Later this week, I’ll put up more photos of Paris. But right now I’ve got something else in mind. My 2006 Tor Books novel Mathematicians in Love had gone out of print, so today I’m publishing a second edition of it, in paperback and as an inexpensive ebook. More info in on the book’s home page.

I’m slowly learning something about book production. I use the InDesign typesetting software for the interiors, and I make multilayered Photoshop images for my covers. Thankfully you can export a decent ebook file directly from InDesign and then tweak it into an EPUB with Sigil and into a Kindle MOBI with Calibre. There’s ten or twenty or maybe it’s fifty or a hundred or even two hundred gotchas involved. Making books is like a hobby of mine by now. Like crossword puzzles or knitting, maybe, or like building model zeppelins out of balsa wood and silken cloth. I think a lot about fonts—these days I’m fond of the Janson font I bought from Linotype.

“Flying Cone Shells” oil on canvas, November, 2014, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting. And see my Paintings page for more info.

I made a new painting for the cover of Mathematicians in Love. At first I didn’t realize that’s what the painting was for. I started out with those three fat lines that weave over and under each other. And then I wanted to decorate the sectors of the canvas that the lines made. I was thinking of an Aboriginal painting, or of an aerial view of crop fields, like Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of the California Delta region that lies northeast of the Bay area.

For the longest time, my painting reminded me of the works you see hanging on the walls in art schools. Unfinished, harsh, dissonant, the paint colors right out of the tubes. I kept at it, layering on the tints and shades, blending, toning, and glazing. Finally the painting seemed warm and harmonious to me. And right about then, I was like, “What painting can I use for the cover of Mathematicians in Love?”

There’s a scene in the novel when my character Bela and his pal Paul and his lover Cammy are driving along the coast of Big Sur, looking to surf over into a parallel universe through a natural doorway in one of the big rocks at Pfieffer Beach. And this giant flying cone shell is following them—I think her name is Rowena. So I added Rowena and one of her smaller friends to the painting, also a tiny image of Bela’s car. Yeah, baby.

On the local scene, we went to a giant potluck Thanksgiving in the Mission district of SF, organized by our son Rudy and his friends. It was a blast. Our daughters Georgia and Isabel were there with their families as well—adding up to thirteen of us in all.

At one point during the visit we thirteen were relaxing under a cypress tree in the SF Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park. I felt the atavistic joy of being in a tribe. A golden oasis encountered along my life’s long journey, a moment to mentally revisit over the years. Thank you, world.

Now that I’m back home, I’m working on my writing biz again. To start with, I published my novel Jim and the Flims in ebook and paperback via my Transreal Books. You might call it transreal magic realism—it’s about a Santa Cruz guy who travels to the afterworld in hopes of resurrecting his wife.

More info is on the book’s page.

Long story short, you can now get my Jim and the Flims ebook on Amazon, or on my Transreal Books page. (A Transreal Books purchase gives you two files: MOBI format for Kindle and EPUB format for all other e-readers.)

And the Jim and the Flims paperback is available via Amazon.

Night Shade Books published Jim and the Flims book in hardback in 2011, by the way, and a few copies of that edition are still kicking around as well.

Another note from the writing biz. By way of leading into it, dig this mural of St. Denis in the Pantheon in Paris. St. D’s head as been chopped off, but the dude is using his halo to think. He’s picking up his head, and he’s gonna plug it back in. Can’t bust him, can’t shut him down.

A symbolic representation of an author, against all odds, keeping his shit together? Art imitating life imitating art? Transreal, dude. One of my preferred modes of literary creation. I am Jim, facing the flims.

I first described transrealism in my 1983 essay, “A Transrealist Manifesto.” Philip K. Dick was definitely a precursor of transrealism, but for a number of years, I was the only self-avowed transrealist writer around. The style finally seems to be catching on.

In an October 24, 2014, essay in the British newspaper, The Guardian, critic Damien Walter proposes “Transrealism: the first major literary movement of the 21st century?”

Yeah, baby!

Oh, one more writing thing, Tor.com published a story by Terry Bisson and me, “Where the Lost Things Are.” With this great illo by Chris Buelli.

Transreally enough, the book is about two aging friends who can’t keep track of their stuff…

Back to my travel notes. We moved on from Geneva/Nyon to Paris for a week. Lovely to be in Paris, my favorite city, along with San Francisco, New York, Vienna, and Lisbon.
You see these great iron business signs here and there in Europe. Everything’s so old.

Sylvia and I went out to a far corner of Paris to see a little Monet museum. On the way we passed this amazing carousel in a little park. The thing had about six or eight horses hanging from a rotating center, and it was powered by…a man pushing the ride around in circles. The kids had wands for spearing rings, and the carousel-man helped them. And then he’d put the rings back into the rickety feeder.

The younger kids didn’t try and spear rings…they were in that Eden before you know there are reward rings that you’re supposed to be gathering.

The museum was someone’s old mansion, I forget whose. Great wrought iron railing here, a yin-yang Zhabotinsky kind of thing.

My feet aren’t what they used to be, and after about ten days in Europe, I’m slowing down.

We stayed in a hotel on the square holding the Pantheon monument…it’s a giant domed building with pillars around it, and with famous dead intellectuals in tombs in the cellar. Weird statue on the main floor…some French revolutionaries hailing a bad-ass goddess of Liberty. “Live Free or Die” it says on her plinth.

The philosopher and author Jean Jacques Rousseau was one of the people in the cellar. Great respect for thinkers over there.

Over the years, I’ve been in the Pantheon a number of times. I love the huge, empty, vaulted spaces within. And more than once I’ve dreamed of floating off the floor and flying around in there.

A woman outside striking a sexy pose for her photo.

All over the place in Paris, you’ll just see a random marble statue. Like these ladies on a roof.

An antiquarian bookshop specializing in old books about flying machines. Dig the deluxe seats for this balloon.

For sure we hit the Eiffel tower. Staggering how big the thing is, I always forget unless I’m actually there. Like I’m a rat under the Golden Gate bridge. Didn’t go up in it, lines too long…lines like you’d see at the pearly gates on Judgment Day.

I love to look at water flowing, the great gnarly undulations in a liquid sheet.

Here’s a nice composition with a statue and a building near the Louvre. More pix from Paris still to come.

Sylvia and I went to Geneva, Switzerland, for a family event. We stayed near Geneva in Nyon for five days, and then went on to Paris for a week. So now I’m photoblogging some of the things I saw.

This is a garage near Levis stadium in San Jose, completely irrelevant, although the dark image does set the tone for William Gibson’s The Peripheral, which I was reading on my ebook for much of the trip. Well, actually I didn’t get it till we’d been there a few days, waiting for the download.

We stayed in a once deluxe hotel now on the skids and run by unpleasant people, but handy for our purposes, the Beau Rivage in Nyon, looking out at Lake Geneva. It’s kind of a wonderful lake, so clean, with the Rhone running through its length, and huge mountains along the edge in spots.

Vineyards all along the lake. The Swiss white wine is good stuff, kind of dry and sour. Not that I drink it anymore, but it’s worth sampling. Not sure if they export much of it.

Like so many European town, Nyon has a little castle from yore. When you get up in a high place in Europe, like in a plane or on a mountain, you can see that there’s a village every two kilometers or so. Really settled in. When you fly over the US, most of it is stone cold empty. Even California. We have a few megalopolises, some towns, and that’s about it.

I’ve always liked coin operated “rides” for kids. The spotted fly agaric mushroom is a big standard icon in Europe. According to the ethnomycologist Gordon Wasson, the Siberian shamans and the Greek Eleusis cult got high off these. And saw overly animated caterpillars in red top hats. Cf. my story with Bruce Sterling, “Storming the Cosmos.”

It was nice, walking around Nyon one morning, everything a little misty, and these European constructs, like a crane of a string of lights, everything a little different from how we’d do it. Like, not quite as SAFE. Sadly, the assumption in the US has to be that, whatever you set up outdoors, there will be people who are blindly bent on destroying it. More communality in Europe, I’d say.

I love when birds fly low across the water. In Santa Cruz, when the pelicans do that, I always think of Hells Angels.

This is a nice, mysterious, paradoxical image. A marble and alabaster statue on the left, and on the right is a doubly reflected image of the statue.

This was in the Beau Rivage Nyon. Good breakfasts and terrif views. But they actually wanted to bill us separately for each cup of coffee we made in our room. And they flatly wanted to refused to drive us half a mile in their van to get to the train station. “The van is only for business guests. People from the Gulf.” “I’m a business. Transreal Books.”

Sylvia and I went into Geneva a few times. Over the years, we’ve been here more than forty times. Sylvia’s parents lived in Geneva during the latter half of their lives. We’ve always liked Geneva’s big old museum of art and history. Dig this armor, it looks so SF. And the light glaring on the glass could be death ray beams from the dude’s eyes.

All marble in there, so frikkin’ deluxe.

Love marble nudes. It doesn’t show here, but in back there’s a marble dog sniffing the guy’s butt.

There was a wonderful artist in Geneva, Ferdinand Hodler, and his works are one of the reasons we like to come to this particular museum. I think you’re not supposed to take photos in here, but usually I sneak one or two. Love the door here with the Hodler in the background.

Gotta get a shot of the famous Jet d’Eau fountain in Genva. During the World Soccer Cup one time they filled a giant soccer-ball balloon with helium and tethered it so that it was hovering right at the top of the water, so it looked as if, cartoon like, the huge ball was indeed floating on the fountain’s spurt.

We went to Lausanne one afternoon with Sylvia’s brother Henry. Fab statue of the Sphinx lady were with her afternoon shadow.

And within the Lausanne cathedral, the Reaper lurks.