{"id":533,"date":"2008-07-29T10:25:18","date_gmt":"2008-07-29T18:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=533"},"modified":"2008-07-29T14:35:30","modified_gmt":"2008-07-29T22:35:30","slug":"novels-as-memoirs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/29\/novels-as-memoirs\/","title":{"rendered":"Novels As Memoirs"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m in the Los Gatos Coffee Roaster, once again. Writing crazy BS. Thinking about Weena Wesson. Recall my mention of this character in my most recent post:<\/p>\n

A scene in a UFO, with a bad kid, call him Denny Allaway, frantically humping a chunk of cow liver, imagining that it\u2019s Weena Wesson, the Hollywood love goddess. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

It makes me happy to think about a novel project. Actually calling a novel Weena Wesson <\/em>might be overdoing it\u2014I mean, the novel might not be about that at all. It\u2019s just a phrase to start with.<\/p>\n

Last night I had insomnia, and I was reading one of Allen Ginsberg\u2019s biographies, Bill Morgan\u2019s I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg<\/em><\/a>. I began imagining writing a transreal SF author autobio novel called, say, A Writer\u2019s Life. <\/em> That\u2019s what Joyce\u2019s great first novel is, come to think of it\u2014dropping the SF element of course\u2014Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man <\/em>(1916).<\/p>\n


\n[Photo of Pablo Picasso, Woman in an Armchair (Jacqueline Roque Picasso)<\/em>, 1960, at a show from the New Orleans Art Museum at the Cantor Art Center<\/a> in Stanford. Note the two profiles, one light, one dark—it took me a few minutes to pick them out.]<\/p>\n

Of course if I put SF in it, then that makes it unreadable for some largish percentage of the people in the world. Oh well!<\/p>\n

Can I really put in the part about the cow liver and Weena Wesson? Maybe. The liver is hiding under the boy\u2019s bed. She whispers to him through the mattress. Maybe her \u201creal\u201d\u009d name is an anagram. Awnee Swones. Anne Swesewo. Anne Wowesse.<\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

Trolling the Web for irrelevant info, I found the YouTube video shown above, entitled \u201cWeena + Me=Love<\/em>,” showing two young women goofing around, filmed, I think, on the street by a stranger using a cell phone.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, mama!\u201d\u009d says the woman on the right.<\/p>\n

The good news is that people think they saw me making love to the legendary Weena Wesson\u2014the bad news is that my co-star was in fact a cunningly tweaked cow liver.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

In any case, I\u2019m thinking it more interesting to cast any memoir-like work into a novelistic format\u2014like I\u2019ve done in the past. Really, all of my novels are transreal\u2014in the sense of having a character who in some sense represents me during some part of my life. I first worked out a correspondence between my life and my novels in some detail in an interview for Hayakawa SF Magazine <\/em>around 1998 (see page two of my online interviews<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Just today I realized that I can force all eighteen of my novels into the table.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I see there’s room at the start and the end. Boyhood and dotage. Maybe an old man is recalling his early years. (Speaking of dotage, I think the ages are off for some of the novels, especially Spaceland and Realware. So write a paper about it…)<\/p>\n

Okay, fine, so what\u2019s the title if not Weena and Me<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Kentucky. Fallout. Yellow Dust. <\/em>Maybe A Writer\u2019s Life<\/em>? That\u2019s right on the transreal border between fact and fiction\u2014which is, nah, too confusing, or even off-putting. And it\u2019s been used a lot.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m looking for a title that suggests the quality of what it\u2019s like to become a writer and\/or a scientist. The Branecaster <\/em>is good, but I used up that word in Frek and the Elixir<\/em>. Daydreamer <\/em>is nice, but, oh oh, Ian McEwan used that for a kids\u2019 book title in 2000. Dreamlight<\/em>? No, been used a lot.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Often it\u2019s better to get deeper into my own particular jargon, so as to find title possibilities that aren\u2019t so picked over. I\u2019m thinking of my beloved Belusouv-Zhabotinsky scroll patterns. Turing Patterns. Standing Waves. Nested Scrolls.<\/em><\/p>\n

I like that last one. Nested Scrolls<\/em>. Searching Amazon for that phrase, I find it\u2019s not a title, but it does appear in\u2014two of my books: Mad Professor <\/em>and the Lifebox <\/em>tome, apparently the same passage in both books, tsk tsk.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing almost at random in these notes. Which could be a good thing. I\u2019ve heard it said that writers are at their best when they have no idea what they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n

In the last chapter of Nested Scrolls<\/em>, the (now-dead) hero Tim\u2019s acquaintance (not really a friend) Denny Allaway is thinking about Tim, and Denny realizes that it doesn\u2019t really matter that Tim is dead, any more than it matters when a pinecone falls off a tree, and that if Tim hadn\u2019t saved the world, someone else would have, maybe even Denny himself, if he hadn\u2019t of been so busy humping that 120 pound chunk of cow liver made up to look like Weena Wesson. The cow liver is sitting next to him, sharing a bottle of hard lemonade.<\/p>\n

\u201cMuuur<\/em>.\u201d\u009d <\/p>\n

\u201cI love you, Weena.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s so <\/em>commercial…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A Louisville memory. Waiting by the side of Route 42 near Rudy Lane for Barbara T. to pick me up and give me a ride to nursery school in her 1951 Buick Roadmaster with the four little portholes set into the side of the hood. Miss T. wore more lipstick than any woman I\u2019ve ever seen, it was almost like she put it on by eating it. Tidy, well-dressed, but not terribly attractive, she lived with her mother. I liked her, up to a point, as I found her pretty easy to talk to, although not so easy as my own parents. She later gave me a science-fiction\/fantasy book that I liked a lot\u2014or maybe I just found it in her house while my parents were having a dinner with her\u2014 the book was called Zotz!, <\/em>by Walter Karig, 1947.<\/p>\n

I should mention that, initially, it seemed reasonable and natural to me that the street I lived on would be called Rudy Lane, only later did I realize that it was a coincidence, due to the fact that at some point a family with the last name of Rudy had lived on the road, which was maybe three miles long. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I remember some of my first days at nursery school, or maybe at kindergarten\u2014the two blend together, and it\u2019s hard to be sure which memories come first. I remember a large room called Hilliard Hall, with grayish-black asphalt tiles on the floor, and ordinary sash windows in the walls. We had some really big blocks to play with, maybe two or three feet on a side. You could stack them and make little mazes. They made a hollow boom when they fell down.<\/p>\n

We\u2019d play a game where we\u2019d dance around the room with a record playing, and now and then the teacher would lift up the needle and you\u2019d have to freeze in place where you\u2019d been right when the music stopped, and if you didn\u2019t freeze fast enough, you were Out.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m in the Los Gatos Coffee Roaster, once again. Writing crazy BS. Thinking about Weena Wesson. Recall my mention of this character in my most recent post: A scene in a UFO, with a bad kid, call him Denny Allaway, frantically humping a chunk of cow liver, imagining that it\u2019s Weena Wesson, the Hollywood love […]<\/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-533","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\/533","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=533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}