Sylvia and I were in LA this weekend. Big billboards. Big city. Coming back home, San Jose felt like a tiny country town.

We stayed with our friends Kenneth Turan and his wife Patty Williams. Ken and I were roommates back at Swarthmore, 44 years ago, and now he’s a film critic at the L. A. Times. Internally you don’t change all that much after your twenties.

Kenny came to hear my panel at the LA Times Book Festival — only one other panelist showed up, (Sandra Blakeslee, who also got her son Matt to be on the panel), so I got to talk a lot.

I said the missing panelists had snorted nanomachines at a party in Venice Beach and were present in the form of one nanomachine every square millimeter on the room’s walls.

We visited Coop a hotrod/Juxtapoz artist friend whom I met via this blog. He made me happy by saying that my Bruegel novel As Above, So Below resonates with him as a practicing artist. Note the alien orange orb that appeared in this picture of Coop in front of his latest big painting.

Coop is twins, and he’s married (I think) to twins, Ruth Waytz and Ruth* Waytz. Ruth has a knitting blog and Ruth* blogs photos of her daily life, kind of an interesting accumulation.

Coop* made his own hotrod, which I find really impressive. This used to be a Model A Ford.

He also has a large collection of Japanese science fiction action figures, including a number from the Ultraman (?) series. Readers of my book Frek and the Elixir may recognize these as figures of Unipuskers. My son Rudy gave me one of these figures before I started Frek, and when I was casting about for how some particular aliens might look, I used the figure. Coop says that the shape of this figure is in fact designed to represent a boy who was very greedy about hoarding his money that his head turned into a coin purse! I’d always thought of it as a clam-shell.

Sylvia and I drove around LA a bit, we came across an interesting block or two on Vermont Street just south of Hollywood Boulevard. I loved that this store was called SquaresVille.

A mural worthy of the Haight, or, hey, even better, it’s LA, it’s the big time. I love that chrome stellated dodecahedron head. Coop was talking about painting chrome too, which reminded me of a ray tracer program by Nick Chapman that I used the last semester I taught at

This weekend, I’m going to LA for the LA Times Festival of Books.

I’m on a panel in on Sunday, April 30, at 10:30 AM – Noon, “Science Writing: Physics and Metaphysics,” held at the Fowler Museum Lenart Auditorium, moderated by Margaret Wertheim, and including Sandra Blakeslee and K.C. Cole as well as me. I'm there to promote The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

Yesterday I was biking on Saint Joseph’s Hill above Los Gatos. This fallen rock made me think of the Robert Johnson song, “Stones in my Pathway.”

Once I told a fried I’d like to take a picture of every single gnarly thing I ever see. I’m getting’ there! Oaks grow slower than other trees, and “think” more about where to go, thus their more convoluted trunks (= spacetime trails = worldlines).

The wildflowers are fixing to bust loose quite soon. Maybe next weekend.

This one part of Saint Joseph’s Hill reminds me of the Shire where the hobbits live. Cozy nature.

I always relate to the lone trees on the mountain slopes.

And here’s one more shot from that hilltop I climbed near Fresno.

When I read in SF last week someone mentioned a “Mundane SF” movement. They had a website, but it’s down, although you can see their not-entirely-serious manifesto in the Google cache. I think they were motivated by a desire to write SF that’s in some way more immediately about our world — their bete noir could perhaps be Star Trek or by extension any kind of FTL alien-laden Space Opera. I can relate to this, although, as I’ve said before, what bugs me more than FTL or aliens is stories where the main characters are military personnel / hereditary nobles. Whatever. It’s always good for a writer to have some kind of group to belong to. It’s too lonely otherwise.

Thinking about Mundane SF set me to reminiscing about the “Freestyle SF” barely-a-movement that I talked about with Marc Laidlaw and Richard Kadrey back in 1987, right after I moved to California. Michael Blumlein and Pat Murphy were co-conspirators in 1987, and by now I’d certainly include John Shirley, Terry Bisson, Paul Di Filippo and Bruce Sterling as Freestylists as well (what these last authors have in common is that I have co-authored stories with them, ergo they must be Freestylists!)

I got a surfboard in December, 1986 — which I never really learned to use — and Marc and I were brimming over with surfin’ analogies to writing. We were heavily studying surf magazines.

Here’s one quote we dug: “Life on the edge measures seekers, performers, and adventurists.” Marc started writing me letters in the surf-magazine style. “There it is, Rude Dude. The Freestyle antifesto. No need to break down the metaphors — an adventurist knows what the Ocean really is. No need to feature matte-black mirrorshades or other emblems of our freestyle culture — hey, dude, we know who we are. No need to either glorify or castrate technology. Nature is the Ultimate. We’re skimming the cell-sea, cresting the waves that leap out over the black abyss …” Marc was reacting against cyberpunk a bit there. The eternal dialectic.

Marc started publishing a neat zine called Freestyle, but it only went through three issues, and then, I dunno, he moved and it fell apart.

(This last picture I found in the same part of the photo albums I was scanning today, it’s Dennis Poague, a.k.a Sta Hi Mooney, hero of the Wares.) I kind of feel like refurbishing the Freestyle concept. As its meaning was always pretty vague, maybe I can just make up a meaning as I see fit. How about this for a start: the primary mission of SF need not be futurology. Certainly it’s interesting and valuable to write “thought experiment” style stories to tease out the possible aspects of imagined worlds. But even here, the writer isn’t constrained to make the SF assumptions be at all technologically likely as seen from the possibly blinkered viewpoint of the early 21st Century. You can do a thought experiment starting with any assumptions you like. Back to the main thread, I think a lot of SF is the sensual pleasure that lies in what I call Power Chords, about playing good patterns — and about Transrealism, that is, using the SF tropes as ways to delve deeper into the psychic nature of the day-to-day world. My main desideratum is, as ever, that it be Gnarly.

I gave a talk on “Gnarly Computation” to the math department at Fresno State University this week. That’s an actual tree gnarl in the picture above, that is, the original meaning of a “gnarl” is a lump like that. I saw the tree in the Sierra foothills the day after the talk. You can get a podcast of the talk at the button below.

You can click the following link to view the Powerpoint slides of my talk.

I soared into Fresno State about ten years ago to speak on, I imagine, cellular automata. Nobody here remembered my visit, nor the person who’d invited me then. But I recognized the buildings.

Fresno feels like Middle America, although more ethnic. I felt remote there. Like a robotically operated Martian lander. This picture shows a train of Chinese goods moving in containers, with a car wearing “God Bless the USA” ribbons. The same administration that's destroying our economy with tax cuts for the rich and paying the bills with loans from China wants us to be patriotic. Don't get me started. Thinking about poltics these days is so alienating. I comfort myself by remembering that even if we have a perhaps illegitimate (due to election irregularities) leader, it really isn't Nazi Germany here, and the Smirking Chimp really isn't a dictator. And, you know, we survived Nixon — although getting out and demonstrating against him did make a difference. It's curious how acquiescent the public has become.

The next few pictures are from a drive I took Route 180 east from Fresno towards the Sierras. I stopped near some orange groves and then I wandered around some cow-pasture foothills covered with big chunks of granite. I saw ground sqirrels, turke vultures, cows, Monarch butterflies, quail and really big black shiny lizards.

My hosts were the age of my children, mid-thirties. They were cute and smart and quirky, as math profs are. I love mathematicians. Some of them asked me a few questions from the audience, and I couldn’t tell if they were teachers or grad students. I’m getting so old. Not that I feel old, it’s more like I’m living in a different world from the young people starting their careers. Really, my math prof stint was two careers ago.

The talk went fine, but the whole exercise felt a little pointless. I no longer have any career interest in promoting myself to math departments; I’m never gonna be looking for an academic job again. And at this point, I’ve somewhat lost interest in promulgating the Wolframite belief that reality is made of gnarly computations. I still think it’s true, but I’m tired of pointing it out.

I drove down to Fresno in my new racing-green BMW 325i, which handles really nicely. I’m still beating down concerns that I might have selected the wrong brand, model, options or color — second-guessing my decisions is a neurosis of mine. But I am growing fond of what I ended up with. Of course on a big highway it doesn’t make all much difference what kind of car you’re in. It’s just driving. The handling excitement only kicks in when you’re on a two-lane twisty road. I stopped at the San Luis reservoir, which was full for once.

On the longer and more heavily trafficked than expected drive, I listened to iPod shuffle of the eight hundred or so songs from old CDs of mine that I’ve ripped. Sometimes a song takes me away; sometimes using the iPod is almost like being high, particularly when I bike or walk around with the earbuds in — high in that sense of not thinking about useful things, of idly spinning your mind. A downside of iPod is that it can feel like constant consuming, and my thoughts are to some extent shackled or slaved to the digital input instead of free to roam. This can be an upside, in that often my thoughts roam into lacertating or fruitless loops.

I filmed a nice moment hearing a song from the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, my car parked under a tree by the King River. Click here to view movie (43 Meg). Nature rolls on.