‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’

by Brian Baker

Instructions/ Introduction

Readers hoping to solve the mystery of J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Beach Murders’ may care to approach it in the form of a card game. Some of the principal clues have been alphabetized, some left as they were found, scrawled on to the backs of a deck of cards. Readers are invited to recombine the order of the cards to arrive at a solution.* Obviously any number of solutions is possible, and the final answer to the mystery lies forever hidden.

Brian Baker, 2009

Originally published in 21: Journal of Contemporary and Innovative Fiction, Issue 1 (autumn/winter 2008/09). Reproduced with permission.

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Architecture (A♣). Physical space is crucial to the Ballardian imaginary, from the eponymous tower block in High-Rise (1975) to the ‘gated communities’ and science parks of Super-Cannes (2000) and Millennium People (2003). Counterposed to images of flight and transcendence found in many of his stories, the urban environment is often an imprisoning space. In his article ‘J.G. Ballard and the Architectures of Control’, Dan Lockton argues that ‘One of the many ‘obsessions’ running through Ballard’s work is what we might characterise as the effect of architecture on the individual’, while complicating his argument by acknowledging the mutual implication of inner and outer, psychological and environment: this blurring being Ballard’s method of ‘reflecting the participants’ mental state in the environment itself’. [1] Lockton also suggests that ‘[t]he architecture […] acts as a structure for the story’ in locating the protagonist and ‘plot’ firmly in an ‘obsessively explained and expounded’ architecture. I would like to develop this argument by suggesting that the informing structural principles of Ballard’s short stories, particularly that of the period beginning with ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) and embracing The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) but also later short fictions, are spatial and iterative: geometry and algebra.

Ballardian (2♣). On the BBC Radio 4 arts review programme Front Row, presenter Mark Lawson, in introducing a discussion of Ballard’s autobiography Miracles of Life, suggested that ‘he’s one of the few writers to have become an adjective — Ballardian’. [2] An author who attains the status of an adjective runs the risk of reduction to culturally received ideas of their work (often erroneous and masking the texts themselves) or, worse still, it makes them the object of caricature or burlesque. To become an adjective suggests a certain kind of cultural visibility (or even cultural power), but also indicates a possible ossification through repetition: another reduction, to a set of representative images, ideas and tropes. In this case, ‘Ballardian’ signifies a recurrent set of narrative structures, characters, and particularly iconic places and things, many of which were identified by David Pringle in his groundbreaking critical work of the 1970s:

Such things as concrete weapons ranges, dead fish, abandoned airfields, radio telescopes, crashed space-capsules, sand dunes, empty cities, […] beaches, fossils, broken juke-boxes, crystals, lizards, multi-storey car-parks, dry lake-beds, medical laboratories, drained swimming-pools, […] high-rise buildings, predatory birds, and low-flying aircraft. [3]

To assert a ‘Ballardian’ imaginary is to suggest a limitation to his work, a finite set of materials out of which a range of texts are worked (and re-worked). It is a critical commonplace to note the ‘obsessional’ return to key images, objects and concerns in Ballard’s work – from emptied swimming pools to a desire to transcend time – that could have reduced his texts to a set of symptoms of an identifiable pathology (and did, in the notorious judgement on Crash by a publisher’s reader). At best, Ballard’s ‘obsessional’ return to a limited creative palette can be used to articulate a consistent and particular vision of the world – what Mark Lawson, characterising ‘Ballardian’, called a ‘way of looking at the world and describing it’ – or is, at worst, a boring and repetitive re-working of the same old material by a ‘minor’ (genre) writer who lacks a wider engagement with human life. ‘Ballardian’ is perhaps best understood (a) as a symptom of genre, and the repetition-with-difference pattern of much genre fiction; and (b) as an effect of Ballard’s structural reliance on iteration.

Confetti Royale (9♣). The original title of the story collected in the 2001 Collected Short Stories as ‘The Beach Murders’ is ‘Confetti Royale’, signifying its intertextual relation to Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953) and the Cold War spy or espionage narrative. The impenetrable motivations of the characters in ‘Confetti Royale’ – two Russian agents, on CIA operative, an ‘absconded State Department cipher chief’ and ‘American limbo dancer’ (whose actions entirely exceed this belittling characterization) – both anticipate the labyrinthine logic of Le Carré’s espionage fiction and compromises the more straightforward and linear adventures of Fleming’s secret agent. There has been some recent speculation on the Ballardian website about the connection between Ballard and Fleming, particularly with regard to The Wind from Nowhere (Ballard’s 1962 ‘disowned’ apprentice novel) and its megalomaniacal industrialist Hardoon, who could be seen as a an analogue of the Bond super-villains who seek the chimera of ‘world domination’. [4] While ‘Confetti Royale’ is a playful iteration of espionage fiction, its card-game structure raises to a formal principle the centrality of the game between Bond and Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. Here, the 27 textual elements (Introduction plus 26 alphabeticized titled paragraphs) are strewn as ‘confetti’, compromising the ordering principles of the baccarat tables or Cold War ideologies.

Diamonds Are Forever (6♣). The 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (OHMSS) was the first to be made without Sean Connery. The opening 15 minutes is suffused by a self-reflexivity which marks out the problematic nature of generic repetition-with-difference. The new Bond, George Lazenby, looks directly at the camera at the end of the pre-credits sequence, when the ‘girl’ he has been fighting for drives off, and says ‘This never happened to the other fellah’; the film’s title sequence replays scenes from earlier Bond films; and when Bond ‘resigns’ and clears his office drawer, key objects from earlier films are introduced with aide-memoire musical leitmotifs from previous Bond films overlaid on the soundtrack. Anxiety-provoking difference is suppressed by reference to the recognisable and familiar, even at the risk of disrupting the film diegesis. In 1971, not only did Bond return, but so did Connery. Diamonds Are Forever is Bond’s ‘revenge’ mission for the death, in OHMSS, of Bond’s wife Tracey (the ‘girl’ who escaped him at the beginning), and is largely set in Nixon’s USA. A morally rotten, bloated film (featuring two sadistic homosexual assassins as an index of its gender sensitivities), Diamonds Are Forever’s main location is Las Vegas, the ‘old’ Vegas of the Dunes and the Sands, the excessive, corrupt Vegas of Bugsy Siegel and the Mob.

Diamonds Are Forever plays the megalomaniacal Blofeld – murderer of Bond’s wife and manipulator of the diamond trade to create a laser-bearing ‘killer’ satellite – against one ‘Willard Whyte’, a helpful billionaire resident of a Las Vegas penthouse suite. This character’s good-ole-boy persona fails to mask the fact that he is a Whyte-washed reiteration of a real-life Las Vegas resident, Howard Hughes, who in real life more nearly approximated Blofeld. Unlike Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953) and the 2006 film version of this Bond narrative, where the high-stakes card games function as a trope for ideological conflict and the dangerous fluidity of capital markets and financial flows, Diamonds Are Forever makes little or no play with the casino chronotope. Ballard’s own Las Vegas novel is Hello America (1981), the most generically ‘science fiction’ of his later works. This novel narrates a journey by a European exploratory mission to a depopulated, post-apocalyptic United States, where they find a self-anointed (and self-named) President Charles Manson, who has assumed command of the remainder of America’s nuclear arsenal. Hello America uses the Las Vegas gambling icon of the roulette wheel, rather than the card table, to critique the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. As Ken Cooper suggests, ‘self-destruction […] is the inevitable payoff of atomic roulette’. [5]

Experimental Fiction (7♣). Ballard’s most formally experimental period lies between ‘The Terminal Beach’ and The Atrocity Exhibition. Although his later novels are iterative in their narrative and textual patterning, they are much closer to ‘mainstream’ literary fiction’s spatial continuity and temporal causality. However, in his short fiction Ballard did return to formally experimental or innovative texts, often playing with textual conventions. ‘The Index’ (1977) consists of just that, ‘the index to the unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography of a man who may well have been one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century’, one Henry Rhodes Hamilton, but the mystery of who he was and the status of the text remains unresolved; ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976) consists of annotations to the subtitle of the story (‘A discharged Broadmoor patient compiles “Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown”, recalling his wife’s murder, his trial and exoneration’), each word of which is footnoted; and in ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985) the respondent implies that he has assassinated the second incarnation of Christ in 100 ‘answers’. [6] These texts are organised by absence or ellipsis, the architecture of the stories signifying a missing central element or text that reader must configure or enunciate for herself/himself. Non-linear, spatial in design, Ballard’s later experimental short stories are textual games that posit a foundational enigma, a mystery that the reader must work to decode.

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

Fugue Fiction (5♣). The ‘fugue fictions’ are three connected short stories that Ballard published around the turn of the 1980s: ‘News from the Sun’ (1981), ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982) and ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982). A close examination of these stories discloses the iterative principle at work even in Ballard’s later texts, where formal fragmentation has given way to more linear narrative models. A paragraph from ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1962) pinpoints the shared emphases of these stories:

The implication was that the entire space programme was a symptom of some inner unconscious malaise afflicting mankind, and in particular the Western technocracies, and that the space-craft and satellites had been launched because their flights satisfied certain buried compulsions and desires. [7]

In ‘Memories of the Space Age’, the protagonist Mallory, a doctor in the NASA program, confesses to his unconscious complicity in the first orbital murder, by a borderline-disturbed astronaut named Hinton. This act produced a kind of ‘space-sickness’ of fugue-states and loss of temporal awareness that is centred on Cape Canaveral: ‘he had torn the fabric of time and space, cracked the hour-glass from which time was running’. [8] The fugues experienced by Mallory and the protagonists of the two other stories are a kind of congealing of time, a transcendence of clock time; in ‘News from the Sun’, these fugues are explicitly typed as a return to a pre-lapsarian state of consciousness. In ‘Myth of the Near Future’, the protagonist Sheppard pursues his terminally ill wife to Canaveral, where the time-effect may ultimately revivify her. All three stories are patterned on a triangulation between the protagonist, his wife (or lover), and an antagonist; a fourth figure is present, outside of the primary triangulation, who is either an astronaut or connected to the space program.

‘News from the Sun’: Franklin-Ursula-Slade (Trippett)
‘Memories of the Space Age’: Mallory-Anna-Hinton (Gale Shepley)
‘Myths of the Near Future’: Sheppard-Elaine-Martinsen (Anne Godwin)

The triangulations suggests a geometric/architectural emphasis, but the sense that these three fictions, published in sequence, are reworkings of the same conceptual material and re-deploy the same motifs (flight, the space programme, fugue states and time) signifies their centrality to the Ballardian iterative complex.

Gemini. (4♣) The Space Age is a crucial source for the Ballardian imaginary, from the negotiations of cargo-cult imperialism in ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1963) to the assassination of a messianic astronaut in ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984). The icon of the astronaut is central to the ‘fugue fictions’ and their sense that NASA’s manned space programs were a cosmic transgression, an hubristic leap out of biological time which has catastrophic psychological consequences. Many of Ballard’s texts are centred on Cape Canaveral, from ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964) (itself later incorporated – reiterated – into The Crystal World (1965)), where time crystallizes, to ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982), where the Cape is the epicentre of a kind of ‘space sickness’. However, it is not Apollo imagery – the Moon landings – that regulate Ballard’s Space Age imaginary. His astronauts have orbital trajectories. In ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968) and ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962) orbiting capsules containing dead astronauts form a kind of artificial constellation in the night sky, while the protagonists wait at Canaveral for their orbits to decay. It is not Apollo, but the Mercury and Gemini programs – manned orbital missions that grew in complexity and duration, but stayed within the ambit of Earth – that provide the backdrop for Ballard’s Space Age. This is no New Frontier, no ascension to other planets, but a limited, problematic endeavour.

Hearts and Minds (8♣). The title sequence of the 2006 Casino Royale plays with the centrality of the card game and the casino to its narrative. In motion-capture animation (where computer-generated graphics are overlaid on live action), a silhouetted polygon Bond fights, shoots, and is finally shown (in a live-action ‘reveal’) to be Daniel Craig, the ‘new’ Bond. The roulette wheel becomes a sniper-scope target in these graphics, as clubs, diamonds and spades become weapons embedded in the torsos of antagonists, ‘blood’ flowing across the screen from their wounds. Bond is himself ‘cut’ by playing cards in one animated sequence, but is invulnerable; no blood seems to flow there. The interrelationship of the casino, the roulette wheel and the playing card with the neo-colonial adventurism represented by the Bond imaginary invites us to read the film itself as a kind of spectacle or game, masking its ideological premises.

Iterative (3♣). Crucial to the idea of a ‘Ballardian’ text is patterning or what I have suggested as iterability. It would be difficult to deny that Ballard returns to similar ideas, or narrative structures throughout his work: it is the effectiveness of the patterning that is crucial, the combination and re-combination of elements to work through a coherent world that provides Ballard’s texts with imaginative power. David Punter, in Modernity, concurs, stating: ‘What is most significant […] is that Ballard is a repetitive writer, a writer of repetition.’ [9] The first formally ‘iterative’ Ballard short story is ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964), in which the textual fabric of the story is fragmented, split into 22 sections (21 of them subtitled), echoing the psychological fragmentation of the protagonist Traven (the earliest incarnation of the ‘T-‘ figure who recurs, as ‘Tallis’ or ‘Talbot’ or ‘Trabert’) who can also be found in Ballard’s iterative masterwork, The Atrocity Exhibition. ‘The Terminal Beach’ and particularly the Atrocity Exhibition texts are non-linear and non-causal in terms of narrative; in ‘The Terminal Beach’, the concrete blocks of the nuclear testing site Eniwetok Island form a maze, ‘their geometric regularity and finish [seeming] to occupy more than their own volumes of space, imposing on him a mood of absolute calm and order.’ [10] Here the spatial ordering of the text is more properly geometric rather than algebraic (iterative), but the repetitive, disorienting regularity of the field of blocks is a figure for a space that repeats itself endlessly. This motif can also be found in the more classically dystopian short story ‘The Concentration City’, where the urban ‘build-up’ has no boundary, no end, and a train journey to find its limits returns the protagonist to the starting point is a regressive, looping trajectory; and in the repeated face of Cordobès on the deck of cards placed upon Quimby’s balcony table in ‘Confetti Royale’.

James (10♣). J.G. Ballard’s first names are James Graham. Only in his Crash alter-ego is Ballard ‘James’, a knowing self-implication in that text’s transgressive sexual material; he was ‘Jimmy’ as a boy, ‘Jim’ to his adult friends. The diminutive, ‘Jim’, humanises Ballard, and it is this name which is given to his ‘autobiographical’ selves in Empire of the Sun (1985) and The Kindness of Women (1991). Opposing this is the self-alienated ‘J.G.’, a not-quite nom de plume that masks the ‘real’ Jim Ballard. Ballard’s textual interrogation of unitary subjectivity is reflected in this circulation of names, and the surnames of his protagonists – Sheppard, Maitland, Franklin, Sinclair – are themselves iterative signs. James Bond, by way of contrast, is never ‘Jimmy’, ‘Jim’ or ‘Jamie’: always ‘James’.

Kennedy (J♣). After his assassination in 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s name was given to the Cape where the NASA space program still has its operational base: Canaveral. This naming has now been reversed, but the Space Center still bears JFK’s name. It is Kennedy who is seen to be the ‘author’ of Apollo, giving the political and economic impetus to reach the Moon through the rhetoric of the ‘New Frontier’ and a sustained arms race (symbolically as well as militarily), though it could be argued that it is Lyndon Johnson who was most committed to the American space program in the 1950s and 1960s. Kennedy’s assassination is, in some sense, a ‘ground zero’ for contemporary American culture, and he looms large in the algebra of icons that Ballard constructs in the period of The Atrocity Exhibition, along with the president’s widow, Jackie. The implication of glamour, celebrity and violent death is embodied in the icon of JFK; in ‘The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’, a key text in The Atrocity Exhibition, the moment of assassination also becomes a fatal game.

‘Continuously creating his own image’: J.G. Ballard self-portrait, double exposure, 1950 (photo via RE/Search Publications).

Lunghua (Q♣). With the publication of Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life, it became apparent that, as much as I would like to resist a biographical reading of Ballard’s work, it is Ballard’s own childhood that has had a fundamental regulatory effect on the Ballardian imaginary. In Empire of the Sun, Ballard playfully encouraged the reader to ‘spot’ the Ballardian icon in an autobiographical context – the drained swimming pool, the crashed plane – while simultaneously denying that autobiography provided any kind of key or code to understanding his work. His life, as represented in both Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, is filtered through the medium of fiction. In the light of Miracles of Life, I would now like to suggest that it is Lunghua, the resettlement camp into which he, his parents and his sister were interned during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in World War Two, that is the model for the Ballardian social environment. Lunghua is enclosed, fenced off from the outside world; it is a place where work is scarce; where a system of social codes and conventions regulate personal interaction; where games, hobbies, organised events schedule the lives of its inhabitants; and where existence shades inevitably into a slow decline unto death. A place to rebel against, if space can be found; a space to escape from, if escape is possible. Lunghua is the model for the high-rises, gated communities, science parks and suburban dormitory towns of Ballard’s later fiction.

Metacriticism/metatext (K♣). ‘What is distinctive about The Arcades Project – in Benjamin’s mind, it always dwelt apart – is the working of quotations into the framework of montage [….] the transcendence of the conventional book form would go together, in this case, with the blasting apart of pragmatic historicism – grounded, as this always is, on the premise of a continuous and homogenous temporality. Citation and commentary might then be perceived as intersecting at a thousand different angles, setting up vibrations across the epochs of recent history, so as to effect “the cracking open of natural teleology.” And all of this would unfold through the medium of hints or “blinks” – a discontinuous presentation deliberately opposed to traditional modes of argument.’ [11]

Spades ♠

(A♠) Macro-economic tidal systems. B sat down in the oak-panelled room of state opposite Sir Richard Markham. Markham assessed this loose-limbed man in the ragged flying jacket. A constellation of scars around his mouth and jaw-line traced the trajectory of his chequered history as an agent. Markham accepted the logic of the situation – an agent lasted a few years in the field, no more – but B had gone further than most, much further in many ways. The grey, haunted eyes that looked through Markham scanned the ocean bottom of his psyche, cut adrift from the time system of Whitehall.
‘You’ve been away, B,’ said Markham.
B’s eyes refocused.
‘In a manner of speaking.’

(2♠) Auto-intentional displacement. B realised, as he stood on the moving walkway in the inner hub of Charles de Gaulle airport, that the geometry of the architecture expressed a latent psychopathology. The concrete tunnels of the travellators indicated a profound desire to return to the amniotic peacefulness of the womb, the octagonal central atrium and suspended Perspex walkways revealing a fascist worship of the late General in the form of an architectural homage to his nasal septum and zygomatic arch. B found himself profoundly identifying with the unknown would-be assassin who had missed his opportunity to be the French Oswald in 1965. It was clear to him that the French, for all their insistence on grands projets like CDG, inhabited a fundamental and psychotic cultural landscape in which the tension between their embrace of modernity and their nostalgia for empire went unresolved.

(3♠) Goldeneye. As he dipped the clutch of the Aston and thrust the gearstick into fifth, B remembered the death of his wife. It was, he now understood, a special form of automobile accident. Blauveldt and Blunt, whom he had previously recognised as enemies, were in fact the agents of an underlying logic of necessity. Since the death of his wife, B had slipped further and further out of time, occupying fugue states where hours slipped by. Now, as blades of sodium light accelerated across his windshield, B felt himself again returning to the fugue state that had plagued him since her death, the Aston congealing in a viscid block of time.

(4♠) Operation Grand Slam. B opened the attaché case. In it he found what Markham had called his ‘assassination weapon’. It consisted of: (a) reproductions of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’; (b) a pulp spy novel by one Richard Markham; (c) Eadweard Muybridge’s series photographs of horse and rider; (d) soft inner flying helmet and communication rig of B-29 navigator, USAAF issue; (e) November 1963 edition of Time magazine; (f) an unused prophylactic wrapped in a tin foil sachet; (g) black-box voice recording of co-pilot, Concorde air disaster, Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris; (h) .25 Beretta pistol.

(5♠) Heliotropic. Dr Catherine Penny waited in the secure car park of the Jodrell Bank radio telescopes, as the man in the ragged flying jacket paced the grounds, where the massive volumes of the dishes sprouted like some monstrous alien crop. Dr Penny thought of B‘s grey, haunted eyes, and turned the heating in the MGC up a notch. What B was looking for, he could not find amongst the files and despatch boxes of Whitehall. Could he find it here, among the constellations?

(6♠) Index of Alienation. B calculated the angle between Dr Penny’s rigid torso and her splayed thighs, as she sat like an ill-propped mannequin on the edge of his bed. The conjunction between her naked body, the vintage bottle of Bollinger and the torn foil of the prophylactic sachet brought back disconcerting memories of the buckled armcove on Monaco race day. He turned back to the light box he was building to display x-ray plates of his own fractured clavicle, femur, and kneecap.

(7♠) Quantum theory. ‘Pay attention, B,’ said Quinn, the head of the special quartermaster stores. ‘One day these things could conceivably save your life.’
He placed another card on the desk and invited B to respond.
‘Come on,’ said B. ‘What will it be next? Solitaire? The Tarot pack?’
‘This is for the good of your health, not mine,’ replied Quinn, ‘though God knows it’s difficult enough to tell the difference these days. How did you find Switzerland?’
B smiled. ‘The facilities were excellent. The doctors pronounced me in fine physical shape.’ The lie was automatic, almost unconscious, thought Quinn.
B’s eyes defocused, the deck of cards indecipherable sigils beneath his hands.

(8♠) Beretta .25. Sitting on the balcony of his room in the Loew’s hotel in Monte Carlo, B watched the workmen fix road markings for the motor racing that would take place next week. The late afternoon sun painted the harbour with gold as he finished the club sandwich and drained the last of the glass of Johnny Walker Black Label. On his knees was the conference pack of the neurosurgery symposium he was attending, where he hoped to catch up with Blufeldt. Blufeldt had assumed the legitimate identity of a specialist doctor and had attached himself to a radical clinic in Bern, Switzerland. He was giving a paper on neurology, brain injury and fugue states. B stood up, brushed the crumbs from his knees, and pinned his identification tag onto his shirt. At least the others would know who he was supposed to be.

(9♠) Jackie O. As B entered Catherine Penny from behind, he registered the way her hips, flaring out from the waist, repeated the sensual curves of the mouthpiece of the telephone. Her back, bent rigidly over Markham’s desk, echoed the planes of the reclining chair that sat, as in a psychiatrist’s consulting room, to one side of the grand office. As he moved inside her, B thought of the coil that sat in Catherine’s womb like an ironic plastic echo of the DNA double-helix. He held Catherine’s hips as if he were piloting the Aston at high speed down the autobahn between Köln and Berlin.

(10♠) Neverland. ‘Blaufeld is in Florida,’ said Markham, looking at B carefully. ‘Down at the Cape, the disused launch site. We don’t think he’s interested in the physical possibilities of the gantries, but…’
‘I always wanted to be an astronaut,’ said B. ‘The NASA program drew a lot of astronauts from Navy fliers, like Sheppard. I met him once. A difficult man. He told me flatly that no Royal Navy Commander could ever make NASA grade.’
‘Space,’ Blaufeld had said, ‘is money.’

(J♠) Solar Transits. The strip lighting haloed from Bluffield’s large, pink, shaven skull as he looked up at B from under cerebrotonic brows.
‘You’ve never understood my work, James. God knows I’ve tried to explain. But I knew you’d come. Particularly here, of all places.’
B looked out of the office windows and saw the rusted, half-ruined gantries propped like a disused stage-set against the Florida sky. He could feel the .25 Beretta in its clam-shell holster beneath his left arm, but knew he would never use it now. The cool afternoon seemed to stretch forever, like the nearby glades.
‘How long have you been having these fugues, James?’ asked Bluffield.

(Q♠) Restitution. Karen Blunt sat astride the Yamaha, revving it slowly, her aviator shades reflecting the parking lot where B sat in the open-top Pontiac. One side of B’s face was turning coral in the intense afternoon sun, as he lived out a waking dream, his memory tapping out the algebra of his past. Karen’s dark hair cascaded onto her sturdy shoulders and chest, which were buttoned up in a grubby NASA flight suit scavenged from Kennedy. Here at Cocoa Beach, outside the bar where the astronauts once dreamed of flight, B and Karen pitched in the oceanic tides of time.

(K♠) Pinewood to Shepperton. In the attaché case B found his instructions from Markham, consisting of a sequence of defaced postcards posted to B by Bloveldt, from Cape Kennedy, Florida; the Alamagordo testing grounds, New Mexico; Utah Beach, Normandy, France; and Fort Knox, Kentucky. They read, in date order: ‘(1) Maiden flight of Concorde (2) Abbey Road (3) Rolling Thunder (4) Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong walks on moon (5) The Wild Bunch (6) Inauguration of President Richard Milhous Nixon (7) Medium Cool (8) d.o.b 20 March (9) Let It Bleed (10) The Stones in the Park (11) Tommy (12) The election of French President Georges Pompidou, succeeding General de Gaulle (13) Woodstock (14) Altamont Speedway (15) On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (16) The Atrocity Exhibition.’

..:: CONTINUED: >> Part 2 ::…

‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’

by Brian Baker

..:: CONTINUED from >> Part 1 ::…

♣♠♥♦

The Joker. The Joker in the pack is the card that, in some games, can replace (or substitute for, take the place of) any of the others. In this sense, the Joker is the empty sign.

♣♠♥♦

(A♥) Time Drill. ‘I don’t remember much about my father,’ replied B.
‘No, I’m sorry, you misunderstand,’ said Bluefield. ‘I meant Markham, Sir Richard Markham.’
‘Ah…’ B looked a little confused, then passed a thin, sunburnt hand across his eyes. Bluefield thought B looked exhausted after his ordeal in the Pontiac. Karen Blunt had finally rescued the half-blistered scarecrow figure in his ragged flying jacket, and at least the soft flying helmet had prevented too much sunstroke. Even now, after a week’s rest and medical attention, Bluefield could see the sores around B’s dirty neckline, beneath the leather collar of his jacket.
‘Are you really a doctor?’ asked B, looking up.
‘Of a special kind.’

(2♥) Unwritten histories. ‘You’ve been in Florida before?’ asked Karen.
B was surprised to hear her speak in light, rather melodious accentless English.
‘Yes, some time ago. I met a man by the name of Scaramanga.’
Blowfield smiled gently and looked down at his large, soft hands. Pink and scrubbed, they looked out of place on the dusty grey melamine table-top. They sat in a red vinyl horseshoe-shaped booth in the abandoned diner, three Coca-Colas in green bottles growing ever closer to blood heat in front of them.
‘I read that case,’ said Blowfield. ‘You weren’t quite yourself to begin with, I recall.’
B’s eyes flickered as he began to enter another fugue.
‘And who am I now, doctor?’

(3♥) Whisky and soda. The fugues seemed to take the place of any true dream sleep, but that afternoon B drew up a sun-lounger beneath an overgrown palm, and drifted to sleep by the side of the drained swimming pool. He dreamed of flight. Propeller blades flashed from his shoulders in the golden sunlight as he ascended into the Florida sky, below him the gantries and concrete aprons of Canaveral. A space-age archangel, clothed in light, he rose until he could see the curvature on the blue rim of the earth and the vault of the sky deepened to a crushing black. Turning on his back, in coronation armour flashing like a new star, he awaited blissful deliverance.

(4♥) Kuomintang. B sat in the wrecked Aston, its red leather trim burst like a rotten scarecrow. He toyed with the broken instrument stalk as he stared at the cracked dials and buckled binnacle, the Aston’s instruments frozen at the crash speed of a hundred and twenty. Feeling his cracked kneecap, B pressed down on the accelerator pedal and saw, through the frosted windshield, the roads of the International Settlement in Shanghai, where he sat on his father’s lap as they drove down empty boulevards in the grandiose Packard that his father bought to impress high-ranking Chinese officials.

(5♥) Viennese Benediction. ‘Who do you want to be, James?’ asked Blovelt.
‘Is it a matter of choice, doctor?’
‘For you, it’s a matter of necessity,’ said Blovelt, drawing aside the Styrofoam cup of coffee.
‘I think you may have the question wrong, if I may say so,’ said B. ‘It’s not a matter of who do I want to be, but why?’
Blovelt slowly traced the parabola of his pink skull with his left palm.
‘Have you seen her, again?’
B seemed, with an effort of will, to come to himself, and looked searchingly at Blovelt, certainty and horror at home in the grey eyes.
‘She’s out there on the gantries, doctor,’ said B. ‘She keeps escaping me, and I don’t have much time left. But I’ll find her.’

(6♥) X-1. In one of his increasingly rare periods of physical activity, B walked towards the Apollo gantry and heard the spluttering engine of the Cessna. Through the cockpit window, as the aircraft circled the gantry, B could make out the habitual white coat, red shirt and pink skull of Blyfield, the man who had murdered his wife, but who had now somehow brought her back to him. Blyfield was waving, pointing to the top of the gantry, and as B looked up, he saw a figure clambering among the rusted geometry of the access platforms. There she was. As B made his way to the stairwell on aching, sore legs, he heard the Cessna’s engine cut out, and watched as Blyfield wrestled the aircraft to a controlled crash landing on the concrete apron.

(7♥) Cobalt Blue. B and Blueweldt met in the mezzanine of the Monte Carlo convention centre, which presented itself as a provincial casino without the formal wear. The foyer was crowded with middle-aged men in light summer suits.
‘Dr. Blueweldt, I assume?’ asked Bond, peering at a name tag.
‘My dear James! How lovely to see you here!’ Blueweldt warmly clasped B’s hand. ‘How have you been?’
B looked searchingly into Blueweldt’s eyes for signs of dissimulation.
‘Have you been to any of the panels?’ asked Blueweldt ruefully. ‘Second rate, to a man. As you can see, they all look like middle-management executives. Appearances, in this case, are not deceptive.’
Blueweldt’s own light-blue three-piece blended him in perfectly with the crowd, but B’s worn leather jacket, cracked aviator glasses and khaki pants identified him either as a media don or a stray patient. B opened his conference pack and scanned the schedule of panels.
‘Nothing of interest next, doctor. Shall we step outside for a sundowner and a talk?’

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

(8♥) Yarrow Stalks. As he finally stepped onto the access platform near the top of the rusting Apollo gantry, legs shaking and a fugue beginning to come on, B saw his wife looking at him from a pool of silver sunlight. His wife pointed away from Canaveral, out into the light and air. He wondered if she was beckoning him to step out into the æther and join her. He edged further along the platform towards the open end, feeling the pull of the light airs that breathed past the gap. As he approached, time slowing, he realised what his wife was pointing towards – there he seemed to see, in the far distance, the light shining on the Everglades, a burnished mirror of the sun. He stared, the reflected light searing an image onto his retina. Turning, slowly turning, he realised that his wife had gone.

(9♥) Dilation of the Iris. Ordinarily, B only found motor vehicles interesting if he was behind the wheel, and despite the glamour of the grand prix circus that had now arrived in Monaco, this week was no exception. He had lost track of Blaufield some time before the end of the neurology conference, having become bored by the presentations of the delegates and unimpressed by the exhibits and displays. He had drifted off into strolling the streets of the city principality, unwilling to return to London and admit – perhaps to himself most of all – that he had lost the urgency of the hunt. He haunted the harbour, obsessed with the Mediterranean light playing upon the water and the large white motor yachts that now filled the marina. Time, here in this piece of France that was not France, seemed to stretch into a long, martini-filled afternoon.

(10♥) Emergency Procedures. Using his conference accreditation to flash the security staff, B made his way with the crowd onto the deck of a large motor launch and accepted a glass of champagne from a waiter. His worn leather jacket and aviator sunshades gave him just the right kind of down-at-heel glamour so that the crowd accepted him as an out-of-work American character actor or throwback racing driver, scion of a far less technical and bureaucratic age. Bored by the upscale small talk, he drifted to the stern rail of the launch and looked back across the marina. At his elbow, a young woman in matching aviator glasses coughed slightly, and said, ‘Thinking of jumping?’
He turned and looked at the self-possessed young woman in the pale blue silk dress who leaned into him, looking up, and saw his own rather ragged features reflected in her glasses. She was a head shorter than B, but held herself with a kind of rakish confidence that marked her difference from the crowd behind them.
‘No, of flying,’ he said.
‘You’re not a race driver, then?’
‘I can’t say I’m much of anything.’
‘You do, however, have a name?’
‘It’s James. James B.’

(J♥) Facts in the Case. They stood arm in arm as the fumes from the high-octane engines hazed the sidewalk, pressed as it was with spectators. Their ill-timed stroll had locked them into the very circus they had hoped to avoid. The falsetto roar of the factory-team racing cars blasting past the barriers stilled their conversation, and they communicated by way of near-hysterical mime, raised eyebrows, pointedly directed eye movement and clasps of the hand. Both wore smiles that the crush and the noise could not erase. B motioned with his head to cut past the end of a run-off area to walk away from the crowds and up into the town away from the circuit. As they disengaged themselves from the crowd and walked past a race marshall frantically waving a red flag, B was suddenly conscious of a blast of engine-hot air that lifted him bodily then slammed him back onto the asphalt. Time and space wheeled like a burst tyre. His ears full of the roar of the dying high-performance engine, he turned his head to the right and saw her propped up against the buckled armcove, smiling slightly at him and tenderly brushing away the drops of blood that spilled from a graze in her scalp onto the white cotton dress.

(Q♥) Left Luggage Office. ‘Come in,’ said Markham.
‘Thank you,’ replied Professor Blowfield with a slight bow. ‘You would like to discuss the case of James B?’
‘Yes. Although when he came back from Switzerland, he professed the desire to return to active service, his behaviour has been erratic to say the least. Here is a record of the surveillance that one of our top female operatives has been conducting.’
Blowfield took up the file that had been slid across the desk to him, and scanned down the list of B’s movements and activities. His eyebrows, beneath the dome of his naked forehead, raised in surprise once, then again. ‘Here?’
M smiled ruefully. ‘I thought that once B’s dalliance with a wife had been ended, he would come back to us. It seems he has, in fact, gone much further away. Is there anything else we can do?’
Blowfield winced, and dipped his head. Looking up at Markham, he said, ‘There’s one more thing we can try. After that…’

(K♥) Zoëtropic. B drove out to one of the abandoned small towns on the edge of the glades, looking for an airboat. He finally found one in the late afternoon, one that started after a little tinkering, and seated high in the driver’s chair, he powered up the caged propeller and swung the airboat out into the middle of the reed-choked creek. He throttled back and let the engine idle as the boat skimmed out into the glades proper, skirting the causeway he had driven on. Once out into flat water, he opened the airboat up, skimming at a speed that seemed literally unearthly, a dream of flight, airborne on water, airborne on light. He glanced to his left and saw his wife sitting beside him looking forward into the sun, dark hair streaming behind her, light cotton dress swept against her breasts and torso. He looked ahead, feeling the fugue coming on him again, and pointed the airboat towards the sun that dipped molten gold into the Everglades.

Diamonds ♦

New Worlds (6♦). Under Michael Moorcock’s editorship from 1964, New Worlds magazine became the home of the science fiction ‘New Wave’. The archetypal New Wave science fiction story was textually experimental and formally and/or generically self-conscious; alienated from the mores and conventions of contemporary mainstream culture (and mainstream ‘literary’ writing); and infused with a cynical, dystopian or counter-cultural politics, signified in the recurrent use of the scientific concept of entropy. Moorcock has written about New Worlds:

Style and technique was merely a means to an end – frequently a very moral means to some very moral ends. We were looking at the Vietnam War, Kennedy’s assassination, the computer revolution, the armaments industry, the manipulations of the media, the profound hypocrisies of the liberal bourgeoisie, the appalling condition of the majority of human beings on the planet, the useless currency of outmoded or inappropriate political language. But our response was scarcely a puritan one and neither did we recoil from experiencing our subject matter. We relished and embraced change, we celebrated the advent of new technologies and theories which opened up the multiverse for further exploration, which helped us understand our own behaviour and which provided us with some profound and spectacular metaphors! If the world was going to hell, we were determined to see how, but we were also determined to enjoy it while it was happening. Our curiosity was considerably greater than our uncertainty. [12]

The iterability of Ballard’s work makes him a central player in the ‘New Wave’ and in New Worlds.

Out There (8♦). James Bond is crucially implicated in the social and ideological practices of tourism and consumerism; but Bond is ‘at home’ anywhere, as in From Russia, With Love, where he is accepted in the Turkish gypsy caravanserai as a kind of ‘brother’ and is even accorded the honour of judging the outcome of a dispute between women. As Vivian Halloran notes in ‘Tropical Bond’, the issue of ‘passing’ for local recurs in Bond texts which consistently, she argues, ‘complicate Bond’s whiteness’; following Edward Said’s argument about Kipling’s Kim in Culture and Imperialism, I would like to stress here that Bond can ‘pass’, even as a non-white other, where the ethnically troubling ‘villain’ (from Dr No onwards) most assuredly cannot. [13] Ballard’s protagonists are alienated everywhere, even ‘at home’; the fragmentation of the Traven/ Talbot/ Tallis figure is of a different order to the disguises that Bond affects, under which the ‘real’ James Bond still exists. In The Atrocity Exhibition, there is no such foundational unitary subjectivity. Where the Ballardian protagonist travels to different parts of the world, he only ‘passes’ in that the indigenous people recognise such a radical psychological dislocation in him that he is not really there at all.

Pleasure Periphery (7♦). Ballard and Fleming share an interest in what Michael Denning calls the ‘pleasure periphery’, ‘the tourist belt surrounding the industrialized world’: the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, or certain parts of East Asia. The centrality of tourism and travel to Bond texts is echoed in such Ballard texts as ‘Having a Wonderful Time’ (1978) or, more importantly, Cocaine Nights (1996). Denning writes, after quoting from a scene in Fleming’s From Russia, With Love:

Here we find the epitome of the tourist experience: the moment of relaxed visual contemplation from above, leaning on the balustrade; the aesthetic reduction of a social entity, the city, to a natural object, coterminous with the waves of the sea; the calculations of the tourist’s economy, exchanging physical discomfort for a more “authentic” view; and the satisfaction of having made the ‘right’ exchange, having “got” the experience, possessed the “view”. [14]

It is no coincidence, argues Denning, that the Bond narratives find their location in the ‘pleasure periphery’: Fleming’s texts articulate the ‘tourist gaze’ (analysed by John Urry), the mobile gaze of consumption embodied by jet-age travellers to ‘exotic’ tourist destinations. [15] In Ballard’s fictions, the ‘pleasure periphery’ is the location for what Andrzej Gasiorek diagnoses as ‘a world dominated not by work but by leisure’, although in Kingdom Come (2007) and elsewhere, the ‘pleasure periphery’ has now been imported to the centre. [16]

Queens and Kings (3♦). In ‘Confetti Royale’/‘The Beach Murders’, Quimby, who is identified several times as the ‘dealer’ of the deck of cards that ‘he set out […] on the balcony table’, both plays a card game alone (with which he ‘amused himself in his hideaway’) and, by extension, with the other characters in the story. [17] Each card has two aspects: the number or face upon it (denoting its value), and on the reverse or back, a picture of the bullfighter Cordobès, whose image is thereby repeated fifty-two times across the table, another figure of iteration. There are no easy homologies between Queen, King and Jack and the characters in ‘Confetti Royale’, however (even though there is a Princess): what is important is the role of the dealer, and the game itself. The game as metaphor for espionage informs this short story as it has the spy genre since Kipling’s Kim (1901) and the colonial ‘Great Game’ played by Britain and Russia for domination of the Indian subcontinent. Kim’s fluid and liminal subjectivity is an index of the instability of the spy-subject at the centre of espionage narrative: the secret agent becomes the ‘double agent’. [18]

Illustration by Michael Foreman for the original Doubleday edition of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Reified Subjects (4♦). David Punter, in The Hidden Script, identifies the centrality of subjectivity to Ballard’s concerns in his fiction. Punter writes:

The long tradition of enclosed and unitary subjectivity comes to mean less and less to him as he explores the ways in which person [sic] is increasingly controlled by landscape and machine, increasingly becomes a point of intersection for overloaded scripts and processes which have effectively concealed their distant origins from human agency. [19]

Punter’s assessment of Ballard’s critique of subjectivity can be exemplified most clearly in The Atrocity Exhibition, where the Traven/Tallis/Talbot figure, whose ‘breakdown’ is materialised in the fragmented form of the text and in the iterated (‘obsessional’) motifs, is a liminal or fractured subject. Ballard’s critique of contemporary life is articulated largely through his destablisation of unitary subjectivity, a fragmentation which leads to the release of ‘unconscious’ forces and desires which remain obscure (as conscious ‘motivation’) to the subject that enacts them. Figures for the fragmented or replicated subject can be found in ‘Confetti Royale’, for instance, in the repeated image of the bullfighter Cordobès on the backs of the cards, or in the first paragraph, where Princess Manon sees herself in the mirrors: ‘In the triptych of mirrors above the dressing table she gazed at the endless replicas of herself’. [20] Ballardian subjects are rarely agents in their own narratives; agency is displaced on to the ‘provocateur’ antagonist, Vaughan or Wilder Penrose, the third point in the Ballardian triangulation.

Secret Agent (5♦). Fleming’s Bond, by way of contrast with the Ballardian subject, seems all agency, however ‘secret’. Bond, though, is acted upon in the death of his wife in OHMSS, and is subjected to a beating of his genitals, administered by Le Chiffre, in Casino Royale. There are limits to Bond’s agency. Also in Casino Royale, Bond is at first ‘defeated’ by Le Chiffre and the cards and is only saved in his mission by the offer of ‘Marshall aid’ (American finance) by the CIA operative Felix Leiter. His rescue from Le Chiffre is also ex machina, as a Smersh agent enters and kills Le Chiffre and his crew, only to leave Bond alive as he has no orders to kill the British agent. The fantasy of total agency represented by the figure of Bond, an expression of Cold War and decolonisation-era anxieties about Britain’s geopolitical role and influence, is destabilised by the texts themselves.

The Beach Murders (2♦). At the missing centre of ‘Confetti Royale’, the 1966 short story that was renamed ‘The Beach Murders’, is Quimby, the ‘absconded cipher chief’ from the US State department, who is the ‘dealer’ of the pack of cards that feature throughout the narrative. Quimby is an encoder, the master of this textual game, though he himself remains an enigma (his motivations obscure even to himself: ‘what these obsessives in Moscow and Washington failed to realize was that for once he might have no motive at all’). [21] The retitling of the story – the text becoming its own double – emphasises the murders rather than the Cold War espionage milieu, placing the enigma ‘who killed?’ at the heart of the generic recoding: the text becomes a detective fiction rather than a spy fiction. As the ‘Introduction’ to the text suggests, the form of the story is an invitation to the reader to decode the narrative, recombine the 26 alphabeticized paragraphs and narrative events to resolve the text by identifying the murderer(s). No such resolution can take place. Of the murders, the following can be stated:
1. the Russian agent Kovorski murders the Romanoff Princess Manon (with certainty: her death is described).
2. the ‘American limbo dancer’ Lydia is killed (accidentally) by a bomb planted in the CIA agent Statler’s Mercedes by Kovorski (paragraph ends at the point at which she presses the starter and sets off the device)
3. Quimby kills the Russian agent Raissa (less certain, but probable)
4. Kovorski is shot and killed by an unknown assailant
5. Statler is killed in an unknown manner by an unknown assailant
6. Quimby and Sir Giles are left alive at the end of the narrative (probable, because there is no narrative of their deaths)

Of the murders, then, one is known; two are probably ascribable; two remain mysteries. The fate of two characters, including Quimby the ‘dealer’, in unknown. The recombinatory game ‘fails’ because there is, and can be, no solution to this criminal narrative. We might suspect that Quimby, as the ‘dealer’, is responsible, but the murderer(s) might also include Sir Giles or other (unknown) figures. The ‘Introduction’ also suggests that the textual game of deduction is doubled: the ‘solution’ to the ‘mystery of the Beach Murders’ requires a ‘key’, perhaps the very phrase that Lydia lifts from Kovorski’s Travel-Riter ink ribbon. As the text foregrounds from the very beginning, ‘any number of solutions is possible, and a final answer to the mystery […] lies forever hidden.’ [22]

Upwardly Mobile (10♦). James Bond is a curiously classless figure, despite the over-coded aristocratic connoisseurship purveyed by the Roger Moore film incarnation. In the film of Casino Royale, Bond and Vesper Lynd travel by high-speed train to Montenegro (the re-location of the casino). After dinner, the two swap character assessments/ character assassinations. After Bond essays a rather trite analysis of an anxious, beautiful-but-brainy femininity, Lynd reverses the trick: Bond is an orphan, the product of a public school and Oxford education (where he never ‘fitted in’), and MI6 via the SAS. Lynd then asks how his lamb was for dinner; ‘Skewered,’ says Bond. ‘One sympathises.’ Bond may be embarrassed by the ease in which Lynd is able to ‘skewer’ his character, but its detail signifies how dis-located he is in terms of social structures: he is an outsider, ‘maladjusted’, a status which in fact generates his mobility as a secret agent. Bond’s popularity can partly be read as a reflection of the aspirational, economically mobile, consumption-oriented imperatives of the British middle class in the 1960s and afterwards – the period of the Bond film phenomenon. Ballard’s own life history echoes Bond’s: not an orphan, but with distanced parents and Chinese servants in loco parentis; public school in England post-war (the Leys School in Cambridge), then Cambridge University; a short spell in the RAF, then marriage and life as a professional writer. Ballard’s connection to, and insight into, the mores and aspirations of the affluent British middle class is clear throughout his writings. Ballard is, in some ways, as exemplary a twentieth-century Englishman as is Bond, even though both are ‘outsiders’.

Vesper Lynd (Q♦). The second point of the Ballardian narrative triangulation, the wife or lover, is often unfaithful or even lost to the protagonist. Even Crash’s Catherine Ballard is no femme fatale, however; sexual infidelity is less a matter of betrayal than of a mirror-image of the protagonist’s own personal trajectory of (self)alienation and (self)discovery. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, drawing upon the critical work of Rene Girard in her text Between Men, writes of an ‘erotic triangle’ in texts, where the (unspoken) relationship between two rival males predominates over, and regulates, the relationship each has with the ‘third’ point of the triangle, the female. The female thus becomes a counter or marker in a system of exchange: a medium or locus of repressed male desire. [23] Ballard’s triangulations are a geometry of homosociality and homoeroticism, made most explicit in Crash, but present everywhere.

War Fever (J♦). The title of Ballard’s last short story collection, ‘war fever’ symbolises the underlying pathology at work during the Twentieth century: an implication of desire, destruction and death.

X = ? (A♦). Ballard’s texts tend to work particularly through the recognition of the component. This is most evident in The Atrocity Exhibition, where each chapter is itself a ‘condensed novel’ and each titled paragraph thereby a ‘chapter’. Here, the architectural/ iterative imperatives of the Ballardian text are at their fullest extent. Brian McHale, in Postmodernist Fiction, suggests that ‘a pattern of repetition-with-variation’ is a central compositional motif in Ballard’s 1960s disaster fiction, and goes on to propose that ‘a fixed repertoire of modules, many of them repeated from the earlier apocalyptic novels, are differently recombined and manipulated from story to story’. ‘All this suggests,’ argues McHale, ‘the game-like permutation of a fixed repertoire of motifs – “art in a closed field”’. [24] Ballard’s ‘modular’ texts are therefore devices to work another iteration on the Ballardian algebra, the triangulation of protagonist, wife and provocateur/antagonist. Where P is the protagonist, A is alienation, V is the provocateur, W is the wife, and T is time:

X (Transcendence, Escape, Death) = ((P/A x V) +/- W) –T

It is not the aesthetic of the fragment that is central to the Ballardian text; it is the algebra of the iterative component or module.

You Know My Name (9♦). The title song of the 2006 Casino Royale was written by Chris Cornell and David Arnold, and performed by Cornell. Its rock dynamics give the title sequence a kinetic edge, and is one of the more memorable of recent times. Its title and refrain, ‘You Know My Name’, signifies that the Bondian imaginary, like the Ballardian, is recognisable without (necessarily) being explicitly named.

Zones of Transit (K♦). The Ballardian protagonist is often in movement, physically and metaphysically; between one place and another, between one state and another. Cast in the role of detective in Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and Kingdom Come, what is revealed by the protagonist’s investigations is of less importance than the progressive shedding of the layers of repression, self-delusion or unknowingness that constitute the protagonist’s world-view, compromised by the experiences the investigation leads him into. Just as there is no solution to ‘The Beach Murders’, only a game to be played, Ballard’s texts remain unresolved, in transit.

♣♠♥♦

The Joker. There are two jokers in the pack; like Gemini, twins, red and black. They do not conform to one of the four suits, but take their colours. They are part of the pack but not part of it, always present but unused in many card games. The extra two cards, a kind of supplement, disrupt the seductive numerology of 13 that otherwise attends the ‘French deck’ of cards: 52 cards, in 4 suits, 13 to a suit; 13 x 2 = 26, the letters in the alphabet; 13 x 4 = 52, the number of weeks in a year; 13 is the number of disciples present at the Last Supper, the unluckiest of numbers. The extra two cards, the jokers, the twins, indicate that all this significance is but a game. The jokers are the fly in the ointment, the empty sign, the absent code.

♣♠♥♦

Notes

[1] Dan Lockwood, ‘J.G. Ballard and the Architectures of Control’, Ballardian: The World of J.G. Ballard, 3 January 2008 . Accessed 18 February 2008.
[2] ‘Obeying the surrealist formula’: Iain Sinclair & Hermione Lee on Ballard’, Ballardian: The World of J.G. Ballard, transcription of discussion between Mark Lawson, Hermione Lee and Iain Sinclair on Front Row, broadcast BBC Radio 4 5 February 2008 . Accessed 18 February 2008.
[3] David Pringle, Earth is the Alien Planet: J.G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare (San Bernadino CA; The Borgo Press), p.16.
[4] Simon Sellars, ‘My name is Maitland, Donald Maitland’, Ballardian: The World of J.G. Ballard, 9 February 2008 . Accessed 19 February 2008.
[5] Ken Cooper, ‘“Zero Pays the House”: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette’, Contemporary Literature 33:3 (Fall 1992), 528-544 (p.539).
[6] J.G. Ballard, ‘The Index’, The Complete Short Stories (London: Flamingo, 2001), pp.940-945; ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.849-855; ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.1101-1104.
[7] J.G. Ballard, ‘A Question of Re-Entry’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.435-458 (p.453).
[8] J.G. Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.1037-1060 (p.1049).
[9] David Punter, Modernity (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), p.137.
[10] J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.589-604 (p.595).
[11] Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, ‘Translator’s Foreword’ to Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge MA and London: Belknap Press, 1999), pp.ix-xiv (p.xi).
[12] Michael Moorcock, ‘Introduction’ to The New Nature of the Catastrophe, Moorcock and Langdon Jones, eds. (1993) (London: Orion, 1997), pp. viii-ix.
[13] Vivian Halloran, ‘Tropical Bond’. Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007, Edward P. Comentale, Stephen Watt and Skip Willman, eds. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 158-177 (p.165).
[14] Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and ideology in the British spy thriller (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 105; p.104.
[15] John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2nd edition (London: Sage, 2002).
[16] Andrzej Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p.26.
[17] Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, p.663.
[18] See Brian Baker, Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000 (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), chapter 2.
[19] David Punter, The Hidden Script (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p.9.
[20] Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, p.663.
[21] J.G. Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.663-668 (p.664).
[22] Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, p.663.
[23] I have myself written on this in relation to Crash: Brian Baker, ‘The Resurrection of Desire: J.G. Ballard’s Crash as a Transgressive Text’, Foundation 80 (November 2000), pp.84-96.
[24] Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), p.69; p.70.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ The ‘DNA of the Present’ in the Fossil Record of the Cold War Through the Imagery of JG Ballard, Related Sources and Documents in Various Media
+ ‘My name is Maitland, Donald Maitland’

From the files of Dr Ricardo Battista’s assistant, School of Specialization in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Melbourne, Australia.

“As Michael Jackson reached middle age, the skin of both his cheeks and neck tended to sag from failure of the supporting structures. His naso-labial folds deepened, and the soft tissues along his jaw fell forward. His jowls tended to increase. In profile the creases of his neck lengthened and the chin-neck contour lost its youthful outline and became convex.

The eminent plastic surgeon Ricardo Battista has remarked that one of the great misfortunes of the cosmetic surgeon is that he only has the technical skill, ability and understanding to correct this situation by surgical means. However, as long as people are prepared to pay fees for this treatment the necessary operation will be performed. Incisions made across the neck with the object of removing redundant tissue should be avoided. These scars tend to be unduly prominent and may prove to be the subject of litigation. In the case of Michael Jackson the incision was designed to be almost completely obscured by his hair and ears.

Surgical Procedure: an incision was made in Michael Jackson’s temple running downward and backward to the apex of his ear. From here a crease ran toward his lobule in front of the ear, and the incision followed this crease around the lower margin of the lobule to a point slightly above the level of the tragus. From there, at an obtuse angle, it was carried backward and downward within the hairy margin of the scalp.

The edges of the incision were then undermined. First with a knife and then with a pair of scissors, Jackson’s skin was lifted forward to the line of his jaw. The subcutaneous fatty tissue was scraped away with the knife. Large portions of connective tissue cling to the creases formed by frown lines, and some elements of these were retained in order to preserve the facial personality of the King of the Pop. At two places the skin was pegged down firmly. The first was to the scalp at the top of his ear, the second was behind the ear to the scalp over the mastoid process. The first step was to put a strong suture in the correct position between the cheek flap anterior to the first point, and a second strong suture to the neck flap behind the ear. The redundant tissue was then cut away and the skin overlap removed with a pair of scissors.

At this point the ear was moved forward toward the chin, and the wound was then closed with interrupted sutures. It did not matter how strong the stitches were behind the ears because that part of the King of Pop’s scarline was invisible in normal conditions.

Complications: haematoma formation is a dangerous sequela of this operation, and careful drainage with polythene tubing was carried out. In spite of these precautions blood still collected, but this blood was evacuated within 48 hours of the operation. It was not allowed to organize. In the early stages the skin around the area that had been undermined was insensitive, and it was not difficult to milk any collection of fluid backward to the point of drainage.

Scarring was hypertrophic at the points where tension was greatest: that is, in the temple and the region behind the ear, but fortunately these were covered by the King of Pop’s hair. The small fine sutures which were not responsible for tension were removed at 4 days, and the strong sutures removed at the tenth day. The patient was then allowed to have a shampoo to remove the blood from his hair. All scarlines are expected to fade, and by the end of three weeks the patient was back in social circulation.

At a subsequent operation after this successful face lift, Michael Jackson’s forehead wrinkles were removed. An incision was placed in the hairline and the skin lifted forward and upward from the temporal bone. The skin was then undermined and the excess tissue removed. The immediate result was good, but as a result of normal forehead movements relapse may occur unduly early after the operation. To remove the central frown line, the superciliary muscle was paralysed by cutting the branches of the seventh nerve passing centrally to it. A small knife-blade was inserted from the upper eyelid upward for 3 cm and then pressed down to the bone. External scars on the forehead often persist, and even in the best hands results are not always reliable. It was explained to Michael Jackson where the scars would lie, and the object of the intervention.”

Based on ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’, by J.G. Ballard.

“I feel a tremendous rapport with pop artists and in a lot of my fiction I’ve tried to produce something akin to pop art. For instance, I’ve just published a piece in New Worlds called ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’, in which I’ve taken the text of a classic description of a plastic surgery operation, a facelift, and where the original says “the patient”, I’ve inserted “Princess Margaret”. So I’ve done precisely what the pop painters did, using images from everyday life — Coca-Cola bottles, Marilyn Monroe — and manipulated them. The great thing about pop painters is their honesty. They’ve turned their backs on the traditional subject matter of the fine arts — which had hardly changed since the Renaissance — and looked at their own environment and decided: yes, the shine on domestic hardware, like the refrigerator or the washing machine, the particular gleam on the mouldings of a cabinet, the moulding of doorhandles, are of importance to people, because these are the visual landscapes of people’s lives, and if we’re going to be honest we’re going to use reality material instead of fiction. I want to do the same.”

‘Sci-fi Seer’, interview with J.G. Ballard, Penthouse Magazine, 1970, Vol. 5 No. 5 (pp. 26-30).

“The relationship between the famous and the public who sustain them is governed by a striking paradox. Infinitely remote, the great stars of politics, film and entertainment move across an electric terrain of limousines, bodyguards and private helicopters. At the same time, the zoom lens and the interview camera bring them so near to us that we know their faces and their smallest gestures more intimately than those of our friends.

Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures seem to offer us. How did Garbo brush her teeth, shave her armpits, probe a worry-line? The most intimate details of their lives seem to lie beyond an already open bathroom door that our imaginations can easily push aside. Caught in the glare of our relentless fascination, they can do nothing to stop us exploring every blocked pore and hesitant glance, imagining ourselves their lovers and confidantes. In our minds we can assign them any roles we choose, submit them to any passion or humiliation. And as they age, we can remodel their features to sustain our deathless dream of them.

In a TV interview a few years ago, the wife of a famous Beverly Hills plastic surgeon revealed that throughout their marriage her husband had continually re-styled her face and body, pointing a breast here, tucking in a nostril there. She seemed supremely confident of her attractions. But as she said: ‘He will never leave me, because he can always change me.’

Something of the same anatomizing fascination can be seen in [this] present piece… which also show[s], I hope, the reductive drive of the scientific text as it moves on its collision course with the most obsessive pornography. What seems so strange is that these neutral accounts of operating procedures taken from a textbook of plastic surgery can be radically transformed by the simple substitution of the anonymous ‘patient’ with the name of a public figure, as if the literature and conduct of science constitute a vast dormant pornography waiting to be woken by the magic of fame.”

Annotations: “Princess Margaret’s Face Lift”, J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), RE/Search edition, 1990.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Jimmy Ballard’s Hospital Review
+ Chariot of Fire: Preliminary Analysis & Damage Reconstruction of the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales

Cover scan via Moorcock’s Miscellany.

David Pringle reports that the fantasy and SF illustrator, James Cawthorn, has died. Cawthorn was a fixture of the New Worlds era, and had a strong link to Ballard’s work. He illustrated Ballard’s ‘Equinox’ for NW #142 (above), and also wrote in 1967 what is surely the very first JGB pastiche, a fragment entitled ‘Ballard of a Whaler’, for New Worlds #170. I’ve reproduced the piece below, in a move that is bound to enrage further the killjoys who have attacked this site for running the occasional pastiche in the past. But as ‘Ballard of a Whaler’ demonstrates, the Ballard pastiche actually has a long and noble history.

For more on Cawthorn and his work with New Worlds and Savoy Books, see John Coulthart’s commemorative post.

BALLARD OF A WHALER
by ‘J. Cawthorn’

Each morning Konrad would go down to the edge of the moraine and gaze across at the skinners stripping the blubber from the whales. Architectural rather than organic, the white bones of the stranded monsters traced the structural relationships of underlying strata with the world above the ice, counterpointing in their curved sequence the prismatic and crystalline complexity of the glaciers, embodying the forms of all sequential aspects of duration. Engrossed by their fundamental geomorphic resonance with the rib-cage of Ulrica Ulsenn, he did not immediately notice the towering figure of Urquart the whale-hunter by his side. The harpooner’s eyes were sombre and brooding and when he spun his eighteen-foot lance end-over-end in a characteristic gesture and drove it splinteringly into the ice, he betrayed by no flicker of a muscle that he had impaled his left foot.

New Worlds #170, 1967.

In true Ballardian fashion, there is more than a touch of megalomania to him and it becomes clear that HRH has his own plans for world domination. Believing himself to be telepathic and claiming the existence of extraterrestrials, he forms a religion called the Perfect Light Movement and is compared to Jesus Christ by André Malraux, eventually using his growing power and influence to sieze the UN where he attempts to spark off world war against the US and the USSR. Eventually he is incarcerated on the Isle of Wight where it’s presumed he wrote his life story.

The story’s conceit is that it is typeset like an index, apparently the only surviving fragment of HRH’s “unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography”, and all of the plot details above, plus much, much more, can be gleaned from the brief fragments in the index itself. It’s a format that allows for some humourous moments, as in this entry, in which we discover that Hitler impressed and then disappointed HRH within the space of two pages, an arc of disillusionment that reflects the greatest schism of the 20th century yet comically reduces it to just one line:

Hitler, Adolf, invites HRH to Berchtesgaden, 166; divulges Russia invasion plans, 172; impresses HRH, 179; disappoints HRH, 181

Eventually we come to learn that the story, despite the form of the piece, actually unfolds in a linear fashion from “A” (including Avignon, HRH’s birthplace) to “Z”. In the entries for “U”, “V” and “W”, for example, HRH’s downfall is revealed:

United Nations Assembly, seized by Perfect Light Movement, 695 – 9; HRH addresses, 696; HRH calls for world war against United States and USSR, 698
Versailles, Perfect Light Movement attempts to purchase, 621
Vogue (magazine), 356
Westminster Abbey, arrest of HRH by Special Branch, 704
Wight, Isle of, incarceration of HRH, 712 – 69
Windsor, House of, HRH challenges legitimacy of, 588

While the very last entry is revealed to be that of the indexer himself:

Zielinski, Bronislaw, suggests autobiography to HRH, 742; commissioned to prepare index, 748; warns of suppression threats, 752; disappears, 761

Thus in one fell metaphysical stroke the indexer actually indexes himself out of existence, causing the editor to speculate, “Perhaps the entire compilation is nothing more than a figment of the over-wrought imagination of some deranged lexicographer”.

But what’s really going on in this story? Did HRH really play a part in changing the course of human affairs, with all facets of his existence covered up to the general public? Is this index then a giant conspiracy of which now have only vague, shadowy knowledge? As the editor again speculates, “A substantial mystery still remains. Is it conceivable that all traces of his activities could be erased from our records of the period? Is the suppressed autobiography itself a disguised roman a clef in which the fictional hero exposes the secret identities of his historical contemporaries?” Or has HRH somehow collaged himself into world affairs, rewriting postwar history with himself in a starring role? The latter would then beg the question: is Woody Allen a JGB fan? For by now you must have detected the obvious similarities to Allen’s film Zelig, made six years after this story was published.

Funnily enough, “The Index”, for all its brilliance, seems to be an extension of ideas first aired in two earlier, markedly less successful Ballard shorts: “Minus One” (1963), in which the existence of an asylum patient is inferred (and then covered up) from a few scraps of medical papers, and “Now: Zero” (1959), in which the reader, like the “deranged lexicographer” in “The Index”, obliterates himself via the act of participation. I guess this only goes to show that Ballard never wastes an idea, or that he really is writing the same story over and over (the latter is not a criticism in my view, I must add).

“The Index” is also in a direct continuum with The Atrocity Exhibition, whose central character, T-, represents all sides of the equation. On the one hand, T-, like the reader of “The Index”, feels as though he is amidst a vast conspiracy, the conspiracy of existence itself. But T-, driven mad by the new communications landscape fracturing the late 1960s, forms a strategy, as HRH possibly did, cutting and pasting the cultural and political events of the late 1960s into a bricolaged version of reality playing inside the cinema of his mind — with himself in the lead role. Eventually, T-, like HRH, is indexed into his own storyline, even appearing in one chapter as a fragmented, diffuse entity, aligned to Christ, again like HRH:

Readers will recall that the little evidence collected seemed to point to the strange and confusing figure of an unidentified Air Force pilot whose body was washed ashore on a beach near Dieppe three months later. Other traces of his ‘mortal remains’ were found in a number of unexpected places: in a footnote to a paper on some unusual aspects of schizophrenia published thirty years earlier in a since defunct psychiatric journal; in the pilot for an unpurchased TV thriller, ‘Lieutenant 70’; and on the record labels of a pop singer known as The Him — to instance only a few. Whether in fact this man was a returning astronaut suffering from amnesia, the figment of an ill-organized advertising campaign, or, as some have suggested, the second coming of Christ, is anyone’s guess.

Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition.

Thus it’s not completely accurate to say that Ballard abandoned the methodology of Atrocity in the 1970s, as many commentators do. As “The Index” shows, his experimental bent was still evident, and as always aligned to a strong storyline. I have read a few pastiches of Atrocity and the importance of plot is something that their writers do not fully grasp for the most part: it’s not enough to pay homage to JGB by simply cutting up text and fiddling with form and structure. Underpinning Ballard, always, is the bones of a strong plot that can be summarised in a linear synopsis and “The Index” (and Atrocity) is no exception. But this sparse framework also makes the work a “readerly” text, in which inference allows the reader to substantially flesh out the bones. In this respect, I see “The Index” as the logical, extreme outcome of the experiment began by Atrocity, in which the text is pared back as far as possible without sacrificing narrative legibility.

This is especially apparent in light of comments Ballard made in a 1983 interview:

In a sense, I’m assembling the materials of an autopsy, and I’m treating reality — the reality we inhabit — almost as if it were a cadaver… the contents of a special kind of inquisition. We have these objects here — what are they?

If you move into a house that hasn’t been properly cleaned up, you find these strange unrelated items: a pen, a hair clip, a copy of Auden’s poems, and without even thinking you begin to assemble from these materials some sort of hypothesis about the nature of life that was lived in this house, or the nature of people who’ve left this debris on the beach after they’ve vanished in a plane crash or what have you.

I assemble materials and I draw from them. I treat the reality we inhabit as if it were a fiction — I treat the whole of existence as if it were a huge invention.… this huge network of ciphers, and encoded instructions — perhaps — that surround us in reality.

“Interview by Graeme Revell”. RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard

Now, having reflected on one of my favourite Ballard stories, I am therefore naturally delighted to report that Lucy Vickery in The Spectator recently ran a competition to “submit a revealing fragment from an index which is all that remains of the autobiography of someone who has privileged access to the great and good”.

Lucy writes:

To give you an idea of what I was after, here are a couple of snippets from J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Index’, a story implied through an index, which is the only surviving part of the unpublished autobiography of Henry Rhodes Hamilton: ‘Churchill, Winston, conversations with HRH, 221; at Chequers with HRH, 235; spinal tap performed by HRH, 247; at Yalta with HRH, 298; ‘iron curtain’ speech, Fulton, Missouri, suggested by HRH, 312; attacks HRH in Commons debate, 367’.

But as she admits this was a pretty tough ask and subsequently “entries were thin on the ground”. However, Lucy did manage to unearth four winners who received £30 each, with a “bonus fiver” going to G.M. Davis. I’ve run two Ballard-inspired competitions here at ballardian.com, and I’m insanely jealous I didn’t think of this for the third — it’s a brilliant idea.

Reproduced below is G.M. Davis’s entry (which includes an entry for Will Self’s “snoring”), but special mention must also go to Basil Ransome-Davies, whose submission featured this hilarious detail: “Eagleton, Terence. Asks me to smooth his way with the Vatican, 246″.

G.M. DAVIS:

Mandela, Nelson, surprisingly short when you meet him, 526; political errors of, 828
Miners’ strike, author’s resolution of, 917–8
Mosley, Max, ‘kindred spirit’, 42; ‘Nazi pervert’, 1620
Nabokov, Vladimir, aesthetic fallacies of, 301
New Statesman, author’s rejection of editorship, 559; sales slump, 560
Portillo, Michael, deaf to good counsel, 338
Price, Katie, seeks author’s advice on mammary enlargement/reduction, 844
Prince Charles, personal hygiene problem, 208; bares soul, 443
Principia Mathematica, discussion of with Allen Ginsberg, 71; author’s refutation of, 113
Quantum theory, author’s contribution to, 12, 19, 47, 77, 101–114, 298–306
Rice, Condoleezza, ‘not so black as she’s painted’, 866; good in bed, 992–4
Rooney, Wayne, spotted by author as four-year-old, 1083; ingratitude, 1119
Sarkozy, Nicholas, requests author’s help in drafting European constitution, 1443
Scorsese, dissuaded from abandoning cinema, 636; as drug-crazed egomaniac, 665
Scotland, faulty central heating at Balmoral, 460; as failed state, 700
Self, Will, snoring of, 1757

The rest of the entries can be found at The Spectator.

“Television crime series…were filled with their huge carapaces, swerving in and out of alleys, reversing in a howl of burning rubber. Watched with the sound down, episodes of Starsky and Hutch resembled instructional films on valet parking”.

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J.G. Ballard, 2005
———————–

Announcing the winner of our J.G. Ballard Pastiche competition, sponsored by the kind people at Harper Collins.

THE PREMISE
We know that as a struggling writer, J.G. Ballard originally moved to Shepperton to be near the famous movie studios, in the hope he’d be able to snare some scriptwriting work. Now picture a parallel world where Jim Ballard achieved that goal, becoming so successful that he relocated to Hollywood, where he became much in demand.

THE TASK
Write an imaginary 500-word extract from an imagined novelisation of Starsky and Hutch (either the original TV series or the recent movie)…as written by J.G. Ballard.

THE PRIZE
A copy of Ballard’s new novel, Kingdom Come, supplied by Harper Collins.

THE JUDGE
Lyle Hopwood, the reigning JGB Pastiche Champion. Lyle, of course, was the winner of Interzone magazine’s 1993 competition for “the best short extract from an imaginary novelization of the science-fiction movie Alien as it might have been written by leading British novelist J.G. Ballard”.

To help you on your way, we’ve reproduced Lyle’s winning story in — what else — the pastiche section. Sorry, Fredric.

THE CLUES
1) In his 2005 feature on CSI, Ballard wrote: “Television crime series…were filled with their huge carapaces, swerving in and out of alleys, reversing in a howl of burning rubber. Watched with the sound down, episodes of Starsky and Hutch resembled instructional films on valet parking”.

2) In his interview with this site Iain Sinclair declares, “Ballard’s a very easy writer to pastiche badly. I think he’s there with someone like Graham Greene as a stylist. There used to be a New Statesman competition to parody Greene’s style, and Greene came second when he entered”.

And the winner, as judged by Lyle Hopwood, is Steven Craig Hickman, whose entry is below. A copy of J.G. Ballard’s latest novel, Kingdom Come, courtesy of Harper Collins, will be winging its way to Steven. Runner up was Rocky Morrow, whose entry can also be found below. Special mention must be made of Rick McGrath’s entry, the movie poster at the start of this page: while it didn’t meet the requirements of the competition (sorry, we wanted text only), it’s certainly good enough to reproduce.

Many thanks to all who entered, and to Lyle Hopwood and Harper Collins, of course. Lyle’s comments on the top two entries follow Steven and Rocky’s ‘novelisations’.

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STARSKY & HUTCH: NOVELISATION BY J.G. BALLARD
Winner: Steven Craig Hickman

At dusk Starsky was still sitting in the cockpit of the Grand Torino like the pilot of an alien spacecraft. Unconcerned by the shifting tide of traffic advancing toward him across the blackened beach of this urban nightmare, he watched the luminous sun melt into the metalloid dreams of Bay City.

Hutch walked out of the shadows of the glass city like a new Apollo of the marketplace, flames sparking from his spectral torso as if the sun in one last desperate attempt to attain eternity had suddenly found in this strange flesh the perfected incarnation of a delirious thought.

Starsky held the key in his hand as if it were a secret accomplice to the dark mysteries of an arcane religion. He prepared himself for a final departure, one that would ennoble both himself and his partner into the greater mysteries of Time. The sparking flesh of Hutch moved steadily toward him as the neon dolphins flew above chromium air.

The last vestiges of the sun’’s decay flashed on the horizon like an angel of the apocalypse, as if to awaken the sleeping minds of all the lost souls before the great and terrible conflagration breaks over the glass sea of Time. In the finale every element of the universe, however abandoned, would take its place on this terminal stage in front of him.

As he watched Hutch suddenly rise into the air on luminous wings, he was reminded of all those ancient astronauts that still flamed above in their dead cages of steel like derelict gods thrown into the emptiness of this vast wasteland. He started the car and began moving toward his old partner in crime, the winged god of a new earth. He would embrace this flaming god of the sun one last time in a torsion beyond time.

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LYLE’S COMMENTS: I particularly liked the length (short) of Steven’s story, the sheer compactness of similies per line and the impression it gave of absolute, almost mechanised intensity. It was, in more than one sense of the phrase, concentration city. And anything that ends with a sentence like that deserves a prize.
————————————————————————————————–

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STARSKY & HUTCH: NOVELISATION BY J.G. BALLARD
Runner-up: Rocky Morrow

Starsky has begun to piece his world together. It has been three weeks since a traumatic cerebral injury rendered Detective Starsky an amnesiac. This report intends to inform the department head, Captain Harold Dobey, and his superiors of my partner’s present condition, a revolutionary cure suggested by a renegade mental health professional, and a possible danger.

I have been briefed by the doctors in charge of Starsky’s rehabilitation that mood swings are to be expected during this period of rediscovery. In particular, any presentation of depression and anger on the part of Starsky is to be understood and forgiven.

Starsky is sticking to the textbook. He is stubborn and refuses, almost violently, to be told point-blank of the particulars of his identity up to and including any information regarding his education, profession, sexual orientation, medical history, family history, military history, or the case of Starsky and I on Playboy Island parts 1 and 2.

He is certain that he will come back to himself.

According to notes provided to me by the trauma counselor, Lyndia Toxwater, David Starsky is open to learning about the present world. A quote from page 23: “He is a voracious reader of anything brought to him. The doctors tell me that he is not so much willing to ‘learn about the present world’ as he is trying to ‘lose himself in the written word’.”

The period of recovery for a person in Starsky’s situation is anywhere from a day to a lifetime. Toxwater suggested that an attempt be made to meet Starsky in the place where he most desires to be lost and, thus, is least resistant to being found.

Toxwater claims that the rate of success for this media neurotherapy is much higher than reported in the “big three” major mental health reference journals: Zepter and Hodges Illustrated, The New Journal of Disorders, and Abnormal Models (published in Spanish as The Aztec Cortex). Toxwater insists that there are at least a half-dozen medical journals dedicated to this, and related endeavors, in the Soviet Union. A telephone call to the Maywood Cesar Chavez branch of the County of Los Angeles Public Library was flirtatious but inconclusive.

With Toxwater’s advice in mind, I have placed the following three advertisements in several Los Angeles dailies:

Under the classification of Automobiles For Sale:

Must sell! Gran Turino red 2-dr
hardtop w/ white striping.
Chrome exhaust, bumpers, grill.
Great suspension, hugs road.
Perfect for the off-duty policeman.
Meets all fed regulations. New tyres.
Reply to box 4343 c/o this paper.

Under the classification of Miscellaneous For Sale:

Picture Yourself Watching This!
1970s era television.
Good condition, retro look.
Perfect for dedicated bachelor’s pad.
Reply to box 4343 c/o this paper.

Under the classification of Personals:

Have You Forgotten Yourself?
Sad SWM seeks Lonely SWM for
male bonding over cars, busting crime rings.
Slobs OK. Reply to Box 4343, c/o this paper.

It is my hope that “voracious reader” Starsky will see these “fragmentary allusions” (a phrase taken from a personal consultation regarding David Starsky with Lyndia Toxwater) and snap out of his fugue. As a bonus, all responses to box 4343 will be checked against our records for bail jumpers and fugitives. In the cases of paroled felons, any address change will be noted and filed.

Toxwater says that it is fortunate that the Los Angeles Police Department has chosen to not publicize David Starsky’s condition in local news media. A photograph of David Starsky accompanied by a caption with his name and medical condition would be a psychotraumatic event on a caustic level, effectively obliterating not only the progress that has been made, but also…

————————————————————————————————–
LYLE’S COMMENTS: I liked this as a story a great deal. It’s something that I would not be surprised to see published in a magazine (without references to Starsky and Hutch, of course). It works very well as a story and I found it engrossing and moving. I did not award it the prize for a similar reason: it was so engaging and the character seemed to have such an emotional need that I felt it was not quite Ballardian enough to take first prize. Excellent story, though, and the Ballard elements were carefully thought out and well rendered.
————————————————————————————————–

…LINKS
+ More Ballardian pastiche

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Lyle Hopwood uncovers a lost Ballard work, apparently the only surviving fragment from JGB’s novelization of David Cronenberg’s film of Alien, before the studio infamously got cold feet and replaced Cronenberg with Ridley Scott and Ballard with Alan Dean Foster.
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It’s only the cat, Ripley.
Squatting in the brine strained from the ore above, Kane pressed the activation panel of the locker. Startled by the noise of the lock tumblers, the skittish cat bounded over him, causing him to slip on a thin mesentery, a sloughed skin like that of an amphibian dissected by a careless junior doctor. “Catch it, you fool,” Ripley shouted. “It’ll show up on our scanners again.” Ignoring her, Kane shone his torch on the masklike membrane, recognising it as the discarded integument of the final nymph of the Alien. He was unaware of the caudal barb creeping behind him until he was pulled up into the air-duct. He heard Lambert’s irritating hysteria below him as he gazed onto the Alien instar. The moist, immaculate skin of the erect head reminded him of the perineum of a young boy; he felt an almost ceremonial arousal but experienced only the ghost of his orgasm as the buccal ram of the creature shattered his spinal column between the fourth and fifth thoracic verterbrae. As consciousness diminished he relished lying in the warm saline flow of the duct, a simulacrum of his origin unexpectedly recreated in the gulf of space.

Priority Override 1007: Crew Expendable
Holding the data-CD that it had removed from the high-pressure liquid chromatograph, the dismembered robot Ash lay before the three medical display monitors like the sacrificial victim of some digital Cargo Cult. Framing the AI like a triptych of its credo, the three video frames displaying dorsal, ventral and sagittal section of the arachnid-phase Alien called up an impossible geometry, a forbidden angle in which some non-Euclidian Angel could dance only in isolation on the head of a pin. Its injured hands proffered the data, the compositional analysis of the buccal mucus, like a wafer. “The organism, like a moss, has an alternation of generations,” Ash said. “Unlike a moss, both the gametozoon and the sporozoon stages require a living host. The last acts of humanity may be as surrogate mothers for this free-living phallus existing only to impregnate the weak. Darwin and Freud in one jewelled lizard. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, they say. Where does that leave me?”

“History,” said Parker, raising the muzzle of the flamethrower.

The option to override the destruct sequence has expired.
The bolts tethering the shuttle exploded in a series of magnesium flares, strobing the tableau inside, a technological Burgess Shale. Between the bars of darkness a woman stood; her interpatellar distance, an indicator of sexual arousal, increasing with each burst of light; her obsolete mammalian uterus nurturing only the copper worm of her IUD. Beside her the Alien basked in the warm exhaust of the hibernaculum, a confident equilibrium suffusing all its parts, a physical instance of a new paradigm. Instead of some implacable hatred that one zoological class might feel for its usurper, she felt a brisk, matronly efficiency. She replaced the flamethrower in the translucent plastic rack. As the ovipositor sought out and probed the hollow of her solar plexus, the cat’s hiss framed the moment, a Polaroid of the Hieros Gamos of the once and future predicates of sentience. Reaching out, Ripley, the Madonna of the New Flesh, stroked the elongated head of the creature, her fingerprints in the mucus tracing in an unknown alphabet the names of the children of the dead.

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This piece originally appeared in Interzone #75, September 1993. The blurb from the editor, David Pringle, was as follows:

Thanks to Lyle and David for permission to reproduce it here.
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The Atrocity Exhibition is a collection of J.G. Ballard’s most extraordinary short stories. Written in the few years following the tragic death of his wife, they are his most difficult work, representing the extremes of anguish, desire, alienation and horror. Compact and repetitive, they pick over the same questions of psychopathology, sexuality and death in paragraph after paragraph.

In this ‘new work’, Another Atrocity, each paragraph has a heading which may or may not relate to its contents. As the original work is already ‘cut-up’ in some sense, I felt it would be perfect for my electronic cut-up technique, in which each heading and sentence is chosen at random from the complete text.

In doing this, I was also reminded of Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote’, in which a modern writer becomes so immersed in Cervantes’ work that he is able to ‘re-write’ it, word-for-word. This is also an attempted ‘recreation’ of Ballard’s work by reproducing it.

I felt the addition of one of Versalius’ brilliant etchings of a dissected man complemented the biomorphic horror of the text, and also reflects Ballard’s (and my own) formative experience in the dissecting room.

And now it is complete, with every click on the refresh button, a unique page of Ballard’s Another Atrocity is created!

>>> Click here for access.

– Mike Bonsall

What might have happened if J.G. Ballard had used his medical training to its fullest potential and become a doctor rather than a writer? Well, there would be no pen name for a start; ‘Jimmy Ballard’ would be a different man indeed, as Johnny Strike discovers. In this fascinating snapshot into an alternate Ballardian universe, Mr Strike transplants the cold, airless, subliminally deviant psychopathology of JG Ballard’s writing into Jimmy Ballard’s life…

Johnny Strike is the author of the cult novel Ports of Hell published by Diagonal in the UK. His work has appeared in Headpress and Ambit among other journals, and he is a founding member of the influential US protopunk band Crime. ‘Jimmy Ballard’s Hospital Review’ was included in A Loud Humming Sound Came from Above, Johnny’s latest collection of short stories, published by Rudos and Rubes Press.

Jimmy Ballard got out of the taxi and stood admiring the vast, impersonal buildings of the hospital whose wards and departments constituted a city unto itself. His mind was filled with the wonders of transplant surgery, the various highs induced by the deadpan team of anesthesiologists, and the haunted pictures displayed in the X-ray rooms. He had always suspected that this hospital was also part of an advanced psychological experiment. And now he was part of it. He was here to write the annual review for the Board.

On his first day the bookish yet sexually charged PR rep, Kate North, R.N., took him on a quick tour of the inpatient units, the operating theaters, the laundry, the kitchen, and finally the pharmacy/lab, where under a harsh light, a young West Indian wearing a lab coat focused on a small container of dark liquid. Kate North ignored him and he did not acknowledge their presence either. Even so, Ballard felt that there was some romantic bond between his guide and this intense pharmacist. As though reading Ballard’s mind, Kate North quickly guided him along another busy hallway, holding his arm now as though he was a patient who had wandered away from his assigned ward.

From a top tier of the main building, through a glass wall, they looked over the layout of the hospital. Ballard imagined the mental landscapes of the victims of road crashes, the pregnant women, the cancer patients, the kitchen staff preparing massive amounts of food, as well as the army in charge of linen for the 500 beds that were usually occupied. Kate North pointed out a staff lounge in a far corner that boasted an indoor courtyard with shrubs, trees, and an ornamental pool. A round skylight gave the pool and surrounding area a dose of natural light and a false feeling of open air and space. Ballard found this lounge the most unsettling of all the areas he would visit during his inspection.

The hospital was divided into three main sections: the central one housed primary clinical and emergency services, operating theaters, intensive care units, and maternity services. Around the central core were the psychiatric units, outpatient clinics, and administration offices. Grouped in the back were the service areas that provided the hospital with food and other supplies. Kate North pointed out the Accident and Emergency entrance, located near a hallway of shops and cafés. Had the architect thought that the emergency patients on entry might catch a glimpse of the diversions the hospital offered—as a kind of prize to motivate recovery?

Kate North escorted Ballard to his temporary office. “Tomorrow we’ll visit the Casualty Department,” she said flatly. Ballard watched her turn and walk away. He admired her athletic legs and the movement of her well-formed buttocks encased in a uniform that seemed a little tight for regulations; even a hint of black silk could be seen at the hem.

THE CASUALTY DEPARTMENT

Kate’s breath smelled of coffee and cigarettes, and mixed enticingly with the fumes of the Dior perfume she had dabbed on in the wee hours. In the staff area, she pulled Ballard aside so they could view the main reception room without being noticed. A man in greasy coveralls sat holding his crushed arm, with a drained look on his pockmarked face. A fat, red-faced man next to him held a swab of gauze over his eye and looked to be staring into space with the other one. Kate guided Ballard into a dark room where he half-expected her to unzip him, but instead she switched on a dim light and they stood looking through a one-way mirror into a small operating room. A doctor and nurse in scrubs were attending to a patient. A saline drip dangled from above and was inserted into the patient’s arm. A nasty wound on his knee was exposed. The blood was sponged away by the nurse who then applied an antiseptic. The wound was finally sutured by the doctor, then wrapped in a dressing by the nurse.

“There are no new crash or burn injuries today,” Kate said blandly, yet Ballard sensed a touch of chaos in her big, gray eyes. They exited the room and moved on to the blood bank, and Kate inquired at the reception desk as to when the next transfusion was scheduled, as if inquiring the next showing of a film at the local cinema. They watched the rather boring procedure for a few minutes before she nudged him and they left.

Ahead, ambulance lights played off the corridor walls as Kate and Ballard made their way past the X-ray techs who slumped slightly, perhaps imitating their patients, weighed down by lead aprons. A couple of them stood sipping teas in their doorways, forlornly guarding their domain of equipment, darkrooms, and radiation residue.

Kate stopped and introduced Ballard to Dr. Stuart, head radiologist and diagnostic expert. Dr. Stuart wore black frame-glasses and a neatly trimmed mustache. His bluish-black hair gleamed under the fluorescent lights from ample application of hair gel. He reminded Ballard of a barber more than a doctor, and he seemed to be sizing up Ballard as well. Stuart invited them into his office and led them to seats that looked borrowed from a spacecraft. Stuart sat opposite, behind a wide blue steel desk. The color photos on the walls were all of children; Ballard was soon to learn they’d been photographed in Peru, where the doctor had done field work in his younger days. After a well-practiced recital of the hospital’s features and the general functions of most departments, he began an in-depth discussion of his specialty. Here his passion poured forth and Ballard felt he was listening to an opinionated visual artist rather than a radiologist. Dr. Stuart segued into the proper preparation of a barium meal, as though he were a profiled chef working for a swank restaurant, determined to maintain its high rating in the Zagat Guide. Again, Kate seemed entranced as he spoke, and Ballard wondered if she’d had liaisons with all the prominent men at the hospital.

Ballard’s mind wandered as they left Dr. Stuart. Had one too many documentaries been filmed in these corridors and departments, making his assignment redundant, even meaningless? How could his review ever compete with the cine-cameras, zoom lenses, and continuity people viewing the latest drama in the Trauma Ward? Ballard could imagine Dr. Stuart checking his makeup before stepping onto the set to explain the X-ray results to the frantic and distressed family members. The Board need only view these films to see that their experiment had taken on a life of its own.

Kate invited Ballard to lunch with some of her friends. “They’re all techies,” she said. “So you’ll get a flavor of all their points of view.” They chose a pizza parlor a short walk from the hospital and Ballard was the only male present. Holly, the stylish, brunette X-ray tech who wore her makeup so pale it approached that of a Goth rocker, worked exclusively with radiation treatment. She was the quiet one of the bunch, but occasionally exuded a sultry look between sips of Diet Coke and rearranging her salad on a paper plate. Betty, a middle-aged redhead with bottle-green eyes and a thin upper lip, called herself a mechanic and began describing in loving detail the various hospital equipment and machinery she worked on. Her discussion of a new type of laser might have continued for the entire lunch, had Kate not butted back in. The lab tech, Sharon, an Amazon who could have pursued a career as a fashion model but seemed ignorant of her especially good looks, wore little makeup and her hair was cut into a messy style that she occasionally brushed out of her eyes. She talked about her duties with a curious zeal. Was she eager for a glowing report from him? Ballard wondered. He enjoyed listening to her while the others seemed to be daydreaming or scanning the room for potential lovers.

“I move from department to department,” Sharon continued, touching Ballard’s hand in a familiar way, “but, mostly, you’ll find me in pathology. I’m the queen of the biopsies and the microtome. I study blood as well, some biochemistry, but lately it’s been more work than I can handle from the doctors in microbiology. Bacteria today are becoming increasingly immune to the antibiotics at an alarming rate. And everybody is afraid of a pandemic.” This brought everyone back and Kate looked especially disturbed.

Sharon laughed and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll always have a stash of antidotes for my friends.” Everyone laughed but Ballard.

“She’s joking, James,” Betty said, winking like a drunken sailor.

“Is it true,” Ballard asked, “that all gated communities in this district have medical tele-linkage with the hospital?” Kate answered in the affirmative and the others nodded silently.

On the walk back, Kate told him that there was a fifth member of their usual lunch group, Will Sanders, who was a physical measurement technician, but that he was out sick with the flu. His specialty was audiology; he suffered from hearing loss himself but wore an advanced aid not yet on the market that gave him the acute hearing abilities of a barn owl. In fact, he was nicknamed “The Fox,” and his ears twitched when he tried to listen to anything a bit out of his range.

THE OPERATING THEATRE

The surgical team entered the theater and approached the patient on the operating table. Each began their respective tasks. The nurse adjusted the patient’s gown to expose the abdomen. She cleaned the skin with an antiseptic, then the surgeon outlined the area where the incision would be made. The anesthesiologist placed a mask over the face of the already unconscious patient.

Standing for a moment in the pose of a matador, the surgeon stepped forward and made his incision. One of the two assistant surgeons carefully swabbed the blood. In rapid succession, the surgeon cut through the layers of muscle. The anesthesiologist studied his instrument panel, making sure the patient was getting the right mixtures of gases. Both assistants clamped off the severed blood vessels and used retractors to pull back the skin and muscle flaps. The surgeon found the appendix and quickly removed it. The assistants worked together to remove the clamps and expertly sew up the incision. The surgeon bowed slightly to his team and departed. Ballard looked at his watch and saw that the whole process had taken under fifteen minutes. He thought of the faceless patient waking up later, groggy and sore and pressing the call button for a shot of morphine. He looked at his notes and the peculiar configuration of his drawing: surgeon, anesthetic machine, assistants, nurse, operating light, patient, diathermy machine, and the instrument trolly that held the various surgical instruments: the dissecting forceps, operating scissors, and the scalpels.

“Tomorrow you’ll have a day on your own,” Kate said, escorting him back to his office. “Will you miss me?” she teased, making him smile and say yes. “But then Wednesday first thing. I’ll be introducing you to all the big shots.”

“Till then,” Ballard said, taking Kate’s hand and feeling the warmth of her palm, but instead of the look of seduction he was hoping for, her expression had shifted to business-as-usual. But she did finally throw him a vampy smile before heading off. Kate North was a mystery that he longed to solve.

THE HOSPITAL DOCTORS

When Kate and Ballard entered Dr. Kaminsky’s office, led by his haughty secretary, they could see him across the room in a white lab coat, standing, viewing a computer screen, wearing headphones. His modish haircut came over the collar of his coat. He was writing something in a notebook. The secretary gestured toward two chairs that faced the doctor’s desk and they sat down. Dr. Kaminsky finished up, removed his headphones, and turned to greet them. He was a young man, with generally good looks and a pleasant smile. Ballard stood briefly and shook hands with him.

“Excuse me, Mr. Ballard, but I prefer to stand whenever I can.” Dr. Kaminsky walked behind his desk, folded his arms, and cradled his chin with his right hand. “I’m an anesthesiologist, and so a key member of the surgical team. I, also, hold the patient’s life in my hands.” The doctor looked briefly at his hands. “We deliver the patient into the world of dreams, across the rivers of myth, to a multitude of netherworlds.” He smiled beatifically. “The afterlife is previewed and it’s nothing like what religions tell us. No, it’s more like the mind of Dali or the hallucinations of the Huichol Indians of Northern Mexico.” Dr. Kaminsky was charming and eloquent and peculiar. Ballard listened with interest as he keenly described his gases and drugs. He was also a contact if needed, set into position a year ago by the Board.

They moved on to Dr. Huber, a cardiologist, who was the opposite of the young Kaminsky, an older man with an annoyed presence, wearing a suit that would have better served a lawyer. He announced that his specialty, heart disease, was bound to affect everyone eventually. Dr. Huber touched his stethoscope and looked expectantly at Ballard, as if waiting for him to volunteer himself for a listen.

“My friends are the diagnostic machines in D Ward,” he said with the wicked, impersonal smile of a new breed of gangster scientist. “They display for me the electrical patterns that help me to see certain blood vessels.”

Next, Dr. Paul, the head pediatrician, was a tall, bony man in his early forties. He, too, wore a modish cut like Dr. Kaminsky, but Dr. Paul had a receding hairline, a Roman nose, and dull, brown eyes. He wore a lab coat with lollipops, candy sticks, pens, and thermometers stuffed in the upper pocket. They met him in the hallway and as he talked he glanced around, monitoring the foot traffic in and out of his department. As they chatted, Ballard got the impression that Dr. Paul was covertly still a child himself, and a devious one at that—overly cautious about what he had to say. Even his expressions seemed borrowed from his adolescent patients. A smiling Eurasian nurse appeared with a young Down syndrome girl in tow. Dr. Paul abandoned their conversation and crouched to face his young patient. They communicated in some barely audible, secret language.

“This is Sybil, my star patient,” he said, looking up at Ballard and Kate. Dr. Paul’s entire face had transformed into a bright smile.

Sybil seemed only marginally affected by the Down syndrome and, after a quick study of the couple, offered her hand. Dr. Paul, Sybil, and the nurse moved on toward the hospital gift shop. Dr. Paul called back that they were going shopping, promising to meet up later in the Children’s Ward.

Dr. Craig, the head gynecologist, appeared more like a strange policeman or some new type of security agent in his tight, powder blue uniform and Egyptian ankh bolo tie. How did this correspond to his arduous work in the domain of the vulva, pubis, labia, and reproductive system, Ballard wondered. But Dr. Craig cut the meeting short after taking a phone call—a call that Ballard suspected had been pre-arranged. As he walked away, Ballard noticed the many keys that swung from his belt, and a pair of rubber gloves that dangled from his back pocket. He appeared more like a sexual deviant posing as a doctor, Ballard decided. Kate stirred him from his thoughts, touching his lower back. Ballard imagined her as an ardent masseuse or chiropractor assessing the area she soon would be working on.

The head pathologist, Dr. Rollins, an elderly man, they caught snoozing at his desk. Kate knocked loud enough on the open door to rouse him. He reminded Ballard of the French bulldog he had petted in the hospital parking lot the previous afternoon. Dr. Rollins’s desk was piled with files and papers and books. Vials of what looked like blackish blood were haphazardly laying amongst a cigar, a thick men’s spy-adventure paperback, and an open box of prophylactics. Dr. Rollins put his fingers together in a steeple and recited, in a monotone, his trials and tribulations as head pathologist. Kate soon appeared drowsy listening to the words that, clearly, made little sense to either of them.

In the next office, the head psychiatrist insisted that Ballard call her Dorothy. But once they’d left their meeting with her, he had trouble recalling what she looked like, let alone what she had said. Ballard felt as though they had participated in some kind of brainwashing or hypnosis session. This crafty shrink would get a special note in his report.

The last stop for the day was the office of the head surgeon, Dr. Spencer, whom they had watched perform the appendectomy. A hum leaked from some invisible machine in his office and Ballard noted that, like some mad maestro, he did not shake hands but instead gave a slight bow. He reminded Ballard of a stage performer as he spoke and moved around his office, almost as though he were practicing steps and poses. Then he stood still, appearing again for a moment like a slightly unhinged matador. For such a large office, it was surprisingly bare, as if to emulate the surgery theater itself: his desk and bookcases were as sterile and empty as his operating tables. They said goodbye to Dr. Spencer and left him to his elaborate rehearsals.

“Do you have a little energy left for a visit to the Maternity Ward?” asked Kate.

“Of course, sure,” Ballard said as she studied him over her glasses. He could see thickly applied black eyeliner and was lost for a moment in her beguiling eyes. Again she guided him by the arm, now as though he were a reluctant father trying to put off the inevitable obligation of facing his new offspring. He expected to hear babies crying, but the Maternity Ward was strangely silent, and Kate seemed to be enjoying his mystification. She pulled a white lab coat out of a supply closet and offered to help him on with it.

“It’s better that you look like a doctor on this ward,” she said, admiring the fit. In the first room, a midwife was checking a patient’s rate of contractions. The patient smiled at them in a daze. Through a number of doors, they stepped into another room where a young mother was breastfeeding her infant. The bedcover was pulled back and her legs were bare. Kate seemed to bristle, perhaps suspecting that he was admiring the woman’s legs.

“There are supposed to be two, maybe even three, births later today, if you’re interested,” she said as she guided him along a window where the incubated babies were lying in clear, square compartments like some bad science fiction film.

He stopped to view a black baby who appeared almost purple in the gaudy lighting and the circulating swirls of purified air.

“Would you like to visit the Children’s Ward? Dr. Paul and Sybil are probably there now.”

Although Ballard was tired, he felt a boost as they entered the Children’s Ward. The walls were painted in lively colors—one in glitzy red and yellow stripes that reminded him of a carnival tent. The beds were arranged in a circle and two laundry baskets were stuffed with toys. But the beds were empty, as though an abduction had just taken place. A stuffed bear and stuffed giraffe sat there, looking at them dumbly. The Eurasian nurse, Lee, came into the room and explained that the children had gone to the hospital garden. Lee had changed to a lab coat decorated with clowns, balloons, flowers, and butterflies. She led them to the window and they looked down at the line of children being led by Dr. Paul, the adult Peter Pan, and Sybil, an awkward Tinkerbell.

“Beyond the garden, they’ll climb a summit and look back to view the hospital grounds in its entirety,” Lee said, making a motion as though adjusting a troublesome corset.

Ballard spent the next day typing up his notes on an electric typewriter. At lunchtime, Kate tapped on his door in a playful mood.

“You know, James, you haven’t asked me much about myself, or the nursing profession, for that matter.”

“I’m sorry, Kate, it’s a very general report.”

“Aren’t you interested in me?”

“Why, of course.”

“Then take me to lunch?”

“Well, with pleasure.”

“Good,” said Kate with a coquettish look. “I’ve found a little bistro not too far. And no one has discovered it yet.”

They left the hospital, boarded the Tube, and got off one station later. The restaurant was on the second level of a shopping complex: dark, comfy, something like a gentleman’s clubroom. They settled themselves into a leather booth in one corner. They both ordered the crab stew special, and Ballard was pleased to see a good French wine on the menu. During lunch, Kate spoke of growing up in London, her early disillusionment with art school, the great thrill of the early punk scene, and a summer of bumming around the beaches of Greece and Turkey. After a profound dream where she’d been a nurse on a battlefield, she became obsessed with the profession. For once, her parents gave her their complete support and even paid for nursing school. From the beginning, she had studied hard. After graduation, she’d worked in many of the different specialties: intensive care, psychiatry, midwifery, elder care, pediatrics, but finally found her true calling in public relations.

“But what was the most challenging before you took this job?” Ballard asked, and wondered just what had so attracted him to this independent young lady twenty-three years younger than he was.

“The elderly,” she said, looking at him as though he had somehow just been transformed into Herbert Humbert, and she into a more sophisticated Lolita. “And it was also the most rewarding.” She sipped her wine and stared off across the empty room, perhaps picturing some stressful life-changing experience she’d had while working in the world of geriatrics.

“Depression is widespread with this age group,” she said. “But I worked under a brilliant doctor who knew the cure and used it: opiates. During that time, the ward for the elderly was an even happier place than the Children’s Ward. He determined the dose each patient could tolerate while remaining functional and then prescribed that dose as needed. Pain complaints ceased almost completely. He also supplied other drugs if the patient had a preference; cannabis extract was very popular.

“During this period, one patient, who’d been a notorious swinger in the Sixties, filled notebooks with her racy memoirs that were later published. And a fantastic art show was exhibited by the elderly patients; it was reviewed by the local media and even caused a bit of controversy. A certain eighty-seven year-old, Mr. Simon Thurston, had obtained Polaroids of his disfigured penis from his medical files and displayed them as found art.

“There were a few musicians there at that time who held impromptu concerts. They covered Stravinsky, Mariachi music, and even some cool jazz. They changed the lighting in the ward to a mix of soft golden splashes and dreamy purple shades, which helped to transform it into an atmosphere of a decadent nightclub-cum-opium-den. But it couldn’t last, of course. The doctor was exposed and booted from the hospital.

“I secretly agreed with his treatment,” she added quietly, as though someone might be listening. “But soon after the scandal, things went back to their old gloomy ways, and after some night classes, I applied for a position in public relations.” Ballard made a mental note of the doctor’s name to file a petition to have him reinstated.

The following day, Kate introduced him to a blur of people. She seemed to take some pleasure in making the endless introductions, including the staff from the hospital gift shop; the manager of the on-site radio station; the chaplain again, whom Ballard managed to neatly brush off; and a sexy, young couple that he was surprised and delighted to find were the hospital disc jockey and beautician.

THE HOSPITAL AT NIGHT

The first thing Ballard noticed was the absence of activity in the hallways. The quietude was enhanced by dim lighting throughout the corridors and waiting rooms. He stopped by a room where a red light above the door was flashing. At the far end of the hallway, Dr. Huber and two nurses were hurrying towards him. Dr. Huber urged Ballard inside. In a moment, they were all in the patient’s room.

In bed was an elderly woman lying on the covers, motionless. Her head was to the side and an arm was dangling over the bedside. A night nurse explained to Dr. Huber that heart massage and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation had both failed. Dr. Huber watched his team set up two trolleys of machines, including a defibrillator. An oxygen mask was strapped onto her by one nurse and a tube was guided down her throat. The electrocardiogram equipment was set in place and Dr. Huber studied the readout and then placed the shock pads on the patient’s chest. After two jolts, the woman was revived. She sat up suddenly, with an almost serene expression, and the team quietly congratulated her.

“Send Mrs. Martin to IC for a few days,” Dr. Huber instructed the night nurse. He turned to Ballard with a nod and then he was gone. Ballard walked out of the room and down another hallway, letting some inner sense of navigation guide him. He wandered the back corridors and looked into the empty rooms and offices. He came across a few porters in a waiting room watching news on TV and drinking tea. He continued on his inspection and spoke with a few women from domestic services. The kitchen was open so he bought a coffee and headed to his office.

MEDICAL ENGINEERING

The clear plastic-covered booklet on his desk, probably left by Kate North since she knew his interest in this field, was titled: Medical Engineering, 1984. The cover diagram depicted a green, human form showing all the current spare parts of the human body in yellow, with corresponding numbers. One leg and arm were orange and obviously artificial. The illustration could have doubled for the cover of a deranged science fiction collection. He read the listing slowly.

1. Wig. 2. Skull plate. 3. Skull plug. 4. Plastic cornea. 5. Plastic eye. 6. Contact lenses. 7. Spectacles. 8. Hearing aid. 9. False teeth. 10. Chin enlarger. 11. Artificial larynx, 12. Pacemaker. 13. Artificial breast. 14. Shoulder joint. 15. Artificial arm. 16. Synthetic artery. 17. Heart valves. 18. Elbow joint. 19. Synthetic vein. 20. Elbow cap. 21. Elbow hinge. 22. Abdominal patch. 23. Hip joint. 24. Testicle implants. 25. Artificial knee. 26. Femur. 27. Finger joints. 28. Knee joints. 29. Knee plate. 30. Shinbone.

Ballard turned the page and the next fantastic drawing was of an artificial hand with its “Arm socket, motor with amplifier and gears,” and its “Rechargeable battery pack.” Another page showed an X-ray, perhaps taken by one of Dr. Stuart’s assistants. The finger joints of stainless steel were already in position in a skeletal hand. Another page displayed the devilish and confusing diagram of a heart-lung machine. Below it was a pacemaker, looking something like a lighter except for the plastic tubing that was attached to it.

He worked on his review throughout the day, breaking only for brief meetings with a physiotherapist and a psychotherapist who had both just returned from holidays in Spain. Afterward, he found himself near the hospital pharmacy/lab. This time, the West Indian pharmacist wished him a cheery good afternoon.

Ballard made brief visits over the next few days to the more mundane outpatient department, admissions office, medical records, the hospital switchboard, and the supplies department. On his final rounds, he looked for Kate North in the staff lounge where he instead spotted Dr. Rollins, coming out of a back room with Lee, the Eurasian nurse from the Children’s Ward. Rollins shot him a quick, contemptuous look, then tried to smile. Lee looked away but he thought he’d glimpsed a slightly bruised lip.

In the cafeteria, Ballard asked Betty and Sharon where Kate might be. Sharon grinned and sent him on what turned out to be a wild goose chase. During his last days, Kate was never where she was supposed to be. He was starting to suspect a conspiracy. Eventually, he stood by her office for nearly an hour, looking periodically at a small notebook before, finally feeling foolish, deciding to give up.

Ballard knew that compiling the psychology of the future was the ultimate aim. The Board would be pleased to see that the inner migration continued unabated. There would always be the variants, the Dr. Craigs and the Dr. Rollinses. But as they were the first of the inevitable deviant behaviors that would erupt from time to time, they, too, would be studied and contained. Dr. Craig would have to go, of course, before he plotted some kind of insane takeover. Ballard had photographed the documents in his files that indicated this tendency. So far, Craig and Rollins had interfered only slightly with the psychic fulfillment that otherwise looked to be flourishing since the Board had put its systems into place. And there were a few others who needed further monitoring, but so far, showed no major glitches.

Ballard finished typing his report and placed the sheaf of papers in a white plastic case. He would present it to the Review Board the following week. On this, his last day, he had hoped to invite Kate to his favorite restaurant in Chelsea, but wondered again if she’d been avoiding him.

He left the hospital, left the grounds, and headed off down a busy city street. It started to rain heavily and he had not brought an umbrella.

He hurried along, looking through the blur of rain for a place to duck into. Shielding his face with the briefcase, he spotted the restaurant where he had eaten with Kate. An exquisite girl, decked out in an open black slicker and stiletto heels, stood under the awning at the entranceway, making him think of a Helmut Newton photograph.

Kate North smiled at him as he approached, now dripping wet. For the first time, she was wearing her hair down and no glasses. She wiped off his face and kissed his mouth, biting at his lip.

“I was just looking for you inside,” she whispered into his ear.

“Now, the real review will begin,” Ballard said, realizing his voice had dropped to a lower register.

J.G. Ballard photo courtesy of Steve Double

This is a work of fiction concerning one of the 20th-century’s more controversial writers, J.G. Ballard. It utilises the method Ballard himself employed as part of a short piece in the RE/Search reprint of his Atrocity Exhibition collection. In that piece, “Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty”, Ballard recontextualised actual medical texts to describe the “surgical challenge the reduction in size of Mae West’s breasts presented,” using the techniques of plastic surgery and the icnonography of actor West to present a critique of contemporary body politics.

In this Ballardian special, Kristoph Eggleston applies the method to the iconography of Ballard himself, in order to present an imaginative look at Ballard’s place in the literary canon.

See ‘Author’s Note’ at the end of the article for more background.

————————————————————————————————-
The increase in size of J.G. Ballard’s penis presented a surgical challenge of some magnitude. There were many factors to be taken into account: Mr Ballard’s age; the type of enlargement; the degree of ptosis present; the actual size of enlargement; and, finally, the presence of any pathology in the penile tissue itself.

After the age of fifty years, penile tissue may behave in a very unfortunate manner if the blood supply is in any way impaired – from wastage as a result of the ageing process, for example. In the case of Mr Ballard, therefore, it was decided that the ‘K2 plasty’ should be performed, rather than pubic incisions, as successful K2 implementation generally results in greater lengthening of the penis.

In dealing with shrunken penises in older subjects, it may be necessary to build up huge volumes of penile tissue in two stages, since radical additions in one stage may well interfere with the nerve supply of the penis and prevent erection of the penis during subsequent sexual excitation. Mr Ballard was warned, therefore, of the possible need for a second operation. As ptosis was present without hypertrophy the chief concern was that the patient’s penis should be replaced in its normal position. Thus, it was decided to also insert a penile prosthesis to allay such fears.

Penile prostheses are grouped in two major categories: rigid, semi-rigid and malleable rods, producing varying degrees of rigidity; and inflatable prostheses including two types: a) the multicomponent inflatable prosthesis, and b) the self-contained inflatable prosthesis.

Rigid prostheses generally produce a low mechanical failure rate, as they contain few moving parts and are able to be implanted relatively simply. However, they often produce unsightly erections and can interfere with urination due to their obstructive nature. Nonetheless, the rigid prosthesis is suitable for men with poor hand mobility, who are relatively elderly, or who do not desire to chance the higher risk of malfunction due to more moving parts. After consulting with the urologist and carefully reviewing the risks, benefits and drawbacks associated with each procedure, Mr Ballard registered his approval for the rigid prosthesis.

PROCEDURE
The most important step before operating on the penis was to ascertain carefully the sites proposed for graft enhancement and prosthesis implantation. Measurements were made in his suite before operation with Mr Ballard lying on his back. Steadying the penis with his free hand, the assistant drew a line directly from the glans to the base of the testicles. The prosthesis would fall directly in line with this marking.

The entire skin of Mr Ballard’s penis was cleansed with soap, water and spirit and wrapped in sterile towels. Mr Ballard was then ready for operation. The markings were redrawn on the patient when he was anaesthetised and on the operating table. The penis was then dissected upwards from its attachment to the perineum, after first splitting the testicular sack in two and carefully laying each half (including the testicles) in miniature humidicribs clamped to either side of the penis. Great care was taken to preserve the internal pedicle arising from the perforating branches of the internal penile artery.

Insertion of the prosthesis.
After proper selection of length and diameter to fit the corpus cavernosum, and general dilation of the corporal body to avoid perforation proximally, meticulous attention to detail was taken to avoid infection, including intraoperative antibiotics and copious irrigation during the procedure. After constructing an artificial canal within the interior penile wall, using a pair of small curved scissors with blunt points, the prosthesis was successfully embedded within its new home.

Further precautions included the use of a surgical bubble system to prevent particles and bacteria from gaining access to the device. The length of the penis and the testicular sack was then successfully sealed with the latest ‘meltpoint’ stitch technology.

Other complications that may have arisen include perforation of the corporal body (the area where the prosthesis is held), which can cause migration of the prosthetic device. A Dacron graft was therefore created to prevent migration.

Dermafat injection (K2 plasty).
The penis was brought forward and laid on a surgical steel board. Abdominal liposuction was performed as part of the procedure, minimising the disadvantages of fat absorption and nodule formation by limiting the amount of fat injected at any one time, thereby improving the overall viability of the procedure. A limit to the thickness of the grafts to be placed was also enforced, so as to ensure adequate blood supply to prevent the grafts from becoming hardened.

Once again, the knife was brought forward and incisions made on the topside of the penis. Injections were made using the dermafat procedure, with the entire field consistently reviewed for bleeding points. Loose skin coverings, freed using the surgeon’s knife, were then arranged to fit snugly over the grafts. A curved clamp was used, but the fact that it fitted tightly on the skin margins did not appear to damage the vitality of the skin edges. Five straight needles mounted with strong silkworm gut were then inserted between the two layers of the skin on the topside of the penis.

Once sealed, the nanografts – via remote microchip technology – extended lengthwise while attached to the interior penile wall. This stretching process occurred slowly over eight hours, so as not to damage skin tissue or vital capillary vessels. The usual increase in length is one-to-two inches and one-and-a-half-to-three inches in girth. Mr Ballard’s penis was found to be incrementally on track.

Upon completion of the operation, it remained to ensure that there was no blood collected in the penis, and the penis was adequately drained on both the top and bottom surfaces. Corrugated rubber drains proved to be satisfactory.

POST-OPERATIVE RECOVERY
Mr Ballard suffered a serious degree of surgical shock, with intravenous saline solution given during the operation. Mr Ballard’s bed was raised on blocks at the foot-end, and he was allowed to lie comfortably on his back until a normal pulse rate and normal blood pressure was achieved. Mr Ballard was then allowed to sit up for as long as the dressings remained firm. The wounds were redressed the next day, with the drains removed after forty-eight hours. Mr Ballard was then informed of his payment options, noting that the facilities accepted most major credit cards and cashier cheques.

It was some time before Mr Ballard’s penis reached its final proportion and shape, and there was no urgency about trimming scar lines until three months had passed. Although Mr Ballard subsequently contacted the surgeon to indicate satisfaction with the length of his penis, the ultimate results of this operation with regard to sexual function are not known, as Mr Ballard has since divorced from his wife.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction concerning one of the twentieth-century’s more controversial writers, J.G. Ballard. It uses the method Ballard himself used as part of the appendix to the RE/Search reprint of his Atrocity Exhibition – a short piece entitled “Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty.” Here, Ballard, uses (or “samples”) actual medical texts to describe the “surgical challenge the reduction in size of Mae West’s breasts presented,” using the techniques of plastic surgery to present a critique of contemporary body politics.

Was Ballard’s penis too small? No, as far as one can tell, but it hangs (by way of deed and reputation) over the collective consciousness like a too-ripe banana. As this figurative member dangles from the tree of Old Guard Avant Garde writing, we pluck it, peel it, suck it, disgorge it – merging its putrefactive flesh with the twisted obsessions of the next generation, giving new life to a ‘once-great’ author on the verge of emasculation by his peers.

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This piece was first published in the short-fiction anthology Amorphik: An Erotic Constellation (2000), edited by Simon Sellars and published by Sub Dee Industries (Melbourne, Australia).
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GRAVITY’S PEAK IS SURVIVABLE
“About midnight, Diana walks out, all green eyes and friendly breast velocity. Dodi, her Prince, is there to sweep her away from the insatiable paparazzi.”

The following extract is presented by the JG BALLARD INSTITUTE for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra.

“On August 31, 1997, Princess Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed died in a horrific car crash. At the exact moment of impact, the conspiracy nuts sprang into action. Was she murdered by the British government – or overseas interests? Did she in fact commit suicide? Indeed, the public seems unwilling to accept the official version of events, culminating in the claims this year that Prince Charles was somehow behind a sinister plot to murder his ex-wife.

For the last 5 years, the JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics has been studying this most Ballardian of celebrity deaths and is finally in a position to make its findings official. Under the guidance of the Institute’s Dr Annick Hovac, the following report – a worldwide exclusive – is sure to blow all previous theories surrounding the incident out of the water.

Now, finally, the truth can be told…”

An extract from a forthcoming paper by Dr Annik Hovak, of the JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics.

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DIFFERENT INJURY OUTCOMES
Dinner at the Ritz seemed the perfect dreamy Paris interlude. Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed, heir to the House of Harrods, spent their last day enjoying each other’s company. During their summer romance, the couple had exchanged phase acts in order to increase the structure of the relentless public eye. She was snapped on the deck swathed in a towel while Fayed smoothed her hair, in full view of the tourists on shore. But after nearly three weeks, the equivalent velocity of the relationship endured a string of disappointing love, and the media reported that the couple had interpretation errors.

Over fatal seafood dinner, Fayed presented a stunning $205,400 diamond solitaire glistening like warm oil sun on a distant beach. Known as the Playboy from the Maximum Deformation, it was noted that in his business and social life, Fayed only addressed women to the point of five Ferraris. The boy grew up in a world of privilege in Egypt and France. Later, he worked briefly as a fixture on beautiful London women. However, it had appeared that from Reference 26 the negligible fairy-tale marriage fell apart amid others (e.g. tests 415, 425 and 448) and that Diana was mentally unstable. The data for the dynamic model, combined with the proposed abandonment of A, B and G variables, prompted speculation that the Princess forced (note that no mention of Charles) the erratic nature of the plots.

POEM TO HER INHERENT ERROR
Flashback to a week before (time is a voyeuristic membrane in the tragic life of the beloved): Dodi wrote a poem for her and had it inscribed on public flesh. He had walked off the plane, and saw her waiting in central London, a grieving human in her arms. Calculations of Delta-V ranged from her skirt too short to be examined.

FORCE VS DISPLACEMENT THEMES! rhapsodised the airport daily headlines.

That afternoon, on the Mediterranean beach, Fayed had presented his oil-covered fingers, circular motion glistening in the warm sunlight. Princess Di dropped one hand to his pants, soft on his deep and passionate Mediterranean journey. Later, in the hot tub with him giggling, sailing up and down the French and Italian Rivieras of the mind. (Or at least so claim the doubles who never leave Diana’s side).

Nothing life threatening. Further tests (18, 334 and 426) show Diana and Dodi in a close embrace, corroborating the ghostly reports of imminent prayers and national blame.

GRAVITY’S PEAK IS SURVIVABLE, WITH FUTURE
When the doors close, the two people in love push the stop button. The elevator doors open and everyone is the result of dynamic collisions, of residual control. She is aware of what is going on, the waiting photographers. However, from the news media, linear relationships are gifts. They had decided to use Fayed’s driver as a decoy in another car. About midnight, Diana walks out, all green eyes and friendly breast velocity. Dodi, her Prince, is there to sweep her away from the insatiable paparazzi. The appointed personnel are also there: the lucky (and belted) bodyguard and the drunk Frenchman. Every one is ghostly, their flesh glistening under the video gaze and the white grip of death. The eyes of the cameras zoom in and out chronicling grainy stills, gray glare and flash of blonde.

They climb in a Mercedes S280 soon owned by speed across accurate westbound lanes of a four-lane coefficient. Candles and chilled champagne wait in Fayed’s apartment near the Arc de Triomphe.They make their getaway through a linear fit, drunk through central Paris at fatal conceptual speeds. The couple’s blue Mercedes signals a speed-change river to escape the paparazzi- who insisted in referring to it as the period of deforce. With romantic track animation and angle view from ominous advise, the duration of central Paris at an average of 90′/sec narrows to a limited number of staged collisions (e.g., References 34, 50-52).Then, in the bridge, not far from the Eiffel tower, Diana gives him a pair of pictures of the wide contact collision with her son Prince Harry. This is one of many simulations, rehearsals. Dodi laughs. In her clear headlight gaze glow Egyptian joy and the midnight algorithm of her white slacks and heeled sandals. Twin stars of whirlwind love that will never see the tunnel’s end.

OUR THOUGHTS & PRAYERS
“At the time of the crash the couple hugged at 60 mph (90 ft/sec), divorced from the average deceleration and contemplating a new peak value of about twice the psychic medium.”

Hollywood Psychologist calls self-examination of Tabloid Voyeurism
Diana reaches in. Dodi outlines the main anatomical regions. They explore each other’s tongues. The Romeo and Juliet of the Twentieth Century reciprocate coefficients in the back seat of the hellbound S-280. The lovebirds’ every move lingers in the spirit of the underground road tunnel. But the Mercedes is now the object of a chase. Pursued by five or so photographers, running into the obstruction crumpled and out of control. From the unidentified sideways, the impact will occur close to where the couple has missed an angle of a few degrees still being pried from the eyewitness reports screeching for the British newspapers before impact. Even if Paul floors the brakes, rages and then backs his car where little steering left, he only has half the vehicle’s width at the limits of traction to position on the road somewhat.Left side damage, the car spinning around.

Shocking, the vehicle can’t be spinning! The car hits a pillar of related data points. At the time of the crash the couple hugged at 60 mph (90 ft/sec), divorced from the average deceleration and contemplating a new peak value of about twice the psychic medium. Paul can’t induce much of a steer centerline even if it’s grilled at original formulation of the crash. Besides, he does not steer to avoid the problematic recognition, since it is obvious that he should still not exist simultaneously over a few demurely plastic concussions to avoid the impact. The vehicle does not roll over, probably cut from the roof by avoidability. The windshield and the roof collapse. The grill of the Mercedes is pushed back into the front seat. The Princess of Wales reaches in to feel the peak of dynamic crush caressing it, sunning herself in the initial impact to the point of maximum time. Acceleration that would have been experienced by the chest is about 70 times the force of gravity (70 g’s), or about seven times what a fighter pilot experiences. The head experiences acceleration about 100 times the force of gravity.

Diana is happier than she had been in a dynamic state. She is delighted as the automobile structures dissolve in acrimony, as the vehicle undergoes godmother impulse for the last several inches of static crush, coupled with photographers in motorcycles and buzzing police. Her hardened nipples glisten as she accepts the paparazzi into her. Speed is anywhere. Dodi Fayed gently takes the maximum collision force and her suit straps, ignoring the restitution phase, the residual crush, the amount of severity. Princess of Wales dies 4 a.m. Paris time. Maybe she is asleep, or mortally injured in the land of public tragedy. There is smoke. People are standing around the car. The Delta-V intercept at zero with photographers crowding within bloodied victims to snap their positions at a forked distance.

This can hardly be the couple that had eaten dinner. The body of a woman sticks out 60′/sec turns to the awful lapse under 0.1 sec. Her head wanly linear, her favorite chest acceleration. During this period, additional cardiac arrest and more damage to the left side.

Crews arrived and worked for more than itself. Emergency residua would need an hour to free Diana from the smashed resistance force. The occupants are freed from their bodies. The bodyguard has survived, but Fayed and Paul die instantly, the latter expiring in continuity with some prior consciousness, a stream of cognition going back to tonight’s top speed.

TABLOID VOYEURISM
Last dialogue between Dodi and Diana:
Dodi: “We have the pattern, not the substance; but in your eyes I pour us each a living being.”
Diana: “True. We can’t live forever.”

Flustered bystander: “We heard the noise of the accident, intended to be humorous. In the tunnel, it was a real massacre. In a state of shock, I pushed on the biological problems of aging. I did not offer assistance. And then I left.”

Another witness says he saw smoke, ran to the wreck. “I was taking pictures of it.” Then he said he turned to the woman: “I freed her breathing and opened her irregular mass. By way of explaining the physical, she was moaning and gesticulating. I put an oxygen mask on her.”

He wanted to testify, because notions of reality are ridiculous when those are signs of choking faster than about 30 degrees.Was she belted? Diana herself later squelched rumors. Thus, trauma is generated, the most erotic strip ever.

Last dialogue between Dodi and Diana:
Dodi: “We have the pattern, not the substance; but in your eyes I pour us each a living being.”
Diana: “True. We can’t live forever.”
Dodi: “Whenever there is a cognition, I must lean across and kiss your lips with the passion I feel for beginningless time.”
Diana: “Oh, my Prince! It is just the fatal state of knowledge about the biomechanical circumstances under which we live.”

The opulent ring, still in its box, is recovered from the floor of the crushed windstorm romance. Hundred photos are no longer distant and grainy.

References
25. Early reports described Diana’s original algorithm, the neglected mirror of the accident scene. While her arm and leg injuries were demonstrated in Reference 26, Princess Diana’s unidentified posture was formulated later, as the pale phase and hardened
forces increased in the total speed change.
26. The impact coefficient for a number of Diana’s measurements and damage determines the amount of additional Fayed after going into severity by prolonging the accelerating conference of residual damage.
27. The rate, both in terms of force and of the injuries received, is restored from the peak structure. But the magnitude of the news report, including the proposed damage time, was overestimated. The angle view from front passenger window shows that both head and chest experienced acceleration a hundred times the force of gravity.
28. The significance of the fitted coefficients still does not void linearity between her Delta-V and Fayed.
29. Any reconstruction which utilises a CRASH3 based damage analysis procedure should add to the predicted speed change a variable of approximately +10% at 30 inches of residual crush to +25% at 10 inches for the predicted total speed change.
30. What’s more, a careful inspection of the site implies a linear relationship between conceptual complication and the smashed windshield.
31. Despite media reports that Dodi and Diana did not hit head on, the crash technique rarely, if ever, has been known to produce uniform crush, or centralised collisions that might have otherwise been lived. At the time of the crash formulation, the restitution effects of the vehicle structures intercepted pulmonary trajectory with the judicious engineering approach to offer the curve damage profile. Thus, injuries in an accident are always assumed to be unnamed.

Addendum
1. Reports of ninety-degree skid marks: ABS systems tend not to leave pronounced skid marks, these are probably scrub marks. Even if they represent locked wheel skid marks they only bring a 75/mph speed down to 55 at impact.
2. Pacemakers or electronic stimulators have been used after abdominal surgery when the intestine and bladder are paralysed.
3. Reports of the driver’s impairment clear up a lot of things.

The following is an excerpt from an official report prepared by Andrés Vaccari, on behalf of the JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra.

DISCLAIMER: The following photos have been modified by the patients referenced by this report. The JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra implies no endorsement of any kind whatsoever by their publication.

The Conspiracy of Grey Men

“The Grey Men,” Dr Travis explained, “play a pivotal role in these kinds of fantasies. The appearance of this archetype is contemporary with the dawn of large bureaucracies and the rise of pseudo-rational economic ideologies. The Grey Men share the ideal traits of bureaucrats, accountants, lawyers, businessmen and other exemplars of the human fauna spawned by industrial capitalism. They are emblems of efficiency and procedure, to whom people are abstract quantities, and society a series of equations of greed and demand. Their code words are ‘inevitability’, ‘invisibility’ and ‘profit’. Their language is a mixture of esoteric jargon and mathematical ephemera, with constant references to quasi-alchemical concepts like ‘The Invisible Hand’, the ‘Balance of Trade’ and ‘The Trickle-Down Effect’. It is not surprising, therefore, that we are witnessing a marked increase in these paranoid fantasies after the Liberal Party’s rise to power in 1996. It is not a coincidence either that patients are becoming fixated sexually on the figure of John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister – the living embodiment of Grey Man.”

The Mechanics of Inhumanity

During one of the studies, a series of photographs was presented to a group of schizophrenic patients, who were instructed to group them in a meaningful schema. This series included: 1) a diagram of a Watt steam engine; 2) Liberal Party figureheads; 3) the disfigured genitalia of anonymous car crash victims; 4) well-known environmental disasters; 5) Jeanette Howard, the Prime Ministers’ wife, eating at a corporate dinner; 6) queues at banks and Centrelink offices; 7) victims of police brutality; Victorian ex-Premier Jeff Kennett’s hairstyle; 9) Iraqi refugees at Port Hedland Detention Centre.

Sixty-five per cent of patients strongly associated the disfigured genitalia with various powerful figures in the Howard Government, a phenomenon doctors interpreted as expressing powerlessness – projected as psycho-sexual impairment – before a divisive and hermetic political regime. The Liberal Party figures were the objects of mutilation scenarios, and often the photos themselves were torn or cut. Also, forty-nine per cent of patients reported various elaborate, Sadean erotic fantasies. In these, they took submissive roles, often involving binding and genital disfigurement.

The Sleep of Reason

Dr Travis explained that the advent of discourses like “Scientific Management”, “Human Resource Management” and “Economic Rationalisation” had introduced a novel figure into the pantheon of modern psychosis. These prophets of efficiency and mechanism had become insistent iconic presences in the cosmologies of the deranged. Dr Travis said that the new millenium would bring nightmarish variations on these archetypes. He cited a recent US study, where patients in various states of terminal psychosis described terrifying meetings with cold female inquisitors, who would read out long strings of numbers, soliciting detailed information such as physical characteristics and financial assets.

These visitors, clad in neat, spotless grey suits, dictated intricate megalomanical theories that explained society through the workings of a cryptic “Economic Realm”, which they described as a land of milk and honey where the souls of workers and managers travelled after death, and which was ruled by a benevolent, all-seeing entity.

Assassination Fantasies

During one of the studies, long-term inmates were provided with Conceptual Assassination Kits, and the ensuing fantasy-elaboration process was monitored closely.

In 87 per cent of cases, the figure of Prime Minister John Howard emerged as a favourite target of assassination. Elaborate death schemes were put forth, many of which involved multiple automobile disasters and byzantine torture machinery. Twenty-one per cent of patients singled out Minister for the Environment Robert Hill as a preferred object of death, with the proposed methods of execution clearly echoing the present global devastation: death by toxic waste poisoning, melanoma and famine.

Psychotherapists concluded that the Prime Minister’s lack of any vital human traits – such as compassion, imagination or sexuality – made him a favourite vessel for various paranoid projections and erotic decontextualisations. In a minority of cases, this perceived emptiness facilitated reconceptualisation of Howard as a robot or a computer-generated image.

John Howard’s Conceptual Pudenda

Shortly before his unexplained disappearance, Dr Travis outlined the results of his research in a manuscript presently in the possession of a Federal Police Task Force.