Comments on: Trompe-l'oeil corridors

By: MOOR EEFFOC « Editions of You

MOOR EEFFOC « Editions of You — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 07:36:40 +0000

[...] blog entry. As odd as it may be to link Chesteron with M. John Harrison, this reminds me of “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium,” which I love. Anyway, emphases mine: Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with [...]

By: surveilling « Uncle Zip’s Window

surveilling « Uncle Zip’s Window — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:10:07 +0000

[...] the mornings now is hot-corner my screen. Because I have got Surveillance Saver, probably the most Ballardian time waster ever devised. The only cloud on my horizon is that it works more randomly in the system [...]

By: Simon Sellars

Simon Sellars — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 23:10:44 +0000

matt, you are depriving yourself. get it on your screen, son…although it is a massive time waster (and chews through the bandwidth, too).

johnny, those mini-scenes sound like something from one of your fiction pieces! i see why you’re attracted to it, now.

By: johnny

johnny — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 23:05:20 +0000

“did you see anything out of the ordinary?”

i saw a man in a hooded djellaba handing a man in a tan suit a packet. the man in the suit walked away like a character out of pepe le moka. i watched a group of spanish tourists take over the terrace in a mood of contained hostility. one day i thought i was hallucinating as a caravan of tiny toy like cars rolled into the parking lot; turned out to be an eccentric german touring group of mini-vehicles. one morning i saw a couple embracing in a corner of the bazaar, an illicit liaison? and so on…

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:42:54 +0000

Great piece Simon – but I don’t think I’ll be installing the screen saver, too many ghosts and spectral spaces to watch, the horror of all that emptiness… I was instantly reminded of the main character in DeLillo’s The Body Artist transfixed by a surveillance camera charting the empty reaches of a back road in rural Finland. Haunting.

By: Simon Sellars

Simon Sellars — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 07:49:39 +0000

great, will do.

and i might ‘go froth’, too! (after all, there have been a few rants on this site…)

cheers.

By: Bosse de Nage

Bosse de Nage — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 07:46:37 +0000

I’ve only seen Solaris, but your comment strikes me as apt…Something about the timing of the film, in fact. In the site, the scenery and the observer’s state of mind appear to have a reciprocal influence on each other, and both appear to be constantly changing.

Go froth, I mean forth, and buy something by MJH.
Good value: Anima (two novels in one: The Course of the Heart & Signs of Life–not-science-fiction in the sense that Ballard isn’t either); Things That Never Happen (collected short stories).

His weblog’s quite amusing as well.

By: Simon Sellars

Simon Sellars — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 07:39:18 +0000

fabulous! also sounds a bit like tarkovsky, yes? ‘abandoned industrial zones’ (ie, stalker), plus ‘strangeness particular to each observer’ (ie, solaris).

anyway, your description makes me want to read it right now.

By: Bosse de Nage

Bosse de Nage — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 07:31:59 +0000

Without going into too much detail, Nova Swing has one mother of an Interzone going. A portion of the Kefahuchi Tract has fallen to the planet Saudade–it’s both the abandoned industrial zone it was before and a site that generates strangeness particular to each observer. Well, I can’t do it justice to it, except to say that it’s the only Interzone, after Burroughs and Ballard, that has exerted on me that fatal pull. NS is the sequel to Light, which is brilliant. But Harrison’s been scripting neural romances for decades–the Viriconium series is a wonderfully stylized series (due allowance made for the first one, the work of a very young man) set in a city that is everywhere and nowhere. One story, A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium, was republished as A Young Man’s Journey to London, as if to illustrate this point.

One thing Harrison shares with Ballard is the tendency to revisit and rework key tropes.

By: Simon Sellars

Simon Sellars — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 07:17:48 +0000

really? how so, bosse? unfortunately i haven’t read any MJM, let alone ‘nova swing’…i’d like to, though, if it evokes this world (of course, i know of MJM through new worlds and so on; he’s always been on the ‘list’).

By: Bosse de Nage

Bosse de Nage — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 07:07:30 +0000

This stuff puts me in mind of M. John Harrison’s Nova Swing as much as it does anything Ballardian.

By: Simon Sellars

Simon Sellars — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 13:53:58 +0000

thanks mike — that’s a lovely little display you’ve got going there. so, would wittgenstein suggest surveillance cameras bring into existence that which previously did not exist (or is it just that it was previously unknowable)?

and johnny — yes, it’s like crack. did you see anything out of the ordinary?

By: johnny

johnny — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 16:39:14 +0000

beautiful. this moody piece reminds me of my last sojourn in tangier. i had access to the hotel’s computer behind the front desk, but once the clerk showed me how to operate the security camera system i was hooked. i viewed the screen which showed shots of the parking lot, terrace, foyer and bazaar. one click and i could make a single shot fill the entire screen. i hurried thru my e-mails so as to spend more time watching the emptiness that would suddenly come to life.

By: Mike B.

Mike B. — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 14:05:09 +0000

Great stuff Simon. A while back I used some of these invisible but accessible feeds to illustrate Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in a suitably Ballardian way: http://www.mikebonsall.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/witt/tract.htm