Sylvia and I were up in SF this week, staying at the Hotel Tropicana on Valencia Street in the Mission. It was cheap and clean, though the service is kind of vague, as are the rates. Great to wake up here every day. And convenient to try living in the middle of the novel I'm writing.

I like this neighborhood a lot, it’s what North Beach was in the 40s and the Haight was in the 70s. Great murals here and there, like the Women’s Building.

Dread Lord of Cyberpunk Richard Kadrey came to our room and let me photograph his tatts.

An art gallery had a picture of those same two twins I always see in Union Square, looking raucous in this environment.

On the sidewalk I saw, like a message from the cosmos, the affirmation of an SF story I’m working on with Terry Bisson. More shall be revealed…

X21 is the greatest upscale junkstore ever. Statue of Mr. Peanut who used to scare the sh*t out of me as a boy. That imperious, rapping cane.

Rainy day after rainy day. We passed some time in the Dolores Mission.

Hit the greenhouse in the park, admiring the water lilies.

We saw something seriously gnarly in the Tibet section of the Asian Art Museum: trumpets made of human thigh bones, and a ewer made of a pair of skull caps.

Sunnier denizens of museum included Parvati and Ganesh.

I hit the Tartine Bakery on Guerrero at 18 St. once or twice a day. One day I picked up an ingot of lemon meringue cake to take to Paul Mavrides’s house.

A reverent silence as the initial incision is made.

Paul has this amazing collection of plastic toys, a veritable Bosch-hell of them, click here to see a bigger image. He also has a large collection of toys like this that he’s doctored in various surreal and dada ways, but those images are classified for now.

{Begin novel excerpt}

Bouncy Linda Loca was working on a metanovel entitled George Washington, depicting the world as seen from the point of view of a dollar bill; Linda had gotten the idea from an exercise she’d been assigned in a high-school writing class. What lent her work its piquancy was how literally she’d managed to execute the plan: perusing George Washington, you felt flat and crinkly, you spent most of your time in a wallet or folded in a pocket, and when you came out into the air the main thing you saw was counter-tops and people’s hands. The beezies had worked their magic by providing Linda with extensive records of real, orphid-meshed bills. Of course the user could rapidly scroll past the dull patches, but it gave the work heft and seriousness to have them there. When, once in a great while, Linda’s happy dollar changed hands, the bill did a good job at moving the story along, buying drinks, influence, or sex, and thereby sketching out the rise and fall of a young cop whom Linda had playfully named George Washington as well. Young officer Washington became corrupted due to his sexual attraction for a promiscuous older woman named Donna, who talked him into executing a hit on her landlord, who turned out to be George’s biological father, this fact being unknown to George until too late.

For a time, Linda had blowback issues with her George Washington character because, to round him out, she’d made him an aspiring writer. Problem was, he began pestering Linda with messages about the metanovel –— dumb suggestions, by and large, for the George Washington character George Washington was, after all, only a beezie simulation of a human, and not a true artist. He failed to grasp, for instance, the dark, claustrophobic beauty of such scenes as four hours consisting of the slow shifting of the dollar within a felt-applique wallet stuffed into the tight pocket of Donna’s jeans as she trolled up and down Mission Street, or that the invigorating convex pressure of the virtual Washington’s butt-cheek upon the walleted dollar during a full day’s stint as witness in courtroom hearings might be more interesting to Linda Loca than a transcription of what virtual George told a virtual judge. Weary of arguing with virtual George, Linda edited out his love of writing, and made him a bowler instead; and just to show who was boss, she patched in ten hours of bowling-ball-point-of-view.

{End novel excerpt}

Out in the woods with Sylvia yesterday. Today’s text is another metanovel description, lifted from my current draft of Postsingular

{Start novel excerpt.}

The excitable Herb Stingray had created The Alice Fan, an unreadable metanovel wherein every possible action path of his middle-aged heroine Alice was to be traced. Waking up with a man, a woman, or nobody in bed beside her, Alice hopped out of the right or left side of her bed, or perhaps she crawled over the head or the foot. She put on her slippers or threw them out the window, if she had a window.

In some forkings she jumped out the window herself, but in most she went to take a shower. In the shower she sang or washed or had sex with her partner. And when she emerged, she found a maple table or silver salver by her bed bearing a breakfast of lox, lobster, steel-cut oats, or a single boiled ostrich egg. In some forkings, Alice had no time to eat, as her house was on fire, or menaced by an earthquake or a giant ant.

Now in practice no human author would have had the time and energy to create so richly ramified a document as The Alice Fan, but Herb Stingray had his beezies helping him by autonomously roughing in sketches of ever-more action paths. As the mood struck him, Stingray would and add voice-over descriptions to the paths; he had a flair for making anything at all sound interesting.

But, densely tufted as the branchings were, Stingray had only managed to fully polish Alice’s action fan for the first two and a half seconds of her day. Random assassins, meteorites, a stroke, the spontaneous combustion of Alice’s pillow — so many things were possible. Stingray had recently set the work aside, declaring it to be finished. As his next project he’d begun an inversely forked work called April March, lifting both his title and concept from the celestial pages of Jorge Luis Borges.

Stingray’s plan for April March was to start with a scene on a particular day and to document plausible variants of what happened on the days before. To make the work more tractable than The Alice Fan, Stingray was austerely limiting his branching factor to one fork per day. The initial scene, set on April 1, would present an ambiguous conversation between a man and a woman at an airport, followed by two versions of March 31, four versions of March 30, eight versions of March 29 and so on. Stingray planned to march as far as March 24, making a thousand and twenty-three scenes in all, linked together into five hundred and twelve plausible action paths which would constitute, so Herb claimed, an all but exhaustive compendium of every possible kind of detective story.

{End of novel excerpt}

I was interviewed for a podcast by Science and Society last week.

Put on your calender: John Shirley and I will be reading at 7 pm, Tuesday, April 18 as

“Dread Lords of Cyberpunk”

This event is part of “SF in SF,” a monthly Series of Science Fiction Readings and Discussions at New College of California in San Francisco curated by Adam Cornford and Terry Bisson New College Valencia Theater, 777 Valencia St., San Francisco ($4 at the door, free to New College community).

Oh, one more link, dread lord of VR Jaron Lanier wrote an interesting review of my book The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. One story I should have mentioned in my book is that Jaron once told me was that the reason he got into developing hardware and software for virtual reality was because he wanted to have a really good and functional air guitar.

Today I was driving around the East Side of San Jose with Sylvia. And I took these pictures. Did I mention that last week in SF I saw a great show “Beyond Real” of Surrealist photos with, my favorite, a book of text and street photos called Banality, by Leon-Paul Fargue and Roger Parry. Any combination of words and images fits. (And, no, I'm not saying that any of these photographed objects are “banal.”)

Here’s my Borgesian (I’d like to imagine) imagining of a book of the same name, that is, Gerry Gurken's Banality appearing in today’s draft chunk of Postsingular

Gerry’s metanovel Banality was a vast combine of images all drawn from one and the same instant on a certain day. No time elapsed in this work, only space, and any hint of a story you might find was only in your imagination. Not to say this was a random data dump: the images were juxtaposed in a somewhat arbitrary order, each block or combine accompanied by written text or a spoken voice-over delivered by a virtual Gerry Gurken — who wandered this time-slice at the user’s side.

Gerry had taken his metanovel’s title, Banality, from a 1930 Surrealist book of juxtaposed text and street-photos, and the name had a particularly heavy resonance because the particular instant chosen was the moment known as Orphidnet Time-Zero, 12:00:00 noon PST on the first day after Orphid Night, this being the instant when the beezies had implemented their protocol of having the orphidnet save, once per second, the precise positions and velocities of every orphid on Earth. At this instant history had truly changed forever, and what did Gerry find there? Banality, although do remember that, being a Surrealist, he wasn't necessarily using the word in a negative sense … think, e.g., of Andy Warhol's love of the ordinary.

[Something rather surpising and unbanal: the Sikh temple in East San Jose. We went in, and three holymen were praying upstairs in little booths. Back to the novel excerpt…]

By the way, Gerry, who was a convivial and gregarious sort, preferred to find the images for Banality not by browsing in the old data base, but rather by roaming the streets. He had a good eye; he saw odd things everywhen and everywhere. Often as not, the beezies were able to scroll back from current sightings to find nearly the same image in that database record of Orphidnet Time-Zero, and when they weren’t, that was fine with Gerry too. For a confirmed Metadadaist, a cauliflower was as good as a catfish.

Banality was hundreds of hours long, and it grew longer every day; Gerry had no intention of every finishing it. Despite the dismissive remarks that Darlene sometimes made about the work, it was some kind of cockeyed masterpiece, for Gerry Gurken was a craftsman to the core. Any ten-minute block of Banality was fascinating, disorienting, revelatory, leaving the user’s mind off-center and agog — unfortunately, after that ten minutes, the work very quickly got to be too much.

Banality was like some bizarre, aggressively challenging sushi bar that the average person would desert forever once having tasted a single item: horse-clam siphon, manta-ray liver, live nudibranch, starfish spawn — “Thanks, very interesting, I have to go.” Slam.

Finally the rain stops for a day.

As Thuy works, she’s letting events impinge, maybe listening to music. I’m practicing being Thuy myself by walking and biking and driving around wearing my iPod. The continual soundtrack. It makes things seem cool and arty. But it also gets to be too much. I end up waiting for some songs to end. Wishing I could have some quiet. Feeling rushed.

Thuy can replay thought sequences. She can replay scenes and then tweak them with “what ifs”. That’s what I do when I’m writing, in fact. I layer on a few minutes a day. I re-experience the part that came before, re-dream it, getting a running jump.

Some force is guiding her, its a Rebel Angel called Azaroth. Azaroth is guiding Thuy so that her tangled plot will reproduce Chu's Knot, which is an interdimensional jump-code.

Something I’d like to express in describing Thuy writing the metanovel: When I’m in the zone on a novel, really flying, dreaming while awake, I sometimes find that my life is changing. I get a synchronistic sense that the world is pushing back, helping me, collaborating.

I read this great graphic novel, Black Hole, by Charles Burns. It gave me nightmares. What terrific line-control and chiaroscuro.

Here’s a bit of the Postsingular chapter I’m working on, Chapter 3: Thuy’s Metanovel.

[BEGIN NOVEL DRAFT QUOTE]

“Westinghouse yam in alleyway,” said the improbable virtual spambot, formed like a waist-high two-legged sweet potato with multitudinous ruby eyes, wreathed in crackling blue sparks, peering at Thuy from a rain-wet alley off Valencia Street, the same spot where Grandmaster Green Flash had died. “Vote for Dick Too Dibbs,” added the yam, once he’d caught Thuy’s attention.

“Dibbs already won,” said Thuy, not bothering to sic her filter dogs on the apparition. These days she enjoyed wandering the streets alone, open to the ether, playing the patterns, riding the flow. The heavier scenes went into her metanovel, which was growing at a rate two or three minutes per day.

You could measure a metanovel’s length in terms of how much access time a typical user took to finish the work, assuming they didn’t set it aside. Thuy’s target-length for Wheenk was eight hours, about the time it would take to read a medium-fat book.

“I like Dick,” said the virtual yam, falling into step next to her, the misty rain drifting through him. “Does Dick like ye?”

“Give it a rest,” said Thuy. “The election’s over, you slushed pighead. Bernard Lampton conceded.” The orphidnet was noisy with the thin cries and hoarse roars of celebrating marshmallow people. To drown them out, Thu had her favorite Tawny Krush symphony playing, and she was enhancing the sound with violin squawks triggered by smooth gestures of her arms and legs: all but dancing down the street…

…The yam sputtered, twinkled, and faded out �— leaving Thuy with a sudden suspicion that maybe that hadn’t been the true flesh-and-blood Prescription John running the yam, maybe it had been the procedurally-animated virtual Prescription John from within her “Losing My Head” metastory. Hanging around the Metotem store the other day, she’d heard some of the metanovelists talking about this not uncommon phenomenon, which they called blowback.

Gerry Gurkin, for instance, kept having visitations from the simulated Gerry Gurkin of his autobiographical Banality, the virtual Gerry clamoring that he wanted metanovelist Gerry to edit in a girlfriend character for him to f*ck. Telling this story, portly Gerry had been darting hot intense looks at Thuy, as if he were planning to feed a model of her to virtual Gerry, which was perfectly fine with Thuy, and she said so.

Thuy was a lonely-but-coned-off emotional state where she was ready to accept any admiration she was offered, as long as it was virtual and with no strings attached. Re. “coned off,” she’d heard a woman actually saying that about herself the other day, as if she were a wreck lane or a crime site. That phrase went straight into the metanovel. The yam’s, “I like Dick, but does Dick like ye?” seemed usable too. Oh, for sure that had been the real Prescription John, a beezie animation couldn’t sound that stupid.

[END NOVEL DRAFT QUOTE]