I mentioned that I’ve been busy revising my autobiography, Nested Scrolls: The Memoir of a Cyberpunk Philosopher. As part of the revision, yesterday I wrote up a little history of my webzine Flurb. Here’s that passage, which is relevant as Flurb #8 went live this week—and is off to a strong start, with five thousand visits in the first two days.

By the way, you can click on any of the Flurb covers below to see the issue in question.

Issue #1, Fall, 2006	Issue #2, Winter, 2006
Issue #3, Spring, 2007	Issue #4, Fall, 2007
Issue #5, Spring, 2008	Issue #6, Fall, 2008
Issue #7, Spring, 2009	Issue #8, Fall, 2009

And here's the excerpt from Nested Scrolls...

Although I’m often able to sell my short stories to science-fiction magazines, it’s a fair amount of trouble for very little pay, and my stories do sometimes bounce back. In 2006 I hit upon the idea of starting my own online science fiction magazine.

I’d recently written a story with my old SF pal Paul Di Filippo, a tale called, “Elves of the Subdimensions.” I was in a rush to get the story published so that I could put it into an upcoming anthology of my stories—it’s generally considered wasteful to anthologize a story of yours that hasn’t already been published.

There wasn’t time to get “Elves of the Subdimensions” into one of the major print magazines, but when I tried one of the existing online SF webzines, they had the temerity to turn our story down. And that’s when I decided to start my own webzine. I mean—why should I court rejection from strangers who weren’t even going to pay me, just in the hopes that they might post my story online?

[Paul Di Filippo]

I’d started blogging by then, and I knew enough about the web to be quite sure that I could design and organize an online magazine. And given that my blog was getting quite a few hits by now, I’d be able to steer a respectably large audience to the zine. And my son Rudy was running an Internet Service Provider business called Monkeybrains, so I could get the server bandwidth for free.

What to call my webzine? The name jumped out at me from a line Paul had written in our joint story. The elves, who live in the subdimensions (whatever the heck that means), are discussing the oddities of our human world.

“The high-planers ingest sweet chunks of their worldstuff!”
“They use picture boxes to learn their hive mind’s mood!”
“Of flurbbing, they know not!”

Yes, my webzine’s title had to be Flurb. I liked the Mad Magazine sound of the word, and its vague feel of stumble-bum incompetence. If pressed, I might define “flurb” as a verb meaning “to carry out a complex, non-commercial artistic activity,” and “flurb” as a noun might mean “a gnarly artwork that’s incomprehensible to the average person.”

This definition even appears in the Urban Dictionary, although it’s competing with an alternate defintion of a “flurb” as an obsessive role-playing fan.

I started by asking my SF writer friends for contributions, and, as the issues went on, I branched out from there, first turning to writers that I knew less well, and then starting to read contributions sent in by strangers. You can see an overview of all the authors so far in Flurb‘s Cumulative Contents page.

I have a fairly clean design for the zine, running a colorful border down along the left side of each story. For the borders, I use patterns that I create with Capow, the cellular automata software that I’d developed on with my students at San Jose State—I use a fresh pattern for each story.

I also illustrate the stories with photographs that I’ve taken. I like photography a lot, it’s instant transrealism. When photography goes well, you’re appropriating something from your immediate surroundings and turning it into a loaded, fantastic image. I’ve been taking photos for fifty years by now, and I’m still excited about it.

For use in Flurb, I make a pool of my best recent photos, and then I choose the individual illustrations from the pool very quickly, almost at random, in adherence to the old Surrealist principle that the human mind is capable of seeing any two things at all as going well together.

I’ve come to enjoy the interactions with my Flurb authors, and I’ve just published issue #8. At this point, we get about sixty thousand visits per issue. And no money at all is involved. I don’t charge people to read Flurb, nor do we carry any advertising, nor do I pay my authors. I try to treat them well, they get a little publicity out of it, and they get to keep all rights. It’s a sideline for all of us.

I like to think that Flurb is a kind of clear-channel border-radio station for SF. As a personal matter, having Flurb as an outlet has freed me to write some stories that are so quirky and non-commercial that I wouldn’t have done them otherwise. For instance I wrote a story called “Tangiers Routines,” about William Burroughs having sex with—and being in some sense eaten by—the early computer scientist Alan Turing. A lot of people liked this gnarly tale. But I could never ever have published it for a large audience in any locale other than Flurb.

Editing an issue of Flurb twice a year is a slight distraction from my writing—but writers are always looking for distractions. Eventually you miss writing enough to want to do it again.

...end of excerpt from Nested Scrolls.

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.