I was up in SF on Valencia Street again yesterday. Here's Ouroboros the world snake who swallows his own tail; twisted into an infinity sign to boot! Ad for an upstaris tattoo parlor.

I hung with John Shirley in the Mission and then went with Sylvia and Michael Blumlein to see Bob Dylan play.

It’s always great to be with Shirley. He gives me this sense that nothing matters but the now. He has the fresh, innocent, all-seeing quality of the true Outsider. (As does Blumlein, come to think of it. I love being with my writer friends, it's like breathing unpolluted baseline-type Antarctic air.)

John and I walked down the grafitti alley off Valencia (which looks like image inside the man in this picture) and there were a bunch of artists at work repainting the murals.

I was rereading Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” this week. And here’s poor Gregor Samsa, he’s turned into a giant cockroach and can’t even get out of bed in his parents apartment because his little legs are waving uselessly in the air, and his boss shows up at the apartment and is yelling through the door, and Gregor offers this very long and heartfelt explanation, but all that the boss and his parents hear through the door is guttural twittering.

To be really far out, you turn into a giant cockroach and make noises that don’t even sound like a human language. I’d like to write a story like that with John Shirley one of these days.

Right now I’m busy revising Postsingular. My editor Dave Hartwell gave me some good suggestions. Basically it’s a matter of rounding out the secondary characters. The spear-carriers. When I’m writing the first draft, I focus on the primary characters, but often the secondary characters are just doing what’s necessary to move the story along. So maybe in Part I Craigor is a jokey artist, and in Part IV he’s a brainless Lothario. So now I need to make him consistent and explain why he changed. The explanations don’t even have to be that convincing, but you need a fig leaf to cover the behavioral forking.

It’s great how Dylan keeps at his art, year after year. Out there performing. A good role model for any artist. Like the writer who writes every day and continues publishing.

A few weeks ago I read an excerpt of an old interview with Dylan, and he was talking about certain of his songs as depicting the quality of later afternoon light in certain parts of a city. Which reminded me that a musician isn’t just thinking about the words, the art is in the sound, like a painter piling up colors and shapes, and it may indeed synaesthetically evoke just about anything that’s on the creator’s mind.

He and the band had a killer trio of songs for their encore: “Thunder on the Mountain,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “All Along the Watchtower.” That last one—I was remembering thirty years ago how I’d sometimes get out my big flat black plastic records and play the Dylan and Jimi Hendrix versions of this song, enjoying both of them. And maybe Dylan didn’t play this song live for awhile, but now he’s back to it. He reimagines his songs on every tour, tailoring them to the band and current state of his by now somewhat duck-like voice.

There were some good guitar lines in “Watchtower” — not mimicking Jimi, which would be dull — but playing something that takes into account what Jimi did, and then does something different. A postmodern, 21 st Century sound, post-9/11, irony in the music, a full awareness of the past thirty years, the long vista of time we’ve passed through, the dead friends and relatives, our own inevitable deaths to come, the human condition, and that good old touchstone: the ecstasy of losing yourself in the music in a crowd.

The other day I went up to visit the lovely University High School to give a talk to the math class of Ben Jacobs, who’s doing a course on non-Euclidean geometry using my very first book, Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension.

The students were bright and attractive. That’s Ben in the very back.

I talked about the fourth dimension, and showed them some of the original illos I drew for my book Spaceland

These are two-dimensional people with their innards showing, a bit different than the A Square approach used in Edwin Abbott’s Flatland. This approach derives from Kee Dewdney’s book The Planiverse which is, I believe, sadly out of print.

Here’s a married guy flirting with the woman behind the counter at the hot dog stand. He manages to have an affair with her.

But his wife finds out! She’s going to stab him but he’s learned of the amazing third dimension, and he manages to bend his gut out of the way!

The University High School is in this incredibly ritzy neighborhood, I guess it’s part of Pacific Heights, near the intersection of Baker Street and Broadway.

I walked by this one house where I could hear a man singing opera to the accompaniment of a piano. A full-bore professional opera voice, drifting into the honeyed autumn air. Amazing. I made an MPEG movie of him singing, just to capture the sound. Click here to view and hear the movie.

Dahlias over the hedge.

Later I went down to my more typical haunts on Valencia Street and worked on the giant ants story I’m writing with Bruce Sterling.

I ended up in the ruthlessly hip Ritual Roasters cafe. I couldn’t sit at a table since I don’t have a tattoo and I use, horrors, a Windows Thinkpad. But they let me sit on a nice leather couch.

I finished my Turing story, “The Imitation Game,” and plan to mail it out to a magazine today. It came out good.

Recently I polished two older paintings that I did this summer “en plein air,” that is, outdoors. This one is a hill in Los Gatos. I added a UFO and turned the old vineyard stakes into snails.

Here’s the view from the cliffs at Davenport. Again I added my trademark saucer, also a Saucerian consulting with a giant cephalopod. Happens all the time.

Just yesterday I finished this painting of the Hollow Earth I’ve been working on; it’s derived from a sketch I added to the Second Edition of the Hollow Earth, coming soon from Monkeybrain Books.

Right now I’m working on a story with Bruce Sterling, which will, I believe, involve some very large ants.

Last week Sylvia and I were down at Cruz one rainy day. I love the pelicans. Here’s one stretching his beak.

When the pelicans fly low along the waves they’re like Hells Angels.

Saturday I went for a walk alone at Castle Rock, my first time back since my sixtieth birthday.

Nice and autumnal, with the sun shining through the parasitic mosses. Every plant is a stained glass window in this cathedral of life.

I always dig that misty distance layering.

And this tree with the floppy lips. Everything so perfect, on its own.

You can crawl inside some of these eaten-away rocks.

I’m thinking of writing a story like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in between working on the story with Bruce. I was reading the original in German today, it’s funnier in German. Kafka’s friend Max Brod claims that when Kafka read this story to him, Kafka started laughing so hard that he fell out of his chair. What a genius he was.

I’m still thinking about Alan Turing, I’m working on a short story about his last days called “The Imitation Game.”

Today’s illos are made with my free Windows software Capow. The images show a highly non-linear two-dimensional cubic wave cellular automaton, loosely inspired by Turing’s work on computational morphogenesis. Computational morphogenesis is the idea that we can find continuous-valued cellular automaton rules that generate natural forms.

Note that the images are in a sequence, becoming increasingly nonlinear — just like the text.

I really love Turing’s late work on morphogenesis; I wrote about it a lot in my Lifebox book. Also see Jonathan Swinton’s Turing and Morhphogenesis site.

Start starting disclaimer.

You can’t really trust what writers say about other writers. A writer is personal friends with some writers, may want to ingratate him or herself here and there, feels envious of certain other writers, and may resent the attention granted to still others who do similar work to what the bitter writer himself does. You need to take my opinions about other writers with a large grain of salt.

End starting disclaimer.

Flame on.

In my ongoing Turing researches, I found the online story “Oracle” by Greg Egan, a writer whose work I don't much enjoy. The story is supposed to be about Alan Turing, and was well received, but…

[Segment deleted.]

Oh, let's just say I don't like what Egan did with it.

Flame prematurely terminated.

Start ending disclaimer.

Probably if I ever met Greg Egan face to face I'd think he was a great guy. After all, he and I have much more in common than not. We're both computer types who write SF. The fact is, the main reason I’m brooding over Eagan’s “Oracle” is that I worry he’s used up the market for stories on Turing’s last days.

I'm in a state of fear, and I'm tempted to lash out. Also I'm avoiding working on my story.

As Susan Sontag wrote in some excerpts of her journals I saw in the N. Y. Times magazine last month, a writer has to be a nut and a moron. A nut to be obsessed enough with something to spend all that time writing about it, and a moron to publically display his or her crazy ideas! Hey, I've got those items covered.

And, come to think of it, if all else fails, I know I can always get my story into the webzine Flurb. I’m in so tight with Flurb’s editor that I even sleep with his wife!

End ending disclaimer.