I was in Japan a couple of times in the 1990s, first for a Mondo 2000 related conference, and then for a speaking tour arranged by Mr. Ohmori of Humanmedia. Those times I had “handlers” the whole time, and this time we’re a bit more on our own.

Doing anything in Japan is about twice as hard as you’d expect. In European countries, (a) lots of people know English, and (b) you can figure out what signs say. In Japan, (a) hardly anyone seems to speak English, not even people like hotel clerks or tourist office people, and when they do, they tend to just say “Yes,” to anything, to be agreeable, (b) you can’t figure out any signs, they’re squiggles instead of letters, and when there is a Roman alphabet transcriptions, the place names are random strings of syllables, always the same few interchangeable syllables. My wife says it’s like we’re illiterate deaf-mutes.

There aren’t many other Westerners here, we exchange haunted, hang-dog looks when our paths cross, untouchable pariahs that we are. It would take years for me to have the faintest notion of what’s going on here, it’s totally like being on an alien world. But not that alien, after all: people are still eating and buying things and pairing up.

The Japanese are very diverse in their facial appearances and clothing; it’s entertaining to sit somewhere and watch the river of humanity stream by.

Many of them are extremely beautiful, both women and men—with faces symmetrized around refreshingly unusual norms. Full lips abound. You still see some women in kimonos. Lots of the men are in black suits, as usual, but some younger guys wear rattier hipster garb.

A lot of teenage and twenty-year old girls are into this eye-catching hooker look: high-heeled shoes or boots with black socks running up to the knees, worn with a microskirt or with hotpants. Many have bleached their hair to shades of orange.

Many Japanese women use a traditional walking gait in which the hips don’t move, it’s sort of the opposite of a model’s runway wriggle. Instead they hold the hips rigid and crouch a little, moving with bent knees. When you cross this walk with high-heel hooker boots, you get a really strange effect, it’s like seeing a predatory alien on the prowl.

We visited the Nijo castle where the local warlord lived, the Shogun. I think of a castle or a cathedral as stone, but here the “castles” and temples are wood and paper. To be safe in his Nijo castle, the Shogun had all the floors rigged to squeak when you walk on them: “nightingale floors.”

You’re always having to take off your shoes to go in places.

Also, he did have stone outer walls around the castle grounds, and a moat. Maybe I’ll make the castle atop the beanstalk in Hylozoic be like a Japanese castle.

We walked around the old geisha neighborhood Gion, tiny wood houses. A few kimonos. This picture is of a non-wood house in a different neighborhood, a house like upended shipping container, a bar, actually, with guys drinking inside.

Saw a cultural variety show of Japanese entertainment, including bunraku, where puppeteers in black hoods are up on the stage with a lifesize puppet. Seems like a symbol of something. Also it seemed like featherbedding, in the sense of hiring extra workers: three people were working this one lady puppet (the third is hidden behind it.)

We hit a big temple atop a hill. I can’t remember the name: some random string of syllables.

We get lost every time we take the bus, always getting off at the incorrect squiggle or R.S.O.S.

It was nice at the temple, with a pot of incense people fanned into their hair, special water to drink, dipping it from a waterfall with cups on long sticks.

A big gong I got to hit, sending up a prayer for my new grandson, Desmond, and for peace, love and understanding on this journey to Japan.

Ate some udon. Saw some worn rocks wearing aprons. Why? I’ll never know. Good to see trees. They love gnarly trees here, in the parks, you’ll see the groundskeepers studying each tree, discussing where to lop off a twig to make the tree gnarlier.

On the way back down hill we walked through a graveyard, like a little city of its own, an identical spire atop each little cache for ashes.

A sign for a monument-maintenance service showed sad-face and happy-face gravestones.

Usually when I travel it’s pretty easy to get money from cash machines with my ATM card. Hard to find an ATM here, and a lot of them don’t have English on the buttons, it’s hard to figure which of the four possible card orientations to use (they vary randomly from machine to machine) and even then a lot of machines won’t honor my bank. We ended up on the roof of a department store looking for ATM machines. They had a room of giant kiddie toy machines. And a jungle of ventilation equipment.

Getting a meal here is challenging. You can settle for udon noodle soup, or sushi (ordered by pointing at plastic models), but if you want a more complicated meal, there’s no telling what you’ll get. Today, expecting to get some tame sushi-style octopus, I hooked into a mound of slug-slimy raw octopus with a puree of white vegetable tasting like horseradish and bearing the taffy-like consistency of ice-cream, this vegetable matter also glistening with slime. I chewed some of the octopus for awhile, and when it showed no sign of giving way, I spit it into a napkin. Tried another piece with same result. A memorable dish. I could really lose some weight here.

There’s a great blocks-long roofed market we walk through every day. Amazing pickles: they pickle just about anything in Kyoto. Lots of dried fish, and beautiful fresh fish. Not much meat to be seen. Some nice looking fruit, selected and polished like art works, and priced accordingly. Saw three mushrooms going for $500. I could really lose some weight here.

The most “real Japan” place we’ve seen so far as been the house of the potter Kawai Kanjiro. Really peaceful in there, with that Zen vibe.

We hit the Kyoto National Museum, too, kind of a disappointment compared to my memories of the Tokyo version. All the “paintings” were black and white. Dude!

They have a special show of Shogun-era colored paintings of gnarly clouds and trees, but it was closed—I did see a lot of these as murals on the paper walls in Nijo Castle, murals from the 17th C, no less.

I can’t get enough of this kiddie Kat. So many signals to sort out here. I have no idea, really. Tourist blogs are quite suspect, I know. You swoop in for a week, make some superficial observations, experience a moment or two of bliss, draw your vast conclusions. Maybe I won’t have any tidy boxed conclusions.

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.