I feel odd now, between books. Like I just got out of the pen. (Pun!) Or out of the cave. Trying to relax, to slow down the art factory machine. I should be paying attention to the world while I can. Enjoying it. Doing nothing. It’s surprisingly hard, that.

I did put out the new Flurb. And I spent one evening listening to some of my old vinyl records. I came across a great oddball pscychobilly LP, Destination Zululand, by a group called King Kurt. And I’m taking a few pictures (like those shown today) with my new Canon S90.

I finished a new painting, Flower Dream, last week, acrylic on canvas, 40″ by 30″. I think this picture might be the “dream” of the somewhat ordinary flower at the lower right corner. The picture arose fairly spontaneously. The first thing that went in were those two big red shapes, the fork and the hook. I combined the paint left over from my previous picture, At the Core of the World, and filled in the background. And then I kept on adding stuff to make it jungly.

I spent a couple of days retweaking the design of my art book, Better Worlds—I put in my latest pictures, and thought of a way to lower the page count by putting the picture notes all together at the end of the book. The book’s a mere $26 right now, and you can get an e-book edition for a laughable $5. We’re givin’ this stuff away!

The other day Sylvia and I went to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in San Francisco, we hadn’t been in the city for awhile. MOMA has a 75th anniversary show on, featuring pictures from their permanent collection, not all of which I’ve seen on their walls before. I admired a really nice painting from 1962, James Weeks Looking West from Spanish Fort – Baker Beach #3.

And I saw a wonderfully red pre-figurative California abstract painting by Elmer Bischoff. I liked this particular work so much that I’m going back to oil paint (instead of acrylic) for my next painting.

After MOMA, we split up for awhile, and I walked through the back streets to the Hobart Building on Market Street near 2nd Street and near Montgomery Street. There’s a space on the ground floor in there called the Variety Screening Room, it’s like a small film theater, but can also be used for spoken word presentations. The space is managed by the Variety Children’s Charity, and is rented out by various other groups, including my pals at SF in SF, that is, Science Fiction in San Francisco.

I’ve read at SF in SF several times, and will be reading from my upcoming Ware Tetralogy on May 22, 2010. I’ll also be reading from the same book at Borderlands on Valencia Street a month earlier, that is, on April 24, 2010.

[Detail of James Rosenquist, Leaky Ride for Dr. Leakey, a sexual (in my opinion) painting at SF MOMA.]

The redoubtable Rina Weisman of SF in SF also arranged for me to have a two-month art show in April and May, 2010, in the smallish lobby and bar area off the Variety Preview Room. The reason I went there the other day was to estimate how many paintings I could fit in. Probably ten or maybe twelve. The lounge is unprepossessing in the daytime, but in the evening, with a crowd of people and drinks on sale, it warms up. I’ll be posting about the opening night party as the time draws near.

It was a cold, windy day and I was worrying about some health problems. Walking to the Hobart Building and then on towards Union Square I felt weary and old. Looking at the clusters of pedestrians, I imagined our dead selves as mirror-images walking upside-down underground, our ghosts shadowing us, all us barely afloat on a quicksand of death, and me, in particular, more than half-dead already. The flame of life flickers; we fret and strut for naught. I wanted to be home lying on my couch. Or at least kvetching to someone. Kvetching always makes me feel better. Another reason to write…

On a whim, I walked into the Mechanics Institute Library, a San Francisco institution I’d heard of but never visited. It’s on Post Street near Market. The Mechanics Institute Library is a very cool place, it’s a private library that you can join—like you might join a gym. If I lived in San Francisco I’d definitely sign up, if only to have a pleasant place to hang out downtown. And they host a word-famous chess club.

Jim Flack, a friend from college, works there as a director, and had mentioned once that I should come see him. Being at a psychic low-point, I was glad for a chance to reconnect with an old friend. Good old Flack.

This morning I was working on amassing photos to accompany Nested Scrolls. I only have digital photos going back to 2004. So I’m hauling out some of our old photo albums and scanning pictures out of them. The process is very nostalgic for me, here on the brink of old age.

[I saw a UFO today. Sorry for the poor image quality!]

Nested Scrolls and Jim and the Flims are done, and I feel really good about that. I can kick back and write journal notes for six months or so. There are slight differences between journal notes, travel notes, and writing notes. The journal notes aren’t necessarily about anything significant in the outer world. They’re more like the free play of thought—and a way of finding out what I think and feel.

Today I went to yoga class. Still in my sweats, I’m typing in my laptop journal here in the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting shop. Daily life seems so precious. The cafe around me feels like a lovely reef in shallow water. We’re anemones, we patrons, mollusks, crustaceans, fish—splashes of life and color in the eddying and all-pervading fluid of the air. And our innards are aglow from the luminiferous aether, yas. I like the sounds and colors, and the shapes and voices of people. The ambient music sets up sympathetic vibrations in my nerves.

[The Canon S90 brings out the full gnarl of your favorite subjects!]

Two attractive forty or fifty year old women are sitting at the table in front of me, engaged in an animated conversation in Japanese. I like the way that foreign languages include expressive sounds that are different than ours. I’m talking about sounds that might play a role like our “uh, oops, hmmm, yuck, huh, aha, eek, heh, grrr, yum, ugh, er, yay, whee,” and so on. Of course I can’t be totally sure, but I feel like I can recognize the interjections because they’re inflected in a special way. Maybe “interjection” isn’t quite the right word—I’m looking for the technical linguistic phrase that means “a vocalization that carries emotive meaning even though it is not a dictionary word.”

When I was a grad student at Rutgers, I attended a seminar at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study with a Japanese math professor, Gaisi Takeuti, who helped me with my thesis work in set theory. We became friends and I had lunch with him every week. I loved listening to him. He had this way of interspersing his somewhat rickety English with these great, deeply informative sounds, Japanese versions of emotive interjections.

I finished writing Jim and the Flims this week and sent it off to my agent. I think it turned out quite well—this fall I was feeling a little uncertain, but I think I pulled the book together very nicely over the last few months. I’d even go so far as to say that Jim and the Flims rocks.

In any case, I’m done with it for awhile. Eventually, as it moves towards publication, I’ll be going over it again, at least for copy editing, but right now I’m off duty.

[The photos today are from my new Canon S90.]

It’s always bittersweet to finish working on a novel. I get to love the characters and their world, and I’m sorry to leave them. When I’m working on a novel, I have something to do all the time, something to think about. This latest trek took me a year and two months.

When I start, the finish seems mythical, imaginary, a dream. And I’ve heard novelists say that there’s a period in the middle when it’s like you’re rowing across a vast sea or lake—you can no longer see the starting point, and the ending isn’t in sight. And then, as the months wear on, I become desperate to finish, bent on bringing down my quarry. Putting it differently, carrying the weight of the incubating novel becomes unendurable. I long for deliverance. And then, in a rush, it comes.

For distraction I’ve been painting again. And I have my new Canon S90 to play with. It just arrived day before yesterday, and I haven’t really used it out in great shooting conditions, mostly I’ve been shooting in semi-darkness around the house. The image quality seems pretty decent, and the thing fits in my pocket. I’m still just barely learning how to tweak the thing for optimum image quality, so don’t judge the camera too harshly on the basis of today’s so-so pix.

I’ve been doing a little business as well. It looks like my memoir Nested Scrolls will come out in a collector’s edition from the high-quality PS Publishing in England late in 2010 or early in 2011. And the Tor/Forge will probably publish an edition in the US in the fall of 2011.

I’ve been straightening out my ebook contracts and editions, too. I dug out all my old book contracts and figured out who I’ve assigned e-rights to, and so on. And my agent and I are getting some of the contract clauses straightened out.

Even though ebooks probably accounted for less than 5% of publishers’ sales last year, writers, agents and publishers are getting the feeling that the e-wave is finally starting to rise—so we’re all paddling like mad to get into place.

It’s been raining pretty much this week, but the papers don’t seem to mention it. My theory is that the all-bad-news media only likes to report on rain:
(a) If they can say, “Well, we’re still having a drought, and this rain isn’t enough,”
(b) If they can report some hideous accident or power outage, or
(c) They can say, “We’ve had too much rain, and mudslides are imminent.”
Right now we’re getting just enough of the rain we need, everything is green and growing, and spring is inching forward—and it may not be news, but it’s wonderful.

So now what do with myself with my novel done? For sure I’m not going to dive into another novel right away. In the immediate future, I’ll be putting together issue #9 of my webzine FLURB. And then maybe I’ll write some articles and stories.

Or just relax and take it easy for a month or two. Walk in the woods, go to the beach, visit San Francisco, like that.