I finished a new painting today, “The Riviera.” I was going for a kind of French Impressionist look with this one, thinking of a garden party. Another inspiration was that I’d recently seen the Mel Brooks theater production of Young Frankenstein. But I went for a robot or mechanical man rather than a Frankenstein’s monster. I like how he’s glowing from the inside. In a way, this painting is an image of my wife Sylvia and me, on a car-trip we took to the Riviera with her brother Henry, in 1966, the year before Sylvia and I were married.

The Riviera, 40” by 30”, August, 2010. Oil on canvas. Click here to see larger image.

As usual, you can get prints or originals of my paintings at my paintings site, also this page has a link to my Lulu art book of paintings, Better Worlds.

I’m still fooling around with my new Alan Turing story, it’s always fun to be writing. I like the craft of the process, the kneading, the interactions with the muse.

I’ve been twittering a certain amount of late, too, and some of the tweets have to do with ramifications of my Turing research. If you want to see my tweets, click the button below.

Brendan Byrne, a young writer who edits an off-kilter webzine called “The Orphan,” sent me a link to a stirring blog post by SF titan Norman Spinrad. As sometimes happens to aging writers, Norman is having trouble getting his books published these days. Norman analyzes this in terms of a “death spiral”.

Norman is about five years older than me, he was kind to me when I was new at writing. When I was coming up, his Bug Jack Barron came as a revelation. You can put curse words in a science fiction book!

Reading his blog-post complaint, I too worry about remaining publishable. More and more often I think of the folk-tale that, among the Inuit, when a member of the tribe becomes too old and decrepit to care for, they’re put on an ice-floe with a hunk of blubber to chew as they drift northward towards the unwinking sun.

You can substitute “e-books” for “hunk of blubber,” I guess…

Just back from hike-in camping with my wife, Sylvia, at the Point Reyes National Seashore Coast Camp. It’s a two mile hike in, not too bad, and you end up in a site right by the Limantour Beach. I never manage reserve campsites in advance—it’s just too big a hassle and too much thinking ahead—but if you show up at the Bear Valley Visitor center shortly after 9 a.m. on a weekday, you can normally get a site. Not that managing this is easy, but every couple of years I can.

When I visit these wild, deserted beaches, I sometimes think of the publicity photo of Raquel Welch for the 1966 film, One Million Years B.C.

It was foggy in the morning, but got sunny around noon on one day and 2 p.m. on the other.

I’m always so impressed with how intricately and beautifully nature arranges things when humans more or less leave her alone. The little rectangles of park and yard that we have in cities aren’t really the same kind of thing.

[On “Sculptured Beach” a mile south of the Coast Camp.]

I’m still thinking about this Alan Turing story I want to write, possibly with an eye to getting up enough momentum to charge ahead with a novel that has the title Turing & Burroughs.

[Protosentient pre-fetal green goo.]

I’ve been reading this very long Turing biography from 1983, Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma. The book really rounds out Turing’s character, and I’m internalizing some of this stuff. There’s always a danger, when writing about historical figures, to settle for a cartoon version of them.

[In the hamlet of Pt. Reyes Station. The Bovine Bakery is a must.]

I feel like in some ways I was like Turing myself as a boy and young man. Like Turing, I always had huge problems with my writing pen, often got ink on myself, and tended to get low grades simply because my papers were so messy. And, like Alan, when filling out official forms, I’d pondered every answer, thiking about the optimal strategy. It was always clear that the authorities were my enemies.

[My friend Bill explains his method of luring a swarm of bees from their lair by building a fake hive outside their entrance.]

Turing had an odd way of speaking. His voice was somewhat high-pitched, he had a grating laugh, and he emphasized words by raising his pitch still higher on them. Hodges has a quote from an American scientist who remembers Alan telling him a dream as follows: “I had a dream last night. I dreamt I was walking up your Broadway carrying a flag, a Confederate flag. One of your bobbies came up to me and said, ”˜See here! You can’t do that,’ and I said, ”˜Why not? I fought in the War between the States.’”

Turing did a lot after his 1936 paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” written when he was 24, and the source of his seminal formulation of an abstract computer as a “Turing machine.”

In World War II, he was in the thick of the British efforts to break the German army’s Enigma and Fish codes. He was said to be the top cryptanalyst in the United Kingdom, and Turing’s group made a key difference in the war’s outcome.

As the war died down, Turing got hold of “a twenty-five cent handbook on electronics, the RCA Radio Tube Manual, and invented a new way of enciphering speech.” The cipher was called Delilah, basically you needed a box of electronics at the sender’s phone and matchinb box at the receiver’s phone. The cipher worked by overlaying random noise on phone message. A cool, modernistic and Wolframesque feature of this is that Turing used a deterministic but chaotic circuit in order to generate the “noise.” The sender’s and receiver’s boxes could be set to generate exactly the same pseudorandom patterns.

Listening to a Delilah message was maybe like listening to Turing himself. It was overlaid by a noisy background buzz and a 4000 Hz whistle. Talk to me, Alan.

I’m working on my third short story about Alan Turing. In the back of my mind I’m hoping that these stories can congeal into a novel with the title, Turing & Burroughs. If the new story works, I may push on ahead with this.

Some SF writers have written Turing stories, but my feeling is that it hasn’t been done quite right. The guy really had something of the beatnik and the rebel about him.

In 2006, I put up a longish post on my initial findings “Alan Turing” , while working on my first Turing story.

This first Turing story, “The Imitation Game” appeared in Interzone and in the Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories edited by Ian Watson and Ian Whates. There’s a link to a podcast of me reading “The Imitation Game” at the blog post, “My Alan Turing Story”

In 2008, I wrote my second Turing story, and posted about the process “Starting ”˜Tangier Routines’ ”. The story itself appeared in Flurb # 5.

I’d like to work the Happy Cloak into the third Turing story. I often recall this line from William Burroughs’s The Soft Machine, and chuckle. “You win something like jellyfish, meester. Or it win you.” I write about the Happy Cloak quite a bit in my four Ware Tetralogy novels.

While traveling through Micronesia, I think I wrote the following paragraph in my journals as a pastiche of Burroughs.

Walking into his hotel room, Bradley saw something high in one corner of the ceiling, a gauzy veil, like the mucus casing that a parrot fish exudes to cocoon itself in when sleeping. The shape fell down upon Bradley faster than he could form a complete thought; it slid inside his shirt collar, down inside the band of his trousers and underwear, down his legs and inside his sandals. He felt a sexual burning in every nerve. The boy who’d spoken to him in the street, appeared in his doorway, his lips as bright red with betel nut as if he were a vampire.

Burroughs’s notion of the Happy Cloak is lifted wholesale from SF-writers Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, Fury, 1947, see excerpt on Google Books.

A culture catering to hedonism has its perversions of science. And Blaze could pay well. More than one technician had been wrecked by pleasure-addiction; such men were usually capable — when they were sober. But it was a woman Blaze found, finally, and she was capable only when alive. She lived when she was wearing the Happy Cloak. She wouldn´t live long; Happy Cloak addicts lasted about two years, on the average. The thing was a biological adaptation of an organism found in the Venusian seas. It had been illegally developed, after its potentialities were first realized. In its native state, it got its prey by touching it. After that neuro-contact had been established, the prey was quite satisfied to be ingested.

It was a beautiful garment, a living white like the white of a pearl, shivering softly with rippling lights, stirring with a terrible, ecstatic movement of its own as the lethal symbiosis was established. It was beautiful as the woman technician wore it, as she moved about the bright, quiet room in a tranced concentration upon the task that would pay her enough to insure her death within two years…

The woman, swimming in anticipated ecstasy, managed to touch a summoning signal-button. Then she lay down quietly on the floor, the shining pearly garment caressing her. Her tranced eyes looked up, flat and empty as mirrors. The man who came in gave the Happy Cloak a wide berth.

Burroughs actually uses some of the above text in The Ticket That Exploded , (see Google Books) and he does in fact credit the quote. He uses the Kuttner-Moore stuff after his great line:

“Skin like that very hot for three weeks and then—” the guard snickered “—wearing the Happy Cloak…”

It’s not so well-known that in his final years, Alan Turing was into biological computing systems. I see Alan making a Happy Cloak and wearing it. I haven’t written enough about Happy Cloaks yet…