Ballardosphere Wrap-Up, Part 5
Author: Simon Sellars • May 27th, 2007 •Category: Australia, Ballardosphere, Salvador Dali, academia, architecture, enviro-disaster, fascism, film, surrealism, visual art
Here I present the latest wrapup, not as extensive as I would like as I’m currently in Dubai trying to locate my missing passport, while entertaining the thought of spending a few days, maybe a week in the non-space of the Dubai International Airport until it turns up (hopefully a week; I’m trying to embrace the catastrophe in true Ballardian style, seeing what brand of human I’ll emerge as on the other side).
Some of the following news is a little old; forgive me. I’m catching up on the last few weeks, after all. If there’s anything I’ve missed, please contact me.
UPDATE: passport located; and me, homeward-bound.
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+ BUT ISN’T IT JUST A NOVEL ABOUT WANKING?
Inspired by Alistair Cormack’s talk, ‘The Unlimited Dream Company: Blake and Ballard’, at the JGB conference, Mike Holliday has onlined ‘A Home and A Grave’, explaining how to read UDC, one of Ballard’s most ignored works, as a fascistic novel. Along the way, Mike offers up an intriguing match, suggesting that the ‘way in which [UDC's narrator] Blake wants to take the very existence of Shepperton’s inhabitants into himself is rather reminiscent of another, more notorious, fantasy novel - Lord Horror’:
…the transcendence that Blake offers up in The Unlimited Dream Company is as empty as that suggested by Adorno and Horkheimer or as portrayed in Lord Horror … all we are left with are vague phrases and the promise of the ending of all differentiation and individualization, a process which can only result in the annihilation of everything: “the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead”.
Now, who among us will dare to rehabilitate The Day of Creation or Rushing to Paradise? (actually, I’m working on the latter).
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+ ULTRA-MAN
Speaking of the conference, k-punk posted a riposte to the perceived ‘feel-good’ vibe of that event. He found it ‘dispiriting’, apparently because of its focus on Ballard’s ‘exhausted novels’ and a desire to celebrate JGB’s work. k-punk suggests that the latter is especially pointless, given that he sees Ballard as already ‘ultra-canonic’ for ‘any group that matters’ (although virtually every entry in the list of cultural nodes he provides as evidence features k-p at the centre or orbiting near by).
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+ HEAD TO THE SOUTH
Still from Silent Running.
Dan Lockton Dan Hill has done it again with another superb post, this time meditating on James Birrell’s ‘Brutalist-lite’ architecture at the University of Queensland campus and the ‘rampant sub-tropical foliage engulfing it’. Mouth watering — he ties in one of my very favourite SF films, Silent Running, as well as The Drowned World before motoring on to the crux of his argument:
Australia seems poised at this junction right now, beginning to explore new and old ways of dealing with its water supply, from divining, to not-building dams - “a 20th-century response to 21st-century problems” - to finally recycling.
…
How to reconcile urban development with climate change? How to build a sub-tropical architecture that adapts to the environment? How to use dangerous environmental conditions to the benefit of a nation, a culture, a people?
…
Like Ballard’s hero, head to the south, into the sun, to find the future. It’s counter-intuitive, but it might just work
(For my own musings on a Ballard-refracted vision of Australia, see ‘The Drought: Water Vigliantes’ and ‘The Rats that Ate Mill Park’).
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+ BLDGBOOK
Another fine archi blog, the one and only BLDGBLOG, announces a publishing deal for a ‘book of the blog’ that will include two subjects very dear to my heart: Ballard and micronations. Congratulations, Geoff.
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+ CHUCK SOUNDS OFF
Chuck Palahniuk disses Ballard in a recent interview:
MT: Were you inspired by J.G. Ballard?
Palahniuk: The Crash book, you mean? Not really. I mean, God bless J.G. Ballard, but that whole ponderous eroticism of car crashes? You know, the idea of putting a hood ornament in Elizabeth Taylor’s pussy and all of that, I thought that was just too much.
[ thanks, Tim ]
Dunno about you, but to me, Palahniuk’s blatant misreading of Ballard’s intentions (violating Liz; there’s nothing of the sort in Crash, not even remotely) seems nothing more than a rebellious kid telling lies about Dad, when deep down the kid knows Dad has influenced him more than anyone will — or can — ever know. The other thing to note is that Palahniuk wrote a short story, ‘Guts’, in which the narrator has his colon sucked out of his anus by a pool pump — all described in clinical detail. Many people found *that* too much.
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+ SECHERESSE
The French edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, looking more like an early Kraftwerk album cover.
Herve Lagoguey has put together a comprehensive gallery of French Ballard cover art. We await the two Ricks verdict on these.
(For more JGB cover art, see Ballardian’s interview with Rick McGrath and our reprint of Rick Poynor’s ‘Collapsing Bulkheads’ article.)
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+ GRAVEST HITS
From the latest RE/Search newsletter:
Dominika Oramus sent us her disturbing, intelligent book: Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, published by Univesity of Warsaw. For a copy write DORAMUS ul OSTROBRAMSKA, 84 m 129, 04-163 Warssawa, Poland. (I’m not sure how to send payment, or what the total cost is.)
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+ AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR…
Still from Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou.
Finally, let’s hear from the man himself, this time in Ballard’s ‘review’ of the Dali & Film exhibition at the Tate Modern (although there are no new revelations, Ballard instead relying on familiar riffs; k-punk’s ‘exhausted texts’ assessment is useful here):
[In Un Chien Andalou] there are no clues to behaviour. Ants pour from a hole in the young man’s palm. Rebuffed, he puts on a curious harness and drags towards the young woman a huge contraption consisting of two priests lying on their backs, tied to a grand piano across which is draped a dead donkey. What comes through this 15-minute film is the feeling that it would all make sense if its scenes were assembled in the right order. But of course it would not make sense, whatever the order, and I take this to be the point of the film. The reality we inhabit daily, our domestic interiors and their emotional dramas, the hands helplessly caressing a young woman’s breasts, the tennis racket she uses to drive away her unwanted suitor (the surrealists were intensely middle class), the small section of space-time we blunder through, are all equally unreal, though meaning and sanity seem tantalisingly within our grasp.
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J.G. Ballard. ‘Shock and gore’, The Guardian, Saturday May 26, 2007.
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It wasn’t the celebration of Ballard that I found dis-spiriting; I generally find conferences pretty dis-spiriting and this was no exception. I wasn’t opposed to his work being celeberated, more the curious idea that his work is now ‘getting the attention it deserves’. From whom, and why should we worry about such laggards? The fact that this ‘attention’ coincides with a period of creative exhaustion in Ballard is perhaps significant.
As to the nodes I listed, I’m grateful that you think I feature centrally in or am nearby to Burroughs, Jameson and postpunk.
Ccru I did feature in, but there were many other people involved, all of whom had found Ballard without my assistance. As for Kodwo, well, I know him, but his estimation of Ballard owes nothing to me!
Cheers mate, though it’s Dan Hill not ‘Dan Lockton’
Cheers Mark…I wasn’t exactly sure what you found dispiriting about the event. but if your post was in response to my initial conference wrap up, where i indeed wrote that ballard was ‘finally getting attention’, then i’m the laggard! i didn’t mean to speak for anyone else who attended. basically, australia can be a cultural wasteland and ballard’s name invariably draws blank stares 9.5 times out of 10. i was simply very happy to meet and exchange ideas with like-minded souls, even if i had to fly to england to do it. of course i fully agree with your agenda to retool ballard, beginning with a complete set of ‘fantasy kits’…as for the cultural nodes, i was referring to your mention of kode9, eshun, CCRU, dissensus — more than burroughs and jameson, of course.
Dan, my sincere apologies — i’ve fixed the error. i was of course confusing you with dan lockton over at fulminate: architectures of control (also a fine blog).
PS: Mark, i’m not being argumentative, but the only real incidence I can find of Burroughs ‘championing’ Ballard’s work is the preface he wrote for the US edition of The Atrocity Exhibition. And that came over as though he hadn’t read the book or didn’t understand it. If you can point me to any other instances of WSB in praise of JGB, i’d really appreciate it, as it’s an area of research i’d like to follow up.
Dinner with Susan Sontag: New York 1980
Sontag: People are very isolated in New York, everybody’s essentially alone here, but there’s probably less hack work. I not only agree with what Bill said about the English literary scene, but I can think of hardly any writers I even admire in England. The whole thing has become so genteel and diluted. I like Ballard.
Burroughs: He’s good.
Sontag: It’s so philistine.
Burroughs: Incestuous! Incestuous!
With William Burroughs - Victor Bockris. Page 79.
______________________________________________
“An assault upon the frontier” - K
I don’t think you see where Burroughs is coming from. Perhaps you have yet to be properly acquainted. How would a Kafkaesque Shaman like Kafka have written this introduction? How would he have seen it? And would you see where that was coming from?!!
As a sauce book how would someone like Genet see it. It’s value is as a source book — Kunst - deep sprung!
My apologies for whimsy, I have a Canadian at home.
hi there, Another Mark, i don’t know how a kafkaesque shaman like kafka would have written the introduction. but thanks for the burroughs reference.
Even the American hardcover artwork for Palahniuk’s “Rant” betrays a Ballardian intention somewhere along the line…the pulsing, elongated strings of nerve, muscle, and bone suggesting an unseen violation evokes something simultaneously exhibitionist and atrocious.
In addition to the preface for Atrocity Ex and the Bockris interview, there is an interview with Burroughs called “The Hallucinatory Operators Are Real,” which occurred in New York in 1965. In it, SF Horizons magazine interviews Burroughs on the subject of science fiction.
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SFH: Can you tell us, sir, what particular science fiction writers have been of most interest to you?
Burroughs: Well, among the modern writers, I’ve always found H.G. Wells to be one of the best. C.S. Lewis is another who interests me very much… And among other moderns, Mr. Ballard and Mr. Moorcock in England, Mr. Arthur C. Clarke, Mr. Sturgeon, of course.
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This shows that Burroughs knew of Ballard (and the other “new wave” sci fi writers) by no later than 1965. It’s possible Burroughs cites Ballard in other interviews, but this is the only one I could remember. (Strangely, Ballard is not listed in the index of Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews, in spite of this mention.)
Aside from this and the Bockris book, I know of no other printed text in which Burroughs mentions Ballard. Most of the time that Ballard figures in Burroughs tomes, it’s for the former’s high praise of the latter.
Also, as some of you may know. Graham Rae recently interviewed Ballard on the subject of Burroughs:
http://realitystudio.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=279
cheers supervert, i know all about the instances where ballard praises burroughs, but i’m really looking for it the other way around — wsb championing jgb.
but if you can’t find any references, then that pretty much wraps it up, considering you are the publisher of realitystudio.org! (a comprehensive burroughs site, for those interested)
I’ve never really liked Chuck Palahniuk, and I think this might have hit the nail on the head; he doesn’t realize that his schtick is a pale imitation of Ballard, but instead of having the psychological sea changes of Ballard, he just has the smut. Though I do admire the film Fight Club–best subversive anti-fascism movie made by an American in the modern era. The film transcends the books limitations and becomes something wholly different. I always thought David Fincher could make a good version of High Rise.
“(the surrealists were intensely middle class)”
No wonder I feel so at home with them!