This just in: Bertram Niessen’s interview with me in the Italian ezine Digimag. (They posted an Italian language version as well.)

It’s mattering less to me if I actually do write a memoir. All that matters is that I’m writing up notes for—something. My fingers work, my brain, my word-circuits. It might really be more reasonable to write another novel. Or maybe just a couple of stories first. There’s such a powerful “why bother” haze surrounding any plan for a memoir.

“Wiseacring for the swing of thought” is a phrase used by G. I. Gurdjieff in Meetings With Remarkable Men. He used the word wiseacring a lot, meaning something like free intellectual play. Some people spell it as “wiseacreing,” by the way, but “wiseacring” seems to be more common.

Today I actually got a thousand words done on a new story I plan to write with Paul Di Filippo. Working title: “To See Infinity Bare.” It wasn’t too hard. The writing felt good.

I’m in the Los Gatos Coffee Roaster again. On my own. It’s so terrible when people have words appliquéd onto the butts of their sweat pants. Like the back of a van. Like the woman I’m looking at right now. Pale blue sweat pants with “H O L L I S T E R,” in an arc, the name of a small town south of here. But of course, to her, the pants aren’t terrible, they’re cool fashion. All a matter of convention.

If I weren’t going to write a nonfiction memoir, what might I write instead? I could scootch just a bit away from that, and write a novel that’s close to my actual life. A transreal SF memoir, in other words. Go with my fantasies and fears about nuclear fallout as a boy in 1959 at a German boarding school, for instance. And then follow my character back to the US and, whoah, NYC and/or DC are gone. Especially Texas could be gone.

A frikkin’ Texas-shaped hole in the surface of the globe, a thousand-mile deep shaft with a giant orange blup-blup lava lake at the bottom. A fence around the edge, and you can buy little baskets of bread and throw in the Texas-shaped crumbs for the Texas gnomes. Tiny cowhand gnomes down there in half-pint hats, shooting cap pistols. You can rent time on an ion-beam destruction ray and fry the Texas gnomes that you’ve lured out with the Texas-shaped bread crumbs. Gnome cracklins drift up and people munch ‘em down. “Yaar!”

[Yes, yes, I know there are many fine people in Texas, just having a little fun here. I could always change the victimized state to my old home of Kentucky.]

Am I writing crazier than usual? Or is just that this week I give less of a squat? The numerical fact that Hylozoic was my thirtieth book, sets me to thinking about trying something new for #31.

On the other hand, why not another novel. It might be nice to write a really easy novel. Something first person and transreal, like Mathematicians in Love.

I had another SF vision today, of what you might call Oinkness. An alternate world or mindscape that’s made of pig. It’s not like encountering a single pig, it’s pure pigness. Pink skin, ears, perhaps an eye here and there, the stench, the squeal, layer upon layer of skin and meat, an endlessly cloned pig surface, folding back on itself.

Or maybe combine the sunken state with the Oinkness thing, and sure, have the sunken state be my Olde Kentucky Home. It’s the land of Oinkness down there. The older boys are down there wallowing with the pigs. (Note the highlighted rat in the motel swimming pool.)

German fallout, sunken Kentucky, Oinkness in the pit, J. Edgar Hoover attempts to arrest the hero, that is, young Russ, but Russ calls on the force of Oinkness to protect him.

[Image from Wikipedia.]

Wiseacring for the swing of thought.

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