Book 77 - J.G. Ballard "Crash"

J.G. Ballard "Crash" (Harper Perennial)





This is a perverse novel about a group of automobile accident victims who develop a sexual fetish for car wrecks and the resulting injuries. There is a lot of sex in this book, but it isn’t very arousing. If this is an attempt at pornography (I don’t think it is), it’s not very successful. Ballard’s prose is too clinical (I believe he contemplated a medical career once), to be arousing. This prose tone and quality mutes his attempt at poetic explanations for his narrator and Vaughn's (that "nightmare angel of the highways”) thuggy, obsessed psychological state. While l I realize that people can and do develop all sorts of bizarre sexual fetishes, Ballard never really convinced me of the reality, plausibility, or emotion behind this one.

While this is not an sf novel per se, it has a science fiction sensibility about it in its exploration of the erotic attraction and mediation involved in a technology – here autos and automobile transportation (even for the failures of the latter in wrecks). Ballard uses the novel to plot an extended series of sexual metaphors involving autos. In that sense, I can see his influence on the cyberpunks and their use of technological metaphors (though William Gibson is more skilled in this area). His fascination with celebrities and media – here symbolized by Vaughn’s obsession with “the film actress Elizabeth Taylor” – also prefigures cyberpunk themes. Sf critics antagonistic to the New Wave and its major figure Ballard accused him of creating disaster stories in which not only does the hero not try to prevent the disaster, is passive in the face of it, but actually seem to desire it. This is certainly true here. The narrator – named James Ballard – not only senses a coming “autogeddon” but looks forward to his death in it and plots the erotic configurations of his future death.

Weird and yet an intriguing novel.

Book 78 - Sylvia Simmons " Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes"

Sylvia Simmons " Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes" (Helter Skelter)



I stumbled upon this in the back end of my bookcase recently. I decided to read it again. I inhaled this bookt back in 2008, took its wayward magic into my lungs and held it.

Historically I haven't read much about French vocalists, and in fact, I tend to read about French artists more. However, as I have a couple of albums by the Frenchman I thought this was an appropriate read.

Serge's televised encounter with the late Whitney Houston was astonishing as was during his less than cereberal time in Yugoslavia. Beyond such, Gainsbourg was an unflinching artist, one compensating for his own insecurites and baggage. He stormed across borders and perforated genres. His mark on music is unmistakable. This biography illuminates such and is a remarkable survey of his life as well.

I highly recommend it.