Back in 1978 we lived in Heidelberg for two years, and when we came home to pick up our stuff from a warehouse in Louisville, we heard the Beatles song, “Back in the USSR” on the radio in a Winn-Dixie parking lot. Lennon [Whoops, reader Paul Reiners tells me it was McCartney] has this great, authoritative, Elvis-like voice in that song, “You don’t know how lucky you are boy, back in the, back in the, back in the USSR.”

Mutatis mutandis, lucky to be back in California. It rained a lot while we were gone. On the cut bank above the road, each pebble has a rain-shadow beneath itself in the sandy dirt.

It’s more or less spring now. There’s this one vine we always notice, it’s a wild cucumber that eventually bears fruits that look like spiky green ball-sacks, like chestnut pods.

The tendrils are wonderfully curly. Reminds me of Bernoulli’s spiral, and a slogan I often inscribe in the sand at the beach, “EADEM MUTATA RESURGO”, which is Latin for “The Same, Yet Changed, I Re-arise.” The mathematician James Bernoulli (1655-1705) had this inscribed on his tombstone in Basel along with a picture of the logarithmic spiral. I mention this in Frek. The plant, the same yet changed, rearises is the same spot each spring. Springs forth, bearing springs.

Beautiful nature, the same forms occurring over and over. The same computation classes.

The flow of energy in a growing plant is in some ways like the flow along a candle flame.

As above, so below.

One reason I’m going all mysto here is to get my mind off all the discouraging speculations I read in the Sunday Times yesterday about the Chimp's plans for the next four years.

Today’s Martin Luther King’s birthday, and I’m hearing him on the radio, admiring the power of his approach: non-violent protests against unjust oppression. I’m visualizing immense non-violent protests over the impending attacks upon the common people, maybe that could work.

I just read Martin Amis's 2003 novel, Yellow Dog in a 2005 Vintage pb edition. Some people say that everything slimy and vile about American culture stems from our pasty-faced British heritage. All on glorious display here.

This said, I loved the book and I was sorry when it was done. Such fun with the language. And such outrageous stuff, as good as the old Zap comix. I’ll list a few quotes that caught my eye.

“…women naturally like to prolong routine departures. It is the obverse of their fondness for keeping people waiting.” p. 4

“In the west a garish, indeed a porno sunset had established itself. It resembled a titanic firefighting operation, with ethereal engines, cranes, ladders, the spray and foam of hose and standpipe, and the genies of the firemen about their massive work of hell-containment, hell-control.” p. 12

As a maturing writer, I notice a tendency to censor myself, to make my work more palatable. Amis has a character attack such authorial softening.

“You mean you toady to the reader. Well, there is a feeling of ingratiation. A kind of pan-inoffensiveness. And you seem to subscribe to various polite fictions about men and women. In my view. As if all enmity is over and we both now drink the milk of concord.” p. 234

“As he climbed from the car a boobjob of a raindrop gutflopped on his baldspot.” p. 287

What a guy.

When I was in high-school, I really loved Lucky Jim by Martin’s father Kingsley. Over the years, Kingsley’s stuff weakened, his later books seem almost like attempts to justify authorial pig-headedness. Martin, on the other hand, seems to be improving as he goes on, and his characters’ nastiness remains, most of the time, external to his writing voice, which is increasingly humane.

His memoir about, among other things, his father Kingsley, Experience, is really good too.

Today the European spacecraft Huygens is in the atmosphere of Titan! Updates here. (Thanks to Brent Rasmussen for hipping me to this.)

Hopefully the space cuttlefish will return the visit soon.

When not in such hallowed precincts as the Public Library, I noticed the taxis a lot this time. It’s like when you’re snorkeling or SCUBA diving and you see schools of one kind of fish. Or, for that matter, like seeing flocks of seagulls or of pigeons. Or herds of cows. This one particular kind of indigenous “animal.”

Their cries can be heard at any hour of the day. From the moment I exit the airport until the moment I leave, the 3D environment is studded with the honks, near and far, hanging out there like Christmas balls, like stars, like raisins in dough. The honks respond to each other like barking dogs.

And when I ride in a taxi and suddenly the road ahead opens up — the joy with which this artificial organism leaps forward, devouring the tenths-of-a-mile.

One day it was raining and a slight man in front of us with a portable umbrella began dancing a soft shoe and singing, yes, “Singin’ In The Rain,” in a light, fine tenor. Channeling Fred and the Bingle. This guy is, however, maybe not quite all there. A taxi pushes its snout through a light and comes to rest blocking our cross-walk. “You’re supposed to stop at the light,” yells the para-Astaire, his good humor melting away. And then in the street he stops to glare at the taxi, perhaps it’s made some gesture of defiance. “You better not get outta there! I’ll break your head!” Emotional lability. But also a bit like a country person scolding a wayward hog. A civic duty to keep the taxis in line.

Looking down from the hotel windows I saw the taxis swarming like paramecia. Their distress when the road was narrowed. Nudging, nuzzling, honking.

We had to laugh at a sign we saw near Times Square. DON’T HONK. FINE $350.

That sign isn't in this picture, this is just a street scene, waking down towards the Flatiron Building, tinily visible in the canyon crack, there to meet my Tor editor David Hartwell. Turns out Frek and the Elixir is now available in paperback, and I thought it wouldn't be till April. Go git it, gaaaahs.