[Photogrpher Rob Lewine, film critic Kenneth Turan, and artist Barry Feldman. I believe Rob Lewine took these two pix on my camera by using autotimer.]

I get occasional email from a group of my old classmates at Swarthmore College, where I spent the golden years of 1962-1967. Recently one of our number brought up the “We’ll Work It In Jug Band” which some of the gang formed, and asked, “Who were the band members and what instruments, I use the word loosely, did they play? I only remember Roger and his guitar.”

[Roger Shatzkin and his guitar.]

Rob Lewine answered the question better than I could (by the way Rob is a professional photographer; you can see hundreds of his images on the commercial stock photo site Corbis; (you may have to Search for “Rob Lewine”). His Smiling Man is used in a lot of ads for Microsoft Office 2007!):

“Loosely is indeed how we played.

“It was Roger Shatzkin on guitar, banjo, harmonica and Bennett Lorber on guitar (they were our ringers). Then Greg Gibson playing jug; Barry Feldman on washboard (and responding to audience requests with “We'll work it in!”; when in fact we never did because we didn't know any tunes other than what we played); myself on kazoo, amplified by an enormous paper cone; Andy Cook on washtub bass (which I think I took over at some point); and Terry Livingston doing something [playing a fake trumpet through his hands]. There may have been others. Tom [Wolfe] was too accomplished to participate; we had our standards.

[Rob playing the washboard.]

“I have pictures somewhere, I think, of us rehearsing in a Wharton dorm breezeway.

[I dug out my own pictures of those times. This one shows bookdealer and author Greg Gibson playing the jug.]

“There was a concert, at Bond Hall, I think, which was taped (reel-to-reel), and which some of us listened to over and over, with overdone appreciation. There was a contest at a local high school; we lost to some girl wearing a black wig and lip-synching to Joan Baez. (That was bitter.) There was a performance at a high-school graduation dance, where we mystified the crowd by our very existence.”

Many of the songs came from The Jim Kweskin Jug Band. I gotta get some of those records again, the ones I have from college are whipped. Over forty years ago. But inside I'm still in my 20s, and always will be.

Working on Postsingular again, trying to finish big Chapter Three. Here’s some of what I wrote the last couple of days.

“Wonda’s right,” chimed in Azaroth. “Remember, she and I been drifting into the ExaExa labs and checking out the scene. They don’t like it, but, hey, we’re big ghosts, what can they do? Jil’s connection is your pal Andrew Topping, Thuy. We’ve seen Jil meeting him inside a quantum-mirrored delivery dock at the back of ExaExa. The sudocoke he’s pushing is laced with these special controller nanomachines that Luty’s cooked up. They tell the users what to do. Like Nektar’s beetles, yeah.”

“Oh Jil,” said Thuy, overcome by sympathy for the other woman. Anyone who loved Jayjay couldn’t be all bad. “I wish I could fix her.”

“Ask the Big Pig how,” suggested Jayjay. “The Pig knows everything.”

The Pig graced Thuy with a vision of language as a network, of words as many-faceted gems, of phrases as incantatory program codes, which is not to say magic spells. In a flash, Thuy knew how to heal Jil — although she also knew she wouldn’t remember this newly won secret.

“Azaroth,” she muttered, her lips feeling as distant as a pair of tube worms deep in the abyssal trench off Easter Island. But Azaroth heard, and he was with her. He cast something insubstantial around Thuy’s head — a fine iridescent mesh, a dream net that refined Thuy’s current state of mind into a memory he could store in the dreamcatcher organ at the center of his head.

Thuy’s head ached. She probed her memories, trying to reconstruct her big insight about how to fix Jil. Incantatory programming. But the details weren’t happening. And Thuy’s vision of the Big Pig’s face was fading too. Off to one side, the sheep was cropping the grass as if nothing had happened.

“Ask Azaroth,” said Jayjay, guessing Thuy’s train of thought.

“I got it,” said Azaroth bringing his big, insubstantial head down near Thuy’s. “The mind state I caught for you. Feel me.” He opened his mouth and a bight of shimmering mesh bulged out like a tongue. The mesh did some odd, higher-dimensional jiggle, and then it was wrapped around Thuy’s head.

“Ready?” asked Azaroth.

“It’s okay,” murmured Jayjay. “Don’t be afraid.”

“Go ahead,” said Thuy.

All those thoughts about the language web came back to Thuy, percolating into her brain from the outside in. Decoupled from the Pig, she was able to assess and package the ideas, able to butcher the whale of inspiration into manageable packets. She knew how to deprogram Jil; now she knew how to undo the controller nanomachines her friend had snorted up with her sudocoke.

Even if the Pig was helping Luty, there was hope, as she was helping Thuy, too. And that was — why again? Azaroth hadn’t captured Thuy’s second vision; the only solid memory that remained was a single phrase: “I want a gnarly show.”

Even as she continued firming up her plans about how to heal Jil and steal the Ark, Thuy was thinking about how to finish Wheenk. Yes, yes, she could just about see what to do. She felt she had a richer control of language than ever before. All she needed to finish the Great Work was a little bit of pain, to make it profound.

The four of them teleported to the Merz Boat and found Jil sitting in the sun, looking sour, bedraggled and hung over. Now that Thuy knew the truth, she realized the sparkles that the orphidnet showed within Jil’s head were nanomachines, infecting Jil and filling her head with things like Nektar’s beetles.

“Love cycles useless rain in the tea,” said Thuy to Jil. “Stun rays squeeze the claws of Flippy-Flop the goose mouse. Caterwaul hello, dark drooping centaur dicks. Are you good to go-go, gooey goob? Able elbow boogie brew for two in anxious battered porches of thine ears, Jungle Jil. Comb out and pray. Pug sniff the cretin hop on lollipop pain of me and you, meow and moo.” Thuy rambled on like this for a minute or two, freestyling a seemingly random flow of Dada apothegms, but all the while she was guided by the precise and logical incantatory programming principles that Azaroth had helped her bring back from the Big Pig.

One by one, the evil bright sparks in Jil’s brain were winking out. And then Thuy was done, and Jil was joyful, tearful, her old self.

I’m thinking about Easter Island a lot these days, as I'm setting a scene in my novel there.

Picture of some Easter Island statues called moai that I found on a cool Easter Island site. They're on the slopes of Rano Raraku, an extinct volcano; they quarried stone for the monoliths or moai here. The stone is basaltic tuff, that is, stuck-together foamy clinkers.

Here’s another picture of the Rano Raraku site that I found on Wikipedia.

I’m starting on a painting of a surfin' moai. Next week I'll add the board and clean up the shading.

I went camping with my son Rudy at Point Reyes this week. We backpacked into the Coast Camp, an easy one hour hike.

It was lovely, right by the ocean, with one giant eucalyptus tree. It felt like had a soul.

Rudy managed to dam up a stream that wandered across the beach there, great success, he dragged one log, dug some sand, and the dam was in place — at least for a few minutes.

The beach near the Coast Camp is called Sculptured Beach; the steady wind eats funny round canyons into the sandy cliffs.

And the erosion makes big patterns.

We wanted to see how far down the coast we could hike on the beach. We came to this hole in the rock that we had to go through.

It seemed feasible if you took off your clothes and carried them high overhead. I went first, and ended up getting totally soaked. My sun hat floated back through the gate which was all Rudy saw of me for a minute. He said, “In movies that’s always a bad sign.”

We made it down the beach to where there was a wall we really couldn’t get around. We found a dead fish there, maybe a salmon.

My catch.

Springs were pouring down the cliffs, making little altars to Gaia.

And the sedimentary rocks had stripes.

We had to climb up a creekbed to get to the tops of the cliffs again.

I love being in interface zones, sky meets land and earth meets ocean.

Nature is always even better than I expect. Especially the beach.

On the way back I saw a rock that reminded me of a giant duck, also of Easter Island. Did Carl Barks ever paint an Easter Island statue of a duck? Maybe I should. I'm setting a scene on Easter Island right now in my novel — not that I've been thinking about it the last few days.

There was a rock like a castle near the campsite, we walked up there near sunset.

A lot of deer roamed around our campsite, also quail.