Have a great holiday! This is a long post, with some stuff to read, it may have to last you till 2011…

This month I made some imaginative efforts and finished the next chapter “Dispatches From Interzone” of my novel in progress, Turing & Burroughs. As I mentioned before, I wrote this chapter is in the form of letters from my Beat hero William Burroughs, some samples of which I put in my post, “Burroughs Letters, Tangier 1954-1956.”

Molding an SF action-novel out of William Burroughs letters is like collaging a landscape out of frames from the Sunday funnies. And I had to draw all those wacky little frames too. Or it’s like building an epic out of haikus. But I like the way the chapter came out. It’s funny, I think, and deep as well. You can read an excerpt down below, at the end of this post.

Right now I’m unsure of the upcoming story arc. To some extent I’m back where I was a month ago, when I wrote my blog post, “Skuggers”

It’s daunting how many scenes and ideas a novel needs. But I don’t have to write the whole novel at once. All I need now is to write the next chapter. So now what I need is to outline Chapter 8 fairly well, and also get some clear idea of what happens in Chapter 9. And the chapters after that will take care of themselves.

It’s a long process, after all. And there’s no rush. But that’s not exactly true. My sense is that I don’t feel as if there is a rush, then I might not drive myself hard enough to actually finish the book. Onward!

No, wait, Christmas comes first.

Anyway, in my “Dispatches from the Interzone,” chapter I did indeed get Burroughs to organize a trans-Atlantic skugger-star teep antenna, as I’d planned to. By the end of the chapter the construct falls apart and the individual skuggers go their own ways. And this is as it should be, because it would be too much of an onus for Turing to have a skugger-star tracking him on his road trip to Los Alamos.

It’ll just be regular cops chasing Alan, although, for a while, there will be more and more of them. We’ll see an ongoing attrition in the forces of control, as more and more of them will be converted into being skugs.

I realized today, it’s as if I’m telling the story of The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, but I’m telling it from the p.o.v. of the pod people, and I’m viewing these alienated mutants as a positive force. Which is, after all, precisely what happened culturally as the 1950s segued into the 1960s.

If near the end of the book, I have Turing pulling the skugs up into a higher reality, it vaguely correlates with Tim Leary lifting the hippies out of politics and into Lotus Land.

And what happened then in the real world in terms of the culture wars. What aspect of reality might I transrealize into Turing’s final move?

I’m thinking of the internet as being the thing that resurrected political action. And it could be that Turing starts manifesting himself via the web. I could even go transreal for the last couple of chapters, and insert myself as an authorial character, getting messages from Turing in “real time.” Like there’s an astral blog site that only I and a few privileged others (such as the readers of this blog), can see. Maybe I’ll give you the URL in 2011…

Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from the latest chapter. Burroughs is a skugger now, that is, a shapeshifting, mildly telepathic host for a symbiotic skug. And the British Embassy has engaged him to turn a basement filled with 64 captive Arab skuggers in Tangier into a telepathic antenna for tracking Alan Turing, who’s escaped to America. He knows one of the skuggers already, a youth named Driss.

The second day, Driss and the fellahs tell me they’re edgy at being in police custody. Only a few of them speak English or Spanish, but our short-range teep is working. The skuggers don’t wanna play ball. So I get the Embassy stooges to haul down a fifty-pound bag of refined white sugar. Everyone in the pit start feeling friendly.

The third day I double the sugar ration, and slime out some tentacles from my fingertips, plugging every navel in the room. Puppetmaster Bill. “Let’s all get soft,” I propose, teeping sexy images of mollusk reproduction. I chant whatever gone strophes come to mind, also feeding the skuggers’ real-time reactions into the mix. Feebdack feedback. The locals are easy-going people, if you give them a chance.

On the fourth day, even more sugar, also a carboy of olive oil. Everyone feeling festive—we shining and sticky with the sweet slick. I push my face against Driss’s so our heads merge. Plup! Feel real wiggy. I use my squiddy arms to gather ye rosebuds. And then we’re a starfish with a shared yubbaflop head on the Embassy basement floor, like the center of a wagon wheel.

I grow out a feeler with a lobster-eye to admire what we done. Our group face look like a gangland hit on President Eisenhower, a bald baby with slit-mouth scars and eye-puckers like bullet holes. Hopper and his boss upstairs are abreast of our session, they very pleased.

On day five, I engage three footmen to haul in hods of wobbly British pastries, barrows of dates, heaped trays of kumquats. The skugger fellahs are increasingly glad to see me. Great cheers. “Booo-rows! Booo-rows! Booo-rows!”

Driss and I plup our heads together, the rest of the gang piles on. We make a parabolic monster face, a dish-shaped teep antenna pointing towards the floor. We vibe our mind-rays through the watery gut of Ma Earth. You wave, we wave. Hopper is run a droopy tentacle down the basement stairs into my spine.

And then—lo! We pick up on Turing in Florida.

Happy X and a Great Y!!!!!!

Raining here this week. I love the rain. Everything gets green, including the moss on the trunks of the oak trees.

My son Rudy put a skylight in his living-room. It doesn’t leak!

I’m playing with Lightroom all the time. Used a blue filter on this color picture to kill the overbrightness of the light fixture.

I’d like to be reborn as a crow. People used to imagine that animals work really hard to get enough food each day. Turns out, they can fill up with about an hour or hour-and-a-half of pecking. The rest of the day is for hanging out. Cawing and flapping. And no computers.

We took two of our grand-daughters to this funny old place in Oakland called Fairyland this week. It’s very much a home-brew folk-art construct. When I was a boy in Kentucky, there were lots of places like this. Disneyland didn’t exist yet.

We even saw a puppet-show of Cinderella. I always wondered about the glass slipper. Would it be comfortable?

We hit a science museum the week before. “How many bones?” This sign made me laugh, remembering an Underground comic strip years ago that started off, “I’d just smoked two big bones of the good old green and…”

The year’s dwindling down. Around this time it gets to be hard to remember what day of the week it is. The calendar breaks and falls apart. And we take a little rest among the ruins of the decaying year, making merry with our relatives and friends.

The other day, I posted a lot of photos on my Flickr, I put the best shots of the last ten months or so into a collection, “2010 March-Nov”. In a sharing or deluded mood, I uploaded most of them at rather high resolutions—and I don’t feel like going back and changing this, so feel free to sample and print from there for private use, although I am still maintaining copyright over the pictures. If you want to buy a ready-made print, I have a lot of my photos on Imagekind as well.

I’m going to try and keep my Flickr photostream and my Imagekind gallery a little more closely in synch with the photos I put on the blog, so in general, you might find larger forms of the images there. Adobe Lightroom is making my photo-juggling a lot easier—with the downside that I’m spending more and more time doing it, even running outside and takiing more photos just so I have more raw material to work with. “Like a picture of a water fountain? You kidding me?”

I’ve been frittering away increasing amounts of time on delusional web activities like Twitter, Flickr, Imagekind, my blog, my email, Wikipedia research, my paintings website, free ebook releases, my book websites—it’s a little alarming, really. At some point I’ll cut back. “Only not today.”

Really, I get much more pleasure out of actually writing, but by now there are so many ways to avoid writing when I have my computer on.

When I remember to be an author, these days, I’m into writing my second chapter of fake William Burroughs letters. It’s an odd mind-set, to be using such a particular and quirky format to create text that advances the plot of a science-fiction novel. Like making a portrait out of collage snippets.

But certainly Burroughs himself did often think in terms of having his novel Naked Lunch or Interzone (as he called it) be SF. The juxtaposition seems odd in 2010, because, over the years, SF has ossified into a somewhat rigid genre, and the more literary or experimental kinds of work get classified as something else. Speculative fiction. But I generally still see publishing my novels as SF in a positive light. It gives access to a certain level of distribution and readership.

[Some cellular automata “Nested Scrolls” made my Capow software.]

We went and saw John McLaughlin and his group The Fourth Dimension at the Rio Theater is Santa Cruz last night. It was lovely music, sweet, rocking, and somehow spiritual. Sylvia noted a large number of men with gray ponytails in the audience. We first saw McLaughlin with a double-neck guitar and the Mahavishnu Orchestra about 40 years ago, in Princeton, here’s a video from that time.

Speaking of earlier times, here’s a photo from 1992, right before the appearance of The Mondo User’s Guide edited by me, R. U. Sirius, and Queen Mu, and designed by Bart Nagel, who’s wearing the flashy “sperm jacket”. The photo was taken either by Bart using a timer or, I think more likely, by Mondo staffer Heidi Foley during a photo shoot by Time magazine. Thanks to Bart for sending me this photo.

Coming back to my concerns about wasting time on the web, a good benchmark of where I’m at is the kinds of things that I think about while I’m at a concert. It’s an ideal chance to space out and the mind roam. Sometimes, more commonly with rock, I manage to get so deeply inside the music that there’s nothing else. With McLaughlin, there’s some chance of a meditative state—for me, he often evokes the mental image of being in outer space free-falling into a giant star. But I noticed that last night, I was spending more time than I wanted in thinking about how to promote my writing and images on the web.

Once again it’s time for a walk in the woods.

[Noted added in January, 2017: I put up this post in December, 2010, while working on my novel Turing and Burroughs. You can find links for paperback, ebook, and a free webpage version of the book at the Turing & Burroughs page.]

I’m about to write a new chapter (Chapter 8: Dispatches from the Interzone) for my Turing & Burroughs in the form of letters by William Burroughs—following up on my earlier chapter, “Tangier Routines” which appeared in my zine Flurb.

By way of getting into the right frame of mind, today I copied out some of my favorite bits from a book I’ve had for nearly thirty years, William Burroughs, Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953-1957, (Full Court Press, New York 1982). This book is out of print, but many of these letters are also in Oliver Harris (ed.), The Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959 (Viking, New York, 1993). All of the letters I’ve excerpted below are from Tangier, and are to Allen Ginsberg.

6/24/54. I’ve been thinking about routine as an art form and what distinguishes it from other forms. One thing… it is subject to shlup over into “real” action at any time. Do you dig me? I am not sure if I dig myself. And some [poser] is going to start talking about living his art.

6/24/54. I am surrounded by curious Kafkian hostility. A number of people seem to have taken a violent, irrational dislike to me. Especially people who run bars.… This is not imagination, Allen.

8/18/54. What am I doing here, a broken eccentric, a Bowery Evangelist, reading books on Theosophy in the public library—(an old trunk full of notes in my cold water East Side flag)—imagining myself a Secret World Controller in Telepathic Contact with Tibetan Adepts… Could I ever see the merciless, cold facts on some Winter night, sitting in the operation room white glare of a cafeteria—NO SMOKING PLEASE—See the facts and myself, an old man with the wasted years, behind, and what ahead having seen the Facts?”

8/18/54. I am having serious difficulties with my novel. I tell you the novel form is completely inadequate to express what I have to say. I don’t know if I can find a form. I am very gloomy as to prospects of publication… But still I need publication for development. A writer can be ruined by too much or too little success.

10/12/54 (date uncertain). Tremendous dream.… I walk along a dry, white road. There is danger here. A dry, brown vibrating in the air, like insect wings rubbing together. I pass a village of people sleeping, living under mounds—about 2 feet high—of black cloth stitched onto wire frames.… The vibrating is everywhere now—horrible, dry, lifeless. Not a sound exactly; a frequency, a wave length. The vibrating comes from a tower-like structure. A Holy Man is causing it.… I approach [the townspeople] and ask “How much will you give me to kill the Holy Man?” We… both know money is not the point.

12/13/54. You don’t study Zen and then write a scholarly routine, for Christ’s sake! Routines are complete spontaneous and proceed from whatever fragmentary knowledge you have. In fat a routine is by nature fragmentary, inaccurate.… Sex mixed with routines and laughter, the unmalicious, unstrained, pure laughter that accompanies a good routine, laughter that gives a moment’s freedom from the cautious, nagging, aging, frightened flesh.

2/19/55. I guess all writers suffer from fear of losing their talent, because talent is something that seems to come from outside, that you have no control over.

2/19/55. The novel is taking shape. Something even more evil than atomic destruction is the theme—namely an anti-dream drug which destroys the symbolizing, myth-making, intuitive, empathizing, telepathic faculty in man, so that his behavior can be controlled and predicted… this drug eliminates the disturbing factor of spontaneous, unpredictable life from the human equation.… Novel treats of vast… malevolent telepathic broadcast stations…

4/20/55. Why do I always parody? Neither in life nor in writing can I achieve complete sincerity… except in parody and moments of profound discouragement.

5/17/55. Just back from 14-day cure in clinic.… Everything looks sharp and different like it was just washed. Sensations hit like tracer bullets. I feel a great intensity building up, and at the same time a weakness like I can only keep myself here, back now in this doughy, dead flesh I have been away from since the habit started.

8/10/55. [Describing a crazy man who keeps accosting him on the street.] In fact there is something curiously sweet about him, a strange, sinister jocularity, as if we knew each other from somewhere, and his words referred to private jokes from this period of intimacy. On Monday, August 1, he ran amok with a razor-sharp butcher knife in the main drag, killed 5 people and wounded four, was finally cornered by the police, shot in the stomach and captured.… I wonder if he would have attacked me? I missed him by 10 minutes. The whole town is still hysterical.

9/21/55. [He gets very high on opiates and makes a scene at his rooming house.] I could only remember snatches of what had happened, but I do remember wondering why people were looking at me so strangely and talking in such tiresome, soothing voices.

10/21/55. [He’s working on the novel he calls Interzone, and which will become Naked Lunch.] This writing is more painful than anything I ever did. Parentheses pounce on me and tear me apart. I have no control over what I write, which is as it should be.

10/23/55. I am progressing towards complete lack of caution and restraint. Nothing must be allowed to dilute my routines. I know I used to be shy about approaching boys, for example, but I cannot remember why exactly. The centers of inhibition are atrophied, occluded like an eel’s ass on The Way to Sargasso—good book title. You know about eels?

10/23/55. Yesterday I took a walk on the outskirts of town. Environs of the Zone are wildly beautiful. Low hills with great variety of trees, flowering vines and shrubs, great, red sandstone cliffs topped with curiously stylized, Japanese-looking pine trees, fall to the sea.… The knife fight potential was… one facet of that moment, sitting in the café, looking out at the hill opposite, stylized pine trees on top arranged with the economy of a Chinese print against blue sky in the tingling, clear, classic Mediterranean air… I was completely alive in the moment, not saving myself, not waiting for anything or anybody… This is it right now… Actually I am so independent, so fucking far out I am subject fo float away like a balloon…

11/13/55. Arab Café: Sit down and had three words… just three long words, with Miss Green… Watching a glass of mint tea on a bamboo mat in the sun, the steam blow back into the glass top like smoke from a chimney… Some Arabs at a table .. It is unthinkable they should molest me… Suppose they do? And suddenly they have seized me, and are preparing to castrate me? It can’t happen… must be a dream .. In Interzone it might or might not be a dream, and which way it falls might be in the balance while I watch this tea glass in the sun… The meaning of Interzone, its pace time location is at a point where three-dimensional fact merges into dream, and dreams erupt into the real world.

2/26/56. When I was a child I thought you saw with your mouth. I remember distinctly my brother telling me no, with the eyes, and I closed my eyes and found out it was true and my theory was wrong.

9/13/56. [Describing a boy who wants to spend the night at his apartment after sex.] I indicate as tactfully as such a concept can be effectively indicated that I considered this project inconvenient in the widest sense.… So come along to Europe, Allen, and have a good time with the boys. I can wait. But just remember I’ll always be there if you want me… creak, creak, creak… [sound of a rocking chair]

9/13/56. And you recall my dream (described in letter of 10/12/54) about the Holy man who was making with a Malignant Telepathic Broadcast?… I am developing Holy Man concept in [my novel] Interzone. Latest Control Concepts: Anyone using telepathy as means of coercion must cut himself off form all protoplasmic contacts. He must always send, but never receive… He becomes an automaton, a ventriloquist dummy, withers in orgoneless limbo.

9/16/56. I find my eyes straying towards the fair sex. (It’s the new frisson dearie… Women are downright piquant.) You hear about these old characters find out they are queer at fifty, maybe I’m about to make with the old switcheroo. What are those strange feelings that come over me when I look at a young [woman], little tits sticking out so cute? Could it be that?? No! No! He thrust the thought from him in horror… He stumbled out into the street with the girl’s mocking laughter lingering in his ears, laughter that seemed to say “Who you think you’re kidding with the queer act? I know you, baby.”

10/13/56. Germs got no class to them. And the evilest of them all are the virus… So bone lazy they aren’t even hardly alive yet

10/29/56. My disregard of social forms is approaching psychosis.… It’s like the sight of someone about to flip or someone full of paranoid hate excites me. I want to see what will happen if they really wig. I want to crack them wide open and feed on the wonderful soft stuff that will ooze out.… Kicks, man, kicks.