[Photo copyright (C) Embry Rucker 2009. Shot for DC Shoes.]

I was just looking at some of the pictures in the “Current” portfolio of my photographer nephew Embry Rucker. Wow. Maybe this woman lives in Elfland! I asked Embry for more info, but he just said: “i forget her name – she’s in some rock band in LA – or was last year, she could be a suburban mom by now for all i know.”

I was out at Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz yesterday, working on a new painting. I’ll be layering on more versions of this one…

Several surfers paused to inspect my progress. They approved. “That’s my beach!”

My writing problem today is that I haven’t decided what it’s going to be like in Flimsy. What are some options? Before listing options, note three desiderata to keep in mind.

Playable. The world should be able to support a story. In particular Jim should be able to move around it as a human character, and he should be able to interact with the flims in fairly comprehensible ways.

Meaningful. The world should transreally represent something that’s important to me, and should carry some satiric or philosophical subtext.

Wonderful. The world should be beautiful to think about, and somehow be essentially different from any environment in our present or past world.

So here are some possible worlds that come to mind.

The Afterworld. Whatever I decide on for Flimsy initially, we might eventually reveal this world to it overlap with the afterworld—and then have a big scene where Jim meets his dead wife. The “surprise, this is heaven” move is however a bit of a genre cliché, and corny, and plot-wise it’s a kind of retrograde step to meet his dead wife, and, come to think of it, I used the afterlife in White Light. So I think I’d rather not do this here.

[A cartoon I drew as a hippie in 1970 for the Rutgers campus newspaper. The somewhat reactionary joke in it actually was something I’d seen on TV show, Laugh In.]

Cartoon world, with cartoon conventions. Fine, but if I do this, I immediately face the same what-is-the-nature-of-Flimsy question all over again, for I have to ask what kind of underlying world this is a cartoon of. Of course when I mention cartoons here, I think of Frank, and of the jivas that Jim Woodring draws—and maybe the yuels would look like spiders—but to make this playable at novel length, I think I’d need for the flims to take on a more humanoid form most of the time. I think that, rather than having a cartoon world, I might better have a somewhat realistic humanoid world, but with cartoon physics.

Fantasy kingdom. The default for “fantasy” these days is a medieval land with nobles, knights and dragons. But it’s hard for me to get very excited about such a world, as it’s so burdened with received ideas, so fannish, so non-transreal. To make a fantasy land that’s meaningful and vibrant for me, I might rather suppose that it’s a rural world like the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel. But I have in fact written about this B & B rural world in As Above So Below and in Hylozoic. So, wait, how about a fantasy world that’s…Elfland! I’ll break out a new section for that.

Elfland. I think this might I what I really want to write about. A land where magic is real, and it’s not the Middle Ages. So elves, goblins, elementals, and so on are in fact real, but they live in the world of Flimsy that’s slightly askew from ours. Note that I wouldn’t want to be overly tendentious about matches between Flimsy and the folk mythology of our fairy tales, as this leads to mere name-checking. What might it be like in my Flimsy Elfland? I could have a kind of episodic picaresque, like a trip through America, and we encounter a variety of scenes, each with its own odd natives.

We might start in a rural Elfland akin to the Grulloo Woods of Frek and the Elixir—recall that the Grulloos were like goblins, and their bio-tweaked tools were effectively like magic. Transreally, this is my country childhood near Louisville, Kentucky. And then we segue to a small town, like all the little villages I lived in over the years: Highland Park, Geneseo, Lynchburg, Los Gatos. It’s like our contemporary world, only with things like magic that works, things like flying carpets, genies in bottles, spells, demons. And then, near the end, we get to the capital of Flimsy to deal with the issue of installing Ayaka as the Jotei, or Empress. And maybe this city is like Kyoto. And we might also visit the power center of the yuels, which is a brutal immense Manhattanesque city. Maybe for the finale, Flimsy segues into a dreamscape or into a surrealist scenario, like the Magritte world they visit at the end of Frek and the Elixir.

It would be good to have some specific and radical difference to the laws of nature or the nature of society in this other world.

In our world, it’s easy to change something physically or to build a machine. But it’s hard or impossible to affect something with your mind. What if it were the other way around in Flimsy. They can teleport stuff, but they can’t put together a wagon or a flight of stairs. They’re unable to build a window that lets in light and keeps out the wind and rain, they count on teeking away the droplets one by one—or maybe they train the house wall to do the teeking, maybe the house teeks something like a force field barrier within the window frame.

Would they even need a house in a telepathic Elfland? It doesn’t protect you from teleporting thieves or ruffians. Any protection is, once again, going to be teek-based. We might set this up by having Weena be very awkward with physical things. She’s not used to using her muscles to do stuff. But, back to the point, sure we want houses in Elfland. So it’s what I call playable.

Do understand that I use the world “Elfland” with a touch of irony and in somewhat the same spirit that I might touch a sore gum-canker with the tip of my tongue. The very corniest (yet somehow among the most memorable) verses we had to memorize in school were these:

The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

— From “The Princess,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson

I can still hear John Cadden reciting this my ninth grade English class, little John with his cozy Kentucky accent…

As I’ve mentioned in this blog, I’m working on a novel called Jim and the Flims in which we have two worlds, the “real” world of Fatland and the alternate world of Flimsy.

In traditional style, I see a tunnel connecting the worlds. The tunnel between the worlds is in the basement of a crumbling Victorian house in Santa Cruz. The house, inhabited by three surf punks, is called the whipped Vic around town. Most of the time you can’t see it. You have to walk a certain labyrinthine path to get there.

How does Jim Oster find the whipped Vic in the first place? I’ll suppose that some higher being from Flimsy led him there the first time—she sent Jim signs in the form of a colorful bird flitting from tree to tree, a bird that was really an apparition of a jiva under the being’s control.

Now—this higher being in Flimsy is, let us say, a disenfranchised Queen or Princess whom Jim is supposed to help to power. But “Princess” too pedestrian a word, so I’ll use a Japanese word. A “kougou” is the wife of an Emperor, but a “jotei” is an Empress herself. So I call her a Jotei.

As it happens, the lovely Japanese-Italian actress Rosa Kato (see these Japanese commercials) played a girl named Ayaka in the 2007 Japanese TV series Jotei, based on a manga comic of the same name, which is about how the school girl Ayaka who, aided by a handsome underworld boyfriend, becomes the “empress” of the Osaka demimonde of bar hostesses. (Hostesses, the Japanese never tire of asserting, aren’t actually prostitutes.)

Initially I was seeing my Jotei character as being from a truly royal family of Flimsy jivas and she’s blocked from her throne by an evil anti-intellectual yuel. But, yeah, maybe it should somehow be like an Osaka nightclub scene…with the bad guys being Japanese gangsters in the pay of psychic polluters who, like, send out telepathic spam. That could be cool.

Anyway, we’ll suppose that Jotei Ayaka helped Jim get to the whipped Vic the first time around, but now the yuels are harassing her, and she can’t project an image of her jiva over to Fatland to help guide Jim, so Jim and Weena have to get back to Flimsy on their own. So they run all over Santa Cruz looking for some trace of the three surf punks from the whipped Vic.

Here I need to ponder what kind of beings these punks are? Are they (a) regular humans, (b) flims, (c) some kind of interworld beings like security guards in airports or like aphids living on the “flower” of the whipped Vic, or (d) are they organelles or parts of the Whipped Vic “house” itself—as if they were pistils on a flower.

I’ll go with (a). It could be that lots of people know about Flimsy—the psychics and schizos and stoners and meditators. The three surf punks are locals who’ve found out how to squat in the twilight zone or interbrane or tunnelspace as we might best call it. In this case, it would indeed make sense to ask other surfers around Santa Cruz about these three. Suppose that Jim asks (as I was thinking the other day) one of his daughter’s high-school surfing pals.

So now I need to invent that character. His name is Chang. He teaches introductory surf classes to goobs at Cowell Beach by the pier. He’s cynical, and a randy con man, but also kind of an enlightened surf sage who truly doesn’t care about anything. He’s ethnically Asian, but very much a Santa Cruz California boy. The guy who first owned my blue Haut surfboard that I bought second-hand was named Chang, so I like that name. Perhaps our Chang has bleached the tips of his hair to be blonde.

Chang escorts Jim and Weena to a wild party at the Whipped Vic that evening. During the day they have to dodge the yuels, and we get to see Dick Simly burst open to birth out two dozen jivas that fend off the yuels. But in the process, Jim is seen and is accused of murdering Dick Simly.

On Saturday, I took a walk up towards St. Joseph’s Hill over Los Gatos, California. I’ve been walking on this hill about once a week for some twenty years so I guess I’ve been up there nearly a thousand times. It’s always new to me, because Nature’s a fractal.

It’s been raining this week, but the rain let up for a day, and I could enjoy how green everything is.

I took my new 100 mm macro lens along and shot mostly small stuff. This is the tip of a tendril of an early spring vine called wild cucumber that we get out here.

I really love the shapes of the tendrils, they form conical helices, and latch onto lots of other plants.

In a month or two, the wild cucumbers bear their fruits, which are spiky green pouches akin to scrotums, filled with a pair of big seeds and milky juice.

Here and there, I could even spot the vestiges of last year’s wild cucumber crop. I see more details when I’m carrying around a macro lens—I’m looking at the world in a special, detail-oriented way.

The sun hit these berries in just the right way to set three hanging water drops alight. Whoah.

What else did I do this weekend? We saw Paula Poundstone do a stand-up comedy gig at the Rio Theater in Santa Cruz. She was pretty funny, with that edge of bitterness and misanthropy that so many stand-up comics have. But she showed up a frikkin’ hour late, and kept telling us some boring B.S. story that she’d slept through the plane’s landing in San Jose, and had ridden it on to Portland. Right. Like the plane people aren’t going to clear out the plane at ever stop?

I didn’t like that Paula thought she could stand there and lie to us. But, like I say, she made me laugh. She did a thing about a near-death experience and she didn’t see any dead friends and relatives or any white light, and she’s like, “Even in the afterlife they’re avoiding me! They’re, like, ”˜Quick, hide the light!’” The light is a water drop on a cucumber vine, you understand.

We watched “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” on DVD. It had a few laughs, but not quite as many as I’d expected. Earlier this week we saw “Revolutionary Road,” which was somewhat better than I expected, I’d thought it would just be lots of bitter yelling—there was a lot of that, but they had a good crazy mathematician.

I finished reading Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs’s early work “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.” It’s amazing to me how weak their writing was at that early stage, considering how good they got later on. It’s a complicated process. In some ways, their writing later on seemed better because by then each of them had built up a “brand” and a personal legend.

I think Buddha means “grow.” So this bud is Buddha. It’s a chestnut tree. They’re always in such a hurry to grow up, these chestnuts. They turn yellow and lose their leaves by August. “Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful buckeye.”

I totally zinged this shot—I saw it, this giant hilltop tree that I love, and a nice tasty cute single-unit cloud overhead, and I had the 100 mm lens and I was able to frame it just right. The hill was all in shadow in the original, but I ran the Photoshop Shadow/Highlight adjustment and got the light back on the hill. The thing about digital photography—a whole of information about the scene is present in your image file, and you can excavate things that you can’t even see to start with.

I’ve shot these vents before, but today I was able to get more of them into the picture thanks to the telephoto effect.

Up on the hill, I have this nice view of San Jose, it’s an isolated whole, the downtown. And I always think of a story about a boy meeting up with an old hermit, and they’re walking towards the actually rather poky little market town nearby, and from a hilltop they glimpse the city, and the hermit, who’s a religious fanatic, starts railing against the town, “Yea the mighty shall be brought down, the walls of Babylon shall fall, woe unto the wicked.” And, really, its just ordinary people living their lives down there, and the furious hermit is hopping up and down shaking his gnarled fist. The boy—he’s eager to get into the town. Like Mason Reynolds in The Hollow Earth.

M. C. Escher made some nice etchings of things reflected in puddles. This shows a tree with some branches and leaves dandling over a muddy puddle near a spot where I usually crawl under a fence to get back down to my house. I miss having my dog Arf along for that part.

In my previous entry, “Painting Thirteen Worlds and The Flims,” I was talking about painting an image containing one of Jim Woodring’s “jivas,” as seen, for instance, in the story “Frank and the Truth About Plenitude,” that appears in Jim’s wondrous and profound anthology The Portable Frank.

[Image is Copyright (C) Jim Woodring, 1993.]

I now realize that I’ve seen similar shapes in Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature (or Kunstformen der Natur). I own the book, but I also found some of his images, like the one below online, like at the Wikimedia Commons! (This is kosher because copyright only lasts seventy years after the author dies.) Here’s Haeckel’s Plate 17, of siphonophores, edited by me to show three of the jiva-like forms.

Note that a siphonophore is an animal which resembles a jellyfish—such as a Portuguese man o’ war—but which is in fact a colony of individual siphonophore critters called zooids. The jiva-like guys in the Haeckel picture are individual zooids, according to this discussion. A zooid might specialize to work on locomotion, or stinging, or reproduction, etc. They’re a little more sophisticated than individual body cells, and little less specialized than organs. By the way, those little gramophone horns dangling down are feeding tubes.

The light dawns. In my new novel, Jim and the Flims, I can have two humanoid factions of “flims” in this alternate world called Flimsy—both good and the bad aliens, naturally. And I think I’ll have the jivas and the yuels be agents working for these humanoid flims. The jivas for the good guys, the yuels for the bad guys.

The jivas and the yuels (that’s a preliminary visualization of a yuel on the right of my painting The Flims) can be creatures along the lines of hunting dogs or falcons or unruly pets or intelligent robots. If the main flims are humanoid, then we can relate to them—and have sex with them.

I hope Woodring doesn’t mind if I talk about “jivas” in my novel. I’ll have to check with him, maybe via our mutual friend Paul DiFilippo—those two recently did a boxed chapbook/illustration/puzzle project together called Cosmocopia. (After posting this lihk, I just bought a copy online.)

Update: I emailed Jim and he wrote back that I have his blessing for this project. Thanks, Jim!

By the way, I’d been thinking of the yuels as blue Tibetan-demon-dogs the size of ponies, as in my painting. But it would be freakier, I think, to have them look like big seals. Maybe blue or deep purple. Voracious, omnivorous seals in any case. It’s kind of uncanny and creepy the way seals “walk,” humping along with their feet together. Seals would be “reasonable,” as the book is set in Santa Cruz.

I like how in the photo above the seals are hassling the poor guy who’s trying to come aboard. Reminds me of tenured academics dealing with a timorous job applicant.

Imagine a Repulsion-type hallucination where your floor turns into a carpeting of seal bodies and flippers. Your house has turned into a heap of yuels! The flims are somehow able to convert pieces of our world into yuels or jivas to serve as proxies in their war for cosmic supremacy.

This week I wrote a funny (in my opinion) scene where Jim Oster discovers that his new live-in girlfriend Weena Wesson having a tryst with Jim’s landlord Dick Simly. (Weena is in fact an alien, a flim from Flimsy.)

When I came home in the late afternoon, Weena had someone else in our bedroom with her. I could hear that they were having sex. I went shaky all over, with my chest feeling all hollow.

I threw a chair across the kitchen so they’d know I was home, and then I went out in the back yard and started sharpening my biggest carving knife, using a long sharpening iron that made a sinister slithery sound.

A few minutes later I heard quick footsteps going through the house and out the front door. Weena appeared in the back yard, wearing shorts and a t-shirt.

“Are you planning a psychotic rampage?” she asked, half smiling.

“I want you to know that I’m taking this very seriously,” I set down the knife. “Don’t you love me, Weena?”

“We’ve never talked about that. I thought you wouldn’t mind if I did another fatsy.”

“I do mind. I—I’ve grown very attached to you. Who was the guy?”

“Dick Simly. Your landlord. I’m sorry you’re upset. I don’t have to do him again. It wasn’t normal sex like with you. I was implanting jiva larvae in Dick’s flesh.” She bucked her hips gently. “With my ovipositor. Like a wasp.”

“You’re crazy,” I said. But I had to laugh. Weena was a step beyond spacy, that was for sure.