I’ll be in Kyoto, Japan, for about two weeks. Mainly I’m there to give a talk in Kyoto at the University: “Life is a Gnarly Computation.” I’ll be giving a talk in Osaka as well: “Psipunk.”

If you’re a reader of mine in that area, send me an email and maybe we can meet while I’m in town, or at least say hi after one of the talks.

I finished one more picture for my upcoming art show. It’s “Shells,” a still-life.

I went through a lot of versions on this one, with the result that the colors have a nice blended look. That big shell is a triton that I bought from a local on the (sand) street on the island of Lifuke(?) in the Kingdom of Tonga a number of years ago. The conchs are from the beach in Grand Turk Island, where my brother used to live. The little guys in front are cone shells with CA patterns; I think I bought them in a shell shop. And that’s a kind of fat sand dollar on the left, a radiolarian echinoderm Great Old One.

Starting Tuesday, October 2, 2007, you can get my new novel, Postsingular! Why not order a copy on Amazon right now?

If you’re waffling, read more about the book on my Postingular web page, including reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, and Interzone.

It’s my seventeenth novel. Life rolls on. I started it in July, 2005, finished the main writing in September, 2006, with revisions and copy edits continuing till April, 2007.

Looking at my notes for the book, I find this summary of the goals I had for the book starting out:

• Come to terms with the ubiquitous presence of cell phones, cameras, and computers, increasingly connected into a seamless wireless web.
• Delve into the notion of the technological Singularity likely to occur when the artificial intelligence of networks overtakes that of the human race.
• Write an novel that can serve as a foundation for a series of novels.
• Write something flashy and contemporary, somewhat in the old cyberpunk manner.
• Call it Postsingular; that title’s mersh, man — “mersh” being Bruce Sterling’s word for “commercial.”

After finishing the Bosch chapter 5 of Hylozoic I took some time off for other things, like visiting the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose with my cousin Hedwig, visiting from Luneburg in Germany. And making my first animated GIF. I love the Rosicrucian museum, we used to go here every month when we first moved to San Jose, I remember a photo of the baboon statue with my father, my son, and I. Egyptian style!

I finished painting my Hylozoic triptych, and rearranged it with the subbie dancers on the left and the vine on the right. I like the little flying people a lot. That’s Jayjay with the brush, Thuy with the pigtails, and the alien Hrull manta ray Duxy, heading for the point at infinity, the castle on the beanstalk where the aktuals live.

Tor is helping me orgainize a show of my paintings at Live Worms Gallery in the North Beach part of San Francisco, November 9-11, 2007, as part of the Postsingular publicity. I’m scared to death.

I finished another picture for the show, “Prickly Pear Cactus.”

And, as mentioned in my previous post, I put together a new issue of Flurb, #4. I decided to make Flurb just be semi-annual, it’s so much work. A chunk of Chapter 5 went in as my story in Flurb #4, called “Hieronymus Bosch’s Apprentice.” I just used the middle part, with Bosch onstage. Our Flurb hits were pretty good, we got almost 4,000 unique visitors in the first week. Not that many of them are *sob* bothering to post a comment…

And now I’m ready to get back to writing Hylozoic, the novel. Sort of ready. I’m kind of avoiding the writing, still. So I’m compulsively revising the outline of the next three chaps, over and over and over. But I know from experience that’s not actually a waste of time. The more detailed the outline gets, the easier the chapter is to write.

I got the newly published edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: The Original Scroll. I was reading his great dynamic description of downtown L. A. tonight. Thinking it would be nice to have my Chapter Six start out like that, with Chu and Glee seeing all sorts of stuff going on in San Francisco right after the Hrull crash. The eternal dream of writing like Jack…

A cityscape—with silps. That is, a city where every object is alive.

There’s a fiftieth anniversery Kerouac boom all of a sudden, the scroll edition is reviewed by high-lit mandarin Louis Menand in the New Yorker, more sympathetically than I expected. Menand makes some interesting points, such as (a) before On the Road, there weren’t any men like this ever depicted in fiction, which is why TV and movies even now have trouble presenting “beats,” and (b) On the Road proposes that you can find God right outside, just go look for him, and this, too, was something new.

At the end of the long review, Menand even breaks out with a capable and heartfelt Kerouac pastiche. He’s like: “I can’t keep up this stuffy prof front anymore. I’m a beatnik, too!”

I had insomnia from an aching tendon last night, and hauled out Visions of Cody, too, and was rereading it a little. That’s the hard-core alternate version of Road, with lots more pot-smoking, obscenity, and passages that were clearly written zonked and never revised, also direct transcriptions of drifty conversations with Neal. Completely unpublishable, a thumb in the eye of propreity. I could hardly believe this book when I was reading it in the early seventies (Cody was only published in 1972), it was like an induction notice/manifesto/call to arms/instruction manual that couldn’t be refused. I never really got over it, it’s almost creepy looking into the book again, I identified with it so much that it emotively feels like I wrote some of the sentences myself; the prose and the legend implanted in me like false memories that I’m irrationally nostalgic for.

I was so enchanted by the Road and Cody pair that I wrote a pair of books something along these lines. First I wrote a ninety-foot single-spaced scroll on an electric typewriter, All the Visions, and then I turned that into a transreal SF novel, The Secret of LIfe, about realizing I was a UFO alien while growing up in Louisville and going to college at Swarthmore. Both are out of print, but available in used or electronic form; more info on my books page.