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.

I gave my new painting “Collaborators” yet another layer today, July 24, 2008. Draft 3, call it final and move on. Daughter Isabel said their mouths should be open so they look more hyper. I think it’s done now.

[“Collaborators,” Draft 3, probably final, July 24, 2008.]

On July 22, I painted Draft 2. As you can see, the picture shows two guys sitting on the ground, with unnaturally long, insect-like arms, choking each other. It’s meant to be an image of the collaboration style of two co-authors who argue a lot.

To enhance how the foreground pops out from the background, I moved towards cool desaturated colors in back, and warm saturated colors in front.

July 21’s Draft 1 was more primitive, which is, in its own way, charming, but I had that usual yen to polish it some more. Over the versions, I made their faces better, and clarified the choking hands. But, yeah, it still looks something a guy might have drawn in a rehab program run in a church basement. Not such an easy effect to achieve! 🙂

These wires are sort of the same as the the limbs of the two Collaborators…

I was idly thinking about working the Oinkness idea into a story. Not that it’s such an incredibly wonderful idea, but I have nothing better to think about. I sit around the house all day doing nothing, occasionally taking a nap. The email’s been slow.

Today started out all gray and fogged over, but now the sky has a clear, blue, California-summer quality. There’s been fires—a big one in Big Sur in particular—that were overcasting us, but finally they’re dying down. The Big Sur fire is 70% contained as of today.

HIgh Voltage! The pole transformer is a kind of electromechanical pig.

This just in: Bertram Niessen’s interview with me in the Italian ezine Digimag. (They posted an Italian language version as well.)

It’s mattering less to me if I actually do write a memoir. All that matters is that I’m writing up notes for—something. My fingers work, my brain, my word-circuits. It might really be more reasonable to write another novel. Or maybe just a couple of stories first. There’s such a powerful “why bother” haze surrounding any plan for a memoir.

“Wiseacring for the swing of thought” is a phrase used by G. I. Gurdjieff in Meetings With Remarkable Men. He used the word wiseacring a lot, meaning something like free intellectual play. Some people spell it as “wiseacreing,” by the way, but “wiseacring” seems to be more common.

Today I actually got a thousand words done on a new story I plan to write with Paul Di Filippo. Working title: “To See Infinity Bare.” It wasn’t too hard. The writing felt good.

I’m in the Los Gatos Coffee Roaster again. On my own. It’s so terrible when people have words appliquéd onto the butts of their sweat pants. Like the back of a van. Like the woman I’m looking at right now. Pale blue sweat pants with “H O L L I S T E R,” in an arc, the name of a small town south of here. But of course, to her, the pants aren’t terrible, they’re cool fashion. All a matter of convention.

If I weren’t going to write a nonfiction memoir, what might I write instead? I could scootch just a bit away from that, and write a novel that’s close to my actual life. A transreal SF memoir, in other words. Go with my fantasies and fears about nuclear fallout as a boy in 1959 at a German boarding school, for instance. And then follow my character back to the US and, whoah, NYC and/or DC are gone. Especially Texas could be gone.

A frikkin’ Texas-shaped hole in the surface of the globe, a thousand-mile deep shaft with a giant orange blup-blup lava lake at the bottom. A fence around the edge, and you can buy little baskets of bread and throw in the Texas-shaped crumbs for the Texas gnomes. Tiny cowhand gnomes down there in half-pint hats, shooting cap pistols. You can rent time on an ion-beam destruction ray and fry the Texas gnomes that you’ve lured out with the Texas-shaped bread crumbs. Gnome cracklins drift up and people munch ‘em down. “Yaar!”

[Yes, yes, I know there are many fine people in Texas, just having a little fun here. I could always change the victimized state to my old home of Kentucky.]

Am I writing crazier than usual? Or is just that this week I give less of a squat? The numerical fact that Hylozoic was my thirtieth book, sets me to thinking about trying something new for #31.

On the other hand, why not another novel. It might be nice to write a really easy novel. Something first person and transreal, like Mathematicians in Love.

I had another SF vision today, of what you might call Oinkness. An alternate world or mindscape that’s made of pig. It’s not like encountering a single pig, it’s pure pigness. Pink skin, ears, perhaps an eye here and there, the stench, the squeal, layer upon layer of skin and meat, an endlessly cloned pig surface, folding back on itself.

Or maybe combine the sunken state with the Oinkness thing, and sure, have the sunken state be my Olde Kentucky Home. It’s the land of Oinkness down there. The older boys are down there wallowing with the pigs. (Note the highlighted rat in the motel swimming pool.)

German fallout, sunken Kentucky, Oinkness in the pit, J. Edgar Hoover attempts to arrest the hero, that is, young Russ, but Russ calls on the force of Oinkness to protect him.

[Image from Wikipedia.]

Wiseacring for the swing of thought.