I don’t think I mentioned this on my blog yet: I scanned my mostly handwritten notes on my conversations with the great logician Kurt Gödel during the years 1972-1977, and saved the scans into a single PDF . Once the download finishes (it’s about 15 meg), you can click the book-with-a-ribbon Bookmarks button on the left side of the PDF viewer to separate out the six different files. My notes are a little hard to decipher in spots, and often rather mathematical, but here they are for the historical record, treasures from the Rucker vaults.

Reading them, I was amused by my temerity in arguing about things with Gödel. Arrogant young pup that I was. But maybe he was entertained by that. I liked when in my 1975 phone call Gödel tells me, vis a vis the offbeat ideas about set theory I held at that time—“But no one in the whole world agrees with you.” He wasn’t one to soft-pedal his opinions.

And I like the bit in the very last 1977 phone exchange when, as an example of unpredictability or of free will, I’m talking about how one makes a decision about which shoe to put on first, and Gödel seems to say, “But why wear shoes?”

Maybe I can take that as a metaphor! But why wear shoes? Indeed.

Most of the notes are hand-written or typed, but here’s a doodle I made talking to him on the phone, March 10, 1972, mostly talking about set theory and transfinite numbers, with logic and philosophy of mathematics mixed in.

The good old days, my golden dawn.

For more on my meetings with Gödel see my memoir essay “Memories of Gödel” in the next post.

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.