* The “equally fictional” nature of things, ie. ‘Reality isn’t real, but simply realistic..’
* Wintermute in Gibson’s Neuromancer: “Mind’s aren’t read. See, you’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print literate [..]”
* The fact that (again) we have to take seriously Gysin’s observation – and the subsequent research of Burroughs – that “Literature is 50 years behind painting.” (And therefore perhaps “The Alien Net is 2.0 biocomputational hologenerations beyond video.” – Henry Swanson)
* All this seems to point to McKenna’s idea of a shamanistic “hyper-Visual Language”
* Ballard’s idea of ‘transcending time’ via direct ‘textual-image’ based intervention in human consciousness, accessing distinctly ‘Other’ dimensions via the ‘hidden-in-plain-view’ unconscious of the Western Materialist-Scientific Everyday.. his own ongoing art mutation of the true surrealist agenda..

L8ers

Henry

the above combined with the ‘three levels of experience’ has given me a nice head rush.

excellent piece!

thanks to tim chapman for explaining the court circular to us yanks.

And all the comments posted so far are fascinating, if not somewhere out there beyond ‘fascinating.’ Thanks to you and all of the commentators to date, for jobs so very well done!

(And to Simon for yet another posting that is nothing short of outstanding)!

Vivat!

Still is!

Chris Evans, who Ballard described as his closest friend, was keen to encourage Ballard’s computer experiments. Evans died tragically young, of cancer, at 48.

Ian Sommerville, one of Burroughs’ closest companions and his ‘technical adviser’, was keen to encourage Burroughs’ computer experiments (see below from The Third Mind). Sommerville died tragically young, in a car crash, at 36.

Might the work of these two great writers have developed differently had these two friends lived longer?

KICK THAT HABIT MAN
THAT KICK HABIT MAN
KICK HABIT THAT MAN
HABIT KICK THAT MAN

THAT HABIT KICK MAN
HABIT THAT KICK MAN
KICK THAT MAN HABIT
THAT KICK MAN HABIT

(Part of – ‘Poem printed on Honeywell Series 200 Model 120 computer programmed by Ian Sommerville’ – The Third Mind – Permutations)

“I can visualise for example a world ten years from now where every activity of one’s life will be constantly recorded by multiple computer-controlled TV cameras throughout the day so that when the evening comes instead of having to watch the news as transmitted by BBC or ITV – that irrelevant mixture of information about a largely fictional external world – one will be able to sit down, relax and watch the real news … a computer-selected and computer-edited version of the days rushes. ‘My God, there’s Jenny having her first ice cream!’ or ‘There’s Candy coming home from school with her new friend.’ Now all that may seem madly mundane, but … let’s take another level – the warmth and rapport you have with a two-year-old infant, the close physical contact, his pleasure in fiddling with your tie, your curious satisfaction when he dribbles all over you, all these things which make up the indefinable joys of parenthood. Now imagine these being viewed and recorded by a very discriminating TV camera, programmed at the end of the day, or at the end of the year, or at the end of the decade, to make the optimum selection of images designed to give you a sense of the absolute and enduring reality of your own experience. With such technology interfaced with immensely intelligent computers I think we may genuinely be able to transcend time.”

The whole interview’s available at http://www.rickmcgrath.com/jgballard/penthouse_1979.html

I think that what JGB doesn’t like about computers is their use as a word processor for writing fiction – which, if you think about it, is really an extremely unimaginative use of the technology. He was certainly interested in them in the 60s and 70s, I suspect partly as a result of his friendship with the ‘maverick scientist’, Dr Christopher Evans.

There’s two other printouts in JGB’s work. both of which refer specifically to Doc Evans: “How Dr Christopher Evans Landed on the Moon” in 1969, and one of the “Invisible Years” series in Ambit from 1977. You can see both of these at Rick’s website: http://www.rickmcgrath.com/jgballard/jgb_uncollected_work/evans_on_moon.html and http://www.rickmcgrath.com/jgballard/jgb_uncollected_work/invisible_autumn77.html

So the ‘Court Circular’ would have been an expected feature of the newspapers which this special issue of Ambit seems to have been pastiching. ‘JG Ballard’s Court Circular’ could suggest that it’s intended as the record of Ballard’s own official engagements, which is perhaps fodder for the amateur psychiatrists (over to you, Dr McGrath…). Or, given Ballard’s oft-stated anti-monarchic principles, it may just be satirical.

As for the poem’s ‘print-out’ format, I’d strongly suspect the involvement of Christopher Evans, who had access to early mini-computers such as the DEC PDP-8 in his day job at the National Physics Laboratory (see also “How Dr Christopher Evans Landed on the Moon”, the New Worlds piece which seems to be a print-out from an early lunar-lander game).