Why do humans want to escape their mind and avoid reality? How is it an advantage? — Skalidris

Some things are just a bonus.

Even elephants and monkeys were said to seek out and eat fermented fruit for its intoxicating powers. — Wayfarer

Small point: monkeys are more than just said to enjoy alcohol. It's been observed in wild situations, i.e., not just those monkeys stealing cocktails on the beach.

I didn't know about elephants though. A drunk elephant could do a lot of damage.

It would take a lot of money to persuade me to wait in a queue for someone. I can hardly wait in a queue for myself. I miss so many things owing to my fear of queues.

I should just start saying "line" cos writing "queue" is getting tiresome.

Music for late-night coding. A certain mood.

I’m not super into dance music except on rare occasions. That sounds ok. So…tentative agreement.

I love rainy days — javi2541997

Me too. It's as if time stands still and allows you to contemplate the world unhindered.

Cosmism — Bret Bernhoft

I don’t find the idea of a techno-optimistic religion either realistic or enticing, but I’m glad you started this discussion, because it prompted me to look into Russian cosmism, a weird spiritual-philosophical-scientific movement from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some argue that it was cosmism that influenced the use of cosmonaut instead of astronaut (although there’s no particular reason why they should have chosen astro- anyway).

One cosmist was Alexander Bogdanov, a Bolshevik revolutionary who later formed a breakaway party independent of Lenin’s governing faction in the 1920s. He was a physician who experimented with rejuvenation by means of blood transfusions, hoping to attain eternal life, participated in politics, developed an early version of systems theory, and wrote a science fiction novel about a communist utopia on Mars, Red Star, which heavily influenced Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.

The tone of some cosmism seems to be similar to your modern techno-optimism, though of course the technological focus has changed.

I don’t know what you mean ND. What’s digging for info got to do with the varieties of Brit?

EDIT: It’s either that I’m bad at conversation and thus find it hard to follow what you are saying, or you’ve had too much wine and are beginning to spout gibberish. Either way, it’s all cool, as they say.

Are the English people the English people? — Noble Dust

That’s one of the defining characteristics, yes.

British (is that the biggest umbrella? Can't remember) — Noble Dust

Scottish, Welsh, and English people are all British, but only one of the three groups is English.

Ok, I’ll try responding again, this time earnestly: thanks ND and it’s all cool :cool:

What? Oh that. I’d forgotten all about it. Totally haven’t been seething with resentment for the last few fucking months.

Ok ND, I agree to be friends with you again, on condition you never mention my geographical location.

I'm currently reading Ocarle Night by Paul Auster. I seem to remember Jamal being an Auster fan, but not of this one. — Noble Dust

I said I don’t remember it, not that I didn’t like it.

It helps that I live a 20 minute walk from the neighborhood it took place in. — Noble Dust

:zip:

You telling a story, Ballard telling a story, DNA telling a story, me telling the story of not reading the story of the story your story is about; all of these as cracks in the ineffable beauty of the world, as if the perfect story needs no telling. When one relates a story, one relates it to another, and the interaction is also a relatable story. And the moral of that is — that stories have morals, and are relationships that we morally judge. — unenlightened

This is interesting, obscure, and either agreeable or disagreeable. :up:

But read Bateson. He is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Much more important than Ballard, because he moves the whole story of human thought forwards. Like Shakespeare, his writing is littered with cliches of his own invention. — unenlightened

I’m speeding along a different road right now, but Bateson now appears slightly bigger in the distance.

Incidentally, I found many scholarly papers that look at Ballard’s work in terms of Bateson or otherwise somehow combine them.

Speaking of books I haven't read, I just came to this fragment, and thought of this unhappy thread. Make of it what you can — unenlightened

I don’t see what’s unhappy about this thread, and although I keep encountering the name of Bateson and am quite interested, I don’t know what to make of the quotation in the context of this discussion. I’d be interested in reading either an explanation of what you think its relevance is (without worrying that you’re judging Crash without having read it), or a new and exciting thread on Bateson’s Mind and Nature.

If I had to guess, I’d say you kinda want to say something like: Crash seems like a story without a context, a revelling in psychopathy untethered from context and norms; and that if you are going to throw out love, you better make it clear that doing so is not recommended.

But I might be reading too much into your post.

If I am fanatical then so are you. — universeness

I don't think you've shown this to anyone's satisfaction except your own. I'm not saying you're fanatical just because I disagree with you. Having a contrary opinion is not in itself fanatical.

What is important is which of us is more in line with the truth. Do you think being fanatical about truth, is a negative, if what is professed does turn out to be true? — universeness

It's a negative. The point is that fanaticism is a bad approach to the truth, because it doesn't actually care about it.

while staying within Forum guidelines, of course — 0 thru 9

Whether you actually do or not is me to decide, 0 thru 9. :razz:

Your whataboutery doesn't answer the charge of moral untenability. It sidesteps it. You talk as if the mere fact that Israel seeks to justify the killing of civilians makes their opponents' equivalent justifications (and yours) morally tenable.

I think your true believer optimism is pretty brutal, not all that far from bloodthirsty utilitarianism (the ends justify the means). In the end, it just doesn’t matter what people have to go through to reach your Roddenberryesque utopia, so long as we get there. 300 years? Fine! Add more zeros!

This is what I meant in another discussion when I said that I’m inclined these days to “hope without optimism,” for which pain and suffering are essential.

I say all this as someone who once said the things you say. I recognize it now for what it was: fanaticism.

Fair.

Not sure I’d recommend Crash for excitement, but fair enough.

Thank you for your contribution. Next time I start a topic about a book you haven’t read, be sure to join in. :grin:

But I'm guessing on hearsay, because the whole horror/porn/thriller/gangster/ police /serial-killer/supernatural scene already bores me, so I'm not really concerned to find out either way. — unenlightened

If the horror/porn/thriller/gangster/ police /serial-killer/supernatural scene bores you, allow me to recommend…Crash.

So crazy shit becomes boring when normalised. Maybe the world needed to be appraised of this. Like how porn in general becomes ever more explicit, and ever more extreme, as the breaking of each taboo becomes normalised. Eventually, megadeath, or the vaginal evisceration of a woman is just as dull as another wank. I remember the good old days when playing doctors and nurses was excitingly transgressive.

It's not an Earth shattering insight: when you're tired of Crash, you're tired of death. That's about how good it can possibly be, I think: a demonstration of the banality of evil. — unenlightened

Internally, Crash normalizes some crazy shit, but the result is to de-normalize what we take to be unremarkable in the real world: the inhuman landscapes of flyovers, car parks, and airport hotels; selfish passionless sex; the love affair with cars; a horrific accident. Ballard wrote about the “death of affect”, referring to the replacement of feeling with mere sensation:

When I wrote about the death of affect in The Atrocity Exhibition in the late ’60s, I was writing against a background of a sensation-hungry media landscape that seized on all the violent imagery emerging from Vietnam, from the Kennedy assassination, from civil wars in Africa—all that atrocity footage that gave The Atrocity Exhibition its name. I was writing about the way in which sensation had usurped the place previously occupied by some kind of sympathetic engagement with the subject. I mean, one saw blowups of the Kennedy motorcade used as backdrops in fashion magazines. Images that should have elicited pity and concern were drained of any kind of human response, in the way that Warhol demonstrated. His art really was dedicated to just that. I don’t think it is quite so blatant nowadays. It is now incorporated into the way we see the world. In the ’60s one would see fashion models flouncing around in front of a backdrop of the Kennedy assassination, or a napalm explosion. You’d think, “My God, what are they doing?” Now, of course, thirty years later, you don’t even notice it.

I think a large part of the furor created here by Crash has been the desperate response of people who’ve seen a number of appalling atrocities on British television—like the massacre of sixteen five-year-olds in Scotland last March—and are looking for an explanation. You know, something must be behind this appalling event, and people think maybe there’s something wrong with the media world itself. — Ballard interview in Artforum magazine

Appraising the world of this is more than just about the banality of evil, I think. It’s a particular kind of banality.

But I want to pull back from the cautionary tale angle somewhat. Crash is an artistic reflection or exaggeration of reality that does not have a clear message, or one that is easy to explicate, but does that mean it’s just an indulgence of depravity?

Reminds me of the Atrocity Exhibition. I think these two works are probably deeply related on a conceptual level. Might have to take a lok again. — Apustimelogist

Forgot to reply to this. Although I haven’t read it, I’ve heard it said that Crash is indeed a development of some of the ideas in that book.

One other thing that lingers, now I'm remembering the impact of 'Crash' on me...The developed world really does fetishize the car in a most peculiar way, and this is very rarely remarked upon. People rationally agree that we've got to cut back on oil use, and yet buy bigger energy-guzzling cars, can only imagine a net zero future with loads of cars, vote for policies that allow cars more rights than pedestrian people. The person with the flag walking in front of a car to keep its speed down in 1900 would have saved thousands of lives: why do we laugh at such an image? The victory of car-drivers over pedestrians for rights over the city streets that gave rise to the term 'jaywalkers' 100 years ago wasn't an inevitable historical victory. The advertisements I see whenever I go to a cinema seem to be a sensual and sometimes quasi-erotic hymn to the car, and few other than Ballard have ever taken up this notion and run with it. I think future eras will look back on this phase of humanity's relationship with cars and wonder at how perverse we were. to so over-value the car, an asset the salaryman/working woman can enjoy and love and work dutifully for and become addicted to. — mcdoodle

Totally agree. In fact, I think jaywalking was pretty much an invention of the car industry. They campaigned hard to entrench the idea that streets are primarily for cars. The land of the free, where you can get arrested for crossing the road.

I live in a city clogged with traffic. When I say to a local person that in the future people will look back on this period in disbelief, they look at me like I’m crazy.

So I’m definitely supportive of Ballard’s effort of outrageous defamiliarization, which shines a new light on the world we live in.

Thanks for the reply, and some nice insights! To be honest I deeply respect the idea of someone who is uncompromising to put their stamp on a goal or vision they want to communicate and explore. Those kind of things really are what stick with me in stories or films. Even if a film or story isn't particularly exciting or enjoyable, if I perceive of it as projecting some kind of well-built underlying concept or vision, I often find myelf returning to it again and again, at least in thought, over more enjoyable alternatives. Sometimes though it takes time for those things to click. There have definitely been examples, in particular of films, where my first viewings I didn't find good at all, but once I can construct a picture I find interesting, whatever I found boring or uninteresting or disagreeable with it doesn't really matter anymore, or even accentuates the new way I am viewing it. — Apustimelogist

I know what you mean, although I’m struggling to think of a film I disliked that I later regarded highly. Maybe Eyes Wide Shut, but I’m still at the dislike stage on that one :grin:

The wikipedia synopsis of Unlimited Dream Company sounds quite interesting actually. — Apustimelogist

Though I did find it a bit irritating, it’s interesting and fun at times. I can imagine myself reading it again. It’s unusual for Ballard in that it feels upbeat and life-affirming—in a psychotic and apocalyptic way.

I was very taken with 'Crash', which I read about thirty years ago. In a way I felt prepared for how inexorable it is. From earlier novels I remembered 'The wind from nowhere', which I'd read before 'Crash', when a cyclonic wind springs up, and blows, and blows, and when any other writer would maybe have it ease up, the wind and the terrors it unleashes are relentless. Perhaps it was that familiarity with how Ballard's mind seemed to work that makes me feel I wasn't as affected as you were by 'Crash': I knew he would take one giant premise, and be inexorable, relentless. 'High rise' is a later, to me failed, version of the same obsessive approach. Maybe I was ready to keep my distance. — mcdoodle

That makes sense. Whereas I was dismayed by the relentless elaboration of a single idea, you were expecting it. It was the first of his novels I've read, after all.

In longer retrospect, 'Empire of the sun' was later an eye-opener to Ballard's imagination, a semi-autobiographical novel of a boy lost in the horrors of the Second World War in 'the far East', forced to confront terrible things before he was old enough to have developed a moral compass. — mcdoodle

I haven't read it. It hadn't occurred to me that it would be possible to trace the disturbing surrealism of his other work back to his real experiences, since I seem to remember him saying that life in the internment camp wasn't all that bad, as if he was trying to downplay the attempts at psychologizing him. But that might have been my misinterpretation.

Last thought: I felt as you did about 'Crash', about the Pinturas Negras, the 'Black Paintings' of Goya when I saw them in Madrid. They are images that still sometimes haunt me. I can see 'Saturn devouring his son' or 'Two old men eating soup' clearly now, without having to look them up, and my gorge rises. They are ghastly, and I'm deeply glad I saw them. — mcdoodle

Yes indeed. I saw them in Madrid as well, and felt something similar. It's not fun to spend a lot of time with those paintings. Aside from Saturn, the two that stay with me are the fight with clubs, which is brutal, and the dog.

Anyway, thanks. It's great to get some insight from someone familiar with Ballard's work.

To add to the reply I posted above…

What might be the case is that in his novels, he is free to let his imagination run wild. That sounds trite, but I think it’s an important fact about Ballard that he is not actually interested in the world except insofar as it shapes the unconscious; what he really likes to do is dredge up dreams and fantasies and develop them in surreality, with little concern to refer back to reality.

So in the novels, we get long descriptions of the surreal, presented—in what seems like a formality or concession—as if they were real. And just like the description of someone else’s dream can be boring, so can Ballard’s imaginings. It is not that the ideas are unengaging, rather that the exhaustive development and description of those ideas wears me down.

This isn’t a problem in the short stories, where the ideas have to take centre stage.

To me an excellent work is engaging — L'éléphant

To me, there wouldn't be a clash of antagonistic judgments if I find a piece of work engaging — L'éléphant

Many people find the book engaging, and not only writers and critics. It’s quite popular and also highly regarded.

What you’re pointing out is that my opinion seems contradictory, and I agree: this is the conundrum.

Do you think it needed to be unenjoyable to be the art it is, in your view? — Apustimelogist

Good question. It needed to be unenjoyable (to me) to be what it was. What it was was unenjoyable in its bones. I don’t think it would have been the same work of fiction, with the same power to haunt me, had Ballard removed, for example, the endless description of the mergings and juxtapositions of mutilated bodies and broken car parts in purely aesthetic terms, repeating ad nauseum words like “stylized,” “formalized,” “junction,” and of course, “engine coolant.”

And I don’t think it would have made much difference to my enjoyment had he just done a bit of light revision to find some more varied vocabulary.

So I suppose the answer is yes. But that’s not to say that it was the merely the unenjoyableness itself that caused me to think it was a substantial work of art.

I do, however, own a collection of Ballard's short stories and find that he is a great short story writer, both very enjoyable as well as insightful and intelligent. So I wonder if you think Crash needs to be unenjoyable to be its art. — Apustimelogist

I recently read his collection The Terminal Beach and found it very enjoyable, but found the novel The Unlimited Dream Company rather irritating and not anywhere near as powerful as Crash. So yeah, in terms of reading enjoyment his short stories seem better.

I haven’t read The Atrocity Exhibition but probably will one day. The next one of his books for me will likely be Vermilion Sands, which I think is a short story collection.

David Cronenburg, who adapted it into a film, had a similar experience to me. He couldn’t finish it the first time he read it, and even after he’d finally gone back and read the whole thing, he didn’t like it. But it stayed with him, and he ultimately felt he had to do something about it (turn it into a film, in his case)—the question of like or dislike was irrelevant.

Something like that. But in my case at least, the dislike was not so much about the distasteful subject matter (and I seriously doubt that was the problem for Cronenburg tbh), but about the tedious pretentiousness, repetitiveness, and so on. Which makes it all the more puzzling that I’m now saying it’s an important work of literature. I think I’ve just changed my mind upon realising how powerful an effect it had on me.

Right, so good for you but unenjoyable. Like plain broccoli.

Again I think it’s best to think of artworks in terms of parts. Maybe most of it is boring, but certain parts stand out or stick with you. Certain scenes in a movie, certain chapters in a book, certain melodies in music, whatever.

Perhaps that’s a way to square this circle. — Mikie

I tend to think that if only a few bits of a book or film are great, while the rest of it isn’t great, then the thing has failed. On the other hand I agree that there will always be bits that stick with you more than other bits. I don’t think this gets to the problem with Crash, which is utterly consistent. Ballard doesn’t lose control for a second, except perhaps for the endless repetition of words like “stylized” and “junction”, which he may not have noticed himself doing.

Reminds me of some portions of Dhalgren sans the violence — Manuel

I expect to be reading that soon, since I’ve been getting into Delany recently.

But then today I thought of Videodrome. This is the Cronenberg flick I was thinking of when saying he crosses the lines at times. The movie sits in a very uncomfortable place for me because there are depictions of what I'd call snuff (except that we know we aren't watching real snuff) and so if you think about it at all you're like "this just is snuff" and it's disgusting. But then there are scenes through the movie which bend around the idea of snuff. It's a weird blend of phantasmagoria and this blunt reality of the possibility in human desire. — Moliere

I always say I like Cronenburg but I haven’t even seen Videodrome, by most accounts one of his most important and original films. What you say makes me want to see it. Not that I’m into snuff movies, you understand.

Deadringers evokes similar feelings in me, but then I don't have a cognitive dislike of what's going on so it's not as bad, it's merely "oogie" to me but not a rational opposition... maybe this feeling is what you're talking about? — Moliere

Not sure. I do like Dead Ringers though.

Go for it.

Well I say go for it, but you already know I have mixed feelings about it.

Following is a representative sample to help you make the decision. It’s one of the more imaginative and lyrical passages, dispensing with the technical language in favour of a more fanciful register. I can easily imagine that some people would find it fascinating, while others would roll their eyes.

Two firemen cut the door from its hinges. Dropping it into the road, they peered down at me like the assistants of a gored bullfighter. Even their smallest movements seemed to be formalized, hands reaching towards me in a series of coded gestures. If one of them had unbuttoned his coarse serge trousers to reveal his genitalia, and pressed his penis into the bloody crotch of my armpit, even this bizarre act would have been acceptable in terms of the stylization of violence and rescue. I waited for someone to reassure me as I sat there, dressed in another man's blood while the urine of his young widow formed rainbows around my rescuers' feet. By this same nightmare logic the firemen racing towards the burning wrecks of crashed airliners might trace obscene or humorous slogans on the scalding concrete with their carbon dioxide sprays, executioners could dress their victims in grotesque costumes. In return, the victims would stylize the entrances to their deaths with ironic gestures, solemnly kissing their executioners' gun-butts, desecrating imaginary flags. Surgeons would cut themselves carelessly before making their first incisions, wives casually murmur the names of their lovers at the moment of their husbands' orgasms, the whore mouthing her customer's penis might without offence bite a small circle of tissue from the upper curvature of his glans. That same painful bite which I once received from a tired prostitute irritated by my hesitant erection reminds me of the stylized gestures of ambulance attendants and filling station personnel, each with their repertory of private movements.

Yet what would be the point of even speaking about it if doing so would only produce boredom? Strange. — Manuel

That’s the thing: nobody is supposed to do this. It’s taken for granted that in telling a story about boredom, you shouldn’t be boring. But Crash is boring while telling a story that is not boring—there’s a lot of crazy shit happening.

Essential to the novel is that it is deadpan, clinical, amoral, and emotionless. One might say I’ve just mistaken this very intentional style for boringness.

What makes this difficult to think through is I can almost always find something I enjoy in a work of art, but when I don't I also just move on. There can be a morbid curiosity that pushes me on, but that isn't the frustration you're describing. What you describe is a work of art that more or less invokes aesthetic analogues to pain which you suffer through, dislike, and then come to appreciate.

With literature I'm struggling, though I can think of some examples from philosophy that are a lot like that -- start out frustrating and boring but then, upon pushing through, they become something better -- at the very least, worthwhile to have read. (and it's a curious experience because it's hard to describe to someone why you'd subject yourself to pain for the good of appreciating it, when usually people like creative works not in this sense but because it appeals rather than because it frustrates) — Moliere

Yes, I think that’s a good analogy: it is a bit like the experience of reading profound but badly written or abstruse philosophy (which is not to say that Crash is badly written, since this is just an analogy).

And maybe it’s more than just an analogy. I mentioned before that Crash is some kind of conceptual fiction. In the same way as visual conceptual art is a way of doing philosophy (recalling Deleuze’s characterization of philosophy as the creation of concepts), conceptual fiction is a literary exploration of concepts free of the conventional demands of fiction. You can maybe just boil it down to: you don’t have to like it, it doesn’t have to be beautiful, and it doesn’t have to be executed with traditional skill—it’s just meant to make you think.

And that’s fair enough. Crash then is something along the lines of a bunch of bananas filled with piss, a can of the artist’s shit, or a sheep cut in half.

Another possibility is that I did actually enjoy it in some way, despite how tedious and boring I often found it. The whole premise of the book is crazy, but presented totally deadpan—I mean, that’s just inherently intriguing to me. So maybe I’ve been basically fascinated with it the whole time.

Which means the enjoyment angle is pretty much beside the point. I don’t know where that leaves this discussion :grin:

Actually, the first 240 pages of Gravity's Rainbow were close to being unreadable. One almost has no clue what is going on. But once it takes off, it's nuts. — Manuel

Damn, for some reason I thought it was the first 50, and after that plain sailing. Well, I’ll get around to it eventually, but it still feels too soon after completing the mammoth Against the Day.

The topic of boredom itself is hard to speak about in a profound manner. I think David Foster Wallace's last book, The Pale King, tried to speak about boredom - working in a tax office - while attempting not to be too boring. He never finished the book, due to his suicide. — Manuel

I think one can make boring experiences interesting in the telling, submitting them to the tools of the storyteller. Boredom can be fascinating and funny, in retrospect. Maybe another way that boredom isn’t boring is when the boredomee is not him/herself boring; like Proust, they may have a rich inner life that means that even when they’re bored they’re never boring, if we get inside their mind.

What I’ve been doing in this thread is discussing a boring experience in a quite interesting way. It’s actually pretty easy, and everyone does it, e.g., ranting wittily about how boring a movie was.

Edit: na man, I can feel I'm not making any interesting comments. May try again later — Manuel

Don’t worry, you’re not being boring. So far I haven’t really framed the debate properly to give it clarity (see my struggles to define enjoyment), so we’re all just scrabbling around in the dark.

Then I'd suggest that you weren't actually bored, maybe you were reading it in a disinterested manner. But boredom to me, carries negative connotations that if allowed to continue for too long, is quite exhausting and frustrating. — Manuel

I was definitely bored, exhausted and frustrated. I abandoned it a couple of times but went back to it because I wanted to have read it, to know about Ballard’s flavour of avant-garde, to find out what he was doing.

But if it was shocking, how could it have been boring? I think because the shock kind of wears off in the first few chapters, after which it’s tedious repetition.

Thinking about the book afterwards—which I’m obviously still doing—wasn’t boring, but the experience of reading it really was, despite moments of interest and a certain appreciation of the writing. This is why I said at the time that it’s a conceptual piece more suited to analysis than to artistic appreciation.

200 plus goddam pages.

I should point out again that I’ve changed my view, and consider those things that seemed bad at the time as contributing to its effectiveness.

I remember watching all three films in the 'hostel' series. Have you watched them? I found them quite stomach-churning — universeness

No, I would not watch something like that. I am a total wuss when it comes to horror, although oddly enough I do like a lot of horror films, up to a point.