Regular reader of this blog Emil Rojas asks:

Question “I'm wondering why you don't allow responses on a per article basis on your blog like most blogs? Your blog is definitely more interesting then most, and it would be cool to see what people are thinking in response to the great stuff you are putting out. I think you would attract more readers if they could respond, after all most people just want to hear themselves talk :-)”

Answer I had the responses turned on for awhile, but there were very few of them, and it was bumming me out to look for them and find none. I kind of like just posting the blog and then forgetting about it, as opposed to hovering over it to see if there's any reaction.

In such situations I always remember the pigs at the Rutgers Agricultural School Farm that Sylvia and I would go look at when we were in grad school there. The pigs' food was placed into a little metal box with a slanting roof that they'd push up with their snout. So all day long the pigs are checking to see if there's food, and you're hearing this lonely clank of the all-too-empty food box. I think of those pigs when I check for physical mail in my metal mailbox, also when I check for non-existent email, or for comments — and there aren't any.

But, what the heck, I can turn the comments on for awhile, and just not worry about them. What a concept. Comments are now ACTIVATED!

[The Rutgers Ag Farm pigs in 1968]

Emil also asks:

Question “I'm also curious how big your readership is, and the number of responses would give some idea.”

Answer Thanks to the excellent support system of Monkeybrains, I know that in January, 2005, the site www.rudyrucker.com averaged some 6,000 hits per day, coming from about 400 vistors a day. (Each visitor produces some 15 hits as various images and style sheets are downloaded to build the visible pages.)

My most popular page is the blog, the second most popular is the notes on how I wrote my book As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel, and third most popular is the page describing my forthcoming nonfiction book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

[Rudy at Rutgers in 1968.]

My mathematician/computer scientist friend Michael Beeson sends a link to a master page showing about a hundred neat graphical Java applets by ascended code-master Ken Perlin.

Fellow cyberpunk/dadaist SF writer John Shirley found a page of Hieronymus Bosch action figures.

And reader nicknamed Majcher found a site about a woman taking the first small steps towards the fully organic house-trees of Frek and the Elixir — she’s growing coat hangers!

I went for a Sunday walk in the Almaden Quicksilver Park today. I like to leave the car by the Guadalupe Reservoir on Hicks road and walk in across the dam.

I come to this park about twice a year, usually alone, and I always have this sense of giving myself a special treat when I’m here. Getting away from the friggin’ computer and touching Gaia.

I remember last year I came here when I was thinking about retiring, for instance, and again right after I retired.

I’m always amazed how Nature keeps on doing her thing unaided. All the fractal layers of life, I just want to zoom in on it forever. But can’t actually zoom that far, so need to stop and savor the four or five levels I get.

Around 1930 Alfred Stieglitz took a lot of pictures of the sky and gave them all the title “Equivalent,” which he said meant that each of the sky images captured a pattern that was equivalent to some mental or emotional state. In this picture, I was thinking the cloud and the wood grain were equivalent patterns, so that’s another kind of equivalent.

I have a weakness for pictures of the sky, as readers of this blog will have noticed by now, and I admire Stieglitz for figuring out a rap for making them sound like more than “isn’t this pretty?” (Be it said, his pictures of the sky are amazing.)

I couldn’t find a good link for a page with a bunch of Stieglitz equivalents, you can get a kind of fake page of them with a Google image search, and there’s a good page at the George Eastman House.

The thing about calling a picture of a sky an “equivalent,” is that if it’s just a picture of a cloud, people are like, so what, but if you tell them that it’s really a picture of your inner turmoil or passing serenity, then it seems more interesting, gossipy monkeys that we are.

Thanks to Jennifer Saylor for emailing in to tell me that the plant depicted yesterday was a red-hot poker plant , (Latin name kniphofia uvaria).

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[Painting by Paul Mavrides, Victors, about 36″ by 24″, acrylic on black velvet.]

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Here's an example of transrealism in action. A note from my journals, followed by a scene from my novel in progress. The world is SF.

=====Journal Note, Creatures in a Mirror, November 16, 2004.=====

At the SF international air terminal, about to fly to Milano to give a talk, I’m waiting for them to print my ticket, staring absently at this clear space behind the ticket counter, assuming it’s a mirror, and then I realize it’s open air, and that I’m staring into the far distance, this terminal is huge.

And then I get the idea of looking into a real mirror and seeing beings in the distance that aren’t there in your real world. The alien cockroach mathematicians.

=====Draft scene for my novel Mathematicians In Love, January 27, 2005.=====

I looked in the mirror on the wall above my dresser — grinning with an open mouth, hungry for the next rush. In the mirror’s recesses, I saw the image of my open window and the reflected tiny view of Haste Street with the eternal Berkeley freaks truckin’ on down the line. I noticed a couple of characters with heads like the buds on a fractal Mandelbrot set. Heads with waving antennae, bodies with smooth glistening backs and an extra set of arms. My visitors! Half-human cockroaches walking on two legs.

I turned towards the window, oddly calm, rocking my guitar, fire-hosing feedback from my amp. I couldn’t see the cockroach-men outside in the plain light of day, no. They were only visible in the mirror’s dark glass. Fine.

I went back to my mirror and watched the visitors scurry across the mirror-street, climb the mirror-wall of mirror-Rochdale, wriggle in through my mirror-window and stand in my mirror-room. I could hear them twittering behind my mirror’s glass. I peered in at them, oddly unafraid, still playing my guitar.