I finished two paintings in the last couple of weeks. As always, you can buy quality art prints of my paintings at Imagekind. And you many of my originals are for sale at my Paintings site.

“Buddha and the Mouse”. Oil on canvas. 18″ by 24″. July, 2010.
I took a photograph of an interesting statue of a twelve-armed Buddha in a small Asian art museum in Pasadena, California. The somewhat sinister pattern of the arms and shadows interested me. So when I got home, I painted the image, and I added a mouse to give the picture a bit of a narrative quality.

Above is the original photo, which appeared in an earlier post as well.

“Davenport Cave”. Oil on canvas. 24″ by 18″. July, 2010.

This one started as an en plein air painting atop a cliff in Davenport, California. I was there with my wife Sylvia and my painter friend Vernon. It was a windy day, so I didn’t work on the picture for very long at the site. I was struck by a little sea cave in the side of the cliff and by the towers of a shut-down cement plant to the right. Back home I worked on the painting for another week, adding a man, a woman, and a shadowy crab-like shape inside the cave. I like that the cliff shape looks a little like the head of an elephant.

Above is the actual scene that I was looking at.

And here’s the thing in the cave. Representing the man’s psyche? Does he know the crab thing is there? Is it an alien? What is the man’s relationship to the woman? Do they live in the cave? Is the crab their friend? I like pictures to be like ambiguous and indecipherable parables.

The cement plant at Davenport is being closed down, it has a certain rough industrial charm.

“Fractal Skate Posse”. Acrylic on canvas. 24″ by 18″. May, 2010.

While I was at it, I recently retouched this painting that I did in May. I hadn’t been quite happy with the lower right-hand corner. I wanted to get it right for use in the illustrated free ebook version Billy’s Picture Book that I made with Terry Bisson last week.

My brother Embry recently shipped me a family painting of our great-great-grandmother, Sarah Elizabeth Harris Rucker (1814-1895). I remember looking at this painting at all of our mealtimes as a boy—Sarah hung in our dining-room. As boys we thought the picture was dark and stern, but now, seeing her again, Sarah looks quite pleasant, with a hint of a smile. As you can see in this detail, the paint is cracking and flaking a bit—it’s oil on a wooden panel—and I’m looking into having it restored.

[As of 2020 this 2010 page was obsolete and I’ve updated it. I reissued Terry Bisson’s Billy’s Book in 2020. See the 2020 blog page for new links.]

In our never-ceasing quest to shock and enlighten the world at large, Terry Bisson and I are releasing illustrated print and ebook…see the revised 2020 Billy’s Book page for Terry’s incredible collection of tales, sometimes known as Billy’s Book, but also as Billy’s Picture Book, thanks to some painted illos I created for it.

Billy’s Picture Book contains Terry Bisson’s thirteen off-kilter tales about an eager lad named Billy—including “Billy and the Spacemen,” “Billy and the Ants,” “Billy and the Talking Plant,” and more. The tales are like Zen parables, with an odd, rollicking humor. Rounded out by my surreal painted illustrations, Billy’s Picture Book is the book your inner child needs.

You can still find the original, non-illustrated, out-of-print, highly collectible PS Books edition from resellers.

Geek and ye shall find.

Oh, and the new edition uses Mikado font and not Comic Sans.

I’ve been reading parts of David Lipsky’s book-length interview of the writer David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Tragically, Wallace (1962-2008) suffered from depression, and he hung himself at the age of 46.

The interviews in this book were done back in 1996, when Wallace was only 34, and at a high-point, having just published his thousand-page novel, Infinite Jest. Originally the interviews were going to serve as source material for a long profile in Rolling Stone, but the article got cancelled.

Lipsky’s lines of questioning don’t always seem perfectly perceptive, but, hey, the interviews were done on the fly, and Lipsky wins Wallace’s confidence and gets him to talking. See the New York Review of Books review for some critical thoughts. Some of interviews could just have well been edited out—Lipsky had to stretch his material to get a book out of it. But I found a lot of good stuff. In his afterword, Lipsky does the signal service of giving us a real sense of sympathy for Wallace’s final struggles to stave off his depression and stay alive.

Wallace has always interested me—in 1987, I was one of the reviewers who praised his early novel, The Broom of the System. His magnum opus Infinite Jest changed my life—even though I skimmed over the sections about tennis. And years later, in 2004, I wrote a harsh review of his nonfiction book Everything and More, which was about Georg Cantor and infinity. There were in fact some good things even in that book, but for me it was spoiled by factual errors and by a rushed ending that fails to pick up on what I consider to be the most interesting aspects of Cantor’s work. A better editor might have been able to save the book.

There’s a lot more of my thoughts about Wallace and his writing in my earlier post, “David Foster Wallace, Oblivion”.

One of Wallace’s stylistic innovations was his use of a casual slacker’s spoken-English tone in much of his prose. He wasn’t the first to do this—the use of a street-voice-narrator plays a part in the success of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and this kind of tone also pervades Philip K. Dick’s Scanner Darkly. I often like to use this style myself, and it’s not as easy as it looks.

The passage in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself that popped out hard at me is where Wallace is discussing his reaction to David Lynch’s movie, Blue Velvet, and his subsequent thoughts on realist and surrealist literature, which are a very close fit for my own thoughts along these lines when I talk about transreal science-fiction (as in my recent podcast). I’ll just quote some Wallace excerpts here (taken from pp. 170-172 of the Lipsky book).

And there was somethin’ about…it was my first hint that being a surrealist, or being a weird writer, didn’t exempt you from certain responsibilities. But in fact it upped them. And the magic of Blue Velvet was that it so clearly—I mean I’ve got this whole theory that you don’t want to hear about. That Lynch is really an expressionist in the way that like Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is expressionist. Or that he’s very much about manifesting his inner states on the film, and it’s actually a very sick thing that drives him to make films.

… it’s just one of those little off things in every frame, that instead of seeming gratuitous or stupid or pretentious, actually makes those frames mean a whole lot. It was my first realization that there was a way to get at what those realist guys were saying, that was via the route of the surreal and expressionist.

And I think one of my—I mean, I’d always used sort of dreamy stuff. But I had never as a young writer realized that you still had an obligation to make a kind of narrative. That really the goals of realism and the goals of surrealism are exactly the same. And they’re indescribable. But they’re two completely different highways that have the same destination.

Adios, King.

So I’m back from Pasadena where I was a Guest of Honor at a small science-fiction convention called Westercon.

I was busy as an idol with twelve hands at the con, they had me give a lot of talks…more than I’d expected. One talk was on Transrealism, starting with a reading of my brief 1983 “Transrealist Manifesto”. The other talk on “New Futures in SF.” I’d outlined what I planned to say in this talk and posted it on my blog last week. But my actual talk was somewhat different. To hear my two talks, click the button below to go to Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

I’d forgotten my handy digital mini-recorder. Instead I borrowed a big microphone from the Westercon a/v guy, plugged it into my computer, and used the free Audacity software to turn my computer into a tape-recorder. Audacity rocks.

I took quite a few photos in Pasadena. When all else fails in terms of subject matter, I often take a photo of my bare foot. A human foot is, if you let its familiarity drain away, really quite odd-looking. We’re gnarlier than we realize.

One of the fans at the con was wearing an interesting hat which suggests an infinite regress, an endlessly branching binary tree. Or if the horns were to try and grab each other, you’d get something called Alexander’s Horned Sphere.

Here’s a picture of the Horned Sphere that I remember from a math textbook in college. Was the book by Kelly maybe? Here’s a video of it, too.

Speaking of interesting shapes, my wife and I spent some time in the Huntington botanical gardens near Pasadena, looking at the extensive succulent holdings. We were with Ernesto Hogan and his wife Emily Devenport (a.k.a Maggy Thomas a.k.a. Lee Hogan), all of these personae being writers. Ernesto is a cool guy, I’ve known him via letters and email for years.

This little row of cacti reminds me of a crowd of people. Maybe they’re gathered to listen to the cut-off bit of cactus in front.

I hung some prints of my paintings in the art-show at the con, and sold three of them, which was satisfying. Note that you can buy prints at anytime online from rudy.imagekind.com. Sell it, Ru!

We had two kinds of views out of our hotel window. Looking in the middle distance we could see a very cool Christian Science church against a backdrop of these amazingly dramatic and steep mountains.

Looking closer, we could see this immense and insanely noisy roof fan connected to the HVAC system of the hotel. When did it become acceptable to put such noisy fans everywhere?

Sylvia and I made it down to the Pasadena Rose Bowl on the eve of Independence Day to see the “largest fireworks show on the West Coast.” It was an awesome spectacle, about half an hour of blasts, with a number of intricate rockets that were new to me. Crackling cascades of spark dust. Wriggly twirlers. It was cool being in such a huge, diverse crowd of SoCal people. The traffic was such that we had to walk the two or three miles back to the hotel.

One complaint is that it seems to have become de rigueur to play hideous, loud, corny, “patriotic” music at unheard of volumes at fireworks shows, thus saturating the audiences’ sensory inputs so much that it’s difficult to even perceive the fireworks themselves. I think the worst song they played was called, “Let Freedom Ring,” (but not the version I linked to here). When they stuck to Ray Charles or Bruce Springsteen it wasn’t so bad. I think they showed a video of Reagan too. But no picture of Obama.

Going around Pasadena, we made our way into somewhat louche restaurants, like a combined sushi-place and bar. They had a great red staircase to the restrooms.

Back at the con, I ran into the kilt-wearing Klingon, Sqottie MacKlingon. Somehow he and I had gotten into a debate about my opinion that the US military draws its members disproportionately from low-income and disadvantaged citizens, and Sqottie now produced a link to an article on the conservative Heritage Foundation site that seems to show that I could be wrong in my belief.

Statistics are a jungle. In any case, I’m better at talking about escape literature than debating political points. Getting deeper into the subdimensions or some other kind of new SF future.