Early in 2017, I was starting work on my next novel, Return to the Hollow Earth, intended as a sequel to my 1992 novel, The Hollow Earth. Unsure where to take my story, I considered introducing a Cthulhu mythos theme. But then I decided to fission off the Lovecraft element into a separate story. And it worked! Paul Di Filippo and I wrote “The Lost City of Leng,” and it’s on the cover of Asimov’s SF. Here’s some extracts from my writing journals.

February 15, 2017. I want to write a 20 thousand word novella that’s a sequel to Lovecraft’s classic novella “At the Mountains of Madness.” For me, this work is the single greatest SF story ever written. I’ve admired to for years and years, and every time I reread it, it seems better. In this post, I’ll call Lovecraft’s novella ATMOM for short. I want to do the sequel project quite seriously, making a real push to create something great. Not a jape. But no need to be too serious about it, I suppose. Given that I’m more or less incapable of writing something that isn’t, at some level, at least to me, funny.

The tale is related to the Starkweather-Moore expedition that Lovecraft’s character William Dyer is inveighing against. I want to collaborate on it with Paul Di Filippo. Serious pastiche is one of Paul’s fortes, and I enjoy it myself…I call it “twinking.” Cf. my novel The Hollow Earth, which twinks Eddie Poe.

Maybe we’ll call it “The Plateau of Leng” which was Lovecraft’s indirectly intimated name for both the Elder Ones’ city and for the landscape it was in.

Re. this name, note that in 2009 my friend Marc Laidlaw wrote a memorably creepy Lovecraft-style story called “Leng,” which appears in his recent story collection 400 Boys and 50 More . Marc’s ending for his tale is one of the most disgusting climaxes ever, so be careful not to read any online discussion of the tale before you savor the foul original itself.

March 30, 2717 I finished a new painting, “In the Lost City of Leng.” It goes with the ATMOM sequel project.

[ “In the Lost City of Leng” acrylic on canvas, March, 2017, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.]

Recall that Lovecraft’s tale is about some adventurers who find their way into a tens-of-thousands of years old city beneath the ice and snow of an obscure plateau in Antarctica. And some of the down-sloping walls of the hallways are adorned with friezes that describe the history, science, art, and culture of the “Elder Ones” or “cukes” who lived there. The cukes were all but exterminated by some train-car-sized slugs known as shoggoth. So in my painting, we see a couple of explorers, totally unaware of the waiting shoggoth below…

***

[Awesome Fake “Classics Illustrated” Comic Cover for ATMOM]

As an aside, I found a nice online edition of “At the Mountains of Madness.” The page includes reproduction of a truly bitchin’ cover, purportedly for a Classics Illustrated edition of the book. The image features a raging echinoderm Elder One or what I call a “cuke-man” waving a hapless dog and a man. Dig the frieze in the background? Like the one I painted, and like the ones that Lovecraft describes.

Love the guy cringing in his Antarctic furs. When I posted thus image on Facebook, one of my more comics-savvy readers, Seth Kallen Deitch, informed me the cover is a fake. Wonder who the artist is. I just love those shades of green.

Looking up “At the Mountains of Madness” on Wikipedia, the closest thing to a sequel is Stross’s magisterial “A Colder War” in Toast. I reread it, and it’s very strong, and even a bit daunting. It’s set in the Reagan years, and the existence of the “plateau of Leng” with the lost city of the Elder Ones is systematically covered up by the powerful nations—they signed a 1935 “Dresden Accord.” Even Hitler signed. In the end, to my relief, Stross’s tale diverges from the path I plan. “A Colder War” segues into a WWIII disaster story, with the Lovecraftian Old Ones off-camera. On camera we have some star-gates to other worlds. Bleak worlds. And the story has an emphasis on the evil quality of the alien critters, which gets into into another area of the Cthulhu mythos, the Eater of Souls thing, and at the end we sense that the main character is literally in Hell.

I also found this sidelight on Wikipedia.

“Chaosium Games released a campaign book [that is, a connected series of battles, adventures, and scenarios] titled Beyond the Mountains of Madness for their Call of Cthulhu role-playing game in 1999. This book details the Starkweather-Moore expedition return to the ice to discover the truth about the Miskatonic Expedition. The book incorporates many of the aspects of the original Lovecraft story, including references to the Poe story novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, [the artist] Nicholas Roerich, [and the characters] Danforth and Dyer.”

The “campaign book” is on Abe Books for $120 or more, so never mind reading that.

Random idea: Have the characters be beatniks, a la William Burroughs’s Yage Letters,searching for deeper kicks? Nah, that would be corny, also I just did the Beats in my novel Turing & Burroughs. Would be more fun to do a full-on Cthulhu Mythos tale. Not that Ole Tentacle-Face actually needs to appear himself.

[Rudy Rucker and Paul Di Filippo in Boston, August, 2012]

I just now wrote Paul Di Filippo to ask if he will collaborate on this, and he’s like yeah, but not just now, he has commitments. I wrote back:

I went and reread the poem “Kubla Khan” just now. Possibly we can work in some of my Hollow Earth stuff into our tale, as it seems logical that’s where Coleridge’s Alf and the river in ATMOM both ran. Stench of penguins at their indoor pen at the NYC central Park zoo. Riding down through the sunless sea on the backs of two penguins. The resounding *bonng* of freedom and air as our characters pop out into the Hollow Earth. And there in the far distance, at the Hollow Earth’s Central Anomaly, there one can see *zonnng* the giant sea cucumbers, the true Great Old Ones.

Paul said he was booked till March 26, 2017, but he allowed as how he might have some “interstitial time.” I kept after him.

Aha. Secret interstitial high-quality Di Filippo time is on tap! I’m gonna frikkin’ start the story this week. Time spent on the “wrong” project is always the sweetest. First I’ll make a few notes. I’m thinking the characters might be Starkweather and Moore, the guys who HPL’s character says were about to make the second expedition. Say Moore is from Providence. He’s more of a practical guy. Starkweather is his somewhat flaky prof pal, like me. And we have a woman as well. She starts out as Starkweather’s wife, but she ends up with Moore. Starkweather dies or disappears near the end, maybe he tumbles off toward the center of the Hollow Earth. He’ll want to be with the giant sea-cukes at Earth’s core. I’ll get some notes together and write maybe 3 or 4 thousand words and send it to you in a week or two.

And Paul was like, “Go, man, go. Love it. It’s been too long.” So he’s in. Wonderful. Paul is great to work with. Thius will be our sixth story together. The others: “Instability,” “The Square Root of Pythagoras,” “The Elves of the Subdimensions,” “Fjaerland,” and “Yubba Vines.” You can find the older ones in my online Complete Stories.

[Rudy’s old painting “The Hollow Earth.” See his Paintings page for more info.]

I also read I. N. J. Culbard’s graphic novel version of “At the Mountains of Madness.” This one is nicely laid out, but it’s kind of weak. The buildings of Leng don’t look alien at all…they look like Chicago. And the friezes get short shrift, and the cuke-men aren’t so good, nor is the shoggoth, and the author writes the word “Tekeli-li” at least a hundred times in big red letters near the end of the book,..which doesn’t accomplish much. So much of Lovecraft’s effect comes from his prose. Culbard’s big eyeless penguin is good.

One more source to check, suggested to me by Paul Di Filippo: Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, Nemo: Heart of Ice. I just bought it online. It came, I looked at it, not all that much there for me. He, too, invokes the sacred word tekelili in vain. The best thing is a super-intense drawing of a shoggoth.

***

In any case, it looks like there’s room for a post-ATMOM tale involving the Starkweather-Moore expedition. To give it a bit of an outsider spin, it could be that our trio of characters (two guys and a woman) are not in the S-M expedition. They’re freebooting drifters who go to Leng on their own, and have to outfox and/or save and/or be saved by the S-M crew.

Or, no, better, let’s say the S-M expedition has already been sent down and it was an effin’ disaster with every single person killed and the support ships sucked down into giant maelstroms as well! Of course! And then our chracters skeeve down there while the world powers dither whether to send a yet-larger expedition including full military support.

Having just three or maybe four in the party would make the story’s setup more lightweight. They’d need a special plane that can fly really far and high and carry a buttload of gas in expanded tanks, enough gas for the flight back, but that’s doable with 30’s tech, possibly modulo some slight rubber science tweaks. And they can steal the plane, so they don’t really have to be that rich or well-equipped.

An issue I’m worrying about is how our guys will deal with the shoggoths. These seem to be group organisms like mold slime, giant slugs the size of a subway train with eyes and mouths spontaneously forming and dissolving all over their surface. Capable of moving as fast as, say, a running horse. How do you kill one of those with tweaked ’30s tech? Projectiles seem fruitless. A flamethrower might work, but that’s hella heavy to lug over the Mountains of Madness and down into the tunnels of “Leng.” Need something trickier.

I’m thinking ultrasonics. Like a dog whistle. A shoggoth whistle. Breaks the thing up into amoebas. That “tekeli-li” chirp is how it holds itself together, an acoustic control system that marshals the protean cells of the undifferentiated tissues of the monster into form. You can carry the shoggoth whistle in your pocket! One of our guys, or, better, the woman, invents it.

Juices starting to flow, Muse casting flirty glances my way.

[Painting of Tibetan village by Nicholas Roerisch. Roerisch was an inspiration for Lovecraft’s vision of Leng.]

Characters

How about the characters? For his character, Paul suggested Diego Patchen, a character name from his novella “A Year in the Linear City.” Maybe we call him Doug Patchen so it’s a different person.

Doug Patchen (27) is a young, eager reporter for the Boston Globe. He has some women friends, but nothing serious as yet. Doug has done news-stories on both of the other two male characters, which is how he knows them. He thinks the people in Lovecraft’s Arkham town are full of shit and, as a reverse twist, this turns out to be, by and large, true. Small-minded religious zealots. We’re not going to see Cthulhu in this story.

Stan Gorski (45) used to fly a rescue plane for the Boston Coast Guard. He lost his pilot’s license for drinking and for getting involved in liquor smuggling. (Prohibition ran from 1920-1933.). Works as a plane mechanic now. Has a wife and four kids. A tough guy, Raymond Chandleresque.

Dog. Gorski has a dog named Gurrr. Or maybe Hauhau, which is supposed to be the Polish imitation of barking. Or, no, give the dog to Doug Patchen, and use the name Baxter.

Leon Bagger (37), a marine biologist. And Bagger’s wife Vivi Nordstöm (32). Leon is Australian, Vivi is (seemingly) Norwegian. She’s an artist, she does watercolors of sea creatures for monographs. Also a techie. Doug develops a huge crush on Vivi, who in turn flirts with him. Doug met these two while doing a Sunday supplement article on them. In Fredrik Sjoberg’s book on entomologists, The Fly Trap, I read about a cool aviator and adventuress and explorer named Ester Blenda Nordström, and she had a sister named Vivi, who had a scandalous affair with an entomologist.

[Ester Blenda Nordström in flying togs. ~1930.]

Leon specializes in echinoderms. Especially sea cucumbers. Leon has been trapping sea cukes on the deep sea floor off Boston, in the Grand Banks. He had a problem in his research boat—it was sinking—and Stan Gorski rescued him. Leon and Ariel are visiting scholars at the Harvard Department of Invertebrate Zoology, part of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. The museum’s echinoderm collection is one of the richest in the world. Founded 1860.

Leon gets in touch with Doug because he objects so strongly to the upcoming military attack on Leng. He found out via upper-echelon Harvard faculty club gossip. Leon feels the Elder Ones—whom he calls cuke-men or cuke-women—are meant to be our friends. He wants Doug to help him organize a commando-like rogue expedition to Leng in the Mountains of Madness before the joint US-Australian military expedition goes there. Leon, who’s quite a schemer, has gotten in touch with Stan as well. Stan is up for anything, with his background of bootlegger connections.

And—oh yeah, this’ll kick it up a big notch—have a cuke-woman in the posse. She made her way to Boston (or at least to Melbourne) and connected with Leon Bagger to talk about the threat to her race. A little tricky for her to disguise herself as human. See the image below!

[Wonderful drawing of a cuke-man by Jason B. Thompson.]

Name? Urxa, or even Urxula, if that’s not too much. Great reveal when Doug meets this cuke-woman in Leon’s office. Vivi close friends with Urxula.

Outline

February 21, 2017. If we want to write a novella, we need several blocks of story. Here’s a first slash at it.

I. To Leng! Tell back story and get our characters onto the plane to Leng.

II The Cukes. Leon enables them to find and to talk to a colony of cuke-men, who are agitated over the impending invasion. The cukes can hear radio waves, and generate them. They talk via the short-wave radio the crew brought along. The cuke-men are in some sense using Earth as a spaceship, riding it to wherever our solar system happens to be going.

III. The Battle with the Shoggoths. They use ultrasonics to wipe out the nest of Shoggoths beneath Leng. But not with full success. Maybe jealous Leon dynamites the entrance to the tunnel under Leng so that Doug and Vivi are trapped there—and then they have to exit via the Hollow Earth.

IV. The Lake. They flee go down into the deep subterranean lake, riding on the backs of cukes, who feed them air from their mouths.

V. The Hollow Earth. At the bottom of the lake is a hole leading into the Hollow Earth. Maybe it’s just Doug and Vivi, or maybe Leon is with them after all, and he flips out and wants to fly all the way in to the center to be with the giant sea cucumbers there. Vivi becomes young Doug’s lover. Stan Gorski gets drunk and fucks Urxula (maybe) or otherwise pisses off the locals and they have to leave in haste. Doug and Vivi get married.

VI. They make their way home and forestall further invasions of Leng.

As often happens, we used almost none of this outline.

Plane

[The Grumman Plane Stan Gorski Flew for Coast Guard Rescue, 1930.]

I was briefly tempted by the Dornier Do X planes, also called a flying boat. In 1930 it was the heaviest plane in the world. It has six engines in a row atop the flat wing and six more in the back and is enormous inside, with fifty passengers and a crew of 19. But the Do X could only manage an altitude of about 1,500 feet. And they only built three of them. Too kludgy.

In ATMOM they have large Dornier seaplanes that land on deep snow, and to land a seaplane in deep snow is indeed feasible. I assume they were the Wal or Whale or Do J planes. The pass to Leng is 24,000 feet, which might actually have been too much for hem. But Lovecraft didn’t worry about this.

For our novella, I like the Dornier Do 24, developed by Dornier for the Dutch Navy, mainly used by the Luftwaffe. All metal. Can carry bombs. Armed with Hispano-Suiza cannon and 2 machine guns. Crew of 6. Do 24 range is 1,600 miles, ceiling 26,000 feet. Had three Wright Cyclone radial engines mounted up on the overhead wing. You could fly it from, Ushuaia, capital of Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of South America to Leng if you managed to refill the gas tank on the way…you could manage that if you brought some barrels of fuel. Or, better yet, outfit the thing with double or triple size tanks of gas. If you double-size the tanks you can do 3,200 miles.

Regarding range, by the way, I notice that, as of 2017, there are round trip day-flights over Antarctica from both Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. Round trip flight time is about 12 hours in a 747, and it’s about a 6,000 mile round trip.

[The Dornier DO 24.]

Looking at the Google Earth program, I see a short geodesic path that goes straight down along the west coast of South America. About 10,000 miles from Boston to Leng. The Do 24 range is, again, 1,600 miles, and if I’ve doubled the fuel tank size, or a bit more, I can get a range of 3,600 miles, and I can do the trip in three hops.

A Do 24 cruises at about 200 mph. So we’re looking at a 50 hour flight for 10,000 miles, not too bad. Break it into just three hops to keep the story moving.

Boston – Lima – Ushuaia – Leng
3,600 mi – 3,000 mi – 3,500 mi
18 hr – 14 hr – 17 hr

A catch: they won’t have any gas to get back. Bagger and Gorski know this, but they don’t tell Doug, who’s too green to thin of it. They’re counting on the cukes to carry them back. Urxula told them they would.

Suppose that one of the other Do 24x planes sets out in pursuit a day or two later, and he can show up at the end in Leng for the finale.

Date

ATMOM expedition starts from Boston on September 2, 1930, and when they get to Antarctica it’s November 7, 1930. It’s not quite clear when Lovecraft’s story is written, perhaps in mid-1931, and the Starkweather-Moore expedition would be in the fall/winter of 1931.

And then I’m saying the S-M explorers were massacred by shoggoths—despite the cuke-men’s attempt to restrain the shoggoths—and their ships disappeared into maelstroms. There may also have been some damage from mysteriously purposeful lightning bolts, as were observed by Dyer above the next peaks over (the true Mountains of Madness.) And it wasn’t covered up, it was all on the radio.

After the utter disaster of Starkweather-Moore, nobody does a follow-up for a couple of years. Let’s say this brings us to the end of 1933. And the US, or maybe some private guys, are planning a secret expedition. And our guys steal their Do 24x in Boston at the very end of December 1933, on New Year’s Eve. Just checked and—how beautiful—there was a full moon that night. Perfect for a long flight.

Location:

Lovecraft’s Leng is near Lat 76 15’ S, Long 113 10’ E. In East Antarctica, which is (I hadn’t known this) the part of Antarctica that’s in the Eastern hemisphere. It’s close to being due south of New Zealand and Australia. It’s on a plateau beyond the volcanic Mt. Erebus in McMurdo Sound. Beyond the Transantarctic Range. Inland from Queen Mary Land.

[Map of Antarctica. Leng is by Lake Vostok.]

Turns out Leng is near the subglacial Lake Vostok , which Stross incorporates into his “A Colder War” of 2002. Lake Vostok’s existence was suspected around 1960, and confirmed around 1990. By some uncanny vision or stroke of luck, Lovecraft writes about a warm subterranean lake beneath the Elder One’s city of Leng. And William Dyer and the grad student Danforth were on their way there when they encountered the shoggoth.

Lake Vostok is at 77 S, 106 E, Also near the Southern “Pole of Cold,” that is, the spot where the coldest temperatures occur, at 78 S 102 E. Record: -130 degrees Fahrenheit, in July, 1983. Temperatures rise only to -10 F in the summer season of December to February. The surface of Lake Vostok is some 13,000 feet below the surface of the 12,000 foot thick ice, which puts the surface over 1,000 feet below sea level. This creepy lake is 150 miles by 30 miles, and is itself up to 2,500 feet deep. The Russians have drilled down to sample its water—one hopes without contaminating it.

[Lake Vostok, from Wikipedia]

And Leon Bagger and I know that a passage to the Hollow Earth lies beneath the lake, via the River Alf.

The Third Thing

March 20, 2017. In ATMOM, there’s some third thing other than the cukes and the shoggoths. Danforth sees something in the sky as they were leaving and it drives him crazy, and Dyer tremulously writes about this. A list of things Danforth said. I edited out the boring ones.

He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about “the carven rim”, “the windowless solids with five dimensions”, “the primal white jelly”, “the color out of space”, “the moon-ladder”; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years.

And then I put these things into a vision that my Doug Patchen has. You could also call the third thing the “Unknown Kadath.” On the other hand, what if it’s a good thing? Just for a twist.

We’re going along well, nearly 14,000 words into the story now. I’m writing like a maniac—polishing, patching, and adding—fitting our word hoard into a seemly form. Putting a spandex Spanx body-shaper onto our textual shoggoth.

I’d considered having them leave Antarctica via a shortcut through the Hollow Earth, but I think I’ll drop any detailed Hollow Earth stuff—although perhaps the cukes can adumbrate it. Maybe their goal is to go down through Vostok lake into the Hollow Earth, and the shoggoths are hanging them up. We won’t follow them through the lake and into the Hollow Earth—that would be “a bridge too far.” We won’t even explicitly say there’s a star gate inside the Hollow Earth, although maybe there is one. Hollow planets are like stepping stones, or teleportation booths, you hop from one interior to the next.

[James Ryman’s rendering of one of the cuke-people, also known as Elder Ones. The wings are clearly shown here.]

During the battle with the shoggoths, Doug himself blows up the fuel dump, firing a Do 24 cannon blast into it because the boss shoggoth is right on top of the fuel dump. And then a flock of flying cukes invoke the power of the unknown Kadath to send lighning onto the shoggoth. And then the plane with frikkin’ Teirney shows up, and maybe he saves our boys. Or there’s a fight.

Not sure if Professor Leon is still alive in the end. Maybe yes, why not. The two guys were the dupes of Vivi and now she’s gone and they’re comrades in arms.

I’m assuming that Vivi is in fact a cuke, she’s been one all along, and of course Urxula knew this, but Professor Leon didn’t know, or maybe he does to some extent know. Vivi uses a “glamour,” that is, hypnotic teep to make herself seem like a woman to them. She isn’t actually speaking words out loud, only piping, and the teep makes it sound like words. Vivi enlisted Leon so she could get her ultrasound amplifier working, and so the cukes cold sing the shoggoth to bits. And it almost works, but there’s a final white-slime shuggoth core that’s immune to the music and it’s rampaging up towards them, and that’s the one that Doug blows up with the fuel dump—and maybe he’s put the dynamite in there too.

I do still want a scene in those tunnels with the cuke hieroglyphs. Maybe Vivi and Leon and Baxter and Urxula go down there to lure the shoggoths out.

[Rudy and Paul at H. P. Lovecraft’s grave in Providence, RI, 2003]

Two Issues

(1) Paul had the idea of them learning a shoggoth-language spell that would stop a shoggoth in its tracks. But why wouldn’t the cukes know this chant, and be using it? Maybe it only works if it’s declaimed in an ultrasonic treble which penetrates into the bodies of shoggoths.

(2) A problem: If I have, like, a cubic mile of shoggoths, then blowing up the fuel dump isn’t going to kill them. Unless—the shoggoths are flammable. And in the end, it’s the flame thrower that turns the tide. Prefigure his by having the shoggoth in Ushuaia harbor catch fire, though that would be too obvious, have it smoldering, or have them see a plume of smoke behind them.

(3) .. I’d said that a lot of the Starkweather guys were killed by smart lightning bolts. Doug despairingly blows up the fuel dump under the shoggoth, shooting it with the cannon like I said, but then whoops the shoggoth pinches out the flame and comes crawling forward—and that’s when the storm kicks up and the lightning zaps the shuggoth mass extinction. Oh, wait, I said the flying cukes would guide the bolts. And yon shoggoth is a crispy critter. And even more Kadath lightning up on the mountains of madness, killing off the castle-lurking shoggoths up there as well.

Final twist, as they leave and look back, the Mountains of Madness shrink down, and Leng totally disappears into a smooth, rolling field of snow. But maybe that’s too: “And then little Nemo fell out of bed and woke up.” But it’s a traditional kind of fairy-tale ending, and it gives closure, so go with it. And you can always dig deeper if you really want to find Leng again.

Finishing It.

April 2-10, 2017.Paul sent me version 6, pretty well wrapping it up at 17,800 words. He left out a couple of moves that I still might put in, and added some others, mostly better ones.. I’ll go over the whole thing and try to get the tone right—I’d like it to be serious, although somewhat funny.

So okay, by April 6, I had the ending down, and I went through it to make the whole thing consistent. I also started reading another H. P. Lovecraft story, “The Whisperer in Darkness,” which Paul had been talking about. He got his “planet Yuggoth” from there, also a guy Henry Akeley who had his brain packed in a can.

I sent Paul my version 7, he sent back a very slightly changed version 8, and then I dug in and worked for a week on the final version, number 9. As I wrote Paul about it:

“I went over the whole thing once, and went over the final part three or four times. Thickening and smoothing and logicizing. I made Leon a bit more of a bohemian. Added a couple of small eyeball kick scenes: a vision of Leng 100,000 years ago, and a view of Lake Alph, lit by Vivi’s flare gun. The very last scene has the welcome feel of Jack and Neal on the road. And now it’s 21K words and change. A novella, yes.”

Paul sent it off to one of the major SF magazines, and now we’ll see. IMHO, a Hugo and a Nebula would be in order, but I’ve been wrong about such things before 🙂

It was really fun getting into this world, and now I miss it. I added a light Hollow Earth element to the story, which kind of nudges me to go back to my current novel project, Return to the Hollow Earth.. I liked our character Doug Patchen. An unsure-of-himself young reporter in 1934. Maybe I could have a character like that for my Hollow Earth novel-in-progress.

April 20, 2017. Much to our fury and chagrin, the editor to whom Paul had sent our “In the Lost City of Leng” rejected it. Too raw for this person’s taste it seems. For some reason our use of the slang word “mofo” offended them. Or was it the three-way with two men and a woman who’s a trans sea cucumber alien? Said editor intoned that, yes, the Lovecraft canon was due for (their phrase) “re-visioning.” But not, apparently by a couple of old cyberpunk Thomas Pynchonian Lovecraft freaks like Paul and me! So much for my pre-visioning of awards—like poor Eddie Poe’s saddening visions of treasure in his “Gold Bug” story.

Well, remember that Weird Tales rejected our man Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” when he wrote it in 1931. He took this badly and was so discouraged that it was only in 1935 that his agent sent the story to Astounding , where the editor F. Orlin Tremaine butchered the text so badly that Lovecraft referred to him as, “that god-damn’d dung of a hyaena.” They gave him a good cover illo, though.

[ATMOM in Astounding Stories, 1936]

After his troubles with publishing “At the Mountains of Madness,” H. P. pretty much gave up on writing fiction, and died a few years later. Eeek!

So I sent our “Leng” on to the worthy Sheila Williams at Asimov’s, and hoped for the best.

April 25, 2017. Yes! Sheila bought it. Enjoy.

After Madison, Sylvia and I spent a couple of days in Chicago, which is not a town I know well. Hadn’t been there for years.

We stayed a hotel near the Millennium Park. Some nice stuff there, like a pair of large cell-phone-like sculptures showing short video/portraits of Chicagoans. Damp night, reflections on the pavement.

The really striking sculpture in the park is a large chromium bean. On the top, it’s like a reflecting mirror, but if you go under it, you get these weird multiple reflection regresses..

It’s such an interesting work..in that the complications aren’t from physical elaborations upon the form of the sculpture, which is fairly simple in itself The complications come from the physical world’s interactions with the sculpture. I was thinking the glossy upper surface is like the smiling face a person might present to the world.

And the warped, teeming underside is like the private parts of a person’s mind.

Our hotel building was eighty-stories high, but the hotel section of the structure only went up about twenty floors. It’s the smaller building in the middle here, the Radisson Blu.

Another big sight site for us was the Chicago Art Institute, one of the big museums of the U.S., up there with the Met in NYC and the National Gallery in DC. This work is kind of amusing, it’s by Sam Gilliam, known for his poured color-stripe paintings…and at some point in his career he was like, Why bother stretching them? The canvas looks fine if I just toss it into a corner.

It’s kind of dumb to take photos of paintings as nowadays you can find the higher-quality images of the paintings on the museums’ websites. But I still do it sometimes anyway. Love the ringmaster in this Toulouse-Lautrec.

And this garish gas-lit woman in a Toulouse-Lautrec nightclub, her name is May Milton, she was English, and said to be scandalous and doughy. She was dancer Jean Avril’s close friend.

Like the Met, the Art Institute has old stuff as well. Loved these bronze griffins. Over and over in museums, I’ll see something that’s centuries old, and it’s so “modernistic” looking, and I’m reminded how time-independent art is. We imagine we’re making progress and unearthing new tricks, and it’s all been done before.

An interesting temporary show on a Brazilian woman artist called Tarsina. This is one of her most famous works, called “Anthrophagy,” as in “eating humans,” a sort of playful name she had for her art movement, taking off on the notion that Europeans might view South Americans as primitive cannibals, but also taking into account that, as an artist in a less developed country, she and her peers were in some sense “eating” the art of the Europeans and repurposing it for their own style.

Abstract composition of planes and drawing bits. I have a weakness for these kinds of photos, playing with the viewfinder’s space and then, later, playing with the crop tool.

Did you ever realize that ROOF is (almost) FLOOR spelled backwards? Funny how the artist brings this home with a typographic mural, and the one later that doesn’t match is covered here by the man.

By the way, SPELLED spelled backwards is DELLEPS (that’s pointless old Mad Magazine joke).

Chi has a “North River” area, north of the Chicago River, which runs into enormous Lake Michigan, and Michigan Avenue there gets into a kind of NYC Fifth Ave upscale shopping strip, they call it Miracle Mile, I think. Anyway, at the big Uniqlo store I noticed that they actually had a certain famous cellular automaton running in the light-pattern murals, it’s the “Heat” or “Rug” rule.

So horrible, so ghastly, to see a giant Trump hotel in a new city. It’s the frikkin’ second or third tallest building in town. Like a hideous recurrent nightmare to keep seeing that name and hearing about that person. I still feel like we twigged off into a dreadful minor time fork in November, 2016. The world hasn’t felt stable or fully real since then. Like we’re living in an episode of Twilight Zone. Waiting for the alarm to ring and the bad dream to end.

On the much better side, we went to the amazing Kingston Mines blues club in Lincoln Park and saw the Mike Wheeler band and a blues lady called Dimitria Taylor. Wonderful shows, funky place.

Oh, and something else to recommend: a restaurant in the Loop area called The Dearborn. Very mellow, kind of like a relaxed Balthazar of NYC, wonderful food. Such a good place we ate there two nights in a row.

Nice view of the other skyscrapers from our hotel room, via a mirror. Mirrors are gateways into the fourth dimension, right. But it would be risky to pass through and then be hundreds of feet in the air.

We went down to the park and a bunch of skating-school kids were putting on a show. The coach gives me a fish-eye look, old man taking photos of her charges.

I’ve never understood how they can skate backwards. My mind always seizes up, trying to imagine how I’d do it.

Wandered into an old office building lobby in the Loop buildings, that is, the area inside a loop of the elevated train’s track, a few blocks in from the lake.

We made it down to the old Chess Records building/office/studio, a two-story house on South Michigan Ave. Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Walter and even the Rolling Stones recorded there. A shrine.

A guy named Keith gave us a tour, he’s part of the family of the early bluesman Willie Dixon, also a Chess musician. Willie got the deed to the house from Chess in lieu of back money they owed him. Keith posed with me at the spot where Keith of the Stones stood when they reordered their EP 5×5 in that studio. I noticed that one of the walls in the studio were parallel to each other…for a better sound.

They had a case of Bo Diddley memorabilia. Bo’s album Bo Diddley was the first album I ever bought in my life. His song “Crackin’ Up” was my favorite, and later the Stones covered it too. I remember being 13 or 14 and listening to “Crackin’ Up” with its sweet-sour plangent guitar notes, and Bo’s warm voice, me standing in front of my parent’s full-length mirror looking at myself, dancing a little, thinking, maybe yes, maybe someday I can be cool.

They had a case of Muddy Waters stuff too, also some photos of Muddy. Here he is with his girlfriend KD.

It was raining when we got out of Chess, and we went back into the Chicago Art Institute for lunch. Noticed this really odd ancient Greek sculpture of a hand sticking out of a guy’s mouth. I think the idea is that an actor was holding a big mask of a satyr and sticking his hand through, maybe just to make it weird. Actors…

I picked up on this Symbolist painting by the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin, called In the Sea.. 1883. I thought a lot about what’s going on here. A sea god and four women are singing. I think they’re lounging on a reef, like seals. That dark thing behind the guy might be his tail, or maybe it’s a rock. Note that the mermaid woman’s exposed tail branches in two, which is much handier for orgies. Are the women all mermaids, or are some of them just visitors—or even abductees? Two pointy-eared mermen have joined the party, and one is holding a triton shell. Reminds me a little of the painter Franz Stück also. Kind of like science-fiction painting, but not according to any familiar themes.

Amazing views from the air, always. Too much to even process.

When we got home, my neighbors were cutting down a bunch of small eucalyptus trees in their yard. If you get a big euc with a single trunk, it’s kind of nice. I like how they sway in stormy wind, like kelp, but it can be unsettling.

To keep our trip-feeling going, Sylvia and I hit the San Jose Opera, it had been maybe eight years since we went there, and they’ve gotten better. Good scenery, and good singers who handled their acting well.

And then it was up to SF to share Thanksgiving with Rudy Jr. I always like to get a shot or two of the buildings in the city, kind of visually abstract.

Kids crawled around under the tables during the meal. There were a bunch of us there, a real pilgrims and natives scene.

Someone toots a festive trumpet note into the night. And then Rudy set off a bunch of fireworks. He still had a stash from going to Wyoming last year.

Thank you for the dusk.

Sylvia and I took the grandkids to a beach we’d never been too, Thornton Beach, down at the south end of the long SF City Beach.

It’s a long way down to the water, but so beautiful and green, at least these days with a bit of rain under our belts.

Rudy’s garage has a mobile of those old orange records, a sales angle, peppier than black vinyl.

And a week or two later we got together with my dear old friend Nathaniel Hellerstein, having one of those odometer-roll-over birthdays. He put on a cape and a floppy hat and found a cool old cane from his father Earl. The Duke of Earth. Nathaniel, like me, got a Ph.D. in mathematical logic.

Today’s topics are a trip to an SF con near Chicago, and a visit to Madison, Wisconsin.

Flying over the Rockies to Chicago, looking down at a little town by the edge of the mountains. So archetypal, somehow. I can never believe that some people want to close the plastic shutters on their seat windows in the plane. So they can—do what? Look at a video? When right outside the window you’re seven miles above the ground looking down at cloud castles and landscapes heretofore unseen by human eye?

I was what they call the “GoH” or “writer guest of honor” at Windycon, a small (1,000 attendees) SF con held in a hotel in mall parking lot Lombard, Illinois, nearly an hour’s drive south of Chicago. My writing isn’t very popular among the people who go to cons, so it tends to be a discouraging experience for me to go to a con.

I mean, I already know that not all that many people read my books, but to be on a panel and to look out at a small group of people of whom only one or two has read me, and usually that was a long time ago…well, it’s not something I enjoy. But I figured it was time to try a con, and the GoH honor drew me in, and I wanted to have a look at Chicago.

At any con there are always a few fellow mutants in the mix, case in point, Greg Ketter, owner of the Dreamhaven Books in Minneapolis. I’ve known this guy for over thirty years and—hallelujah—he had a few of my books for sale in the dealers’ room. Nobody else had them in stock. And even Greg didn’t have any of my recent self-pubbed Transreal Books novels. All the more reason to have Night Shade Books reprint nine books from my backlist, a worthy project now underway.

The hotel bar was cozy, with a Chicago feel. Even though I don’t drink anymore, I love places like this. They feel safe, they’re like my early adolescent images of the way the world was going to be. Sitting here, I’m looking forward to my panels and my big talk!

Previsualization: My handlers lead the circus animal from his cage in the shadows behind the tent. He blinks at the bright light, slightly confused. He attempts a growl, someone throws a soda can at him, he snarls. Kafka territory.

I bought a great Cthulhu T-shirt (modeled on Sheppard Fairey’s Obama poster). “Cthulhu for REAL Change.” Got it from Barb VanTilburg of OffWorld Designs—she runs it, and her husband Ray designs a lot of the shirts. They drive from con to con in a big van, selling their wares, kind of a gypsy existence.

The thing about cons…they’re not all that much about the actual books, they’re about the media…comics, video, movies, TV, t-shirts, and free-form user-designed costumes. A con is kind of like a reef, with all kinds of curious critters living on it. A short-lived reef—what Peter Lamborn Wilson calls a TAZ, or a Temporary Autonomous Zone.

Speaking of making costumes—or what the fans call cosplay—these two guards were pretty cool. Another upside was that a con staffer called David Iverson got me a good audio of my “Welcome to You Cyberpunk Future” talk which I posted as a podcast. The con organizers were nice to me. Many thanks in particular to Daniel (Gundo) and Teresa Gunderson for inviting me, and to Marinda Darnell who helped me settle in and stay afloat.

I liked giving a reading of my story, “Attack of the Giant Ants” to a group of twelve (few but fit). [Check out the 2014 podcast of me reading this.] And it was sweet when a handful of tru-fans showed up to get their copies of my books signed. Always refreshing to see those old, and sometimes forgotten, items in the hands of someone who treasures them.

Of course a lot of the people getting signatures are just dealers, looking to flip some product, but, hey, their activities are in some sense generating value for my brand. But the ones I love are the elite core who really do care about my work, the ones who say, “This book changed my life.” I live for that.

Despite the good moments, I did have a very strong flash of “What am I doing here?” when I awoke on each of my three mornings at the con. It’s usually like that. And then I feel guilty and ungrateful for tiring of these dear and all-too-human souls. This annual event is their source of joy, their gay holiday of fun and magic, and they look forward to it, and work on it, and plan for it, and make all the pieces come together, and I, the aloof interloper, I have grave doubts. So I’m a horrible person. What a payoff.

“Why can’t you just relax, Rudy?” says my wife’s voice in my head. “Be happy for them that they’re having fun. They’re touching. Love them.” Well, maybe my wife wouldn’t go that far. Maybe that’s Jesus’s voice, or the Buddha’s, or the White Light’s…

One day I left the con for three hours to go see the Thor: Ragnarok movie on an Imax screen in a 19-screen AMC theater across the parking-lot, between the hotel and the JCPenney store. What an overdone heap of bombast and glitz, that Thor flick. Fun at times, though. Jeff Goldblum was great, teasing Thor and saying “the -ass place or ass land” instead of Asgard. So Beavis and Butthead. And you could order food from your seat in the theater, I got an open flatbread with a Philly cheese steak on it, so delicious in the dark, gobbling it like a wild animal (released from my cage in the shadows behind the tent).

Anyway, I got through it, and, like I say, there were a few good moments amid the con ennui. I kept being polite to people, even delivering a saintly homily at the opening ceremony about how it warmed my heart to see their joy at their little communal festival.

Well, okay, I was nice to everyone except for a fellow panelist on a “What are your fave books? panel. It was all the GoHs on the panel: GoHs for science, art, videogames, writing, cosplay, and signing (in the sense of translating talks into sign language in real time).

The panelist sitting next to me wouldn’t shut up about some dipshit fantasy books, lavishing cliché praises upon them, trading heartfelt hosannahs with a another motor-mouthed fellow panelist, who claimed to be the “moderator.” And they get onto William Goldman’s Princess Bride (a fine work but, I would humbly submit, not the greatest novel ever written).

And I manage to break in and mention that Goldman wrote a good coming-of-age novel called The Temple of Gold and that it was, in a way, a bit like Catcher in the Rye. And the panelist next to me cries: “The Temple of Gold is SO much better than Catcher in the Rye!” And I’m like, “Well, they’re different.” And the panelist is like “No, Catcher in the Rye is whiny garbage!” And, without turning my head, I deliver what is, for me, the mild-mannered math prof / SF writer, a withering put-down. “And you’re an…English teacher? Hm.”

And then I rode an Uber to the airport, which was closer than downtown Chi, and at the airport I got a regional bus to Madison, Wisconsin, where daughter Georgia lives. Wife Sylvia was already there. She’d side-stepped the con. It was a four hour trip, I hadn’t done a long bus ride in decades, especially not alone, and it was kind of fun. That unplugged feeling.

Here’s a random shot of an intersection near our mid-journey stop in Janesville, Wisconsin. What if you just got off the bus in some place like this and tried to make a life? Turing a corner in time.

The University of Wisconsin football team is a big deal in “Mad Town,” and some impish sculptor erected an amusing monument next to stadium. It’s a statue shaped like an obelisk of about two thousand concrete footballs. I love it, although some people think it’s silly. But I like art to be witty and fun, as opposed to bombastic and grim.

Madison has a great art museum, thanks to UW, and we went around the place in the company of a certain impish grandchild. Dig this shot of her silhouetted against some art-glass and a window. If you shoot enough, sometimes you catch a good one. Or, as my self-deprecating mother-in-law Pauline used to say of herself, “Sometimes even the blind hand finds an acorn.”

Here’s a work in this museum that really got to me. “Untitled” by David Klamen. Of course it’s “untitled,” because you can’t see the picture in the picture, there’s not enough light, and it’s all black, and here it is, and you’ve been searching for it your whole life, and you can’t see it. Like a dream. What made Klamen’s painting really perfect in this setting is that the museum architecture kind of matched what you see in the picture.

One last shot for today. This is the hook on the inside of the bathroom door at Mickies Dairy Bar on Monroe Street in Madison, not far from the stadium. I figure the hook’s been in place for forty or fifty years. Look how deep it’s dug into the wood. Awesome. Nothing is ever over, nothing is lost, god is everywhere.

Upcoming events: My 2011 painting “A Skugger’s Point of View” will be part of the group show ILLEGAL, curated by Kal Spelletich at the Luggage Store gallery on Market St. in SF. (“P. S. We don’t sell luggage.”)

===Poster for the “Illegal” show in SF. Opening party Friday, Nov 10, 6-9.

And I’ll be at Windycon 44, an SF con in Lombard, Illinois, near Chicago, from Nov 10 – 12, as Author Guest of Honor, doing some panels and giving a talk.

===Either this is Rudy’s painting “A Skugger’s Point of View,” or it’s Rudy’s view (including peripheral vision) of his audience while he gives his talk on “Cyberpunk Future” at Windycon in Lombard, Friday, Nov 10, 8-9.

By the way, all the images in the rest of this post were taken on my new Pixel 2 phone camera over the last few weeks. I’ll say a bit more about this furhter down.

I’m rockin’ it on Return to the Hollow Earth these days, really pushing it along. I’m about a third done. It’s common to think of novels and films as having three acts. I’ve written Act I, with two more to go.

===Rudy at the Luggage Store gallery, shyly joyful.

With the two acts to go on my book, I need to concoct twice as many events as I’ve already described. I worry about this, as I already have had so much stuff happening. And I can’t easily see that far ahead. Foggy road. But it’s always like this. The muse feeds me one scene at a time. And I hardly even pretend to make outlines anymore.

To keep me going, I always have a few big upcoming scenes in mind. This is my twenty-third novel, and by now I’ve learned not to not to hoard my big scenes for later. Don’t vamp while planning to do the big scene later. Write it now. The muse always feeds me more big scenes once I’ve written the ones I already have. It’s can be nerve-wracking to work this way. To depend on the unseen and unseeable muse to step in, over and over, always handing me the next cue card. But it keeps working.

But I do a lot of stuff to get ready for the muse. I find ways to, like, invite her to sit down by my campfire here in the darkness. I use logic a lot—I do have a Ph.D. in mathematical logic, after all. And I know a little bit about physics. So when something physical is happening, I might run some formulas and numbers to find out what has to be done. And when this is working well for me, the numbers turn out different than I expected, and this forces certain new decisions about how to write a scene.

===I’ve been writing so much that my body is sore all over, and I need to start doing daily yoga again.

I have a number of large creatures in Return to the Hollow Earth. There’s the giant flying nautilus with hydrogen in its shell. They’re call ballulas. The one in my novel is named Cytherea and she belongs to Edgar Allan Poe. My guys ride in the ballula through the hole in a maelstrom at the North Pole. Normally ballulas eat people so—logic dictates—I need for my guys to have, um, magic telepathic gems that can control Cytherea.

===Here’s Rudy Jr. at the Luggage Store gallery with me, in front of googly eyes, and with a badass look.

And there’s these fat flying shrigs, who are pigs in front and shrimp in back. Size ranging from a cow to to a three-masted ship. Very dumb. And there’s a couple of krakens, three miles long, and one of them, Jumungo, is swimming in a circle underwater below the Arctic Sea to keep that maelstrom open (more logic here) and the other one, Fafnir, catches shrigs to eat and to feed to Jumungo, who is slowly, slowly brooding upon a clutch of two dozen eggs on her stomach.

===Kelp in Big Sur. Or neurons in my brain. A ganglion. As above, so below.

To help the process along, I write a book of notes in parallel with each novel. When I’m done the novel and the notes are about the same length. At first, when I’m wiseacreing for the swing of thought (a phrase from Gurdjieff’s intro to one of his books), the notes are much longer, and they continue growing all along, but at some point, I get into a bloodlust writing frenzy and the novel pulls ahead.

===Secret of the universe, revealed in a parking garage. The secret is, however, ineffable and cannot be spoken.

And all along, when I don’t know what to do in the novel—or don’t feel like doing it—I go and put something in the notes. Making drawings, maybe, or a timeline, or a case-by-case discussion of what might happen next, or a to-do list of things I need to fix, or kvetching about not getting enough writing done. And none of this is actually where the ideas come from. The ideas come, as I’m always saying, from sudden random thoughts, fed in by the muse. General principle: if an idea seems too wackball and out there to use…then probably you should use it. Readers enjoy being surprised, so the book should keep surprising the writer too.

===I generally do not write about psycho human lurkers in the basement. Squid, okay, or krakens or man eating ballulas, but not lurkers. Too mass media. I write escape literature, right?

I got excited about the new iPhone 8 and iPhone X, but then after reading about them and about the competitors on the web, I decided to break out of the fold and get a Google Pixel 2 phone—as I mentioned above. Some say the Pixel 2 camera is better than the cameras in the new iPhones, although, of course, this kind of thing is endlessly debatable. The Pixel 2 has only one camera lens (unlike the high-end iPhones which have two lenses), but supposedly it makes up for this by automatically shooting a bunch of images and munging them together for each photo, achieving high dynamic range (detail both in the bright and the dark areas), knocking down motion blur, and suppressing low-light high-ISO artifacts.

===Wow! The tree is God. I think the built-in HDR (high-dynamic-range) is what makes this looks so good. Also the Google Photo app’s “auto” setting is usally very nice.

On the Pixel 2 camera, AI, in other words, is supplanting lens glass. Good image is all about having a lot of info about the thing you’re shooting. More info means more photons. Big glass lens means lots of photos being processed. But one might argue that if you quickly, sneakily, take ten shots each time you press the shutter release, then it’s like your lens had ten times the area. This sounds good, but even so the fine details and the low-light shooting of a camera phone is not as yet able to match a heavy duty big lens.

Anyway I’m quite happy, and even pleasantly surprised, and even at times wowed by the Pixel 2 shots. As I said, all the images in this post were taken on my new phone camera over the last few weeks. Although, as I just said, if you zoom in, the detail sharpness never matches what I’d get on my trusty Fujifilm X-100T with the largish wide-angle glass lens, or on my monster-lens Canon 5D. But, as the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you, and this often happens to be the Pixel 2 which, although larger than my old iPhone SE, fits in my pants pocket.

It has been a bit of an ordeal for me to leave the familiar and well-thought-out user interface that that Apple products provide. By now I’ve put in maybe fifty solid hours of, tweaking my Pixel 2 settings, posting on forums, searching for info on the web, and experimenting. I’m still not totally happy with my new workflow from camera to desktop to online posts. But I’m getting there. It’s too complicated and geeky to go into here. But if you’re a phellow photo phreak, you can check my forum discussions online. Disclaimer: I’m often wrong.

Other recent events now: Halloween, Michael Blumlein, Big Sur, walking around Los Gatos, and Blade Runner II! Photos of all that here, with quick comments.

Halloween, we went up to SF and went around Bernal Hill near Precita Park. Kids line-up. I don’t admit to knowing any of these rag-tag urchins.

Some of the adults in costume too. Love this psychedelic garage. The woman’s wig glows, not sure how.

And a house of freaks all dressed like people from “Wizard of Oz.” That might be the wizard himself with the glowing glasses. One woman had a little house atop her head, she was the house that fell on the bad witch.

===Rudy, Michael Blumlein, Carter Scholz, Kim Stanley Robinson, Richard Kadrey

Sylvia and I went to a talk by Michael Blumlein, a fellow Freestyle Cyberpunk Transreal No Wave SF SF writer. We all had dinner together an a new Hungarian restaurant called Duna on Valencia St. Nice easy place, good food, decent prices. So great to sit around with other writers. They understand. The months and years of work at the keyboard, the fuck-all scraps of recognition, the derisory levels of pay, the sweet solace of the craft, the joys of discovery, the pleasure of forgetting you’re alive while you’re lost in the subdimensions.

The big Blum himself. Last year we thought he might be dying, but he keeps hanging in here and maybe even getting better, which is great. We like having him around.

Sylvia and I drove down to Big Sur a week or two after they opened up the bridge, or overpass is more like it, just south of the village itself. On the way home we stopped at Phil’s Seafood in Moss Landing. They had a great bluegrass band playing, “Glad to Be Here.” One of those gifts from the gods, to sometimes happen up on wonderful music.

Wonderful food too. At Phil’s you order at the counter and sit at a picnic table, and they have tables out back on a sand dune sloping to the beach and the sun was setting, so fabu, with the *ping* crescent moon up there. It’s so good to be alive. And every day is the only day.

With that bridge open in Sur, we could go to Pfeiffer Beach (public park, although very nearly unmarked from the highway). The turn off is about a hundred yards north of the new bridge or, as I say overpass. Went down to see the wonderful square hole the big seastack rock, with the surf coming through, a magic door to another world, which I used in my novel Mathematicians in Love. I put the Pixel 2 phone video on YouTube to make it lightweight enough to fit into this post.

Cosmic gnarl brimming through.

And magical sun rays through the pines. Pfeiffer Beach is one of my favorite spots in the world. Oddly enough it is the setting for several scenes near the end of Marlon Brando’s movie “One-Eyed Jacks,” now out on a Critereon Blu-Ray at last. So I went and bought that DVD, can’t seem to stream the new hi-res version online. Marlon was such a physically beautiful man, and had such a perfect “bad attitude.”

Warming up at Rudy Jr.’s hose before Halloween, dig the baby pumpkin and the hand. Alien objects. If you ever really look hard at a human foot or hand…how strange.

So that’s almost enough photos for this blog post. A month’s worth. This is me waking up as Blank Reg from Max Headroom after a night of uneasy Franz Kafka dreams about metamorphosis…

And a still photo from the new Blade Runner movie, which I liked very much. I posted a bunch of stuff about it over at FaceBook. The photo above, that’s the hero K and a 60 foot tall hologram of his girlfriend Joi, who is a hologram even when she’s small, a hologram run by some AI software that poor K is in love with. The image, to me, captures something at the core of a person’s relationship to the internet. The internet so big and sexy, toying with you, pretending as if you, as an individual, matter.

Never mind. The daily world is always just outside my window, incalculably rich and detailed, always free.

The past, not now
The future, not yet
Between two nots
Is