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Author Archive

Podcast. Around North Beach.

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

Reminder: I’ll be reading from my autobiography Nested Scrolls at an SF in SF gathering at 7 PM on Saturday, February 11.

I’ll be joined on the podium by the eminent SF writers K. W. Jeter and Jay Lake, also reading from their work. If you come, be aware of the huge Chinese New Year’s Parade in the same neighborhood…in fact come early and watch the parade for awhile before our reading.

I was already up in SF earlier this week, staying in North Beach and giving a reading from my small book Surfing the Gnarl at The Green Arcade bookshop on Market Street near Gough St., a great little store with very cool and diverse pickings. Curated with wit and attitude by owner Patrick Marks.

I made a podcast of the Green Arcade reading, which is introduced by Terry Bisson. You can click on the icon below to access the file via .

My wife and I were walking around SF enjoying ourselves. I like how multicultural the city is, how busy, with the sun so bright and the air so clear and intense. Like water.

I always dig seeing the freaky window display at Aria on Grant Street near Washington Square.

Everything shaped and colored so nice in the morning sun.

But beware the Invasion of the Goobs on… blessedly I’ve temporarily managed to forget the name of those obnoxious roller vehicles. A tour of twenty of them went by! Me taking their picture I was, of course, a collateral Goob invader, come to think of it. “It’s okay, I’m from near San Jose.”

Podcast #62. “Surfing the Gnarl” & NESTED SCROLLS.

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

Feb 7, 2012. Reading from “Surfing the Gnarl” essay/book and NESTED SCROLLS at Green Arcade books in San Francisco. Some Q&A as well. Introduced by Terry Bisson.

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Skungy Art. “Surfing the Gnarl.” Read Feb 7, Feb 11.

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

I have a couple of upcoming readings on Feb 7 and Feb 11, but first I want to tell you about my new painting , Loulou and Skungy.


“Loulou and Skungy,” oil on canvas, February, 2012, 30” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the image.

Loulou is the somewhat mysterious woman in green, Skungy is the rat, and the guy holding the rat is named Morton Plant. At present this is like an illustration of an unknown proverb or a forgotten fable. I don’t entirely know what’s going on. But I do have some ideas, as this is meant to be a previsualization of a scene in my next novel, The Big Aha. Loulou is luring Morton and his helper-rat Skungy to follow her.

The composition was inspired by a Joan Brown painting The End of the Affair, which I just saw in an exhibit that’s at the San Jose Museum of Art till March 11. And I used a thick medium to build up an impasto finish with kind of a van Gogh look on the left. As always, originals and prints of my paintings are for sale on my Paintings page.

I have a small new book out, it’s called Surfing the Gnarl, and it’s from the “PM Outspoken Authors” series at PM Press in Oakland.

The book has two of my more outrageous short stories, a new essay of mine about science and literature called “Surfing the Gnarl,” and an interview conducted by Terry Bisson, the series editor.

I’ll be having a launch party for this slim volume at the funky Green Arcade bookstore near Gough and Market Street in San Francisco, 7 PM, Tuesday, February 7.

Looking a little further ahead, I’ll be reading from Surfing the Gnarl or perhaps my autobiography Nested Scrolls or possibly my recently completed Turing & Burroughs at an SF in SF gathering at 7 PM on Saturday, February 11. I’ll be joined on the podium by the eminent SF writers K. W. Jeter and Jay Lake, also reading from their work.

Whose News?

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

You may have noticed that in my blog posts, I tend not to talk directly about the political stories that you see in the news. My preference is to post about the things that you don’t see in the news. Found art, surreal events, philosophical ruminations, science-fictional concepts, notes on the craft of writing, day-to-day beauty found within the real life unfolding around me.

Whenever I see a news story, my first thought is: Why do “they” want me to think about this? Who are “they”? An age-old question. The one-percenters, the media barons, the commercial interests, sure. I’ve always felt that there’s no essential difference among the three elements of TV: (1) News, (2) Ads, and (3) Entertainment. All are selling fear of death, lust for glamour, and a desire to buy.

Having known a lot of politically active friends over the years, I’d also suggest that the news-cycle-spinning “they” also includes the political junkies and those with a perpetual longing for a distraction from daily life. “I can’t clean up the house while XXX are suffering in YYY!”

There’s always something terrible going on…somewhere…and I don’t like to give consensus-reality’s bad news a majority of my mind. I only have the one life—must I spend all of it waiting for when it’s officially okay to be happy?

Restating my position one more time: all news is in one way or another a lie, a hype, a scam, and a distraction from the warm human faces and the gnarly nature of the now moment.

So that’s why I avoid getting into political threads on Rudy’s Blog. I want it to be “about” the neglected topics other than the concerns shoved down our throats by the media and the countermedia news.

Long live transfinite mountains, the hollow earth, time machines, fractal writing, aliens, dada, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, teleportation, artificial reality, robots, pod people, hylozoism, endless shrinking, intelligent goo, antigravity, surrealism, software highs, two-dimensional time, gnarly computation, the art of photo composition, pleasure zappers, nanomachines, mind viruses, hyperspace, monsters from the deep and, of course, always and forever, the attack of the giant ants!


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