My scholarly friend Leon Marvell has been visiting from Melbourne, Australia. Today he made a video of us in conversation, with an eye to editing the material in weird ways later on—the video not yet available. I made an audio tape into a podcast The topics were my novel, Turing & Burroughs, transrealism, surrealism, the richness of the world, the natural incompleteness theorem, predictability, the book business, self-publishing, and beatnik SF. Click on the icon below to access the podcast via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

And here’s Leon himself. Trained as an art historian, Leon now teaches film and media studies. Two years ago, Leon and I gave a talk on “Lifebox Immortality,” see my Lifebox page for more info and for a link to the paper. Leon studies art history, but now teaches film and meadia art, and is intersted in esotericism. His best-known work is his book, Transfigured Light: Philosophy, Science, and the Hermetic Imaginary.

Before he arrived, I found a two-dimensional mandala on the sidewalk.

As I mentioned, my wife and I were on a road trip through the Wild West earlier this month, and I’m going to start posting some images from that. Here’s a nice picture taken at the upper New Fork Lake near Pinedale, Wyoming. I love the wiggle of the mountains and the clouds in the water. As above, so below.

On the way out there we spent a night at the Border Inn on the line between Utah and Nevada. Saw a glorious Western desert sunset. In this photo, I’m standing in Utah and the buildings are in Nevada.

The dinner cost $20, and I won $20 on a slot machine. The room was like a storage locker with a bed and an air-conditioner. A pleasant place nonetheless.

With a solitary basketball hoop in the desert.

Exciting to be so far off the grid.

Last week I finished a new painting, God’s Eye.

“God’s Eye,” oil on canvas, June, 2012, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the image.

More about “God’s Eye” below, but first let’s talk about buying my art. I’m painting at a good rate, about one a month, and my storage space is getting full.

You can check out the individual works and the price-list at my paintings page. And note that you can buy prints via this page as well.

Here’s an overview image of my paintings.

Click for a larger version of the image.

Each of the paintings is signed, of course. Generally I paint the edges of the canvas so it can hang unframed, and I put my signature on the edge, as shown below.

Coming back to “God’s Eye,” I’ve always been intrigued by a certain image that one sees in old European churches—an eye inside a triangle. This icon also appears, of course, on the dollar bill. It’s meant to represent the all-seeing eye of God or perhaps the divine light within every object. In researching my novels with Bruegel and Bosch as characters, I got the impression that medieval people really did think God was watching them. So here I’ve painted the eye as looking down through clouds—like a spy-satellite. I made the “skin” in this image pink as a kind of joke on the fact that God is sometimes visualized as an old white man. What expression does the eye seem to have? I’d say it looks engrossed, with a possibility of becoming judgmental.

[Ebook cover.]

Still on the art promo front, I’ve made ebook and paperback versions of my art book, Better Worlds. It’s up to ninety-two paintings now. You can buy a high-resolution Kindle ebook from Amazon or get both the Kindle and EPUB formats, both in high-resolution, from my Transreal Books site.

I have a paperback of Better Worlds coming out in August as well. You can check for the link n my Transreal Books site.

And do think about buying a painting! My basement’s too full.

Our daughter Isabel sent us a link to a video of the shadows of skateboarders. Their arms seem to grow or extrude from their chests, amoeba-style.

[In the Mission at San Juan Bautista.]

I think of a 4D version, with hyperskaters, and we sense their hypershadows as ghostly hologram-like blobs somewhat human in shape. Now now and then a sudden arm or tentacle can push out. The hypershadows are cast, not by our merely 3D Sun, but by a 4D “SUN” in hyperspace. The hypershadows aren’t exactly darkness.

[The obscure base of the waterfall at Castle Rock Park.]

Normally our space is filled with the divine light of that thing I like to call the SUN (all upper-case), and we don’t know it. The SUN shines upon us even during our night. We sense this glow not as light but as the all-is-One vibe of things, the vivacity of reality. That’s what’s fueled by the beneficent 4D rays of the SUN. The hypershadow of a hyperskater is a moving zone of desaturation and unreality. You don’t like being in a hypershadow.

[The East Side San Jose Vaqueros on a Sunday run in San Juan Bautista.]

I’m thinking about a Flatland analogy here. Kids are skating on Flatland. The Flatlanders don’t perceive the skateboard wheels, but they do notice the shadows. The skater shadows and the 3D sunlight penetrate into Flatland. The Flatlanders see these shadows not as darkness, but as a—chill. The shadows moves on and the glow returns.

My wife and I made a run down to San Juan Bautista last weekend, hadn’t been there in maybe ten years. Very peaceful out in the country small town. Checking out the mission, the historical museum, the little shops, and the Sunday bikers.

Great live blues music pumping out of Mom and Pop’s Saloon, but we hesitated to go in and mingle with the partying San Jose Top Hatters, although they did seem quite mellow, as did the Vaqueros, in a different bar down the street.

Saw a historical recreation of a saloon in the museum, though.

And some classic high-button shoes. Very goth, I’m thinking.

It’s amazing to get out in the country, maybe a 45 minute drive from home, the whole pace and vibe so sweet and calm. Beautiful view across the valley to the mountains. Why do I waste so much of my energy worrying about shit?

Clatter, click, there go those hyperskaters across the hypersurface of my space again, our world a Wild West false front, yellow-lit by the SUN.

And the eternal glow’s within us all.