Further Upward Steps

There comes a certain point in one's life when one begins to wonder if Lovecraft's fiction isn't really all about a fear of genitals. At this point one can flee the field or one can confront The Great Old Ones face-to-face, as it were.

In addition to Lovecraft this was influenced by Escher and the unspeakable six-ought Rapidograph point. The original was about twenty inches across as I recall.

Care for another cigar, Dr. Freud?

This is a Cthonian, out of Brian Lumley's Cement Surroundings and The Burrowers Beneath. Honestly, I should be ashamed of myself.

Well, there have been a couple of notable events in the last couple of days. I'm gonna be in my first gallery show! It's going to be at the Gualala Arts Center from March 14 to April 6. It's a group show of large prints coming out of Berkeley Community College. If you're a constant reader you may recognize the image they chose -- here it is. Gonna drop a fortune and print it up at three by four feet on canvas. It's interesting -- a lot of the participants in the show are instructors here at school.

Man, Gualala. They got rich folks there. I hear you can get superpowers if enough rich folks see your art. I'm trying to figure out how to make my work appealing to rich folks and I'm currently torn between pheromones from apes in oestrus and some of the musk from behind Alan Greenspan's ears. Decisions, decisions.

And I am now convinced that I'm gonna be in a book. Here's the home page. And here's the author page. Look at that! My name on the same page as Joe R. Lansdale's. Dang. And the title has been changed to Ligature Marks, which I think is a real improvement. Now I need to put a link to my blog from my original site.

This all seems so weird. After being a self-identified loser for my whole damned life all of a sudden things like this are happening. It makes me nervous -- but I think I can live with a little nervousness.

Science and Science Fiction

One of the very first images I processed on a computer -- I don't have any of the color prints I did back then and was very surprised to turn this up. Maybe I should give it a lick of color, just for shits and giggles. I blame this one on Stephan Tall's Mushroom Planet.

Over at Biology In Science Fiction there's been an interesting post made. Peggy and her associate Stephanie Zvan are interested in the relationship between science and science fiction and have posted a number of questions they'd like to ask both science bloggers and science fiction writers.

Here are my answers to the questions directed at SF writers.

Why are you writing science fiction in particular? What does the science add?

I write and I have a strong interest in the sciences and I've read science fiction all my life. Given this, what else can you expect from me? That ain't all to it, though. Science fiction allows us to bring the weight of real knowledge to bear on the human condition. Took me a good twenty minutes to get around to admitting that... Sounds pretentious as hell, doesn't it? But it's true. Most fiction springs from situations that are entirely human -- SF is a wonderful way to deal with the fact that humans are a singular phenomenon in a much wider universe. And the more science we've got, the more it affects the human condition.

And at the end of the day there are some speculative questions that are just plain interesting -- my most recent SF piece deals with the idea that humans aren't made for rational thought -- and that if given access to hardcore rationality they might not reach the decisions that are healthiest. That kind of "Huh, what if?" thought process is really important to me.

Most of what I write is surreal/horror/fantasy stuff -- but scientific thought informs that as well. In the fantasy novel that I'm currently working on, everything from alternative evolution to the idea of limited resources has influenced what I've written.

Science can add a lot to a lot of different kinds of fiction, not just SF. Look at Robertson Davies's portrait of a scientist studying stool samples in The Rebel Angels for a real eye-opener. Rationality itself is a drastically underutilized subject for fiction.

What is your relationship to science? Have you studied or worked in it, or do you just find it cool? Do you have a favorite field?

You're just trying to hurt my feelings with this one, aren't you?

Okay, until I was in my twenties my family assumed I'd be going into the sciences. I had a subscription to Scientific American all through elementary school. (Which was ridiculous because back then Scientific American was some kind of ritualized jargon-based pissing contest... but I did get the Dinosaur Renaissance issue when I was in the fourth grade.) I received a Bank of America scholarship for the laboratory sciences when I left high school. I entered college as a double major in Earth Sciences and Biology with an intention of doing paleontology as a grad student. Unfortunately, crazy intervened and left me to spend my early twenties as a saucer-haunted janitor.

I know enough to be able to get myself into trouble. I come off as knowing more than I actually do. I can talk to scientists -- and I can get way, way over my head. (As an aside, I thought creative writing and art classes were stocked with weirdos until I took some science classes intended for non-science students...)

While I try and keep an eye on things in general, I do have a strong bias for paleontology and evolutionary science. And if I am fortunate enough to be able to make a living with my writing and art, I'd like to stay in school and give the sciences another serious shot. I may never do real research but I do want to be able to write popular science works at some point in my life -- we need to improve the level of scientific knowledge in the general population and this is the only way I can contribute to that.

How important is it to you that the science be right? What kind of resources do you use for accuracy?

This is a question that I'd answer very differently on a case-by-case basis. In the end I owe my loyalty to the story -- but I've got a whole mess of scrapped fiction where an inability to make the science work with the fiction led me to abandon a piece.

Most science fiction is, from my limited and biased perspective, fantasy with chrome. Then comes a particular type of speculation that uses logic problems as a basis for fiction -- I, Robot, anyone? There is the use of scientific jargon as word jazz -- and this at its finest requires scientific knowledge to execute and appreciate. Think Charlie Stross or Bruce Sterling. Then there are those rare jewels, really scientific pieces of fiction. All of these require different degrees of accuracy to work as fiction.

But in the end, my feeling is the more accurate the better. Given two stories of comparable literary value I will strongly prefer one over the other if it has accurate scientific content.

I use a wide variety of resources ranging from a personal library to the internet -- and no matter what I do I'll always feel guilty for not having done more research. What's really thrilling is that scientists are frequently very generous with their time and advice -- and you can track them down on the internet. When I was working on a film script set in the Jurassic I received a great deal of advice from working paleontologists -- and it was great to see them argue with one another over such issues as whether cabeza de sauropod was a good taco filling.

Are there any specific science or science fiction blogs you would recommend to interested readers or writers?

I'd suggest looking around for blogs inside your field of interest. And if you go to my profile you'll find a bunch of the sites that I frequent. But right off the top of my head, Tetrapod Zoology is a favorite -- give me the monsters! And if you dig a good smackdown, Pharyngula smites the non-heathen hip and thigh. I don't know -- there are tons of them and more coming every day and I've had to stop looking at a bunch of sites I really approve of. So if you want my opinion, the sites I've got listed on my profile are my daily staples -- and I'm scared of getting any more.

From The Valley Of Lost Projects: Cyberskunk!

So I was attending Laney college in the mid/late eighties when I ran across a fellow named Angel who wanted to do a comic book. He'd gotten a lot further down this road than I had, to the point of having been to conventions and so on, and he had an idea. A funny animal cyberpunk comic called Cyberskunk. (His name's Cyril -- get it?) It's important to remember that at this time there was no internet and funny animals had not yet been smeared with semen. Angel had the basic ideas, I came in and did some designs and made some writing suggestions...

This is all that remains. A bunch of designs were done, some layouts, some scripting -- we had no idea how to approach a large creative project and this was one that was eventually going to need some kind of financing to get off the ground.

I really want to do comics and it seems as if the better I am at writing and drawing the further away I get from cartooning. This is as close as I've come... I want to address this situation over the summer.

There were a lot more hippy designs than this. 's funny -- the big conflict was greasers vs. hippies and not a punk in sight.

I think I like this guy's boots more than anything else in the whole shebang.

Memed!

Here's something I was doing ten years ago...

So I've been paddling in the slough of despond for a few days now -- a week, actually, now that I think about it. Thankfully not the "I've got to tear a hole in my skin so I can crawl out of it" kind of depression but the more sedate and genteel "I've been walking between the TV and the fridge for more than an hour; I seem unlikely to make any decisions in the near future" kind.

No writing or drawing or school or basically anything worthwhile has been done in a week; enough of this nonsense. Glendon Mellow has hit me with my first meme. (A troll, a meme -- internet, I have arrived!) Now I have no idea what this crazy gadget is supposed to do -- I suppose the only thing is work my way through it one step at a time.

It's called the Five Things meme.

Five Things I was doing Ten Years Ago

1) I was working in a book warehouse as a box lugger. The hardest part of the job was staying away from the vast areas where poorly-selling titles were shelved -- that's where the art books were and after I found stuff like Thirty-Six Ghosts and One Hundred Views of the Moon, both by Yoshitoshi and both in the hundred dollar range I realized I lacked both the sense and will necessary to resist such temptations.

2) I was playing a lot of music, bass and vocals and songwriting and even accordion, once. Band practice four days a week, including two full days. We were in the process of recording the tragically-prophetic album They Used To Be Really Cool.

3) I was getting wasted. Really wasted. A lot. See the above.

4) I was with the woman I'm with today -- and I had been for about ten years. At that point we'd made the transition from "What the hell am I doing here" to "Seems to be working well -- good thing we stuck with it."

5) I was just starting to draw dinosaurs and had no ideas of putting them in front of the public.

Five Things on my To-Do List Today (This is not the day I want to answer that question -- I am dealing with extraordinarily low levels of ambition at this point.)

1) Take a hike and have lunch with my dad. Done -- we went to Sunol, then Mr. T's burgers in Martinez. Poor ol' Dad is looking for a good chili dog platter and is having no luck...

2) Get caught up on my internets, including posting and emails.

3) Stay awake until bedtime and then go to sleep. More challenging than it sounds.

4) Work on the climactic fight scene for the novel. This is one of the reasons I stepped on my dick; my climax didn't work. It made sense, it brought many of the themes of the work to a climax, it was soft and dull and I failed to bring the thunder. Now I gotta find me some thunder. Then I gotta bring it.

5) Eat some fruit. Like I said, it's a low-ambition day so it's a good thing those tangerines are seedless.

Five Snacks I Love (This is just crazy. I'm all about meals -- I know nothing of these things you call snacks. That said...)

1) Booze.

2) Congealed animal fat stripped off the carcass in the fridge, dipped in the jellied juices at the bottom of the pan, possibly sprinkled with salt.

3) A spoonful of the missus's dried coconut milk eaten straight from the container.

4) Pretentious flavored chips -- the cheesier, the better. Bonus points for scary tropical roots that are toxic in their natural state.

5) Toast. Buttered toast, nut-brown.

Five Things I would do if I were a Millionaire. (I believe the term 'millionaire' to be antiquated. It summons up an image of unimaginable wealth and luxury -- while the possession of a million dollars will get you a nice double-wide these days.)

1) Periodically have my hair cut by a pleasant female person rather than doing it myself with the dog buzzers. I like a little grooming every so often.

2) Let's get to some charity stuff here -- Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, CBLDF, etc. All the usual suspects for a lazy leftie such as myself.

3) Health Insurance. I've got a lump in my neck the size of a hockey puck and the last time I poked it, it bit me. Definately health insurance.

4) Have the stairs to my studio moved outside. That would give me a big chunk of floor space but most importantly it would let me come and go without worrying about the missus's students and clients. I'd get in hours more worktime every week. As it is, her workspace is downstairs from my workspace so my access is hampered.

5) Start a more serious exercise program, preferably one involving some kind of martial arts. A vigorous shellacking would do me a world of good.

Five Places I've Lived. (Hmmm. I don't even know if I've got that many.)

1) Richmond, California. Some towns you move away from -- this one you escape.

2) Santa Cruz, California. No doubt it is a lovely place to be a member of the privileged classes. I was a janitor.

3) Sonoma, California. I miss the downtown -- the sausage shop, the cheese factory, the French bakery...

4) Oakland, California. We were the classic bad neighbors, Jesus we were awful. Agent Orange and Flipper at top volume to start off a Sunday morning cleanup? Drunken brawling at all hours? The Wall of Kids? Bad booze is bad news, my friends, and these were the days of St. Ides and Olde English.

5) Berkeley, California, where I've been residing for nearly twenty years. (Whew! Just made it!)

Five Jobs I've Had

1) Day-care center worker and janitor.

2) Janitor at a fashion department store.

3) Under-the-counter laborer for a landscape architecture project.

4) Office worker for Holden-Day, the first company to publish Carl Sagan. Man, that's a story -- only office job in the world where you had to worry about getting chickenshit in the files. Since I was the only one in the office who didn't have a thick accent I was put on the phones when our entire accounts receivable was handed over to a collection agency...

5) Script writer for Mondo Media. Best job ever, aside from the sick guilt and karma and the grodious corporate hack thing. On one hand I was paid fifty dollars an hour to fail to laugh at comedians, on the other hand I was hired for one show only to find months later that the previous staff had been fired after they'd won an award and the boss got scared that they might ask for raises -- so in the interests of damage control he let them go before they found out about the award. Not to mention the whole "reviewing movies before they've been made" thing -- which, honestly, worked fine. The reviews were every bit as accurate as those made by people claiming to have seen the films in question. (Which is as good a way of summing up the state of the art in cinema as I know.) Before that job I was a guy who looked like a writer; after that job I was a guy who could claim to be a writer. I got, by my pathetic standards, good money to train on the job. I need more work like this.

Five People I'll Tag -- no way. I don't know anything about how this stuff works. I've seen enough movies to know that tagging people can lead to plot development and I want no part of it. First I tag someone, next thing you know it's all microchips and bikinis and Yakuza and car chases and I don't even drive.
No thank you.

It's Like Someone Dialed the Gravity Back to its Proper Setting

After I voted yesterday I colored four prints. I had to get my number assignment printed and I wanted enough material ready to go to make the trip to the print lab worthwhile.

I've adopted a coloring procedure that surely marks me as a hack. There's a function in Illustrator that will take an initial color and generate a whole slew of pallets from it.

I'll use that to get an initial collection of colors and then when I've used them in the print, I'll use Photoshop adjustment layers to adjust the colors until I've got something I like. Of course I'll make changes based on what my eye tells me -- the sky in the above image is an example. I didn't like any of the pre-generated colors for the sky so I lightened and warmed it.

For some of these images flat color seems appropriate, for others toned color seems best. At first I thought it would depend on the coarseness of the dithering but that ain't the case -- each image seems to have its own opinion.

Here are some random thoughts from last night:

Up until Obama was declared President, I was expecting him to lose simply because I wanted him to win so badly. Same reason The Tick went off the air.

But he won! I bet this is how it felt for the Munchkins when the house landed on the witch. I am so fucking relieved.

Huh. I kinda assumed that if McCain lost he'd just burst into a thousand pieces like Rumplestiltskin at the end of the story. This speech ain't bad. He's got a good speechwriter who understood that Junior High students will be reading about this in Civics. He's hitting some points that surprise me -- this ain't bad at all. Of course I'm still damned glad he lost.

Funny how Obama's speech isn't as thrilling. I guess that's because I expect him to say the right thing, unlike McCain. That's why I liked that speech -- shock value.

Proposition Eight passed? I haven't been this ashamed of my state since the time they voted a killer cyborg from the future into the Governer's office twice -- and even he's against Prop Eight... Jesus, that's awful.

Cool. We're getting the kind of solid majority in the Senate that needs to cooperate with the Republicans to pass stuff. That's actually pretty perfect.

Huh. I'm already starting to think of mocking points for Obama -- a voice in my ear just whispered he looks like Spock and he's got the body language of a game show host. I am so going to hell.

Thank you, America. You didn't screw it up this time.

Predictably...

Looking down at my ballot I almost lost it for a second -- I really, really wanted to vote for Cynthia McKinney on the G. Harrold Carswell principal -- there are a lot of crazy people in the US and don't they deserve representation?

But I voted the Obama/Biden ticket. The only frivolous vote I cast was for a local fellow named Igor Tregub. A little post-ballot research revealed a worthy candidate, thank goodness.

But he got my vote because, well, you know.

Frankenstein.

Why I Oppose Proposition Eight

These were done for the missus's business card back when she was the one trying to make it as an artist. They're based on two of her porcelain sculptures.

Last night I saw that Rory Harper of Eat Our Brains had posted a link to this video of San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders. I immediately sent Mayor Sanders an email of support and I'm posting this essay in order to affirm my solidarity with his position.

If I had my way there would be no laws at all regarding marriage. It is usually a religious ceremony and as such the principle of separation of church and state seems to cover the matter...

But since there is special legal treatment of married couples, it's only right to make legal marriage available to anyone. Here's an essay I wrote a couple of years back that should make my feelings clear.

Book People was losing money, and it didn’t look like that was going to change any time soon. That was the basis for my position. Book People was a book distributing company that had an unusual structure. It was an employee-owned corporation, which was different than a co-op. The employees were also stockholders, so if the company turned a profit, we all got dividends. Rather than having corporate decisions made by the company as a whole, we elected a board of directors.

Book People had originally acted as a liaison between the small press and independent booksellers. During its glory days, the salaries that people were paid were insignificant next to the yearly dividends. I had heard stories of people taking their dividend checks and buying cars, cash, or making the down payment on a house. Those days ended shortly before I started working there.

The book industry was changing. The mom and pop booksellers had to compete with big chain bookstores, and they weren’t doing well. As a result, we were doing a lot more business with businesses like Borders and Barnes & Noble. At first this was heralded as Our Next Big Break, but it soon became obvious that things didn’t work like that. We were acting as an interface between companies that were in a position to dictate terms to us, and now we our profits were whatever was left over after the big boys took their bite. I hadn’t seen a dividend in the four years I’d been working there, and there had been a freeze on raises for the last year.

So when the question of whether or not to extend health insurance benefits to unmarried partners of employees was brought up, the answer seemed pretty clear-cut to me. We weren’t making money, and all of a sudden a very large expense is being proposed, an expense that has nothing to do with the business itself. It was just more money being spent. It just didn’t make sense.

I thought that was the only factor affecting my opinion on the situation. That wasn’t true; I hadn’t examined myself and the question thoroughly enough to really understand it.
Part of my position was due to the fact that I hadn’t really made use of our insurance program. We had full dental and full optical, and I never made use of either. At that time, my only major health crises had been mental, so I didn’t know how important it was to be able to deal with a health issue without having financial issues come into play. It was all abstract to me, except for the drain on the company’s cash.

I wasn’t as bad as some people were. At least my concern was for the company’s well being. I knew a few people whose position was based on selfishness and resentment.
“I don’t wear glasses,” Gary the Receiver said. “Why should I have to pay for your glasses? Hell, I don’t have kids. Ron’s kid broke his arm, and I had to help pay for the cast. Why doesn’t he have to take responsibility for his decision to have the kid? What makes it my problem?” He stamped the packing slip for the shipment he was processing and counted the boxes, pointing with his finger and moving his lips, then wrote down the number on the slip.

“You’re looking at it wrong,” I said. “You aren’t paying for a pair of glasses, or a kid getting a cast put on his arm. What you’re paying for is a quality of life. I mean, if you’ve got to see benefits from your perspective, you want people driving forklifts with glasses they’ve been wearing for five years because they don’t want to pay for new ones? You want to have to listen to Ron complaining if in addition to worrying about his kid he’s also blown a few thousand dollars on doctor’s bills? And what if something happens to you? You want us to walk around talking about how much you cost?”

“Whatever,” Gary said. (Of course, he got his. Kidney damage brought on by overconsumption of liquor store vitamin pills. Two weeks in the hospital. And I got to hear Dave from Returns asking why we were paying money because Gary was a drunk and an idiot…)

“What I’m saying is, you aren’t paying for any specific item. You’re paying it so that you can live in a society where you and everybody around you is taken care of. Basic compassion, dude.”

“Whatever,” Gary said.

Looking back on it, I don’t really understand how I could have failed to apply that argument to the issue of partner support. For that matter, if I was so concerned about expenses, why wasn’t I trying to have health benefits cut? There was an inconsistency in my position.

But the last big influence on my position was ignorance. I didn’t understand what the “unmarried partners” thing meant. There was part of the situation that I didn’t see at all. And I still feel guilty, because I should have seen it.

Book People culture was to a considerable degree lunchcentric. It had been decided a long time ago that it made more sense to hire a cook and have lunches prepared every day than it was to have people going out for lunch, skipping meals, having to spend time at home making lunch – this was our lunch money, and this was how we chose to spend it. There were a lot of divisions inside the company; the offices vs. the warehouse, returns vs. the order department, and so on and so on. The lunchroom was a place where those barriers broke down. There were the people you worked with, and there were the people you ate with.

I have to wonder why Wendy decided to sit at my table. I call it “my table” because, well, I’m a bit of a loudmouth and a semi-high dominance individual, and if you ate lunch with me, the conversation was going to tend towards the weird and the loud. In fact, we were described by others as ‘the loud table.’ Not everyone is going to appreciate a mealtime discussion of the reproductive habits of the Guinea Worm, or why the Schwarzenegger Conan bore no resemblance to the real thing as written by Robert E. Howard and no one else.

Wendy was a soft-spoken woman, one of those people whose gentleness forms an element of charm. If you were really sick, you’d feel better if she was in the room. Usually, I feel a little uncomfortable around those types. I have to hold back, soften myself. I’m always afraid that something grossly offensive is going to slip out of me.

Wendy seemed perfectly comfortable with the tone of conversation we had going, and when her devotion to decency was brought into the mix, it didn’t dampen things. She was able to check my tendency to hypothetically slaughter vast numbers of people without being a drag. It was nice to have her with us. These days, niceness is seriously underrated. It’s associated with wimposity. I disagree. In this world, being nice takes strength. I may not be nice myself, but I am militantly pro-nice.

Wendy was a mother, and was raising her daughter along with the two children of her unmarried domestic partner. Her unmarried domestic partner was a woman, and this was where I had failed to understand the hidden meaning behind the phrase ‘unmarried domestic partner’.

The insurance question was going to be decided by the Board of Directors, but before that happened, there was to be a company wide meeting so that everybody could have a chance to make their opinion known. Towards the end of the meeting, I raised my hand and made my point. We’re in debt, this will cost money, end of argument.

And then Wendy spoke. “There are people in this room who are in gay or lesbian relationships,” she said. “We aren’t allowed to be married in the eyes of the state. Our relationships,” and here I could here her voice crack, the way it does when your throat aches from tears that you’re holding back, “our love, isn’t recognized. It’s as though it doesn’t exist.

“Book People prides itself on being a community that accepts people as people, that treats all people equally. If Charise and I could get married, we would, and Book People would give Charise coverage. By denying the partners of gay employees coverage, Book People is supporting the way the state treats us. It’s a way of saying that we don’t matter.

“I just don’t think that’s right.” And then she sat down.
I raised my hand. “I withdraw my opinion. I was wrong. I agree with Wendy.”

After the meeting, I went to apologize to Wendy. “I feel like a complete ass,” I said. “I still think that we can’t afford it, but if Book People can’t afford to do what’s right, then maybe we should go under.”

Wendy seemed angry. I couldn’t tell if she was mad at me, or at the whole situation. “Thank you for saying sorry,” she said. “It’s just so… I thought that Book People was supposed to be a place for people who were more,” and she waved her hands. “You know. Conscious of things.”

It wasn’t the logic of what Wendy said that changed my opinion. I agree with the logic, and I’d like to think that it would have been enough to make me change my mind. But it was the sound of her voice that got to me, the way it made me feel that this wasn’t a matter of dollars and cents. It made me think about all of the people who felt that kind of pain, and it made it intolerable for me to think of myself as someone who would support the conditions that led to that pain. The logic worked for me; Wendy’s argument made sense. But in the end I was swayed because I felt that her love mattered.