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Friday, May 04, 2012

Still Befuddling

I've been blogging here since May 2004, so, you know, eight years or so, and I still find it completely strange when more than twice as much attention attaches, say, to this spur-of-the-moment throwaway afterthought post reminding folks of something I've said (better) a bazillion times before than to this more substantive post preceding it that took hours to craft, said some things I haven't said before, and which even provocatively had the word "sex" in the title. Weird. Last month, a post consisting of something like a snapped finger in the aftermath of being annoyed by an episode of a reality show on the tee vee was read hundreds of times more than any of the political commentary or futurological critique penned all month long which is more or less the definitive pre-occupation of the blog. Not complaining, just registering amused perplexity. Blogging is still crazy after all these years.

5 comments:

jimf said...

> . . .more than twice as much attention attaches, say, to this
> spur-of-the-moment throwaway afterthought post reminding folks
> of something I've said (better) a bazillion times before than to
> this more substantive post preceding it that took hours to craft,
> said some things I haven't said before. . .

Well, I read the latter, anyway. Didn't have anything flippant
or substantive to add, though.

I appreciated the Adorno and Horkheimer quote (from 1944!
What a time to be giving "society" the finger!) about
the culture industry putting folks into a state of perpetual
arousal without ever letting them cum. (And "culture industry" --
must've meant, what, radio and movies and magazines in those days, mostly --
before TV and the Web and enormous photo-quality full-color
billboards of people in their underwear in the middle of town.)

You know, the soap opera, first on the radio and then on TV, is
the quintessential "art form" that leads people on forever
without **ever** providing resolution. Nowadays, there are
TV shows with "story arcs" (Battlestar Galactica, True Blood,
Smallville, Heroes), and even movie franchises (Twilight)
that do the same thing.

But life itself is a soap opera, the only ultimate release
being the grave.

I've been re-reading J. G. Ballard's _The Drowned World_ (strangely
soothing, just like the soporific disintegration Ballard's
characters are usually enmeshed in), in which the protagonist
muses:

". . .[H]e accepted [his suicidally-beckoning primordial dreams] as
an inevitable element of his life, like the image of his own death each
of them carried with him in the secret places of his heart. (Logically --
for what had a more gloomy prognosis than life? -- every morning one
should say to one's friends: 'I grieve for your irrevocable death', as
to anyone suffering from an incurable disease. . .)"

Chad Lott said...

I spent the last two days surrounded by marketing suits at an interactive conference and it's the same for everyone.

You get more hits asking "who farted?" than explaining what a fart is.

Dale Carrico said...

Ballard's never been surpassed (though he's had equals since, thankfully), and just as uncannily contemporary every single damn year you read him, from the year of publication right on down to now. I've grown up re-reading him since Junior High School and mean to keep re-reading long after I've given up.

jimf said...

I have to get this:

http://www.amazon.com/AVENTINE-Lee-Killough/dp/0345295218
---------------------------
Publication Date: December 12, 1981

A resort for the super-rich and the super-sophisticated on a bucolic planet at the crossroads of the civilized galaxy; where lifestyle and living quarters are limited only by imagination; where furniture changes shape and color to match the owner's mood, where the statuary moves and the stones sing; where split personalities live without pressure to become normal...
---------------------------

It's described in:

_The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard_
by Roger Luckhurst (1998)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Angle-Between-Two-Walls/dp/031217439X

"For science fiction, parody. . . remain[s] vital. . . Ballard's texts did not survive long before entering this circulation. . . A later _New Worlds_ collection. . . contained [Thomas M.] Disch's mock interview with G. G. Allbard, author of _Rash_ (who talks so obsessively about his bodily fluids that the interviewer is incapable of posing any questions). [John] Sladek also wrote a brief parody of the catastrophe novels, 'The Sublimation World', which accurately picks up on stylistic tics ('The whole city was a gibbous dune, once a mercury refinery, now frozen into a single gaseous crystalline chrysalid, depended from what had once been a flaming bloodfruit tree, now gone to iron, ironically' [That's a little heavy-handed!]; 'He was barely visible, a slash of red among the yellow balloons, like a wound').

Most intriguing, however, are the series of stories published by _Fantasy and Science Fiction_ that were eventually collected under the title _Aventine_. There is no framing reference anywhere to the fact that they are parodies of _Vermilion Sands_. . . [W]hen asked [to] by [David] Pringle, Ballard refused to read them.

Killough's borrowings are extensive. 'The Siren Garden' shifts from the singing plants of Ballard's 'Prima Belladonna' to crystals which, like many of the objects in _Vermilion Sands_, are sensitive to extremes of emotion. Lorna Dalridian exploits them to ensnare the narrator into a murder of her husband. Lorna's eyes, incidentally, move through the range of silver, violet and obsidian. The garden is borrowed from another Ballard text, ['The Garden of Time']. 'Tropic of Eden', with psychotropic houses, synthesizes elements of 'The singing Statues' and 'Venus Smiles', whilst the series of portrait-sittings before psychically reactive materials recalls 'Cry Hope, Cry Fury!'. 'A House Divided' uses props from '[The Thousand Dreams of] Stellavista', as does 'Broken Stairways, Walls of Time'. 'Menage Outré', meanwhile, has a narrator who writes computer-generated novels and becomes ensnared with a mysterious female neighbor, just as in 'Studio 5, The Stars'. 'Menage' begins: 'At night the sound of flutes and drums pulsed across the lawns'; 'Studio 5' opens: 'At midnight I heard the music playing from the abandoned nightclub'. Verbal echoes are constant, as is the. . . use of simile and the opening paragraphs which structure the narrative in retrospection. The women tend to have suitably mysterious and tragic pasts. . .

That there is no acknowledgment of 'borrowing', no obvious sign of homage. . . clearly irritates David Pringle. . .

The repetitive predictability of Ballard's texts allowed Martin Amis, in a review of _The Day of Creation_, to summarise the book through a parodic exchange between two Ballard fans: ' "I've read the new Ballard." "And?" "It's like the early stuff." "Really? What's the element?" "Water." "Lagoons?" "Some. Mainly a river." "What's the hero's name? Maitland? Melville?" "Mallory." '

;->

jimf said...

Here's something cool I just found. An on-line J. G. Ballard concordance!
http://bonsall-books.co.uk/concordance/

Here you can find all the instances, throught his oeuvre, of Ballard's characteristic vocabulary words.

Here's an example:
http://bonsall-books.co.uk/concordance/c4623.htm#SPECTRAL

SPECTRAL..............................63

the balcony and I listened to her voice, like a spectral fountain, pour its luminous notes into the air. The music p 10 PB 1956
shoulder to shoulder in endless ranks, like spectators in a spectral arena. Beside me a voice spoke, and it seemed to p 92 WG 1959
tiered upwards into multi-faceted lenses, focused slowly on the vivid spectral outlines of the sounds dancing like phosphorescent waves around the p 191 VT 1960
hundred yards away my neighbour's villa was lit like a spectral crown. The exposed quartz veins in the sand reefs along p 209 S5 1961
its patina of age stripped away, loomed with a curious spectral whiteness as if suddenly remembered in a dream. Raising his p 299 GT 1962
to the waist with dandified skeletons in tuxedos against a spectral bonelike landscape. On another wall one of Max Ernst's self-devouring p 29 DW 1962
held in his hands like the heady vapours of some spectral grail. The Causeways of the Sun The next day, for p 45 DW 1962
and out of the air like the architecture of a spectral city. In the centre of the square, by the edge p 66 DW 1962
he could still see the vast inflamed disc of the spectral sun, still hear the tremendous drumming of its beat. Timing p 70 DW 1962
own spinal levels. At times the circle of water was spectral and vibrant, at others slack and murky, the shore apparently p 83 DW 1962
flickering with the ghostly light, like the crew of a spectral ship. Puzzled, Kerans searched the sky and lagoon. The dusk p 118 DW 1962
and turned them into the expiring corner of an ancient spectral city. Crawling from below the throne, he rose uncertainly to p 140 DW 1962

. . .