Our neighbor and dear friend Elena Vialo died peacefully this morning after a short illness. Rest in Peace.

These are some pictures from when she and her husband Gunnar came over for Christmas.

Yesterday, we were visiting with her. Near the bed was a book of poems she liked, The Essential Rumi, by the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Jelaluddin Rumi. One of us read the last poem in the book to her.

***

Say I am You, by Jelaluddin Rumi

I am dust particles in sunlight,

I am the round sun.

To the bits of dust I say, Stay.

To the sun, Keep moving.

I am morning mist,

and the breathing of evening.

I am wind in the top of a grove,

and surf on the cliff.

Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,

I am also the coral reef they founder on.

I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.

Silence, thought, and voice.

The musical air coming through a flute,

a spark of stone, a flickering

in metal. Both candle,

and the moth crazy around it.

Rose, and the nightingale

lost in the fragrance.

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,

the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,

and the falling away. What is,

and what isn't. You who know

Jelaluddin, You the one

in all, say who

I am. Say I

am You.

***

We'll miss you, Elena. It was a joy and an honor to know you.

TPM, or The Philosophers' Magazine has an interesting page of interactive philosophical games.

[This is a picture of Rudy Jr. beating me at Go. He's been able to beat me at every known board game since he was five or six. Up till then he was a good chess partner for me!]

The idea is that you answer a series of questions, and the game chides you if your answers aren't consistent with each other, and praises you if they are. I tried “Staying Alive” and “Battleground God.”

I've started looking at protozoa in my microscope again. There's a nice pond of them at the top of this hill.

My novel Master of Space and Time is back in print from Thunder’s Mouth Press, an imprint of Avalon Publishing being edited by John Oakes, formerly of Four Walls Eight Windows.

This is the book that Michel Gondry is interested in filming with Jack Black in a starring role. At least that was the news in Variety in May, 2004. I haven’t heard anything new on this front, other than that Midi Minuit recently renewed the option with me, which is of course a favorable sign.

Yesterday I went into San Jose and saw Ishmael Reed give a presentation at the King Library (the new joint library of San Jose State University and the city of San Jose). It’s always exciting to meet a legend of literature. Lately he’s mostly been writing non-fiction, the latest being Blues City, a book about Oakland. I picked up a reprint copy of his funny, wild Mumbo Jumbo of 1974, which I haven’t reread in a long time.

I was talking to him and he said he’d been reading about parallel universes and “spring theory,” which is a great twist on the usual term. I told him he should write a science-fiction story. He was a little concerned about getting the science right. I was like, “Just pick up some buzz words and use mumbo jumbo!” By the way, Mumbo Jumbo explains that this phrase comes from the African language Mandingo (ma-ma + gyo + mbo) = (grandmother + trouble + depart) = magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away.

Things have settled down and I'm working on MATHEMATICIANS IN LOVE. Here's a piece of a scene I wrote yesterday that I like. The point of view is the mathematician and rock-singer Bela Kis, he's fronting a memorial concert for his bass player Cammy, who was murdered by a guy named Sandoval, who nearly cut her head off. The German metal rock star bassist Jutta Schreck of AntiCrystal is sitting in for Cammy.

***

To get some energy, I led the band into our AntiCrystal cover, and that finally picked Jutta up. She bared her sharp teeth in a smile, left the smile in place, and growled the words of “Crying Chainsaw Clown,” her bass playing a funeral dirge that accelerated into a rocket launch, with Jen3 wailing and Naz sprinkling fireworks of percussion. It was very German, very metal, deeply good. Jutta plowed on past the final chorus, and we stretched out, turning the song into a jam, getting into a groove for the first time tonight, the music meshing like the wheels and levers of a locomotive, and winding up with multiple repetitions of the psychotic chorus.

Crying chainsaw clown ­- her head is on the ground.

Crying chainsaw clown ­- my head is on the ground.

Crying chainsaw clown ­- your head is on the ground.

Crying chainsaw clown! Crying chainsaw clown! Crying chainsaw clown!

The crude, English-as-a-second-language lyrics seemed uncannily powerful to me tonight, and for the first time ever I was able to break my voice into the heavy-metal falsetto register, screaming my aching heart out. I even began to feel some compassion for Sandoval in his jail cell.

***

Every post needs a picture, so here's a vaguely relevant painting by Robert Williams, a self-portrait with a starving clown in the upper right-hand corner.

***

For the next scene, I get to blow up the Tang Fat Hotel in Chinatown with a prediction machine that violates the Margolus-Levitin computational density limit! (See also the slightly more readable paper.) Jabbering tenants scattering like chickens from a cherrybombed henhouse! Louche sex workers popping through soft meat walls into each others beds!