Antigues idees. [1]

Antigues idees. [1]

Llibres llegits en mitjans mecànics, més difícil doncs de prendre notes. Llegits durant l’hivern passat. Només mostraré els indrets marcats.

Pop. 1280/ Jim Thompson/ 1964/

Un dels llibres d’en Thompson que encara no havia llegit. M’ha agradat? Sí.
Aquests són alguns dels bon trossos, si fa no fa definitoris.

—He blinked at me. Then the wild sweat broke out on his face again, and a streak of spit oozed from the corner of his mouth. And there was fear in his eyes. It had soaked in on him at last, the spot he was in. Soaked clear through a quart of booze until it hit him where he lived and rubbed the place raw./ [Xèrif molt naturalment assassí. Abans d’assassinar un xèrif veí.]

—I figure sometimes that maybe that’s why we don’t make as much progress as other parts of the nation. People lose so much time from their jobs in lynching other people, and they sepend so much money on rope and kerosene and getting likkered-up in advance and other essentials, that there ain’t an awful lot of money or man-hours left for practical purposes./

—Everyone was pretty surprised, including me, and they were puzzled too, which I wasn’t. It looked like I’d sold my pottage for a mess of afterbirth, as the saying is. I’d been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever’s got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped on./

—"Well, I’m not real sure they will, Henry Clay," I said, noticing how Uncle John’s head was crushed between the wood and the wagon bed. "After all, you was comin’ to town anyways."
—"But what about that nigger?" he said. "A white man ought to get some kind of ree-ward for handlin’ a nigger.
—"Well, maybe you will," I said. "If not in this world, the next one."/ [Hà. Com tot bon cristià, abans d’assassinar-lo.]


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Extreme Metaphors/ 2012/ Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967–2008/ Edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara.

Molt repetitiu. Feixuc. No gaire bo. Aquestes són les notes que m’interessaven llegint-lo.

[Parlant del repel·lent Sutcliff, amb el qual coicidíem: mentre (jo) rondava, (ell) rondava.]
VALE: Did you find the Yorkshire Ripper interesting?
BALLARD: I found that case odd – something rather repellent about it. I don’t think he was an interesting man in any way. I think he just had this obsessive hatred for prostitutes, and the impression I got was that he was simply reacting to his gut spasm of hatred. He kept a hammer in his car and every so often he would stop in a red-light district and hit one of these woman over the head in the dark. Difficult to feel any kind of sympathy for him whatsoever. Well, one shouldn’t feel too much sympathy for any murderer!\\

BALLARD: I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves. Years ago, sitting at the café outside the American Express building in Athens, I watched the British actor Michael Redgrave (father of Vanessa) cross the street in the lunchtime crowd, buy Time at a magazine kiosk, indulge in brief banter with the owner, sit down, order a drink, then get up and walk away – every moment of which, every gesture, was clearly acted, that is, stressed and exaggerated in a self-conscious way, although he obviously thought that no one was aware who he was, and he didn’t think that anyone was watching him. I take it that the same process works for the writer, except that the writer is assigning himself his own roles. I have a sense of certain gathering obsessions and roles, certain corners of the field where the next stage of the hunt will be carried on. I know that if I don’t write, say on holiday, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.

FRICK: I believe I once read – perhaps it was in connection with the Vermilion Sands collection – that you actually enjoyed the notion of cultural decadence.
BALLARD: Decadence? I can’t remember if I ever said I enjoyed the notion, except in the sense of drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels, which I don’t really see as places of decadence, but rather like the desert in that I see them merely as psychic zero stations, or as ‘Go’, in Monopoly terms.\\

BALLARD: Burroughs, of course, I admire to the other side of idolatry, starting with Naked Lunch, then Ticket, Soft Machine and Nova Express. I’m less keen on his later books. In his way he’s a genius. It’s a pity that his association with drugs and homosexuality has made him a counter-culture figure, but I suppose his real links are with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats. Still, I think he’s much more of an Establishment figure, like Dean Swift, with a despairing disgust for the political and professional establishments of which he is a part. I have met Burroughs quite a few times over the last fifteen years, and he always strikes me as an upper-class Midwesterner, with an inherent superior attitude towards blacks, policemen, doctors and small-town politicians, the same superior attitude that Swift had to their equivalents in his own day, the same scatological obsessions and brooding contempt for middle-class values, thrift, hard work, parenthood, et cetera, which are just excuses excuses for petit-bourgeois greed and exploitation [i per a distreure la por a la mort]. But I admire Burroughs more than any other living writer, and most of those who are dead. It’s nothing to do with his homosexual bent, by the way. I’m no member of the ‘homintern’, but a lifelong straight who prefers the company of women to most men. The few homosexual elements in Crash and Atrocity Exhibition, fucking Reagan, et cetera, are there for reasons other than the sexual – in fact, to show a world beyond sexuality, or, at least, beyond clear sexual gender.\\

BALLARD: And then the America that interests me is that reflected to us in the mass media. The America of cinema, of television, of magazines, of publicity – in a word, the models’ seem to me more important than this or that aspect of concrete reality, of the type ‘the smell of the fields of wheat in Iowa’. No need to travel: these models are sent to us direct by satellite! These days, journeys are practically pointless.\\

LEWIS: Have you read Baudrillard’s America? It’s a wonderful book.
BALLARD: Yes, a wonderful book, yes. A lot of Baudrillard that I’ve tried to read, I’ve found rather heavy going. He actually wrote a very complimentary essay on Crash. I found what he said incomprehensible, and I wrote the book! But I thought America was brilliant. I don’t think I’ve ever read such concentrated brilliance, anywhere! The only rival is something like Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in terms of brilliance. Every sentence, and if not, every paragraph. I’ve read it about three times, and each time it gets better. America, I thought, was tremendous. I don’t know what Americans make of it, because of course, what is absent from the book (and I imagine this is rather irritating to Americans themselves [hà]), is a single American.\\

BALLARD: No. Empire of the Sun and Kindness of Women are novels – they draw on my own life. Had I been born in Godalming, worked on the TLS, moved to the BBC and wrote a novel about it, no one would say ‘Ah, an autobiography’. That’s the perfect Hampstead novel – it would be regarded as a proper piece of fiction. But because my childhood, and, to an extent, my later life in England, is a bit out of the ordinary, people assume it’s autobiography. In fact it is substantially fiction. In The Kindness of Women, as in Empire of the Sun, almost all of the characters are invented. There are no original women in The Kindness of Women. I don’t want to disappoint anybody. Even the narrator – myself – is to some extent invented. I did many of the things that took place in The Kindness of Women, but not quite in the same way they are described because I am trying to reach the imaginative truth, which is more important than the literal truth, drawing on the experiences of a lifetime. To some extent, drama consists of what people say if they had two minutes to think about it. That is a very important point. It’s a reworking of life and I think that’s what writing is all about.\\

BARR: How would you describe the mood as we head towards the end of the millennium?
BALLARD: It’s very strange. I remember years ago, I think in 1984, I said we could expect, as at the end of past centuries, there might be a spread of decadence. But that the decadence might take the form in our case, not of sexual licence, but of a new kind of puritanism. Puritanism of a sort of little-Red-Book-Maoist-guard type. That is exactly what we’ve seen: a huge rise in puritanical zealousness [I a hores d'ara, pitjor!], in which a whole range of new vices have been invented – people are never happier that when inventing new, or rather exposing new, vices. People are full of puritan relish. We had a bizarre case here, yesterday or the day before yesterday – some animal rights activists attacked a dairy and planted bombs under a whole lot of milk wagons. Those big tankers that drive milk all over the country, like gasoline tankers. They blew up about thirty of these vehicles, protesting the farming of the ox for human consumption. And you know there’s another group of weirdos that are anti-car. And they closed off London streets for a mass demonstration against the car, turning them into pedestrian zones. These are not sort of little shopping streets where you can have a cake, these are main thoroughfares.
People believe in nothing. There’s nothing to believe in now. All ideology is gone. The great churches are empty, political ideology is finished, there’s just a scramble for power. There’s this vacuum … what people have most longed for, which is the consumer society, has come to pass. Like all dreams that come to pass, there’s a nagging sense of emptiness. So they look for anything, they believe in any extreme. Any extreme nonsense is better than nothing.\\

SELF: There is an essay I must send you by a young psychoanalytic thinker called Adam Phillips, who wrote a book called On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored.
BALLARD: I have its successor, On Flirtation.
SELF: I thought you might like some of his apophthegms, such as ‘An artist is a man who has the courage of his own perversions’.\\


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My Dark Places/ James Ellroy/ 1996/

Llibre d'algú just un any més jove que no jo. I doncs moltes d'afinitats culturals. Això me'l fa interessant. Cercant el criminal qui occí sa mare, alhora explica la seua "perversa" vida mentre pujava "educat" per son pare.

—Gene Biscailuz’s myth was strictly local stuff. Bill Parker’s myth was marketed nationally. The Sheriff’s resented the LAPD’s celebrity. The LAPD considered the Sheriff’s a bushleague outfit and hogged the credit for their joint operations. Ideology divided the two agencies. Topography divided them more. The LAPD pointed to their densely packed jurisdiction and racial demographics as proof of their superiority and the justification for their state-of-siege mentality. The Sheriff’s pointed to the county spreading out at a boom rate. They had new turf to learn. New cities were signing up for contract services. They simply couldn’t afford to kick indiscriminate ass.
—Bill Parker turned 56 in 1958. His sensibility was on the rise. Gene Biscailuz turned 75 and planned to retire at the end of the year. Biscailuz joined the Sheriff’s Office 50 years before. He saw horses replaced by flivvers and "Grey Ghost" sedans and Ford black & whites. He saw his Wild West Los Angeles grow and reinvent itself--way outside the borders of his myth. He probably knew that white settlers raped Indian squaws. He probably knew that Wild West lawmen were psychopaths and drunks. He might have conceded that his myth was mostly wishful thinking and moonshine. He might call nostalgia an indulgence. He probably knew that the Wild West played hell on women — then and now.
—He probably knew that Wild West Saturday Nights comprised a myth of their own. He might have written that redhaired nurse off as a mythic casualty.//

—My father took me to movies on Hollywood Boulevard. We caught Vertigo and a string of Randolph Scott westerns. My father laid out the straight dope on Randolph Scott: He was one notorious homo. He took me by the Hollywood Ranch Market and gave me a crash course in homos. He said fruits wore mirrored shades to measure crotch bulges covertly. Fruits served one good purpose. Their presence expanded the pool of available women. He wanted to know if I liked girls yet. I told him I did. I didn’t tell him that full-blown women jazzed me more. Divorced mothers were more precisely my type. Their bodies had these neat imperfections. Heavy legs and bra-strap markings drove me crazy. I liked pale-skinned, redhaired women especially.//

—I was well fed and had a loving father. Books provided stimulation and a sublimated dialogue on my mother’s death. I possessed a quietly tenacious ability to exploit what I had. My father gave me free run of the neighborhood. I explored it and let it fuel my imagination.//

—He learned that men killed with less provocation than women. Men killed because they were drunk, stoned and pissed off. Men killed for money. Men killed because other men made them feel like sissies. Men killed to impress other men. Men killed so they could talk about it. Men killed because they were weak and lazy. Murder sated their lust of the moment and narrowed down their options to a comprehensible few. Men killed women for capitulation. The bitch wouldn’t give them head or give them her money. The bitch overcooked the steak. The bitch threw a fit when they traded her food stamps for dope. The bitch didn’t like them pawing her 12-year-old daughter. Men did not kill women because they were systematically abused by the female gender. Women killed men because men flicked them over just that rigorously and persistently.//
—He learned that men killed women and ran to other women in self-pity. A Norwalk man shot his wife. He aimed above her head and caught her right between the eyes. The man was just letting off steam. He stashed his marijuana plants before he reported the incident. Stoner popped him for murder two. He learned that men killed women out of boredom//

—I was hooked on MORE as bad as she was. Gender bias and my time favored me. I got to drink and fuck with a sanction she never dreamed of. Luck and a coward’s circumspection saved me. I saw the road she went down. She force-fed me the survivor’s instinct she never developed herself. Her pain was greater than mine. It defined the gap between us.//

—The poor guy got flicked by a cold-hearted cunt. I looked at Sharon Hatch. I tried to read her. She seemed passably smart. She probably knew that Daddy was wigged out well in advance of their breakup. He was a strongarm loan collector. He was an armor fetishist. His chivalry to women was a symptom of his hatred for women. He was a sex psycho hibernating. He knew that he wanted to rape and kill women. The breakup gave him a justification. It was based on one part rage and two parts self-pity. You could not date his gender-wide hatred to the moment Sharon Hatch said, "Walk, sweetie." Daddy Beckett was working toward his explicative flashpoint already. He was like the Swarthy Man in the spring of ’58. I felt a little jolt of empathy for the Swarthy Man. I felt a big jolt of hate for Daddy Beckett. My mother was 43 years old. She was caustic. She could put weak men in their place. Tracy Stewart was utterly helpless. Daddy Beckett trapped her in his bedroom. She was a lamb in his slaughterhouse.//


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