It’s starting to look like I’m going to find a publisher for my autobiography, currently titled, Nested Scrolls: The Memoir of a Cyberpunk Philosopher. I’ll give more details if and when I actually get an offer.

But with encouragement in the air, I’ve started doing a revision of Nested Scrolls, starting with reading through it and patching things that seemed either too roughly phrased or too flat. I’d been a little uneasy that the manuscript might be really weak—given that I hadn’t looked at it since last winter. I’d been almost scared to reread it. But it’s good, I dig it, there’s some great stuff.

I’m going to write a couple more chapters for Nested Scrolls now, bringing it up to the present, and maybe I’ll blog a little of that material later on. Right now, here’s some quotes from my chapter about when I was working as freelance writer in Lynchburg, Virginia, from 1982-1986.

[Today’s photos are shots I took around the house and yard yesterday and today.]

It was an exhilarating time, but stressful. Sometimes I’d feel like a piano with its wires tightened to the point where the surrounding frame is about to snap. Exquisitely overwrought. Bursting with beautiful music.

Every weekday I’d go into that office to write. Nonfiction, stories, essays, novels—I loved it all. At any given time, my current project would be like an immense sliding-blocks puzzle in my head. I’d carry it around inside me all day and all night, fiddling with it, moving things around, working to improve the patterns.

[Hungarian-style embroidered pillow, but with ants instead of flowers, by Isabel Rucker.]

Even when I’d spend time doing other things, the steady river would still be flowing. In my subconscious mind, I’d continue trying things out, thinking ahead, feeling for the best idea. And when I’d focus back in on the work, I’d find that the river had changed a little.

The characters in my fiction would get to be like imaginary friends—I’d laugh to myself about things they’d said or done, puzzle over what they might do to improve their situations, and interrogate them to learn more about their pasts.

The best was when the world around me would begin to merge with my writing. I’d see or hear things that were just what I needed for the next chapter of my book. Conversely, I’d write something and the next day something very similar would actually happen. I came to think of this as the world dancing with me. The intense mental discipline of writing was putting me into such a sensitive state that the soul of the world was beginning to play to me. I was hanging out with the Muse.

But with the Muse at my elbow, it wasn’t like I had to sit at my desk alone all the time. Sometimes, if one of our three kids had a cold and couldn’t go to school, I’d take them to my downtown office with me. I remember Rudy coming along one day. He brought some plastic toy soldiers that he liked—the green kind that come two hundred to a bag—and his battery-operated Japanese robot. He put the soldiers in a circle around the robot and turned on the robot, and it was like seeing an SF flick right there. Later we walked down to a fast-food restaurant for lunch—Hardee’s—I liked their fried chicken sandwich, although Rudy preferred their barbecue.

This particular Hardee’s was entertaining because there’d often be an odd man there wearing an orange knit cap—he’d be with his aged mother, and she’d always be trying to calm him down. The day that Rudy came with me, the guy in the orange hat was excited about his hot drink, and yelling about it.

“Cup of tea! Cup of tea! Cup of tea! Cup of tea!”

We loved it.

Back in 1976, when I was starting to be a writer, in Geneseo, New York, at night I’d write poems on my red IBM Selectric typewriter. Not that I bothered sending the poems out to magazines—submitting my math papers was heartbreak enough. A friend on the English faculty encouraged me to join in the periodic faculty poetry readings, where I’d hand out my works in mimeographed form.

Thirty years later, I’d run into Thom Metzger, who’d been a student of mine at Geneseo, and has since become a successful writer. He still has what may be the sole surviving copy of my mimeographed handout, and he shared a Xerox of it with me. Most of my old poems are in my Transreal collection, but the three below have never been reprinted.

[Today’s photos are from the Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, California.]

Dick Tracy With Crutches in a Bucket

Imagine
A national restaurant chain with
“crutches” of french-fries and
“chicken” of Tracy
a pot of honey with each meal
and French ticklers in the men’s room.

I remember exactly what I mean by that Dick Tracy poem. When I was a country kid in Louisville, my favorite restaurant was called Pryor’s. They had a big sign showing a tousled rooster playing golf. Their specialty was a dish called “Chicken in the Rough”— a huge mound of French fries, with pieces of fried chicken nestled into it. The meal came with soft dinner rolls and a tub of honey. And, as I think I mentioned earlier, my favorite comic strip as a boy was Chester Gould’s surreal Dick Tracy, with its peculiar insistence on grotesque criminals and the details of physical objects, often with lettered labels. So in my poem, I imagined a large bucket filled with dismembered and deep-fried limbs of Tracy, packed in among soft limp crutches of the kind you’d see in a painting by Salvador Dali. Of course!

Here are the other two poems. The first has to do with some mandatory vaccinations the government was promoting in the name of preventing that year’s flu du jour. And the last one is maybe, in part, a kind reminiscence of high-school.

Mr. Jones

One fall the
     people were vaccinated before the
          Election.

There are four plausible interpretations.
Or were.
     Now we are again singularities surfing
          on the wave of story.

Spore replication,
     Virus wars,
          it was there all
               the time.

Up All Night

I could fall
I realize as
The upturned faces begin
To shake
    Insanity is not a
    Habit but a “jackal’s
    Head” inside/outside the
    Lambency —
Imagine the hair-line cracks
Sudden black-dipt
Innards of a wind-faired
    Auto laid out in
    That basement with those H-2-0 trains
            Back there
After graduation the cars were empty
I was searching the glove compartments
For a pint
    Never mind
    We started kissing with thunder coming on, yeah
            thunder.

I recently acquired a copy of my old friend Clifford Pickover’s new tome, The Math Book , a really attractive and reasonably priced volume with 250 full page color illustrations, each illustration accompanied by a single-page description.

In Pickover’s words, “My goal in writing The Math Book is to provide a wide audience with a brief guide to important mathematical ideas and thinkers, with entries short enough to digest in a few minutes.”

[Breather Pseudosphere, Copyright (C) 2006 by Paul Nylander. See a larger image on Paul’s site.]

One of my favorite images in The Math Book is Paul Nylander’s rendition of the so-called Breather Pseudosphere. The idea behind this surface is that it has a constant curvature of -1, as opposed to a sphere, which might have a constant curvature of +1, and also as opposed to a plane, which has a constant curvature of 0. You’re supposed to ignore the ribs, and you need to accept that the surface intersects itself along a circle, which is clearer in the image below, by Xah Lee. You can rotate this image on Xah’s site.

[Segment of a Breather Pseudosphere, Copyright 2006 by Xah Lee.]

From the arcane math references that I’ve consulted—see for instance the Wikipedia “breather” page—I gather that the breather pseudosphere can in fact “breathe” in the sense that, by diddling a certain parameter, someone (not me anymore) could create a sequence of images of it and then assemble these into a video in which this negatively curved object will pulsate like some omnivorous space squid from Dimension Z. If any of you ultra-math-and-CS maniacs out there has access to such a video—or feels the urge to create one—share the link with us via a comment on this post!

[A traditional Beltrami pseudosphere, Copyright (C) 2006 by Richard Palais and the the 3DXM consortium.]

As Pickover’s book explains, the notion of pseudospheres was invented in 1868 by the mathematician Eugenio Beltrami, who formulated the more familiar “double trumpet” model, as shown above, created by the 3DXM Consortium . (3DXM is a graphics program, now called 3D-XplorMath.)

You can find further images of various kinds of pseudospheres (these images by Xah Lee, Luc Bernard and other members of the 3DXM consortium) on the Gallery of Pseudospherical surfaces at the Virtual Math Museum. This page includes an essay “About Pseudospherical Surfaces,” which explains (amid much gnarly math) that, at least when depicted in our normal 3D space, any surface of constant curvature -1 will include “singularities” in the forms of self-intersections or cuspy lines where the surface has a crease in it—like those ribs in the breather pseudosphere or like the edge where Beltrami’s two trumpets meet. But you can smoothly embed pseudospheres into 4D space, I believe.

As I was discussing in an earlier post, another way to create a negatively curved space is to start with a disk of some ductile material, and the keep stretching the disk all over, but without overly stretching the outer edge. The inside of the disk acquires more area than one would find in a regular flat disk. The extra room is there because the interior is now a negatively curved surface. And I think this surface is something like a pseudosphere. (A different approach is to stretch the outer edge of the disk to infinite length, and this is a different model of negatively curved space called the Poincaré plane.)

[Copyright (C) 2009 by Vonda N. McIntyre . White hyperbolic anemone with red veins.]

Some knitters and beaders have crafted physical objects like the edge-stretched pseudosphere, some of which appear among a wild Crochet Reef show in 2009. Among the goodies on display was a bead construction of a pseudospherical sea anenome by no less a personage than the fantasy and SF writer Vonda N. McIntyre —see the MathCrafts section of her home page.

When I was snorkeling near Palau a few years ago, I noticed that many naturally occurring soft corals are indeed negatively curved surfaces.

It’s worth remembering, by the way, that if you’re living in a very small house, it might be nice to have negatively curved space inside…