Out in the woods with Sylvia yesterday. Today’s text is another metanovel description, lifted from my current draft of Postsingular

{Start novel excerpt.}

The excitable Herb Stingray had created The Alice Fan, an unreadable metanovel wherein every possible action path of his middle-aged heroine Alice was to be traced. Waking up with a man, a woman, or nobody in bed beside her, Alice hopped out of the right or left side of her bed, or perhaps she crawled over the head or the foot. She put on her slippers or threw them out the window, if she had a window.

In some forkings she jumped out the window herself, but in most she went to take a shower. In the shower she sang or washed or had sex with her partner. And when she emerged, she found a maple table or silver salver by her bed bearing a breakfast of lox, lobster, steel-cut oats, or a single boiled ostrich egg. In some forkings, Alice had no time to eat, as her house was on fire, or menaced by an earthquake or a giant ant.

Now in practice no human author would have had the time and energy to create so richly ramified a document as The Alice Fan, but Herb Stingray had his beezies helping him by autonomously roughing in sketches of ever-more action paths. As the mood struck him, Stingray would and add voice-over descriptions to the paths; he had a flair for making anything at all sound interesting.

But, densely tufted as the branchings were, Stingray had only managed to fully polish Alice’s action fan for the first two and a half seconds of her day. Random assassins, meteorites, a stroke, the spontaneous combustion of Alice’s pillow — so many things were possible. Stingray had recently set the work aside, declaring it to be finished. As his next project he’d begun an inversely forked work called April March, lifting both his title and concept from the celestial pages of Jorge Luis Borges.

Stingray’s plan for April March was to start with a scene on a particular day and to document plausible variants of what happened on the days before. To make the work more tractable than The Alice Fan, Stingray was austerely limiting his branching factor to one fork per day. The initial scene, set on April 1, would present an ambiguous conversation between a man and a woman at an airport, followed by two versions of March 31, four versions of March 30, eight versions of March 29 and so on. Stingray planned to march as far as March 24, making a thousand and twenty-three scenes in all, linked together into five hundred and twelve plausible action paths which would constitute, so Herb claimed, an all but exhaustive compendium of every possible kind of detective story.

{End of novel excerpt}

I was interviewed for a podcast by Science and Society last week.

Put on your calender: John Shirley and I will be reading at 7 pm, Tuesday, April 18 as

“Dread Lords of Cyberpunk”

This event is part of “SF in SF,” a monthly Series of Science Fiction Readings and Discussions at New College of California in San Francisco curated by Adam Cornford and Terry Bisson New College Valencia Theater, 777 Valencia St., San Francisco ($4 at the door, free to New College community).

Oh, one more link, dread lord of VR Jaron Lanier wrote an interesting review of my book The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. One story I should have mentioned in my book is that Jaron once told me was that the reason he got into developing hardware and software for virtual reality was because he wanted to have a really good and functional air guitar.

Today I was driving around the East Side of San Jose with Sylvia. And I took these pictures. Did I mention that last week in SF I saw a great show “Beyond Real” of Surrealist photos with, my favorite, a book of text and street photos called Banality, by Leon-Paul Fargue and Roger Parry. Any combination of words and images fits. (And, no, I'm not saying that any of these photographed objects are “banal.”)

Here’s my Borgesian (I’d like to imagine) imagining of a book of the same name, that is, Gerry Gurken's Banality appearing in today’s draft chunk of Postsingular

Gerry’s metanovel Banality was a vast combine of images all drawn from one and the same instant on a certain day. No time elapsed in this work, only space, and any hint of a story you might find was only in your imagination. Not to say this was a random data dump: the images were juxtaposed in a somewhat arbitrary order, each block or combine accompanied by written text or a spoken voice-over delivered by a virtual Gerry Gurken — who wandered this time-slice at the user’s side.

Gerry had taken his metanovel’s title, Banality, from a 1930 Surrealist book of juxtaposed text and street-photos, and the name had a particularly heavy resonance because the particular instant chosen was the moment known as Orphidnet Time-Zero, 12:00:00 noon PST on the first day after Orphid Night, this being the instant when the beezies had implemented their protocol of having the orphidnet save, once per second, the precise positions and velocities of every orphid on Earth. At this instant history had truly changed forever, and what did Gerry find there? Banality, although do remember that, being a Surrealist, he wasn't necessarily using the word in a negative sense … think, e.g., of Andy Warhol's love of the ordinary.

[Something rather surpising and unbanal: the Sikh temple in East San Jose. We went in, and three holymen were praying upstairs in little booths. Back to the novel excerpt…]

By the way, Gerry, who was a convivial and gregarious sort, preferred to find the images for Banality not by browsing in the old data base, but rather by roaming the streets. He had a good eye; he saw odd things everywhen and everywhere. Often as not, the beezies were able to scroll back from current sightings to find nearly the same image in that database record of Orphidnet Time-Zero, and when they weren’t, that was fine with Gerry too. For a confirmed Metadadaist, a cauliflower was as good as a catfish.

Banality was hundreds of hours long, and it grew longer every day; Gerry had no intention of every finishing it. Despite the dismissive remarks that Darlene sometimes made about the work, it was some kind of cockeyed masterpiece, for Gerry Gurken was a craftsman to the core. Any ten-minute block of Banality was fascinating, disorienting, revelatory, leaving the user’s mind off-center and agog — unfortunately, after that ten minutes, the work very quickly got to be too much.

Banality was like some bizarre, aggressively challenging sushi bar that the average person would desert forever once having tasted a single item: horse-clam siphon, manta-ray liver, live nudibranch, starfish spawn — “Thanks, very interesting, I have to go.” Slam.

Finally the rain stops for a day.

As Thuy works, she’s letting events impinge, maybe listening to music. I’m practicing being Thuy myself by walking and biking and driving around wearing my iPod. The continual soundtrack. It makes things seem cool and arty. But it also gets to be too much. I end up waiting for some songs to end. Wishing I could have some quiet. Feeling rushed.

Thuy can replay thought sequences. She can replay scenes and then tweak them with “what ifs”. That’s what I do when I’m writing, in fact. I layer on a few minutes a day. I re-experience the part that came before, re-dream it, getting a running jump.

Some force is guiding her, its a Rebel Angel called Azaroth. Azaroth is guiding Thuy so that her tangled plot will reproduce Chu's Knot, which is an interdimensional jump-code.

Something I’d like to express in describing Thuy writing the metanovel: When I’m in the zone on a novel, really flying, dreaming while awake, I sometimes find that my life is changing. I get a synchronistic sense that the world is pushing back, helping me, collaborating.

I read this great graphic novel, Black Hole, by Charles Burns. It gave me nightmares. What terrific line-control and chiaroscuro.

Here’s a bit of the Postsingular chapter I’m working on, Chapter 3: Thuy’s Metanovel.

[BEGIN NOVEL DRAFT QUOTE]

“Westinghouse yam in alleyway,” said the improbable virtual spambot, formed like a waist-high two-legged sweet potato with multitudinous ruby eyes, wreathed in crackling blue sparks, peering at Thuy from a rain-wet alley off Valencia Street, the same spot where Grandmaster Green Flash had died. “Vote for Dick Too Dibbs,” added the yam, once he’d caught Thuy’s attention.

“Dibbs already won,” said Thuy, not bothering to sic her filter dogs on the apparition. These days she enjoyed wandering the streets alone, open to the ether, playing the patterns, riding the flow. The heavier scenes went into her metanovel, which was growing at a rate two or three minutes per day.

You could measure a metanovel’s length in terms of how much access time a typical user took to finish the work, assuming they didn’t set it aside. Thuy’s target-length for Wheenk was eight hours, about the time it would take to read a medium-fat book.

“I like Dick,” said the virtual yam, falling into step next to her, the misty rain drifting through him. “Does Dick like ye?”

“Give it a rest,” said Thuy. “The election’s over, you slushed pighead. Bernard Lampton conceded.” The orphidnet was noisy with the thin cries and hoarse roars of celebrating marshmallow people. To drown them out, Thu had her favorite Tawny Krush symphony playing, and she was enhancing the sound with violin squawks triggered by smooth gestures of her arms and legs: all but dancing down the street…

…The yam sputtered, twinkled, and faded out ¬— leaving Thuy with a sudden suspicion that maybe that hadn’t been the true flesh-and-blood Prescription John running the yam, maybe it had been the procedurally-animated virtual Prescription John from within her “Losing My Head” metastory. Hanging around the Metotem store the other day, she’d heard some of the metanovelists talking about this not uncommon phenomenon, which they called blowback.

Gerry Gurkin, for instance, kept having visitations from the simulated Gerry Gurkin of his autobiographical Banality, the virtual Gerry clamoring that he wanted metanovelist Gerry to edit in a girlfriend character for him to f*ck. Telling this story, portly Gerry had been darting hot intense looks at Thuy, as if he were planning to feed a model of her to virtual Gerry, which was perfectly fine with Thuy, and she said so.

Thuy was a lonely-but-coned-off emotional state where she was ready to accept any admiration she was offered, as long as it was virtual and with no strings attached. Re. “coned off,” she’d heard a woman actually saying that about herself the other day, as if she were a wreck lane or a crime site. That phrase went straight into the metanovel. The yam’s, “I like Dick, but does Dick like ye?” seemed usable too. Oh, for sure that had been the real Prescription John, a beezie animation couldn’t sound that stupid.

[END NOVEL DRAFT QUOTE]

Busy last week. Went to get my eyes examined so I can relace the glasses I scratched with sand in Grand Turk. (That's my retina.) I’m getting glass lenses this time around, sick of replacing plastic.

I had computer problems. Learned something. If you have a pivoting Viewsonic monitor, don’t use the free image-rotating Pivot software that comes with it, use your graphic card’s built in ability to rotate the image. Much better image now.

Saw some friends in Santa Cruz, including Michael Beeson and Jon Pearce.

A flock, school, herd — what’s the word? — of seals off the dock, mothers and children.

We walked past a somewhat scurvy motel that had a dead rat floating in the pool.

I ended up getting a BMW, it kicks ass.

Getting to work on (long) chapter two (of four) for Postsingular. Metalovelist Thuy’s point of view. I want to have a scene were Thuy walks into a “Rebel Angel Church on Valencia St.” And they chant and Rebel Angel Azaroth from the Mirrorbrane appears.

Initially I was thinking of lifting the Kamikaze chant from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow:

“Hi wa Ri ni katazu,

Ri wa Ho ni katazu,

Ho wa Ken ni katazu,

Ken wa Ten ni katazu,

Ten wa Hi ni katazu,

Hi wa Ri ni katazu,

Ri wa Ho ni katazu…”

“On and on, around and around. Searching in the orphidnet, Thuy found referents and meanings for the Japanese words, but the meanings didn’t matter, the meanings were bullshit, only the sounds mattered, like divine Aum vibrations bringing the Rebel Angel Azaroth into the room…”

But that seemed too derivative. So I looked up some riddles or lallagunut in Gaddang, a language of the Luzon Island Philippines.

Here are some good ones:

Riddle: Gongonan nu usin y amam; maggirawa pay sila y inam. (If you pull your daddy's penis; your mommy's vagina also screams). Answer: Campana (a bell).

Riddle: Itannu si canayun; udde ammem maita-ita. (You stare at it often, yet you never have seen it.) Answer: Sinag (the sun).

Riddle: Innacun cunna, gampamade nattoli. (If he says he goes, he means he comes.) Answer: Laddao (a shrimp). [For plot purposes, I think I’ll cheat and say the answer is “cuttlefish” or “squid.” (“Squid” is “pusit” in Tagalog and some other Filipino languages, although I’m not sure what it is in Gaddang.)]

Riddle: Ana tata tolay, accananna bagguina. (A person eating up his own body.) Answer: Candela (a candle).

How about using the candle/cuttlefish/sun lines for a chant, like

“Ana tata tolay, accananna bagguina;

Innacun cunna, gampamade nattoli;

Itannu si canayun; udde ammem maita-ita.”

He’s eating his own body;

When he turns away, he’s coming to you;

You stare at him, but you never see him;

I think it works better to just use cuttlefish/sun. I went by an actual storefront church on Valencia St. yesterday for atmosphere, here’s a current draft of the opener for the scene:

Thuy was digging the scene, eating her popcorn, and then Luis paused and stared right at her, drawing info from the orphidnet. He was a kiqqie, with beezies bedecking him like shelf-mushrooms on a forest-floor log. “Welcome, sister Thuy in back,” he called in his weirdly accented tenor. “Azaroth be with you. Chant with us, ay, I’m calling out the Rebel Angel Azaroth, ay, despised by the high lamas of the Mirrorbrane, guiding us to revolt against the dicky-ducks, a sword against the Pharisees, ay, our savior from the ravening Big Pig. Show us your face, Azaroth, caress us with your energies, ay, warm our hearts to heal this wounded world. Lead us in the invocation, Sister Kayla!”

[Note, we were in SF yesterday and saw the Calder show at MOMA.]

Kayla was the woman running the popcorn machine. Smiling and pressing the hands of her fellow worshippers, she curvetted up the aisle, taking a second microphone from Luis and beginning a chant.

Innacun cunna gampamade nattoli.

Itannu si canayun udde ammem maita-ita.

On and on, Kayla and congregation repeated those same two lines, drawing out the sounds. Searching in the orphidnet, Thuy found the phrases to be couched not in Spanish, but in the Gaddang language of the Philippine island of Luzon, not all that far from good old Vietnam. Thuy’s grandparents had landed there when they’d fled Vietnam in a leaky boat. The two lines turned out to be folk riddles, meaning something like:

When he turns away he’s coming to you.

You stare at him but you never see him.

The answer to the second riddle was “the sun;” the answer to the first was “a cuttlefish.” The chanted words overlapped, divine Aum vibrations calling another order of being into the room. Everything was becoming so very deeply intertwingled.

Warm air eddied across Thuy’s neck, making the hairs stand up. Luis kicked aside the silk Persian rug to reveal an pattern inscribed on the floor, an octagon with a square drawn on the inner side of each edge — a beezie agent told Thuy the pattern was a flattened hypercube — and here came Azaroth, or the upper part of him anyway, the lower half of his ethereal form sticking down through the floor.

[I saw the famous twins in Union Square, nice to see them still out there shopping, they were already a fixture 20 years ago.]