (I think it was an Winfree rule.) I started with that, and the characters emerged after a lot of layers.

Like I said before, the Duck is everywhere.

Here's a link to all of Rudy's paintings.

After seeing Marc Laidlaw's comments on his movie, John Walker couldn't help but see what his Anagram Finder does with Marc's name and my name.

best anagram “marc laidlaw” — admiral claw

best anagram “rudolf rucker” — red luck furor

best anagram “rudolf von bitter rucker” — lurk contributed fervor.

Fervidly I lurk, red, furious, lucky, periodically contributing.

An alternative to downloading Walker's anagram tool is using a web-based anagram tool.

The catch with these tools is that as the number of letters in a phrase grows, the length of the the list of its possible anagrams increases exponentially.