I can’t be bothered gettingindignant at all the bourgie-wourgie tributes to Ballard because this kind of assimilation to the cosy is what the English always do with their writers if they survive to old age, no?
As Max Beerbohm hypothesised about another literary radical: “Byron!–he would be all forgotten to-day if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to The Times about the Repeal of the Corn Laws.”
The class-ridden posturing and genre turf wars which are starting to spring up in the wake of Ballard’s death are not very interesting, but it is worth having a laugh when Martin Amis tells us that Ballard “had no ear for dialogue”. (The war against cliché is going well, then, I see. My money was always on cliché.)
“Cardboard characters” is another one doing the rounds. One of the things I love most about Ballard’s writing is that he deliberately abandons the pretence that one set of puppets made of lifelike painted plaster, ears for dialogue, middle-class adultery and career politics are better or more well-rounded than those which he constructed from a sort of papier-mâché of scientific journal articles, celebrity magazines, pornography and surrealist art.
Currently reading through the two-volume Collected Short Stories, which I bought on Sunday; almost all of which I read as a teenager, but which I don’t own and haven’t revisited since. The early stories are mostly better than I remembered.
Adapted from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera by Stephen Jeffreys. Directed by Max Stafford-Clark. Sydney Theatre Company
Saw this in previews a couple of weeks ago but forgot to review it. The conceit is that a group of convicts bound for Botany Bay are staging The Beggar’s Opera to pass the time on the voyage: this is a great concept which the adaptation generally carries off well. The to-and-fro between rehearsals on ship and the plot of the original are a bit creaky sometimes but in general it stops the show getting too bogged down and some of the transitions are sublimely funny.
The musical numbers are about half-and-half modern pop standards and what I suppose are songs from the original show. The cast are about half and half Australian and UK, and about the same mixture of opera and theatre performers, I think, and all the singing (and live music performed on stage by the cast) was terrific.
Overall it was much more fun than a 17th century musical, even one as roguish as The Beggar’s Opera, has any right to be.
The staging was great, except that I’m sure I saw a FILING CABINET. ON A SHIP. A SAILING SHIP IN 18-OH-WHATEVER.
Science fiction writers who should be in the canon ahead of Philip K Dick, part 6
Usually I find it’s J G Ballard who is writing the scripts for the news, but almost everything about the Beijing Olympics seems to be straight out of Aldiss’ 70s stories like ‘A Chinese Perspective’. The Bird’s Nest looks so much like a structure from an Aldiss story that it’s a little spooky.
Aldiss’ ideas about China are always teetering on the brink of kitschy Orientalism, but no more than most Western thinking about China. What Aldiss got completely right about the struggle between capitalism and communism was that it would end in a compromise which very few people would even make the effort to be embarrassed about.
In Aldiss’ novel The 80 Minute Hour the two ideologies explicitly merge as CapCom, which is then marketed as a global brand. The 80 Minute Hour is one of the few space operas which is literally an opera, with characters occasionally breaking into song – it’s a lurid and slightly camp fantasia. After reading this io9 article about eradicating campiness from science fiction I came to the conclusion that sf is inherently camp, because what would you have left over? I think Aldiss would agree.
An American journalist befriends Max Beerbohm in the last years of his life and drops in on him in his villa at Rapallo for a series of what would sound like implausibly charming and reminiscence-filled chats if they were not being held with Max Beerbohm, who seems to have been destined to reminisce charmingly. They were originally published in the New Yorker.
My favourite part: the genuine guilt he seems to have felt over his feud with Kipling, who he believed to have betrayed his talents in the service of jingoism. He doesn’t feel remorse for his attacks, but for not having attempted to explain the reason for his attacks to Kipling in person when he had the opportunity.
The attacks were delicious. Berhman quotes from Beerbohm’s review of a dramatisation of Kipling’s The Light That Failed: the adaptation was by a woman under a male pseudonym:
‘George Fleming’ is, as we know, a lady. Should the name Rudyard Kipling, too, be put between inverted commas? Is it, too, the veil of a feminine identity? If of Mr. Kipling we knew nothing except his work, we should assuredly make that conjecture. [...] in Mr. Kipling’s short stories, especially in The Light That Failed, [...] men are portrayed [...] from an essentially feminine point of view. They are men seen from the outside, or rather, not seen at all, but feverishly imagined [...]
Until I read Behrman’s book I wasn’t aware that Beerbohm made radio broadcasts for the BBC during World War II. I sincerely hope that they were recorded and are available somewhere: a few web searches have turned up nothing.
I read D B Wyndham Lewis’ anthology of bad verse in breaks from Empson. I needed the breaks, enfeebled by illness and laziness as I was, and The Stuffed Owl never fails to cheer me up. Both works were first published in 1930, and they both refer to Macaulay’s wonderful demolition of the pietistic Robert Montogmery’s The Omnipresence of the Deity. This is Macaulay, not Lewis:
“Oh! never did the dark-soul’d ATHEIST stand,
And watch the breakers boiling on the strand,
And, while Creation stagger’d at his nod,
Mock the dread presence of the mighty God!
We hear Him in the wind-heaved ocean’s roar,
Hurling her billowy crags upon the shore
We hear Him in the riot of the blast,
And shake, while rush the raving whirlwinds past!”
If Mr. Robert Montgomery’s genius were not far too free and aspiring to be shackled by the rules of syntax, we should suppose that it is at the nod of the Atheist that creation staggers. But Mr. Robert Montgomery’s readers must take such grammar as they can get, and be thankful.
Empson applies the last sentence to Shakespeare. Cheeky!
Which reminds me. Did I mention that Grace and her friends have become fans of Are You Being Served?
I got a bit tired of being the only middle-class person in Sydney who hasn’t read any McEwan. The Child In Time is upsetting, almost deliriously so, if you have children, or know any children, or perhaps just if you were once a child yourself; but it is very good. The elements of fantasy reminded me curiously of Brian Aldiss, probably because the latter author wrote a short story which also refers to David Bohm. McEwan gestures at a longed-for synthesis via some quantum hand-waving (and thus, also, hand-particling?) and the neat device of having his central character fail to understand the lectures on physics. In 1982, Janine Gray also uses science as a potential source of hope: it’s more ferocious – McLeish’s utopian fantasies are quick to slump into angry despair – but also more optimistic, because not as dependent on future developments. With Gray, the tools are already in our hands, if only we would put them to use.
Earth’s Moon floating in the sky of an alien planet, the shapes as familiar and as remote as those of one’s own face in a mirror.
It’s the most beautiful sf image I can remember seeing on tv as a kid. It justifies everything about this show. Yes, everything, even the outfits that make most of the guys look paunchy, and that one episode which terrified the living crap out of me when I was about eight, the one with the wiggly alien thing that ate people and left their corpses all smouldering and covered with cobweb stuff.
Also, the theme song is a total funky freakout.
I only watched the pilot on the DVD I rented, so I don’t know if the image of the Moon in the sky actually looked any good; I don’t think it could live up to my expectations.
Simon Stephens; little death productions, directed by Ben Packer. Stables Theatre, 10 Marc
This is an entertaining play, and the performances were all excellent, but it wasn’t till I read Alison Croggon’s description of it as “a scathing indictment of contemporary Britain” that I could really put my finger on the second reason for why I found it dissatisfying.
The play’s central character, Danny, is a soldier who has just returned from Iraq. He is by no means satisfied with contemporary Britain because he says things like “you come back to… this”, but nowhere in the play did I get any idea of just what his problem with contemporary Britain is. There are the obligatory racist rants which every new English play seems to contain: presumably these are there to make the audiences feel thrillingly politically incorrect, but, again, these don’t really connect with anything apart from other clichés. If this is satire, then so is being driven around by a reactionary cab driver. It also reminds me of those late Roger-Waters-era Pink Floyd albums where he’s so unhappy about how he’s not living in the 1940s anymore.
The first reason is that about halfway through, I started to wonder about how much drama is constructed around the figure of the inarticulate, rage-filled, violent man, and to what extent this figure is actually real, or alternatively a kind of McGuffin to build plots around. Like Chekov’s gun, only in this case it’s the man who’s going to go off.
For the main dish that evening was to be Ludla’s Hunter’s Pie – a standing pie like a fortress. Already she was stripping the flesh off the bones, breaking the carcasses and putting them in the great stewpan, where they would simmer down to a compounded broth of capercaillie, grouse, pheasant, partridge, woodcock, and hazel hens. The flesh lay on different platters, according to the time required for par-cooking before it was enclosed in the fortress and the fortress went into the oven. A Hunter’s Pie was a day’s work, and the kitchen maids had been up since dawn, plucking and gutting. Pimentos, chanterelle mushrooms, garlic, juniper berries, segments of orange, anchovy fillets, dried and fresh herbs, salami that holds the mixture together, the grated chocolate that brings it to life were assembled; the flour had been sifted, the shortening flavoured, reduced and clarified.
I discovered this book via Manguel and Guadalupi’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places, and it took quite a few years to find my secondhand copy. It was worth the wait. The stories, most of which were published in the New Yorker in the late seventies, are even stranger and richer I had expected from the intriguing entries for several of its fairy kingdoms in M&G. It’s a little like Angela Carter, and the interplay between real and mythical history reminds me of James Branch Cabell, although Warner’s irony is several degrees more elegant and delicate. The stories have a dash of politics, light and delicious: her fairies are all born with wings, but only the lower orders ever fly. For the nobility, leaving the ground is firmly infra dig.
A lot patchier than I remembered, but the good bits are still good. What I really want to know is this: did anyone – and I didn’t, even at the time, when I was fourteen, and pretty good, if I may say so, at convincing myself that things were hilarious, even if they weren’t – ever think Mike the Cool Person was funny?
