I finished a new painting, “Hawaii,” (doing one last touch-up on March 14, 2014, which is the image shown here.) It has three big plants and three petroglyphs, although the guy on the right is perhaps morphing into something more.

“Hawaii” oil on canvas, March, 2014, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

This painting has to do with an experience I had about seven years ago, and which I’m currently trying to fashion into an SF story. For the rest of this post, I’ll just edit some of the relevant passages from my 1997 journals. And, following my usual fashion, the photos will have nothing to do with the subject matter at all.

[Photo taken from the air near Salt Lake City in winter. I call this one, “A New Map of the World.”]

So in August, 1997, my wife Sylvia and I spent a few days at a somewhat generic resort hotel on the big island of Hawaii. The place was called something like the Royal Wak. With its parking-lots, golf-club, and shops, it formed a asphalt island atop a desert of black a’a lava stones.

Among the local sights in Hawaii are the petroglyph markings.

[Paul Mavrides with his black velvet painting of the Challenger disaster.]

Stones bearing petroglyphs are viewed as sacred, but I noticed that the Royal Wak hotel developers had broken up some of them to decorate the little shops around the hotel. Sad broken glyph frags sitting in, like, the flower bed of a Benetton, with educational labels by the glyphs.

I was cuprous about petroglyphs, and I found a little book that talked the glyphs being in places where there is a lot of power, or mana. One big spot is in a lava field near the volcano Mauna Loa. Another was near out hotel, a spot called Puako.

[Greyhound Rock, north of Santa Cruz, CA.]

We went and saw the Puako petroglyphs two times. They’re in a field of smooth pahoehoe lava, which has cracks, making a background pattern like the plates of a turtle shell. The petroglyphs show men, animals, spirits. Many of them are drawn with their heads towards Mauna Kea, the highest peak on the island.

It’s hypothesized that the men etched onto the rock are perhaps projections of the artists, like shadows. I imagined the early Hawaiians of 1300 AD jumping up in the air, looking at their shadows, then drawing that kind of design.

[Rudy at a Pixies concert in San Jose, February, 2014. Hat knit by Georgia Rucker.]

The Puako petroglyph field is in a spooky place, overgrown with introduced exotic kiawe or mesquite thorn trees. In the old days, it was blank lava here, like the slopes of Mauna Loa. So much mana there that it’s a little scary.

There was a menacing warning note at the bottom of the sign at the petroglyph field: “Those who defile or mistreat the petroglyphs must bear the emotional, physical and spiritual consequences for those and those around them—we can take no responsibility for these effects.”

Somewhat foolishly ignoring this, I walked onto the petroglyphs with my shoes off—in my socks—to get a better photo. Immediately I felt like I was trespassing, that I had intruded.

[Anxious tourist, who appeared in an early draft of the “Hawaii” painting. Sylvia’s advice on this detail: “One word, Rudy. Palette-knife.” But I documented him before I scraped him off. He reminds me a little Bill Burroughs in the Amazon jungle, or rather, of a fellow-traveler whom Bill would have made fun of.]

A bit later, dizzy from the August sun, we lost our way and forked off onto a false path in the woods. The criss-crossing shadows of the kiawe branches seemed petroglyph men all over the ground, twisting at odd extra-dimensional angles like A Square coming up out of Flatland, and threatening, nay pursuing me, intent on extracting a terrible vengeance for my defilement of their field.

Back in the room, I heard a knock on my hotel-room door. I peered out through the peephole. A petroglyph is in the hallway—an intense stick-figure of a man, like figure made of glowing fluorescent-light tubes. I didn’t open the door.

[Rudy with old college room mate Kenneth Turan, now the famed film critic of L.A. Times and NPR. Great to see him up in San Jose this month. Photo by Patricia Williams.]

I did a two-tank scuba beach dive near Puako the next morning. It was good. There was an eel garden at a drop-off to the continental shelf. There were about a hundred eels, silvery green, each with its tail tucked into the smooth white sand, and its body floating erect, wobbling this way and that. A few eels were swimming around free, adjusting their position. They had long slit mouths partly open. Behind them was a huge, huge form slowly moving, a leviathan of the deeps. An extraterrestrial

I felt a sense of mystery, of vastness, a sense enhanced by incipient nitrogen narcosis. The guide and taken me a little too deep.

[Natural Bridges in Santa Cruz.]

After the dives I talked to my guide about the petroglyph who was stalking me. He asked, “Is it all the petroglyphs that are after you, or just one of them in particular? Maybe you can get a second petroglyph to help you deal with the first one. Maybe the first one was from a burial site. And the helper-petroglyph might be a turtle.”

“Where would I find a turtle petroglyph to help me?”

“There’s a lot of petroglyphs by the good fishing spots. Meet me this evening and I’ll show you. I go spearfishing near hear at night. The fish are asleep and you can dive and just pick them up. It’s like a supermarket.”

And then? Wait for the finished story…if I manage to write it.

[“Grandpa’s Birthday,” oil, 24 ” x 20 “, March, 2013. Note 67 candles, some on cake, some on strawberries.]

And, by the way, tomorrow, March 22, 2014, is my 68th birthday! I’m happy to have made it this far. It’s been interesting the whole way.

So, yeah, I enjoyed the rain and now it’s spring.

Love this bank with the exposed root. All the unknown underlying aspects of the world.

Went out to the beach one foggy morn with daughter Georgia, her husband, and their two darling children. The piles of washed up kelp amaze me, so beautifully crafted, for free, discarded, Nature’s bounty.

Awesome heap of seals beside the Santa Cruz dock these days. They wriggle over each other, and “nobody” gets that worked up. Some barking for show, some teeth-baring, but very rarely an actual bite.

Gotta dig that neon Stagnaro’s fish sign. Certain things belong in neon, and one of them is the icon of a fish.

My neighbor Gunnar turned eighty last week and one of the other neighbors gave him a party.

Exciting to go over before hand and see the colored lanterns, and then it was dark and the lanterns were in full play. Party lights.

Markings on cracked asphalt are always an easy photo. Add in a bird and you’re got a composition.

We saw a newt up on a Los Gatos hill, not sure if s/he had slept in this hole or was just hiding in it. Newts, the way they wriggle, always remind me of the way Deadheads dance, repetitively raising the arms and legs.

As for me, I’ve been working on some Transreal Books productions, preparing some of my backlist books for re-release. Editing, proofing, designing. I’ll talk more about this in a few weeks when I launch a new Kickstarter to fund the new editions.

I’ve got a birthday of my own coming up, and I can only hope to emulate the example of the eighty-year-old Gunnar, shown here getting funky and way way down.

It’s time for another sale on my paintings.

I have no room left in my storage racks, and I’m painting more than ever. Please buy one! I’ve cut just about all the prices by $100 or $200. Check out the prices now. I know some of you said you’d like to buy Frog Man, so here’s your chance!

“Frog Man,” oil on canvas, January, 2014, 20” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

I finished a new painting last week (shown below). The way this one came about is that I was finished writing an SF story “Laser Shades” for a very cool art book, The Superlative Light, by the photographer Robert Shults. The book consists of photos taken in a very-high-power laser lab.

“Laser Shades,” oil on canvas, February, 2014, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

While I was working on the story, I wasn’t quite sure about how to end it, and then I made my new painting as a way of previsualizing a big scene. The guy in the painting is wearing special laser-proof shades and he’s (rather unwisely) holding a fetal “egg” in the path of a yottawatt laser beam. A yottawatt is about the power of the Sun. That zapped egg is going to hatch out some kind of weird person, so look out!

Eventually I’ll post the story online, but not yet. I’ll let Shults’s book come out first. Also I might read the story somewhere this spring, and if I do, I’ll put up a podcast of the reading.

I was up at Borderlands Books on Valencia Street in SF yesterday to see my old friend and way-gnarly SF writer Dr. Michael Blumlein doing a presentation on his new book of stories, What the Doctor Ordered. It was a good show. Learn more about the book on Michael’s home page.

Speaking of Borderlands, my Big Aha show of paintings there has been extended until March 29, 2014. So if you’re a local, you can check out some of my latest paintings in person. And then buy one!

And speaking of art projects, Sylvia and I saw this man Scott Weaver doing a demo at The Exploratorium in San Francisco early in February. His life’s work is a giant toothpick sculpture, kind of depicting San Francisco as a whole. He’s been tinkering with it for thirty-five years Weaver also has a toothpick hat that he sometimes wears while discussing his work.

I just read the new Dave Eggers book, The Circle . It started out a little slow, but then it became a page-turner. I plowed through it in two days, thinking a lot about the characters and the ideas, and when it was done, I missed having it to read.

I liked the book a lot. It got to me.

The “Circle” is a company something like Google + Twitter + Facebook. They’re working to take over the world, ultimately controlling all information and all elections, and making it impossible (and illegal) for anyone to be offline. The main character is Mae Holland. She starts out as something of a free spirit, but she’s also ambitious, a striver, and very much a people pleaser. And by the end, she’s a self-deluding and heartless zealot. You empathize with her, pity her, and end by despising her—which is just what you’re supposed to do. The book is something of a moral fable.

Being a science fiction writer, I’m interested in the fact that The Circle is a science fiction novel by a mainstream writer, and it’s being marketed as a general audience book. Not that these general audience books use the “SF” genre label. They’re “visionary,” “speculative,” “dystopic,” “novels of the near future,” and so on.

[Happy moment for a writer. Sitting on a hillside with a manuscript to correct.]

I’d been wondering what exactly to call these books. I don’t necessarily want a bitter, negative word for them…I don’t want to be like a crusty old-time Mission hipster throwing rocks at a Google bus. So I posed the what-do-you-call-these-books question on Facebook, and a person with the screen name “Post Script” coined what I think a the perfect word. Gengen.

Gengen is a cozy word, pleasant to say, and this is important for a new coinage. I see the gengen move as working in two directions. The name can be read either as “general audience genre” book, or “genre book that’s broken out to a general audience.” It isn’t inherently disparaging to either side. You can be an SF writer moving onto the general shelves, as William Gibson has done and as Kurt Vonnegut did before him.. Or you can be a denizen of the general shelves, safe in your position, wanting to get wild and write a genre book—like Margaret Atwood, Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Lethem, Chang-Rae Lee, and nnow Dave Eggers.

(By the way, re. “gengen,” someone might protest that there are other genres besides SF. That’s fine, and if someone wants to have a gengen discussion about the detective or romance or western genres, sure, why not. Gengen is a type of move, a sidling between the genre ghetto and the shopping street. But it’s gengen SF that I’m talking about in this post, and often as not I’ll just call them gengen for short.)

There’s more and more gengen books these days—the SF mode has acquired a trendiness, a cachet. And really that’s good. I like reading SF books, and if they’re gengen by a talented writer, so much the better.

[View from the poetry room in City Lights Books.]

Of course, some pro SF writers might jeer, “The Brahmins are wading in the funky Ganges where we hardcore SF sadhus have wallowed for, lo, these many years.” Or, “Are we lowly science-fiction pros expected to be grateful when a mainstream writer stoops to filch a bespattered icon from our filthy wattle huts?” Not, harrumph, that I would ever say those kinds of things. Yes, I do write literary SF, and I don’t get much recognition in the general market, but I don’t want to be all bitter and resentful about this, at least not all the time. Today I want to talk about gengen and about Eggers’s excellent The Circle.

In discussing gengen, critics often namecheck Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. And there’s much of Brave New World in The Circle.
Mae and her Circle bosses formulate three sayings that could have been lifted directly from 1984: “A Secret is a Lie.” “Sharing Is Caring.” “Privacy Is Theft.”

The Circle does lack certain things—I’m thinking of cyberpunk flash, wild SFnal speculations, and rollicking laugh-out-loud humor. But that’s not what Eggers was trying to do, so there’s no point bugging him about it. The Circle totally nails the points that he wanted to hit. Like the pious holier-than-thou and insanely-naive attitude of techies who want to run everyone’s lives and have everyone be so much better and cleaner than humans are meant to be. They even use that old line, “Why would you want privacy unless you have something you want to hide?” And there’s a cutting riff on the self-aggrandizement of a cubicle-dweller who feels brave because she “liked” someone’s strongly political post. And Eggers really gets the brutal, brutal work schedule of computer types.

My mind was blown by a couple of scenes where Mae goes into zombie-mode feeding-frenzy bloodlust-clicking-frenzy and spends hours or even a whole night working the social sites, building up her rankings, raising her various virtual scores, all of these scores being precise numbers you understand—Eggers goes ape on this, and has a one-or-two-page paragraph where every clause contains a number that Mae is pumping for better job security and higher self esteem.

And reading those scenes, I was repelled, but also, I had to think, “My god, this is me. I do this.” Obsessively spinning from Twitter to Facebook to email to my iPhone messages to the work on my new blog post to the latest tweaks of the HTML on my umpteen webpages, then back to Twitter to Facebook to… I’ve spent whole days like this, lost in the clicks, returning to each site over and over, hungry for comments, for Likes, for reviews, for response…

I think of a pigpen that my friends and I used to enjoy visiting at the Rutgers Agricultural School campus, back when I was in grad school at Rutgers in 1970, a tidy pen, with a feeding-trough at the near end, and a hinged metal flap over the trough, and every so often a pig would come to the trough and nose up the flap, the younger ones did this more often, and usually there wouldn’t be anything in the trough, and the lid would click on the way up and then clank back down. No mail. No comments. No likes. Click clank. Or maybe there’s one left-over nugget of chow. Great streamers of saliva. Possibly an exultant squeal.

Another thing in The Circle that got to me was that Mae starts out with a pantheistic or nature-worshipping side to her. She likes to kayak out into the San Francisco Bay, enjoying the company of the watchful seals, loving the light on the water, even exploring a deserted little island by night, wholly in the now, fully analog, not even thinking of checking her phone.

That’s when I loved Mae the most, when she was doing these kinds of things that I myself place great value on, getting outside and into nature, and leaving all the computer crap behind. I’m sure Eggers himself has this side to him, or he wouldn’t have been able to evoke it so movingly. And then—what a bummer—the Circle bureaucrats kind of crush Mae for going offline like this. And from here on in her personality is pretty much destroyed. She loses her contact with the natural world—and she loses her soul. Echoing Winston Smith in 1984.

So yeah, The Circle is a great book. Viva gengen.

See the Facebook comments on this post.

See the Facebook comments on the "gengen" word .