Busy last week. Went to get my eyes examined so I can relace the glasses I scratched with sand in Grand Turk. (That's my retina.) I’m getting glass lenses this time around, sick of replacing plastic.

I had computer problems. Learned something. If you have a pivoting Viewsonic monitor, don’t use the free image-rotating Pivot software that comes with it, use your graphic card’s built in ability to rotate the image. Much better image now.

Saw some friends in Santa Cruz, including Michael Beeson and Jon Pearce.

A flock, school, herd — what’s the word? — of seals off the dock, mothers and children.

We walked past a somewhat scurvy motel that had a dead rat floating in the pool.

I ended up getting a BMW, it kicks ass.

Getting to work on (long) chapter two (of four) for Postsingular. Metalovelist Thuy’s point of view. I want to have a scene were Thuy walks into a “Rebel Angel Church on Valencia St.” And they chant and Rebel Angel Azaroth from the Mirrorbrane appears.

Initially I was thinking of lifting the Kamikaze chant from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow:

“Hi wa Ri ni katazu,

Ri wa Ho ni katazu,

Ho wa Ken ni katazu,

Ken wa Ten ni katazu,

Ten wa Hi ni katazu,

Hi wa Ri ni katazu,

Ri wa Ho ni katazu…”

“On and on, around and around. Searching in the orphidnet, Thuy found referents and meanings for the Japanese words, but the meanings didn’t matter, the meanings were bullshit, only the sounds mattered, like divine Aum vibrations bringing the Rebel Angel Azaroth into the room…”

But that seemed too derivative. So I looked up some riddles or lallagunut in Gaddang, a language of the Luzon Island Philippines.

Here are some good ones:

Riddle: Gongonan nu usin y amam; maggirawa pay sila y inam. (If you pull your daddy's penis; your mommy's vagina also screams). Answer: Campana (a bell).

Riddle: Itannu si canayun; udde ammem maita-ita. (You stare at it often, yet you never have seen it.) Answer: Sinag (the sun).

Riddle: Innacun cunna, gampamade nattoli. (If he says he goes, he means he comes.) Answer: Laddao (a shrimp). [For plot purposes, I think I’ll cheat and say the answer is “cuttlefish” or “squid.” (“Squid” is “pusit” in Tagalog and some other Filipino languages, although I’m not sure what it is in Gaddang.)]

Riddle: Ana tata tolay, accananna bagguina. (A person eating up his own body.) Answer: Candela (a candle).

How about using the candle/cuttlefish/sun lines for a chant, like

“Ana tata tolay, accananna bagguina;

Innacun cunna, gampamade nattoli;

Itannu si canayun; udde ammem maita-ita.”

He’s eating his own body;

When he turns away, he’s coming to you;

You stare at him, but you never see him;

I think it works better to just use cuttlefish/sun. I went by an actual storefront church on Valencia St. yesterday for atmosphere, here’s a current draft of the opener for the scene:

Thuy was digging the scene, eating her popcorn, and then Luis paused and stared right at her, drawing info from the orphidnet. He was a kiqqie, with beezies bedecking him like shelf-mushrooms on a forest-floor log. “Welcome, sister Thuy in back,” he called in his weirdly accented tenor. “Azaroth be with you. Chant with us, ay, I’m calling out the Rebel Angel Azaroth, ay, despised by the high lamas of the Mirrorbrane, guiding us to revolt against the dicky-ducks, a sword against the Pharisees, ay, our savior from the ravening Big Pig. Show us your face, Azaroth, caress us with your energies, ay, warm our hearts to heal this wounded world. Lead us in the invocation, Sister Kayla!”

[Note, we were in SF yesterday and saw the Calder show at MOMA.]

Kayla was the woman running the popcorn machine. Smiling and pressing the hands of her fellow worshippers, she curvetted up the aisle, taking a second microphone from Luis and beginning a chant.

Innacun cunna gampamade nattoli.

Itannu si canayun udde ammem maita-ita.

On and on, Kayla and congregation repeated those same two lines, drawing out the sounds. Searching in the orphidnet, Thuy found the phrases to be couched not in Spanish, but in the Gaddang language of the Philippine island of Luzon, not all that far from good old Vietnam. Thuy’s grandparents had landed there when they’d fled Vietnam in a leaky boat. The two lines turned out to be folk riddles, meaning something like:

When he turns away he’s coming to you.

You stare at him but you never see him.

The answer to the second riddle was “the sun;” the answer to the first was “a cuttlefish.” The chanted words overlapped, divine Aum vibrations calling another order of being into the room. Everything was becoming so very deeply intertwingled.

Warm air eddied across Thuy’s neck, making the hairs stand up. Luis kicked aside the silk Persian rug to reveal an pattern inscribed on the floor, an octagon with a square drawn on the inner side of each edge — a beezie agent told Thuy the pattern was a flattened hypercube — and here came Azaroth, or the upper part of him anyway, the lower half of his ethereal form sticking down through the floor.

[I saw the famous twins in Union Square, nice to see them still out there shopping, they were already a fixture 20 years ago.]

Note the two corrections to my notes on the GDC, I misspelled Pekko Koskinen’s last name, and I mistakenly said the Strange Attractors team at Ominous Development Studios were students. I’ve been playing that game by the way, it’s soothing.

After I used iTunes for a few days it broke my install of Windows XP because I *gasp* dared to take out the iPod before the sluggish and vengeful Apple-ware gave me permission, and now my machine’s at the shop getting the operating system rebuilt. [Though maybe the machine probs are unrelated to iTunes, you never really do find out these things.] Anyway I do love my iPod. I’ll write more on it later. Changing my worldview. Since I’m machine weak, I’ll just recycle old pix today.

I'm wrestling with the question of what kind of novel people would write if they had postsingularity style mind amplification, helper agents, planetary ultra-wideband access for all, etc. Store it as a waking dream, as a VR, as a game? I call this a metanovel.

I’d like to get all Borgesian and Stan Lem-ish on this problem's ass. Think of a variety of oddball new ways to write a novel. (I consulted my Collected Stories by Borges already, but need to get hold of a copy of Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum (reviews of nonexistent books) for more inspiration.]

Metanovel design patterns:

Lifebox. A metanovel that feels like a person’s whole remembered life. The art of a lifebox novel is to tweak it so that the life is a bit more interesting than your own. A lifebox novel will normally be a temporal interval of a life, possibly the whole thing. You could artificially limit yourself to hovering near the main character (third person objective) instead of inhabiting them (first person), but the third person option doesn’t make that much sense.

Inventory. This is a way of organizing a Lifebox novel. Think of Charles Simmons’s book where he goes over his experiences with various ordinary kinds of things, like a water chapter, a frying-pan chapter, a vagina chapter, a freckles chapter. hats, tongues, bicycles, dogs, trees, drugs, food, cars, clothes, teaching, voice, fish, shit, wind, kites, airplanes…. Or instead of themes, you could organize the Lifebox around locations, like by telling everything that happened in each important location in your life.

Multithread. A metanovel that’s like a movie, but with complete mental records of everyone in it. Possibly have it really be like a movie, and have the offscreen records as well. Fake a lot of the internals on a need-to-know basis, like the way you could make an infinite VR by having the landscape be created on the fly.

Forker. A metanovel that includes all N to the Nth possible options. Jorge-Luis Borges hints at this notion in his story, “The Garden of Forking Paths.”

Reverse Forker. Jorge-Luis Borges discusses this story pattern in his tale, “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain,” describing an (imagined) book called April March by Quain. April March begins with a somewhat ambiguous scene of a man and a woman talking, and is followed by three versions of what happened to the man and woman the day before, each of which is followed by three versions of what happened the day before that.

Mirror. A factual account of a scene followed by a metanovel version of the scene, possibly followed by a further transformed version of the scene, possibly including the metanovelist imagining the metanovel version…

Props. A metanovel from the point of view of object or objects that are passed around; one thinks, in a melodramatic vein, of a gun or a treasure. Alain Robbe-Grillet got into this zone.

Hive. A metanovel in which the “characters” are groups of people.

Animal. P.O.V. of an animal. Doesn’t need to be meta, strictly speaking, I mean look at Call of the Wild. But having the orphidnet and the possible brain access could let you really get into an animal’s p.o.v. I’d love to fly or swim.

Timeslice. An exhaustive description of everything happening in a city or a smaller zone, the description limited to one instant of time.

Reveal. A metanovel detective story that proposes the wrong solution to the crime, but with loose ends that allow the user to in fact winkle out the correct answer. This is a Borges idea. Doesn’t really need to be a metanovel, but the meta might make it possible to make this work better.

I got a floor pass to the Game Developers Conference in San Jose last Thursday, courtesy of my old publisher (of Infinity and the Mind) Klaus Peters, who, with his wife Alice, publishes an interesting line of math, graphics, and game-related books.

I didn’t run into anyone else I knew, and felt a bit lonely and out of the loop. Zillions of young game-biz guys there, only a few women.

Some of the ultra-geeks had balloon bee-hive hats.

Coming at games as a computer scientist, I get excited about the graphics — this is a demo of the Playstation 3, with flexing teapotaedrons.

The hardware is also very cool, like this water cooled, mirror-cased job.

But the uses these tools are put to always seem so tawdry and dull.

And playing them looks so geeky. I always find the most interesting games to be those in the Independent Games Festival. You can download a lot of these for free.

These two guys are colorful Finns, the talkative guy on the right being named Pekko Koskinen. They entered an Unreal mod called “Dragonfly Variations.” Pekko’s real passion is for three-paragraph head-games on the back of his business card. He told me that one of the greatest Finnish novels is Volter Kilpi’s Alastalon Salissa, sadly untranslated.

These fellows were competing in the Independent Games Festifal too, they had a nice single-button game called Strange Attractors. You turn the force of gravity on and off in an Asteroids-like setting, that’s all. It’s intriguing. They reminded me of the very best students I used to teach in my Game Programming course at SJSU.

Driving home, stopped at a traffic light, I saw a beautiful tree. In some oblique fashion, I'm sure that today I saw something I can use in Postsingular. I'm still wrestling with determining the nature of the metanovel…

I went for a 60th birthday hike up at Castle Rock Park on Skyline Drive yesterday with Emilio, a software engineer whom I initially got to know as an occasional commenter on this blog, and who I then got to know better as a student in my Computers and Philosophy class at SJSU last fall.

It was a beautiful green day, like descending into the Hollow Earth. We worked our way down to below Castle Rock Falls and back up. And we took a lot of nice pictures. Enough about my birthday already. I’m over it.

I’m almost done reading this great little book on writing, John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (Written 1983, Vintage Books edition 1991). Gardner was a novelist in his own right, also famous as a creative writing teacher.

I’ve never read a whole book on writing before; I read part of Annie Lamotte’s Bird by Bird some years ago, but got tired of it: too much Annie and not enough notes on craft. Oh, I’ve looked through Strunk and White as well. (Remember I was a math major, not an English major.)

The reason I bought the Gardner book is that I’ve been thinking about point of view to use for Postsingular, my seventeenth novel. As all the characters are plugged into the orphidnet mind network, their experiences are to some extent internal, and can only be accessed by describing what’s going on in their minds. In the so-called “third-person subjective view,” you get close to a character and describe their thoughts; Gardner says the third-person subjective point of view is really the same as the first-person point of view with “I” replaced by “he” or “she”.

But I want to see into lots of people’s heads. Gardner recommends the “omniscient author” point of view, in which the author freely dips into any of the characters’ minds at any time. Think Tolstoy. Gardner says omniscient author isn’t so much used as in the past, and seems to think it’s underrated. The problem is that omniscient author can be done badly, and instead of appearing elegant, can become, rather, amateurish “wandering point of view”. Phil Dick skirts the border between the two; it doesn’t read that smoothly; maybe if he’d gone into full omniscience it would have worked better; but authorial omniscience requires, perhaps, the writer to make the psychologically difficult (for some) move of thinking of him or herself as a superior being, and this, if done badly comes across real obnox.

What I’m really going to do, probably, is something I’ve done before (as in Realware or As Above, So Below), that is to use a “rotating third-person subjective POV,” that is, to have different chapters or sections written through the eyes of different characters. And not to wander about within a single scene. To some extent, looking through a character’s head promotes them to the status of being a main character, and there’s a sense that a shapely novel shouldn’t have too many main characters.

(Another reason I’m reading Gardner’s book is because I’m mulling over what kind of style might be used for a metanovel. Maybe in a metanovel you really could have all the characters inner lives there to see. More on metanovels in a later entry.)

Even thinking about the authorial omniscient style is freeing me up in any case. I’m starting to feel free to rotate POV without always having to set the shift off with a *** line break.

The Art of Fiction really encourages me overall. I’d been a little anxious that I’d find out I’ve been doing everything wrong for the last sixteen novels. But Gardner tells it just as I feel it. And he really nails some things. And he has some very useful craft suggestions.

“Good description is symbolic not because the writer plants symbols in it but because, by working in the proper way, he forces symbols still largely mysterious to him u into his conscious mind where, little by little as his fiction progresses, he can work with them and finally understand them. To put this another way, the organized and intelligent fictional dream that will eventually fill the reader’s mind begins as a largely mysterious dream in the writer’s mind.” p. 37. And again, “…nothing in what I’m saying is more fundamental than the concept of the uninterrupted fictional dream.” p. 115.

I totally concur with that. First you see a scene as waking dream, then you write it. Actually it’s not that simple. You get a rough dream, you write it, the writing brings up new juxtapositions, symbols, and action problems, you redream it, rewrite it, and iterate. In the end, you have a dream that’s isomorphic to the text. So could you, as metanovelist, publish the thought-states of the dream instead of the text? Yes and no. Part of the pleasure of a text is flavor of the actual words, which have their own peculiar associations. So, okay, for a metanovel, you’d want the dream as a VR, but you’d want the tasty words attached.

“The fictional process is the writer’s way of thinking, a special case of the symbolic process by means of which we do all our thinking …. in some ways the elements of fiction are to a writer what numbers are to a mathematician, the main difference being that we handle fictional elements more intuitively…” p. 51.

That is so great. Painters sometimes say the canvas and oils do some of the work. Same thing with writing. The text helps you think. As I like to say, it’s a thought experiment. But you need that physical apparatus of pen and paper, typewriter or word-processor as surely as a high-energy physicist needs a particle accelerator. You need to smash the words together and see what strange particles appear in the curly trails of the spallation events.

“…the number of fictional elements that exist is finite… By the elements of fiction I mean … “event ideas”such as kidnapping of the loved one …. particles that go to make up character, such as obesity … particles that go to make up setting and atmosphere …” p. 52

Dude! Once we’re talking about recombining a finite number of elements, we’re talking about a computer program! But it needs a good seed. I think of Burroughs’s cut-up method, a crude approx. A metanovel that shuffles its elements each time you access it. Or perhaps continually, like a waterfall.

“Failure to recognize that the central character must act, not simply be acted upon, is the single most common mistake in the fiction of beginners” p. 65. I’ve been guilty of this one; in fact it still requires a conscious effort for me to get my sensitive, put-upon, misunderstood, too-good-for-this-world heroes to get out there and kick some butt.

“The amateur writes, ‘Turning, she noticed two snakes fighting in among the rocks.’ Compare: ‘She turned. In among the rocks two snakes were fighting.’ … vividness urges that almost every occurrence of such phrases as “she noticed” and “she saw” be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing seen.” p. 99. Yes! Of course! I’ll start doing that. In a way this is an elementary example of using omniscient author POV instead of third-person subjective.

On transrealism: “When one writes about an actual parent, or friends, or oneself, all one’s psychological censors are locked on, so that frequently, though not always, one produces either safe but not quite true emotion or else — from the writer’s desire to tell the truth, however it may hurt — bold but distorted, fake emotion. … Real-life characters do sometimes hold their own in fiction, but only those, loved or hated, whom the writer has transformed in his or her own mind, or through the process of writing, to imaginary beings.” p. 126.

I’ve felt that, too, the liberation when a character pulls free of any realworld model I might have had in mind. As then the character can get really unpredictable and funny and deep.

Gardner also talks about rhythm in an interesting way; I’d never quite understood why I had to keep my turning sentences around until they sounded right; it’s a matter of getting a smooth pattern of stressed vs. unstressed beats (as in poetry) to create prose that would be easy and pleasant to read aloud (even though you imagine that readers are silent, the sounds of the prose are subliminally sensed.)

On the way home, I noticed that Lexington Reservoir is overflowing. Last time I remember that happening, Bill Clinton got elected. Like a visible I Ching sign: Overflow. Change is gonna come.

Parting shot: here’s an MPG of the Castle Rock waterfall, a 27 Meg movie of delicious natural computation. Click here to view movie. Seek the gnarl.