Recently I put a lot of energy into putting out the monstrously cool issue #10 of my webzine Flurb #10 . It’s off to a good start, we’ve already had ten thousand visits, so go take a look if you haven’t yet.

She Has a Pet, August, 2010, oil on canvas, 24″ by 18″. Click for larger version.

I did a little work on a new painting, I’m calling it “She Has A Pet.” This picture began as a landscape painting in a hot, dusty park near Cupertino, California. In the park, I was thinking about Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants, but I didn’t actually put in the elephant until I got back home. The landscape seemed like it needed something big to pep it up. And, as I added layer after later to the picture, I came up with a somewhat mysterious encounter between a woman leading the elephant, and a man she meets. The title is a bit of a joke, as in, “I met a nice woman, but she has a pet.” I was also thinking of someone who carries a lot of personal baggage. But ultimately, I’m getting at something more general, mythic, and imprecise. An encounter. As always, more info on my artwork is at my Paintings page.

This is what the landscape actually looked like. I was there with my painter friend Vernon Head, who’s mastered a much more realistic style than mine. You can see his picture in his Facebook album here, he titled it “Fremont Older Open Space (final)”.

The new issue of Locus is all about the history of steampunk science-fiction. I always feel like the SF scholars should mention my 1989 novel, The Hollow Earth in this connection, but usually they don’t. The book’s new edition is still in stock at Amazon. I wrote about more about the history my writing of this novel in an earlier post, “Writing the Hollow Earth.”

I was telling Vernon we should start doing outdoor paintings of buildings in town, like this storehouse at the local Rural Hardware store, but he’s not into it. I can see painting this scene, though, and tweaking it into a warehouse at an alien spaceport.

I finished writing my SF story with Paul Di Filippo last week, it’s called “Fjaerland,” and it deals with a somewhat Lovecraftian “eel man” who lives beneath the waters of a Norwegian fjord. It’s always fun to work with Paul. Our normal authorial voices are quite different, but when we get going together, we meld into a nice harmony that’s different from either one of us alone. And Paul’s very efficient about getting an SF story done—he’s written more of them than anyone I know.

I’m still making some plans towards a novel featuring computer pioneer Alan Turing and a race of alien beings called skugs. I’m leaning towards a three-act structure like I’ve used in so many of my novels. It’s the old Monomyth pattern: Departure, Initiation, Return. i) Alan meets the Skugs, ii) Alan goes to Skugland via a magic door, iii) Alan comes home and kicks butt.

From 1967 to 1972, I was in grad school at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, getting a Ph.D. in mathematics. I was in love with the then-new medium of underground comix, and I started drawing some of my own. Most these appeared in the Rutgers campus newspaper.

For the sake of lifebox-building and mind-preservation, I just made a Wheelie Willie page that has eleven of my strips in small and large formats.

As a taste of what you’ll find there, here’s one of my later Wheelie Willie strips that appeared in my non-fiction book, Infinity and the Mind.

Wheelie Willie in “Take a Deep Breath,” drawn March, 1978, appeared in Infinity and the Mind, 1982, p. 46. Click for larger version.

I drew “Take a Deep Breath” in Geneseo, New York, around March, 1978, right when I was finding out that, thanks to budget cuts and academic politics, after six years I was going to be fired from my first teaching job. I’m Wheelie Willie here, sadly but contemplatively leaning against a tree. I have my vision of an infinite set of possible thoughts about nothing, and when I’m done, ants have crawled onto my tire and my tube-like body. The philosophy of mathematics has made me happy.

And, as I say, there’s more on my new Wheelie Willie page .

I rode the CalTrain commuter train up to San Francisco alone, with bicycle, there to cycle over to Richard Kadrey’s house for a pot-luck afternoon party thrown by him and his wife Nicola Ginzler.

Lately the achievements I strive and scheme towards haven’t felt so rewarding. Sometimes I begin to wonder why I get so worked up about my little events, my small victories, my incessant machinations for fame. Sometimes I wish I could stop trying to accomplish something and frikkin’ relax. So…I headed off to Kadrey’s.

It was fun to ride my bike in the city, although I was at times worried about getting lost, or about being flattened by the traffic. Cycling through the empty quarters of the “knee” in SoMa where the city grid turns, I saw a bum with two stolen bicycles, one (with no wheels) on his shoulders, the other being rolled along.

Riding up towards Market, I was side to side with a motorcycle ridden by a Hells Angel, and then, another block further, we came to a gathering of a hundred of Hells Angels and their ilk outside some kind of motorcycle store. A few of them good-humoredly jeered at me, the retired professor riding by with sensible yellow bands on his trouser bottoms and his yellow safety windbreaker flapping.

I found my way to Rudy, Jr.’s old neighborhood on lower Haight St. between Webster and Steinhardt. I was a little too early for Richard’s party, and I had some time to kill. I walked the bicycle along the sidewalk looking things over. One of the stores had posters for Lazertits, images of women with rays of light shooting out of their breasts. They have a website, I think these are women that dance on stage with literal lasers in their bras. I have no idea what it really means, but the posters are cool.

The Horseshoe café where I used to hang with Rudy Jr. was gone. I was tempted to eat a platter of food at Memphis Minnie’s, a great BBQ place, but I wanted to save some stomach-room for Richard and Nicola’s spread. So I had a light snack at the International Café, not too bad a place—I like any café that has couches. Going inside, I felt great concern about bicycle thieves, and I chained my whipped old yellow Rockhopper beater to a lamp-post right outside the café window, running the chain through the frame and the two wheels.

[I shot a few photos from the moving train yesterday, they’re a little blurry, but kind of interesting, like images from the subconsciousness of the hive mind.]

When I got to the party, I initially thought I couldn’t talk to anyone—this is part of the reason why I used to immediately get drunk at parties. But, as it happened, I ended up in a series of interesting conversations. I’ve slowly, slowly learned that it helps to walk up to people and introduce yourself…as opposed to just staring fishily their way.

I met a gilder, that is, a man who hammers thin sheets of gold onto things like picture frame or cornices. The sheets are very then, a folder with fifty sheets weighs only about an eighth of an ounce. But, the gilder told me, the price of gold has never been so high.

I met an electronic musician who uses some newer ware than the Max/MSP that my friends at the Iannis Xenakis lab in Paris were using, I forget the name of the new ware, some funny name. He agreed with me that it’s criminal to use a repetitive wallpaper rhythm loop, when it’s really so easy to put in a little procedural randomness and texture with something as simple as a logistic map feedback loop. I like to think of that word as feebdack.

I met a leather-clad pair of women who said they’d been partying for two days, first at the Drag King party, and then at the Drag Queen party. One of them said, with a laugh, “There were even some bio women competing to be the big Drag Queen.” It took me a second to grasp that she meant regular, non-transgendered women. Richard took us inside and showed us some of the erotic and fetish photos that he takes for his online Kaos Beauty Klinik site.

Richard is such a trip, so San Francisco, so wholesome and matter-of-fact about his esoteric preoccupations—things like tattoos, the naïve artist Henry Darger, serial killers, obscure films and erotic photography. His two novels about Sandman Slim are doing really well, and he has a third in the works. I’m glad to see him getting some rewards from the publishing world.

Shortly before I left, a big guy was talking to Richard about publishing and then it turned out the guy was Jason Williams of Night Shade Books. As it happens, my latest novel, Jim and the Flims, is under consideration at Night Shade right now—Tor isn’t taking it, as they’re already publishing my memoir, Nested Scrolls, next year, and didn’t want to load up with two of my books. The Night Shade guys seem receptive. I could be due for a new start.

It was good day. I got away from it all, and ate a huge amount of food at Richard and Nicola’s, and then, in the end, the business side of things came back at me, in its own way, on its own schedule and in an encouraging way.

And on the train up, I did a little work on the still-embryonic Turing & Burroughs novel—I left my computer at home, but brought some scraps of print-out along. Mr. Day Off. I’m visualizing aliens that resemble large slugs and are called skugs.