Rudy’s Blog

Reminder: I’ll be reading from my autobiography Nested Scrolls at an SF in SF gathering at 7 PM on Saturday, February 11.

I’ll be joined on the podium by the eminent SF writers K. W. Jeter and Jay Lake, also reading from their work. If you come, be aware of the huge Chinese New Year’s Parade in the same neighborhood…in fact come early and watch the parade for awhile before our reading.

I was already up in SF earlier this week, staying in North Beach and giving a reading from my small book Surfing the Gnarl at The Green Arcade bookshop on Market Street near Gough St., a great little store with very cool and diverse pickings. Curated with wit and attitude by owner Patrick Marks.

I made a podcast of the Green Arcade reading, which is introduced by Terry Bisson. You can click on the icon below to access the file via my Feedburner podcast station.

(Note that Feedburner only shows my most recent podcasts. For older audio files, see my archive on Gigadial, which runs back to 2005.)

My wife and I were walking around SF enjoying ourselves. I like how multicultural the city is, how busy, with the sun so bright and the air so clear and intense. Like water.

I always dig seeing the freaky window display at Aria on Grant Street near Washington Square.

Everything shaped and colored so nice in the morning sun.

But beware the Invasion of the Goobs on … blessedly I’ve temporarily managed to forget the name of those obnoxious roller vehicles. A tour of twenty of them went by! Me taking their picture I was, of course, a collateral Goob invader, come to think of it. “It’s okay, I’m from near San Jose.”

I have a couple of upcoming readings on Feb 7 and Feb 11, but first I want to tell you about my new painting , Loulou and Skungy.

“Loulou and Skungy,” oil on canvas, February, 2012, 30” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the image.

Loulou is the somewhat mysterious woman in green, Skungy is the rat, and the guy holding the rat is named Morton Plant. At present this is like an illustration of an unknown proverb or a forgotten fable. I don’t entirely know what’s going on. But I do have some ideas, as this is meant to be a previsualization of a scene in my next novel, The Big Aha. Loulou is luring Morton and his helper-rat Skungy to follow her.

The composition was inspired by a Joan Brown painting The End of the Affair, which I just saw in an exhibit that’s at the San Jose Museum of Art till March 11. And I used a thick medium to build up an impasto finish with kind of a van Gogh look on the left. As always, originals and prints of my paintings are for sale on my Paintings page.

I have a small new book out, it’s called Surfing the Gnarl, and it’s from the “PM Outspoken Authors” series at PM Press in Oakland.

The book has two of my more outrageous short stories, a new essay of mine about science and literature called “Surfing the Gnarl,” and an interview conducted by Terry Bisson, the series editor.

I’ll be having a launch party for this slim volume at the funky Green Arcade bookstore near Gough and Market Street in San Francisco, 7 PM, Tuesday, February 7.

Looking a little further ahead, I’ll be reading from Surfing the Gnarl or perhaps my autobiography Nested Scrolls or possibly my recently completed The Turing Chronicles at an SF in SF gathering at 7 PM on Saturday, February 11. I’ll be joined on the podium by the eminent SF writers K. W. Jeter and Jay Lake, also reading from their work.

You may have noticed that in my blog posts, I tend not to talk directly about the political stories that you see in the news. My preference is to post about the things that you don’t see in the news. Found art, surreal events, philosophical ruminations, science-fictional concepts, notes on the craft of writing, day-to-day beauty found within the real life unfolding around me.

Whenever I see a news story, my first thought is: Why do “they” want me to think about this? Who are “they”? An age-old question. The one-percenters, the media barons, the commercial interests, sure. I’ve always felt that there’s no essential difference among the three elements of TV: (1) News, (2) Ads, and (3) Entertainment. All are selling fear of death, lust for glamour, and a desire to buy.

Having known a lot of politically active friends over the years, I’d also suggest that the news-cycle-spinning “they” also includes the political junkies and those with a perpetual longing for a distraction from daily life. “I can’t clean up the house while XXX are suffering in YYY!”

There’s always something terrible going on…somewhere…and I don’t like to give consensus-reality’s bad news a majority of my mind. I only have the one life—must I spend all of it waiting for when it’s officially okay to be happy?

Restating my position one more time: all news is in one way or another a lie, a hype, a scam, and a distraction from the warm human faces and the gnarly nature of the now moment.

So that’s why I avoid getting into political threads on Rudy’s Blog. I want it to be “about” the neglected topics other than the concerns shoved down our throats by the media and the countermedia news.

Long live transfinite mountains, the hollow earth, time machines, fractal writing, aliens, dada, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, teleportation, artificial reality, robots, pod people, hylozoism, endless shrinking, intelligent goo, antigravity, surrealism, software highs, two-dimensional time, gnarly computation, the art of photo composition, pleasure zappers, nanomachines, mind viruses, hyperspace, monsters from the deep and, of course, always and forever, the attack of the giant ants!

I’m still flapping, still trying to get fully airborne on my intended next novel, The Big Aha. But today instead of flapping, I’m playing with my blog. As so often happens here, the pictures have very little to do with the words.

View of my home office from my desk chair, January, 2012, pan made with AutoStich app on an iPhone. Click for a larger version of the image.

I’ve been wondering what advertising will be like in eighty or a hundred years. Nobody reads anymore or even watches a movie. It’s all web nuggets. They don’t “cruise” so much as “harvest” the web. The ads are like viruses, like smart drones, they hound you, they’re targeted to individuals.

In the future, some real work is being done on getting ads into dreams. Particularly if you sleep with your personalized web cruiser on. Maybe you get used to the ads in your dreams, and the ads help you sleep. As it happens, just last night, I kept dreaming I was Googling things in my dreams. How terrible.

Maybe your personal web cruiser can synch the ads you get with with you’re actually seeing in the real world. The ad-mongers might give you fake sense of synchronicity. If they can process your realworld inputs a bit faster than your brain does, and then feed in the kicker maybe ad just a a split second before you see the real thing. And you’re like, wow!

I’m also thinking about the idea that, in the future, we can use quantum engineering to make wacky matter.

The way this works is that computers of the future use quantum computation. Atoms and molecules are always doing quantum computations, even when they’re just sitting around. These computations are in fact rich enough to emulate anything that an ordinary computer could do. If we can just get the hang of how to do it, we can start having computers that are chairs, rocks, air currents, glasses of water, candle flames—whatever.

Okay, suppose that any bit of matter as carrying out a quantum computation, and that we’ve learned to interface with these computations and tweak them.

(Fun option) You dose your surroundings to make them more vibrant, more cartoony, more congenial. Slogan I’ve mentioned before, “Instead of you getting high, your house gets high!” At first it seems harmless and things snap back.

Wild turkeys spotted across the street. Gobbling softly, under their breath.

(Fear option) What if something like a computer virus infects matter, perhaps changing the laws of physics to make our world more congenial for some evil darkside hackers. Or maybe even for some type of aethereal aliens—come to think of it, I used that power chord with the Peng in Hylozoic, so this time let’s keep it more of a near-future actually-happening-in-Silicon-Valley thing, and funner.

(Change option) What if the repeatedly wacked space in some area reconfigures itself—and settles to a new stable attractor. Like that “false vacuum” power chord. Our local spacetime becomes a new domain. Or maybe just the body of one character becomes a new domain.

“What, ME cyberpunk?”

Good scene, with the wacked space. Like the ultimate hungover friend scene. He appears, tottering, and he’s somehow altered the dimensional “signature” of the spacetime in his body. His body has, like, two-dimensional time and two-dimensional space. He slides into your room, coming under your door like a menu to a Chinese restaurant.

And then we get a page or two of this wacked dude describing how it feels to be in 2D time.

More pictures of Berlin today, taken in late November, 2011. This follows on my earlier post, “Berlin #1”.

Despite the WW II bombing, there’s still a lot of nice old buildings around. And of course the industrious Germans have rebuilt many of those buildings as well. I like this type of nineteenth century look. Serious attics and garrets up there.

I wandered into an art gallery featuring a show by an Italian woman whose current motif was round watermelons. They even had a melon/globe on the desk.

The big Wheel at the Christmas market near our hotel. Der grossen Rad. The Berliner Dom in the background.

We went to another Christmas market, this in the Gendarmenplatz, one of the more elegant squares in Berlin with, I think, three separate cathedrals on it, also a concert hall. The Christmas markets are mostly about food, as opposed to being about classy, crafty decorations for your tree. This one restaurant had set up an enclosed dining room, heated, and with a transparent roof. A real treat.

Looking up into the dome the awesome Berlin cathedral, that Berliner Dom…it’s a Lutheran cathedral, meant to be a match for the Catholic ones. I love how the great dome’s circles work together in this kind of image. Mathematics on parade.

The round church of St. Hedwig has lovely curves. In the future, we’ll grow our buildings and everything will be like this.

Berlin has many museums. As Berlin was, for a time, two separate cities—East and West—many standard cultural institutions, like museums, concert halls, and opera houses, are duplicated, one for each half.

This one museum is in the old “Hamburg train station,” and it has contemporary art, including this great eight-foot-tall mask by Keith Haring. I think it’s the best of his works that I’ve ever seen. Wonderful cafe in this museum as well.

I like these guys moving around a statue of some high-level guy. Kind of a metaphor for…something.

In the Pergamon museum we looked at some Greek antiquities, including this tiling of a floor. I like how the square forms in the inner ring do a visual reversal like a Necker cube. And the wavy yin-yang nested scrolls on the other ring.

We went to a residential neighborhood where lots of young parents live. I always like these food-people statues, particularly when they get this battered street-person look. And he’s eating frags of his own brain. Fry-brain.

The Hamburger train station museum had a special installation of big inflated plastic domes by an artist. This one had two levels, and I went inside to look up at the people on the next level. Very spacy.

We saw a piano soloist in the concert hall off the Gendarmenplatz square. The inside of the hall was insanely elegant, like Viennese pastry.

One day we rode an urban-rail train a few miles out of the center of Berlin, going deep into the old East zone. The buildings in the East zone have this very solid, utilitarian look.

A cool old statue of a devil seen in a museum. As seen in artworks, devils always seem to be having more interesting lives than angels. I think an angel is in fact standing on this guy, but he’s making some plans anyway, sleazy city slicker that he is.

The basement of the Berliner Dom is this, like, living-room or non-living-room filled with giant, ornate nineteenth-century caskets for members of the then-ruling families. Kind of a horrible place, deeply creepy.

A statue of Death perches at the foot of one casket. “Oh, here’s your name. Got your spot all set for you here.”

A seriously classical-looking museum on the Museum Island. I love this kind of extravagent stuff. To hell with that 1950s-1960s “less is more” crap. More is more.

We wandered into this cafe of the Bode museum on the Museum island. Monumental European luxury, a marble-columned cafe with a hundred-foot-high ceiling. And marzipan cake. And hardly anyone else there.

Looking down at the Spree River from our hotel we could see an occasional barge chuffing by.

The East Berliners had their own icons for the traffic lights, including this “Ampelman” or “Traffic Light Man.” He’s kind of a mascot of the city now.

Wandering around town we passed a weathered old Amerika Haus or “America House.” These are libraries with American books and magazines, in English, set up in the 1950s to promote a sense of unity with the US. They all looked exactly like this one. When I was a boy visiting my grandmother in Hannover, Germany, I liked to go to the local Amerika Haus to get science-fiction books.

I still remember finding a story anthology with a tale about a guy who goes to a lecture on the fourth dimension and dozes off during the lecture to find himself surrounded by sentient higher-dimensional spheres. I don’t remember how that story ends. Maybe the guy gets a Ph.D. in mathematics and becomes an SF writer!

[Note added after the reading.]

So I gave my reading from Nested Scrolls at Borderlands. We had a small, friendly crowd, including several characters from the book.

I made a podcast of the reading. You can click on the icon below to access the podcast via my Feedburner podcast station.

(Note that Feedburner only shows my most recent podcasts. For older audio files, see my archive on Gigadial, which runs back to 2005.)

[Advance announcement.]

As I’ve mentioned before, the US edition of my autobiography, Nested Scrolls, is out from Tor Books.

This Saturday, January 14, at 3:00 pm, I’ll be giving a reading from Nested Scrollsat the fabulous and cozy Borderlands Books (and cafe) on Valencia Street in San Francisco. We’ll have a Q & A session after the reading, and we’ll be giving away a large, high-quality art print of one of my paintings.

Come on over!

I just finished a new painting yesterday, I call it “Telepathy.”

“The Lovers,” by Rudy Rucker, 24 x 20 inches, January, 2012, Oil on canvas. Click for a larger version of the picture.

The idea is that they’re in a nearly telepathic state, sharing a single thought balloon. And in the thought, they’re merged like a yin-yang symbol. Her 1940s bob acquires an infinity symbol, and their lips form a pair of little hearts. An early Valentine’s Day picture!

As always, you can learn more about my work on my Paintings page.

I got a very nice review for my autobio Nested Scrolls by Paul Witcover in the January, 2012, issue of Locus, a magazine about the SF & Fantasy field. Here’s an abridged quote.

Rucker is a writer to whom that cliché “a genuine original” legitimately applies. Nested Scrolls is a pleasantly meandering, chattily digressive read. We hear the authentic voice of the beat, the hippie, the cyberpunk, the hacker, the bomb-throwing revolutionary iconoclast that, at heart, Rucker has always been and remains even at the age of 65—though, to judge by Nested Scrolls, he is the most pleasant and decent bomb-thrower one could ever hope to meet.

And now a few more thoughts on my notion of people achieving a supernal Big Aha mental state, probably via their physical body’s quantum computations. Today’s photos are older ones, from Point Reyes, San Francisco, and San Jose

People with Big Aha might develop some new augmented senses. What if you could see radio-waves, electrical charges, neutrinos, Higgs bosons, and/or neutrinos? Maybe these senses would let you see specters, archetypes, dreams, or give you teep into other people’s selves.

One way to go here would be to have the new sense be a very highly developed sense of empathy which emerges, one might suppose, from a conscious awareness of quantum entanglement, or awareness of the overarching wave function that includes both you and me as subsystems.

Grokking, in other words.

I have dreams every night, what do they mean?

I think there’s still a lot of interesting things to be done with dreams. Waking up inside them? Finding out that they’re really happening in a higher dimension?

Maybe with Big Aha I can go into your dreams.

With Big Aha we might see ghosts of dead people. Or we might see heretofore invisible aliens whom, for whatever reason, we’re ordinarily unable to perceive. Those flashes of light you see out of the corner of your eye sometimes—maybe those are alien beings.

Finally, let’s suppose that thinking with the Big Aha leads to levels at which myths and archetypes are real. God’s art studio. Or, best of all, the giant’s castle in the clouds atop the beanstalk.

A Big Aha adept learns to see quantum fluctuations and climbs them like steps, up past the clouds and finds the giant there. He steals the bag of gold and the magic harp, climbs down, cuts the stalk and kills the giant.

And then what? Maybe the universe unravels. The giant was God. He was keeping our whole act together.