Supposedly contemptible components

Zadie Smith on Ballard (in her ceaselessly quoteworthy Guardian piece/book excerpt in response to David Shields' Reality Hunger):

This year Ballard's stories in particular have been a revelation to me, being at once well made, full of the supposedly contemptible components – plot, setting, character – and yet irreducibly strange in proportion. It's a marvel how implacably and consistently weird he managed to be despite appearing to use all the normal tools at the disposal of any English short-story writer. All in all there is something a little shaming in reading Ballard: you have to face the fact that there exist writers with such fresh imaginations they can't write five pages without stumbling on an alternate world.

It blooms with all these great offhand lists:

Every now and then a writer renews your faith. I'm looking around my desk at this moment for books that have had this effect on me in the not-too-distant past: Bathroom and Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli, Number9Dream by David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel's An Experiment in Love, Dennis Cooper's My Loose Thread, The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, the collected short stories of JG Ballard. [...]

Off the top of my head: David Markson's Reader's Block, Peter Handke's The Weight of the World, Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, Georges Perec's Species of Spaces and Other Pieces and Kafka's own Blue Octavo Notebooks . . .

J.G. Ballard as father

"So in between school runs, ironing school ties and cooking sausages and mashed potato, he wrote his novels and short stories – one minute conjuring up wild dystopias, the next watching Blue Peter....The watching of television was not rationed (unlike most of my friends) and was welcomed as an interesting vehicle of information and popular culture." —Bea Ballard, The Guardian

(From Levi)

Parkiana for October 2009

I. My J.G. Ballard appreciation, in the form of an abecedary, is in this weekend's Los Angeles Times. Alas, we couldn't fit the entries for letters F, M, S, and W, so I include them here—that's right, this is a DISAMBIGUATION EXCLUSIVE™! (This whole setup reminds me of the end of Mark Leyner's Et Tu, Babe, where the abecedary is revealed to be incomplete because "On September 24, 1994, federal operatives, acting under the authority of the Punitive Confiscation Act, sized Chapter Five manuscript entries for the letters B, E, H, J, K, L, N, O, P, Q, R, U, and X.") Many thanks to my editors for letting me write the piece in this form in the first place!

Flight
Flight enabled and denied haunts these pages. In “The Air Disaster,” the “world’s largest airliner,” holding a thousand passengers, crashes near Acapulco, and though people think it landed in the sea, one intrepid journalist, acting on a hunch, heads to a remote mountain village instead. But his hunger for a scoop colors his judgment, and he finds himself in a hell of grotesque misunderstanding.

Man
Some story titles: “The Overloaded Man” (1961), “The Subliminal Man” (1963), “The Illuminated Man” (1964), “The Impossible Man” (1966).

Science fiction
Places where most of these stories appeared: Science Fantasy, New Worlds, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Fantastic Stories, Worlds of If, Argosy, Anticipations, Dangerous Visions.

Wave IX
Poetry journal edited by Paul Ransom, narrator of “Studio 5, The Stars,” featuring products of the VT. (See Vermilion Sands.)

II. I wrote a brief appreciation of Renata Adler's Speedboat for a cool little book called City Secrets Books: The Essential Insider's Guide (Fang Duff Kahn), a gathering of similar appreciations of interesting (and mostly obscure) titles. How obscure? Thornton Wilder's...The Cabala. Patricia Highsmith's...Edith's Diary. Jonathan Franzen's..."Erika's Imports." E.B. White's...The Fox of Peapack and Other Poems. Plus stuff I have somewhere but have never read (Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept...no, not that Elizabeth Smart), stuff by writers whose other stuff I like (Robert Kelly's The Flowers of Unceasing Coincidence—"The shape of the whole thing...is that of a rhizome, i.e. a non-hierarchical space, a burrow where you, the can go to earth for as long as little as you like"), stuff that I've mentioned on this blog within the past couple of weeks (Chuck Wachtel's Joe the Engineer), stuff I truly have never heard of, authorwise and titlewise (Otto Lilienthal's 1889 book Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation, anyone? Giovanni Paolo Marana's 1683 Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy?), and enough of my all-time favorites (William Boyd's Any Human Heart, Powell's Dance of course, Todd McEwen's Who Sleeps With Katz [!!?!?!], Jonathan Coe's The Winshaw Legacy, Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban, Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity) to make me believe that this gathering has some basis in reality. And where else can you read writers like John Crowley on Paul Park (no relation!), Carole Maso on The Pillow Book, Gary Shetyngart on Mordecai Richler? Wait...Buck Henry on Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress?? Is this book for real?

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for April 25, 2008

1. Levi runs with the tag!

2. Becky plays Carcassone! (Carcass 1? Carcass own?) Remind me to tell you about playing Settler of Catan, translating slowly from the German!

3. Madonna's "Four Minutes"! I feel like this is an Ouroboros....I'm calling everything an Ouroboros these days...OK...maybe it's just a pretzel thingy...a song that it about its own duration!


Also those vivisectional views are very unsettling, like the cover of this Ballard Re/Search thingy!









4. Molls: "Whew! Are you poped out?"

5. Is that Jude Law in the window of the Beatles' limo?...Various new Personal Days notices...I thought this headline [Jennifer Lopez to star in a TLC reality series (AP)] meant that J.Lo was starring in a series based on TLC the group...

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for March 25, 2008

I. Two quotes—

Ultimately I was removed from Buffalo, but the stages of my breakdown have a montage-like quality to them, and by now they’re mixed up with what I have dreamed.
—Charles Baxter, The Soul Thief

Anthony Powell wouldn't do, while Michael Moorcock became a friend....
—Karl Miller, "Duty and the Drink," review of J.G. Ballard's Miracles of Life, TLS

II. Lots of action on the Personal Days blog! I deliberately chose the most antiseptic-looking Blogger template, but what does it mean that I find it very warm now? (Thanks to Dizzyhead Jen for co-blogging there with me.)

III. Janet Maslin on Jodi Picoult:

What if a bad man murdered a nice woman’s husband? What if he killed her daughter too? What if she had another daughter? What if 11 years later, as the date for the bad man’s execution approached, the second daughter needed a new heart?

What if the bad man wanted to make amends with an organ transplant? What if he wanted to give his bad heart to the innocent child? As Ms. Picoult puts it, in the bold, high-concept idiom of movie ads: “Would you want your dreams to come true if it meant granting your enemy’s dying wish?”

Let’s put it another way: If you were that mother, would it take you 447 pages to make up your mind?

I kind of wish the whole piece was composed of questions—didn't Lester Bangs have a piece in which every sentence ended in an exclamation point? (Via Light Reading)

IV. I love this Paul Collins piece on How to Do Nothing With Nobody All Alone By Yourself, in the latest Tin House:

A step-by-step guide to grinding oyster shells against the front stoop for no damn reason, to turning buttons and string into buzzsaws that won't cut anything, and to making paper boomerangs that don't come back, Nothing is about what you do when you're nine years old and have neither money nor anyone paying much attention to you, and where your one guiding principle is that you avoid grown-ups and don't ask for help....

V. And finally—it wouldn't be a "Table-Talk" without your daily Ouroboros. This one's from Dizzyhead Khong, who helpfully IDs the critter as an "armadillo lizard"; according to this site, "They bite on their tail and roll themselves into a ball when threatened."

Post #1,000!

Yikes!

1. Bouncing off yesterday's post—I recently had the pleasure of reading some of John Sladek's science fiction parodies (of Hugo Gernsback, PKD, and J.G. Ballard). Hilarious! His PKD parody is entitled "Solar Shoe-Salesman," and features (in its few pages) all manner of Dickian inventions/tics, such as books within books ("Androgynoid, written under the pseudonym 'H.K. (Kid) Cliplip'") and a book constructed using sayings derived from Mah Jongg ("The wise king avoids fried foods")—The Man in the High Castle famously grew out of throws of the I Ching.

2. Arlo recently played Kan-Jam. The Wiki entry includes this term:

Jankowski: A Jankowski is any action or article that the player uses for good luck, such as always flipping the disc before throwing it.

The Connections: Readymades

1. Two quotes read by Joyce Carol Oates at the Bookforum panel yesterday:

Criticism speaks, and all the arts are silent. —Northrop Frye

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure
Critics all are ready made. —Lord Byron

2. Two quotes found by me online yesterday:

Everyday is so surreal. —Britney Spears, homepage letter

Welcome to the surrealist world, which you never knew you inhabited. —J.G. Ballard, The Guardian