Debrecen, August 9-11, 2005.

Kids at an outdoor restaurant play “K�, papir, ollo,” meaning “Stone, paper, scissors.”

This far-east region of Hungary is like the Wild West of the US in that they used to have horsemen tending large herds of longhorn gray cows.

Their free range is called “puszta.”

Big beautiful 1910 oil-paintings of horses and cowboys adorn the marble staircase of our grand hotel, Aranyi Bika (Gold Bull). It’s kind of like being in Billings, Montana, with the huge, open sky. We’re excited to be in Debrecen at the far east end of Hungary, almost in Romania or the Ukraine.

I like this gnarly fountain, with a railing that looks like the time-frozen water. I’m writing this in the big (triangular) Calvin Square of Debrecen at a table in the Gara Cukraszda, a cake and ice-cream shop. “Cukrasz” means “sugar.”

The enormous yellow two-toned Calvinist church of Debrecen is at the end of the square. Most of the Hungarian churches are painted yellow, they love coloring their buildings, as I mentioned before: yellow, pink and green.

The Deri museum. Very bossy guards, guilt-provoking entreaties that I visit every room, these women are like aunts nagging you to take another helping of dessert. Dull metal artifacts, age-browned three-tined wooden pitchforks. The jewel of the museum is three large canvases by Munk�csy: Christ and Pilate, Ecce Home, and Golgotha.

I’m getting more of a sense of how Hungarian my wife is. In Debrecen we went to a handicrafts center, and two women her age were making cut-out felt appliqu� items. She started talking Hungarian with them and they were so interested in her. They kept gently plying her with further questions, as fascinated with my California-Hungarian as if she were an exotic bright-feathered macaw flown in through an open window to perch on the back of a chair.

I sit in a courtyard in Debrecen, the Reformed theology college, dancing pine branches all around me.

I compare the old library here to the nanomachines dreams of the extropians. The lovely quiet books, half a millennium old. Idiocy to turn trees into paper, and even greater idiocy to turn paper into nanomachines.

That picture's of storks on a power pole in the puszta. Think of the storks as humans, pecking at the sparrow nanonmachines.

What are the thoughts of the nanomachine clouds? Like cellular automata, BZ scrolls and gliders. Walker: intelligence = memory. The fluttering leaf is always saying the same things, or so it seems to me from the outside. But the tree is growing new leaves, twigs and branches as time goes on, fed by the light-eating leaves.

Lots of Hungarian women dye their hair red, it’s like the upiquitous blonde dye of California. Reds: cherry, strawberry, purple, violet, raspberry, every imaginable shade.

Thanks to the international SF connection, I met up with Donald and Csilla Morse, who teach in Debrecen, Donald being involved with the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts.

Always amazing to roll into a burg at the ass-end of nowhere and find it full of people doing their thing. The locals are into their soccer team today, Team Debrecen is playing a big-ass game against Manchester, it’s being televised on a giant screen set up in Calvin Square on the steps of that big yellow Reformed church tonight. We can see it out the window in the hotel above the Cukraszda. We have an haut-relief of a puszta longhorn on the bedroom wall.

At Donald's urging, we go see the amazing train-station-like Debrecen University. And then, walking around town we enter yet another church. A fat man is just inside the door, inert, like a fish in the shadow of a rock, hanging there. And a hunchbacked little old man is staring at the Virgin and Jesus in a glass case. Perhaps he’s praying for a miracle.

I had puszta-style gulyasch (goulash) for supper, with caraway seeds, meet from those longhorned grass-fed gray cattle, potatoes and dumplings, it was unspeakably delicious. Traditionally, gulyasch is made in an iron kettle hanging from a three-bar metal tripod over a fire. It told the waiter, “Holnap meg gulyasch,” meaning, “Tomorrow more goulash.”

August 6 – 9, 2005. Southern Hungary: P�cs and Kecskem�t.

So we flew to Budapest, rented a car, and set off into the boonies of Hungary, starting with P�cs down south.

We’ve been eating goose liver nearly every day. The best is soft as butter and pink inside. A good lunch today as well, those handmade little dumplings and a creamy meat stew. The meals are cheap here in the Hungarian boonies. All we two can eat at a top restaurant is under $30. Back in California I’m a pescatarian, but when in Rome… We saw a fascinating museum devoted to the work of P�cs native Csontvary. Like Ensor, also a bit fauve.

Csontvary was a self-taught artist, pharmacist by trade. Amazing work, some of it, with great scumbling, that is, lines of contrasting color lightly brushed over other colors. The guy was nuts, they say. I’m sorry to leave his pictures. A new mind to twink.

The buildings are great, like crumbling cakes, coated with 19th C ornamentation and painted yellow, pink, and pistachio.

Saw a museum of Zsolnay porcelain, amazing art nouveau, deco, ersatz bronze-age pieces too, all these artists came into the Zsolnay company over the years.

The Hungarian signs, it’s such an onslaught of bizarre words. I have very little pattern-recognition, everything has to be sounded out, and even then there’s no cognates. This sign means Women’s Bathroom, “n�” being “woman,” with “n�i” the possessive. I love that word n�. “�,” by the way, is a gender-indefinite pronoun meaning “he, she, or it”.

The next day’s itinerary: P�cs, Moh�cs, Nagybaracsk, Baja, Kalocsa, Kecskem�t. Nagybaracsk = big peach = Sylvia, singing, happy to be in her native land. This picture is of Baja, which is not to say Cabo Wabo. Dig the sky.

We got into the road trip rhythm. Took a ferry across the Danube at Moh�cs, 12 km north of Croatia. I rode a ferry across the Ohio River when I was four or five, I was awed and a little frightened. This ferry on the Danube was cool, too, though the ride not long enough. I was proud that I could buy the tickets. I have better luck speaking German than English in the boonies. And I know a few dozen words of Hungarian.

The streets had little shade trees, unusually long-branched leafy trees, maybe elms. A bearded squeegee guy haunted the parking lot, looking like a peddler from a fairy tale.

Country roads, green trees, fields of hay, corn, wheat and paprikas — the hay tidy in rolls. The skies have been pale watery blue with sweet cloud-puffs. Skies like this always remind me of when I was a young man (32-34) on a grant in Heidelberg, learning to write science fiction novels(White Light and Software).

We saw fields of finger-like Hungarian peppers destined to be ground into paprika; we even visited a paprika museum in Kalocsa. They only started using paprika in Hungary in the 1700s. The pepper came here from … Mexico!

So paprika peppers are cousins of our friend the jalape�o and serrano peppers. What did the Hungarian use for spice before paprika, I wonder.

Lots of peeling stucco. This patch looks more or less like the map of Hungary. They have, I believe, seven neighboring countries. Listed clockwise, starting at the west side: Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. I think many Hungarians consider all of their neighbor countries somewhat shady, always with the exception of Austria.

Genetically, the Hungarians a kind of pond of Magyar genes overlaid upon the indidgenous Slavonic and Germanic tribes; the Magyars showed up in, like, the tenth century, settling and interbreeding, horesemen riding in from the Carpathian basin north of the Black Sea. In Budapest there's a statue of the nine “heroes,” representing the leaders of the nine nomadic tribes who settled Hungary. They have great names: Arpad, Tet�ny, Ond, Kond, El�d, Huba, and Tas. They have beards, mustaches, long hair; they look like Hells’ Angels. Arpad was the leader; that's him on the first horse. As it happens, my father-in-law's name was Arpad.

We ended up in Kecskem�t, means “Goat Walk.” So many European churches paint God as a triangle, often with an eye inside like on the dollar bill, but sometimes with God’s head. I’m thinking about a godlike dark-matter being shaped like a triangular pyramid (tetrahedron) containing an eye, and �’s name is Aum. Aum will free Sol system of the filthy nanomachines.

I have known Hungarians to say things on the order of, “Hearing my child’s sweet voice singing that lullaby was like a knife in my heart,” meaning that the experience was exquisitely touching and almost unbearably wonderful, tinged as it was by the awareness of looming mortality. “Do you love me?” “Seeing your face is like a knife in my heart.” This is known as Hungarian Drama; I'm prone to myself by now.

This is a really gnarly snack I bought at a market, the woman claimed it was marzipan (almond paste), but I dunno. It was flavored with cherry, wrapped in dried apple and rolled in poppy seeds. Like a fork in my stomach.

We went into an amazing Hungarian Art Nouveau building with, like, Peter Max tiles on it, big Zhabotinsky scrolls. Though I didn’t get any pictures, there are really a lot of Hungarian Art Nouveau buildings in a somewhat heavier kind of style than French or Belgian Art Nouveau.

August 1 – 6, 2005. Geneva.

I’m using an analog notebook, spiral-bound, it cost 33� for a 70-pager at Walgreen’s, a real deal. And a pen, my favorite kind for the last few years, a Pilot P-700 fine gel pen, with a nib that looks like a hypodermic. I get these for about 40� each at Office Max. That’s my word processing system now: pen and notebook: no batteries, random access, water-resistant, crash-proof, low theft risk, easy to turn off and on.

In the plane, as we wait for takeoff, the video screens soothe us with images of gnarly computation: sped-up clouds, waterfalls, reflective ripples, flocks of birds. (Not fire, though, not in a plane cabin.) Gnarly continuous-valued CAs would be okay, too, I think. Paradoxically, once we’re in the air and in a position to look at gnarly soothing nature on our own, the steward requests that everyone close their window shades so as to bring into greater prominence the video screens, which begin showing CBS reruns. We’re to look at evil, farty consensus-reality consumerist propaganda instead of the gorgeous clouds right outside our winged tin-can. Ain’t it awful.

It was raining when we got to Geneva.

I took a walk by this great old house like a castle.

Peter Bruegel passed by the Lake of Geneva as a young man, coming back from his visit to Italy. He used this scene as the setting for his paiting, “The Harvesters,” which hangs in the Met in NY.

A sawed-down tree blocking a road: like a Tarot card for “barrier.”

I like walking in the Perle du Lac park by Lake Geneva.

The town is beautiful as well. I’ve been to Geneva nearly every year for the last forty years, as my wife's family lived here.

I always remember coming here with my parents for my wedding in 1967. Excited and proud. Pop had a drink of whiskey right before we landed, the whiskey was in a glass test-tube with a clip bracket like a pen, he had it in his inside coat pocket, one of his parishioners had given it to him, as a joke, I’d thought, but here he was drinking it, nervous I guess, my mother remonstrating, “Really, Ruck.” I thought nothing of it, at the time, I thought it was cute.

This may be the last visit for quite some time, as my wife’s parents have both passed on now. We’re here to tie up loose ends.

It’s raining linden blossoms on me in a cafe in the park-like campus of the University of Geneva across a traffic circle from the opera house and the Musee Rath. A lovely mild blue-sky day, people of all ages here at 10:30 AM, drinking tea, coffee, beer. I just ate a croissant that was Art Deco in its dough-folds.

My favorite Swiss artist is a dead guy called Ferdinand Hodler. Here's a virtual tour of his show at Musee Rath last year.

One night we went to see fireworks by the lake. These are moths swarming around a spotlight. The dottedness of the lines is due to the electical grid's 60 Hz flicker.

One day I spent a long time in a shoestore.

The net-withdrawal continues to intensify. I can’t get the computer at my step-mother-in-law’s house to do webmail. Must I settle for internet cafes? I’m totally jonesing for email. I feel like a man who’s lost his glasses. My laptop and email help me confirm to myself that I do have an identity.

But I’m finding that writing in this notebook soothes the same itch. In the background, I have in mind to type up these scribbles for my electronic journals, and for excerpting in my blog. But what if I didn’t ever type them up? Even so the act of writing would remain pleasurable. Writing is an end in itself, not only a means to an end. I am a graphomaniac.

This woman was doing mime-begging on the street, and then I saw her walking away. Another Tarot card: the mysterious gypsy. I see this as a starter scene for Frek 2.

Variation on the Pig Chef theme: a turtle hawking tortoise-shell eyeglass frames.

My back is unbelievably sore in the upper right quadrant and I’m doing yoga on the lawn as I write these notes, lying on a towel in red Palau T-shirt and black bathing trunks. Also reading and writing notes into Stross’s great Accelerando.

I’m back from visiting Hungary, Switzerland, and NYC. I’ve really missed having my laptop and my blog. Like part of my brain’s been gone. I’ll be organazing some handwritten notes into bloggable journal entries, also processing a mass of photos.

But to get things going let’s jump up to real time.

Last night we went to a barbeque at John Shirley’s house up north of Berkeley.

A lot of SubGenius and SF types were there, it was great to be speaking colloquial English about what I consider to be interesting things. [See my earlier entry for some good links about the Church of the SubGenius.]

John put match-light briquettes into one of those firestarter tubes, producing a pillar of fire. Mimi Heft was worried it would set the palm tree alight.

Among the August company was Philo Drummond, co-founder of the Church of the SubGenius, the Overman himself. Philo has one of those Texas accents where it sounds like each syllable is individually battered and deep-fried.

[Image of “Bob” Dobbs from the Autodesk CelLab package I wrote with John Walker; image was licensed from the Church of the SubGenius and used as a start screen for a Belousov-Zhabotinsky cellular automaton. Vile lichenous scrolls will emerge.]

Philo used to work for Bell Telephone in Texas, selling yellow-page ads, I believe, and he discovered the image of SubGenius icon of “Bob” Dobbs in a book of clip art supplied to yellow-page advertisers. Does that mean “Bob” isn't real? Far from it. The missing link to the puzzle emerged in an interview I conducted with Paul Mavrides for Mondo 2000 in August, 1993, “You Can't See Your Own Eyes: The Art of Paul Mavrides,”, a cover story, now online for the first time. By the way the tax case Paul mentions at the end of that old article was won, over and done years ago (1996) and the CA state sales tax code amended after that to further protect artists' free speech rights.

[Mondo cover by Bart Nagel, modeled by Heidi Foley.]

Yes in this encounter, I learned the origin of the clip-art image itself. In Paul's words:

'”Bob” posed for the 1947 yellow-page portrait. He went to some effort to make this known among his friends. In the post-Hiroshima 40s “Bob” was a drifter earning his way by such day-wage means as modelling. I bought the handgun used to assassinate him in 1984, the less said about that, the better. J.R. “Bob” Dobbs is a mystery enfolded by an enigma bound by a puzzle wrapped in a strip of bacon surrounded by creamy nougat and a rich, milk chocolate coating held together with a toothpick, served on a greasy paper napkin— an indigestible canape for the No Age.' — Paul Mavrides

It's great to be back in the California opera.