[Added Tuesday, September 16, 2008.]

I’ve been upgrading my paintings site, and I updated the painting notes, which you can read as a web page or as a printable PDF file.

Some of the originals are for sale, at prices newly marked-down as of today.

And you can buy prints or even notecards of my paintings at rudy.imagekind.com. The three newest pictures (but not “The Wanderer” yet) are on the site too.

“Sell it, Ed!” … to quote David Foster Wallace (from a 1980s story about some guys getting wasted while watching pitchman Ed McMahon on TV.)

[Added Monday, Sept 15, 2008:]

I’m working on yet another painting, called “The Wanderer,” which is loosely inspired by Jeroen Bosch’s “The Pedlar,” this is just today’s draft version above.

I got the background in an ab-ex fashion by simply painting shapes to match the shadows of leaves that happened to lie on my canvas, then fashioned it into the scene and added the Wanderer (me). I’m thinking I might put some creepy critters in those rocks (?) on the left, and maybe some cows in the field.

[Sept 12, 2008 entry follows:]

I’ve been painting a lot lately, and doing my best to stay relatively idle. Who knows, it may be awhile till I start another book.

This one is called “Alien Picnic,” and I started it en plein air on St. Joseph’s Hill in Los Gatos. I mentioned it before in the blog, but recently I finished it up, adding more colors and layers to the hillsides, and touching up those cute l’il eyeballs.

This is a picture of someone in a hospital and it’s called, uh, “Cerebral Hemorrhage.” It’s supposed to show how he feels. I like the 3D blob of blood and its shadow on the sheet, also the way the guy’s soul is flowing out through the soles of his feet…with the lobes of his brain piled up on the right like a compost heap, with a terrified, watchful eye on top, twinned with the eye of the soul in that starfish shape. Buy the notecard! Send a “Cerebral Hemorrhage” greeting today!

I’d rather be at the beach anytime.

The last few days I’ve been putting together issue #6 of my webzine Flurb , and should be able to serve it up to you next week, the line-up’s all set and I’m just waiting on a few author bios and so on.

I have one story by my friend Michael Blumlein, “The Big One,” a kind of magic fish story, rather than an orthodox SF story, and his magic fish got into my head to the point where I painted him just the other day.

A technical painting issue that interests me these days is getting transparency effects, that is, glazes and veils, when you’re using the somewhat dead and opaque medium of acrylic paint. I’ve been using Liquitex fluid gloss medium lately, though in past I’ve used Golden medium, and I’m thinking it might be interesting to try the gel medium.

I’ll let you know when the fresh platter of Flurb is ready to serve…

I’ve been reading an advance copy Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Anathem, preparing to introduce his reading at Moe’s on Wednesday, Sept 10, 2008. The book goes on sale nationwide on Tuesday, September 9, 2008.

Anathem is heavy in every good sense of the word, one of the best SF novels I’ve read in the last couple of years. I’d put it up right there with Charles Stross’s Accelerando and my own Postsingular, not to mention the esteemed recent works of my cyberpunk pals Gibson, Sterling, and Shirley. It’s truly twenty-first century SF, amazingly broad, deep, and well-informed with, at times, the flavor of a classic philosophical treatise.

One particular SFictional/philosophical theme that Stephenson takes on in Anathem is the question of whether our consciousness might span multiple universes, as well as wider questions about ways in which alternate universes might influence each other.

Stephenson advocates a radical notion under which some possible physical universes might in fact be something like a Platonic world of forms relative to some other universes—he calls this Complex Protism, although we Earthlings might call it Complex Platonism.

The MIT physicist Max Tegmark actually has written some papers discussing a somewhat similar notion—see, for instance his online paper (PDF format) “The Mathematical Universe.”

Here’s Neal’s official website (updated as of yesterday), and a casual personal website that he sporadically maintains.

Neal likes to write long books, and I’d estimate Anathem to be some 370,000 words long, that is, three or four times the length of a typical novel such as we lesser mortals might pen. He liberally uses many made-up words, so at first you’re continually flipping back to the Glossary at the book’s end. A bit of a learning-curve, but after a few hundred pages I was totally into the book.

Rather than going into full plot-spoiling detail about the book, I’ll just paste in some passages that for one reason or another particularly pleased me, marking the quotes by indenting them with a line in the margin. Think of this as a preview reel. Most of the photos were taken in Santa Cruz, CA, this weekend.

The main characters in Anathem are a bit like cloistered academics, and often get into dialogs not unlike what you’d find in Plato’s writings. At one point, our hero and a friend are watching two colonies of ants fighting each other.

”…You look down on it from above, and say, ‘Oh, that looked like flanking.’ But if there’s no commander to see the field and direct their movements, can they really perform coordinated maneuvers?”

“That’s a little like Saunt Taunga’s Question,” I pointed out. “Can a sufficiently large field of cellular automata think?”

Describing a revered philosopher/mathematician, Saunt Bly, who’d been expelled from his enclave:

…to live out the remainder of his days on top of a butte surrounded by slines who worshipped him as a god. He even inspired them to stop consuming blithe, whereupon they became surly, killed him, and ate his liver out of a misconception that this was where he did his thinking.

Note that “slines” are common people, and their name is derived from the central letters of “baseline.” “Blithe” is a tweaked plant that’s rich in the psychoactive agent called allswell.

Discussing how the outer word of “Saeculars” views the enclosed world of the philosophical orders:

“The Saeculars know that we exist. They don’t know quite what to make of us. The truth is too complicated for them to keep in their heads. Instead of the truth, they have simplified representations—caricatures—of us. Those come and go… But if you stand back and look at them, you see certain patterns that recur again and again, like, like—attractors in a chaotic system.”

Our hero’s mentor teaches him about the importance of seeking the gnarl in your everyday surroundings:

“That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see,” Orolo told me. “Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

Our hero is talking to his sister about how they’re going to face a possible alien invasion. He’s recently been in a stationery store. His sister is asking what other supplies they might use to try and defend Earth. They joke like mathematicians…

“Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?”

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”

“Okay, I’ll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.”

“That’d be great.”

Discussing what it is that our ruling class really wants to take from the common people.

The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People … had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were a part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part?

One of the book’s numerous definitions.

Dialog: A discourse, usually in formal style, between Theors. … In the classic format, a Dialog involves two principals … Another common format is the Triangular, featuring a savant, and ordinary person who seeks knowledge, and an imbecile.

A discussion between our hero and his mentor Orolo about what we’d call the Multiple Universes hypothesis.

“You’re saying that my consciousness extends across multiple cosmi,” I said. “That’s a pretty wild statement.”

“I’m saying all things do,” Orolo said. “That comes with the polycosmic interpretation. The only thing exceptional about the brain is that it has found a way to use this.”

By the way, my friend Nick Herbert has written a really good essay on the slippery topic multiversal consciousness: “Quantum Tantra.”

David Deutsch has also written some good stuff on multiversal computation, see my It from Qubit post on this.

A mention of my favorite mathematician, the philosopher-king Kurt Gödel, in a discussion about Gödel’s rotating universe model, in which a sufficiently long round trip can lead back into your past!

“On Laterre, the result was discovered by a kind of Saunt named Gödel: a friend of the Saunt who had earlier discovered geometrodynamics. The two of them were, you might say, fraas in the same math.”

“Saunt,” similar to our word Saint, is a shortening of “savant.” A “math” is an enclave where dedicated scholars live, and a male scholar of this type is a fraa.

Re. Gödel’s model of the universe, see a nice essay by John Bell summarizing how it can lead to multiple universes. The cool image here is from a Japanese essay about Gödel’s universe.

The people in Anathem have something like our Internet, which is called the Reticulum.

“The functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists … for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus versions—bogons as we call them.”

Two miles away—directly across the facet—was a hydrogen bomb the size of a six-story office building. It was essentially egg-shaped. But like a beetle caught in spider’s webbing, its form was blurred by a fantastic tangle of strut-work and plumbing…

Yaaar! We’re talking real SF!

I just finished the book, and I’m sorry to be done. Looking up into the sky, I notice a shiny…metal flying machine. My God! I live on a planet with flying machines! Oh, wait, I knew that already. Anathem makes everything seems surprising.

Earlier tonight I listened to Lou Reed and the Velvets singing “Heroin,” on their 1967 album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. “Heroin” was one of the very last songs we played in our house in Lynchburg, Virginia, 1986, the house empty and echoing, all our worldly goods already in the rental van at the curb, at the time I was kind of laughing with our friend Mike Gambone over the negativity of the song, but as usual loving the swoop of its sound and the imagined glamour of the blanked-out lifestyle—although, of course, in reality, I was moving my family to California to take a job a professor in the then-new field of Computer Science. Some junkie.

Suppose that I only plan to write one more book, what should it be? Wait—why just one more book? Well, maybe I have some rare condition that dooms me to die in a few years. Or maybe I just feel like claiming that, because it makes my life seem interesting. Or maybe I have a sense that I’ve written so many books that it might be time to stop…only not quite yet. “Just one more!”

When he was seventy, my father wrote an autobiography called Being Raised. He was a good guy, a human, a thinker. It’s an interesting book, and he even put in some fairly wild stories, although of course I kind of hunger for whatever he left out. Certainly it’s inhibiting if you imagine that you’re writing your memoir “for your children and grandchildren.” Though, really, by now I’d forgive my father for any imaginable sin, so he didn’t really need to hold back on my account.

But—still—if I were, like, writing my memoir, would I really want to include stories about crummy things I’d done when I was drunk or high? Well, maybe just a few, so as to give the illusion that I’m being frank and forthcoming, but, really, I’d rather write about the events in the main stream of my life: family, teaching, writing, and philosophical investigations.

And, aside from any purposeful sorts of recollections, I’d like to drift back and muse over some of the earlier memories, the things that an old man misses the most.

Like the handful of times my father took me fishing—I think of Sleepy Hollow near Prospect, Kentucky. Catching my first fish on a fly line. A bluegill, naturally. He’d invented a device called the Retrieve-O-Ring to rescue an expensive lure when it got snagged on an underwater log, he even sold a few of them via ads in sporting magazines.

Thinking of those times, I remember the G. family who lived in a shiny log cabin in the country near Harrods Creek. The father was the church organist, quite a musician, and the mother was my second-grade teacher. Cultured, pure people. They had an open house party once and my family was there, enjoying ourselves. I was talking to some big kids, telling them I was in the second grade, and one of the older girls said she was in the tenth grade. I was stunned. I had no idea the grades went up that high.

Mr. G. got my brother and I to come to choir camp one summer, and before each meal we had to sing this song, “Hey-ho, nobody home. Food, nor drink, nor money have we none. Fill the pot, Hannah!” I wondered if the cook was named Hannah. Soon we boys began thinking of “fill the pot” in a vulgar way, first to our great amusement, but eventually to our disgust, and for me it became a terrible way to start a meal, thinking of that chamberpot image.

I definitely want to write about fireworks and rockets, not to mention dogs and smaller pets like white mice. And the canteen of bourbon that Willie F. fetched for me when he was pledging for my high-school fraternity Chevalier. And my friend Barbie van. C. who got me to play a game where we were separated lovers who’d been looking for each other for years and we walked right by each other in a snow storm, missing each other by only a foot, but not seeing each other in the torrent of ice-crystals. This enactment was taking place in a pasture on a sunny September afternoon on her farm, you understand. Barbie had two older brothers and they had an amazing toy circus upstairs in the play room. I used to dream about that circus a lot, the dream even made its way into my novel, The Secret of Life.

And of course I want to expatiate upon life and death, as in—why, whence, and what’s it all for? When my father was on his last legs, finding his way towards death through a maze of heart attacks, hospitals, strokes, and nursing homes, my brother and my son and I were visiting him in a sick-room, and that afternoon I’d bought my son a black suit, just in case. “Why…why’d you get him a suit?” asked my father. “Funeral! ” said my brother in a stage whisper, pitched too low for the old man to hear. We cracked up. Times like that—what do you do? Laugh or cry?

Seeing my grandchildren is such a nice bookend to having seen my parents die. The other day, I was visiting my son and his twin girls, and one of them was toddling out the front door to the porch—she’s only just learned to walk—and I was cheering her on, and she got this proud, happy, shy look on her face, for all the world like a great lady entering a ballroom and being announced.

I’ve signed up to give a keynote talk, at Arse Elektronika, a Viennese-funded avant-garde conference in San Francisco on themes of sex and science-fiction. The talk is still a few weeks off, but they want an abstract from me today, so I’m making up something now, just to post as a start.

“What is Sex?”

Each of us is here as a link in a chain of a zillion reproductive sex acts. The pleasures of partnership and the orgasm help make us obsessed with having sex, even if we don’t know or care about reproduction. We might think of sex as any path that leads to orgasm. Note here the difference between sex with a person and, say, sex via pornography. In sex with a person, you’re talking about emotion, the positions of your limbs, touch across large skin areas, tastes, scents and pheromones. In the “artificial sex” of pornography, you’re talking about visual images, perhaps enhanced by recorded sounds. Amazing how little we’re willing to settle for! How might artificial sex improve? I’ll sketch some science-fictional scenarios.

Bruce Sterling sent me a great link to a Wikipedia article about the word “greeble.” In graphics, a greeble is some essentially meaningless bit of detail added to break up a blank surface and add visual interest.

You can write programs to procedurally decorate any surface with greebles; it’s a process similar to fractalization, that is, you divide up the surface into square are triangles and randomly add a bump or a hollow here and there. If you like, you can do this recursively for several levels, that is, rather than adding a bump or a hollow to a square, you subdivide the square into yet smaller squares and greeble those tiny squares.

In 1993, I wrote a Wired article subtitled “Kit-bashing the Cosmic Matte,” about George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, then in some ratty small buildings in little North Bay town. And one of the things the engineers showed me that when they’d used physical models (rather than digital constructs) for the big spaceships in Star Wars. And they’d pepped up these things by covering the surfaces with bits taken from standard over-the-counter plastic model kits of, like battleships. They called the process “kit-bashing,” but I didn’t hear them say the word “greeble.”

In writing, something analogous is what I’ve always called the “eyeball kick”—I’m actually credited with this use of the phrase by no less an authority than “The Turkey City Lexicon: A Primer for SF Workshops.”

That perfect, telling detail that creates an instant visual image. The ideal of certain postmodern schools of SF is to achieve a “crammed prose” full of “eyeball kicks.” (Rudy Rucker)

The phrase was used earlier by superbeat Allen Ginsberg in the mid-1950s:

Ginsberg also made an intense study of haiku and the paintings of Paul Cézanne, from which he adapted a concept important to his work, which he called the “Eyeball Kick”. He noticed in viewing Cézanne’s paintings that when the eye moved from one color to a contrasting color, the eye would spasm, or ‘kick.’

“Eyeball kicks” are also associated with comic art, as in the work of Will Elder in the early Mad magazine—did editor Harvey Kurtzman popularize the phrase? Help me out if you know about this…

A comix store I visited in in Wellington, NZ, two years ago is even called Eyeball Kicks.

In conclusion, we have to ask…would sex even be possible without greebles?