Groundhog Day is February the second! I remember living in towns with rough weather—like Geneseo, New York, up near Rochester. And then there’d be a article in the paper every year about the so-called groundhog Punxsutawney Phil in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. (What a GROOVY town name!) It seemed like Phil would always predict a heartbreaking six more weeks of Winter.

I formed a bitter theory that this so-called groundhog was in fact a fact a robot on rails. I’d discuss this endlessly with my three children, summing up my theory in the slogan:

Zzzt—*shine*—zzzt!

The first “Zzzt” is the sound of the fake mechanical Pennsylvania groundhog rolling out on rails. The “*shine*” is the illumination by a powerful TV camera floodlight producing a shadow. And then comes the predetermined and automatic second “Zzzt,” which represents the rolling back of the mechanical groundhog and the extinguishing of all human hope.

What is the motive behind this cruel hoax? My theory is that it’s designed to crush the hopes of the public at large. Why? Because a despairing populace stays inside and watches TV, only going outside to visit the shopping mall or a big-box retailer. Sufficiently beaten down, we become ideal consumers, robotic drones in the capitalist hive.

An even more paranoid theory of mine in those times was that external reality is (as quantum mechanics tells us) nothing more than a consensual group hallucination and that therefore, if the media can convince us that the weather will be bad—then the force of our collective convictions will guarantee that the weather really is bad.

By the way, I worked this last theory (that a conspiracy to forecast bad weather is creating the bad weather) as an aside into my short story, “Schrödinger’s Cat,” which appeared in Analog in March, 1981. Just for the fun of it, I’m putting a PDF version of “Schrödinger’s Cat” online for you to read. And here’s the relevant excerpt from the story:

I had a nervous breakdown during my fourth year at Wankato. It had to do with the television weather reports. Quantum mechanics implies that until someone makes an observation, the weather is indeterminate, in a mixed state. There is, in principle, no reason why it should not be sunny every day. Indeed, it is logically possible to argue that it rains only because people believe it to be raining.

Fact: in Wankato, Minnesota, there is precipitation 227 days of the year.

Before too long I thought I had determined the reason for this. All of the citizens of Wankato … even the faculty members … watch television weather reports every evening. These reports almost always predict rain or snow. It seemed obvious to me, in my isolation, that if the weather reports could be stopped, then it would not rain so often.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to gather signatures for a petition. I went to the TV station and complained. Finally, I forced my way into the studio one evening and interrupted the weather report to state my case.

“Tomorrow it will be sunny!” I cried. “If only you will believe!”

The next day it was sunny. But I was out of a job, and in a mental institution. It was clear that I needed a rest. It had been folly to shift my fellows over so abruptly from one belief system to another.

Changing perspective a bit—the movie Groundhog Day is, I would say, one of the very best science-fiction movies ever made, and has a very clever and philosophically profound treatment of time. The author of the story and co-author of the script is Danny Rubin, who maintains an interesting Blogus Groundhogus about his career and about his sacred text. I notice that the second version of Danny’s script (as revised by the film’s director, Harold Ramis), is online.

In an email today, Danny wrote me, “The first draft of the screenplay — which everybody seems interested in — is going to be published soon so you’ll get to see how it developed.” And, late-breaking news flash, Danny is giving me an unpublished SF story of his, “The Palmetto Man” to run in the Spring-Summer, 2010 Issue #9 of my webzine, Flurb! Yeah, baby!

[Image copyright (c) Andrew Wyeth. See the link below for purchasing prints.]

And don’t forget Andrew Wyeth’s classic painting, “Groundhog Day.” Sylvia and I had a print of this on our wall for years, it was like having an extra window. And then it fell out the window and was gone.

And, changing the subject once more, I just finished my own groundhog-day-time-period painting today, the first painting I’ve done in awhile. It’s called Amenhotep’s Ghost, and it has to do with a creature who’s making some dramatic and disturbing appearances in the closing chapters of my novel-in-progress, Jim and the Flims. He’s holding the flail, hook and ankh, symbolic of a pharoah’s power.

[Image copyright (c) Isabel Rucker 2009.]

I got some of those hieroglyphics from my daughter Isabel, who used them in this frame of her masterful graphic novel Unfurling to depict a street-person speaking “Tweakenese.”

What are Amenhotep and the tweaker saying?

“It can be Spring starting tomorrow, if only we’ll open our minds! And don’t let them fool you with the Zzzt—*shine*—zzzt! of Punxsutawney Phil! And Danny Rubin rocks!”

I only have about three more chapters to write on my novel Jim and the Flims. Right now, our hero Jim Oster has been loaded up with ten thousand jiva eggs—the jivas being some nasty aliens who want to invade Earth. The cartoonist Jim Woodring designed the original models of jivas that inspired me.

[Image of painting, “Jivas,” by Jim Woodring, 2008, which recently sold for $1200 at the Comic Art Collective.]

In the part of my book that I’m writing now, Jim Oster is in Santa Cruz, California, with all those eggs about to pop out of him and find human hosts. The jiva eggs want to get inside living humans, there to incubate and grow—and later to emerge as a grown jivas, which have the general appearance of flying beets with a long snaky tails.

Now, originally, I was assuming that it kills you to host a jiva. I thought you’d be like being a paralyzed caterpillar with a wasp larva growing inside you.

[Part of a broken Woodring-made toy with cacti.]

But then I realized that if Jim’s eggs go into ten thousand of the citizens of Santa Cruz, then that many people will killed by the lethal practice of hosting a jiva larva. That’s ten thousand deaths out of Santa Cruz’s population of fifty thousand.

“Oh well!” was my initial line of thought. “Can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs!”

I was taking a kind of prankish delight at the thought of depicting mass destruction in Santa Cruz. The town is like a second home to me, by the way, and I love it dearly…but it seems like a great locale for disaster scenes.

I was also thinking that if ten thousand people died, then I could have a scene of Jim confronting all those dead souls at once, and that would be dramatic. And I was imagining the new ghosts moving into a new tract-home-style development in the afterworld, a place called Nueva Santa Cruz.

But yesterday I decided not to decimate the population of Santa Cruz after all. I think some readers would be turned off to encounter a mass die-off in what’s meant to be a fairly light-hearted novel—it would bring them down, and my goal is to show my readers a good time. A massacre like that hangs up the story-flow. People start brooding over it. And I’d prefer to to keep things bouncing.

So I’m putting in some mumbo-jumbo about the jivas having tweaked the egg-in-human-body routine so that the latter-day Jivaic saints of Santa Cruz can carry their alien spawn to term without lethal effects.

I love how flexible things are in SF. Give people a floating log to hang onto, and they’re willing to go with the flow, and right over a waterfall if that’s to be part of the fun. It’s like that poster of a UFO that was in agent Mulder’s office in the X Files with the caption: I WANT TO BELIEVE. (Click here for the history of this poster.) I always loved that slogan, it really gets to the heart of what ufology and science fiction are all about.

I just finished reading Don Delillo’s White Noise, which was first published in 1985, and is out in a very nice Penguin Classic Deluxe paperback.

[My favorite toy raygun. By the way, my artist friend Paul Mavrides did a great painting, “Peace Dividend” of rayguns in 1997.]

Somehow I didn’t read Delillo’s book when it came out, even though there was considerable buzz. Maybe I was bitter and envious that Delillo was getting the lit-crit attention that I wished we cyberpunk SF writers were getting. You can’t really trust writers’ opinions about other writers books—many of us are, at least some of the time, mean-spirited, back-biting, and resentful.

Anyway, White Noise kicks ass. Other than it’s (refreshing) lack of computers and the internet, it could have been published this year. The dialog is amazingly flat and hard-hitting. And the plot elements are somewhat science-fictional: an unfathomable “airborne toxic event,” and a mysterious high-tech drug called Dylar. Delillo does this cool thing of throwing in generic TV and advertising phrases, standing on their own in little paragraphs, breaking up the action. “Technology with a human face.” “And this could represent the leading edge of some warmer air.” “Not that I have anything personal against death from our vantage point high atop Metropolitan County Stadium.”

[Advertising pins for the 1980 Virgin Books edition of my novel White Light, the pins stored in an argon-filled tetrahedron at the Rucktronics Museum in Silicon Valley.]

Quite a few of Delillo’s scenes are set in a supermarket, with our characters bathed in the waves and radiation of product information. The white noise. They get most of their information about the world from supermarket tabloids.

[A Liberty Light, a gift from my friend Nick Herbert, who at one time worked for the manufacturer.]

The other thing I’ve been into during this rainy, cabin-feverish week is to listen to a boxed set, Back to Mono, of singles produced by Phil Spector 1958-1969. I got it from the library.

My favorite is Darlene Love, singing “Today I Met the Boy I’m Going To Marry,” which you can hear in this YouTube video of…the phsyical record spinning on a turntable. It’s gotten very hard to find free mp3s of songs online, but for some reason you can find a lot of songs being “pirated” as soundtracks of YouTube videos. You can find mp3s on marketing sites like lala.com, but then they only let you hear the things once before buying it. And if you really want to get an mp3 for free you end up on, like, a Polish language site seething with malware. So hooray again for YouTube.

There are a number of videos of the Ronettes, though—they’re the supreme girl-group named after their lead singer Veronica (Ronnie) Bennett, who was later married (unhappily) to Phil Spector—thus she’s more commonly known as Ronnie Spector. That’s “Be My Baby” above, in a kind of weird video of a TV show with, oh my god, gogo dancers. Ronnie’s not a really great dancer herself, but it’s sweet and cute to see her and the other two Ronettes do their best. Probably “Baby I Love You,” is a greater song, here’s a video of that, in which the two sub-Ronettes (Ronnies sister and cousin) are relegated to a role liike appliances being wheeled from a closet. I like their Easter Parade outfits in this one.

I always had trouble figuring out what ethnicity the Ronettes were—turns out they’re a mix of black, white, and Native American. Researching them and Phil Spector and his other groups, it seems like most of them had pretty rough lives. Phil Spector’s in jail for killing a woman, for instance, with no chance of parole till he’s 88.

Looking back to happier times…another great group that Spector recorded were the Crystals, led by the wonderful Lala Brooks. We’re talking “Da Doo Run Run.” You can see the Crystals sing it on YouTube. Oddly enough the song “He’s a Rebel,” which is credited to the Crystals, was in fact sung by Darlene Love. Here’s a recent video of Darlene Love singing the song with Lala Brooks of the Crystals. And, wow, YouTube is bottomless, here’s Darlene and Joan Jett singing the song.

[Danglng raindrops with a palm-tree-bokeh background.]

But the weirdest video of “He’s a Rebel” is the following. Back in 1964, Kenneth Anger made a fairly outrageous underground movie called Scorpio Rising, whose entire soundtrack is pop songs of the day. I remember seeing it in an art house back then and cracking up that they had “He’s a Rebel” in the movie overlaid with some clips of Jesus and the disciples walking around in some ancient religious film. You can see the movie on Google video. The “He’s a Rebel” part cuts in about twenty seconds after the 16 minute mark.

White noise, white light, white heat.

This week I’ve been working on the final revisions of Nested Scrolls: A Memoir, my autobiography. I’ve contracted for it to come out in a collector’s edition from PS Publishing in England, and then in a trade edition from Tor/Forge Books in the US. I’m not sure about the publication dates yet, either 2011 or 2012.

Today I’m running an excerpt from some material that I just added, a passage about blogging and photography. The photos are mostly from a recent walk on St. Joseph’s hill near Los Gatos.

After five and a half years of blogging, I’ve put up some seven hundred posts which, taken as a whole, bulked to a word count comparable to that of three medium-sized novels.

Have I been wasting my time? What’s the point of a blog?

The issue of wasting time is a straw man. A big part of being a writer is finding harmless things to do when you aren’t writing. To finish a novel in a year, I only have to average a page a day, and writing any given page can take less than an hour. So I do in fact have quite a bit of extra time. Of course a lot of that time goes into getting my head into the right place for the day’s writing—and then contemplating and revising what I wrote. But blogging isn’t a bad thing to do while hanging around waiting for the muse.

[Marble rye sandwich with avocado smears.]

I often post thoughts and links that relate to whatever writing project I’m currently working on. And my readers post comments and further links which can be useful. So to some extent my blog acts as a research tool.

Another thing about a blog is that it serves as a tool for self-promotion. By now, my blog has picked up a certain following, and every month it receives about a hundred thousand visits. The only ads I run are for my own books.

But my blog isn’t really about research or commerce. The main reason I keep doing it is that the form provides a creative outlet. I like editing and tweaking my posts, and I like illustrating them. I alternate text and pictures, usually putting a photo between every few paragraphs.

I need to mention that I switched over to digital photography around the time when I started my blog in 2004. I’ve used a series of pocket-sized SONY Cybershot models, a heavy-duty Canon 5D single-lens reflex camera, and a medium-sized Canon G10.

I carry a camera a lot of the time, and I’m often on the lookout for photographs. I sometimes think of photography as instant transrealism. When it goes well, I’m appropriating something from my immediate surroundings and turning it into a loaded, fantastic image.

When incorporating my photos into my blog, I don’t worry much about whether the images have any obvious relevance to the texts that I pair them with. My feeling is that the human mind is capable of seeing any random set of things as going well together. So any picture can go into any post. It’s like the Surrealist practice of juxtaposition, or like the old Sixties game of putting on music while you watch a TV show with the sound off. Our perceptual system is all about perceiving patterns—even if they’re not there.

This said, if I have enough images on hand, I will do what I can to bring out harmonies and contrasts among the words and the pictures. Subconscious and subtextual links come into play. Assembling each blog post becomes a work of craftsmanship. It gives me a little hit of what the John Malkovich character in Art School Confidential calls “the narcotic moment of creative bliss.”

Having the blog and the digital cameras has revitalized my practice of photography. With the blog as my outlet, I know that my photos will be seen and appreciated. It’s not like I’m just throwing endless packs of photo prints into a drawer. For many years, Sylvia assembled our photos into yearly family albums, but now, with the children gone, she’s let this drop. “The kids don’t want to see albums of us two taking trips,” she points out. And I’ve gone online.

Digital cameras are a whole new game for me, after using film cameras for forty years. I like how my digital cameras give me immediate feedback—I don’t have to wait for a week or a month to learn if my pictures were in focus. And I like using my image-editing software. I crop my pictures, tweak the contrast, mute or intensify the colors, and so on. It’s like being back in the darkroom with, wonderfully, an “Undo” control.

And now that I have my photo-illustrated blog, my camera acts as even more of a companion to me than before. When I’m out on the street, I’ll sometimes slip into a photojournalist mode of searching out apt images while making mental or written notes for a post.

An interesting effect of the internet is that, if you’re a heavy user, your consciousness and sense of self become more distributed and less localized. Even when I don’t have the camera along, the blog is a kind of companion, a virtual presence at my side. My old sense of self used to include my home, my workplace and the coffee shops I frequent—but now it includes my blog and my email. Bill Gibson was right. Cyberspace has become a part of daily life.