Just one new graphic today, the others are recycled. The new one is a 12 Meg movie of Times Square which is, in some sense, like a metanovel, the theme for today. Click on this link to see the Times Square movie.

Thinking about the postsingular world, the thing that interests me most is the new or enhanced media or artforms that will arise. Think of metaopera, metasymphony, metanovel, metapainting, metamovies.

As analogy, I think of how the Northwest Native American art changed when they got hold of axes. Until then, their totems had been pocket-sized, carved of black stone. Once they had the axe, they set to work carving whole trees into piles of totems. (But fifty years later their culture was gone. A brief window.)

I see going back to a metanovel over and over, layering on detail, just as I do now in my novels. But it would be more like a movie.

My character Thuy Nguyen wants to be a metanovelist, that is, a director/novelist/composer, orphidnet style, with scenarios and words enhanced by images and sounds.

Thuy gets people to make suggestions for her metanovel — palindromically called Metotem (= totem of me, with the word “meta” suggested as well) — like I do by petitioning my blog readers for suggestions about what to put in Postsingular. She has some other metanovelist friends.

“Wheenk wheenk wheenk” was a term Thuy used to describe metanovels in which the characters spent, in Thuy’s opinion, too much time bitching and moaning, and not enough time doing and loving, Thuy sometimes imitating certain passages with quick, elegant notes on her violin.

[Excerpt from Postsingular draft of Chapter One]

Passing Hogtied Metabooks — which was a hang-out for the Mission metanovelists — Jayjay saw the bobbed-hair proprietress Darlene slumped in an easy chair she’d dragged out front. Her store had a lot of comfortable chairs, also some shelves of beat-up paper books. People did still buy books, even though you could read them on the orphidnet. You might think the rez was too low, at one orphid per linear millimeter, but each page-sitting orphid knew which letters it was near, and it passed this info into the net. Strictly speaking, you could publish a book by printing one copy and letting the orphids settle onto it. For that matter, you could publish a book by thoroughly imagining it — like the metanovelists did. Even so, there was something pleasant about the paper physicality of an old-style book, and they still sold in small numbers. Not that Jayjay owned any.

“How’s the metanovel, Thuy?” asked Darlene, her long jeans-clad legs sticking into the sidewalk, her booted feet crossed like a cowboy’s. “Still wrasslin’ it?” Darlene, who was a metanovelist too, made he living not so much by selling books as by brokering access to metanovels. Most metanovelists stored their works in secure form within the orphids on their own bodies. Your personal orphids tended to be generous about giving you memory space.

“Oh yeah,” said Thuy. “And you’re in it.” She gestured at the shelves in Darlene’s store. “Here’s an idea. Maybe I should put all your books into Metotem, too. Every word, every page, all visible in one synoptic glance.”

“Synoptic,” said Darlene, who was quite the heavy kiqqie. “Brilliant word. My shelves hold the synoptic gospels of our literary heritage; you read them side by side to see the face of the Holy Hive Mind in her presingular state. But you’ve got to be kidding about including all that data. Just do a link. If put too much into a metanovel, it gets as dull as a nearly empty file. Everything and Nothing are dual, you wave? Aim your frame.” Peering from beneath her dark bangs, Darlene held up her hands, regarding the four of them through the rectangle of her thumbs and fingers. “What’s with the Stank ad following you mangy kiqs?”

“We’re extras on the Founders show,” said Jayjay, miming himself soaping an underarm. “On the payroll. I Stank purty.”

“How was Gerry Gurkin last night?” Thuy asked Darlene. Gurkin was a fellow metanovelist who was hyping his new work Apoplexy. He’d just done a presentation at Hogtied Books. Metanovelists presented their works at Hogtied by handing out short-term read-only access permissions and giving the audience a guided tour, the hope being that people would pay for longer-term access.

“Underwhelming,” said Darlene. “These Dick Too Dibbs ads kept popping up. Poor Gerry. Not that his gig would have been much better without the interruptions. Apoplexy is an exabyte of data, yes, but it’s only some guy’s memory records. No plot, and no real characters besides Gerry Gurken. Apoplexy shows us a kiqqie who walks around all day saying he’s a metanovelist. But we’ve already got reality soaps and metablogs for that. The metanovel can be so much more.”

“It needs action trajectories, don’t you think?” said Thuy. “A bunch of archetypal plots.”

“But it has to be real,” said Darlene.

“I want to be an alchemist,” said Thuy. “Transmuting my life into myth and fable.”

Metanovelists’ bull sessions could go on for hours. Jayjay privately wondered how much work Thuy had actually done. She kept all her notes and drafts under secure protection, and had never shared them with him.

My second cousin Hedwig is visiting San Jose from North Germany this month, so I took her along to San Francisco for my reading at the Booksmith. In the afternoon we went to the De Young Museum, to the Conservatory of Flowers (that greenhouse in Golden Gate park), and to Haight Street. Lots of orchids in the Conservatory.

Also some great pitcher plants. These and the orchids look almost like they can talk. Like the flowers in Alice in Wonderland.

Hedwig is the daughter of a lady named Svanburga von Alten, this Svan (for short) being the daughter of Aggie von Klenck and Franz von Alten, Aggie being the sister of my grandmother Louise von Klenck, both of them being daughters of Franz von Klenck and Alice Rahe. I am up to date on all this from talking to Hedwig and from, day before yesterday, spending a few hours scanning in a 5 Meg zoomable PDF version of a family tree that my uncle Rudolf von Bitter (my mother's brother) made of his ancestors before going off to die on the Russian front in WWII. Touching to think of all those generations, all those intense lives. By the way, you can find the great philosopher Hegel in this particular tree, like I’m always bragging about.

On Haight Street I took my respectable German cousin into one of the Haight Street shops selling cheap flashy party clothes: giant fake-fur hats, sequin miniskirts, clip-on feather scrunchies, skintight polyester tiger pants, like that. Well, maybe I followed her in, rather than taking her in. Being a tourist, she wasn’t embarrassed. The women working there were these somewhat skanky but very lively (possibly stoned) hippie types. And it struck me that exactly the same types were working there twenty, forty years ago. Even if you were born in 1986, you can still be an exact and archetypal Haight Street hippie. The persistance of social roles.

My reading went well; a good crowd showed up. (This pic isn’t actually of the audience, it’s a shelf in my favorite Haight Street store, Kid Robot.)

[Prehistoric tree fern in G. G. Park.]

Apropos of the themes of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul,, there’s an interesting list of nanotech and computation-theoretical questions on the head page for Stephen Wolfram’s NKS 2006 Science Conference this summer.

I'm going to be reading from The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul on Tuesday, March 7, at 7 PM at the Booksmith on Haight Street.

I recently got a hard copy of the library volume Contemporary Authors, Vol. 228, (Thompson Gale, Farmington Hills, MI, 2005), which has my autobiographical essay with pictures (pp. 329-354). I have the right to further publish the piece so, what the hey, here it is, my “Autobiography (2004)” in PDF form, weighing in at 20 Meg as it includes a number of photos of me (that's me aged 13, above, playing with a toy we called “Diablo”). I worked on this essay fairly hard, trying to figure out what I've been doing for, lo, these 60 years. Enjoy.

After NYC for granddaughter Althea’s naming ceremony, I flew down to spend a week with my big brother Embry at his house on Grand Turk Island, which at the very end of the chain of islands off the tip of Florida that starts with the Bahamas. It’s just a bit north of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Some people think it might have been Columbus’s first stop in the New World.

Embry used to be a pilot for Turks and Caicos Air down here, and I’ve come to visit him a number of times over the years — going all the way back to 1969, when he was living on South Caicos and flying for some guys trying to get development going on Providenciales Island.

Embry has been around these islands so long that he knows everyone, at least everyone over 45. The locals don’t necessarily perceive him as a white person anymore, he’s such a local fixture.

All in all there’s only about a hundred white residents on Grand Turk. Since there’s so few in the local circle of whites, people play multiple roles. We went to a bar last night, and my dive master was singing in a band, accompanied by one of my brother’s friends playing gut-bucket bass. Someone I met at the airport turned out to own the bar, the woman who led a free yoga lesson down the beach was there too with her husband playing bongos with the band. I thought of a high-school play that requires, like, 30 characters, and the ten people who want to be in the play end up having three roles each.

When I come to Grand Turk, it’s like stepping into a soap opera. Or a daily comic strip. Or onto an opera stage in medias res. Everyone discusses everyone else’s business all day long. The two main topics this week are (a) the coming of the cruise boats, and (b) the break-in at the house next door to Embry’s.

Provo (as they call Providenciales Island for short) has been developed out the wazoo, although Grand Turk has remained primitive and off the grid. As chance would have it, Grand Turk recently allowed the Carnival Cruise Lines company to build a cruise-boat center — complete with huge dock and a veritable townlet of pastel “new town” buildings. Saturday, the first cruise boat ever docked here. Most of the locals seem apprehensive or contemptuous. When a cruise boat docks, you have an abrupt influx of a thousand or more day-tripping tourists — they return to their boat before suppertime, don’t buy much and don’t eat much either as they’re stuffed from the ship.

I actually witnessed the first of the big boats gliding in, the Noordam of Rotterdam for the Holland-North America line. Embry and I were leaving Grand Turk on a fishing expedition; we motored past the Noordam; it rose up nearly to the sky, ten stories high. The door was very small, at the waterline; the people coming out looked like ants. Marching down the spanking new concrete dock, silhouetted against the cloud-puffed Caribbean sky. I thought of a starship at a spaceport, the vast, bulging hull, the tiny figures moving along spindly catwalks. Actually only a few of them came into town, and only for a short while, and the ships aren’t coming very often as yet, so there’s hope for Grand Turk.

Embry had taken me out fishing on his little Boston Whaler with a local friend of his named Carl, and after checking out the Noordam, we went across a strait to an even smaller and more godforsaken island called Salt Cay. Carl, a stout young black guy with gout, was continually criticizing everything I did, like how I’d reel in a line, or how I’d steer the boat — Carl lecturing me in a high-pitched hysterical tone as if I were a twelve-year old. Being almost sixty, I was able to argue back and take it in my stride, at least up to a point. While I was reeling in a fish — too slow in Carl’s opinion — a barracuda bit half of my fish off in the water. I caught half a jack. But then we caught two barracuda. Seeing Carl return to his mother’s house carrying the nice big barracuda we caught, I felt some empathy for him after all.

Having my big brother's associates treat me like a kid has traditionally been a sore point for me. Actually, everyone but Carl has been treating me well. Embry kindly tells them that I’m his famous brother.

Working on Postsingular in my head in the open boat in rough seas between Grand Turk and Salt Cay, I was thinking how it would be to have the orphidnet and have access to my text. And that seemed kind of dull, like bringing my work with me. Better than writing, if I had insanely rich mental net access, would be to lay down actual visualizations of my scenes. And that’s the product people would enjoy. Call it a metanovel. Writing a metanovel would be like directing a movie. Would it be hard to visualize all that detail? Naw, I wouldn’t have to fill in all the architectural details of, e. g., Dot and Red’s worn-out Victorian house. The beezies could patch the details in, collaging them from a real house and, where necessary, bending the collaged reality bits to fit.

I’d go back to the metanovel over and over, layering on detail, just as I do now with a novel. Even though it would be more like a movie. Would I have to pick a point of view? For a first pass though, yeah, it might be easier to just do one point of view. But I’d eventually want to round out the other characters.

They had the best french fries I ever tasted at the Island Thyme Inn on Salt Cay. Porter, the proprietor, guy said he bakes white potatoes, and then cuts them into thin wedges with the skin on and fries them briefly in very hot peanut oil. Embry and I were the only customers, he was there to so some business with the host, discussing some development scheme.

Everyone here is continually talking about developing their land; they’ve been talking this way for the nearly forty years I’ve been coming. With the coast of Florida utterly plasticized and devastated by condo-condo-condo hammered bam-bam-bam into place as if by angry giants’ fists, the developers seek new shores to despoil. The nearby island of Provo is starting to go, though of course it’s still nothing like the hideously condo-bombed once-lovely Sanibel Island in Florida. I’m hoping Grand Turk’s inertia and general disorganization will serve to protect them a bit longer. Of course the basic problem is that there are three times as many people on Earth as there were fifty years ago when I was a kid. From 2 billion to 6 billion.

Embry’s wife Noreen is out of town for a week. Embry has a house and a guest-house. I’m in the guest-house, very nicely designed, the houses side by side, right on the beach. Embry comes in to inspect my living-quarters from time to time, sometimes mildly disapproving of my housekeeping. He’s about the only person left who acts like a parent towards me. In a way it’s touching. He cares.

Occasionally I wish Embry would lighten up — and I realize how fervently my wife must at times wish the same for me. “Relax, old man, take the starch outta your spine, the stick outta your ass, the rules outta your ruler.” Nevertheless, Embry and I have some laughs.

I think if I stayed here a few months, I’d start to drink again. That Gosling’s Dark Bermudan Rum looks good. I could spend the days in bed with a fifth of rum, a couple of limes, some cans of Coke, and a good freezer-full of ice. (And end up wishing I was dead.) Part of the urge is that this is the end of the Earth and nothing matters here. Part of the urge is that I’m so deracinated, a temperate plant-cutting in tropical sand.

I went diving three times, six dives in all. I’ve dived nearly sixty times now, and I have a pretty good idea of what I’m doing. Grand Turk’s great dive feature is a nice mile-deep drop-off only a hundred yards from shore, making a good wall you can dive along. I always wish I could go down and down and down one of those walls. Like in a bathysphere.

Good schools of fish. Nice limber sponges and gorgonians, good brain corals. I saw a big grouper, who was used to begging food from people; I was able to give his slimy tail a little pat, though the dive master reproved me for that. I saw a barracuda hovering over a vase sponge like it was his nest. Vase sponges are very cool, I like peering into them to spot a tiny fish or crustacean within. Three dolphins on the last dive, big as people, very close, moving slow, doing the dolphin kick.

I actually saw the green flash two nights in a row. You stare out at the setting sun, as it goes into the horizon like a cartoon coin into a piggy bank and right as it disappears: green flash!

About the break-in I mentioned above. I heard the following story over a long dinner. A gentle married couple my age live next door to Embry’s, Andre and Joan, they wanted to retire, but don’t have quite enough money, so Andre still works as a government lawyer. Andre told me the story as follows. The day before I arrived, a local man wearing a bandanna broke into their house at 4:30 AM, pulled Joan out of bed by her hair and began hitting her with the flat side of a machete yelling, “Give me money.” A pirate of the Caribbean.

[Some of the local buildings have a “duppy board” on top, which is meant to keep bad spirits, or “duppies” from roosting.”]

Andre tried to call 911, which didn’t work, and eventually got into a struggle with the burglar, who sliced a four inch long but rather shallow gash into Andre’s forehead above his eye. The burglar finally fled on Andre’s bicycle. Andre called Embry, who managed to get the police to come.

On the way, the police saw the man on the stolen bicycle, but didn’t manage to arrest him. A few hours later, they arrested a local troublemaker called “Mr. Buck,” whom Joan and Andre believed to be the burgler, perhaps the police saw Mr. Buck on the stolen bike. Andre and Joan underwent a similar break-in-and-machete-threatening last April, ten months ago, and had asked around and arrived at the conclusion that the burglar had been this same Mr. Buck. After a few hours the police released Mr. Buck. There was then a feeling that the police weren’t doing their best to investigate the case, a feeling of paranoia that it was a deliberate cover-up by the police; that Mr. Buck did it, but the police don’t want him to be indicted. But after I left Grand Turk they did re-arrest and charge Mr. Buck, which is where it stands now.

It was very dramatic sitting at a dinner table, listening to Andre’s tale. Like dinner theater. Imagine a medium where people tell you dramatic stories over great meals. Possible with the orphidnet…

The best thing about the Caribbean is the colors. And being with my brother was such a nostalgic experience. He's the only one left who remembers the surroundings of my early childhood. Good old Embry.