I’ve been kind of strung-out on computer programming for the last month. Turning some of my old stuff into ebooks. I keep meaning to write up a detailed “how to publish an ebook,” but I keep learning new stuff. So many gotchas.l

I’ll be announcing my new ebook, Collected Essays, on Monday or Tuesday, and it’ll be available via several channels on my Transreal Books site. But today is Saturday, and not a good time to launch a web product. Today I’m mainly posting more photos from our trip to Manhattan early in March.

As I mentioned, we were on the 34th floor of a hotel on 8th Ave near Times Square. The window actually opened, a little bit, and it was so awesome to look down at the people. Great morning shadows of the cyclists.

And the skyscrapers at night. Another world.

The Met has a renovated section of art from the Arabian countries. Wonderful stuff. One of my favorites was this calligraphic emblem called a “tughra,” from the court of Süleyman the Magnificent, 1555. The pieces of it stand for parts of Süleyman’s titular name. But the details make it rather conspicuously difficult to forge.

Interesting Babylonian art near the Arabian art wing of the Met, too. R. Crumb used to draw flying vulture demonesses. Maybe he’d done some actual art-historical research.

Naturally we hit the MOMA as well. Nice atrium. Great to see the golden oldies of modern art upstairs. For some reason Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror” is in storage. The biggest draw right now is van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” Kind of a weird 21st century crowd in front of it, all foreign tourists, and every single one is holding up a camera or cell phone to get a picture of the actual painting in actual real life—photography is allowed, and by now everyone finally understands not to use their flash. But weird to have this anenome mass of arms with cameras on the tips. SFictional.

The really great new thing at the MOMA was a retrospective show of Cindy Sherman’s work. I looked it over first with Sylvia, then with our cinematographer friend Eddie Marritz. We liked her early work “Untitled Film Stills” almost the best, the way Cindy looks so neutral in the images, like stills from European films, she said. Lot’s of exhibition eye-candy here.

I don’t think I mentioned that in this gallery where I did my reading, the Soho Gallery of Digital Art, they had about thirty computer display screens on the walls. So they can put up any show at all with an hour or two of fiddling with the central controller machine. I’d emailed them a link to my paintings site, so they had a lot of my paintings “on” the walls. Was nice to see them.

Yet another museum to mention is the Whitney. They had the Biennial show. Like so many Biennials, this was “the worst one yet.” Nobody takes the time/trouble to develop any craftsmanship anymore. Piles of garbage on the floors, YouTube-level videos of like a woman chewing food and spitting it out. An artist sleeping on a bed installed in the Whitney galler. Six art-school-hallway-type paintings with unmixed colors right out of the tube painted in *wow* squares along the edge of the cheapest possible pre-stretched canvases. It’s all about the accompanying rap. The best thing I saw at the Whitney was a pile of blue-painted wood things leaning outside. (Droned the old man.)

The good old Empire State building is still there, so 1940s, such a dowager. Looking at it near the city-block-sized Macy’s. You don’t specifically find what you’re looking for in a store that big, everything is scattered around. Eventually you happen on what you need. Or on something like it.

We went down to Ground Zero, former site of the World Trade Center. Out in California, I’d had the mistaken impression that they were still stalled in arguments about what to build. But they’re moving right along. Lots of cranes, and there’s a new tower growing up.

The memorial in the central area is deeply moving. They have two square holes in the ground, exactly matching the footprints of the fallen towers. In each hole, water flows down the sides, across a flat part at the bottom, then down into a black pit.

Kind of like the course of life. You come from who knows where, sparkle in the sun, end up on a level plateau, then disappear into darkness.

All the names of the dead are cut into the heavy metal railings around the edges. This is one of the the most moving monuments I’ve ever seen, along with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in DC.

And how are you supposed to feel about it? Sorrowful, certainly. Wistful for the more peaceful times before. But—vengeful, angry, bellicose? That’s natural too. But you don’t want to take it out on a whole country or a whole region of the world.

I don’t see why President Obama doesn’t get more credit for finally tracking down Osama Bin Laden. It was good to get that done. A step towards closure.

And the rebuilding at ground zero is wonderful to see.

Manhattan is, at some meta-level, a living organism. Energy flows down the long avenues in the morning, with each crossing lit by the rising sun. It’s a hive, Manhattan, an anthill, an indestructible giant paramecium. Long may it wave!

I’m a little behind on the journal aspect of my blog. This month I was busy finishing issue #13 of Flurb, and then converting the issue into ebook format. But before that, my wife and I were out in NYC for a week. So today I want to blog some of that.

Actually, before New York, I need to post this picture of the hippo at the San Francisco zoo. Hippos are among my very favorite animals. The comely bulk, their smoothness, their nimble lightness on their feet, and the fact that they’re said to be quite vicious and dangerous if encountered in the wild.

One of the things I did in NY was to do an interview and give a reading from Nested Scrolls at a gallery in Soho. This was organized by Jim Freund in connection with his New York Review of Science Fiction reading series and his Hour of the Wolf radio show — here’s a link to a stream of the show online, though I’m not sure how long the link will keep working. I start up about five minutes into the stream, and the show contains both my interview and my reading.

(Thoth in the Met)

Streams aren’t a convenient medium for listening on-the-go. The picture above shows me on the left fruitlessly trying to extract an mp3 of my interview from Jim Freund, partially seen on the right. He eluded the flail of Thoth! No matter. What I finally did was to capture the stream with Audacity on my computer, and then edited the interview out of the Hour of the Wolf show. And a very good interview, too. Jim’s good at this. I added it to Rudy Rucker Podcasts, click on the button below. (And I put a hint about capturing streams in the comments section down at the end of today’s blog post.)

Speaking of my Podcasts, let me jump away from NYC and up to the present for a moment. Today I was up at the Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco and I did a panel with Terry Bisson and John Shirley. Our theme was “Anarchism and Science Fiction,” and I got a good recording of the hour-long panel. We had a nice big audience—anarchist kids in their twenties or thirties, very shaggy and bright-eyed. Not a typical SF crowd at all—actually I don’t think they were in fact SF readers. But fun to talk to. You can click on the button above to access both the Freund interview podcast and the “Anarchism and SF” panel podcast.

Okay, back to New York. We lucked into a great room in the Intercontinental near Times Square. The window even opened, a little bit, and I could peer down at wonderfully tiny Manhattanites with their early morning shadows.

The white ways of the night.

There was this burger place downstairs, the Shake Shack, at Eighth Ave and 44th St, I became mildly obsessed with the name, saying it over and over. Always a line there, every hour of the day. There’s another Shake Shack in Madison Square near the Flatiron Building—where I always go to visit Tor Books, where I was doing most of my publishing from from 1999 – 2011. An autumnal feeling at Tor this time, who knows how many more times I’ll go there.

Publishing is in such a fierce state of change. Authors are like the dinosaurs after that big meteor crashed into the Gulf of Mexico a zillion years ago. We’re trying to turn into birds as fast as we can. This object above is an Espresso Book Machine which I saw in this really great Soho bookstore, McNally Jackson Books. You can print off a print-on-demand book on the spot there, even one of your own if you want.

Print-on-demand is already fading, though, it was a weird stilt-legged trilobite of the Cambrian explosion. Ebooks are where it’s at now, where “now” might last five years. Publishing is very chaotic just now, I’ve never seen it like this. It’s like the carriage business the year after Henry Ford starting selling the Model A.

I’m glad I’m learning how to make ebooks. I’ve got my Transreal Books page working pretty well, with my Collected Stories on it, and my Collected Essays coming online soon. I made an ebook Flurb of issue #13 as well, and next fall if I can work things out with my authors and the technology, I may put together a Completely Flurb: E Flurbus Unum ebook omnibus that’s about a hundred megabytes in size. Go frikkin’ wild with this sh*t.

Anyway, back to NYC. Always so great to be in Central Park, the classic contrast between the skyscrapers and the old trees and grassy swards with humans at rest and play. Very New Yorker cover.

My wife and I have been to NYC so many times over the years, it’s kind of a constant in this changing world, the frail honks (Love the minatory traffic signs: DON’T HONK (what part of that don’t you understand??)), the siren wails, the rumble and jostle, the shuffle of feet, the smells, the windows at Bonwit’s, the rhythms of the subways, the ballet at the Joyce, the ubiquity of the New Yorkers, curt but not unkind.

I always smile when I see the perennial Army Recruitment Center in Times Square. It’s been there as long as I can remember, maybe forty years. I always imagine a group of guys on a wild spree in the Big Apple and then, late at night or in dawn’s early light, one of them reels into the Recruitment Center like a disoriented lobster who’s crookedly tail-snapping his way into a trap.

Later that day…“So this is Fort Dix!”

We happened upon the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, and I posed for a photo on it—I actually did this once already, in 2005, and the reason I like to do this is that I’m thereby emulating my boyhood hero and my first actual writing mentor, Martin Gardner, who wrote a wonderful column for Scientific American for many years.

Dear Martin. He lent me about twenty rare books on the fourth dimension in 1982 when I was writing my nonfiction book, The Fourth Dimension. And now he’s dead.

Beautiful tree-shadows on the wall of the Met. And our bodies are shadows of our souls. How many dimensions?

March 23, 2012

Issue #13 of Flurb is out, with astonishing tales by thirteen writers: Albrecht, Ashby, Cha, Deitch, Garcia, Garrison, Hayes, Highsmith, Rucker, Quaglia, Salinas, Watson, What, Worrad!

This brings us into the sixth year of Flurb since the first issue, with 164 stories published in all.

Go to flurb.rudyrucker.com and be among the first of the fifty thousand or more people who’ll be checking out our new issue over the coming months!

Enjoy the gnarl, dear readers, it’s good for you.

And when you take a break, come back here and post something encouraging in the comments section below. Our intrepid authors need and deserve your support.

March 27, 2012.

Some twerp was griping that Flurb should be an ebook, so, just to see if I could do it, I made an ebook version of Flurb #13 that can be read on any ereading device—Kindles, iPhones, Androids, NOOKs, Windows laptops, iPads, whatever.

Mobi (for Kindle) and Epub (for the others) now available for free download at

http://flurb.rudyrucker.com/ebook/

I’m still hanging out in Gotham. Love the roar and bustle. Had a nice reading with Brendan Byrne. Eventually a tape should appear on the Hour of the Wolf radio show, I’ll let you know when it’s streamable.

Tor Books is about to produce a trade paperback edition of my autobio, Nested Scrolls. I’d like to clean up any remaining typos in this book, so if you’ve found some, please let me know over the next week or two—you can simply post the typo as a comment here or email me.

My Complete Stories ebook is selling some copies, thanks for that! (Only $4.95 for a mammoth tome.) I’m glad to have found the self-published ebook alternative to the Kafka castle of traditional publishing. Toothless Inuit on an ice-floe or…rat leaving a sinking ship?

I’ll be publishing issue #13 of my webzine Flurb at the end of this month, I have 13 good new stories edited and ready to go, all I need at this point is a few days of production work.

But meanwhile, as mentioned, post any Nested Scrolls typos you find or email me about them.