Three Links

1. Rude And Reckless: Punk/Post-Punk Graphics, 1976-1982
2. J. G. Ballard’s Terminal Documents
3. Last Year At Marienbad: “return to the ice palace”

 

Four Things

I am, at the moment, so intrigued by:

1. Invisible Cities: not just the book by Italo Calvino (the first of his works I’ve read and still my favorite after nearly two decades), but the multimedia design project I just downloaded
2. American Women Poets in the 21st Century: not only because of the poets who appear and how they’re presented in this anthology (a selection of poems is followed by a statement of poetics from the poet herself and then a critical essay about them by another), but also because its subtitle (“Where Lyric Meets Language”) is something I aspire to in my own work
3. Ghostlier Demarcations: not only for borrowing (from Wallace Stevens) a great title for a book on “modern poetry and the material word,” but also because every poet Michael Davidson discusses is someone I find intriguing, if not inspirational in one way or another
4. Living in Ballardian Times: not only for being the syllabus for a course on Ballard that I want to attend but one I want to teach

Derivative

That’s the Wordle that was derived from a “poem” I inputted in the site. The poem itself was derived from three different sources, the result of an assignment to do a cut-and-paste poem. The title of “my” piece–“Guilt Like Concrete”–was derived, in turn, from the three most prominent words in the Wordle, although one may also say that those three words only loom large because of my poem, which was derived from pre-written texts from books I own, selections which I’ve chosen and which may be said to derive from my own reading interests…

…and so all these derivations within (alongside, over, under, within, etc.) derivations are perhaps best left entangled, even while it’s possible to at least cite the three pieces of text from which I derived “Guilt Like Concrete”:

1. the first two paragraphs of Walter Benjamin’s 1921 fragment  “Capitalism as Religion”
2. the entire section entitled “The Catechism of Goodbye” from the J. G. Ballard short story “The Terminal Beach”
3. three consecutive paragraphs from “The Last Sex Pistols Concert” by Greil Marcus, a section of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

(I started with the paragraph that begins, “Probably no definition of punk can be stretched far enough to enclose Theodor Adorno,” but the first line of “Guilt Like Concrete” is actually taken from the last three words of my selection: “aggression, domination, malignancy.”)

Ballard Across the Universe (NSFW)

The universe of different arts and media, that is. Some examples, all from Ballardian, some NSFW:

1. “Crouching Pervert, Hidden Meisel” and “Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency”
   (NSFW commercial photography)
2. “The Ballardian Primer: Surveillance Cameras”
   (surveillance technology…and screensavers!)
3. “Architectures of the Near Future: An Interview with Nic Clear”
   (architecture and multimedia exhibitions)
4. “Cousin Silas: Another Flask of Ballard”
   (music as ambient soundscape)
5. “The fusion of science and pornography”
   (totally NSFW x-ray artporn from Wim Delvoye)

Bonus:
“You are Hochhaus!: Ballard in Berlin” tells you how to screen a radio play. Brilliant.