Today I was out on a scuba dive. I was thinking about my novel after Bruegel. The big effect is being in hyperspace. Things look like the sponges, corals, invertebrates. I’ve often had this thought before. The book will be a “crossover” type SF book. Light on the tech, big on the wonder, plot, characterization. My role model is Being John Malkovich. The fourth dimension is the one big effect and things come off of that. Write in first person p.o.v. (to make it easy to write), have it be maybe a Silicon Valley middle-manager. Present tense? I’d like to do that for once. An average Joe. In fact call him Joe. He has some hackers working for him. He can almost understand them, now and then. “Can you explain chaos to me one more time?” He has a pointy-haired boss like Dilbert. Give the boss some bogus biz lingo: “walk the walk,” “the big cats are hunting,” etc. Of course some of the programmers view our hero as a pointy-haired boss himself. Call the main hacker Scot. Or no, call him Spazz.

Starts with a 4D Pac-Man game. VR 4D lets you get unstuck and then you start to do it yourself. Or no, don’t assume 4D or people are confused. Start with a special kind of 3D TV broadcasting.

He can’t decide whether to marry. His girlfriend is — artist? — business dynamo? He loses her to the Spazz the hacker! At first she’s disgusted by the hacker (cf. tidy Carole Fowler and my fellow math grad-student David Slater’s fingernails). Call her Carole. Or no, use Jena, it’s more modern. At the end Joe doesn’t get Jena back, instead he gets a new girl. In fact he gets Spazz-the-hacker’s girl, an Indian girl called Tulip.

Love Story 4D.

(Joe + Jena) & (Spazz + Tulip)

(Joe) & (Spazz + Jena + Tulip)

(Joe + Tulip) & (Spazz + Jena)

(Joe + Tulip) & (Spazz) & (Jena)

“Drunker than six Texans at a Cancún Hora Feliz.”

More thoughts about mainstream SF books: the book where the guy travels back in time to stop Reagan from being president. And there was a (non-H. G. Wells) Invisible Man. Nicolas Baker’s, The Fermata. Being John Malkovich. In each of these there’s a miraculous SF trick, but the trick has no impact or interaction with society at large. Society stays exactly the same. This is one reason why these books aren’t true SF. SF tends to show a “future society” in which the gimmicks do change things. In the non-SF “wonder books,” the gimmick is just that. A curio, a bauble.

June 22, 2000. Brussels, Hypercube on TV.

On TV is one of those European variety shows at a nightclub. A man juggles a ten-foot wireframe cube of chrome pipe. Twirling it, stepping in and out of it. Attacked by a hypercube onstage.

June 28, 2000. Joe’s view of Spazz. Joe’s Redemption.

Seeing a photo of an athlete smiling. Usually you tend to imitate a smile, to internalize it, to empathize. But in this picture, I felt there was no human personality behind it. Only a bundle of ganglia the size of a lemon. Like the bared teeth of a resting dog or horse. Or a cringing one — but no, not cringing, no emotion to relate to at all, like the arrangement of a plant’s petals. Joe Cube might view Spazz this way. In other words, this is a dumb guy’s view of a smart guy.

Think of Updike writing about Rabbit Angstrom. What would it be like to be stupid? Limited? Unimaginative?

I’d like Joe to get a redemption or “recovery” in the sense of opening up and being less self-centered. I don’t specifically want to have Joe have a substance-abuse problem and have an AA recovery, as I’d rather not have the so-often-treated-by-me addiction issue in the book. I want Joe to become less self-centered, less resentful.

Maybe the company he works for his called Kenco and his boss is Ken, maybe a Taiwanese dotcommer called Ken Wong.

June 30, 2000. Joe’s Astral Body.

The Dublin National Library was wonderful. Sitting there my thoughts turned to Joe Hyperspace or, as I now think I’ll call him, Joe Cube.

Suppose I made the book quite closely modeled on Flatland, to the point of starting it out on New Year’s Eve 2000. Use our trip to SF that night as a model? No, better to have Joe a total gull of the Y2K panic, staying home, a sucker, the pawn of every passing media fad.

At first I’d thought of calling the book Joe Hyperspace. But if it’s analogous to Flatland, the title Spaceland would make more sense.

The National Library’s reading room is a wonderful space, barrel-vaulted and the vault coffered, with the individual squares painted different shades of blue. I sit in this room thinking about hyperspace viewpoints. Outside of space, you could easily rotate and jump around. You could put your eye down next to anything. If you were slightly ana from space, you could see through things.

What “light” would you be seeing with? The ordinary light is limited to space, it doesn’t leak out into hyperspace. You would have to use some Higher-D light that the Spacelanders don’t even notice. Call it Higher Light or Subtle Light. Might occasionally a photon of Subtle Light be diffused at an angle to stay in Space, giving the effect of energy creation? But would the Subtle Light interact with ordinary Spaceland matter? Maybe we do need to assume some Spaceland hyperthickness. We could wrap the hyperthickness Flat Torus style so as not to have to deal with a hyperskin.

Joe learns to see with Subtle Light. He becomes able to see ana the Spaceland objects. This could work if he has a greater than normal Spaceland hyperthickness. There could be layered upon his physical body and astral body which projects ana into the fourth dimension. In the same location as his normal eye is a Subtle Eye that is able to see down, at a very flat angle, onto Spaceland, thus seeing the insides of things, and seeing through things. Joe sees surfaces, but he sees innards as well.

Joe learns to flip himself over after awhile, and to jump. Note that if he flips, the astral body is the one in our Space and the physical body is the one sticking ana into hyperspace. When flipped he might well look ethereal.

Chapters: Joe Meets Momo, Journey to Hyperspace, Joe’s Astral Body, He Flips, He Learns to Jump.

I might use the gimmick of presenting the book as a manuscript entrusted to me, and then I could have Notes and Drawings.

Joe’s favorite bands are Dokken and the Melvins.

July 5, 2000. The cliff at the end of Sheepshead peninsula.

Hiking today on Sheepshead peninsula, one of the fingers sticking out of the southwest of Ireland.

Looking at the section map. The peninsulas and islands. If land is a fractal, why not space?

I was sitting at the edge of a 500 foot sheer stone cliff carved out of the land by the beating surf, looking down at the seagulls gliding.

How a height like this always draws me forward, what a longing to die, the rapture of the fall. Sublimated into a deep desire to fly. But I wouldn’t fly, and oh how it would hurt to smash against that first jutting rock, and to tumble on down, breaking.

Could Joe Hyperspace survive if he jumped off a cliff? Just before the moment of impact, he could hyperjump and slide parallel to Spaceland. But what about the velocity? (a) He keeps the velocity when he leave Spaceland, so is moving rapidly parallel to it, which means he moves on through the Earth or (b) He loses all Spaceland velocity when exiting, it does a Reset. This is a better option. Could be justified by Mach’s principle whereby inertia is the effect of the total matter in Space, so if you leave space, you lose your inertia for that Space at least, so your velocity could go too. So, yes, if Joe leaves space he stops moving and then can pop back in with no velocity. Jump off the cliff, do a jiggly-doo right before impact and you’re the man.

July 8, 2000. The two plots.

Quote from paper, someone talking about Harry Potter: There are only two plots in literature: a person goes on a journey; a stranger comes to town.

I usually do the first, most of my books are about journeys. Spaceland will be too, but I could add an element of “stranger comes to town” by having Spazz the hacker not be there at the start. Joe laboriously hires him.

July 18, 2000. T-shirts.

Jim, a friend of Jon Pearce’s, tells me he’s been an engineer for 15 years and finally got a job in marketing instead. “I wanted to see what it was like to be the guy shitting on people. Giving the engineers T-shirts.” The odd thing, he reports, is that the engineers actually like getting the T-shirts.

August 8, 2000. Hypervision.

I read Clifford Pickover’s Surfing Through Hyperspace (see notes on the book below), and it got some thought going.

Say that I use the overbeings’ words for the two new directions: klup and dron.

Joe Cube is hyperthick. He can see inside of other things. For this to work, the other things have to be less thick than he so that he can see klup over their 3D surface.

The way this works is that stacked klup above his regular 3D eye are a series of extra eyes, each with its own 2D retina. Each of the retinas images a different 2D X-section of our space. Taken together the stack is a 3D retina. By proper lensing, the 3D retina forms a 3D copy of a real world object, inside and out. The front of a person appears in his regular retina, the slice beneath their skin upon the next retina klup, and so on. The fence on the first retina and what’s behind it on the retinas further klup.

Read that Sci Am article again. A problem: if Joe is thick in the klup/dron dimension, then his mass and weight will be much greater?

Let’s say regular things have NO hyperthickness at all.

August 25, 2000. Started Writing.

Yesterday I wrote the first page and today I’m writing some more. It’s going good, writing itself. I didn’t yet work out the “treatment” of the plot as much as I wanted to, but I needed to get started on it. I didn’t want the Fall semester to kick in without a live novel to be playing with. Something to love, something happy to think about. I love thinking about 4D vision.

September 12, 2000. Underway. Calvino quotes.

I feel like I’m well underway now. I have 15,000 words, maybe a sixth of the book. I emailed a note about it to my friend Don, and he was like “another book? Jeez.” I emailed him this:

“In any case [after the Software movie stress], went back to the basics, to what makes me happy: what I am is a novelist, in particular an SF writer. Not trying to knock it outta the park this time, just writing it, it's going real easy. Kind of a riff off Flatland, called Spaceland, set in Silicon Valley. Seeing your ‘another?’, Don, I thought of this phrase in Italo Calvino's If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. ‘She said that...she feels the need to see someone who makes books the way a pumpkin vine makes pumpkins --- that's how she put it...’ That's exactly the kind of writer I most enjoy being. Like Elmore Leonard or Phil Dick or even Updike, a book every year or two. Another pumpkin getting orange in the Fall sun. That's the ticket. Barry's that kind of painter, for that matter, growing them like a pumpkin vine grows pumpkins.”

I love, that, making books the way a pumpkin vine makes pumpkins. Another quote from If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler: “The novel I would most like to read at this moment...should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as of branches and leaves...” The desire to narrate, yes.

September 15, 2000. Four Chapters, and What Next?

Ok, now I have a shade over four chapters done. Joe won a million at blackjack in Vegas, saw Jena fucking Spazz, and has split up with her. The book’s a fourth done. What do I do now? I really can’t visualize Joe going on TV preaching about the fourth dimension.

What does Momo really want? That’s what I don’t know yet. Why would she want Joe to preach about the fourth dimension anyway. Why would she give a fuck. What would I want from Flatland, for instance? It’s similar to the issue of Om in Realware, what would she want with us? Or the aliens in Saucer Wisdom. It would be a nice change if Momo really did want something specific from Joe.

Another tack. What are the big scenes I still want to do? I read some of Gulliver’s Travels this summer. I liked the stuff about Gulliver being a pet at court in Brobdignag. I can see Joe being a pet in the land of the fourth dimension.

October 10, 2000. Coming Up with a Model. First Black Spot.

The last week or two I’ve been busting my head figuring out a good model for how it all works, the 4D vis-à-vis the 3D, the Kluppers vis-à-vis Spaceland, 4D vision, 4D mass and inertia, etc. I’ve been typing it all in, further down in the doc. This morning I even started doing some calculus, setting up a triple integral in spherical coordinates to try and evaluate the gravitational force felt by someone near an endless 4D hypersheet. Fun.

This weekend, I was talking to a guy in the Math department about my efforts, and he said something like, “Oh, fashioning a consistent model.” And I thought, yeah, that’s it, I need to get the full mental model so that everything fits. And it’s not something I can really do before I start to write, as before I start I don’t have the full set of requirements, and also I haven’t yet bruised myself enough on the hundred wrong ideas to be able to see what the remaining correct notion might be. Sometimes you never do get a consistent model and you push on anyway, as in the worst of SF movie scripts. But it’s hard to have the strength to continue without a clear picture in mind.

In any book any writer hits this stage, it isn’t really about the science alone. There ought to be a word for it. When you’ve hammered your cantilevered platform of sentences pretty far out off the edge of the cliff, and then you look down into the abyss and the timbers are creaking, and you’re madly scrambling around bracing and adjusting lest the whole thing tumble down into destruction.

I feel like it happens twice in each book. Somewhere Sheckley talked about hitting the “Black Spot” in your story. I think that’s a pretty good word for the first time, the Black Spot, because it’s about being confused.

Maybe the first time could be called the Alpha, and the second time could be the Beta — taking the expressions from Software Engineering, where the Alpha is when you get the first fully working prototype and then see what features you can add, and the Beta is when you have the final feature set and now try and make the thing bug-free.

November 17, 2000 Sketch at Los Perros Roasting

Imagine this from the viewpoint of Joe Cube, try and notice what he would, think what he would. Transreal ventriloquism.

Smiling woman, plump features, Uggs boots, running in place a little to make a point, light orange Polar fleece shirt, her partner also in Uggs, jeans, sweatshirt, looks like a good guy, chin weak enough so I don’t feel threatened. He makes a show of checking his watch when two of their friends come in, a small smile on his mouth then, always nice to get a smile from a face like that. Passing out, the woman in the orange Polar fleece glances at me, catches how hard I’m looking at her, and looks away, slightly disturbed.

Woman alone on a stool, blonde with a new model cell phone, large screen on it, gets no answer. Then later she’s hooked up, talking about the job openings at a new company. On and on about it. But then I turn and she actually isn’t on the phone, its just a monologue. Her partner wears a sweatshirt and running shorts, when they stand up she holds him an accordion file organizer filled with separate small folders.

Couple in identical blue and yellow biking jerseys, blue and yellow shoes, black spandex shorts, like they’re on a team, “Voler” is the log on their shirts. They’re talking to a table with three older guys, he’s nodding like he knows what’s going on, eyes calculating. Long straight nose, fine teeth, strong chin, I should have had the jaw surgery that my orthodontist wanted to do, a slant cut to slide my lower jaw forward so I’d look more ruling class. He has curly brown hair. A bit later he’s hit his stride, he’s holding forth, with the older guys listening to him. The girl silently gazing at him like a flower at the sun, now and then he says something to make the older guys laugh, then she ducks her head and looks openmouthed over at them, milking the moment.

A girl with a big slice-of-melon mouth, full-lipped, wearing a crop top that just shows a line of soft skin above her beltline, chatting up her rumpled boyfriend, the eternal come-on in her motions, the little adjustments of her head, the slight knee bends for emphasis. Oh, you little bud, in your tight pants, your ski-jump nose, your eyes bright and blank as buttons.

A dignified silver-haired guy in turtleneck and jeans, surely a CEO, I tried to imagine ever reaching that level of comfort in my own skin. I tried to image success. God know I had no role models in my own family. My father was practically a bum.

A nerd with pooched-out lips like Dilbert’s co-worker Wally. That blank, willfully self-involved look.

Everyone dressed the same way, everyone in sports gear, sweatshirts, jeans.

But wait, here was a hugely fat woman, long waterfall of hair, surprisingly easy in her own skin, but so not-Los-Perros. Back in Colorado there were a lot more fat people.

A man eating a pita and reading the paper, innocently and unconcernedly chewing. Comfort.

Man in checked shirt and jeans, heavy newspaper under his arm, disturbed over the rocking of his table, gets up and moves. Cell phone on his belt.

Woman with a set half-smile on her face, as if to say that she and the world were both nice.

Woman fresh from jogging, hair stringy, chewing on a long biscotti, licking her thin lips.

The crappy pictures on the wall, like UNESCO greeting cards.

Later in the day at the Borders coffee-shop. A Chinese woman talking really loud on her cell phone. Long straight black hair, very tidy, the words rapid. A bit harsh-sounding. Two tidy little boys, no three, one of them brings his fold-up Razor scooter into the shop. The father in jeans and sweatshirt, it’s all one big casual Friday on Sundays, everyone’s one chance a week to wear their casual clothes.

A regular-looking mother and kid, the kid with long slicked back blonde hair, chewing some enormous wad of gum, wearing a nylon tanktop. His mother short curly blonde hair and one of those forgettable middle-aged middle-American faces, plain as a piecrust.

December 2, 2000. In Café Puccini in North Beach.

Reading Caws and Casuistries by Anselm Hollow this afternoon. He’s good at stirring up the old “ontological wonder sickness.” (James’s or Russell’s phrase?) What is it like to be alive? How does time feel? What is a mind? The minds outside walking by, carried in bone crania atop the bodies with their beating biped legs.

I walked a lot today. Alone, S. off shopping, I wanted an empty day. The beautiful matter of the City. Some bare pipes in the Vesuvio Bar’s men’s’ room were particularly striking. I stopped in at Capps’ Bar on Green Street as well — I remember working on a manuscript there years ago, when I was drinking. It was Hollow Earth or maybe The Hacker and the Ants. Today I’ve had a few pages of Spaceland with me, working on it off and on. I’m lucky to always have a manuscript. Easier to work in coffee shops than in bars now, though. The drunks at Capps’ were telling jokes about priest playing golf. At least three jokes on this topic.

It would be nice to retire to SF soon. Would help to make more money off my books. It’s been a few years since I went back to that intractable old problem of trying to think of a big-selling concept. Maybe a new agent would have an idea. That guy Brockman. This isn’t a really pleasant thing to think about. The obvious idea: Fractal Reality. Been done so much, though. Let go. Let God.

I’m lonely.

December 3, 2000. Howl and a Sketch From Market Street.

We were in North Beach last week, and I was reading a book of reminiscences by Anselm Hollo. I bought it at City Lights. Anselm was talking about the first time he read Howl. And then I started thinking about Howl and my favorite line from Ginsberg’s Howl:

“and who therefore ran though the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash
of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the
vibrating plane.”

I’ve always loved this little list, making me-the-math/science-guy feel at home with Allen. Imagine my disappointment to see in his “final” 1986 version of Howl where it takes it all back and changes it to, *yawn*, “the ellipsis catalog a variable measure and the vibrating plane.” How English Department, how boring. He claims he meant “ellipsis” all along, just had used the wrong work all these years, e.g. in his 1956 City Lights original and again in his Collected Poems edition of 1984, both of which have the line the way I like. Only in the last senile “final” version does he ruin it for me. I’d always imagined the “meter” like a Robert Williams Scientology e-meter standing on little legs and holding out ‘trodes and with a face of a dial and needle.

I started trying to write a story based on this, centered on a street-scene I saw on Market Street. I don’t know if I’ll finish it. I was going to write it for a charity benefit anthology John Shirley’s involved with, something to make money for crack mothers. Here’s what I wrote. I kind of lost my momentum when I saw Allen’s 1986 version. But I could just forget that and do it anyway.

The Use of the Ellipse the Catalog the Meter & the Vibrating Plane

“Damn this is good crack. How come nobody ever writes about how good crack is?”

“You don’t smoke crack, old fool. That’s a gum-stimulator you’re holding, not a crack pipe.”

“I’m gonna tell you a crack story anyhow. Something that happened to me today, Sunday, December 3, in the year Y-fuckin’-2K. I’m sitting on a door-step next to a crackhead woman at the Powell and Market cable car stop. Me there in my Saks corduroys and my shiny leather jacket, waiting for the cable car. Gray-haired and wearing a beret. It’s a cold day and this stone door-step is the only spot with sun. I’m sitting there in the sun waiting for my wife to come out of Nordstrom’s so we can ride back to North Beach. A festive lark. We’re up in SF for the weekend.”

“Who cares?”

“Let me tell my story. You’ll care soon enough. There’s this hobbling alky guy talking to the crackhead woman, a guy who moves like a broken toy, maybe he has an artificial leg. He’s being real gentle with the crackhead woman. Commiserating with her. He’s like, ‘It’s Sunday, sweetheart. I know that’s hard to believe. I’ve lost a few days that way myself.’ There’s this admirable sense of warmth coming off him even though he’s a guy I’d skirt around on the sidewalk. He’s got this camaraderie going out to the woman. She’s a black woman, maybe thirty years old, sturdy-looking, maybe only a year or two into her addiction. I’m wishing she could detox and get in a program.”

“Were you using your gum-stimulator?”

“Naw, man, I was high on life. Taking things in. Experiencing the now. And standing right in front of me were two homeboys with low pants — they’re as low as I’ve ever seen. The waists are literally at their knees. They could shit or piss without taking those pants off. The legs are like eighteen inches long. It’s as if they were midgets. But they’re not midgets, they’re big strong guys. I’d almost like to ask them how the pants stay up; they have long coats and I can’t quite see if there’s suspenders as well as belts. But I’m not gonna say anything. This spot I’m sitting on could be viewed as their turf, and they’re being kind enough to ignore me. There’s a looped line of tourists waiting for their turn to get on the Powell-Hyde cable car, and then there’s the homies and then there’s the sunny stone stoop with me and the crackhead woman. I’m enjoying the sun. An old homeless woman is playing Christmas carols on a keyboard on her lap, though there’s no sound from the keyboard. Maybe it’s just a piece of cardboard to give her confidence. She’s singing the songs real loud and getting some money from the tourists. It’s peaceful there in the sun. I’m zoned out. My wife’s still not coming for awhile.”

“You’re high on life.”

“It’s the best, man. No rush to do anything. No need to score. A motion catches my eye and I see that one of the homeboys is manipulating a green nylon fanny pack that’s on the sidewalk. He’s moving it around with this short cane he’s got. A cane like to match the length of his pants, maybe two or three feet long. I don’t know how he got hold of the fanny pack. I assume it came off one of the tourists. The homies are like salmon fisherman standing by a salmon ladder, and this is a fish they’ve pulled out. The other fish aren’t noticing though, they’re calm as ever, inching forward in the line and getting on the street-cars. Evidently the green nylon fanny-pack fish has already been filleted, because the homie with the cane passes it over to the crackhead woman. She’s got nothing, so he’s giving her something. That flash of camaraderie again. The woman fumbles around the fanny-pack for awhile, getting it open, feeling inside it with her wooden fingers. I figure if there was anything valuable in there, the homie would have already gotten it. I don’t watch her opening it very closely. It’s just sad how wasted she is. For sure she’s forgotten about it being Sunday already. She’s losing days at a time, maybe even weeks.”

“Is anything gonna happen in this story?”

“Exactly now is when it gets surreal. I’m looking across the street at Nordstrom’s to see if my wife is coming, and then I hear this kind of xylophone chord next to me. And the crackhead woman is sitting up and she’s pulling all this stuff out of the fanny-pack. It’s like five circus clowns coming out of a suitcase. Big cartoony shapes with little arms and legs. There’s an ellipse, a catalog, a meter and a vibrating plane. Their like dancing ring-around-the-rosy in a circle around the crackhead woman. And her face is like suddenly suffused with health and joy.”

“How do you mean — an ellipse, a catalog, a meter and a vibrating plane?”

December 13, 2000. Trying to sell Spaceland.

Avon rejected SPACELAND! I can't believe it. The editor says the book is "too weird". Since when is that a problem? They did all the Wares, after all. Of course those were mostly bought before I got this new editor Diana Gill. She rejected SAUCER WISDOM and BRUEGEL too. The only thing of mine Diana ever bought was REALWARE, and I guess she sort of had to as it was in the series. But the sales of REALWARE haven’t been all that great. So I don’t think it would be wise to write another in the series anytime soon. If Avon didn’t buy a hypothetical fifth *WARE, as they very well might not the way things are going, then it would be pretty much impossible to sell elsewhere. Maybe in ten years the time will be ripe for another WARE.

Meanwhile there’s the matter of SPACELAND. Well, Susan Protter got in touch with David Hartwell at Tor, who’s still half-planning to make an offer on BRUEGEL, and Susan said he instantly “got” the idea of SPACELAND, and wanted to publish it right away, was sorry even that I’m not finished with it yet. So today I sent him a new version of the proposal along with chapters 1-8. Maybe he’ll make me a two-book offer. That would be pretty cool. The Tor books are nice-looking and they get distributed and reviewed. And David Hartwell is a pleasant guy to work with, a man my age, literary and knowledgeable.

I wonder how much of an advance I can get.

This comes back to the thing I focused on so much in BRUEGEL, that for most artists or writers, it’s a never-ending struggle to get their stuff marketed. Particularly if you’re somewhat innovative.

I recently got from Australian critic Damien Broderick a book called Transrealist Fiction which takes it’s title from my theorizing, and has its last chapter about me. The chapter also appeared as a long lead article in this month’s New York Review of Science Fiction. It’s nice to get so much attention, but I think it’s kind of a damning-with-faint-praise piece. I’m having to work to get through my reactions to it, to process it and get it out of my head. I think his reservations had to do with my — oh, occasional haste and sloppiness, limited range of emotions and topics, dirtiness, and unsettlingly writing about getting sober.

Well, I’m still growing. And I do think that when I’ve been dead for twenty years I’ll get some more respect.

December 15, 2000. Reading On the Road.

I keep thinking about On the Road, which I’m rereading this week. I got a copy at City Lights in SF last week. Oh, by the way, I finished that story called A Use for the Ellipse the Catalog the Meter & the Vibrating Plane yesterday, it was the first time I’ve just written for fun in such a long time. As opposed to grinding it out for the latest novel. Writing this story in an experimental, screwing-around, Sunday painter kind of vein. I sent it to this pro-bono charity-ball kind of anthology John Shirley’s involved with, I guess I mentioned it before, it’s called Desperation Street, the proceeds are to go to crack mothers. Anyway, the North Beach outing got me back into the Beats again, I guess. Thinking of Jack and Neal here alone in Tucson. This is a road trip modern style: you fly somewhere and rent a car. Not that you see all the good back road stuff, which is the real joy of a road trip.

Another thing that got me back to On the Road was having reread my own Secret of Life last week in a newly typed up version for an ebook from electricstory.com. I’d always fondly thought of Secret as my Road, though now, seeing them so contiguously, I really have to admit I don’t hold a candle to Jack. I did what I did, that’s enough, I don’t need to go and pretend I did more. My routine of comparing the cyberpunks to the Beats — what a crock. Not that I disdain Secret, it has some great SF transreal twist to it. (Although the constant drinking did start to grate this time around.) But the main thing I’m thinking is that Secret has nothing like the complexity of characterization in Road. As I writer I’m more inner-directed, more self-centered, less generous and less lyrical than Jack. The way he describes the weather and the sky and the sunsets! And, most specifically, I don’t have any character like Dean Moriarty that I delve into in such richness, and with whom “my” character has such a complex relationship.

So naturally my clever simian mind turns to thinking about how I might better ape the Master. Could I put a Dean Moriarty into Spaceland? Probably too late for that, though maybe something can be done with Wackle. A better move might be to really thicken and complexify Tulip. As a lifelong transrealist, I have this kind of blind spot about how to invent characters. It’s painfully slow, like growing a body in a vat or something. So much more work than simply collaging in a real person. And I tend to not feel confident that I can invent enough tics and tricks to match the texture of reality. But I need to remember that it really doesn’t take all that many actual words.

It’s like in a painting, if someone just draws a red line across the top of a green meadow patch, the eye reads it as a lovely scattering of poppies in bloom (I recently saw this particular trick in a somewhat cheeser gallery in Los Gatos). A beginning painter might think, “God, I can never paint all those individual flowers in that meadow, I can’t paint a blooming meadow at all.” But then a skilled and crafty cheeser just wipes some stripes and dibs some dabs and the eye is satisfied. By the same token, I tend to be afraid to try and create characters out of whole cloth because of the staggering complexity of growing the fully convoluted brain in the jar, but in fact all I need is like fifty (at most) catch phrases and tropes to make the person seem fully rounded. Dean’s “mad bony face.” His “Yes” and “yas.” Of course Dean was in fact collaged in, but one could, after all, invent such a character.

So, coming back to Tulip and, for that matter, Jena and Spazz and Joe, I should make up a list of like twenty things for each of them and keep using those things. To make them real. And I especially should do that for Bruegel and Williblad and Mayken and Ortelius when I go back to the rewrite. Assuming Hartwell buys it.

One of the good things about being alienated and alone in an anonymous hotel is that then I write in my journal. But that’s enuff for tonite.

Oh, one last thought about Road. What if I did an SF novel that set out from the start to be an homage to Road? That might be fun. It could be a picaresque galaxy-hopping kind of thing. One thing that makes Road so rich is the truly tragic quality of Dean, the fact that he really is losing his mind over the course of the book. The kind of desperate downward spiral. The itchy fascination, too, of matching the characters to the transreal biographical individuals — that’s one gimmick I picked up on for sure. But if I did my homage called, say, Galactic Kicks, this one would actually not be transreal, it would be a pure fabrication.