I live near the Lexington Reservoir, which is next to Highway 17 near Los Gatos, CA. It’s very rare for the Lex to overflow—the last time I clearly remember it happening was nearly twenty years ago, late in 1992, shortly after Bill Clinton had won his first Presidential election.

Today the Lex finally overflowed again. I’d been tracking the progress via drive-bys and an online gauge page. Sylvia and I drove over just now to check it out in person.

When I see water in these dramatic states, I’m sometimes a little amazed at how calmly the water does its thing. No resistance. Go with the flow. Remain restless.

Further down the flume, of course, things get hyper. Yet even here, the bits of water are computing their way along continuous trajectories.

I often think about the theory of computation when looking at fluid flow, as in the photo above (taken in a gutter near my house during yesterday’s rainstorm). One reason fluids in motion are so fascinating is that make a huge amount of physical computation visible.

As the early chaoticians and the later computer scientists such as Stephen Wolfram and myself have pointed out (see for instance my Lifebox tome, readable online), computations fall into roughly three classes, which we might term the Dull, the Gnarly, and the Pseudorandom—you can see these three modes from the top to bottom in the photo above.

Before the waterfall it’s Dull, in the waterfall it’s Gnarly, in the crash zone at the bottom it’s Pseudorandom.

Sorting it through, in the Dull, low-end category, nothing much is happening—you’re getting phenomena like the smooth laminar flow of a non-turbulent stream.

In the wild, high-end Pseudorandom, messy zone, you get patterns that are very hard to decipher. Computer scientists say pseudorandom rather than random because, if physics were in fact to be fully deterministic (as it actually may be, despite the smoke and mirrors of quantum mechanics), then nothing is “random” in the sense of “utterly arbitrary.” Everything emerges from a prior cause—only it’s (even in principle) impossible for our smallish minds ever to trace the full webs of natural cause and effect.

Computationally speaking, the in-between Gnarly zone is where the action is, as in the photo above. Living organisms or minds aren’t Dull computations, nor are they Pseudorandom. They’re Gnarly. That is, on the one hand, they’re somewhat orderly, allowing one to adapt to them. And, on the other hand, they’re not fubar, that is, f*cked-up-beyond-all-recognition.

Am I a stump amid the flow? Well, no, I am flow. Dull, gnarly, and pseudorandom, depending on my mood…

By the way, if you could see the air currents, they’d be equally fascinating—now and then, when it’s misty or foggy, you can in fact begin to appreciate the dancing vortices of the air. I wish I had some special glasses that would let me see the air.

That’s about enough for today, but I’ll throw in two more watery photos. First a shot I got of a “Weedy Seadragon” at the Monterey Aquarium on my birthday earlier this week. Gnarly, dude.

And in closing, an awe-inspiring and slightly scary picture of the vast sea and sky off Moss Landing. Come on in. The water’s fine.

Issue #11 of Flurb is out, guest-edited by the redoubtable Eileen Gunn, and with astonishing tales by twelve wonderful writers: Anders, Bef, Brown, Chimal, Minister Faust, Guffey, Kek-W, Lain, Rojo, Rucker, Swanwick, and What!

A first: three of our stories are from Mexico, and appear in both English and Spanish.

Enough talk! Go to flurb.rudyrucker.com and be among the first of the sixty or seventy thousand people who’ll be checking out our new issue over the coming six months!

When you’re done, come back here and post something encouraging in the comments. Our authors need your support.

One more thing—today’s my 65th birthday! I’m grateful, at my age, to still be a part of the literary scene. I’ll take the gold watch later.

Today’s long post consists mostly of excerpt from William Burroughs’s novel, The Western Lands, 1987, which is the final part of a trilogy, preceded by The Cities of the Red Night, 1981, and The Place of Dead Roads, 1984.

I realized that I hadn’t carefully read these three books—I’d read parts of them thirty years ago when they came out, but I’m not sure I ever read them through. So I decided to read The Western Lands fairly closely. I marked passages that seem in some way relevant to my current novel project, Turing & Burroughs, which will include a version of Burroughs as a character—Alan Turing’s lover.

Listen up with your fancy ear!

Some notes on the book’s contents.
(1) The “Western Lands” of the book’s title come from Egyptian mythology about the afterlife. Supposedly, beyond the Land of the Dead, lies a heavenly Elysium: the Western Lands.
(2) Burroughs often goes off on these great riffs like you’d find at the start of a story or novel—such as a detective story, or a science fiction tale, or an exotic adventure novel about explorers in the jungle. He slips smoothly into the genre conventions, but then begins warping them, and ultimately he drops the riff once he’s gotten all the juice from it that he wants. He just about never bothers to really wrap up a sequence or bring it to a full conclusion. I especially noticed a lot of great science-fiction twists.

(3) He has this wistful obsession with beautiful young boys—he’s always returning to them like a hungry man describing food, or a pauper describing treasure.
(4) Bill loves weapons and violence, but in a kind of twelve-year-old-boy way. His scenes of dismemberment and destruction are like scenes a schoolboy might draw on the flyleaf of his Algebra book. Schematic, energetic, more about the flow of action than about actual pain.
(5) He has great timing, and is often very funny.
(6) Much of the book mingles dreams and reminiscences—an old man is fingering the fabric of his life.

So here are some choice excerpts from The Western Lands. Page references are to the US Penguin paperback edition of 1988.

1. The old writer lived in a boxcar by the river. … Often in the morning he would lie in bed and watch grids of typewritten words in front of his eyes that moved and shifted as he tried to read the words, but he never could. He thought if he could just copy these words down, which were not his own words, he might be able to put together another book and then…yes, and then what?

7. Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast? If human and animal souls are seen as electromagnetic force fields, such fields could e totally disrupted by a nuclear explosion. The mummy’s nightmare: disintegration of souls, and this is precisely the ultrasecret and supersensitive function of the atom bomb: a Soul Killer, to alleviate an escalating soul glut.

23. Allerton was a thin, blond man with an air of arrested age. He seemed to float a few inches above the ground, wafted here and there, a specialized organism at once torpid and predatory.

27. …the same ancient guild—tinkers, smiths, masters of fire…Loki, Anubis and the Mayan God Kak U Pacat, He who works in fire. Masters of number and measurement…technicians. With the advent of modern technology, the guild gravitated toward physics, mathematics, computers, electronics and photography.

30. Joe the Dead belongs to a select breed of outlaws known as the NOs, natural outlaws dedicated to breaking the so-called natural laws of the universe foisted upon us by physicists, chemists, mathematicians, biologists, and, above all, the monumental fraud of cause and effect, to be replaced by the more pregnant concept of synchronicity.

42. Outside a Palm Beach bungalow waiting for a taxi to the airport. My mother’s kind, unhappy face, last time I ever saw her. Really a blessing. She had been ill for a long time. My father’s dead face in the crematorium. “Too late. Over from Cobblestone Gardens.”

46. A rule that is almost always valid: never refute or answer a critic, no matter how preposterous the criticism may be. Do not let the critic teach you the cloth, as they say in bullfighting circles. Never charge the cloth, even if the critic resorts to actual misquotation.

58. And you know the difference between the difference between the air before August 6, 1945 [the atomic bombing Hiroshima] and after that date: a certain security. No one is going to explode the atoms you are made of…with a little strength an skill one could outlive himself…but now…

59. Joe is tracking down the Venusian agents of a conspiracy… It is antimagical, authoritarian, dogmatic, the deadly enemy of those who are committed to the magical universe, spontaneous, unpredictable, alive. The universe they are imposing is controlled, predictable, dead.

60. Produce the first all-virus rat, it’s more efficient—instead of all these elaborate organs we have just cells, an undifferentiated structure … If he can become Death, he cannot die.

98. [In this scenario, some people worship these hideous huge man-eating centipedes that the call ‘pedes for short.] The spectators are completely naked, except for exquisite centipede necklaces … eyes dilated to shiny black mirrors reflecting a vile idiot hunger. “We feed with the ‘pede.” La jeunesse dorée of Pedeville, obviously.

100. In Picture Puzzle scripts, the glyphs are incorporated into the big picture: an eye, a phallus, water, birds, animals spell out the story. At first it’s just a picture with a special look, then glyphs swim out of clouds and water, pop out of swift lizards…

101. These were troubled times. There was war in the heavens, as the One God attempted to exterminate or neutralize the Many Gods and establish a seat of absolute power.

104. Neferti knows the arts of telepathic blocking and misdirection. You can’t make your mind a blank, for that would be detected at once. You must present a cover mind which the Pharaoh can tune into, and which is completely harmless: “For me the Pharaoh is a God.” You can’t lay it on too thick.

115. It started in the sensational press … “Ancient Egyptian Papyrus Demonstrates That Life After Death Is Within The Reach Of Everyman.” … soon the Papyrus starts unrolling very precise instructions fo reaching the Land of the Dead. The message falls on … the parched deserts of mid-America, dead hopeless wastes of despair, a glimmer of light and hope on a darkening earth.

119. [A young man makes an illegal deal with an old shopkeeper.] The old man’s face relaxes into contented depravity. “Of course one must always take the Big Picture…Yes, I have what you need.”

120. The road to the Western Lands is by definition the most dangerous road in the world, for it is a journey beyond Death, beyond the basic God standard of Fear and Danger. It is the most heavily guarded road in the world, for it gives access to the gift that supersedes all other gifts: Immortality. Every man starts the course. One in a million finishes.

132. Horus Neferti turned aside into a Jump Joint, where your dreams come true. Yeah, sometimes. They work like this: you got a scenario in your mind, usually made up of dreams. Sophisticated electronic equipment makes the dream solid. Or rather there are infinite nuances of solidity.

138. Film sequentially presented…now, imagine that you are dead and see your whole life spread out in a spatial panorama, a vast maze of rooms, streets, landscapes, not sequential but arranged in shifting associational patterns. Your attic room in St. Louis opens into a New York loft, from which you step into a Tangier street. Everyone you have ever known is there. This happens in dreams of course.

139. So I levitate fifty feet in the air just for jolly, wouldn’t you?

170. …the old sets are brittle, falling off the page, waves dash against sea walls, old photos curl and shred. The Veiled Prophet Parade [in St. Louis] floats in the hot summer night…yellow glow of lights, giant leaves, eating pink cake, the cardboard around the edges blowing away in the rising wind, piers crumbling into the sea’s waves, wrecked house, rain, gray sky.

175. There comes that moment in a blinding flash of bullshit when he suddenly sees everything, and the way it all fits together as part of the great whole. He is everything and everything is him, and there is no aloneness, no separation, just endless love. He knows all the questions and all the answers, and there is only one answer so he wrote “Nature Boy” and got cured [meaning got rich]: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn / Is just to love and be loved in return.”

177. Operation Clipper: Space sailcraft propelled by the blast that reduces planet Earth and its inhabitants to a smoldering cinder. It isn’t good PR, not good at all.

179. The house on Pershing Avenue [Burroughs’s boyhood home] is well back from the cobblestone street, worn smooth by centuries on the march. He finds his key. The lock turns. Inside he stumbles over a heap of toys…one Christmas after another in layers…a .30-.30 rifle at the top with a box of shells. A crust of broken ornaments crunches underfoot like snow.

186. [After a circus riot, a storm.] On this scene fell a sudden chill, as the temperature dropped fifteen degrees…freezing sweat, and the sky turned bright green around the rim and…the rubes fled the stricken field, screaming down the Midway as the hail pelted down big as hens’ eggs, knocking holes in the tents. The elephants trumpeted frantically, and then the sound: like a low-flying jet, as the boxcars were tossed about like matchboxes …with snakes and freaks and the great tents whipping into the sky…bleachers and seats and rifle ranges, Kewpie dolls and screaming railway cars, caught in a black whirlpool and pulled up into the sky.

188. [Boy explaining why he killed his friend with a shotgun.] …it was as if, just as I pulled the trigger, making absolutely sure the pellets wouldn’t hit Greg…something moved my arm…

200. (A leader advises his agents.) This future may not happen, if you all strike at the right time in the right places. So we have a human lifetime with a few moments of meaning and purpose scattered here and there… It is fleeting: if you see something beautiful, don’t cling to it… However obtained, the glimpses are rare, so how do we live through the dreary years of deadwood, lumbering our aging flesh from here to there? By knowing that you are my agent…

221. Since music is registered with the whole body it can serve as a means of communication between one organism and another. … Agent attends a concert and receives his instructions. Information and directives in and out through street singers, musical broadcasts, jukeboxes, records, high school bands…

231. [He describes a Valley with a priestly sect called the Corners because they eat a radioactive blue corn.] …at the age of puberty, the mark of the Corner can be perceived: a look of dreamy despair, the look of a hungry ghosts in time of famine, but a noble resignation that transcends the hunger.

234. [Great crank SF idea.] A photo has no light of its own, but it takes light to be seen. Every time anyone takes a picture, there is that much less light in circulation. Slowly at first, the gathering darkness on the margin of vision…the mutters of voices at the edge of hearing.

236. [Dream narrative] …a restaurant/hotel/station area, where one is always in doubt about this room reservation and rarely able to find his way back to his room if he leaves it in search of breakfast, which is always difficult to locate.

242. The visions, the glimpses of the Western Lands, exist in space, not time, a different medium and a different light, with no temporal coordinates or recurrences. The medium bears some relation to holograms.

245. [Recurrent dream] He…carried a huge covered basket. He was taking the basket somewhere, but he could not find the place to leave it. An din the dream tehre was a peculiar horror i wandering on and on through the crowd, and not knowing where to lay down the basket he had carried in his arms so long. … A child is dying in the basket. [Perhaps this is Bill’s son Billy.] And there is no help here…

251. [A man describes visiting an old writer like Burroughs.] I went to see Bill. He told me he’d found a cat… I heard a … mewling noise, but I couldn’t see anything . Then I realized Bill was making the sound without opening his lips … He opened a can of cat food, all the time making that sound … he gets down on all four and rubs himself against invisible legs, purring … Straightens up and put the plate of cat food on the floor. Next thing he gets down on all fours and eats it.

257. [A rain of old memories.] Back in the 1920s, looking for an apartment in the Village. I am wearing a cape and hold a [newly puchased antique] sword in my hand, a straight sword three feet long in a carved wooden sheath wih a brass clip.

257. A tree like black lace against a gray sky. A flash of joy.

258. [The last page.] The old writer couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words. … “Hurry up, please. It’s time.”

The writer Nisi Shawl emailed me today, asking for the best and worst writing advice I ever received, with an eye to using my answer in the Clarion West’s spring newsletter. Here’s what I said.

The Best Advice on writing I ever read — and I don’t remember who said it, perhaps it was John Varley — was something to the effect that: “If you get a completely crazy idea for a twist on a scene, an idea you don’t think you dare use…go with it!”

The Worst Advice, which came from any number of boilerplate how-to-write articles is this: “Don’t think of starting work on the novel until you have a complete and detailed outline, and then stick to the outline!”

Of course it’s useful to have an outline, but it’s folly to imagine you can really know how things are going to end up once you’re five or ten chapters in. I revise my outline constantly as I go along. As for sticking to an outline, see the Best Advice!

[I bought two big tubes of my fave oil-paint colors yesterday, Cadmium Red Deep, and Cadmium Yellow Deep. You’re looking at $100 of paint. Cadmium is expensive.]

I’m working on Turing & Burroughs, and it’s going well. I’m leading up to the big scene that I painted in “A Skugger’s Point Of View” last week.

I don’t want the cops to know that Alan is making a run for Los Alamos in hopes of getting hold of an H-bomb, so I took out an earlier passage where he tells his companions Judy and Ned what he’s up to. I’m kind of sorry to see this conversation go, as I thought it was funny. But I saved it into my “Notes for the Turing & Burroughs” document, and maybe I can use some of it later. For now, though, here it is.

[One can never match Edward Weston’s photos of calla lilies , but it’s fun to shoot them anyway.]

“Me, I’m hip to the master plan, too,” bragged Vassar. “I picked up on it when were doing skugger conjugation. Uhn, uhn, uhn. Alan wants to blow himself up with a hydrogen bomb from Los Alamos. Talk about your clear-channel radio! Shedding his light.”

“That’s something of a caricature,” said Alan with a sigh. “And I would request that everyone does their best to hide this kind information from anyone outside our circle.”

“An atomic bomb?” said Judy, laughing. She took this for a joke. “In Los Alamos? I’d love to tape the sounds.”

“And be sure to get Alan’s last words,” said Vassar. “Th-th-th-that’s all folks! Quaaaaaaak!”

“Don’t always be a dumb-ass,” said Ned. “This is real. An H-bomb’s flash could spray skug vibes into everyone in the country. We’d be home free after that.”

“You guys believe in the skugs that much?” said Judy, changing tack. “I keep thinking this is more like—I don’t know—a virus that I caught, and I’ll be well by the time I’m in California.”

Back in January 15, 2011, I signed fan Ron Corral’s Kindle because he had The Ware Tetralogy inside it! This was at an “SF in SF” event where I read from my forthcoming memoir, Nested Scrolls: A Writer’s Life.

The reliable Rick Kleffel made a nice podcast of both my reading, and an interview with me before my reading, he just posted the interview on his blog “The Agony Column.” You can also get to the podcast via , click the icon below.

Today’s big, late-breaking, news is that my former San Jose State University computer science student Harry Fu has gotten his three-dimensional Belousov-Zhabotinsky-scroll cellular automata (3D BZ CAs for short) working again. I posted about this a few years ago, but link-rot set in, and now it’s all good again.

Way to go, Harry. Nobody’s ever seen three-dimensional CAs before except on supercomputers or using special hardware, especially not 3D BZ CAs, and our man Fu has these mofos working as a Java applet running Open GL!!!

Note the spontaneously forming scrolls. The first 3D BZ CA picture shows a 3D version of the Hodgepodge Rule, and this one is the 3D Winfree Rule.

Gnarly much? Live mushrooms, vortices, jellyfish.

So how can you, too, run Fu’s applet? Go to Fu’s Welcome to CA 3D page for an overview.

And then proceed to o Fu’s CA3D download page, which walks you through three steps for your Mac or Windows machine.

(1) Make sure you have the latest and greatest version of Java, this would be version 6 today. Anyway, go and get the JRE (Runtime Environment) for your Mac or Windows system. You don't need the full developer’s kit, just the JRE. (2) Get JOGL (Java bindings for Open GL). (3) Run Fu’s application locally, as ca3D.jar or run it in your browser at Fu’s 3D CA Simulation page (Caveat, right now the online version runs in Internet Explorer 8 for me, and in Firefox 3.6, but not in the current Firefox 4 RC1 release, although this prob may go away in the final Firefox 4. Harry says it runs in Safari on the Mac as well.). And in any case, it runs locally from the jar file.

Geekin’ OUT! And lovin’ it. You realize, of course, that your brain is a 3D BZ CA?