Comments on: Ballard Backlash x2

By: James

James — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 17:05:00 +0000

I recall Harlan Ellison commenting about the word processor contributing to “lazy writing”, in that one can merely pound on the keyboard for awhile and then cut-and-paste a sense of logic into the bits and pieces after the fact – as opposed to sitting down with relatively fully formed thoughts and beginning to write. I think in these terms the PC is more of a tool to aid _thought_ than to aid writing….

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 18:04:19 +0000

James Joyce at a word processor; Finnegans Wake would have been incomprehensible

i thought it was incomprehensible. burroughs called it the great novel that no one can read.

im with ballard on the pc, that is for the first draft, but revising and editing have been changed forever.

By: FJ Torres

FJ Torres — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 02:36:37 +0000

About Dali, it seems some people forget there were several “Dalis”- periods, the earliest in which he collaborated with Bunuel was very productive and rich…
The 60s-70s media star phase- Now thats a different matter altogheter. Altough I rather see any weak late period Dali work to most of the art that has been produced since Dali’s supposed decadence.

By: Rick McGrath

Rick McGrath — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 22:40:29 +0000

On PCs: Ballard knew his McLuhan — if you look at the pen, the typewriter and the PC and remember the medium is the message, we go from body to machine to pixels… ever more distant from the necessity of imagination…

On Dali: it seems to me our apollonian culture saves its deepest, most anxious bile for dionysenian characters. We seem to like to keep artists and their art separate, and when they start living the life of the imagination for real, we dismiss them in a variety of anal gestures

By: Bosse de Nage

Bosse de Nage — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 08:48:24 +0000

I wonder what effect computers have had on reading.

By: TimC

TimC — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 08:33:25 +0000

Mike H – that’s the thinking I was thing of. Love the Finnegans Wake comment.

By: Tim Sterne

Tim Sterne — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 04:21:16 +0000

Novels were much better back in the quill and ink days. Everything since has been shite.

By: Mike H.

Mike H. — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 21:39:25 +0000

You may be thing of this, Tim, from the Re/Search “J. G. Ballard: Quotes” book:

JGB: “I don’t think the [typewriter] affected my writing, but it certainly has happened in respect to the word processor, hasn’t it? I do a lot of book reviewing, and although I’ve never used a PC, I’m absolutely certain that I can tell the difference between books that are written on PCs and those that are not. Books written on the PC have very high definition in the sense of line-by-line editing, grammar, sentence construction and the like. But the overall narrative construction is haywire. There’s a tendency to go on and on and on, in a sort of logorrhea, and to lose one’s grasp of the overall contents. Imagine, say, James Joyce at a word processor; Finnegans Wake would have been incomprehensible!” [21C, 1997]

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 11:02:38 +0000

At the risk of calling the kettle black, with a few notable exceptions (like this site), the blogosphere sucks. The shrill and self-righteous tone that would seem to prevail is nauseating.

By: TimC

TimC — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 10:50:09 +0000

On the first point, one complaint is that novels written on WPs tend to be polished on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but the overall shape and structure is all to shit. At least one lit heavyweight (maybe Ballard, maybe Mailer) has put that a lot more eloquently, but I can’t recall who or where.

Anyway, here’s big Norman, from ‘The Big Empty’:
“To me, there is a kind of neurasthenia built into working with the computer. To look at a screen all day is to take one down below the spiritual punishment of those who had to bang away at typewriters all their lives. It’s hard to explain how agreeable it is to do one’s writing in longhand. You feel that all of your body and some of your spirit has come down to your fingertips. Even if you have bad handwriting, as I do, there’s something perversely elegant about it.”

Besides, have there been any truly ‘great books’ written in the past couple of decades, on PCs or otherwise?