Touring the ghostly technopolis

Via Reason, a video tour around Masdar City, on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.

It's a short, interesting and eerie journey through a kind of eco-Ballardian "community" in the desert: there's even an empty swimming pool 53 seconds in!



Whether this particular venture is sustainable or economically viable over the long term, I can't say.

But it does give me the urge to re-read Super-Cannes.

Science fiction triple feature

I've been in a science fiction state of mind recently, which is perhaps why I was particularly struck by a few things I ran across in the last day or so.

First, there was a lot in author Charles Stross's discussion of 'world building' (part of a series) that reminded me of my own efforts at 'past reconstructing': i.e. how closely related efforts to understand the past and predict the future can be. (Even if the problem of 'unknown unknowns' plays a rather different role in each case.) (Thanks to Chris W. for pointing me to Stross's excellent blog!)

Second, another 'future building' track brought me to SF author Bruce Sterling, some of whose novels I've liked for many years now (such as Islands in the Net or Holy Fire).

Sterling downplays both his blog and, by implication, his 'State of the World' discussions at The Well, as being 'rambling, open-ended, eclectic blather'.

Without being utterly inaccurate, however, this description does insufficient justice to Sterling's ability to write things that are well-phrased, insightful and funny all at the same time.

For instance, I like his summary (at the Well discussion) of what he sees as the key society-shaping factors of the coming century, i.e., demographics and climate change. The mid-century world, he quips, is going to be dominated by 'old people in big cities who are afraid of the sky.'

Or put another way: 'Futurity means metropolitan people with small families in a weather crisis.' Also quite good, but not nearly as memorable.

Of course, there are other visions of futurity to be dealt with, such as those of right-wing talk radio hosts, the People's Republic of China and Cyberculture ('Smartphones! They make the Silicon Valley of the 1980s look like the railroads of the 1880s!').

In Sterling's summary of what he sees as the sorry state of 'fringe beliefs about the future', I am embarrassed to discover an apparently well-known fringe group of which I had never heard: the 'chemtrail' conspiracy theorists. (Sterling: ' These guys are pitiable loons, but they're interesting harbingers of a future when even scientific illiterates are deathly afraid of the sky.')

I have to admit more sympathy for two other fringe beliefs that Sterling observes seem to have disappeared a bit:

Space Travel people.  Visible mostly by their absence nowadays.  About the only ones left are nutcase one-percenters of a certain generation, with money to burn on their private space yachts.  This was such a huge narrative of the consensus future, for such a long time, that it's really interesting to see it die in public.   There's no popular understanding of why space cities don't work, though if you told them they'd have to spend the rest of their lives in the fuselage of a 747 at 30,000 feet, they'd be like "Gosh that's terrible."

Transcendant spiritual drug enthusiasts.  People consume unbelievable amounts of narcotics nowadays, but there used to be gentle, unworldly characters who genuinely thought this practice was good for you, and would give you marijuana and psychedelics because they were convinced they were doing you a big, life-changing favor.

You go into one of those medical marijuana dispensaries nowadays, they're like huckster chiropractors, basically.  The whole ethical-free-spirit surround of the psychedelic dreamtime is gone. It's like the tie-dyed guys toking up in the ashram have been replaced by the carcasses of 12,000 slaughtered Mexicans.

Finally, Sterling -- who spends a lot of time in Italy and Serbia -- offers two interesting perspectives of these countries' views of future change based upon his experiences in each.

With regard to the Italians' views of 'Europe':

The Italian version of "Europe" is different from other people's versions of "Europe," mostly because "Europe" is so much better-governed than Italy.  If Italy hadn't founded the European Union, Italy wouldn't be allowed into it now, because Italy's too decadent and ramshackle to live up to the standards.  So, every once in a while some kind of cold European economic/political breeze will ooze over the Alps; and Italians rarely complain; on the contrary, they're grateful for it and hope for better.  Like, maybe "Europe" will somehow dispell the "Crisis" without Italians having to do much of anything, and wow, that would be great.

With regard to the Serbians' views of Russia:

Serbia's fantasy version of Russia is like nobody else's conception of Russia; most everybody else thinks of Russia as some half-blind, yellow-fanged ursine creature bristling with rusty nuclear weapons, while for Serbia, Russia is a fluffy angelic-winged flying bear to be depicted in stained-glass windows in a cloud of Orthodox incense. Tremendous emotional energy is invested in imagining that Russia will somehow show up and set everything to rights someday,even though Russia has never really done that anywhere for anybody.

Third, and finally, at 21C magazine there is quite a good discussion of J. G. Ballard among Sterling, V. Vale and (our friend) Simon Sellars. (Who also has an essay in the Ballard collection I noted here recently.)

This is by no means new, but I failed to mention it at the time and ran across it quite by chance again yesterday. 

Sterling again:

You’re not suicidal if you understand J.G. Ballard. On the contrary,this guy’s a consummate survivor. Burroughs and his friends and the beatnik movement had a tremendous casualty list, whereas Ballard and his friends in the British New Wave movement and the Pop Art scene were actually fairly solid, well-balanced if unconventional individuals – people with jobs and children, they were not reedy figures. This is a towering oak tree of a writer, who wrote many volumes of consistently good, accomplished work.

This reminded me a little bit of some similar comments on this blog that we offered a few years ago now on the occasion of Ballard's death.

OK, enough 'open-ended eclectic blather for one evening, methinks.

A brief note on literary violence and shady politics

We're just recently back from a week in snowy, snowy Davos (long story, largely very enjoyable*) and have been making the jarring transition from the holidays back to the workaday world.

But, two things made me very happy today.

First, my contributor copy of J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions was there waiting for me when I arrived at my office. It looks fabulous and is full of interesting essays on a wonderful and much-missed author. My own contribution (the only effort, as far as I know, that anyone has ever made to analyse Ballard's work from the perspective of Norbert Elias's 'civilising process') can be perused in draft form here. Some comments on the conference that spawned it are here and here.

Second, I learned a new and useful German word, halbseiden, which means 'dubious' or 'shady' (and, apparently, in older usage, 'homosexual'). I ran across it in the context of a story about the German president, Christian Wulff, who has gotten into a spot of bother about some (allegedly) questionable loans from friends and a couple of (allegedly) threatening phone calls to the press which has been eagerly reporting on them. (Any possible homosexuality has, so far as I know, remained unrevealed.)

Quite a profitable day, if I do say so myself.

-----

* We can, for example, very much recommend the sauna at this place. And if you feel up to it, a jog around the Davosersee can be very invigorating. And the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Museum has a small but very worthwhile collection. Skiing, you might have noted, is not really our thing....

Vertical violence

Via my friend Chris, I was made aware of a post at Blood & Treasure referring to a new building design that has been unveiled for a planned skyscraper in Seoul, South Korea.

It's referred to as 'The Cloud':

I will leave aside any aesthetic comments (other than WTF!!!! An image of a twin-towered complex exploding...who thought this was a good concept?) and simply use this image as an excuse to note the recent publication of a collection of essays, J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions.

This collection derives from a conference in which I participated some years ago and includes an essay by your humble narrator ('"Going mad is their only way of staying sane": Norbert Elias and the Civilised Violence of J. G. Ballard') on the novels High-Rise  and Super-Cannes.

Whilst wandering around Bloomsbury a few days ago I had the pleasure of discovering this book in one of my favourite London bookshops and finding my essay nestled there among the others.

In academia you have to take your joys where you find them.

I recommend this book for those of you interested in Ballard's writing.

I'm very happy to be among the essays contained within it.

A bridge: too far?

My first reaction to these images (via Spiegel Online) of the new, enormously long sea-spanning bridge in China was amazement.

My second was to wonder what J. G. Ballard might have made of it. And part of me is now sad to think that a water-borne sequel to Concrete Island will never be written. 

When words hit the road

I steered the Jensen into the slow lane of the M4, and began to read the route signs welcoming me to the outer London suburbs. Ashford, Staines, Hillingdon - impossible destinations that featured only on the mental maps of desperate marketing men. Beyond Heathrow lay the empires of consumerism, and the mystery that obsessed me until the day I walked out of my agency for the last time. How to rouse a dormant people who had everything, who had bought the dreams that money can buy and knew they had found a bargain? (J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come 1)

If you've ever wondered (as I did in my girlish naivety) whether a "Jensen" is a real existing car and not another technological chimera from Ballard's eutopic suburbias, today's Spiegel has a whole photo series of the "Jensen Interceptor III."

Just enjoy the pictures and don't read the text (and don't - DON'T - think about fuel efficiency). According to the comments (I only ever read the comments, really), it's full of unforgiveable mistakes about the intricate inspirational conduits of international auto design.

"The togetherness of modern technology"

As if summoned from a novel by J.G. Ballard: "China traffic jam stretches 'nine days, 100km'"

The title of this post comes from a 1979 Penthouse interview with Ballard on the prescience of science fiction in which he observed:

I suspect it will also turn out to have been extremely accurate in the way in which it is now predicting or anticipating the peculiar affectless quality of life in the 1980s and 90s.

Penthouse: What kind of things?

Ballard: Well, for example the way in which the traditional togetherness of the village is giving way to the inbuilt loneliness of the new high rises, or the peculiar fact that people nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It's a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it's the togetherness of modern technology, and the science fiction writers of the 40s, 50s and 60s picked it out unerringly as being a dominant feature of the future - often without realising what they were doing.

Not that that togetherness is all that cozy, at least going by the Chinese example:

The drivers have complained that locals are over-charging them for food and drink while they are stuck.

Clearly, our Chinese friends have that capitalism thing down pat. Yet, the real traffic jam seems to nevertheless lack, how shall we say, the rampant psychosexual perversion of the Ballardian original.

You can't have everything. 

The dark side of the sun

Thanks to Geoff for pointing me to an interesting article on the plight of many of those Britons who moved to the Spanish Mediterranean coast in the last couple of decades. As the article says:

Television shows such as Channel 4's A Place in the Sun promised adventure, swimming pools and the good life. A collapsing pound and the credit crunch have brought a harsher reality: homesickness, financial hardship and something those who call themselves "expats" rarely take into account, that they are immigrants – often with all the problems of not understanding the language or the rules.

Any latent Schadenfreude aside, the article's description of these British enclaves reminded me of nothing so much as the coastal resort of 'Estrella de Mar' invented by J.G. Ballard in his 1996 novel Cocaine Nights.

And then I ran across these lines, which made the Ballardian atmosphere complete:

Even the dead try to save money. Seventy percent of the corpses donated for science to Alicante's Miguel Hernández University belong to Britons – in some cases simply to avoid the expense of a funeral. "Some of those who have approached me don't have much money," admits Lionel Sharpe, who helps the university recruit future corpses.

Fascinating.

Now there's a job description: 'recruiter of future corpses'.

Everything you always wanted to know about the Swiss

The Cement Garden (book/film) meets Concrete Island - only funnier, by the looks of it.

Home (dir. Ursula Meier). More here.

Meier explains at Cineuropa:

It is a contemporary family tale; it is about isolation turning into madness. There are strong intimate ties between the characters, which will be revealed by the motorway. It becomes the screen onto which each of the characters projects their own neuroses. It is also a mirror of the world – violent, aggressive, and polluted – which enters the homes of people who thought they would be able to live alone, set apart from society. In this sense, it is a film about Switzerland.

Just as a kestrel sees more vividly than a mole

I recently ordered the first volume of George Orwell's collected essays, journalism and letters (we have volumes two and three, and very well thumbed they are...).

It's striking that, before you've even read a few dozen pages, you find such amazing examples of both cutting insult and sublime praise.

The insult comes from a review of J. B. Priestley's novel Angel Pavement:

When a novel lacks the indefinable, unmistakable thing we call beauty, one looks in it for sound delineation of character, or humour of situation, or verbal wit. But one looks in vain in Angel Pavement--Mr. Priestley can be clever, but he cannot be in any way memorable. (26)

Oh, that's painful, in a particularly painful way. But then comes the coup de grâce: Orwell notes that Priestley has been much over-praised by other reviewers, and he continues,

Once this absurd praise is discounted, we can salute Mr. Priestley for the qualities which he really possesses, and take Angel Pavement for what it is: an excellent holiday novel , genuinely gay and pleasant, which supplies a good bulk of reading matter for ten and sixpence.(Emphasis added, 27)

Oh man...that must have burned.

On the other hand, Orwell knew how to make a well-placed compliment.

In the context of a review of a biography of Herman Melville, he enthuses:

More important than his strength, he had--what is implied in real strength--passionate sensitiveness; to him seas were deeper and skies were vaster than to other men, and similarly beauty was more actual and pain and humiliation more agonising. Who but Melville would have seen the beauty and terror of a ridiculous beast like a whale? And who else could have written scenes like the bullying of Harry in Redburn, or that shocking and ludicrous account of an amputation in White Jacket? Such things were done by a man who felt more vividly than common men, just as a kestrel sees more vividly than a mole. (Emphasis added, 20-21.)

Partly because of this review, and partly because I noted recently that Melville also made the top of the 'best reads' list by J. G. Ballard some years ago (I found this in the additional material added to my copy of Millennium People), I have thought I should probably give Moby Dick another chance.

It was--like many things...and nearly Shakespeare!...ruined for me in high school (a common story, perhaps).

Though my renewed Melvillian interests may also be partly because I've been enjoying my belated discovery of Mastodon's 2004 heavy metal concept album, Leviathan, which is based on that novel about the white whale.

(I very much like the song--though not so much the video--for 'Blood and Thunder'...which for some reason involves clowns. Far scarier than whales, if you ask me.)



Any post-secondary-school Melville fans out there with their own observations?

And, yes, I know: from a strictly naturalistic perspective, one could have turned Orwell's metaphor on it's head, saying just as a mole feels more vividly than a kestrel.

But somehow I don't think it'd have worked as well.

Funny, that....

Notes from the back garden

Just some meaningless fragments...and a nice photo series at the Guardian on J. G. Ballard.

I think my favourite two are the ones showing Ballard as an ordinary bloke in his garden.


Although often lionized as an avatar of the extreme, one of the things I've always found most intriguing -- and most appealing -- about Ballard was his rootedness in the normal and routine.

It was his ability to so effortlessly traverse this seeming chasm between the banal and the weird that makes him so interesting.

Perhaps perversely, he was a poet of the weirdly ordinary.

From Justine Jordan's review of Ballard's last book published during his lifetime, Miracles of Life:

His literary career has been conducted from one "warm domestic nest", the Shepperton house he declines to leave because it reminds him of the family room in Lunghua. After the destruction of the war and two years of dissection, procreation was a magical act for Ballard, and he writes movingly about his three children, "miracles of life" whom he brought up single-handed after the early death of his wife from a sudden bout of pneumonia.

Domestic confinement enabled his imagination to run wild: "My greatest ally was the pram in the hall." The fragmentary meditations on geometry, psychosis and "celebrity sex death" of The Atrocity Exhibition were composed between the school run and Blue Peter, while anatomies of solitude such as Concrete Island came from the man who could now say, "Thankfully, I had long forgotten what it was like to be alone."

From David Pringle's Guardian books obituary:

On a family holiday in Spain in September 1964, his wife contracted an infection and swiftly died of galloping pneumonia. As Aldiss was later to say: "It unhinged Jimmy for some while." He wrote nothing for about six months and drank too much. Nevertheless, resisting suggestions that he farm them out, he continued to care for his three children. "It was an extremely happy childhood," his daughter Fay said later. "Daddy sacrificed everything to bring us up. We had a lady who came in to change and wash the sheets every Friday, but apart from that he did everything, and he did it brilliantly. Our home was a nest, a lovely, warm family nest."

One doesn't have to be a parent, I think, to appreciate his comment that "My greatest ally was the pram in the hall."

There are many kinds of ways of anchoring oneself in domestic tranquillity and human ordinariness, and such regularised order can be a tremendous aid to creativity.

I think the notion that the artist must be a personal extremist is a very tired one.

Thinking along these lines brought an association with John Gray's description of Arthur Schopenhauer.

I wouldn't for a minute agree with much of Schopenhauer's philosophy (which, in any case, only has a tenuous relationship to Ballard, except perhaps for both men's appreciation of the animal nature of human beings) or some of his biography, but he was certainly a productive and imaginative guy.

Gray summarises his lifestyle as follows:

He had a love of habit. During his later life in Frankfurt he followed an unvarying daily routine. Getting up around seven, he would write until noon, play the flute for half an hour, then go out to lunch, always in the same place. Afterwards he returned to his rooms, read until four, then went for a two-hour walk, ending up at a library where he read the London Times. In the evening he went to a play or a concert, after which he had a light supper in a hotel called the Englischer Hof. He kept to this regime for nearly thirty years.

(John Gray, Straw Dogs, 2002, p. 40)

I may be a freak, but I find something tremendously appealing about this.

Goodbye, JGB

We're both too sad to really express anything right now.

J. G. Ballard has died. (Telegraph. Boing Boing. Guardian. Independent. Times.)


As ever, the links to know are Simon's place, Rick's place, and Mike's place.

**

[UPDATE] Not long ago, Toby Litt expressed well that distinct feeling that emerges when reading the best of Ballard's fiction:

When I read JG Ballard, I go into a particular kind of trance. The effect of his books isn't comparable to those of any other writer. His prose, right from the beginning, has a mesmerising pace, rhythm and decorum all its own.

While I would agree with Toby about The Drowned World (which was the book that first turned me into an admirer after a difficult first-attempt at The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash), I think that of Ballard's mid-period work I prefer High-Rise.

Of the later stuff, I think Super-Cannes beats out Millennium People. They're difficult to compare, though, since the latter's tone is far more amused irony, even if it does--as ever--go to some pretty dark places.

But with Ballard, of course, one is spoilt for choice when it comes to picking favourites...

**

Some links from our archives dealing in one way or another with his writing:

"Seeing everything makes you sad": My translation of a Ballard interview with Welt am Sonntag.

Perchance to dream

Speaking in tongues

Handle with care

Home movies

That's entertainment

Dream the Unlimited Dream

A vision from the hidden side of the sun

Angry (but creative) old men

Matters of Honour(s)

More thoughts on rampant pathologies, modernist ziggurats and countless rabbits

Nightmares at noon

The revolting middle classes

Middle-class hero?

'Dangerous bends ahead'

Worth reading this weekend [Bruce Sterling on Ballard]

Speaking in tongues

Ian McEwan’s thoughts on John Updike (bless ’im) in today’s Guardian are well worth reading. His assessment of Updike’s style is lovely, a real gem:

Like Bellow, his only equal in this, Updike is a master of effortless motion - between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson.

I guess this style of conflicting perspectives and voices is what Mikhail Bakhtin meant by heteroglossia – the disruptive multi-tonguedness that he ascribed to the Dostoevskian novel. With reference to Bakhtin, therefore, I'd like to beg to differ with McEwan on the point that Updike is the sole representative of such a style (equalled only by Saul Bellow).

Here a passage from J.G. Ballard’s novel Rushing to Paradise (1994) – a viciously politically incorrect satire about an island commune of noble eco-warriors turned feminist dictatorship - which I had to think of when reading McEwan's article:

Neil tucked into the greasy mackerel with a plastic fork. His spirits rose as he remembered the savoury anchovies from Carline’s hamper that he had devoured on the beach. The waters of the lagoon teemed with snapper and coral trout, blue-fish and sea perch that many of the yacht-crews, not yet indoctrinated by Dr Barbara, grilled on open fires in the evening (84).

Dr Barbara, you must know, is the warrior queen/sadistic guard who oversees the utopian concentration camp in which the novel is set; Neil is the teenage admirer/alter ego/competitor with whom she exists in a destructive symbiosis.

It seems to be through the latter's eyes that this scene (as indeed much of the novel) is presented. In the third sentence, however, another perspective appears to intrude upon Neil's culinary and zoological contemplations, when a voice that might or might not be his suddenly, unmotivatedly raises the issue of indoctrination.

But is it Neil's voice? One the one hand, the reference to Dr Barbara's indoctrination would tie in with the image that he tries to project throughout the novel, namely that he is the last remaining sceptic in a microcosm of totalitarian madness. On the other, especially given his fascination with the feminist dictator to the very end of the novel, it seems doubtful that he is at all capable of such a rational stance.

Alternatively, this comment might be seen to come from another source altogether, like a distant, disembodied voice of reason speaking from elsewhere - possibly through the character - yet without influence upon his actions.

Rushing to Paradise hinges on the idea, central to Ballard's writing, that human beings are addicted to what destroys them and that no amount of rational analysis can bring them to their senses. Neil's problem - as well as that of the rest of Ballard's cast - is their inability to heed the voice of reason that they sometimes (as the example of Neil suggests) seem to ventriloquise.

This is the great contradiction explored again and again by Ballard: We like to think that we are rational creatures and do everything to leave that impression in public, but underneath the thin veneer of civilised rationality we are driven by impulses and passions that are beyond our control.

Is that different from Updike's writing? I think that yes, but not in principle. Where Updike uses heteroglossia to express his protagonists' battles with the world at large, Ballard's writing is all about the seductive enemies within that overshadow his characters' engagement with the world.

This does not mean that Updike is the more "social" (and realistic) and Ballard the more "psychological" (and surreal) author. What it means is that they approach their shared interest - the conflicts and contradictions of human existence - from different angles, only to finally meet somewhere in the middle.