I took up painting in 1999 while writing a historical novel called As Above So Below: A Life of Peter Bruegel about my favorite painter. I wanted to see how it felt to paint, and quickly I fell in love with the medium. I used acrylics at first. Later I came to prefer oils as they seemed richer and deeper. And then I returned to acrylics for their ease of use, and for the brightness of their hues. My studio remains the same: a plastic chair and table in our back yard, with my paints and brushes in a knapsack.

I enjoy the exploratory and non-digital nature of painting, and the luscious mixing of the colors. Sometimes I have a specific scenario in mind. Other times I don’t think very much about what I’m doing I just paint and see what comes out. After I’ve finished a rough first version of a painting, I’ll polish and tweak it through several iterations. I’m never in a rush to finish. I like exploring these better worlds.

My pictures are often realistic in that they contain recognizable objects, but fantastic in their use of heightened colors, cartoony simplifications, and odd scenarios. The genre is sometimes called pop surrealism. Some of my pictures seem to tell a story. The stories may relate to my novels, or they may be free-floating parables, ambiguous, with their precise meanings unknown.

You can get more details about my art on my Paintings page.

Today, I’m assembling ten of my paintings from the Covid years 2020-2021. (I number my paintings in the order painted, and not all of them are included here, so you’ll see jumps in the numbering.)

181: Pandemic #1: Infection. Acrylic, 30″ x 24″, March, 2020.

In December, 2019, I had the lenses of my eyes surgically replaced by soft plastic lenses. My own lenses had gotten cloudy and dark over the years. I was delighted by how rich colors became, seen through new eyes. Maybe I’d been painting with such bright colors because my vision was dim? I held back from painting for three months, and in March, 2020, spurred on by the onset of the Covid plague, I started again. Turned out that now I was using even brighter colors! Working at a fever pitch, I painted a Pandemic triptych. The initial panel, Infection, shows a tumble of heedlessly festive micro-critters, spotted with itchy dots to suggest disease.

182: Pandemic #2: Panic Acrylic, 30″ x 40″, March, 2020.

In Panic, I went wild, hitting a strong abstract-expressionist style, with super-intense colors. I created some delicious shades of orange by mixing cadmium red and the lesser-known diarylide yellow. In all three of the Pandemic panels, I started by setting blobs of paint from my palette onto a damp blank canvas, along with gobs of heavy gel medium. And then I freely smeared, going for gestural brush strokes, and not letting the colors mix together and get muddy. To bring order, I outlined choice passages of action painting, and filled the extra parts of the canvas with flat colors. I think Panic looks, overall, a bit like a face with holes in it. But some of the smaller areas look like faces as well. Those two pink patches at the bottom might be a hapless Covid victim’s lungs. Or buttocks. Or shoulders. Or neck. Hard to be sure exactly what’s going on…and that makes it interesting.

183: Pandemic #3: Peace. Acrylic, 30″ x 24″, March, 2020.

For Peace, the third panel of Pandemic, I wanted a sense of recovery. As before, I smeared around some blobs of paint from my palette, and then I outlined them, and added fields of violet and orange. The central shape is perhaps a bit like a holy baby or, looked at more abstractly, like the famous mathematical form known as the Mandelbrot Set. I was of course deluded in my hope of peace coming soon.

184: Hazmat Spring. Acrylic, 40″ x 30″, April, 2020.

This was my fourth pandemic painting. It’s thematically inspired by Botticelli’s Spring, but with the person wearing a hazmat suit. S/he might be me or my wife enjoying a rare Covid-era outing, or maybe the figure is the cheerful neighbor who was trimming her hillside with a sickle and a weed whacker, right adjacent to our back yard, which is where I paint. I started with overall action smears, like I’d been doing, then cropped down the marks to form odd, vaguely medieval plants. The flowers of course fulfill the rebirth motif of spring.

188: Cells Eat Viruses. Acrylic, 28″ x 22″, May, 2020.

At this point, with growing hopes of a Covid vaccine, I had a vague, inaccurate notion of healthy blood cells killing off viruses by eating them—and I painted it. Cheerful round cells, and the viruses looking like stick-and-ball molecules. Nice colors, lively action, happy feeling. Almost like a Mardi Gras crowd! If only.

199: Zoom Meeting. Acrylic, 24″ x 18″, December, 2020.

By the time I painted Zoom Meeting, we’d been under Covid lockdown for nine months, and one of my few social interactions was to attend Zoom meetings. I was taken with the look of the Zoom screen, and I’d play with the layout during the meeting. Here we see an underlying “speaker view” with a “grid view” overlaid upon it, with part of the grid offscreen. I like how the speaker also appears in the grid, and that she has a window behind her looking out onto the “real” world. There’s a sense of multiple realities. That’s me in the top center, of course, with my beloved bookcase of my published editions. Some users show static photos of themselves instead of live images, and the coiffed woman in the center is one of those. And of course we have an alien.

203: Invaders. Acrylic, 28″ x 22″, May, 2021.

I created the background of Invaders one by “stamping” the canvas with the still-wet palette paper I used for a previous painting. It made a nice, mysterious pattern resembling what an SF writer might call a subspace continuum. It needed critters, and I thought of a flock of invaders. Kind of like eyeballs. Or maybe Covid viruses. Or maybe something worse..

204: Escaping Death. Acrylic, 40″ x 30″, June, 2021..

Soon after Invaders, things did get worse, but not due to Covid. I had a vein burst inside my stomach, and I nearly bled to death. A surgeon stapled the vein closed, and I needed a transfusion of four pints of blood. Then I was better. I had some heavy visionary dreams in the hospital. I saw Death as a shadowy figure with a helmet. And I saw the afterlife as an “underside” of the world, with the underside covered in shifting white fuzz. And I had a vision of returning to life in the form of a glowing image atop my sheet. I kept revising the shapes in that image, and ended up with a woman warrior. A heroine fending off Death, possibly on her way to escaping into a pool that resembles her shield. Escaping Death seemed important to me, and in my somewhat desperate, I began to think of it as a talisman with healing powers. Like a Tibetan sand painting. Who knows. Oh, and what about that big eye? Well, I like painting eyes, and it was fun to shape this one like a torpedo. Maybe it’s the Cosmic One. And the duality between the inner and outer skewed frames on the painting and on the image—that reflects my notion of there being a hyperdimensional “underside” of our living, daily world.

214: My Back Yard. Acrylic, 28″ x 22″, November, 2021.

I got better, but there’s still plenty to worry about. When I can, I focus on my immediate surroundings. Like our backyard. I like old paintings that illustrate proverbs that have been forgotten. Unknown parables. In this context, I think of three works by Peter Bruegel the Elder: Peasant and Bird Nester, his sinister drawing Beekeepers, and his late career Misanthrope . As I mentioned above, I once wrote historical novel about Bruegel’s life, and I still think about him a lot. Making a new painting of an unkown parable on your own is, I would say, a type of Surrealism. In My Back Yard I started with a scene from my backyard, and added a squirrel, two chickens, and three somehow symbolic-looking bumblebees. Plus a cool towel with a mandala design. And a woman, perhaps my wife, who’s perhaps hanging the towel, or perhaps painting something on the back of it. And deliberately with no explanation. The lost parable of the towel!

215: Mr. Gray. Acrylic, 24″ x 18″, November, 2021.

Here I’m just thinking about paint. Mr. Gray is a little like M. C. Escher’s images of tiled-together creatures. But I made Mr. Gray more random and irregular. In grade-school my friends and I would play a game of drawing a squiggly shape on a piece of notebook paper, and your fellow player would have to make it into an animal or a person. Reallly any shape at all can be a critter if you stare at it long enough. It’s just a matter of figuring out where to put the dot for the eye. The one human form here is “Mr. Gray” himself. And maybe he’s having these colorful visions. I was also thinking of the Bob Dylan song “Idiot Wind” that opens with the line, “They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy.” To me this line represents Dylan toppling the old regime and running off with the country’s youth. Taking them somewhere pleasant and colorful. And becoming the new Mr. Gray.

For further info, see my Paintings page. Or check out my book of my paintings, Better Worlds, available as paperback and as a free online PDF.

I’m going to get into some deep philosophy today, relating to the fact that we don’t know how to create a mind, and we can’t really predict natural processes. And we never really will know. And it’s not because we’re not trying hard enough. It’s because of the nature of the world. There’s a basic principle at work, which I call Natural Undecidability.

More on this below, but to start with, I’ll have some stuff about what my family and I have been up to in this dear natural world.

And lately I took lots of photos with my new Leica Q2.  Reviews say it’s a “point and shoot” but that’s not exactly true, to say that would be like saying a Fender Stratocaster is a ukelele.  The Leica is like a piece of equipment left behind by a flying saucer. Day by day I’m figuring out more and more of the settings.

As usual, my photos don’t necessarily have any obvious connection with the text.

Our neighbors are building an extra dwelling right on the other side of the fence of the back yard, which is ny painting studio, and general hangout space.  The Algerian ivy on the fence makes a pretty good privacy screen, but its heavy and the fence has been drooping. Son Rudy came down, and we put in five steel pipes to prop up our fence.  A fun, sculptural activity. The temporary 2×4 props were to hold the fence back while the cement hardened in the metal pipes’ postholes. Surprise: a deer is in this shot.

Then our gang drove north to spend Thanksgiving with daughter Isabel in Fort Bragg, a few miles past Mendocino.  Well out of the Bay Area bustle, which dies down after Petaluma. We stayed at the Beachcomber, a relatively inexpensive motel right on a cliff by the bluffs and the beach.  Sunset in the photo above, with a low cloud/fog layer, and the sun just angling in through the slit. Obviuosly a UFO mothership. This was the view from our room.

Being 75, I’m thinking about mortality more and more these days.  Forever trying to grasp the ancient riddle: “What is like to die?” Or to accept it, or come to term with it.  Not that any of that makes a difference.  It’ll come. I often list to myself my friends who’ve died.  So strange.

Anyway, with that in mind, I noticed something about the ocean waves—I never get tired of watching the sea and pondering what I’m seeing.  When a wave is just starting to break, a transparent lip of water curls over and reaches down to touch the face of the wave.  the part I’m interested in just now is the few moments when the falling lip hasn’t yet touhed the body of the wave. Like what you see in the photo above.

And I formed the notion that the fleeting sheet of water was at some level a perfect metaphor for a full human life.

Back at home at my mad-scientist-type desk/laboratory, I described my insight to my writer Marc Laidlaw as follows.

Looking at the big waves breaking, so endlessly various and, at a more superficial level, the same. The ocean is vast and eternal, Syliva says the sea is a little scary as it’s so utterly indifferent. The ocean doesn’t care about the biggest storm, or how to move. The arriving water sloshes off the rocks and returns to the waaves.

I was focusing on the thing where a tube forms, often just a smallish teardrop-shaped-in-cross-section flap and not a full-on tunnel. I focus on the second when it hasn’t yet hit the face of the wave. This transient pompadour of water IS YOUR LIFE. Yes, that gnarly curved sheet, ridged-with flow-lines, edged-with-loplop-droopy-fronds,  with drops flicking off, and light gleaming on it—IT’S YOU. You flow. You are flowing. That flap of water is your whole entire life. It lasts—from our point of view—only a second or two, but in and of itself it’s a complete life.

And then? It merges into the wave and dissolves into vortices and into a new, diffuse, order of being, with the old floppy teadrop-cross-section, striated, sun-gleamer gone. Over and over and over and over it happens. Nature never tires of repeating herself, but it isn’t really ever a REPEAT. Each of those water flaps, or lives, is solo unique entity—due to chaotic dynamics and due to the deep and essential unpredictability of naturally occuring universal computations.

Group mind.  There were nine of us at Isbael and Gus’s loft, and we played some rounds of Banagrams.  To finish one of the sessions, we did a group bananagram, not a contest, just a matter of playing all the letters, a group construction, a Poincare cross-section of the chaotic group mind.

While we were up there, Isabel lined up some heavy-duty old-fashioned redwood outrigger kayaks for us to paddle up the Big River at Mendocino.  I rode with two of the grandchildren, and it was fun.  Much more work than I’d expected. We’d imagined the incoming tide would carry us upstream, peak at the right moment and sweep us back down. Not exactly. Also my nine-year-old grandson perceived this as a race, and was contantly exhorting me to paddle faster.  But it felt good. I was breathing really hard, and even grunting, and it was like I was exhaling some of the malaise that’s been dogging me of late.

“Mr. Gray” acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 18″, November, 2021. Click for a larger version of the painting.. More info on my Paintings page.

Let’s break for a painting that I finished a couple of weeks ago. Mr. Gray. 

It’s a little like M. C. Escher’s images of tiled-together creatures. But I made this one more random and irregular. In grade-school we’d play a game of drawing a squiggly shape on a piece of notebook paper, and your fellow player would have to make it into an animal or a person. Really any shape at all can be a critter if you stare at it long enough. It’s just a matter of figuring out where to put the dot for the eye. The one human form is Mr. Gray himself. Maybe he’s having these colorful visions. I was also thinking of the Bob Dylan song “Idiot Wind” that opens with the line, “They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy.” To me this line represents Dylan toppling the old regime and running off with the country’s youth. Taking them somewhere pleasant and colorful. And maybe becoming the new Mr. Gray.

And now let’s get down the deep philosophy I promised. The ignorabimus, which is a future-tense Latin verb meaning “we will not know.”

When we got home from our trip, my cyberpunk writer friend John Shirley alerted me to a news item about some scientists, one of them at Harvard, who made some artificial organisms that assemble copies of themselves, and naturally I’m, like, “I wrote about in Wetware. Meat boppers are real!” But some were saying, “This is the end, we’ve had it, Greg Bear’s gray goo is going to eat the world.”

But I don’t think we have to worry about artificial organisms eating the world anytime soon. After all (as I’ve said before) every single species has been trying, for millions of years, to totally dominate Earth, ceaselessly evolving and mutating and refining their wetware. And none of them ever wins. Because their rivals keep getting tougher. Kind of an intrinsic homeostasis, with the competing species keeping each other down.

If a little Harvard-built organism skips out into a rain-slick alley of our realtime cyberpunk future…it’ll be mugged by the skanky millennia-old critters seething around in the gutter, the OG germs of the natural funk.

An interesting point about this newly designed self-reproducing organism is they used a type of simulated evolution to design it. Computer scientists refer to this technique by the phrase “genetic algorithms.” You let a randomly generated population of algorithms compete with each other, and reproduce, and mutate, and recombine.

These days, any effective AI code arises by this type of evolution, which is also called deep learning.. Face recognition programs, or the pattern-recognition code that reads human handwriting—it’s all evolved. And nobody ever really “understands” the result. It’s incomprehensible. It’s a mound of a few thousand seemingly random decimal between 0 and 1. And these serve as weights for the links in a so-called neural network, which is designed by, as I say, an evolutionary process of genetic algorithms.

Back in the early days of AI, like the and 1950s and 1960s, zealots dreamt of finding a few simple rules about how minds work. And then (they imagined) bright MIT robots could march forth, utterly logical, well-programmed, gleaming with rationality. But this was a false dream. Indeed, when Kurt Godel proved his epic Incompleteness Theorem in 1931, he showed that it is even in principle impossible for us to describe human-equivalent code, and to describe it so clearly that it would be obvious that the code is correct and consistent.

Yes, due to profound and deep workings of logic, human-equivalent code must in fact be a fucked-up mess. Impossible to understand. No hope of proving it to be consistent. I wrote about all this in the “Towards Robot Consciousness” section of my nonfiction work, Infinity and the Mind. You can read it online.

In a prescient remark, Godel observed that nevertheless it would be possible for us to “bring such [human-equivalent] into existence.” And he was right. We do now in fact make computer code that’s smarter than expected. And, as I’m saying, we don’t do by deep insight. We do it by beating the problem to death with simulated evolution in an toy model of a world. What’s the expression? Nibbled to death by ducks.

Another science news item that got my attention of late is a new nonfiction book, A Natural History of the Future by Rob Dunn who argues that humans can’t fully comprehend the complexities of the natural world, or of evolution, let alone control them. (Full disclosure: It’s not like I actually read this book yet. I glanced at the description on the purchase page. But I certainly approve of it!)

It’s odd to me that even now, nearly a century after Godel, the average person keeps expecting that we’re going to get some simple final answers, and then begin controlling everything in sight. Hasn’t anyone been paying attention? For reasons related to Godel’s Incompleteness theorem, any hope of rational control over the world is dashed, just as was the hope finding a compact, crystalline secret-of-like-type design for an artificial human mind.

We can’t predict or control the natural world. About ten years ago I actually wrote up a formal proof for this, “An Incompleteness Theorem for the Natural World,” see details in this blog post. You could also call my result a proof of Natural Undecidability.

When I was in grad school at Rutgers, getting my Ph.D. in mathematical logic, I had a few golden hours of talking to Godel, I dreamed of writing an essay about the incompleteness of natural science, and then when I finally did, but somehow nobody but Stephen Wolfram cared. I’m not an officially licensed philosopher. And I have a peculiar talent for remaining obscure and underground,

My proof relates to Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science (NKS) and his “Principle of Equivalence.” He notes that natural processes can be thought of as gnarly natural computations: processes like flowing water, eddying air, flickering flames, growing organisms. And he posits that all gnarly computations are in fact equivalent to universal computations, capable of emulating any other system. And our man Alan Turing proved that the behavior of universal computations are, even in principle, unpredictable. Turing’s proof is similar to the proof of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. My full version is an anthology on Wolfram’s work, and in the “Random Truth” section of my tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, available in ebook, print, and browsable online.

As with producing something akin to AI by means of long-drawn-out evolution of logical systems, we can to some extent predict nature by lengthy, time-consuming emulations, as is done by weather forecasters. But, and this is the key point, there is no quick-and-dirty way to predict nature. Just as there’s no simple golden rule for AI.

The unpredictability of nature relates not only to Godel and Turing’s work, but also to the mathematico-physical notion of chaos. The slightest difference in initial conditions leads to quite different outcomes. Making the point once again, natural processes do not allow prediction by simple formulae, but only by, at best, long emulations which inevitably deviate from the actual course of events..

“But what about quantum computation?” someone might say. “Once we get that working, we’ll have it sucked. We’ll be able to predict anything.”

Well, probably not. Sorry to be such a wet blanket! But, listen. We don’t know, and we never will. Ignorabimus. The best we can do is take pleasure in the state of not knowing. Keats wrote a famous letter mentioning “Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…”

A final note on the quantum computing thing, I wrote about it a little in my essay, “The Great Awakening.” Long story short, given that atoms function according to the laws of quantum mechanics, the natural world is in fact a quantum computation itself, and it’s not clear that we’d get any appreciable game-changing “leg up” on our predictive powers if we had tame quantum computations in our handy pocket flasks.

That that’s a fun thing to think about. Taking a nip off that quantum flask. SF! Chilly! Shivery! Brain freeze! And you’re like, “I see it all!”

But, d’oh, come to think of it, I actually already used this gimmick in my novel Mathematicians in Love, wherein the heroes are in fact able to predict the future by using some quantum-type gizmo.

Cryptomnesia strikes again! That’s when I think I’m having a new idea, but in fact it’s an idea I had a long time ago, an idea that I already wrote about at length. Where cryptomnesia gets pathological is if it’s someone else’s idea that you’re remembering, and you’re imagining you just discovered it.

But ideas aren’t everything. The harder part is coming up with the characters, language, plot, point of view, action, scenes, arcs, and publication possibilities. In Vergil’s words, loosely translated, “Ah, there is the bring-down, there is the drag.”

But writing fiction is doable. Even if we don’t know anything about anything. We know what it’s like to be human, and to be alive—and we know how to tell stories.

I just spent a couple of weeks rereading John Updike’s Rabbit Qunitet, that is the four novees Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit is Rest, plus a final novelette, “Rabbit Remembered.” The five works appeared, approcimitely, in 1960, 1970,1980, 1990, and 2000.

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is the hero. A one-time high-school basketball star, aging through the decades. Marriage problems, family problems, puzzling about the meaning of life, taking joy from the world’s details. Viewed from 2020, Rabbit’s thoughts about women are occasionally questionable. But one keeps in mind that he’s a character of his times, and is not necessarily Updike himself.

I read the quintet on Kindle, and highlighted passages that I liked, so for today’s post, I’m interleaving the quotes with some photos, mostly froum our recent trip to New York City, mostly taken with my new camera.

I think (but don’t gurantee) that the numbers by the excerpts match the page numbers in the printed book. And as always, the images have no calculated connetions with the texts, but the universal quantum wave function called Surrealism will ensure harmonies.

One more thing, mostly the main character is referred to as “Rabbit,” but often Updike uses his given name “Harry.”

—–Begin excerpts from Rabbit Run by John Updike—–

10. Priest: “God gives to each one of us a special talent.”
Janice and Rabbit become unnaturally still; both are Christians. God’s name makes them feel guilty.

16. At the corner, where Wilbur Street meets Potter Avenue, a mailbox stands leaning in twilight on its concrete post. Tall two-petaled street sign, the cleat-gouged trunk of the telephone pole holding its insulators against the sky, fire hydrant like a golden bush: a grove. He used to love to climb the poles. To shinny up from a friend’s shoulders until the ladder of spikes came to your hands, to get up to where you could hear the wires sing. Their song was a terrifying motionless whisper. It always tempted you to fall. The insulators giant blue eggs in a windy nest.

60. (Meeting is soon-to-be-mistress Ruth.) Rabbit sits down too and feels her rustle beside him, settling in, the way women do, fussily, as if making a nest. … He pulls his head back and slumps slightly, to look down past the table edge, into the submarine twilight where her foreshortened calves hang like tan fish. They dart back under the seat. … He stands up and takes her little soft coat and holds it for her, and like a great green fish, his prize, she heaves across and up out of the booth and coldly lets herself be fitted into it.

76. (Rabbit overhears the punchline to an unknown joke.) “But man, mine was helium!”

93. As if to seek the entrance to another dream he reaches for her naked body across the little distance and wanders up and down broad slopes, warm like freshly baked cake

.

95. (Rabbit presses Ruth.)

“Why don’t you believe anything?”

“You’re kidding.”
“No. Doesn’t it ever, at least for a second, seem obvious to you?”
“God, you mean? No. It seems obvious just the other way. All the time.”
“Well now if God doesn’t exist, why does anything?”
“Why? There’s no why to it. Things just are.”

114. She is tepid and solid in his embrace, not friendly, not not.

133. You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they’re right.

142. (Rabbit takes a job as a gardener.)
Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes. In Mrs. Smith’s acres, crocuses break the crust. Daffodils and narcissi unpack their trumpets. … He loves folding the hoed ridge of crumbs of soil over the seeds. Sealed, they cease to be his. The simplicity. Getting rid of something by giving it to itself. God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Self-destined to a succession of explosions, the great slow gathering out of water and air and silicon: this is felt without words in the turn of the round hoe-handle in his palms.

149. (Rabbit at the pool with Ruth.)
Her bottom of its own buoyance floated up and broke the surface, a round black island glistening there, a clear image suddenly in the water wavering like a blooey television set: the solid sight swelled his heart with pride, made him harden all over with a chill clench of ownership.

171. She yanks powerfully at the lever of the ice-cube tray and with a brilliant multiple crunch that sends chips sparkling the cubes come loose.

176. He drives past a corner where someone is practicing on a trumpet behind an open upstairs window. Du du do do da da dee. Dee dee da da do do du.

237. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

238. Your wife’s parents can’t get at you the way your own can. They remain on the outside, no matter how hard they knock, and there’s something relaxing and even comic about them.

—–Begin excerpts from Rabbit Redux by John Updike—–

57. A car moves on the curved road outside. Rugs of light are hurled across the ceiling.

75. Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.

[My agent, John Silbersack.]

124. (Radical Black guy Skeeter who will settle in at Rabbit’s house after Janice leaves. From his first, self-introductory rant.)
“All these Charlies is heartbreakers, right? Just cause they don’t know how to shake their butterball asses don’t mean they don’t get Number One in, they gets it in real mean, right? The reason they so mean, they has so much religion, right? That big white God go tells ’em, Screw that Black chick, and they really wangs away ’cause God’s right there slappin’ away at their butterball asses. Cracker spelled backwards is f*cker, right?”
Rabbit wonders if this is how the young man really talks, wonders if there is a real way. He does not move, does not even bring back his hand from the woman’s inspection, her touches chill as teeth. He is among panthers.

131. As Babe plays she takes on swaying and leaning backwards; at her arms’ ends the standards go root back into ragtime. Rabbit sees circus tents and fireworks and farmers’ wagons and an empty sandy river running so slow the sole motion is catfish sleeping beneath the golden skin.
…Rabbit’s inside space expands to include beyond Jimbo’s the whole world with its arrowing wars and polychrome races, its continents shaped like ceiling stains, its strings of gravitational attraction attaching it to every star, its glory in space as of a blue marble swirled with clouds; everything is warm, wet, still coming to birth but himself and his home, which remains a strange dry place, dry and cold and emptily spinning in the void of Penn Villas like a cast-off space capsule.

171. “The mountain was really quite deserted.”
“Except for hawks, Dad. They sit on all these pine trees waiting for the guys to put out whole carcasses of cows and things. It’s really grungy.”

178. “Anyway, Dad, in a society where power was all to the people money wouldn’t exist anyway, you’d just be given what you need.”
“Well hell, that’s the way your life is now.”
“Yeah, but I have to beg for everything, don’t I? And I never did get a mini-bike.”

210. “Harry, it just came over the radio, engraving had it on. Kennedy’s been shot. They think in the head.” Both charmers [JFK and (remembered) FDR] dead of violent headaches. Their smiles fade in the field of stars. We grope on, under bullies and accountants.

218. “I love you,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t makes it true.

244. It frightens him, as museums used to frighten him, when it was part of school to take trips there and to see the mummy rotting in his casket of gold,

335. She is gumdrops everywhere, yet stately as a statue, planetary in her breadth, a contour map of some snowy land where he has never been;

339. The universe is unsleeping, neither ants nor stars sleep, to die will be to be forever wide awake.

376. (Rabbit’s sister Mim’s) marvellously masked eyes force upon her pale mouth all expressiveness; each fractional smile, sardonic crimping, attentive pout, and abrupt broad laugh follows its predecessor so swiftly Harry imagines a coded tape is being fed into her head and producing, rapid as electronic images, this alphabet of expressions.

379. (Looking at his childhood home with Mim.)
Rabbit can’t remember it, he just remembers them being here together, in this house season after season, for grade after grade of school, setting off down Jackson Road in the aura of one holiday after another, Hallowe’en, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, in the odors and feel of one sports season succeeding another, football, basketball, track; and then him being out and Mim shrunk to a word in his mother’s letters; and then him coming back from the Army and finding her grown up, standing in front of the mirror, ready for boys, maybe having had a few, tinting her hair and wearing hoop earrings; and then Janice took him off; and then both of them were off and the house empty of young life; and now both of them are here again.

387. [Rabbit’s aging mother’s] laughter reminds Rabbit of the laughter of a child who laughs not with the joke but to join the laughter of others, to catch up and be human among others.

400. Time is our element, not a mistaken invader. How stupid, it has taken him thirty-six years to begin to believe that.

430.(Reunited with Janice, Rabbit and her check into a motel. The clerk calls him young.)
“I’m not so young.”
“You’re yungg,” the man absentmindedly insists, and this is so nice of him, this and handing over the key, people are so nice generally, that Janice asks Harry as he gets back into the car what he’s grinning about.

—–Begin excerpts from Rabbit is Rich by John Updike—–,

71. “(Phillies baseball player) Bowa’s being out has hurt them quite a lot,” Webb says judiciously, and pokes another cigarette into his creased face, lifting his rubbery upper lip automatically like a camel.

77. Cindy’s towel hangs on her empty chair. To be Cindy’s towel and to be sat upon by her: the thought dries Rabbit’s mouth.

84. Faces and bodies rise from the aluminum and nylon furniture (by the country club swimming pool) like the cloud of an explosion with the sound turned down on TV. More and more in middle age the world comes upon him like images on a set with one thing wrong with it, like those images the mind entertains before we go to sleep, that make sense until we look at them closely, which wakes us up with a shock.

100. The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started.

142. “I would have taken a bath,” Janice says, but she smells great, deep jungle smell, of precious rotting mulch going down and down beneath the ferns.

142. Lying spent and adrift he listens again to the rain’s sound, which now and then quickens to a metallic rhythm on the window glass, quicker than the throbbing in the iron gutter, where ropes of water twist. … Murmurously beyond their windows, yet so close they might be in the cloud of it, the beech accepts, leaf upon leaf, shelves and stairs of continuous dripping, the rain. … Rain, the last proof left to him that God exists.

203. The earth is hollow, the dead roam through caverns beneath its thin green skin.

[With my Swarthmore College friends Don Marritz and Roger Shatzkin at our hotel.]

230. Before reaching into the breast pocket of the seersucker coat, (Reverend) Campbell taps out the bowl of his pipe with a finicky calm that conveys to Harry the advantages of being queer: the world is just a gag to this guy. He walks on water; the mud of women and making babies never dirties his shoes. You got to take off your hat: nothing touches him.

263. Harry has always been curious about what it would feel like to be the Dalai Lama. A ball at the top of its arc, a leaf on the skin of a pond. A water strider in a way is what the mind is like, those dimples at the end of their legs where they don’t break the skin of the water quite.

285. (Rabbit talking to the mother of Pru, who’s about to marry his son Nelson.)
“Well, your daughter does you proud,” he tells her. “We love her already.” He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.

313. The thing about those Rotarians, if you knew them as kids you can’t stop seeing the kid in them, dressed up in fat and baldness and money like a cardboard tuxedo in a play for high-school assembly. How can you respect the world when you see it’s being run by a bunch of kids turned old? That’s the joke Rabbit always enjoys at Rotary.

327. It’s fascinating to Rabbit how long those strands of hair are [that childhood enemy Ronnie Harrison] is combing over his bald spot these days, if you pulled one the other way it would go below his ear. In this day and age why fight it? There’s a bald look, go for it. Blank and pink and curved, like an ass.

366. In these neighborhoods health-food stores have sprung up, … and little shops heavy on macramé and batik and Mexican wedding shirts and Indian silk and those drifter hats that make everybody look like the part of his head with the brain in it has been cut off.

399. At the church the people in holiday clothes are still filing in, beneath the canopy of bells calling with their iron tongues, beneath the wind-torn gray clouds of this November sky with its scattered silver.

444. Where the sea impinges on the white sand a frill of surf slowly waves, a lacy snake pinned in place. Then this flight heads over the Atlantic at an altitude from which no whitecaps can be detected in the bluish hemisphere below, and immensity becomes nothingness.
… The plane, its earnest droning without and its party mutter and tinkle within, becomes all of the world there is. … God, having shrunk in Harry’s middle years to the size of a raisin lost under the car seat, is suddenly great again, everywhere like a radiant wind. Free: the dead and the living alike have been left five miles below in the haze that has annulled the earth like breath on a mirror.

447. For years nothing happens; then everything happens. Water boils, the cactus blooms, cancer declares itself.

471. (Rabbit starting an affair with Ronnie Harrison’s wife Thelma.)
Her whole body, into her forties, has kept that trim neutral serviceability nurses and grade-school teachers surprise you with, beneath their straight faces. She laughs, and holds out her arms like a fan dancer.
“Here I am. You look shocked. You’re such a sweet prude, Harry—that’s one of the things I adore.

485. Harry suddenly hates people who seem to know; they would keep us blind to the fact that there is nothing to know. We are each of us filled with a perfect blackness.

525. Uncurtained winter light bouncing off the bare floors and blank walls turns her underwear to silver and gives her shoulders and arms a quick life as of darting fish before they disappear into an old shirt of his and a moth-eaten sweater.

533. (Rabbit’s daughter-in-law Pru) comes softly down the one step into his den and deposits into his lap what he has been waiting for. Oblong cocooned little visitor, the baby shows her profile blindly in the shuddering flashes of color jerking from the Sony, the tiny stitchless seam of the closed eyelid aslant, lips bubbled forward beneath the whorled nose as if in delicate disdain, she knows she’s good. You can feel in the curve of the cranium she’s feminine, that shows from the first day. Through all this she has pushed to be here, in his lap, his hands, a real presence hardly weighing anything but alive. Fortune’s hostage, heart’s desire, a granddaughter. His. Another nail in his coffin. His.

—–Begin excerpts from Rabbit at Restby John Updike,

100. Janice sleeps on her stomach turned away from him, and if the night is cool pulls the covers off him onto herself, and if hot dumps them on top of him, all this supposedly in her sleep.

116. There is something hot and disastrous about Nelson and Pru that scares the rest of them. Young couples give off this heat; they’re still at the heart of the world’s business, making babies. Old couples like him and Janice give off the musty smell of dead flower stalks, rotting in the vase.

128. Your children’s losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.

133. Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colorful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind.

162. (Rabbit is felled by a heart attack in the presence of his daughter-in-law Pru.)
He lies down on the sand at Pru’s feet, her long bare feet with chipped scarlet nails and their pink toe-joints like his mother’s knuckles from doing the dishes too many times. He lies face up, looking up at her white spandex crotch.

196. Maybe Nelson is right, Toyota is a dull company. Its commercials show people jumping into the air because they’re saving a nickel.

209. The magnolias and quince are in bloom, and the forsythia is out, its glad cool yellow calling from every yard like a sudden declaration of the secret sap that runs through everybody’s lives.

210. Every other house in this homely borough holds the ghost of someone he once knew who now is gone. Empty to him as seashells in a collector’s cabinet,

260. Rabbit: “Thelma? We never see her anymore, we ought to have the Harrisons over sometime.”
Janice: “Pfaa!” She spits this refusal, he has to admire her fury, the animal way it fluffs out her hair. “Over my dead body.”
Rabbit: “Just a thought.” This is not a good topic.

268. Rabbit has never gotten over the idea that the [daily] news is going to mean something to him.

304. He leans down and kisses [his nine-year-old granddaughter’s] warm dry forehead. “Don’t you worry about anything, Judy. Grandma and I will take good care of your daddy and all of you.”
“I know,” she says after a pause, letting go.
We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.

310. Harry has trouble believing how his life is tied to all this mechanics—that the me that talks inside him all the time scuttles like a water-striding bug above this pond of body fluids and their slippery conduits. How could the flame of him ever have ignited out of such wet straw?

324. “Mim.” Just the syllable makes him smile. His sister. The one other survivor of that house on Jackson Road, where Mom and Pop set up their friction, their heat, their comedy, their parade of days.

350. “Harry, you’re not going to pop off,” she tells him urgently, afraid for him. That strange way women have, of really caring about somebody beyond themselves.

379. It is not night, it is late afternoon. The children, home from school, have been instructed to be quiet because Grandpa is sleeping; but they are unable to resist the spurts of squalling and of glee that come over them. Life is noise.

381. His eyelids feel heavy again; a fog within is rising up to swallow his brain. When you are sleepy an inner world smaller than a seed in sunlight expands and becomes irresistible, breaking the shell of consciousness. It is so strange; there must be some other way of being alive than all this eating and sleeping, this burning and freezing, this sun and moon. Day and night blend into each other but still are nothing the same.

398. (Rabbit unexpectedly sleeps with another woman.) Her tall pale wide-hipped nakedness in the dimmed room is lovely much as those pear trees in blossom along that block in Brewer last month were lovely, all his it had seemed, a piece of Paradise blundered upon, incredible.

436. (At the funeral of Ronnie’s wife Thelma, with whom Rabbit had that years-long affair, and Ronnie berates Rabbit.)
“I don’t give a f*ck you banged her, what kills me is you did it without giving a sh*t. She was crazy for you and you just lapped it up. You narcissistic c*cksucker. She wasted herself on you. She went against everything she wanted to believe in and you didn’t even appreciate it, you didn’t love her and she knew it, she told me herself. She told me in the hospital asking my forgiveness.” Ronnie takes breath to go on, but tears block his throat.
Rabbit’s own throat aches, thinking of Thelma and Ronnie at the last, her betraying her lover when her body had no more love left in it. “Ronnie,” he whispers. “I did appreciate her. I did. She was a fantastic lay.”
“You c*cksucker” is all Ronnie can get out, repetitively, and then they both turn to face the mourners waiting to pay their respects

457. [Rabbit], having to arise at least once and sometimes, if there’s been more than one beer with television, twice, has learned to touch his way across the bedroom in the pitch dark, touching the glass top of the bedside table and then with an outreached arm after a few blind steps the slick varnished edge of the high bureau and from there to the knob of the bathroom door. Each touch, it occurs to him every night, leaves a little deposit of sweat and oil from the skin of his fingertips; eventually it will darken the varnished bureau edge as the hems of his golf-pants pockets have been rendered grimy by his reaching in and out for tees and ball markers, round after round, over the years; and that accumulated deposit of his groping touch, he sometimes thinks when the safety of the bathroom and its luminescent light switch has been attained, will still be there, a shadow on the varnish, a microscopic cloud of his body oils, when he is gone.

467. (Nelson was hooked on coke, and he bankrupted the family car dealership. And now he’s sober.)
Nelson tells [Rabbit], in that aggravating tranquillized nothing-can-touch-me tone, “You get too excited, Dad, about what really isn’t, in this day and age, an awful lot of money. You have this Depression thing about the dollar. There’s nothing holy about the dollar, it’s just a unit of measurement.”
“Oh. Thanks for explaining that. What a relief.”

472. Expansively [Rabbit] says to Ronnie as they ride the cart to the eighteenth tee, “How about that Voyager Two? To my mind that’s more of an achievement than putting a man on the moon. In the Standard yesterday I was reading where some scientist says it’s like sinking a putt from New York to Los Angeles.” Ronnie grunts, sunk in a losing golfer’s self-loathing. “Clouds on Neptune,” Rabbit says, “and volcanos on Triton. What do you think it means?”
One of his Jewish partners down in Florida might have come up with some angle on the facts, but up here in Dutch country Ronnie gives him a dull suspicious look.
“Why would it mean anything? Your honor.”
Rabbit feels rubbed the wrong way. You try to be nice to this guy and he snubs you. He is an ugly prick and always was. You offer him the outer solar system to think about and he brushes it aside. He crushes it in his coarse brain.

519. They did do some fun things, [Rabbit] and Jan. The thing about a wife, though, and he supposes a husband for that matter, is that almost anybody would do, inside broad limits. Yet you’re supposed to adore them till death do you part. Till the end of time.

531. So when the system just upped one summer and decided to close Kroll’s down, just because shoppers had stopped coming in because the downtown had become frightening to white people, Rabbit realized the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of the money.

590. [Rabbit’s dying words.] “Well, Nelson,” he says, “all I can tell you is, it isn’t so bad.” Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough.

—–Begin excerpts from “Rabbit Remembered” by John Updike—–

199. A slender dark-browed girl of startling beauty waits on Janice, such beauty among the middle-aged and pudgy pimpled teen-age other waitresses that Janice’s eyes sting [with a vision of the girl’s] sad future: the marriage, the pregnancies, the heavy meals, the lost looks. The blazing beauty dwindled to a shrill spark, a needle of angry discontent lost in these streets lined with row houses and aluminum awnings and little front porches where the patient inhabitants sit and soak in the evening heat and wonder where it all went.

232. When Nelson tries to picture what a schizophrenic sees he remembers [doctor] Howie Wu telling him, Their sense of distance has broken down. Things up close look far away, is how Nelson has framed this—there is no clear depth in which to locate yourself. The gears that notch us one into another fail to mesh, maddeningly, meltingly. Trying to think his way into [patient] Michael’s head plants a sliding knife inside Nelson, a flat cold queasy sensation below his ribs.

266. [Nelson] is afraid getting back into circulation might get him back into coke, or Ecstasy if that’s the thing, or the ever-cheaper heroin; it’s so easy to slip back when you don’t feel you have much to lose. Talking to the substance abusers at Fresh Start, he can’t much argue when they argue for it. Happiness is feeling happy. Maybe it shortens your life but when you’re dead what’s the diff? Living to the next hit, the next scrounged blow-out, gives their lives a point. Being clean exposes you to life’s having no point.

[With my publicist Patty Garcia, who told me about meeting Updike.]

274. Mim: “Vegas is dead, the way it was—a sporting town. The people used to come here had a little class—the gangsters, the starlets. A little whiff of danger, glamour, you name it. Class. The guys used to pay cash for everything, off a big roll of fifties. Now it’s herds. Herds and herds of Joe Nobodies. Bozos. The hoi polloi, running up credit-card debt. Gambling is legal in half the states so they’ve built these huge moron-catchers along the Strip, all the way to the airport. A Pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, Venice—it’s all here, Nelson, all for the morons. It’s depressing as hell.”

306. She [Janice] and Ronnie left alone tended to each other’s needs, one of which, never stated, was getting ready for death, which could start any time now. A pain in the night, a sour number on the doctor’s lab tests,

311. (Pru telling her estranged husband Nelson about their geeky son Roy)
“He’s is scary, of course, spending so much time at the computer, but a lot of his friends are like that too. Where you and I see a screen full of more or less the same old crap, they see a magic space, full of tunnels and passageways and pots of gold. He’s grown up with it.”
Nelson is being invited, he realizes, to talk as a parent, a collaborator in this immense accidental enterprise of bringing another human being into the world. “Yeah, well, there’s always something. TV, cars, movies, baseball. Lore. People have to have lore. Anyway, Roy has always been kind of a space man.”

323. Seeing [childhood friend Billy Fasnacht], Nelson cannot but warm: here is a partner in his childish dreams, the conspiracy of imagined speed and triumphant violence that boys erect around themselves like a tent in the back yard under the scary stars.

325. Billy: I’m going to die, I can’t get it out of my head.
Nelson: By our age, Billy, we should have come to terms with this stuff.”
Billy: “Have you?”
Nelson: “I think so. It’s like a nap, only you don’t wake up and have to find your shoes.”

Juicy Ghosts is live.  I sent all the reward copies out to my Kickstarter backers.  It was a lot of work, but well worth it, to know the books are the hands of those who love them.

You, of course, can get your own copies in any format you like at the Juicy Ghosts page.

I celebrated by buying myself a new camera, a Leica Q2, and it kicks ass.  Some non-camera-nut friends were asking me why I’d even use a heavy old camera when I have such a great camera in my cell phone.

“More photons,” I tell them.  “All that glass. It brings in more photons.”

One of my first shots with the Q2. My stash of toys and icons and mementoes on my desk beside my screen. Pig’s Hoard.

And I can grab a pretty good phto right out of the window of my car.  The lens is kind of wide-angle, so I’m free to crop down to an image that I like.

I was in North Beach walking around…we were up there to see the Blue Angels air show, something Sylvia loves.  There’s a cool sculpture of hovering books right near City Lights Books.

And here’s the holy source itself.  I’m proud that a bunch of my SF novels are in there, downstairs.  I always wanted to be a Beat SF writer, and that’s what I am. Juicy Ghosts is maybe my heaviest countercultural statement yet.  I hope people read it.

Something so Forties about big display clocks. And that now-small TransAmerica tower.  I’ve always wondered about the pyramid room at the top…like is there one?  Does anyone ever get to go in there?

I have a great fondness for gnarly knots of wires and fuses and connectors and insulators.  Images of my mind?

And the lovely warm shades of paint in the sun.

I like this image because it looks like the sign is warped or distorted or crushed by sliding space.  Always loved that notion of warped space.  And infinite dimesional Hilbert space, which comes into play in Juicy Ghosts, where I call it teepspace.

Managed to catch a shot of a Blue Angel with a street light behind it, which is good, as it sets the plane into space and gives it scale.  Right before this shot, a similar plane few right over us, banking a turn, not more than 200 feet in the air above us, a moving wall of roaring machinery.  What a trip. You wouldn’t really stand a chance if those planes were after you.

But for the show, theyr’e demure and playful.  Dig the furrow of sky smoke next to the Vic cornice.

“Birth” acrylic on canvas, October, 2021, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

With the books printed and mailed out, I’ve gone back to painting. For this one, called simply Birth, I started with a group of more or less grotesque heads, like in a James Ensor painting. And I put in a cartoon baby, who’s an icon I’ve been drawing for fifty years. Another factor is that we’d just been to see a big Judy Chicago show in the De Young museum in San Francisco, and she had a whole room of very dramatic birth paintings. So I put in a woman who’s given birth, although I didn’t go as far as Judy does. Who are the other people? I’d say the little guy at the bottom is Dad, and on the left, that’s Sis, and at the top we have Aunt Bea, Grandma, and a 50s Grandpa. Love his hairdo.

When we came out of the De Young, we noticed that a statue was missing…I’d forgetten who it was of, but someone told me it had been Francis Scott Key, author of The Star-Spangled Banner, and he’d been a slave owner, so last year a crowd of demonstrators tore the statue down. Kind of like with Robert E. Lee in Richmond, VA. And then the city put up a ring of “slave” statues around where Key had been. Weird, the changes you see over a long lifetime.

We rode on a big ferris wheel right there. I like the ideogram of the kid’s legs.

I dig this spider-like bench in a meeting room in the De Young.

Colorful feet!

I mentioned that I like photographing wires and meters. Here’s some in Santa Cruz. I tend to crop all the cars out of my photos whenver I can, even if it means tilting the image. Something about generic cars so so boring.

Nice when object look alive. Mop face!

We also hit the good old Rosicrucian World Headquarters in San Jose once again. Always a good place to take a guest. This item here is a classic trop of fantasy fiction: The Door In The Wall. Usually leads to somewhere very cool…and when you back, the door disappears.

I call this photo, “I read the news today, oh boy.

Home-grown heiroglyph of railing-shadows on a hose.

What, another hose picture?  Well, we’ve got the contrast with that lounge-chair wheel, so it’s different.

Awesome shadow on the De Young museum wall.

We went to a game at the SF Giants’ stadium in SF.  I was shooting a lot, and cropping images down later for a zoom effect.  I like these three people.

The huge stadium a titled bowl of fellow humans.

Shooting photos with the Giants’ mascot! I forget what he is.  A rat? A seal?

This cotton candy hawker in back is kind of classic.  Working hard.

“High Five” acrylic on canvas, September, 2021, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

This was one of those paintings I started by smearing leftover paint onto the canvas and looking for patterns. I saw the woman, and a caveman-like guy. Maybe he’s a lifeguard. The woman like him; they’re exchanging a high five. What about the crocodile? Well, I needed something on that side of the canvas. The croc the woman’s ally.

As you know, if you follow my blog, I love gnarly roots. I’ve photographed these guys before, but the Q2 pops them out really well.

Philodendron with a little sculpture we got from Sylvia’s father.  Made of alabaster and marble.

The endless fascination of mirrors.  I’ve been thinking about how the sea surface looks like a mirror from underneath…like to a fish, it’s an unduating mirror.  And then sometimes … a pelican bursts through! Snappy beak.  This is kind of a SF/fantasty trope.  The monsters from higher dimensions who enter your room through a mirror.

Another shot I’ve done before, but once more with feeling.  Sunrise shadoes on the wall.  Domestic Stonehenge.  That’s a silhouette of a Deco sculpture by my friend Vernon Head on the left.

And I’ve photographed this birch for before.  This shot is acutally not with the new Q2 but with an old R-series Leica lens adapted to sit on my Canon 5D.  In case you care.  It’s a very kludge setup, though that Leica glass is gorgeous…and this experiment in fact drove me to the Q2.

Broomsticks? Happy Halloween.

And don’t forget to read Juicy Ghosts!  Universal ebook buy link.