I’m celebrating Halloween at the World Fantasy Con in San Jose. It’s nice to see so many writer friends and to discuss our craft and biz. I talked about my paintings on a panel yesterday with some other writer-artists.

[See my previous post for info about the Japanese paintings.]

If you have too much fun, Emilio sent in a link to a “lifelogging” article about 22 “lifebox” tools, starting with the SenseCam, which takes a picture of just about every damned thing you see—it’s said to be “aimed at helping Alzheimer’s and dementia patients recall the events of their day.” Where did I put my glasses? Did a ghost take them?

Woooo!

In order to hook up Earth with my fictional land of Flimsy in my novel-in-progress Jim and the Flims, I’ve been thinking about using an STM (Scanning Tunneling Microscope) to poke a hole in an atom or, even better, into an electron. And this produces a tunnel to an alternate world. Simple!

Really you’d need some SFictional way to amp up the power of the thing—maybe I fall back on that hoary SF-movie expedient of a well-timed stroke of lightning on a nearby power pole. I see this happening on some slacker’s hobby porch, not in an intergovernmental lab. I gather that it’s possible to build your own STM at home.

Somehow he’s virtually riding on his picometer needle and … Zzzzzt!

There’s some nice STM pictures on the IBM Almaden Labs site. (The photo above shows the results, however, of San Francisco graffitti removal, not the machines at IBM.)

Photo by Kenneth Garrett, Copyright (C) 2008, National Geographic

We went to see the King Tut show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco this weekend. It was a good show, with some gorgeous things. I loved this “pectoral” or necklace.

[Photo from www.suite101.com, Credit: Credit: Egyptian Museum/Andreas F. Voegelin]

Even better was the gilded coffin of Tjuya, who may have been Tut’s mother-in-law. Ride the boat to heaven.

I pick up cultural associations of the 1920s and 1960s when I look at Egyptian art. Howard Carter discovered Tut’s tomb in the 1920s—I just read Carter’s fascinating account of it in a Dover reprint called The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen—this is a great little book. And in the 1920s there was a fad for Deco and Egyptian stuff.

[Art by Rick Griffin for Zap #3, (C) Rick Griffin]

The psychedelic rock posters and cartoons of the 1960s often used to feature flying scarabs—I think particularly of the work by Rick Griffin.

[Found on Wikimedia Commons.]

This pair of cartouches contains the hieroglyphic signs that render Tutankhamen’s name. I’ll give an explanation that’s partly or even largely wrong. (A cartoonist named Chris Cooper has posted a more accurate illustrated essay about Tut’s name.)

The cartouche on the left is his more informal name, Tut (chicken) + Ankh (hippie cross) + Amun (earth, air, and sea) and under that a Crook for Ruler, an On (butter churn?) for the city Heliopolis, and a Papyrus plant for Upper Egypt, or Thebes. The cartouche on the right represents his throne name, “Nebkheperura.” Here we have Ra=God (sun disk) + Khephri (Scarab) + Neb (Basket, stands for All).

Sylvia pointed out that one of the ankhs on display had a woman’s lower body sketched on it, right below a Nebkheperura cartouche. I’d never thought of the Ankh that way.

It felt so weird to come out of the tomb-like show into the museum shop, three thousand years later, and a half a world away from Tut’s tomb and everyone is imitating Tut and taking pictures.

[Sarcophagus-like Scanadavian pancake house on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley, converted to a sushi resaurant.]

Certainly there should be some Egyptian stuff in my fictional land of Flimsy. A flying snake. A great scarab. But maybe in a diner.

This week I read he 1912 Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Bourroughs. The 1990 Penguin paperback edition has a great cover by Frank Frazetta.

[Copyright (C) Frank Frazetta]

I enjoyed the book a lot, and now I have to get hold of the first of the many sequels, the 1913 The Return of Tarzan , to see if Tarzan manages to hook up with Jane—who slips through his noble fingers in the final scene of Tarzan of the Apes.

I’m curious about Philp Jose Farmer’s Burroughs/Burroughs pastiche, “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod,” but I can’t find it online. Maybe I’ll have to buy a Farmer anthology for this one.

[Copyright (C) E. C. Publications, Inc.]

I also dug out my old Mad magazine parody, “Melvin of the Apes,” every frame of which is eiditcally etched into my brain tissues from my first exposure back in the early 1950s.

On an unrelated front, I’ve been thinking about biotech, genomics, bioengineering, bioinformation—whatever you want to call it. I’m thinking there’s a rich vein of SF story material here that’s ripe for more mining.

Of course Paul Di Filippo suggested this years ago in his Ribofunk Manifesto, and his story collection, Ribofunk. And we can’t forget Greg Bear’s classic Blood Music.

I’d be curious to hear suggestions about existing SF along these lines and, above all, I’d like some recommendations for readable popular science books on the subject. I’m not so interested in worries about new plagues, I’m more intrigued about how we might tweak living orgainsms.

The other day we were in Santa Cruz, and we came across a rave-like street party, it was kind of an after-party for Burning Man.

I took a few pictures, and I’m going to mix them in with some pictures that I snarfed today from a Japanese yokai or “mythic monster” scroll showing the “Demons’ Night Parade.” Note that the picture below shows a demon studying a scroll!

A fan named Lex Berman sent me a link to a BoingBoing post about this scroll, and I found a fairly complete copy of this scroll on eBay, where it’s for sale for $15,000, which, in a way, isn’t that bad a price considering how great it is.

Speaking of scrolls, my daughter Isabel Rucker has an art show coming up in San Francisco, starting on Thursday, November 5, 2009. She’s drawn a 400 foot long (!) scroll, somewhat autobiographical, a graphic novel in one piece, it’s called “Unfurling.”

So as to keep these images out where I can find them again, I saved off the page as an 8 megabyte PDF file that I posted on my website. And I’ll post a few of the frames here today, I think they go well with the rave party.

And what am I up to otherwise? I’m working on my two book projects, that is, my memoir and my new SF novel. It looks like I’ve found a good publisher for the memoir, I’ll tell more about when the deal is actually signed.

I’m still working on getting a publisher for Jim and the Flims, and I’ll keep you posted on that. I’m thinking of changing Jim from being a 60 year old to being a 30 year old…that’s probably a better move in terms of appealing to the target audience. And actually it wouldn’t be that hard to do.

I had a couple of interviews appear recently. First of all, there’s an interesting new book called Alice Beyond Wonderland, edited by Christopher Hollingsworth for the University of Iowa Press. Chris and Steve Hooley did an email interview with me that went into the book.

Secondly, the September, 2009, issue of The National Fantasy Fan, includes an interview by Heath Row with me about Postsingular and Hylozoic.

You can also find these interviews in my online collected online email interview document, “All the Interviews,” which I just updated today.

Further fannish news: I’ll be at the National Fantasy Con in San Jose. I’m on a panel on October 30, Friday, 5:00 PM, “Artists Who Write & Writers Who Paint,” with me, Greg Bear, ElizaBeth Gilligan, Karen Haber, and Seanan McGuire. And I’ll be autographing later that evening, I think. Thanks, by the way, to Christine Valada, who helped me get a con membership—which I’d postponed too long.

What else? I tried to enter a couple of my paintings (“Topology of the Afterworld” and “Surf Pilgrim”) in a local Los Gatos juried art show, and they turned down my pictures, of all the outrage. As COOP told me when I asked him about the possibility of a pro art career, “Sure, if you want a whole new way to break your heart!”

Come to think of it, I have to go pick up those works right now.

Late breaking news…a guy called Brett Harder just sent me a link to his site, which has a some nice, somewhat SFictional and transreal graphic novelette, “Observance” which is, in way, formed like a vertical scroll.