Student of McLuhan that I am — aren’t we all? — I love to ponder how my use of this new medium, the blog, affects my thought patterns.

Usually I do weird new technological things for reasons I’m not fully aware of at the time. The lack of conscious awareness of its meaning is an essential aspect of any of new medium.

As a practical matter, it could be that by blogging, I’m doing research for Mathematicians in Love. That is, I can see some of my characters becoming bigtime lifeboxers or lifebloggers. I have a feeling Nokia has trademarked “lifeblog” but I like the word a lot, maybe more than my coinage “lifebox.” I guess the lifebox is the hardware, and the lifeblog is the content. The software is “Jenny,” like in Freeware? Naw, I need a better word for that code, which is embedded in the lifebox. Blogware.

I see my character Bela as wearing a ring with a camera in it, and that’s how he gets big. The win with putting the camera in a ring (as opposed to a brooch) is that then the users can see the lifeblogger. Just have a fisheye lens in there, and trust the blogware to run some Eric-Gullichsen-style anamorphic algorithm to flatten out the image or, better yet, to let the user put their virtual eye at the ring and look all over the place. Anamorphocam blogware. Generally it’s wise to wear the blog-ring on the opposite hand from the hand that you use for the more intimate duties. Uneasy rests the hand that wears the blog-ring.

And now strum a classic SF god-chord: Bela’s lifeblog wakes up and starts doing things.

I changed planes in Munich; they had some big Lego sculptures in the airport lobby. This one is of a tourist! My twin. Those black things around his neck are camera straps.

In Milano, about the first thing I did was go to the center of town to check out the Duomo (Cathedral) and its vast square. Here it is, looming in the morning mist, a bit blocky due to restoration-scaffolding. Note the galleria angling off to the left.

I went up on the roof. It was like walking around on a stone wedding cake, A huge stone Mandelbrot set.

Not many of us were up there on this November morn.

And the people down below were tiny. Such a volume of space!

Then I visited Milano's other cathedral, Prada store Numero Uno. Note fashionista peering into the window, she was about fifty.

A sneaked photo inside Prada. Most of the store is down below sidewalk level. Some really nice purses and shoes in those cases.

Later in the same galleria — which is a centuries-old stone stucture, two hundred feet tall — I saw this outfit. Note the oversize sport bag used as purse, not to mention the super-floppy knickers. The heavy-duty multi-buckle exquisitely-tooled luxury combat boots don't show up so well. This woman was about twenty.

And then I made my way to the FuturShow. It's about three hundred booths, each wholly closed off in a square tent some ten meters across, with video projections on the tent walls. Inside each tent are gizmos and booth-bunnies — spokespersons? It's all very high-fashion.

I'm in Milan to give a talk on uploading your mind into digital form, as in my novel Software. It was a long trip, I always forget how nightmarish and draining air travel is.

It’s always a big hassle getting dial-up service to work when I first come to Europe, in fact I have a lot of trouble even making a phone call, what with all those confusing extra prefix digits. Last night I was unable to do either.

This was kind of worrying me, to the point where I dreamed about the phone and network connectivity issues most of the night. Amazing how much of my identity resides in my ability to plug in. We’re social animals. The virtual link becomes of particular urgency when I’m isolated as on a trip in a land where I don’t speak the language.

This morning I wanted to get to the venue to check it out, they’d been phoning me to come in today. It’s this kind of trade fair/cultural event called FuturShow 3004, held in a different Italian city every year. I was supposed to call the organizers to request a taxi, but couldn’t get the phone to work, and then decided to take the metro.

But the Metro is broken, not just the train, the whole line is broken, like for the rest of the day. Italian style. And I’m in California business mode, all rushing and sweating to be at the FuturShow venue at 9:30 sharp to hear Bill Gates pitch the Windows Media package, and meet my hosts. But, then, seeing Italians all around me, and the big buttery yellow buildings, I snap out of it.

“Do like in Italy.”

Nobody cares when I get to the FuturShow. The organizers that I’m imagining to be “expecting” me are Italians, for God’s sake. Whenever I get there will be fine, even if it’s tomorrow.

So I looked around downtown for awhile, got two good sights under my Mars Rover belt — I walked on the roof of the cathedral, a great stone Gothic wedding-cake. And I went into the local Prada store, which may well be the original Prada store, given that Miuccia P. hails from Milano. Then eventually took a beat old tram to FuturShow.

At the show I posted roughly this entry into my blog and emailed home, kind of rushed, as I had to be interviewed for some afternoon TV show. They’re all intrigued by my “lifebox” notion of digital eternity via uploading your software. They even printed a little essay I prepared for Milan’s paper, Corriere Della Sera.

***

Eventually I got the dial-up to work; the kicker was that I had to include the prefix “1,” in front of the phone number. Yes, that’s a comma. The guy at the desk told me, “Put one comma your number,” but I thought he was using comma metaphorically to stand for the idea of a temporal wait, so I’d only put 1 into the number and had been trying to dial by hand with a hand-timed pause to represent that mysterious comma, and then plug the computer in… And it’s not like there’s a comma on a phone keypad. But when you type your number into the dial-up software’s edit box, you can put a literal comma. I feel a hacker’s nerdish delight at this little puzzle’s resolution.

The new novel title is definitely Mathematicians in Love. I got the first chapter done last week, modulo a few web-path maze-doors that I’ll inevitably have to carpenter in later on. I hardly saw or talked to anyone last week, other than Sylvia. Somewhat claustrophobic, not having the job at SJSU anymore. I’m still coming to terms with being retired from being a professor.

Having no life, I was blogging a lot, which meant I had all the more reason to stay *ugh* indoors. In one of his interviews, Bill Gibson remarks that he fears blogging drains off some divine essential energy that might otherwise go into writing. Takes the edge off.

But, on the other hand, could be as basically positive as warming up in my journal. Though blogging takes longer, both because you get into wrestling with the ever-refractory computer tech, and because bogging is seductively multimedia. Like I painted the dining-room pink this week, and now, saying that, I have to go and digitally photograph it and upload it, wah-la. Come to think of it, that's another reason I didn't get out much this week. The painting took three days.

By the way, the oil painting on the left is by Isabel, and the one on the right by Georgia.

***

Saturday night we saw a great band, Wilco. I’d never heard them, just bought the ticket on the guess that they’d be good. Saw them in a nice venue, the Frank-Lloyd-Wright style Performing Arts Center in my dear San gets-no-respect Jose. Tix were sold out, but I tried Ticketmaster again in the afternoon and lo and behold, we got two seats in the middle of the ninth row. As usual, Sylvia and I were the oldest people at the concert.

These guys rocked in an interesting way. No hair, no costumes, no spit. The workmanlike musician thing, kind of like the Zappa bands. The drummer looked great and ecstatic, his arms up in happy spider arcs. They’d play this simply catchy ballads and then wipe this great smear of sound across it, like an earthquake. Or pile up huge riffs and loops so that the big hall became an aural funhouse. Everyone was standing up after awhile, and then I was tired and I was sitting down, letting the music wash over me, my eyes closed, turning my head slowly, savoring how the sounds came in differently as I moved my ears. Each person there is hearing something slightly different. The soundscape is like a 3D cellular automaton filling the room, amazing how quickly it updates, amazing how it stays in synch (somewhat) with the twitches and twiddles of the musicians’ picks and knobs.

I’d been kind of brooding over being lonely and isolated this week, also worrying about what goes into Chapter Two of Mathematicians in Love, but sitting there, letting the great sounds of “Spider” wash over me, I was able to open up and let go of my gerbil-wheel concerns. To imagine that God was speaking to me. If I used to be able to believe such a thing when high, why not now believe it sober? The chaos, the big aha, the noise in the sky, the synchronistic universe funneling me the exact impulses that I need to figure out the next chapter of my novel about guys who funnel impulses to alter the universe. The cosmos dancing with me.

Peering deep into the sounds, examining their ragged edges, gnarly as the borders of the Mandelbrot set. Dappled sound. And for the next few days, listening to any sound at all, I realize that I can do the same thing, notice the little patterns. Sounds are like ripples, standing waves in a stream, chaotic enough to be universally computing. The origin of the universe was that one big Om, it's said, though better are the interfering overlapping beat-sounds of the throat-singing monks. But, again, all that creative wealth is everywhere, even in the tapping of my keyboard, the ringing in my ears, the hum of my computer, well maybe not in the hum, I don't think 60 Hz sounds can have much soul, any more than a drum machine or a leaf-blower, it's gotta have that raggedness to it. Why oh why don't drum machines do slightly chaotic beats? It would take like two lines of code, or one extra feedback wire in the processor.

Orpheus was said to play the lyre in such a way that animals would gather around, trees would lean over, and even the rocks would get softer. I’m imagining going a step past that, imagining a science-fiction guitar that's an analog process capable of emulating the universe. Can predict any phenomenon by playing it. “Hum a few bars and I’ll fake the rest of it.”

Somewhat unrelated thought. I remember a, I think it was Bugs Bunny, comic years ago, where he gets a tuba-like Horn of Plenty, and all kind of food comes out of it. Carrots. And then Elmer Fudd jumps up and down on the magic tuba, and it comes apart, and Bugs puts it back together wrong, and when he sqwonks it again, things break and disappear, and he says, oh-oh, it’s a Horn of Nothing.