[Draft of the text in this post.]

I’d like for part of the novel to be Jim Oster’s memories of his boyhood, thus allowing me to transrealize some of the remaining unused segments of my autobiography. But for the novel to work as a story, I need some hooks between the old days and the present year (around 2010 ) in which Jim Oster is narrating.

A fan, Andy Valencia, wrote me in response to my blog post, “Nested Scrolls, Alpha Start,” suggesting that Jim Oster be somehow broadcasting his story to other worlds, perhaps by collapsing the info into diamond-weave nanobooks that he launches into space via a rail-gun. Andy also proposed that Jim might find some extraterrestrials’ nanoautobiographies on Earth.

I like the feel of these idea, but in order to give my book a fresh feel, I do want to avoid familiar notions of possible technology—sometimes we forget how unfamiliar the future is likely to be. I see the autobios as being more like biotech growths than like tiny abacus-precise tapestries of atoms. I think of seeds or animalcules that grow into scroll-patterned cultures, akin to lichens on rocks. Or of hive-mind algal blooms. Or of quantum-computing air currents.

We can readily suppose that alien autobios are all around us in these kinds of forms, and always have been. But—until Jim Oster’s breakthroughs—we haven’t been able to read these natural books. Note that natural books aren’t a new concept. For instance, my friend Brian Wallace has, I believe, an ancestor, Alfred Russel Wallace, who was a fringe scientist who said he could read the markings of shale as clearly as the pages of a newspaper.

For that matter, the Book of Mormon is described as originating in some marks on plates that the prophet Joseph Smith deciphered by using a “seer stone” or a pair of “stones of sight” known as Urim and Thummim. What if Jim Oster were to found a new religion based on a natural book that he finds in the form of the shadows of a eucalyptus tree’s leaves, or in the rustling whispers of a palm tree’s fronds?

There’s a bit of the hylozoism notion in the concept of natural books—as we’re talking about ubiquitous, logically deep information. I find it pleasant to suppose that the air is teeming with the biographies of extraterrestrials. Note that these aliens aren’t necessarily from other planets, they might be from the subdimensions or parallel branes. To me it’s always seemed like overkill to drag in aliens from millions of light-years away. Why shouldn’t they be as near as my heartbeat?

In any case, Nested Scrolls—or maybe it’s called The Natural Book—still needs a plot. We’d want to have some impending crisis that might end our world—and the aliens are enlisting Jim Oster to help save our shared reality. Save it from who? From some benighted humans—I might well bring back my favorite villains, the Heritagists. One can readily suppose that Heritagists have a hysterical, superstitious, witch-burning fear of the aliens. And they’re working on a Reality Cleansing Treatment to erase all the ambient alien autobiographies and alien minds.

Opening scene: Jim Oster in the hospital, recuperating from what they’re telling him is a mild stroke, caused by a cerebral hemorrhage. His long-term woman friend Anne Wowesse visits him—these two are both somewhat out of it, along the lines of the characters in Phil Dick’s A Scanner Darkly or William J. Craddock’s Be Not Content. This said, I think it clarifies and simplifies my story if I assume that Jim and Anne are both sober, perhaps even in recovery—this way, it’s more believable that their perceptions of the world’s workings are in fact true.

After visiting hours end, and Anne leaves, Jim is thinking over some of the things she said, and he becomes convinced that his so-called stroke or hemorrhage was in fact a Heritagist attempt to wipe the very scroll-nesting powers of alien empathy that Anne has been teaching him.

He escapes from the hospital in his gown and catches a ride with a not-so-coincidentally passing van of seeming hippie/punk musicians who are, we suspect, aliens. The odd musicians fan Jim’s mental scrolls back into life, and he becomes more and more certain that, yes, the consensus world-view is a lie. The evidence is right there in his memories—and in the tales that the other van members tell, Decameron style, as they motor down the coast to a disorganized hippie/punk festival to be held on the beach near Andrew Molera State Park.

The van band, Monkeybrains, comes on at sunrise, and when they start playing, the aliens and their subdimensional UFOs appear.

So I think I might as well make this new book a novel. I mean, Jack Kerouac didn’t write “memoirs,” nor did Burroughs or Ginsberg. They wrote transreal novels and poems! Some possible themes…

* A state becomes a sunken, glowing hole in the Earth, permanently lost.

* A character has a lasting relationship with an intelligent, humanlike being that he meets in a UFO.

* How it feels from the inside carry out fictional fabulation.

*The meaninglessness/meaningfulness of life, or reality/unreality of death.

As I mentioned before, I’m seeing the title for his novel as Nested Scrolls . I like the phrase because it describes the chaotic, self-organizing, artificially alive artificial life simulations that I love. And “scroll” is good, as it refers to a document or even a sacred text, and if the scrolls are “nested,” that’s fractal and self-referential and heavy.

I think I can get literal with the title, and have the book in the form of a memoir that an aging man is trying to write, and he begins finding extra stuff in the document. Maybe he can somehow zoom in—it’s an electronic document—and he sees stuff that he doesn’t remember writing. And he goes into time-travel flashbacks. And maybe some characters from the past show up. Nested Scrolls.

I have an unreliable narrator named Jim Oster, and a woman (maybe she’s a woman) that he lives with, Anne Wowesse. I like that name better than Weena Wesson; it’s an anagram with a wow.

Usually I put together a fairly thorough outline of a novel before I begin writing the book itself. But maybe this time I could do less of an upfront outline than usual. I have this urge to just dig in and get going. Later I could still do some outlining in any case, especially if I get stuck. And it’s not like the outline is such gospel anyway, I usually end up revising it a dozen or so times during the course of the book. But just for now, let’s try writing an opening scene.

The book starts with Jim Oster reminiscing about his life with Anne Wowesse.

Twenty years ago, I had a few days of publicity for appearing in an online sex video. My partner, Anne Wowesse, was rumored to be a saucer alien. Our video link was everywhere: “New UFO You!” But then the public’s fickle attention moved on.

I do feel it’s possible that Anne is non-human—this is something I periodically think about, as I still live with her. In certain moods, I can visualize her body as a tissue-culture grown from tweaked cow liver cells, and her mind as a holographically implanted alien engram.

Not that just anyone would notice this, whether by talking to her or by having sex with her—which is, I might add, not especially difficult. Live and let live.

Our Surf City neighbors regard Anne and me us as unsavory or even beneath contempt. But I’m dreaming of restoring us to the level of fame that we deserve.

What’s going to make the difference is the “scroll nesting” technique that Anne recently taught me.

Jim Oster wants to write his autobio, well not write exactly, he wants to make a kind of electronic version of his autobio, a pattern of nested scrolls that’s based on what he says or types. The scroll nester isn’t a computer-science kind of thing, it’s more like a cell phone earpiece that you talk to a lot. Jim himself isn’t a techie. For much of his career he worked as an assistant for a guy installing wooden screen doors.

What’s gonna happen with the scroll nester is that Jim Oster stares into the display and gets hypnotized and flashes back into the past.

I’m in the Los Gatos Coffee Roaster, once again. Writing crazy BS. Thinking about Weena Wesson. Recall my mention of this character in my most recent post:

A scene in a UFO, with a bad kid, call him Denny Allaway, frantically humping a chunk of cow liver, imagining that it’s Weena Wesson, the Hollywood love goddess.

It makes me happy to think about a novel project. Actually calling a novel Weena Wesson might be overdoing it—I mean, the novel might not be about that at all. It’s just a phrase to start with.

Last night I had insomnia, and I was reading one of Allen Ginsberg’s biographies, Bill Morgan’s I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. I began imagining writing a transreal SF author autobio novel called, say, A Writer’s Life. That’s what Joyce’s great first novel is, come to think of it—dropping the SF element of course—Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

[Photo of Pablo Picasso, Woman in an Armchair (Jacqueline Roque Picasso), 1960, at a show from the New Orleans Art Museum at the Cantor Art Center in Stanford. Note the two profiles, one light, one dark—it took me a few minutes to pick them out.]

Of course if I put SF in it, then that makes it unreadable for some largish percentage of the people in the world. Oh well!

Can I really put in the part about the cow liver and Weena Wesson? Maybe. The liver is hiding under the boy’s bed. She whispers to him through the mattress. Maybe her “real” name is an anagram. Awnee Swones. Anne Swesewo. Anne Wowesse.

Trolling the Web for irrelevant info, I found the YouTube video shown above, entitled “Weena + Me=Love,” showing two young women goofing around, filmed, I think, on the street by a stranger using a cell phone.

“Oh, mama!” says the woman on the right.

The good news is that people think they saw me making love to the legendary Weena Wesson—the bad news is that my co-star was in fact a cunningly tweaked cow liver.

In any case, I’m thinking it more interesting to cast any memoir-like work into a novelistic format—like I’ve done in the past. Really, all of my novels are transreal—in the sense of having a character who in some sense represents me during some part of my life. I first worked out a correspondence between my life and my novels in some detail in an interview for Hayakawa SF Magazine around 1998 (see page two of my online interviews.)

Just today I realized that I can force all eighteen of my novels into the table.

I see there’s room at the start and the end. Boyhood and dotage. Maybe an old man is recalling his early years. (Speaking of dotage, I think the ages are off for some of the novels, especially Spaceland and Realware. So write a paper about it…)

Okay, fine, so what’s the title if not Weena and Me?

Kentucky. Fallout. Yellow Dust. Maybe A Writer’s Life? That’s right on the transreal border between fact and fiction—which is, nah, too confusing, or even off-putting. And it’s been used a lot.

I’m looking for a title that suggests the quality of what it’s like to become a writer and/or a scientist. The Branecaster is good, but I used up that word in Frek and the Elixir. Daydreamer is nice, but, oh oh, Ian McEwan used that for a kids’ book title in 2000. Dreamlight? No, been used a lot.

Often it’s better to get deeper into my own particular jargon, so as to find title possibilities that aren’t so picked over. I’m thinking of my beloved Belusouv-Zhabotinsky scroll patterns. Turing Patterns. Standing Waves. Nested Scrolls.

I like that last one. Nested Scrolls. Searching Amazon for that phrase, I find it’s not a title, but it does appear in—two of my books: Mad Professor and the Lifebox tome, apparently the same passage in both books, tsk tsk.

I’m writing almost at random in these notes. Which could be a good thing. I’ve heard it said that writers are at their best when they have no idea what they’re doing.

In the last chapter of Nested Scrolls, the (now-dead) hero Tim’s acquaintance (not really a friend) Denny Allaway is thinking about Tim, and Denny realizes that it doesn’t really matter that Tim is dead, any more than it matters when a pinecone falls off a tree, and that if Tim hadn’t saved the world, someone else would have, maybe even Denny himself, if he hadn’t of been so busy humping that 120 pound chunk of cow liver made up to look like Weena Wesson. The cow liver is sitting next to him, sharing a bottle of hard lemonade.

“Muuur.”

“I love you, Weena.”

That’s so commercial…

A Louisville memory. Waiting by the side of Route 42 near Rudy Lane for Barbara T. to pick me up and give me a ride to nursery school in her 1951 Buick Roadmaster with the four little portholes set into the side of the hood. Miss T. wore more lipstick than any woman I’ve ever seen, it was almost like she put it on by eating it. Tidy, well-dressed, but not terribly attractive, she lived with her mother. I liked her, up to a point, as I found her pretty easy to talk to, although not so easy as my own parents. She later gave me a science-fiction/fantasy book that I liked a lot—or maybe I just found it in her house while my parents were having a dinner with her— the book was called Zotz!, by Walter Karig, 1947.

I should mention that, initially, it seemed reasonable and natural to me that the street I lived on would be called Rudy Lane, only later did I realize that it was a coincidence, due to the fact that at some point a family with the last name of Rudy had lived on the road, which was maybe three miles long.

I remember some of my first days at nursery school, or maybe at kindergarten—the two blend together, and it’s hard to be sure which memories come first. I remember a large room called Hilliard Hall, with grayish-black asphalt tiles on the floor, and ordinary sash windows in the walls. We had some really big blocks to play with, maybe two or three feet on a side. You could stack them and make little mazes. They made a hollow boom when they fell down.

We’d play a game where we’d dance around the room with a record playing, and now and then the teacher would lift up the needle and you’d have to freeze in place where you’d been right when the music stopped, and if you didn’t freeze fast enough, you were Out.

I’m still wondering what I might write next. How about two hundred thousand words of kvetching about my life—not. The memoir plan, I dunno, it’s not gelling for me. It feels like work instead of like fun.

Today I’m leaning towards a simple and crystalline SF novel. Something light and irresponsible. How about a UFO novel in the Young Adult mode. I’m imagining a scene with a bad kid, call him Denny Allaway, frantically humping a chunk of cow liver, imagining that it’s Weena Wesson, the Hollywood love goddess. Cute Sue Pohler is laughing at Denny. Our hero, Tim Bruno, helps Denny out of the saucer, shielding him from Sue’s ridicule.

It’s like an after-school special. They learn that the President of the U. S. has sold us out. So they set out to kill him—but are spared the karmic onus of the assassination when Tim reforms the Prez by talking sense to him—that would be a very after-school-special touch. As if you could teach a President anything by talking to him. But in YA-land, you can!

Or a book where a kid goes to visit his dead father in Heaven. I remember a radio play—maybe it was by Norman Corwin, “The Odyssey of Runyon Jones”—about a kid who goes to look for his dead dog in “curgatory,” first broadcast in 1941, I might have heard it as a re-broadcast around 1954. It’s available as part of an out-of-print CD set called Thirteen By Corwin, I’d dig hearing that if I can find it for free online.

I’m really starting to feel like myself again. I keep saying that, and then a week later, I realize I was only kidding myself the week before. Maybe I’m still kidding myself. How can you really tell when you feel like yourself, after all? It’s so subjective.

Writing this particular paragraph that’s magpied into this blog post, I’m sitting on the deck outside Borders Books, one of my favorite spots in Los Gatos—although it’s slightly tainted by the infernal noise of ventilation fans. I have a great view from under a huge live oak of a high, virgin, wooded hill called perhaps Monte Sereno. The shapes of the trees and shrubs along the ridge-line always make me think of the border of a cubic Mandelbrot set.

In this connection, I think of a guy I met at the Almaden IBM research lab near San Jose, around 1988, and we’d been in his office talking, and then we walked outside together and were looking at a wooded ridge-line similar to this one, and he was telling me that the patterns were—I don’t remember exactly what—some manifestation of a type of fractal or Fourier series that he was studying. He thought everything in the world was a reflection of what he was doing in his lab. But he was thinking this with a complete lack of irony, which is dangerous. I wonder what ever became of him.

I gave a great Christmas talk on cellular automata at that same IBM lab, also around 1988. I’d just gotten a CAM-6 cellular automata accelerator card, and I shoe-horned it into an early IBM PC and connected it to this monster projector they had in the lab. Nobody had projectors like this back then, so it was incredibly exciting to be projecting the enormous images.

When I was in the choir at St. Francis in the Fields Church in Louisville, around 1959, this funny boy, Roger, would sometimes sit next to me at rehearsal. He was a real 1950s type, with a burr haircut, heavy glasses frames, and a cocky attitude. His father was, I think, a real estate scam artist, physically resembling the then-famous con-man Billy Sol Estes whom I’d seen on the cover of Time magazine. There was this one hymn we were rehearsing, with the chorus, “Jesus loves you, why not serve him?” And Roger would make his voice sweet and gentle, and sing an obscene variant of the line. What a witty guy.

My wife and I spent the day in Santa Cruz today. It was really nice to be out seeing different stuff. The ocean was a nice aqua color. We ate some nice food, looked at bookstores. I bought a nice sweater on sale. I’m exhausted now, but in a nice way. Lying on the couch with my laptop.

This morning, as soon as I woke up, I felt good. The world outside is so green and lively. I recall a feeling I sometimes have when I’m flustered—less so now than when I was younger—of being in a tunnel, caught up in my worries, deaf and blind to the outer world. It’s all a matter of the attention that you’re able to pay.

The world runs itself without me. It used to baffle me that the world would go on after I die. I understand this better now. It’s like I’m just one particular monitor displaying the reality crunch. The interesting thing is the world itself—as opposed to the interesting thing being my individual mind. This is in some sense obvious, but somehow it’s not a fact that I really internalized until I was older.