This just in: Bertram Niessen’s interview with me in the Italian ezine Digimag. (They posted an Italian language version as well.)

It’s mattering less to me if I actually do write a memoir. All that matters is that I’m writing up notes for—something. My fingers work, my brain, my word-circuits. It might really be more reasonable to write another novel. Or maybe just a couple of stories first. There’s such a powerful “why bother” haze surrounding any plan for a memoir.

“Wiseacring for the swing of thought” is a phrase used by G. I. Gurdjieff in Meetings With Remarkable Men. He used the word wiseacring a lot, meaning something like free intellectual play. Some people spell it as “wiseacreing,” by the way, but “wiseacring” seems to be more common.

Today I actually got a thousand words done on a new story I plan to write with Paul Di Filippo. Working title: “To See Infinity Bare.” It wasn’t too hard. The writing felt good.

I’m in the Los Gatos Coffee Roaster again. On my own. It’s so terrible when people have words appliquéd onto the butts of their sweat pants. Like the back of a van. Like the woman I’m looking at right now. Pale blue sweat pants with “H O L L I S T E R,” in an arc, the name of a small town south of here. But of course, to her, the pants aren’t terrible, they’re cool fashion. All a matter of convention.

If I weren’t going to write a nonfiction memoir, what might I write instead? I could scootch just a bit away from that, and write a novel that’s close to my actual life. A transreal SF memoir, in other words. Go with my fantasies and fears about nuclear fallout as a boy in 1959 at a German boarding school, for instance. And then follow my character back to the US and, whoah, NYC and/or DC are gone. Especially Texas could be gone.

A frikkin’ Texas-shaped hole in the surface of the globe, a thousand-mile deep shaft with a giant orange blup-blup lava lake at the bottom. A fence around the edge, and you can buy little baskets of bread and throw in the Texas-shaped crumbs for the Texas gnomes. Tiny cowhand gnomes down there in half-pint hats, shooting cap pistols. You can rent time on an ion-beam destruction ray and fry the Texas gnomes that you’ve lured out with the Texas-shaped bread crumbs. Gnome cracklins drift up and people munch ”˜em down. “Yaar!”

[Yes, yes, I know there are many fine people in Texas, just having a little fun here. I could always change the victimized state to my old home of Kentucky.]

Am I writing crazier than usual? Or is just that this week I give less of a squat? The numerical fact that Hylozoic was my thirtieth book, sets me to thinking about trying something new for #31.

On the other hand, why not another novel. It might be nice to write a really easy novel. Something first person and transreal, like Mathematicians in Love.

I had another SF vision today, of what you might call Oinkness. An alternate world or mindscape that’s made of pig. It’s not like encountering a single pig, it’s pure pigness. Pink skin, ears, perhaps an eye here and there, the stench, the squeal, layer upon layer of skin and meat, an endlessly cloned pig surface, folding back on itself.

Or maybe combine the sunken state with the Oinkness thing, and sure, have the sunken state be my Olde Kentucky Home. It’s the land of Oinkness down there. The older boys are down there wallowing with the pigs. (Note the highlighted rat in the motel swimming pool.)

German fallout, sunken Kentucky, Oinkness in the pit, J. Edgar Hoover attempts to arrest the hero, that is, young Russ, but Russ calls on the force of Oinkness to protect him.

[Image from Wikipedia.]

Wiseacring for the swing of thought.

Where to go with the autobio? Can I imagine being a woman? A businessman? A teenager? Buddha? A terrorist? A track coach? A tree? An ant hill? A marathoner? A puppy?

Probably only my real memories are worth writing, otherwise I’m just recycling received or second-hand ideas.

Coming back to the Dylan Memoir Model, I’m thinking it might be best to pick, say, five limited time periods, and to delve into each of these fairly deeply.

(1) Larva. A chapter during my year (age 12) in Germany where I realized I wasn’t weak or dull. I learned to cope on my own. Imagining the pine pollen in the rain puddles in Germany to be fallout from an atomic war. Worrying that I had worms. Painting myself brown with cocoa to play the black boy in the Huck Finn skit. The annoyingly insistent carpentry teacher, Brueder Rezas, wanting me to be licking the cocoa off my skin, urging me, “Ami: schlecken!” (“American: lick yourself!”)

(2) Artist. The marriage to Sylvia, our dual view. The grad school years. Discovering math, Zap Comix, Pynchon, hippiedom. Gödel. The night that Zappa record Chunga’s Revenge seemed to speak to me, 1971. Hearing whole Zappa songs in my head the car, no harder than understanding set theory. Creating Wheelie Willie.

(3) Transrealist. Isabel’s birth, relating to the fourth dimension and synchronicity—although I wrote about this birth already in All the Visions. Maybe a fresher fatherhood memory, something I haven’t written about. Or about transrealism. Life and science into fiction and fact. Back-to-back in Heidelberg: seminal works in two new SF subgenres: White Light (transreal), and Software (cyberpunk). And don’t forget Infinity and the Mind. My dream of finding crystals in the shale on the mountain slope I was climbing.

(4) Cyberpunk. Writer in Lynchburg, 1983 – 1986. Roland, the Vaughans, my career starting to happen, the birth of cyberpunk. The boat race, poling from L’burg towards Richmond. Talking in a field to that ex-MP guy John— what was his last name? Those kids from Richmond coming to see me, as if sent by Eddie Poe. The trip out West, effectively in telepathic contact with Sylvia as, over and over, we were able to find each other.

(5) Wizard. Retooling in Silicon Valley, getting up to speed, working three jobs, the Cyberthon. Falling in with the Mondo crew. 1986. Figuring out what computation means. Grasping the gnarl of natural life.

[Preying mantis face produced by sucking in my cheeks.]

But—why bother writing an autobio note at all? What am I supposed to get out of it? Self-knowledge. Bragging pleasure. Guidance. Publicity.

Working on these notes in the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting cafe. The guy at the next table has an ascetically shaved head, and he’s eating an abstemious salad of greens and goat cheese. Thoroughly, carefully, he chews a single wafer-thin slice of tomato.

It’s foggy every day in San Francisco this July, Sylvia reports, studying the paper.

A young woman at another table shakes her head, smiling. No health problems for her, not yet. I used to feel that way. Potentially immortal.

Who would really want to read a memoir by me, after all? It’s not like I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people who read the Contemporary Authors autobio note, which is online.

There should be some riddle whose answer I’m seeking by writing the memoir. What is reality? What’s the point of my life? How can I be happy? What did I learn by writing thirty books? What’s the missing book that I need to write?

I’m writing some catalog copy for Ralo Mayer’s small upcoming show in the funky Vienna Secession building, Sep 19 ”“ Nov 9, 2008. I delved through my online lifebox files to find my notes of the time I met her/him in Forth Worth, Texas, during the production of my play, “As Above So Below.”

By the way, I’d love to see the play produced for a third time. Aas well as the Fort Worth production, the the Elsewhere Troupe did a partial production of it as an opera for the Keep Santa Cruz Weird Festival (shown above). I have a version of the script online as a PDF.

I’ll keep re-editing this entry this week in the context of this post, both to include my meeting Roni / Ralo, to move it to 2006, and to fatten it to 1,500 words. I had 700 as of July 14, 900 as of July 15, and early on July 16, I revised it to about 1,200 words. I think it’s close to done—I’ll do one more version off-line, a Draft Four, and email that one to Vienna.

[Begin Catalog Text Draft Three.]

I start with a photo of Ralo Mayer (a.k.a. Roni Layerson) on the right, and his collaborator krõõt on the left, near “Rucker Lane” in Vienna, holding two of my books, I believe Seek and Freeware.

In August, 2006, I saw my transreal play “As Above So Below” produced in Forth Worth, Texas. The play involves an encounter that I had with a higher-dimensional manifestation of the Mandelbrot Set fractal, who came to me in the form of a womanly entity called “Mamma Mathematica,” or simply “Ma.”

The production was great, with beautiful dancing—Ma had dancers attached to her by ribbons, serving as small, satellite fractals—just as Roni Layerson is wreathed by her satellite identities and works of art.

Roni in fact approached me after the show and said, “Hi, I’m in your play. I’m a fractal.” She had orbited in from Austria to visit the Biosphere and to dance in the show. She gave me a copy of a tiny Phil-Dickian book, Multiplex Fiction: How to Do Things With Worlds, 1.

I had a strange feeling of mirroring when I talked to Roni, as if a hologram recording had come to life. Like me, Roni had heavy stubble; unlike me, she wore pancake makeup.

Being in Fort Worth as a visiting star artist felt like inhabiting an entry in Andy Warhol’s Diaries, which was my favorite bed-time reading in those days. One thing that struck me about the locals was how many of them were dressed like cows—that is, they were wearing white clothes with cloud-shaped black patches on them.

Roni suggested that these shapes were in fact designed from the panel-patterns of the Biosphere 2 dome. “The pattern of the shadows of the space-frame of Biosphere 2, which the sun projects onto the ground of prairie are in fact a kind of non-repeating space-filling Penrose tiling.”

No less a cultural light other than Ivan Stang, the High Scribe of the Church of the SubGenius, was present at the Forth Worth show, right at Roni’s side. It was wonderful to have Stang there in his long hair and rough face with a gap between his front teeth, leaning maniacally forward, grinning at the lines. And even more wonderful to have Roni beside him.

After the show we all went to some local art patrons’ house for dinner. Stang began peforming a Southern preacher routine: “Sun Young Moon, L. Ron Hubbard, and me were talking things over the other day. Sun Young talked about having done 110 Short Duration Marriages, with some lonely people having married Sun Young himself. I’ve done that. But, if a ShortDurMar is not consummated in 24 hours it is a grievous affront to ”˜Bob.’”

“So do you consummate all your marriages personally?” Roni wanted to know. “I’m interested because I’ve been calculating the number of possible sex acts that may have been performed inside the Biosphere 2.”

“I don’t practice what I preach,” replied Stang. “I’m a counter-Puritan. I tell people to have sex, and then I don’t.”

The “Ma” soprano Fiorella Tirenzi, was beautiful, and she came to dinner with her stage-wig on. She had enormous breasts with décolletage and a tight line where the mounds touched each other. Her leather blouse was open at the bottom, you could see her navel. Roni spoke Italian with her, and they shared some makeup, marking a tessellation of odd polytopes onto Roni’s bristly cheeks.

And then Roni said, “Come outside and look at something with me, Rudy. Science-fiction magic.”

We made our way outside , and Roni fetched a container of liquid charcoal lighter fluid in our hosts’ garage. With quick, efficient motions, she sketched the skeleton of a hypercube onto the lush lawn and set it alight. “Nobody has to invent the time machine, you understand,” she said. “This is a preconstruction. What I do these days is to imitate myself.”

“But does the pattern work?” I asked. “As a time machine?”

“It transmits matter through time and space,” said Roni. “Come on, I’ll take you to Vienna, 2008.” And it was none too soon, as our hosts were howling with anger over their charred lawn.

Roni and I flupped and shlupped, end over end through N-space, our ears filled with Yugoslav chants. And we touched down beside the Secession museum in Vienna.

“Every aspect in this building was designed by me,” said Roni / Ralo. “Preconstructed according to Metamartian edicts. It all follows logically from the architecture of Biosphere 2, the hermetic crystal palace of the Arizona desert, the Hall of the Martian Kings.”

“Even the dome?” I asked.

“Ah, that’s another Penrose tiling,” said Roni, pulling off her shirt to reveal an intricate tattoo on a lean belly. “My skin has preconstructed the Secession building into the past. I am, you see, a kind of alien jelly fish. A living blueprint.” Her tongue flickered, its tip rapid and forked. “Would you like to go inside?”

“Isn’t the building locked?”

“No matter, never mind.” Roni made a fluid gesture, her fingers trailing like cuttlefish tentacles. And the negative spaces around the building became four-dimensional black blocks that annihilated all distinctions.

We passed through the icon-filled rooms to Roni’s exhibit room. A low, dim space with a rumpled bed and a running refrigerator. A video machine. Mounds of tiny books. A cactus the size of a bicycle. And here Roni folded up like portable drinking cup, disappearing into another dimension.

Poking around, I found a honey jar filled with moldy mushrooms in the fridge. I suppose I ate them, for the next thing I knew I was back in California—but with Roni’s book, Multiplex Fiction in my hand, tripping my brains out.

I read the little book daily now, at every hour, wandering my monastic halls like a beadle with his breviary, musing upon Roni’s lucidities and obscurations. It’s as if the entire corpus of human art and philosophy has been compressed into this tiny paper pad, which is very nearly small enough to eat. From time to time I gnaw off a page and eat it, spicing it with a fine brown mustard.

Roni makes me smarter all the time, or perhaps it’s science fiction that does the job. Science fiction is a blue-collar philosophy of science, a tradesman’s hammer for nailing the spikes of daily wonder. If UFOs aren’t real, how can God exist? If there are no higher dimensions, how can time pass? If there were no antigravity, how could the planets dance?

I’ve learned from him to create some mental add-on software that I call a Perplexing Poultry philtre. It’s a totally bizarre lift. If you fire up Perplexing Poultry in a microsoft attached to your spine, all the things around you seem to deform into linkages of odd-shaped birds with weird multisymmetrical ways of pecking into each other. You yourself become a wave of perplexity in the Poultry sea.

Philtres are cutting-edge in terms of image manipulation. Rather than being a static video or text, a philtre is a system of interpretation. The technology has evolved from a recreational device called a twist-box that was popular in the early twenty-first centurly. Twist-boxes were marketed as a drugfree method of consciousness alteration, as “a pure software high.” The twist-box used a simple Stakhanovite three-variable chaotic feedback loop, rather than a teleologically designed process as is characteristic of the new-style Perplexing Poultry philtre, which is really meant as an enhancement to drugs rather than as a replacement for them.

Clicking and chuckling, I collapse into the subdimensions, following my mentor, Roni Layerson.

[End Catalog Text Draft Three.]