Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
Journal
(15) More bragging.
(16) Fit modularity into scale free networks. More bragging.
March 26, 2003. Hiking in Big Sur, Waiting for Inspiration.
I keep wondering what to do next, now that Frek and the Elixir is all but done. The
rewards for my SF novels are so meager. I feel like giving up on SF. I can’t face the tedium
of writing a popular science book about computation, though. And I don’t think there’s a
market for enlightenment books. If the reception of Bruegel had been less tepid, I’d say do
my novel about Bosch’s life. Right now any of these writing plans feels like beating a dead
horse. Maybe polish and publish my journals? Write a third comic Silicon Valley novel, a
bit less SF-ictional than before, possibly centering on Wolfram’s New Kind of Science? But
then I’d have to (ever more inaccurately) try and imagine young people. Maybe a non-book
about computer science. Aphorisms. Everything I Need to Know My Computer Taught Me.
Or forget about writing entirely. Paint. Take art classes and get better at it. Or get into
computer programming again? No way. Maybe, yeah, paint and learn to paint like my man
Jeroon van Aken a.k.a. Hieronymus Bosch.
March 27, 2003. The Idea!
By the ocean, sun going down. On the rocky Esalen beach, alone, below the house
where Terence McKenna and I led a seminar five or six years ago, maybe in 1997. I have an
urge to write the N. Y. Times Book Review a letter defending Terence against a reviewer who,
last week, said that, in Terence’s last days, you couldn’t tell if you were talking to him or to
his brain tumor. Actually Terence was the same all the time. A seagull looks at me, its eyes
disappear when seen directly head on. I sketch him in five or six positions: staring out to sea,
cawing, looking at me, looking down at his feet, glancing at the shore. Sulfur smell from the
stream raging into the sea. The sea here somehow wholly unlike in Santa Cruz. It’s Big Sur
sea, nay, Esalen sea. How lucky I am to be here. I say, “I love you,” to the seagull. He
bows. We do it again. Maybe the seagull is Terence.
Book idea: Memoirs of a Crazy Mathematician. Settling scores, taking credit. If I
wrote a memoir, I wouldn’t have to learn anything new, and I could talk about myself all the
time. I’m old enough. Fifty-seven. That’s really, really old. If the book did well, I could
trundle out my collected journals. There might be new interest in the novels as well. Book
as press-kit.
Patriotism is the last resort of a scoundrel. A memoir is the last resort of a writer.
April 16, 2003. What?
Today I noticed a Memoir directory on my hard drive, and failed to recognize it.
Memoir? Huh? Then I found this notes document again.
I’m leaning towards making the book less focused on being a memoir and more on
the What is Everything idea.
Cleaning out the physical stack of folders on bookcase, I noticed those Web Mind
folders, containing my essays purporting to explain the Web as a fractal in cyberspace or
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