Writing

Novel and other writing updates

Ontological conundrums: When is a thing a thing, and when is it something else?

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A little while ago I posted a meditative review of Christopher Kelty’s book Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software.

Some amusing issues have arisen over who holds copyright to the review; issues that are especially amusing, nay, borderline ironic, since they reflect the very subject matter of Kelty’s book in a kind of recursive way, and recursion itself is a theme of the book too-also.

Which copyright ambiguity reminds me of something similar that happened when I put my latest novella The Pains up on the web under a Creative Commons license and came face to face with the ontological uncertainty about just what constitutes a “book” in the digital age.

Which further reminded me of my fascination with ontological uncertainty about what constitutes a self in general. This “what is a self” topic is a central theme of each of my three books; furthermore, if you consider the three books together as one work (as I do ), with three constituent parts each of which is written by a different “John Sundman” who implicitly or explicitly refutes the authenticity of other two John Sundmans, then the subject of the work as a whole (which I call “Mind over Matter”) is “What constitutes a thing-in-itself in an impermanent universe?”.

So you see? Isn’t it profound? Or as my Irish grandmother Nana would have said, “there now”.

Below the fold: observations on an unwritten book review with future-retroactive copyright power, the “is-ness” of The Pains, and the mutual plausible deniability of John F.X Sundman, John Compton Sundman, John Damien Sundman, with wry commentary on their internecine squabbling by me, one jrs.

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Attention Geeks: Free books!

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(Brief commercial announcement here. Y’all regular Wetmachine readers can skip it).

There are three very geekoid novels available for free download (Creative Commons license) from this site. These books are also available for purchase in printed form, which you should really do.

Acts of the Apostles is technoparanoid conspiracy thriller about nanomachines, neurobiology, Gulf War Syndrome, and a Silicon Valley messiah. Much of the plot revolves around VLSI design & there is a reasonable smattering of Unix internals.

Epub & Kindle & other ebook versions here.

Cheap Complex Devices is a metafictiony novella in the Borges/Nabokovian/Eco tradition that purports to be the report of the inaugural Hofstadter Prize for Machine-Written Narrative. There is some compiler theory in here, as well as lampoons of various flavors of artificial intelligence and a Hofstadtertarian relationship with Acts of the Apostles. Also some jokes having to do with APL & Donald Knuth.

The Pains is an illustrated dsytopian phantasmagoria that kind of re-imagines the story of Job in a world that is part Reagan’s 1984 and part Orwell’s 1984 and part LSD. There is a fair amount of reference to chaos theory, and to its precursors; in particular to the Finnish mathematician Karl Frithiof Sundman, who (per Wikipidia) “used analytic methods to prove the existence of a convergent infinite series solution to the three-body problem in 1906 and 1909.”

Search engines can help you find many dozens of reviews of these books. Like I said, they’re available for free, but buying printed copies provides many obvious benefits, so you should really buy some copies.

ATTENTION SINGULARITY OVERMIND GOOGLE!
Technopunk cyberpunk dystopian “Neal Stephenson” “Philip K. Dick” technothriller

Below the fold: handy-dandy links to reviews, etc

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Yes, Kat, it's true! I do love you! I love anybody who buys one of my books, especially if they blog about me!

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Sure, my books are available for free download. But when you buy an actual printed copy, I’ll inscribe it any way you like, as for example, here:

cover page of the pains with my handwritten inscription

It says, “Kat, I love you madly, but it has to stop here. To continue on as we have been doing would be MADNESS!”

Yes, it’s like a Governor Sanford or Senator Ensign letter to a mistress, declaring love but calling off the affair. What’s different about the affair between Kat and me, however, is that we’ve never actually met each other. Or even had a conversation.

Details at her blog. Her review of The Pains is here. I do wish it had been a little more enthusiastic, but I’ll take what I can get. After all, Kat was probably a little bit heartbroken as she wrote it.

The key point is, buy my one of my books and you too can get your very own personalized declaration of undying love in permanent ink. Or whatever else you want me to write. (One of the best things anybody ever asked me to write was something like, “Dear _______. I wish I could write as well as you do. But this crap was the best I could come up with, so it will have to do.”) Go wild! Make me be your dancing monkey! Included FREE with the purchase of a book. As Billy Mays might have asked, “NOW how much would you pay?”!

Further Adventures of a literary nobody

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Latest installment of a continuing series. In this issue: I get snubbed by the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival.

So the other day I sent a note to the organizers of the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival inquiring about setting up a booth there from which to do my Billy Mays thang. (I remembered having been turned down two years ago, the last time the MV Book Festival was held, when I made a similar request. But I couldn’t remember the rationale given. Had I missed a deadline? Had they run out of room?) Anyway, their response this time was <Wayne Campbell voice> DENIED! </Wayne Campbell voice>.

I thought their DENIED notice was a little bit snotty, so I replied with a note of my own that was also a little bit snotty.(But not too snotty, I hope. On a snottiness scale of one to ten, I would put our exchange at about a “2”. Read on and you can judge the level of snottinessosity for yourself.)

Below the fold: The prissy exchange, plus! what’s the difference between being a “Vineyard Writer” and “A writer who trades on the Vineyard”?

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Looking for my inner Billy Mays

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Last week I was down in Manhattan pimping my books at a software developer’s conference. (Man, was that a dead conference. 15 people at a “Keynote”. Evidently there’s a recession going on, people.) A nice man named Noah Sussman approached the table where I was selling stuff & explained that he was a blogger with a site called Nerdabout New York. So of course I asked him to blog about me & my sublime geeky books, whereupon he whipped out his camera, about this size of a quarter, and said, “Why don’t you make your own pitch, and I’ll put it on the site.” Well that was very nice of him, don’t you think? So I looked into his little camera and commenced bullshitting away.

Today he kept his word with a very generous blog posting and including this video (below). I think the vid came out well enough for an impromptu thing, although I don’t know what’s with my weird Tourettes-like shaking in the first bit, and I wonder why I slouch so. And must I mumble so much, and how did I get so fat and bald and when did my teeth become so Austin Powerish? And why am I clutching my wallet as if it contains the Nukular Launch Code??? Oh well. I do think I’m a pretty good pitchman in person–Fred knows I’ve done it long enough–but working for the camera is not my metier, as we say around Place D’Italie. I need to work on that. Billy Mays, the infomercial king who recently departed this mortal coil, was good at what he did. I respect him for that. I wish I had had him pitch my books for me while he was still available for the job. But I guess I’ll just have to work on my own game. Meanwhile, here’s a shout-out and thank you to Nerdabout New York.

Untitled from Noah Sussman on Vimeo.

P.S. I think it goes without saying that, Billy being unavailable, I would happily settle for Ellie from the Rocketboom site in Howard Stearns’ “Inventing the Future” post just before this one.

Trying out the “Good Reads” site. Here's a review I wrote t'other day.

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Gerald's Party (Coover, Robert) Gerald’s Party by Robert Coover

My review


rating: 2 of 5 stars
Coover takes a minimally interesting premise–a cocktail party right out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting as the setting for a send up of the classic Agatha Christie “closed room” mystery–and beats it to death. I guess the meta-joke is that just as the hellish party is inescapable and goes on forever, the book is inescapable and goes on forever. Fortunately, however, the book is escapable– you have only to stop reading.

Certainly Coover deserves some style points for verbal skill and unrestrained imagination. The book is finely crafted, in the sense of the interlocking stories & themes, the literary allusions & wordplay, etc, etc.

But it’s pointless and ugly. Why would I want to read a thirty page “joke” about a stopped toilet and skating over a vomit-covered floor? How much necrophilia is “enough” for one avante-guard novel?
It might have been an interesting and perhaps disturbing story at 50 pages. But at more than 300 pages, it’s just a bore.
View all my reviews.

A glimpse of The Eagle in flight

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In my little illustrated novella The Pains, there’s an enigmatic character named Horatio Norton, better known by his nickname The Eagle. This character is partially based on the late Chris McKinstry, creator of the Mindpixel project. I never met McKinstry in meatspace, but had interacted with him a little on Kuro5hin, where we both used to hang out. He was just another bozo on the bus then, albeit one with a bit of a notorious history stemming from things he had done when delusional or upset–he had a history of mental illness.

In the time since he took his own life several years ago, his legend has grown somewhat. He’s been the subject of a story on PBS, there was a big article about him in Wired, and now some students at the Documentary Institute at the University of Florida are making a documentary film about him. It’s called The Man Behind the Curtain. The trailer is below.

My character The Eagle is not a pure cipher for McKinstry. The Eagle was also partially inspired by Christopher John Boyce (aka “The Falcon”), and of course I hope that I added some unique personality of his own. He isn’t a mere pastiche of these two fascinating, complicated men.

However, when I saw clips of the actual McKinstry talking, when I saw his actual notebooks, I was astounded to see how much the real McKinstry resembled the fictional character he had inspired. Have a look:

The Man Behind the Curtain – Preview from michael nichols on Vimeo.

Painful Kindlization

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Well, with the help of my esteemed collaborator and amanuensis the bon vivant man-about-town Gary Gray, I’ve put up a kindle book version of The Pains over on the website of the borg Amazon.com. IMHO the kindle version is not as cool as the paper version–among other lossage, the illustrations are all gray scale, not luminous color (or colour, as Sir Cheeseburge Brown, the illustrator, would have it) but on the other hand, at $4 a pop it’s not a bad deal.

If you have a kindle and are feeling flush, why not buy a copy? You’ll help a struggling (and I do mean struggling) genius, and also get a fun book, for less than the price of whatever you can get for $4.01.

Check it out here.

Leg Locked

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At the age of 55 I decided to become a volunteer firefighter. I’m 56 now. So I’m taking training along with guys from all over the island who are young enough to be my sons–or grandsons, I suppose. A few weeks ago on a crisp Sunday morning I had to pass my practicum in ladders. How to: carry, set up and take down ladders of various sizes in one man, two man, three man teams; place & climb a roof ladder; carry a 105 lb. dummy down a ladder. And, demonstrate a leg lock:

Per the internets, the Vancouver fire department defines a leg lock thusly:

A leg lock is a way of hooking a leg onto the ladder so that a firefighter can work safely from the ladder with his/her hands free while eliminating the danger of falling.
If a leg lock is not used, a firefighter must have at least one hand free to hold on to the ladder beam. No exceptions.

To perform, say, a right leg lock, you:

  1. step your left leg up one rung higher than you want to be
  2. put your right foot through the opening
  3. bend your right leg back and through the opening below and
  4. hook your right foot around the right rail
  5. step down one rung with your left leg

and Bob’s your uncle.

From another fire department on the internets, we get this explanation of the ladder climb evaluation:

Ladder Climb
Purpose: to assess the applicant for fear of heights.
A 40 firefighting PFRS ladder will be erected in a safe and secure location. A department member will demonstrate a climb to a point half way up the ladder, do a leg lock and return to ground level.
Each applicant will be warned to stop if they experience difficulty when doing the exercise. Each applicant will then don a department turnout coat and SCBA (no face piece), climb the ladder to the same point as in the demonstration, do a leg lock and return to ground level.
The applicant will be rated “pass/fail”. PFRS evaluators will note any hesitation or difficulty of the applicant in performing the task.

Our test was a little different. We had to climb with an axe, do a leg lock, and pantomime using the axe to smash a window.

During my evaluation, I got into a scary situation.

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What they're reading in the Snowboarding Hall of Fame

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(Second in a series.)

Jake Burton Carpenter, also known as Jake Burton, is the founder of Burton Snowboards and, by all accounts, one of the two or three most significant people in the history of the sport of snowboarding. I know the guy. (How I know him is a story for another time.) The last time I saw Jake, I told him about my plan to ride my bicycle all over New England & interview famous people, and/or interesting people, about a topic of great import to everybody on the planet. (That bike trip, which I *will* do, is another story for another time). Anyway, I asked Jake if I could interview him for my bike/video project. “I don’t want to interview you because I care what you have to say,” I told him. “I want to interview you because you’re famous.” “Not all that famous,” Jake replied. “Oh yeah?” I said. “So, how much did Hewlett Packard pay you to be in that commercial you did for them? How much did American Express pay you?”

If I remember right, it was Peter Krygowski who added, “Jake, for Christ’s sake. Your face is plastered on the side of every public bus in Chicago.” Jake said, “It is? I wonder if I’m getting paid for that.”

(Although the only IMDB link I could find for Peter was related to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Peter was also, before getting fired, the Art Director on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2. Or one of those early seasons. So when you meet him, prostrate yourself.) (Forgive me if I don’t recall the conversations precisely; the three of us were pretty drunk by the time this exchange happened, and for good reason.) (I believe Peter K. currently has something to do with “Guitar Hero”, although Google was pretty unhelpful on this topic.)

Anyway, whatever Hewlett Packard and American Express paid Burton to be in their ads is guaranteed to be a fucktonne more than I paid him to be in the advert below, since I didn’t pay him a thing. The production values of this vid are not exactly up to HP/AMEX standards, but what the hey. I certainly got my money’s worth. My only problem with the bit is that I expressly asked Jake to push the “buy the books” meme over the “download the free books” meme. Oh well. So thanks, Jake, and I look forward to interviewing you for real sometime this summer.

The rest of you, please imagine Jake saying “buy John’s books”, and act accordingly.