A read a several year’s old book by Bruce Wagner last week, Still Holding, and I just got The Chrysanthemum Palaceout of the library. I kind of like Wagner, he writes these very dark and hip stories about Hollywood characters. He’s a master of California dialect. And now and then he unleashes these really poetic streaks.

This said, you need to be careful to to read some Bruce Wagner books while eating a meal—I do often read while eating lunch, and several times the Wag-Man spiked my appetite with some truly gross scene. “Rude Chuckles with a Negative Charge,” as Robert Williams wrote as motto on the cover of Cocaine Comix a few years back.

I can’t quite figure out what kind of guy Wagner is. In Still Holding he goes off on these really intense riffs about Buddhism, maybe in a kind of overdone Hollywood maven kind of way. He kind of makes Buddhism square, like interior decorating magazine article, or a Lives Of The Saints schtick, or a Neimann-Marcus catalog. Maybe he’s doing this on purpose to make fun of Hollywood. Or maybe he just over-researched the topic.

There’s also something a little cruel in his attitude towards his characters. In Still Holding a couple of the characters die fairly horrible deaths, and if feels…unkind. I’m thinking there’s this Hollywood thing of “going for the tough ending” that some people think is artistic and avant-garde. My feeling on this is that we all know that life is full of hideous pain, so why harp on that in a work of fiction that many readers are likely to be using for escape and entertainment.

Wagner seems to have befriended the aging sixties drug-shaman Carlos Castaneda during the nineties, see this 1994 interview with Carlos that Bruce did.

It seems like his novels should have been made into big movies, but I think there’s only some indie releases. Whatever gripes I have about him, Bruce Wagner’s novels are tasty page-turners. [And, see my Aug 17, 2010, comment at the end of this post, The Chrysanthemum Palace is incredible, rising above any criticisms I ever had.]

I finished reading Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, a long and good biography. I relate to Turing in many ways. I went ahead and wrote another story about Alan, “Undifferentiated Tissue.” I’ll be running this in the next issue of Flurb. I’m lining up some good stuff for the coming issue, which is #10.

I went out painting en plein air on a beach near Davenport with my friend Vernon Head again today. Vernon just got a portable oil kit, and I have a kit cobbled together with a collapsible aluminum easel and a lot of stuff in a knapsack. Vernon is a really skilled painter, he gets the colors right, and his pictures look like Corots. He likes my approach, although he always laughs and says “Why do you even go out for en plein air painting, when you’re going to make a picture like that?” Vernon has some of his images up in an album on his Facebook page…the album is public, so you should be able to see it, although you will need to log into Facebook first. Vernon paints really well, it’s kind of humbling.

This is a rough first layer of a new painting “Beach Saucer” that I got done today. I think I’ll add some figures on the beach, maybe fleeing or waving humans or maybe aliens. Maybe some birds in the sky.

I’m working on two more SF stories as well, a couple of collaborations with writer friends, one with Paul Di Filippo, one with Eileen Gunn. I really enjoy writing, although it’s also stressful and hard. As I always say, I like the craft of it, and the dreaming.

Writing stories is kind of weird, it’s like painting a miniature. You keep having to prune back avenues of investigation and get to the point. If you think in terms of getting “high” on your art, then doing a story is like smoking a roach of seeweed that you found in your car ashtray. And writing a novel is like, say, having a kilo of merge to polish off. I’m a glutton for the “narcotic moment of creative bliss,” as the John Malkovitch artist-prof character says in Art School Confidential. But I’ll settle for the ashtray roaches for awhile, that’s cool too.

Publishers Weekly came out with a great review of The Ware Tetralogy today.

Rudy Rucker, The Ware Tetralogy. Prime Books, $24.95 (752p).
Rucker’s four Ware novels—Software (1982), Wetware (1988), Freeware (1997), and Realware (2000)—form an extraordinary cyberweird future history with the heft of an epic fantasy novel and the speed of a quantum processor. Still exuberantly fresh despite their age, they primarily follow two characters (and their descendants): Cobb Anderson, who instigated the first robot revolution and is offered immortality by his grateful “children,” and stoner Sta-Hi Mooney, who (against his impaired better judgment) becomes an important figure in robot-human relations. Over several generations, humans, robots, drugs, and society evolve, but even weird drugs and the wisdom gathered from interstellar signals won’t stop them from making the same old mistakes in new ways. Rucker is both witty and serious as he combines hard science and sociology with unrelentingly sharp observations of all self-replicating beings. This classic series well deserves its omnibus repackaging, particularly suitable for libraries.

Read it now!

I finished a new painting today, “The Riviera.” I was going for a kind of French Impressionist look with this one, thinking of a garden party. Another inspiration was that I’d recently seen the Mel Brooks theater production of Young Frankenstein. But I went for a robot or mechanical man rather than a Frankenstein’s monster. I like how he’s glowing from the inside. In a way, this painting is an image of my wife Sylvia and me, on a car-trip we took to the Riviera with her brother Henry, in 1966, the year before Sylvia and I were married.

The Riviera, 40” by 30”, August, 2010. Oil on canvas. Click here to see larger image.

As usual, you can get prints or originals of my paintings at my paintings site, also this page has a link to my Lulu art book of paintings, Better Worlds.

I’m still fooling around with my new Alan Turing story, it’s always fun to be writing. I like the craft of the process, the kneading, the interactions with the muse.

I’ve been twittering a certain amount of late, too, and some of the tweets have to do with ramifications of my Turing research. If you want to see my tweets, click the button below.

Brendan Byrne, a young writer who edits an off-kilter webzine called “The Orphan,” sent me a link to a stirring blog post by SF titan Norman Spinrad. As sometimes happens to aging writers, Norman is having trouble getting his books published these days. Norman analyzes this in terms of a “death spiral”.

Norman is about five years older than me, he was kind to me when I was new at writing. When I was coming up, his Bug Jack Barron came as a revelation. You can put curse words in a science fiction book!

Reading his blog-post complaint, I too worry about remaining publishable. More and more often I think of the folk-tale that, among the Inuit, when a member of the tribe becomes too old and decrepit to care for, they’re put on an ice-floe with a hunk of blubber to chew as they drift northward towards the unwinking sun.

You can substitute “e-books” for “hunk of blubber,” I guess…

Just back from hike-in camping with my wife, Sylvia, at the Point Reyes National Seashore Coast Camp. It’s a two mile hike in, not too bad, and you end up in a site right by the Limantour Beach. I never manage reserve campsites in advance—it’s just too big a hassle and too much thinking ahead—but if you show up at the Bear Valley Visitor center shortly after 9 a.m. on a weekday, you can normally get a site. Not that managing this is easy, but every couple of years I can.

When I visit these wild, deserted beaches, I sometimes think of the publicity photo of Raquel Welch for the 1966 film, One Million Years B.C.

It was foggy in the morning, but got sunny around noon on one day and 2 p.m. on the other.

I’m always so impressed with how intricately and beautifully nature arranges things when humans more or less leave her alone. The little rectangles of park and yard that we have in cities aren’t really the same kind of thing.

[On “Sculptured Beach” a mile south of the Coast Camp.]

I’m still thinking about this Alan Turing story I want to write, possibly with an eye to getting up enough momentum to charge ahead with a novel that has the title Turing & Burroughs.

[Protosentient pre-fetal green goo.]

I’ve been reading this very long Turing biography from 1983, Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma. The book really rounds out Turing’s character, and I’m internalizing some of this stuff. There’s always a danger, when writing about historical figures, to settle for a cartoon version of them.

[In the hamlet of Pt. Reyes Station. The Bovine Bakery is a must.]

I feel like in some ways I was like Turing myself as a boy and young man. Like Turing, I always had huge problems with my writing pen, often got ink on myself, and tended to get low grades simply because my papers were so messy. And, like Alan, when filling out official forms, I’d pondered every answer, thiking about the optimal strategy. It was always clear that the authorities were my enemies.

[My friend Bill explains his method of luring a swarm of bees from their lair by building a fake hive outside their entrance.]

Turing had an odd way of speaking. His voice was somewhat high-pitched, he had a grating laugh, and he emphasized words by raising his pitch still higher on them. Hodges has a quote from an American scientist who remembers Alan telling him a dream as follows: “I had a dream last night. I dreamt I was walking up your Broadway carrying a flag, a Confederate flag. One of your bobbies came up to me and said, ‘See here! You can’t do that,’ and I said, ‘Why not? I fought in the War between the States.’”

Turing did a lot after his 1936 paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” written when he was 24, and the source of his seminal formulation of an abstract computer as a “Turing machine.”

In World War II, he was in the thick of the British efforts to break the German army’s Enigma and Fish codes. He was said to be the top cryptanalyst in the United Kingdom, and Turing’s group made a key difference in the war’s outcome.

As the war died down, Turing got hold of “a twenty-five cent handbook on electronics, the RCA Radio Tube Manual, and invented a new way of enciphering speech.” The cipher was called Delilah, basically you needed a box of electronics at the sender’s phone and matchinb box at the receiver’s phone. The cipher worked by overlaying random noise on phone message. A cool, modernistic and Wolframesque feature of this is that Turing used a deterministic but chaotic circuit in order to generate the “noise.” The sender’s and receiver’s boxes could be set to generate exactly the same pseudorandom patterns.

Listening to a Delilah message was maybe like listening to Turing himself. It was overlaid by a noisy background buzz and a 4000 Hz whistle. Talk to me, Alan.