So I’m back from my stint on Charles Stross’s blog. I started with a post on digital immortality and went on to do a total of eight. I signed up to guest blog mainly as a way to promote the newly published US edition of my autobio, Nested Scrolls. And of course it’s an honor to work with Charlie.

[The awesome fountain in the Detroit airport.]

Today I’m going to be illustrating this post with photos I took during our trip to Brussels to give a TEDx talk in November. I’ll say a few more remarks about blogging, and I’ll bracket some notes on the trip beneath the individual pictures.

[There’s nothing like an irregularly-shpaed, fresh Belgian waffle made on a heavy iron cooker, quite unlike the frozen-and-heated straight-edged things you normally see.]

While blogging on Charlie’s Diary I posted some ideas about the novel I’m trying to get going, my working title is The Big Aha . Doing these early posts got me to polish my ideas and it makes the new project seem real.

[Chalk Space Invader icon on a restaurant’s discarded daily-specials blackboard. They’re everywhere!]

I get a heady, reckless feeling of working without a net when I post my ideas for novels that I’m still only vaguely planning to write. It’s like I’m flying in the face of the “don’t leave your game in the locker-room” adage. But I find it energizing, and a few of the comments are actually useful.

[Manikin Pis is one of the classic tourist attractions in Brussels. It’s nothing much, just a little statue of a peeing boy, supposedly set up by a happy father who’d found his lost child pissing at a particular corner. I’m posed like a degernate here with a vernacular copy of the statue—the copy includes, of course, a Belgian waffle.]

It’s not so much that readers’ comments show me how to build further on my ideas, it’s rather that they show me the objections to my ideas that will occur. And then I know to add material to disarm the objections from the start. And in doing this I end up clarifying my ideas.

[Lovely sunset down a long European street. I lived in Brussels for three months in the fall 2002 while I was working on my novel Frek and the Elixir and on my non-fiction tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. I had a grant to lecture on the Philosophy of Computer Science.]

Charlie Stross says he gets about ten thousand unique visitors a day on his blog, Charlie’s Diary, while Rudy’s Blog gets about three thousand a day. Charlie’s readers are very vocal, so if post on his blog it’s a bit like posting on Boing Boing. You need to keep a level head lest you become dispirited by ignorant gibes from a tiny number of trolls.

[A cool spectrum of gloves on sale in the St. Hubert gallery in Brussels, one of the earliest shopping arcades.]

Trolls get angry about certain controversial ideas. Like the many universes theory, which isn’t a notion that I care to use, at least not in The Big Aha. I’ll say more about this issue in another post. It’s not that I think the many universes idea is absolutely wrong, nor do I think it’s inevitably right. I’m simply making an aesthetic decision not to use it just now.

Many trolls have a strong emotional investment in the idea of digital immorality. Idea for a humorous SF story: “A Day No Trolls Would Die,” the title taking off on the title of the young adult classic about a farm boy and his beloved pigs. Digital immortality becomes available—but only for those obnox and obsessed trolls! So who’s laughing now?

Anyway, most of the comments on Charlie’s Diary were very friendly and helpful, and it was pleasant to have these daily interactions going on. So thanks to all those folks.

[A street performer blowing giant bubbles for tips. Symbol of the creative artist!]

When I post about my ideas for novels in progress, I have to fight back my atavistic fear of people “stealing” my “ideas.” But by now, I know that they can’t, anymore than someone could record an as-yet-nonexistent song on the basis of some scribbled notes by the singer. And really there aren’t any completely new ideas in SF, any more than there are new chords or new situations. It’s all in how you arrange them and trick them out.

[The St. Hubert shopping arcade itself. I love the shadow.]

This week I’ve been working on the names for my characters in The Big Aha, and on an outline. As I start this long ascent, I find a haiku by Issa (1763-1837) in a great book that Gerogia gave me for Xmas, The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass.

Climb Mount Fuji,
O snail,
but slowly, slowly.

Great stuff.

Merry Christmas, ya’ll! I’ll be posting on Charles Stross’s Charlie’s Diary for a week or two. I’ll probably put my first post on Charlie’s Diary today.

Where am I? Inside which reflection?

Before I go off into Christmas and Charlie’s Diary, here’s a Rudy’s Blog post with images of Bruges.

Cool wires on the electric train lines in Belgium. Ambient abstract art.

One of the big things in Bruges is the canals. At one time, the town was linked to the North Sea via a river which then silted up, leaving the town as a literal backwater. And, ah, that early winter sunset over a canal.

I lover pictures of reflections. Imagine walking down these old stone stairs into the wobbly mirrorworld inside the ancient canal.

The upside of being a backwater is that Bruges was spared the brutal and destructive waves of war and redevelopment that convulsed the second half of the 20th Century.

The have a local beer called the Zot, or the Fool. Love it. Zot is like sot.

Lace is still big there, although one suspects that these days a lot of the Belgian lace is made in China.

Cool old Gothic banister that looks like a dog.

I love the God’s eye icons you see. The eye in a triangle in a set of rays. I think I described one of these in Hylozoic. The point at infinity.

Great old fountains with lion’s mouths. I like the medieval notion of turning everything into an animal. It’s all alive. Our future form of computation. No chips, no biotech, just quantum computing things.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

I’ll be back on Rudy’s Blog in early January. Until then I’ll be posting on Charles Stross’s Charlie’s Diary . And if you want more Rudy, don’t forget about my new autobiography, Nested Scrolls.

All this fall, here in 2011, I’ve been busy editing some twenty years of electronic journal files which I’m planning to publish as an ebook called Journals, 1990 ”“ 2011, from my emerging Transreal Press in the early months of 2012. This book, Journals, 1990 ”“ 2011, will weigh in at about half a million words, really too long to appear as a print book. It’s maybe five times as long as my new autobiography, Nested Scrolls. Certainly the autobio is more of a shapely book, but I am finding some interesting stuff in the old journals.

At this point I have rather a lot of unused photos that I wanted to post anyway, so I’m going to mix a couple of them in with journal excerpts from time to time. Today we have an excerpt written in 1994. My last Ramones concert. Even though you’re dead, you’re still my friends.

“On My Home Planet,” by Rudy Rucker, 20 x 24 inches, November, 2011, Oil on canvas. Click for a larger version of the picture.

It was the Ramones final tour, and on March 9, 1994, I went with my wife and children to see them at the Warfield on Market Street in San Francisco. My son, Rudy, Jr. got thrown out during the first song for stage-diving, which seemed quite unfair, as he’d often stagedived at punk concerts before and everyone had thought it was fine.

I managed to stay in the pit till almost the end of the main set. Thanks to my fitness I could hang in there pretty long. Although today I like can’t lift my arms, they’re so tired from fending people off. Whenever it would be relatively quiet and I’d be near Joey, I’d yell “My Back Pages.”

The newest Ramone, C.J. the bass-player, is the one who sings that song, though I didn’t actually realize that when I was yelling to Joey. They were off key almost the whole time, but then Joey said, “Cheap acid, cheap show,” and, perhaps in reaction, their playing got better. They did about five more songs and left the stage and people are clapping, and C.J. and Johnny and Marky come out without Joey, and tear into yes “My Back Pages”.

I love the wall-of-sound quality to it. They’re like crucifying this old Dylan-folkie song on the wall of sound. And the words to the song are so great. “But I was so much older then,/ I’m younger than that now.” Too true!

For this encore, C.J. and Johnny had put on fresh dry t-shirts. C.J.’s T-shirt is like a circle with a picture of the Manhattan skyline. And over that is a big red SS in that lighting-stroke kind of jagged S. And Johnny is wearing a Charlie Manson T-shirt, and draped on either side of Charlie are his crazy woman followers, like Sadie Glutz, and Squeaky Fromme, and the t-shirt says “Charlie’s Angels.” Squeaky once tried to shoot Jerry Ford with a .45 automatic pistol, she’s still locked up. Charlie Manson and SS, ripping the sweet thoughtful sixties folksong “My Back Pages” to frikkin’ shreds.

It was one of the most awesome multimedia presentations I’ve ever grokked. I went back in the pit, and the wave threw me up near C.J. I had my glasses off so they wouldn’t get clawed off, but then I wanted to put them on to be able to see him, and there was a crowd-surfer over my head, and I was thinking, “I’m busy with my glasses, so just this once I’m not going to reach up and push the guy,” so of course he falls on my head. But I don’t think it did any lasting damage.

[You can’t really find a good video of the Ramones doing “My Back Pages,” although there is what looks to be an amateur video of it, with fairly weak sound, shot in Buenos Aires in 1996. Note again that Joey isn’t on stage for this number and C.J. is singing. But you have to imagine it about ten thousand times louder.]

At the end of October, the historical novelist Celia Holland got Terry Bisson and me to accompany her and her son-in-law John to a Raiders game in Oakland.

In Celia’s wonderful novels, such as Varanger, we often read about Vikings and warriors. Not such a far stretch from the types we found at the Raiders’ stadium.

I’d been a little uneasy about going there. But I had enough sense to wear a black shirt. Just about everyone else was wearing a numbered Raiders football jersey, but they were all friendly enough to me. The very fact that I’d bought a ticket to the game meant that I was on the right side.

I was of course impressed by the Raiderette cheerleaders. They had a separate group for each side of the field, and now and then they’d come down near the endzones. I made a video of them too.

The area where Celia had gotten us tickets was in the bleachers near one of the endzones. It turned out this was in fact the most fan intense area of all—the so-called Black Hole. Guys were dressed like Death or like pirates. Two ladies in front of me were cheerfully sharing a plate of nachos, and when for some reason the public address announcer mentioned the Girl Scouts, one the women said to her friend, “Eff the Girl Scouts!” Her friend echoed the sentiment.

When the opposing team—the Minnesota Vikings—was on the point of scroing a touchdown against us, nearly everyone in the Black Hole stood up to scream curses and give our enemies the finger.

In the fourth quarter, security guards began coming down into the Black Hole to handcuff and lead away those of our company who were considered to be too drunk.

We lost the game, but at the end, there was a calm, mellow feeling of mutual empathy. Together we’d weathered the storm. Note that the “5150” on this lady’s jersey is by way of being a Raiders code number—it stands for the number of the California legal statute for “involuntary psychiatric hold” under which people can be imprisoned if they’re considered to have a mental disorder that makes them be a danger to themselves or to others. That’s the Black Hole spirit!

A suprisingly fun and upbeat day.