{"id":2679,"date":"2010-10-19T08:36:34","date_gmt":"2010-10-19T16:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=2679"},"modified":"2010-10-19T08:42:38","modified_gmt":"2010-10-19T16:42:38","slug":"wild-west-7-moab-alan-turing-and-the-beats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/19\/wild-west-7-moab-alan-turing-and-the-beats\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild West #7. Moab. Alan Turing and the Beats."},"content":{"rendered":"

I want my character Alan Turing in Turing & Burroughs <\/em>to make friends with a woman. What if he meets up with an early electronic composer, as he has some facility in that direction thanks to his Delilah <\/a>analog voice encryption project. <\/p>\n


\n[Today\u2019s photos are mostly from around Moab, Utah, and particularly from the Arches National Park, although the photo above is of an aspen near the Flaming Gorge.]<\/em><\/p>\n

They barely had the phrase electronic music in 1955. They called it musique concr\u00c3\u00a8te<\/em>, see Wikipedia history of electronic music<\/a>. Some called it acousmatic art, where that weird word means you can\u2019t see the source of the sound. They used Ampex tape recorders, sampling natural and manmade sounds (like factory noises and ship sirens and motors) collaging them, speeding them up, slowing them down, echoing and looping. Sometimes playing a tape track with live instruments.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading the cool book of interviews, Pink Noises <\/a>for inspiration. One woman in there, Annea Lockwood, taped a burning piano, the mike wrapped in asbestos. And she went the length of the Danube, taping it\u2019s various sounds.<\/p>\n


\n[Coming into Moab in driving rain. High plains drifters.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Burroughs himself was really into tape recordings <\/a>for a time, come to think of it. Edgard Var\u00c3\u00a8se and Karlheinz Stockhausen were active in the late 40s and early 50s. They had the idea of synthesizing music via electronically produced signals. In the U.S., John Cage was involved with the Music for Magnetic Tape Project. Turing\u2019s friend Christopher Strachey wrote a music program for a computer based on an early Manchester computer.<\/p>\n


\n[Earlier: long portico shadow at Yosemite Lake Hotel.]<\/em><\/p>\n

My fictional character named Judy Green is the woman composer. I\u2019m thinking she\u2019s gay, and Turing, who sometimes skug-shapeshifts into a woman named Abby, is pursued by her. The \u201cimitation game\u201d\u009d to the second power.<\/p>\n

I see Alan Turing (mostly shapeshifted into a simulacrum of William Burroughs, but sometimes looking like Abby) driving from Palm Beach to SF with someone like Neal Cassady. Certainly Neal himself could fit into the story, given that we have Burroughs already. But I feel some uneasiness about writing about Neal. It might be gauche, derivative, dull. I don\u2019t want to come across as a Beat fanboy. It would be better to invent my own madman. Make it fresher. Yes, I enjoyed writing the Burroughs chapter, \u201cTangier Routines<\/a>,\u201d\u009d and Burroughs might even come back. But that doesn\u2019t mean I have to put in pop-up cameos for every single Beat.<\/p>\n


\n[Gotta love those \u201choodoo\u201d\u009d formations.]<\/em><\/p>\n

So okay, the cross-country driver isn\u2019t Neal. I recall the name of a character who was just about to make an entrance when I broke off work on a never-finished novel in, I think, 1982. I think his name was Vassar Fogarty. Vassar could be Alan\u2019s driver instead of Neal. A (fictional) lesser-known friend of Burroughs\u2019s.<\/p>\n

And Vassar could be into some soul-sleeping jive along the lines of Neal\u2019s Edgar Cayce stuff. Only it\u2019s sort of true<\/em>, and Alan is picking up telepathic or chthonic vibes.<\/p>\n

Maybe Turing doesn\u2019t like Vassar at first. Vassar\u2019s a bumptious blue-collar stoner, and it seems like Alan would have to be sexually attracted to him. But at a personal level, Turing dislikes him initially. He\u2019s won over into some intricate mind analysis game. Maybe Vassar gets Turing to be stealing gas and food. And Judy is making music out of it. And using her tape recorder to rob people. <\/p>\n


\n[Pure Wile E. Coyote territory.]<\/em><\/p>\n

While in Abby form, Alan tells Judy that his friend is getting a ride to SF with another friend, Vassar Fogarty, and Abby can ride along. When Judy gets in the car, it\u2019s just Alan and Vassar, and she\u2019s uneasy. Vassar wants to have sex with Judy and she\u2019s putting him off. Alan calms Judy, and at the edge of town he shapeshifts into Abby. Vassar is impressed. Suppose they go for a sexual three-way that night or the next. Alan\/Abby is happy to be getting Vassar\u2019s embraces, and Judy\u2019s happy to be making it with Abby as well. <\/p>\n

It might be interesting, after they get to San Francisco, to have Alan use skug power to swap genitalia with Judy Green. The couple would be a metaphor for a certain kind of man-woman pair. \u201cShe wears the pants.\u201d\u009d Oh, I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll do that, the readers might not like it. And Alan wants men, not women. He\u2019ll get a real boyfriend.<\/p>\n


\n[Ambient gnarl.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Re. Alan\u2019s boyfriend in SF, I figure he\u2019s not Allen Ginsberg, for the same reasons why I don\u2019t want to use Neal Cassady as a character. But the boyfriend is, I think, an experimental film maker along the lines of Bruce Conner<\/a>. And the film maker and Alan do go to the famous Gallery Six reading where Ginsberg read \u201cHowl.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n


\n[Stalking the giant ants along the Colorado River.]<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m thinking I\u2019d like to work some giant ants into the novel. The first SF movie I really really wanted to see (and my parents wouldn\u2019t let me go) was Them<\/em>, a giant ants movie. Giant ants are very 1950s, after all. I just watched the movie again last night on Netflix instant watch, it was awesome, even if the ants are just ten-foot stuffed toys being waved by grips off camera. The ants resulted from the radiation mutations from an A-test of 1945, and the movie is set in 1954. Perfect.<\/p>\n

Possibly Turing causes the giant ants with his tinkering? Perhaps the pursuit of the giant ants leads him into the A-blast? I\u2019m tempted to reprise the scene in that otherwise weak 2008 movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull<\/em>, where Indy wanders into a fake suburban town set up to test the effects of the blast, and the houses are full of mannequins. Alan could have Burroughs along with him for this, heaping scorn on the \u201d\u02dcburbs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I want my character Alan Turing in Turing & Burroughs to make friends with a woman. What if he meets up with an early electronic composer, as he has some facility in that direction thanks to his Delilah analog voice encryption project. [Today\u2019s photos are mostly from around Moab, Utah, and particularly from the Arches […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2679"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2684,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2679\/revisions\/2684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}