I got some new Adobe software this week, including a copy of Lightroom, which I’m just now figuring out how to use. It’s funny about software, there used to be this notion of reading a book about how to use it, but now it’s more common that you just dig in and fool with it. The real trick is always that you need to get a mental image of what the software is doing, and once you have that, you can get somewhere.

The Lightroom Help menu has this one option, I like, “The Five Rules…” which takes about two minutes to read, and the fifth rule is “Enjoy.” Photographers often aren’t the most text-oriented kinds of people, so this is the kind of help they like.

This summer my nephew, Embry Rucker III, a great professional photographer, convinced me to start using Lightroom.

The first few of today’s pictures were taken at Rudy Jr.’s house, and in his Berkeley neighborhood. I shot them as JPG files.

But the main thing I want to mention today is this great book I just finished, Travels in Siberia, by Ian Frazier.

Travels in Siberia grew out of a three-part article that Frazier wrote for the New Yorker. It’s grown into a massive, white Siberia-sized book, describing five different trips that Frazier took. The most dramatic trip is a long August roadtrip driving a van from St. Petersburg on the Baltic Sea to Vladivostok on the Pacific. And a close second is the trip through the deep Siberian snows north of Yakutsk one March—temperatures still at 20 and 40 F below zero.

“I asked if I should buy a travel directory of Siberian campgrounds, and Victor laughed. He said I would understand better what Siberia was like once I got there.”

The last three of today’s pictures were shot in Santa Cruz as RAW files (with the same camera). Lightroom makes easier to handle RAW files, and to develop a smooth workflow that saves the 16-bit RAW as a kind of digital “negative.” Shooting in 16-bit RAW files instead of the 8-bit JPG files lets you maybe get a richer color. And then you save it as a JPG anyway, for something like posting on a blog. Embry III explained this to me.

We saw a band of street musicians in Santa Cruz who call themselves Alien Vomit, kind of a good name. They use an accordian. It’s the old Camper Van Beethoven heritage.

The fun thing about the Siberia book is just how different things are in Russia. The author insists on seatbelts in the van, and learns that nobody in Russia ever wears seatbelts. The only time he ever saw anyone use a seatbelt was when they took it out of their car and used it to connect the rear bumper to the front bumper of another car so they could tow it.

Humongous sunset in Cruz today. On the campus radio station they were playing reggae and calling the town “Rasta Cruz.”

I’m sorry to have finished my Siberia book, it was fun to live inside it for a week. Highly recommended.

In the course of my work on Turing & Burroughs, I’m thinking of a scene in which Alan Turing, disguised as William Burroughs goes to the Burroughs parents in Palm Beach, Florida, in January, 1955. And I’m trying to visualize what this would be like.

I found a photo of Mortimer Burroughs with Billy, Jr., on a memorial page, apparently made by a fan or by some people who make a living of creating memorial pages. Mote, as he was called, was born in St. Louis in 1885. So he was seventy in 1955. He lived ten more years.

Mote’s wife Laura Lee Burroughs was three years younger, and from Georgia. I found Laura Lee’s photo in this cool article, “Like Mother, Like Son,” about some books on flower-arranging that she wrote for the Coca-Cola company!

I also learned that the Burroughs home was at 202 Sanford Ave in Palm Beach, here’s a satellite view. I’ve been using the street-view mode on this page to walk around near the house. Palm Beach is this narrow strip of sand with water on the inland side as well.

I’d forgotten that Bill’s son William Burroughs, Jr., known as Billy, may have living with the grandparents, which complicates things.

Billy was born in 1947, so he’d be eight in 1955. Our Burroughs did visit his parents in Palm Beach in October, 1954, according to Ted Morgan’s biography, Literary Outlaw, p. 251. Wikipedia indicates that Billy Jr. only moved there with grandparents when he was 10, or in 1957, but I’m guessing this is an error.

In any case, I got the location of the house from Billy’s third (and posthumous) book, Cursed from Birth, available new and used online. I have his earlier autobiographical novels, Speed and Kentucky Ham. It’s kind of a sad story, he died young. Here’s a bit from Cursed from Birth about the Palm Beach home.

Mote and Laura moved to Palm Beach so I could grow up wholesome. For ten years, we lived at 202 Sanford Avenue, a street lined with royal palm trees where the houses get smaller and some of them have no servants. My grandparents ran an antique-furniture business on Worth Avenue, Cobblestone Gardens, where they sold elegant antiques to the very rich, and always met them at the door. The house was full of the creaking stuff. Some of the rooms were furnished according to different historical periods, but after Mote was gone, my grandmother sold a lot of it and scrambled up the rest. We had a lot of old Victorian articles with taloned paws carved on the legs; one coffee table actually had wings.

On Friday we had the opening of my art show at the Borderlands Café on Valencia Street in San Francisco. We got about 20 guests for the opening, and the place was full in any case, with a steady flow of hipsters. My artist friends Paul Mavrides and Hal Robbins showed up with some of Hal’s fractal-freak friends from NYC, R. U. Sirius was there with a “blotter artist,” my son Rudy Jr. was there with his family, fellow Flurb writer Charlie Jane Anders of io9 (and frequent contributor to Flurb) showed up, and my freestyle SF-writer pal Michael Blumlein appeared with his wife and we had dinner together. I shot a video right after hanging the pictures, for what it’s worth, here it is.

Borderlands has a pretty good supply of signed prints of my paintings right now, with more coming into stock later this week. I’ve been making them at home on highest quality Museum Etching paper, 19 x 13 inches, using a Canon Pro9500 inkjet printer with ten colors of ink. Just the paper and ink cost me about $10 per print, and right now we’re selling them at Borderlands for, I think, $35 each. You can also buy unsigned prints of my paintings online for a comparable price at rudy.imagekind.com, where you can select various sizes, paper grades and possible frames.

On Halloween, Sylvia and I went walking on Tate Avenue in Los Gatos, which has come, over the years, to be a really popular holiday street. The people who live there go all out with the decorations, and ton of trick-or-treaters turn up. Dig this light-up zombie rising from the grave as a little girl darts past.

Halloween is an odd holiday, kind of unique to the US—it’s not exactly like All Saints Day or the Day of the Dead. It’s more about facing your most horrible fears and somehow finding them funny, or at least thrilling. And getting candy.

I liked this topical icon of Brian “The Beard” Wilson, the SF Giants’ closer pitcher. Though we rarely watch sports, we got into viewing the whole Series. It’s surprising how many really close and somewhat arbitrary calls the umps have to make, and interesting that there seems to be no movement towards using instant replays to check the calls on the field. Maybe that would slow things down too much. As it stands, there’s an element of “psych” in the calls. It also surprised me how often there are tiny little-known sub-codicils of the rules that come into sway.

After California beat Texas in the series, I was hoping it would be a good omen for the congressional elections. Oh well!

When all else fails, I always like to take a walk in the woods. I’m making good progress on on Turing & Burroughs, I have Alan Turing at the Burroughs family house in Palm Beach right now. Shapeshifter that he is, he’s wearing Bill Burroughs’s body-form and is trying to tell the Burroughs parents that he’s not really Bill, and of course they think he’s insane. I think he’ll have to bail from there quite soon.