On Saturday, I took a walk up towards St. Joseph’s Hill over Los Gatos, California. I’ve been walking on this hill about once a week for some twenty years so I guess I’ve been up there nearly a thousand times. It’s always new to me, because Nature’s a fractal.

It’s been raining this week, but the rain let up for a day, and I could enjoy how green everything is.

I took my new 100 mm macro lens along and shot mostly small stuff. This is the tip of a tendril of an early spring vine called wild cucumber that we get out here.

I really love the shapes of the tendrils, they form conical helices, and latch onto lots of other plants.

In a month or two, the wild cucumbers bear their fruits, which are spiky green pouches akin to scrotums, filled with a pair of big seeds and milky juice.

Here and there, I could even spot the vestiges of last year’s wild cucumber crop. I see more details when I’m carrying around a macro lens—I’m looking at the world in a special, detail-oriented way.

The sun hit these berries in just the right way to set three hanging water drops alight. Whoah.

What else did I do this weekend? We saw Paula Poundstone do a stand-up comedy gig at the Rio Theater in Santa Cruz. She was pretty funny, with that edge of bitterness and misanthropy that so many stand-up comics have. But she showed up a frikkin’ hour late, and kept telling us some boring B.S. story that she’d slept through the plane’s landing in San Jose, and had ridden it on to Portland. Right. Like the plane people aren’t going to clear out the plane at ever stop?

I didn’t like that Paula thought she could stand there and lie to us. But, like I say, she made me laugh. She did a thing about a near-death experience and she didn’t see any dead friends and relatives or any white light, and she’s like, “Even in the afterlife they’re avoiding me! They’re, like, ‘Quick, hide the light!’” The light is a water drop on a cucumber vine, you understand.

We watched “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” on DVD. It had a few laughs, but not quite as many as I’d expected. Earlier this week we saw “Revolutionary Road,” which was somewhat better than I expected, I’d thought it would just be lots of bitter yelling—there was a lot of that, but they had a good crazy mathematician.

I finished reading Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs’s early work “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.” It’s amazing to me how weak their writing was at that early stage, considering how good they got later on. It’s a complicated process. In some ways, their writing later on seemed better because by then each of them had built up a “brand” and a personal legend.

I think Buddha means “grow.” So this bud is Buddha. It’s a chestnut tree. They’re always in such a hurry to grow up, these chestnuts. They turn yellow and lose their leaves by August. “Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful buckeye.”

I totally zinged this shot—I saw it, this giant hilltop tree that I love, and a nice tasty cute single-unit cloud overhead, and I had the 100 mm lens and I was able to frame it just right. The hill was all in shadow in the original, but I ran the Photoshop Shadow/Highlight adjustment and got the light back on the hill. The thing about digital photography—a whole of information about the scene is present in your image file, and you can excavate things that you can’t even see to start with.

I’ve shot these vents before, but today I was able to get more of them into the picture thanks to the telephoto effect.

Up on the hill, I have this nice view of San Jose, it’s an isolated whole, the downtown. And I always think of a story about a boy meeting up with an old hermit, and they’re walking towards the actually rather poky little market town nearby, and from a hilltop they glimpse the city, and the hermit, who’s a religious fanatic, starts railing against the town, “Yea the mighty shall be brought down, the walls of Babylon shall fall, woe unto the wicked.” And, really, its just ordinary people living their lives down there, and the furious hermit is hopping up and down shaking his gnarled fist. The boy—he’s eager to get into the town. Like Mason Reynolds in The Hollow Earth.

M. C. Escher made some nice etchings of things reflected in puddles. This shows a tree with some branches and leaves dandling over a muddy puddle near a spot where I usually crawl under a fence to get back down to my house. I miss having my dog Arf along for that part.

In my previous entry, “Painting Thirteen Worlds and The Flims,” I was talking about painting an image containing one of Jim Woodring’s “jivas,” as seen, for instance, in the story “Frank and the Truth About Plenitude,” that appears in Jim’s wondrous and profound anthology The Portable Frank.

[Image is Copyright (C) Jim Woodring, 1993.]

I now realize that I’ve seen similar shapes in Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature (or Kunstformen der Natur). I own the book, but I also found some of his images, like the one below online, like at the Wikimedia Commons! (This is kosher because copyright only lasts seventy years after the author dies.) Here’s Haeckel’s Plate 17, of siphonophores, edited by me to show three of the jiva-like forms.

Note that a siphonophore is an animal which resembles a jellyfish—such as a Portuguese man o’ war—but which is in fact a colony of individual siphonophore critters called zooids. The jiva-like guys in the Haeckel picture are individual zooids, according to this discussion. A zooid might specialize to work on locomotion, or stinging, or reproduction, etc. They’re a little more sophisticated than individual body cells, and little less specialized than organs. By the way, those little gramophone horns dangling down are feeding tubes.

The light dawns. In my new novel, Jim and the Flims, I can have two humanoid factions of “flims” in this alternate world called Flimsy—both good and the bad aliens, naturally. And I think I’ll have the jivas and the yuels be agents working for these humanoid flims. The jivas for the good guys, the yuels for the bad guys.

The jivas and the yuels (that’s a preliminary visualization of a yuel on the right of my painting The Flims) can be creatures along the lines of hunting dogs or falcons or unruly pets or intelligent robots. If the main flims are humanoid, then we can relate to them—and have sex with them.

I hope Woodring doesn’t mind if I talk about “jivas” in my novel. I’ll have to check with him, maybe via our mutual friend Paul DiFilippo—those two recently did a boxed chapbook/illustration/puzzle project together called Cosmocopia. (After posting this lihk, I just bought a copy online.)

Update: I emailed Jim and he wrote back that I have his blessing for this project. Thanks, Jim!

By the way, I’d been thinking of the yuels as blue Tibetan-demon-dogs the size of ponies, as in my painting. But it would be freakier, I think, to have them look like big seals. Maybe blue or deep purple. Voracious, omnivorous seals in any case. It’s kind of uncanny and creepy the way seals “walk,” humping along with their feet together. Seals would be “reasonable,” as the book is set in Santa Cruz.

I like how in the photo above the seals are hassling the poor guy who’s trying to come aboard. Reminds me of tenured academics dealing with a timorous job applicant.

Imagine a Repulsion-type hallucination where your floor turns into a carpeting of seal bodies and flippers. Your house has turned into a heap of yuels! The flims are somehow able to convert pieces of our world into yuels or jivas to serve as proxies in their war for cosmic supremacy.

This week I wrote a funny (in my opinion) scene where Jim Oster discovers that his new live-in girlfriend Weena Wesson having a tryst with Jim’s landlord Dick Simly. (Weena is in fact an alien, a flim from Flimsy.)

When I came home in the late afternoon, Weena had someone else in our bedroom with her. I could hear that they were having sex. I went shaky all over, with my chest feeling all hollow.

I threw a chair across the kitchen so they’d know I was home, and then I went out in the back yard and started sharpening my biggest carving knife, using a long sharpening iron that made a sinister slithery sound.

A few minutes later I heard quick footsteps going through the house and out the front door. Weena appeared in the back yard, wearing shorts and a t-shirt.

“Are you planning a psychotic rampage?” she asked, half smiling.

“I want you to know that I’m taking this very seriously,” I set down the knife. “Don’t you love me, Weena?”

“We’ve never talked about that. I thought you wouldn’t mind if I did another fatsy.”

“I do mind. I—I’ve grown very attached to you. Who was the guy?”

“Dick Simly. Your landlord. I’m sorry you’re upset. I don’t have to do him again. It wasn’t normal sex like with you. I was implanting jiva larvae in Dick’s flesh.” She bucked her hips gently. “With my ovipositor. Like a wasp.”

“You’re crazy,” I said. But I had to laugh. Weena was a step beyond spacy, that was for sure.

This is a multi-day entry. I added to it on Jan 31, Feb 1, Feb 2, and finally Feb 3, 2009.

Jan 31, 2009.

I love how the wave looks in this picture. The reflection along the top.

I finished writing a new story called “All Hangy” with John Shirley last week. Some of my recent thinking about pathways to alternate worlds leaked into this tale.

I’ve been painting, as well as working on my novel Jim and the Flims. This picture is called Thirteen Worlds. I started it before Christmas—we were hanging up some glass ornaments and I was thinking about the reflections in them. I remember reading somewhere that a good exercise for a painter is to practice drawing circles—and then spheres.

I didn’t actually look at all that many mirror balls to paint this, it’s more that I thought about them a lot, although I did keep one reflective ball next to my easel so I could figure out how my hand with the brush would look. It seemed more interesting to have all thirteen artists be different. Thus, “Thirteen Worlds.” As usual, you can get prints or originals of my paintings at my paintings site, also this page has a link to my recent book of paintings, Better Worlds.

I’m working on a new picture now—today’s working title is Portal to the Flims. It has to do with my characters Jim and Weena finding a gateway or a transitional zone that leads to an alternate world of beings called flims. Getting the landscape was easy—I just took some leftover paint from Thirteen Worlds and painted a landscape in the shape of some shadows that were falling on my canvas. The straight lines are shadows of some telephone wires. They’re like symbolic of this being a portal zone. In a way the picture was nice like this. But, the thing is, I always like to keep painting and adding stuff.

When I was in the woods in Louisville I had a mental image of a creature that I think of as a “yuel.” It was the size of a pony with powerful muscles under its dark skin. Kind of a flesh-eating horse. With a short rounded bull-dog head. Wider than you’d expect. If you’re alone, and you see a yuel, you’re probably going to die.

So today I tried to paint a yuel, and she didn’t come out the way I expected at all. No matter what I do, she keeps looking like cat, or some crude Rousseau panther. That’s the thing about painting. My subconscious mind has as much control over my muscles as does my conscious mind.

But I didn’t want a painting that’s mainly of a big cat! I don’t much like cats—but, uh, that’s why my “scary creature” looks like a cat! In any case, I’ll work on the yuel’s body, and add more critters to take this one a bit out of the limelight.

Feb 1, 2009.

Alex’s comment that it’s easier to paint a dragon than a dog struck home. Also I was studying Jim Woodring’s anthology, The Portable Frank, last night—you can buy it in the “Store” section of Woodring’s site.. So this morning decided to overpaint my “cat” with something more demonic…a Krishna-blue Woodring-influenced demon!

[Image of painting, “Jivas,” by Jim Woodring, 2008, which recently sold for $1200 at the Comic Art Collective.]

Continuing this afternoon, I started work on putting a Woodring-style jiva into my painting as well. As explained in the Wikipedia Woodring entry, “jiva” is Jim’s word for the rotationally symmetric, top-like shapes he likes to draw—the world means something like “soul” to Hindus and Jains. I’ll show you the new version tomorrow or the next day.

Feb 2, 2009.

Okay, here’s The Flims with a jiva. I might still decorate it more. And I think I need one more thing—maybe something in the upper right hand sky. A flying woman maybe, standing in for my character Weena Wesson.

Feb 2, 2009.

Okay, now I’m done. The Flims. Let me recapitulate and explain this once again.

I’m working on a novel called Jim and the Flims, about a man who finds a way to get to an alternate world overlaying our own reality. And this other world is inhabited by the so-called “flims.”

I wanted to see what the flims looked like. To start with, I took some leftover paint from Thirteen Worlds , and painted a landscape in the shape of some shadows that were falling on my canvas. The straight lines are shadows of some telephone wires. They’re symbolic of this being a portal zone.

And then I painted the creature in the lower right—this is a menacing beast that I call a “yuel.” When I was in Louisville in January, I imagined seeing something like this in the woods, although in my vision, the yuel was darker and more like a horse. But I decided to go for a Tibetan demon look.

The other two beings are modeled on what the cartoonist Jim Woodring calls “jivas,” they appear, for instance, in his book The Portable Frank. They’re a bit like free-floating souls—and, it now occurs to me, a bit like animated paint brushes.

Finis Coronat Opus.

I’m back to thinking about a novel called Jim and the Flims. I see two races—the somewhat ethereal flims and our race, which they call, let us say fatsies. And the worlds are Flimsy and Fatland.

How do they fit together topologically? I think we’ll suppose that they share the same time axis. How about the space?

The obvious idea is to use parallel branes like in Postsingular. But, just to change things a bit, one might suppose that the two branes are like the two sides of a sheet of paper, or the two sides of a wooden board.

An related alternative would be some notion of inside-out. If we simply wrap the sheet of paper into a sphere, we get a balloon with a picture on the outside and a picture on the inside. But maybe somehow there is a “balloon” for each atom. You go from one world to the other by turning each of your atoms inside out.

For the moment let’s stick with the sheet with two sides—or, more accurately, a hypersheet bounded by a pair of three-dimensional hyperplanes: Flimsy and Fatland. How do you get from one to the other?

I suppose you tunnel through. If we do this abruptly, then it’s a matter of making a right-angle turn into the fourth dimension, drilling through the bulk, and then making another right turn to get back into the other universe. But I’d like to see a more gradual transition, something more along the lines of Sheckley’s “The Altar” , which I posted about last week.

I suppose there could be a sloping tunnel that leads through the bulk, and when you ease into it, you can see the source universe in certain directions and the target universe in the other directions. The tunnel might be quite short—more like a doorway or a portal—so that you don’t have a lengthy zone of darkness in between the worlds. I used a portal of this kind in Mathematicians in Love.

In order to require the back-and-forth thither-and-yon bumbling of the “Altar” approach, we might suppose that our space is rucked up and folded over, so that the tunnel’s mouth can only be reached by going along a certain path. I think of a process like scraping away paint—you go back and forth past a certain alleyway, and each time you pass, the alley looks a little different, and finally it leads to Flimsy.

We might suppose that my character Weena came through this tunnel, but that she can’t find her way back from our side. My character Jim finds the way for Weena, aided by his dog Arf—he hits on the Sheckleyesque spinor path between worlds

Alternately, I might consider there being a whole range of ways to travel between Fatsy (our world) and Flimsy (Weena’s world). I’ll display some options in a bulleted list:

• The method of moving along an odd path in fashion of Sheckley’s “The Altar.” For some possibly relevant science, See the Plate Trick entry on Wikipedia, and the one on Orientation Entanglement.



• Pushing through a rubbery mirror as in Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.
• Drawing a door on a wall and then opening it. This is pretty common, I think it’s in, for instance, the movie Pan’s Labyrinth.
• Walking though a magic door that’s hidden in a kind of closet, like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Or through a tunnel in a dungeon. This tunnel/portal/door method is the one I’m most likely to use.



• Meditating on a certain pattern, like in my novel Postsingular. This is similar to chanting a spell, in that it involves getting a certain pattern going in your mind.
• I see a visual of someone literally turning inside out via a 4D rotation. The two worlds are related like the outside leather and the inside silk of a glove. You turn inside out—ugh—and then you snap over to the other side.



• Eating something—like a magic potion, a drug, or matter from the other world.
• Clasping a magic amulet, possibly made from alternate world stuff.

Note that these travel methods might apply to different kinds of models as well.

I’m thinking that I feel a little bored with the two brane model. I’ve used it before. I’d like something spookier, something more fantasy-like. Today I’m leaning towards the notion that the other world in some sense overlays our existing world. The two worlds aren’t separate hyperplanes or different locations, they’re in the same place. The Land O’ Faerie is one and the same as our mundane world, if only we have the eyes to see it.

In fantasy novels this kind of thing is simply left unexplained. “The horns of Elfland, faintly blowing…” But, as is my habit, I grope for a scientific model. Suppose that the two overlaid worlds are in some sense at an angle to each other—that is, Flimsy (or the Land O’ Faerie) is made of matter particles whose quantum spins are rotated by, let us say, 13.711 degrees. And normally these rotated particles don’t interact with ours. They might, come to think of it, be dark matter! In effect, we blinkered mundanes see through polarized sunglasses—which filter out the views of the wondrous.

We might also suppose that some cosmic clock is turning, bringing Faerie into full overlap with Main Street. The dark matter spires are gonna be shimmering into view. And already, as harbingers, certain nimble humans and flims can twist and untwist themselves to dart from world to world. Sometimes a half-transformed Flimsy creature will bump against you in the dark—I think of some pony-sized dogs that I call yuels. You don’t see anything, but you feel the brush of a yuel’s hot flank, and you smell his rancid, meaty breath.

And in the night, the barking of the seals shades into the unearthly baying of the yuels. Rapid footsteps sound on Jim’s porch…