We visited my friend Dick Termes in Spearfish, South Dakota. He’s an amazing artist, he paints on spheres instead of on flat canvases. He calls his works Termespheres.

His www.termespheres.com website has some great explanations of how does his work.

In this shot of him in his studio, you can see his “easel” which is a cloth-draped ring resting on an armature that rises up and down and rotates. It holds the sphere in progress.

In the background is a new kind of sphere he’s working on, one in which there are transparent windows through which you can see into the interior. He paints a (slightly) different inward-pointing image beneath the outward pointing image.

The best way to understand these works is to look at a video of some rotating Termespheres:

It’s really remarkable how the perspective seems to go into the spheres. You may also notice sometimes that your mind “reverses” the perspective, so that the sphere looks concave rather than convex. Note that when this happens, the sphere seems to rotate the other way. How does he create these works?

As I explained in a 2004 post about him:

Termes’s painting method consists of getting a spherical canvas, standing in front of it, and painting onto the canvas what you see on the other side of the sphere, in front of you. Termes does not work by painting what is behind him onto the sphere, all the while looking over his shoulder. He paints what is in front of him. Once he has finished a patch corresponding to what is in front of him, how does he add what is, say, to the left of the patch in front of him? He moves around the sphere to the right a little so that he is now looking directly at the area that was formerly to the left. And he rotates the sphere to the right so as to expose the blank part of the sphere canvas to the left of what he already painted.

Mathematically, this is equivalent to central projection of the world onto the inner surface of the sphere, followed by eversion. By eversion I mean this: turn the sphere inside out. This way the correctly projected image which was visible from the inside is now visible from the outside.

If you were to try and do this yourself, you’d probably end up with a mess. Termes’s other innovation is that he has developed a “six-point” form of perspective that allows him to organize what he paints on the sphere.

In 1997, I spent three or four days visiting Termes, sleeping in this polyhedral dome on top of his gallery, doing research for my novel Saucer Wisdom, which has it’s final scenes in Spearfish and at the nearby Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. I have a journal entry about this trip in my Saucer Wisdom Notes PDF online.

When I returned last week, an amazingly violent thunderstorm came through during the night. Dick said the Black Hills of SD are known for their thunderstorms and that, although the Native Americans would hunt there, they preferred to sleep away from the hills in the grasslands.

He assures me that the stellated icosahedron on the dome above his gallery is grounded.

Termes is a real old-master kind of artist, it was great just to look at his brushes. Seeing him again gave me some ideas about how to round out my Bosch character in Hylozoic. Termes is very excited and enthused about his work, and I can imagine that Bosch was too.

While we were in Sioux City, SD, we visited a four-foot diameter Termesphere on display in the Sioux City convention center. Termes has gotten a number of public art commissions over the years.

He has a gallery built on to his house, with a zillion decorated spheres dangling from the ceiling. You can go online to see what’s for sale .

Prices range from about $5000 to $20000 in the gallery but there are also some silk screened spheres for $200. If people want the actual price for a specific piece Dick will email that to them or talk to them on the phone. About half of his pieces are done on commission, and on these, the prices vary according to what the patron wants.

He’s into polyhedra too, and at one time was working with a system he calls “Total Photography” for mapping sets of photos onto polyhedra. His online store sells a variety of low-cost reproductions, such as paintings on polyhedra.

Naturally his house is all made of domes, that’s the living room ceiling in the picture of the polyhedron mobile. It’s very cozy in there. The spherical ceiling has this odd property of focusing sounds, so that if you sit at the right distance from Termes, it’s like he’s talking into your ear.

Those gold decoration-type balls in the studio picture above are waiting to be coated with gesso and used as “sketch paper”! Whenever Dick runs across mass-produced spheres at a good price he gets a bunch of them; he says the big Xmas balls at K-Mart make good “canvases.”

Thinking about the amazing achievements of Dick Termes — as compared to the relative obscurity in which he works — I recall a remark that Jorge Luis Borges made in an essay about the writer Herman Melville.

Vast populations, towering cities, erroneous and clamourous publicity have conspired to make unkown great men one of America’s traditions.

We were out West just now, visiting daughter Georgia and her family in Madison, Wisconsin, and daughter Isabel and family in Pinedale, Wyoming, driving overland between the two through Minnesota and South Dakota.

Madison is very lush. Even the weeds look like special garden plantings.

Georgia told me take this picture, through a window in her garage.

Downtown Madison has nice buildings and interesting alleys, not to mention two big lakes.

Sylvia made a nice Warhol-like drawing for our granddaughter, who glued on the sequins. Sequins have come a long way.

Minnesota was suitably vast and Midwestern.

We stopped in a tiny town called Blue Earth, Minnesota, just because it seemed like a nice town name. Earlier in the day we’d hit a Wal-Mart to pick up some food. The Wal-Mart trademarked slogan now is kind of ominous, a single word: Always.
.

Blue Earth had a hippie store with dried fruit and this weird single-tree park.

We spent the night in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which was kind of a nice place, although there was an enormously loud ventilation fan right outside out window, a recurring problem on the trip. On the Interstate 90 in South Dakota you’re in this endless ocean of rolling grasslands, and get eager for a roadside attraction, such as the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. The murals are freshly tessellated from sawed-in-half corn cobs every year. They were corny.

The Mitchell high-school team is the Kernels!

The clouds were amazing in the prairies, feathery, vast, spaced out from horizon to horizon like cauliflowers in a field.

1880 Town was another SD roadside attraction. Note the mannequin of a woman in the upstairs hotel room. All the buildings were trucked in from all over the state, genuine.

It was surprisingly hot in the sun; a guy working there said it goes up to 120 in the summer. The guy was a retiree from Mississippi who parks his RV for free at 1880 Town in the summer and puts in a few hours a week as an attendant. His wife was with him, doing the same thing, apparently Work for RV Campers is a popular thing for retirees. Sort of reminds me of the pheezers in my novel Software.

I dug the peeling wallpaper in the hotel with the mannequin upstairs.

The RV Work-Camper’s wife told us that most of the buildings were kept up, but that the man who’d donated the hotel insisted it be kept as is till he died because he’d spent a night there in the 1910s. He’s 94 and he visits the hotel every day. Maybe he’s in love with the mannequin. Twilight Zone episode…

Antlers are a favorite form of natural gnarl decoration in the Wild West. One thing that struck me about the WW is that it only lasted 20 or 30 years. I’m thinking there was something similar in Silicon Valley from like 1975-2005, a 20 or 30 year transition period, and I happened to be here for most of it. Maybe I could get a memoir out of that.

We hit the Badlands of South Dakota next. They aren’t all that big, but they’re pretty great.

What made it wild was that most of the time there was this enormous thunder cloud hovering over us.

The clouds under the thundercloud looked dark and the far-away clouds looked light. I shot this intelligent-alien type cloud from my moving car. A flying jellyfish. I considered Photoshopping away the tilt, but the tilt makes it look more desperate and authentic. Shot moments before that intergalactic contact after which everything changed…

Suckling on the breast of Mother Earth.

We were diving this nice PT Cruiser I rented. I like those cars a lot, although the mileage was only about 23 mpg even on the freeways, and the pickup isn’t that great if you really want to pass someone. If they could make a high-mileage turbo PT Cruiser, it would be irresistible.

Gotta hit Mount Rushmore. The road to Rushmore from Rapid City is insane, a roadside attraction every thirty yards for like twenty miles. But once you’re there, the statues really are impressive, it’s intense to see the physical reality of something you’ve seen take-offs of your whole life. The guy who made them was a refreshingly nutty artist, Gutzon Borglum (Danish name).

We stopped in Lead, SD, (pronounced leed) to check out the enormous pit-like “Open Cut” gold mine, now unused. For the sake of good public relations, the Lead Homestake Mining company doesn’t actually have a photo of the open cut on their website! I thought it was kind of beautiful though, smoothed off by the weather as it is, and with the lush green grass growing right up to the edge. An earthwork. Those diagonal stripes are veins of rhyolite.

This is going to be my last blog post for a couple of weeks, as I’m going to be busy with other things.

I got some revision suggestions for Hylozoic from my Tor editor, Dave Hartwell. He felt that the first half reads a little slow, and he suggests I put in more chapter breaks to pick up the pace, essentially splitting each of the book’s chapters into 2 or 3 pieces.

That’s a good idea, I think readers find it easier to have a book in manageable chunks. When I was composing the book, I was into a “long breath” notion, cf. Jack Kerouac’s notion of a saxophonist playing a very long jazz chorus. I was thinking of each chapter as a kind of novella. But they do contain natural breaks, so it’s not hard to make some splits.

I’ll put in some extra wows at the new chapter ends to give them punch, and I’ll even subdivide some chapters with “***” breaks. At this point I see 19 chapters instead of the 8 I had before. The chapter titles?

Chapter 1: After Everything Woke Up.
Chapter 2 : Moving the House.
Chapter 3: Jayjay and the Beanstalk.
Chapter 4: The Missing Gnarl.
Chapter 5 : Alien Tulpas.
Chapter 6: The Peng.
Chapter 7: The Hrull.
Chapter 8 : Coma Nurse.
Chapter 9: Lusky.

And…

Chapter 10: Ergot.
Chapter 11: Hieronymus Bosch’s Apprentice.
Chapter 12: Painting the Thistle.
Chapter 13: Hrull Gel.
Chapter 14 Viral Runes.
Chapter 15: In the Stew.
Chapter 16: The Magic Harp.
Chapter 17: To the Gibbet!
Chapter 18: The Maelstrom.
Chapter 19: Transfinite.

My editor likes the Chu character, he said he was surprised how well he worked, and that it was refreshing to find an autistic character in an adventure novel where external stuff is happening, something which my reader Sarah Heacox blogged about as well.

I worry a little that the main thing I really wanted to write about, that is, hylozoism (everything being alive) doesn’t come through as strongly as I wanted. But, really, it does shine through pretty well. It’s better to take a light touch with this, I think, and not have every single object making a speech…

The revision work feels painfully clumsy and slow, and, as usual when writing, I’m anxious. I do worry that I made Hylozoic too complicated. I’m looking for ways to simplify the science ideas, but it’s hard to just take something out, as the whole thing gets to be like a mathematical proof or a Swiss watch—if you take out one of the gears, the thing doesn’t tick.

Maybe for some readers a certain background complexity of scientific ideation is a good thing? Said the crazy old man wistfully.

Yes, I know that I’m worrying too much. If I didn’t worry a lot, I probably wouldn’t write at all. Actually, my editor didn’t think the complexity is a problem at all. People just zip through that, it’s expected in modern SF.

I think part of my difficulty in working out the story is that all along I was seeing Hylozoic as the middle novel of a trilogy. On the one hand, a lot of complex back-story sloshed over from Postsingular, and on the other hand, I’d been trying to foreshadow some story and plot ideas for a third novel in the series that I was calling Transfinite.

I decided yesterday that I don’t actually want to go on and write that Transfinite as a third novel. I want to bail from this stress and cut it down to a two-novel series. Often, the sales of a third volume of a trilogy are lower than the sales of the two before—except of course for the exceedingly rare runaway smash. So why do it?

I recall that my 1980s novels Software and Wetware sold really well as a pair, and then, in the 1990s, when I added on two more to the series, Freeware and Realware, they didn’t sell so well.

Okay, so what do you call a pair of linked novels? “Duology” is okay, but I’d prefer to call it a “double feature”! In any case, it could still be that eventually I revisit the Postsingular series world and its characters with a fresh adventure. But this way, I’m free to take on something different for my next novel. Maybe something simpler next time…

By way of cutting my series down to a double feature instead of a trilogy, I plan to add a chapter describing in detail a scene that I’d set up for the start of Transfinite. Taking the time to add this material will probably delay the release of Hylozoic until Fall, 2009, instead of Spring, 2009.

Transfinite was going to start with an account of Thuy Nguyen’s trip into the transfinite, or “beyond infinity” (which is not a joke concept, despite what the movie Toy Story seems to suggest), with her husband Jayjay and the painter Hieronymus Bosch, who’s one of the characters now.

By the way, a preliminary draft of one of my Bosch scenes appeared in Flurb—although I’ve revised that piece a lot in the meantime, and am still working on it, as Bosch needs to be more particularized to work as a character.

For the new material in the final chapter of Hylozoic I’ll essentially fold that start of the projected third volume into a chapter-length “metanovelistic” account by Thuy Nguyen of her trip beyond infinity — she’ll just be telling it to her friends, knowing that it’s going out live on the Internet, abandoning her notion of selling the story, and just telling it now so that she can write an entirely different metanovel for her next work. I am Thuy, actually…

“It’s all tangled up,” protested Chu after Thuy told her tale. He’d been brooding about the muddled chain of cause and effect. “It doesn’t make enough sense.”

“It’s what it is,” said Thuy. “And now that I’ve told you this end part, I’m not gonna bother writing it up as a separate metanovel. Everyone on the web heard what I said. This story’s done right now, just as it is.”

Catch ya later, mischief-makers…

Good old Bo Diddley. His were the first record albums I ever bought, back in St. Matthew, Kentucky in the very early 1960s. My friend Niles and I treasured them.

I saw him in Louisville in 1963 with Niles at the Kentucky State Fairgrounds in a rock show, and with Sylvia in San Francisco in 1989 at a club, in San Jose in 1994 at a club with Ronnie Wood, 1998 San Jose Blues festival) and in 2000 in a club, and in Saratoga with my daughter around 2005.

Go, Bo Diddley!

I wrote a scene in my autobiographical UFO novel, The Secret of Life about seeing him at that show in Louisville, 1963.

[Video of Bo Diddley playing “Bo Diddley” on a 60s TV show.]

“You do know who Bo Diddley is, don’t you, Dee?” They were on their way to a holiday-weekend rock and roll show at the Kentucky State Fairgrounds.

“He had that hit on the radio. Hey, Bo Diddley.”

“And the new one. You Can’t Judge a Book by Lookin’ at Its Cover. He’s the best. He even builds his own guitars. You know I have four Bo Diddley albums at home, Dee?”

“That many! Tell me about the deeper meanings of Bo Diddley, Conrad.” Dee looked pretty good tonight. She wore a thin white cardigan, and a print dress with a Villager collar. Usually she wore sweatshirts.

[Click for Audio of Bo Diddley playing “Crackin’ Up.”]

“Well, my favorite song of his is called Crackin’ Up. It goes like this.”

Conrad proceeded to sing the first few lines of the song, capturing the sense, if not the exact sound of Bo Diddley.

He sang it loud, with just the right number of dit-duh-duh-dit-duuh-dit-dit-dits, his voice rising to a hoarse shout on the last line “You crackin’ up.”

“What’s buggin’ you?” said Dee repeating the line from the song. “I should play that for my parents.” Dee’s father was a career engineer for GE. He and his family were due to be transferred out to California in only one month. Conrad’s family was moving at the end of the summer. It was all ending fast.

“I first got that record when I was fourteen,” said Conrad. “I remember listening to it one day; it was the day that I really got the idea of rock and roll. I was alone at home, and I put on Crackin’ Up real loud, and I went and stood in front of my parents’ full-length mirror and danced a little, singing along, you know. As I watched myself, I realized that someday I’d be cool.”

Suddenly, finally, Bo Diddley and his band were out on the stage, red sequined tuxes and all. Conrad dragged Dee back to their seats. Diddley struck up a steady chicken-scratch on his git-box and began trading insults with his drummer.

“Hey.”
“What dat.”
“I heard yo’ daddy’s a lightbu’b eater.”
“He don’t eat no lightbulb.”
“Sho’ ’nuff.”
“Whaah?”
“I heard every time he turn off the light, he eat a little piece!”

Now the band was blasting an old tune called ’Deed and ’Deed and ’Deed I Do, with the incredible Diddley sex-beat, and over it, the soaring alienation of Bo’s strange, homemade guitar. Bo Diddley, the man, right there, in the flesh, black as they come, sweating and screaming—for a few minutes, Conrad forgot himself entirely.

Bo Diddley was the last act before intermission, and Conrad hurried down behind the stage to get a closer look at his hero. Incredibly, Bo Diddley was right there, standing around talking to some black women. He was shorter than he looked on the stage, and uglier.

“Are you Bo Diddley?” blurted Conrad, pushing his way forward.
“Yeah. I’ll do autographs after the show.”
“Can I shake your hand?”
“All right.”

They shook briefly. It was incredible, to be touching the actual meat-body, the actual living person that made the music Conrad loved so well. During the moment he touched Diddley, everything seemed to make sense. And then the moment was over, as usual, every moment over, over and over again.

They went halfway up the dark bleachers behind the stage and passed the bottle around. For some reason, Conrad was feeling a little desperate. Hank started talking. He was all worked up.

“Bo Diddley is right here, and all these crazy blacks are having a good time. Jesus! The sixties have begun! Why should we be all white at college and learn stuff to be faceless Joe bureaucrat with kids like us? I want this summer to last forever!” Hank trumpeted briefly with his lips. “I want to be black, I want to go hood!”

They stood there for a few minutes, leaning on a railing, Conrad staring upward, mouth open, staring up at the spot high overhead, in search of the Secret, the Answer to a Question unnamed, the Question whose annihilation is, in some measure, the Answer, for a time at least, though, no matter what, the Question always returns, making a mockery of yesterday’s Answer, but just here and now, at the Kentucky State Fairgrounds, July 5, 1963, Conrad has it, Conrad knows . . .

—Quotes from Rudy Rucker, The Secret of Life