Lately I’ve been kind of obsessed with finishing my new novel, which I’m still calling Turing & Burroughs. I’m around the final turn and in the last stretch.

It’s kind of a 1950s invasion novel, involving a contagious mutation that makes people into telepathic shapeshifters. It includes two historical figures as main characters: the computer pioneer Alan Turing and the Beat writer William Burroughs.

Anyway, I’ve been using every spare minute to work on the novel, which is why I haven’t been doing many blog posts lately. If I blog a lot, it’s a pretty good sign that I’m not writing, and vice-versa. Although, of late, I continue tweeting even when I’m writing a lot—it’s so easy to tweet a nice link or phrase that I find in my ongoing researches for a story or book.

Last week Sylvia and I were up in San Francisco for a couple of days and I took a few pictures.

The one above is the Bay Bridge seen from the Ferry Terminal at the end of Market Street. A lot of action here on Sundays, like the farmers market and lots of food. It always helps a bridge picture to have a sailboat in it. What I like the most are those gantry(?) cranes the background, from the port of Oakland, they load and unload containers from ships. They always remind me of giraffes.

We walked through Chinatown, on our way to our favorite Pho Noodle restaurant, the hole in the wall Golden Star Vietnamese Restaurant facing onto near the little square of park over the parking garage in front of the old Chinatown Holiday Inn. What makes the Golden Star great is that if you order Pho Ga (Pho with Chicken), the chicken is a broiled leg on the side, not a bunch of characterless white squares in the broth.

This is, like, my Nth picture of Chinatown. I always like the fire escapes and the brick walls and the people walking around.

Another Chinatown fire escape. I love the colors here, and the stripes of shadow and light. The world really is so remarkably intricate and beautiful.

Here’s a simpler abstract pattern, maybe in Chinatown, maybe in Santa Cruz. For going on fifty years, I’ve been into taking pictures that fall into an assemblage of rectangular patterns. Finding the composition is always fun, and if you have good colors that’s nice. Though faint pastels are good too, or you can play off the textures.

Sometimes I worry that I’ve taken pictures of everything I’d ever want to take a picture of, but if I carry my camera around, I’ll see stuff, even though it’s, in a way, the same old stuff as ever.

Like swirls of grass or cactus. These are in the Bezerkistan (excuse me, Berkeley) Botanical Garden, just up the hill from the football stadium that they’re refurbishing. A steep $7 to get in, but really a lovely place.

Cactuses, too. My god, how many cactus pictures have I taken? This is a nice cactus though. I like the little “ears” on the lower lop-lop lobe.

Back in SF, there’s a little park near Mason St. and California St., in front of the big Episcopal cathedral, I often walk up there when I have some spare time. Nice breeze up there, and they have a lovely Italianate fountain, complete with bronze turtles.

Good water coming off the fountain, too. Water’s another thing I’ve photographed a zillion times. Sometimes I feel like I ought start shoving my lens into people’s faces on the streets, or telephotoing them—and now and then I do that a little—sometimes I try and work to have a personality for street photography, but of course a lot of time, I don’t want to work.

Well, here’s one piece of light street photography, a mover in a van in Santa Cruz, you can’t see his face, and he really does fill out the picture. Just that dolly isn’t enough—I shot the picture first that way, and then with the guy in it, and with the guy it’s much fuller.

I wrote a lot in the past week, working out many kinks in the outline for the ending, weaving in a lot of fixes, and writing maybe five thousand words of new material. I feel like I’m around the corner and into the home stretch. To use a more colorful and accurate metaphor, I feel like a primitive hunter in the woods.

I’ve been on the trail of this shaggy beast for five years, if I counting the preliminary first two chapters. It’s wounded now, I can see more and more of its stains on the leaves, I can hear it in the underbrush up ahead, I’m pushing forward, heedless of the branches scratching my face, my whole being is focused on the task of taking down the beast at last, I want to bring it to the ground and tear out its throat to see it shudder and lie still, and to bathe my face in its last dribbles of ink, finishing my quest at last.

For the metaphor-impaired: Do understand that I’m speaking figuratively—in reality I’ve never hunted and, generally speaking, I even go out of my way to avoid killing insects. But a novel I’ve been actively working on for a year—and planning for five years—that’s a beast I want to lay to rest.

My computer programmer friend John Walker used to speak of a “bloodlust hacking frenzy” when pulling long hours to finish a project. Bloodlust writing frenzy, yeah.

I finished my painting of my friend Vernon Head near Mt. Umunhum and the Guadalupe Reservoir south of San Jose last week. I used a palette brush more than usual. Vernon’s a good painter, you can see some of his oils here.

I want to get back into my novel Turing & Burroughs now, but I’m still painting, a piece called V-Bomb. I think the painting is helping me with the novel.

The V-bomb is a device that Alan Turing is going to use perhaps to remove these parasitic skug creatures from Earth—or perhaps to spread skugs all over Earth. We’ll suppose that the V-bomb rays are expected to pass through matter, so there’s no particular need to set it off high up in the atmosphere. It’s just sitting in a tin shed in the Frijoles Canyon near Los Alamos. Like this:

I found another big stash of bomb photos online, including this one of the of the Trinity bomb, shown above, with gnarly exposed wiring. It was built in Los Alamos, they called it The Gadget, and it exploded in the first nuclear weapons test of an atomic bomb, which took place on July 16, 1945, near White Sands, New Mexico.

That cross-legged guy suggests the idea of Turing getting inside the V-bomb. And instead of expanding outwards, the V-bomb implodes. I got the imploding idea from my painting V-Bomb that I’m currently working on. I kind of ruined the painting today…a lot. The colors are horrible. But I did get the layout the way I wanted.

It’s just a stage. Version 2. And now on to Version 3. I’ve recently developed this habit of photographing my painting in its current state, and then collaging or drawing in extra bits in Photoshop, and using that as a mockup for the next stage. So here’s the mockup for Version 3.

The win for me in this process is that sometimes working on a painting can give me an idea for a piece of fiction I’m working on.

My idea in the mockup above is that Turing is squatting in the V-bomb on the right, and then he’s vaporized and becomes the living essence of the blast—which is shrinking towards a tiny size—and then, when the blast is sufficiently compact, a rip opens up in the fabric of space, and Turing slides through into the afterlife.

“Turing and the Skugs”, 40″ x 30″ inches, Oct 2010, Oil on canvas.” Click for larger version.

Note, however, that he’ll need to send out some rays—or perhaps some logic paradox?—to destroy any free-ranging skugs, and to restore any skuggers to their normal state.

Looking through my image files the other day, I unearthed my oddest fan letter ever—and, believe me, there’s been some stiff competition over the years.

Click on the image to see a larger image.

This arrived in 1981, shortly after my first published novel , White Light. I’d crafted a subtle tale about the 1960s, higher infinities, and the afterlife. And having read my book in a prison library, some guy smeared ink on his foot, stomped on a piece of paper, and sent me the results. In his mind we were literary peers—and I should collaborate on a book with him.

A book about the wrinkle on his foot.

First a word about Father’s Day. I’m lucky enough to have children and to have known my father. It’s wonderful to think about the generations rolling on.

I hope all fathers and sons get some nice hammock time today or a reasonable equivalent thereof. Slack.

When my father died, he had very few possessions. I “inherited” four or five things of his, including a worn cardigan sweater, a Swiss knife, and an egg-cup that my daughter Georgia had made for him.

Thinking about the “rolling onward” and “eternal recurrence” aspects of being a son or a father, I took a picture of Pop’s eggcup with a little can of Royal Baking Powder that happens to be in the Spanish language. The cool thing about the Royal label, well known to mathematicians and cartoonists, is that it incorporates an endless regress.

I think I got hold of this can about 25 years ago, soon after moving to CA, when I was still surprised to see Spanish, and I (with deliberate incongruity) used the name “Polvo Para Hornear” for the name of a landmark in my novel The Hacker And The Ants.

Switching topics now, I’ve been doing research on Stanislaw Ulam this week. He’s going to appear as a character in my novel Turing & Burroughs. I like this photo of Ulam happy with some device he’s cobbled together perhaps to model some arcane physical concept like the notion of a nonlinear springs he discussed in his classic “Fermi-Pasta-Ulam” paper, FPU for short.

For more on this topic, see the software and papers on my Capow page, where I used continuous-valued cellular automata software to run the FPU simulation, reproducing some of Ulam’s results, such as the ergodic long-term reoccurrence of states for the cubic nonlinear CA.

Wikipedia has a good entry on Ulam, but I also found a very interesting essay (although somewhat eccentric and perhaps overly critical) by his mathematician friend (?) Gian-Carlo Rota: The Lost Cafe.

Summary: Rota says Ulam was lazy, didn’t like to work out the details, preferred the flash of insight. He was as sort of alienated and sarcastic, didn’t like authority, felt that ultimately everything was meaningless. Undisciplined. Generous and kind. Liked getting into new fields and picking off the interesting big results. Often didn’t get around to publishing his results, just shared them informally. He had green eyes.

Classic photo of Ulam and the MANIAC computer with his daughter Claire. I first saw this photo in Ulam’s autobiography, Adventures of a Mathematician. I wrote LANL and got permission to use it as an illo in my Lifebox tome.

Ulam is known for his work on the H-bomb, indeed he’s sometimes called the father of the H-bomb. Ulam and Edward Teller made a joint application for a patent on the H-bomb!

In wondering if Ulam was “evil” for helping to invent the H-bomb, keep in mind that he was from a Jewish family in Lwow, Poland, and that he and his brother happened to escape to the US in 1938. The rest of his family died in the holocaust. Perhaps this motivated him to help the military of his new home country.

Another factor in Ulam’s work here was that of scientific obsession. Ulam didn’t get along with Edward Teller, and he developed his design for the H-bomb partly in a desire to demonstrate the Teller’s original design for such a weapon was wrong. Teller then jumped on Ulam’s design and worked on it some more.

Photo of an A-bomb fireball, from a photo-rich Russian site. Note the Joshua trees about to be consumed. I’m intrigued by the irregular spots on the fireball. No natural phenomenon is ever completely uniform.