Landscapes of Tomorrow: J.G. Ballard - University of Leeds Event

Date and Time: Saturday 3 May 2014, 10am-4.30pm

Venue: Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds



This workshop-conference, 'Landscapes of Tomorrow: J.G. Ballard in Space and Time', which took place earlier in the month, was co-organised by myself and colleagues Dr Richard Brown and Chris Duffy (University of Leeds). Here, I'll try and give an overview of what was a thoroughly interesting day of research sharing and lively discussion. The theme - space and time - was deliberately broad to allow for the inclusion of papers exploring diverse aspects of Ballard's writing, including physical and psychological zones of transit, modern consumerism and post-cultural spaces. Being in the Gallery, Ballard's visual art influences were also a central focus of the conference. Papers covered topics including:

* Non-places of Modernity
* Collective Memory
* Space and Mediation
* Romanticism
* Modernism and the History of the Future
* Desire, Class and Consumer Millenarianism
* Invisible Literatures
* Inner Space and Geometries of the Imagination

The keynote speaker, Dr. Jeanette Baxter (Anglia Ruskin University), started off the day with her paper, ‘Fascisms and the Politics of Nowhere in Kingdom Come’. After presenting Giorgio De Chirico’s little-known, interwar novel Hebdomeros (1929) as a narrative of 'nowhere' that resists all sense of orientation, she spoke about how in the novel, Kingdom Come (2006), Ballard takes up, and re-conceives, the 'nowhere' motif as part of his surrealist analysis of contemporary history, politics and culture. Within the surrealist imagination, an imagination rendered artistically and politically out-of-place in an emerging Fascist Europe, 'nowhere' repeats as a resonant motif for interrogating narratives of geo-political displacement, homelessness and exile. Baxter argued that fascism returns in modified forms in Ballard’s contemporary 'nowhere', from the 'soft-totalitarianism' forged by the illusion of consumerist choice, to the neo-fascist communities that commit racially-motivated acts of violence against displaced, immigrant workers.

The morning sessions 'Zones of Transit' and  '(In)visible Literatures' followed. In the afternoon, the sessions were themed around 'Consuming Futures' and 'Post-cultural Spaces', which featured a paper from PhD candidate Catherine McKenna (King's College, London), who catalogued 565 items from the Ballard estate. These will be the subject of a new book by Chris Beckett (forthcoming, 2015). An evening panel discussion, 'Ballard’s Shanghai Orientation', introduced special guest Fay Ballard, who shared recollections of her father, and spoke a bit about related influences in her exhibition 'House Clearance' (2 May-27 June 2014), at Eleven Spitalfields Gallery.

My own paper, entitled 'Ballard's Invisible Literatures', was included in the morning session and discussed the collection of ephemera known as invisible literatures, compiled during Ballard's lifetime and kept in his coal-shed:- he would describe them, aptly, as 'the most potent compost for the imagination'. They included material such as market research reports, pharmaceutical company house magazines, promotional copy, technical journals and scientific manuals. I explored the significance of these texts further and traced their influence, focusing on Ballard's time as prose editor at the journal Ambit and his own modification of Surrealist collage in The Atrocity Exhibition novel. I also raised the tentative question of if and to what extent it might be possible to reconstruct Ballard’s invisible library as an object of study.

Thanks again to the speakers, delegates and to everyone that helped to make the conference possible.

Red Star Gazing and the Inevitability of Full Space Communism

Part One

Russian revolutionary interest in science fiction was inevitably bound up with the trajectory of the Russian revolution itself. The veteran Bolshevik and intermittent opponent of Lenin, Alexander Bogdanov, wrote a pioneering novel on space travel in 1908, in the aftermath of the famously incomplete revolutionary upheavals of 1905. Red Star relates the story of a Russian revolutionary who travels to Mars with an alien agent to learn about how the Martians organise their society along communist lines. In 1924, the movie Aelita, Queen of Mars flipped the script, relating the tale of a Russian Civil War veteran and an astronomer who travel to Mars to aid a revolutionary uprising. Clearly, much had happened in Russia to change the parameters of how science fiction might be imagined in the preceding years. Russians were no longer apprentices but masters and teachers of the revolutionary act. Nevertheless, both Red Star and Aelita emerged at moments in Russian history when revolutionary enthusiasm and optimism were on the wane. Was this a case of red-tinted telescopes turning away from the reality of reaction on terra firma and up to the stars, where a more comforting reality might be imagined?

Poster for Aelita in Russian (1924)

Aelita, Queen of Mars is particularly notable for Aleksandra Ekster’s striking constructivist set design. By the early 1920s, a combination of industrial devastation and political pressure had left constructivism somewhat marginalised in Soviet society. In the face of increasing state control of politics and culture, and the reversal of ‘war communism’, signalled by the introduction of the NEP (New Economic Policy), the utopian impulse that had envisioned the categories of art and architecture dissolving themselves and becoming part of everyday socialist life was in decline. By the time of the release of Aelita, the dystopian science fiction novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin had been banned, while Bogdanov had been arrested by the GPU (although he was released after 5 weeks). The cinematic achievement of Aelita, Queen of Mars was illustrative of the Soviet Union’s continued cultural vibrancy, and the inspirational impact of constructivism on Soviet film, but it also indicated the way in which constructivism was being shunted to the side-lines. Other big names of constructivism, including Aleksandr Rodchenko and the Stenberg brothers, would become involved in film poster and set design in the 1920s as opportunities for Soviet construction dried up.

Aelita, Queen of Mars also shows how, in the context of gerrymandered soviet elections, secret police crack-downs and the failure of the German revolution, communists had to look to the stars to imagine the realisation of their utopia. A similar impulse can be detected in Alexandra Kollontai’s hopeful yet escapist utopian fragment, Soon.

The Soviet sci-fi vision would become more influenced by dystopian imaginings of the horrors of chemical warfare in the following years. Whether the post-war ‘return to the future’ in the context of the space race represented a re-emergence of political sci-fi utopianism will be the subject of Part Two.

Interconnections: From William Burroughs to Steely Dan to William Gibson (Part Two)

Two

Burroughs had his own career as a recording artist, releasing a series of spoken-word albums; his first official LP, in 1965, produced at and issued by the English Bookshop in Paris (42, rue de Seine on the Left Bank), was Call Me Burroughs. The Beatles apparently all had copies of the record, as well as art dealer Robert Fraser and members of the Rolling Stones. He also experimented with tape ‘cut-ups’ in much the same way as his writing – the recordings he made with Ian Sommerville in London were eventually released as Break through in Grey Room in 1986. 1990 saw the acclaimed release of Dead City Radio, an album which served as a musical vehicle for Burroughs’ spoken words; the following year, the film version of Naked Lunch, directed by David Cronenberg, helped to consolidate his relevance to a new generation. Throughout his career, he regarded collaboration as an essential part of the creative process; he later worked with artists such as Laurie Anderson, Kurt Cobain, R.E.M., Patti Smith, Tom Waits and also, appropriately, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan. Sonic Youth paid overt homage in a series of albums, and were among those to visit Burroughs at his home in Lawrence, Kansas (in 1993). 

An American writer based in Canada, William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer popularised the science fiction ‘Cyberpunk’ sub-genre [1], marked by a fascination with technology. Gibson has confessed that “I had to teach myself not to write too much like Burroughs”, though his own work remains highly acclaimed and influential. His novels are also known for their frequent allusions to Steely Dan, a band whose name was itself taken from Naked Lunch. While suggesting the use of the name shouldn’t be taken too literally, Donald Fagen conceded that “we have certainly picked up on some of his world view. I admire Burroughs a lot.” 

Gibson has described Steely Dan’s music as “among the most genuinely subversive oeuvres in late 20th-century pop”. Direct references to their songs in his work include Barrytown (a location), The Gentleman Loser (a bar), Here at the Western World (another bar), and Klaus and the Rooster (characters). Steely Dan, formed in New York, were ostensibly a conventional seventies soft-rock act. They were nonetheless labelled “the perfect musical antiheroes for the Seventies” by Rolling Stone magazine – possibly owing to the sometimes sinister effect of their cryptic, often obscure lyrics hidden within smooth jazz-rock arrangements, suggesting subversive intent; according to Danny Weizmann (in Too Cool), they “pushed the most potent lyric pills since mid-Dyl[an].” 

Gibson is an outwardly conventional figure in appearance (as Burroughs was); he is an innovator in terms of ideas, if not language. The last twenty years particularly have seen him moving beyond traditional sci-fi in a series of novels exploring what happens to humanity in an increasingly technologically-dominated society, tackling the nature of ‘virtual reality’ and the role of the Internet in shaping the modern world, addressing the insidious nature of corporate advertising and branding. Gibson investigates the implications for the very near future, in effect commenting on contemporary life; in this respect he shares an affinity with English author J.G. Ballard, another admirer of Burroughs, who also moved beyond the conventions of science fiction. Gibson’s work has been characterised by critic John Clute as “SF for the new century.” Whilst the Steely Dan references have lessened in recent years, he still titled his 1999 novel All Tomorrow’s Parties, a nod to Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground and their counter-cultural legacy. That book also featured a mysterious character known as the ‘Tao man’, who Gibson has explained as “some sort of avatar connected to the late William Burroughs. An unconscious expression of Burroughsness.”

However, there is always a flip-side to these rich interconnections: Billy Idol paid a dubious homage to Gibson with his 1993 Cyberpunk album, featuring a track entitled ‘Neuromancer’; an enterprise mildly described by Gibson as “very silly.” Also preferably ignored are the subsequent adoption of Deacon Blues (a dire 1980s band appropriating a Steely Dan song title), and The Wild Boys (another Burroughs title and, extending the connection, dismal Duran Duran hit; a group whose own name derived from the 1968 science fiction film Barbarella). In his later years, all manner of unlikely musicians, without any obvious connection to him or signs of influence, began to see a Burroughs photo-opportunity as an ideal means of establishing their own counter-cultural credentials – chief among them Sting and the ubiquitous Bono. While the music of Steely Dan and the novels of William Gibson have a devoted following, they are essentially cult interests. Despite the avant-garde origins and often challenging nature of his work, it is Burroughs who has permeated popular culture, for better or worse.

The influences and the influenced: Call Me Burroughs (Original Cover Design: Tientje Louw, Cover Photo: Harriet Crowther); Neuromancer (Front Cover Illustration by Steve Crisp); Cyberpunk (Cover Art by Mark Frauenfelder)

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[1] OED definition: A genre of science fiction set in a lawless subculture of an oppressive society dominated by computer technology; it has been said that “without Naked Lunch there would probably be no cyberpunk” (Richard Kadrey and Larry McCaffery, Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, 1991)

Interconnections: From William Burroughs to Steely Dan to William Gibson (Part One)

Introduction

The novels of William S. Burroughs, notably the notorious Naked Lunch, written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, have exerted a disproportionate influence on counter-cultural artists, authors, film-makers, and musicians over subsequent decades. Among those influenced by Burroughs are the 1970s pop group Steely Dan, who took their name from a rubber appendage in Naked Lunch; it is possible to trace a line through that band to contemporary science fiction author William Gibson in the 1980s and 90s, a writer known for references to Steely Dan lyrics in his work. It is but one instance of the continued relevance of Burroughs in cultural life, a legacy primarily illustrated through the medium of popular music.

One

“It is a book unlike any other. Famous, infamous, derided, and banned but also recognised as a work of genius. For fifty years, it has tantalized, shocked, baffled, and inspired. It simultaneously holds a significant place in postmodern literature while retaining its iconic, underground allure, resisting diverse critical attempts to define and explain it. It is an aberrant concoction, stylistically brilliant and structurally disorientating, obscene and blasphemous and yet satirically cathartic and redemptive.”

[Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen, Preface to Naked Lunch @ 50: anniversary essays, 2009]

Burroughs came to prominence in parallel with the Beat Generation [1], which he described as a “sociological movement… a cultural revolution”, and is often cited as Godfather and Mentor of the Beats (though a reluctant pioneer himself, never keen on being allied with any group or cause). His reputation was forged with Naked Lunch, published in 1959, which completes the seminal trilogy of Beat works (after Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road). His work has become a byword for the transgressive in modern literature; his status as an iconoclastic figure was recognised in his appearance on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper in 1967, together with numerous major cultural figures. He is credited with introducing the terms ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘heavy metal’ to popular culture – in The Soft Machine, the character Uranian Willy is described as “the Heavy Metal Kid” – a reference initially taken up by the band Steppenwolf, which came to be used for an entire musical genre.

Whilst acknowledging that many readers would find it ‘disgusting’, contemporary critic Mary McCarthy declared in her New York Times review that the almost-plotless Naked Lunch “must be the first space novel, the first serious piece of science fiction.” Avant-garde and experimental it may have been, but many readers must have been not only ‘disgusted’, but thoroughly confused, “as Burroughs's alter-ego William Lee and a shifting cast of protagonists drift in and out of heroin-laced visions of scoring drugs, sexual obsession and degradation, bizarre political plots, and even stranger medical experiments.”

Naked Lunch (whose title was suggested by Kerouac) can be seen as a synthesis of Burroughs’ myriad interests: philosophy, science, language, consciousness, mind travel, altered states and pharmacology. Recognised as a radical, subversive artistic statement, the book was subjected to censorship and faced charges of obscenity (it was banned after a trial in Boston in 1962, a verdict overturned four years later); it repulsed mainstream western society – read as a reaction against its values – challenging the use of language as a means of political, sexual and social control. For Burroughs biographer Barry Miles, it remains “a devastating attack on the hypocrisy, greed, racism, addiction to power and mindless suburban consumerism of the postwar American way of life.”

The origins of Burroughs’ pioneering works lie with Brion Gysin, a British-Canadian poet and painter, and his invention of the cut-up technique – using random juxtapositions of text which are literally cut into pieces and re-assembled. This was adopted by Burroughs when the two were living at the Beat Hotel, Paris (9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, in the Latin Quarter) in the 1950s; he acknowledged Gysin as “the first to create cut-ups.” Burroughs had been attempting to edit Naked Lunch for several years, and finally completed it using this technique. Each of the cut-up novels which followed Naked Lunch – The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express – proved especially influential; David Bowie has by his own admission made use of the method in his lyric writing. Another musician active in New York in the mid-to-late 1970s, David Byrne of Talking Heads, has described the cut-up technique as a means of “achieving a freedom from the strictures of conventional language and thought”.

  

 

Naked Lunch & Soft Machine UK Corgi covers, courtesy of www.beatbookcovers.com

1960s Canterbury-based band The Soft Machine – whose leader, Daevid Allen, had lived at the Beat Hotel – became one of the first Burroughs-inspired names for musical groups, a list which may have begun with the Mugwumps in New York in the early 1960s, and later included Nova Mob and Thin White Rope in the 1980s and 90s. The Velvet Underground are one of several bands to acknowledge the influence of Burroughs, the subject of their 1970 song ‘Lonesome Cowboy Bill’; their songwriter Lou Reed said that “Burroughs alone made us pay attention to the realities of contemporary life and gave us the energy to explore the psyche without a filter.” An early instance of lyrical inspiration drawn from Burroughs can be found in the 1970 film Performance, where Mick Jagger’s ‘Memo from Turner’ includes the line “the man who squats behind the man who works the Soft Machine”.

With his transgressive fiction and anti-authoritarian stance, Burroughs is regarded as a significant influence on punk – during the 1970s he lived close to its major venues in New York’s Bowery district, CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City, where he could often be found, and wrote a column for rock magazine Crawdaddy. Several musicians active in that scene took inspiration from the work of Burroughs – for example, both Iggy Pop (explicitly in his song ‘Gimme Some Skin’) and Patti Smith (in her debut album Horses). In addition, the lyric of Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’ has its source in the ‘operation rewrite’ section of Burroughs’ novel The Ticket That Exploded – the character of Johnny Yen, strip teases, torture films and “hypnotising chickens” can all be found here. His enduring influence extended to the UK in the same period, where it can also be located in Joy Division’s 1979 song ‘Interzone’ – the imagined setting of Naked Lunch – which also became the title of a respected British science fiction magazine founded in the early 1980s [a publication whose Leeds origins will be explored in a future post].

[1] OED: a movement of young people in the 1950s and early 1960s who rejected conventional society, valuing self-expression and favouring modern jazz. Wikipedia: Central elements of “Beat” culture included rejection of received standards, innovations in style, experimentation with drugs, alternative sexualities, an interest in Eastern religion, a rejection of materialism, and explicit portrayals of the human condition.

The First Strike in Space

Skylab space station (1973-74)

Back to the stuff from which science fictions are made, I recently picked up on this story about the first space strike when the organiser, William R. Pogue, died on 3 March 2014. He was one of a three-man crew that flew the longest, and the last, manned mission aboard Skylab, from 16 November 1973 to 8 February 1974.

The strike, which took place while in orbit, was staged (amazingly) to negotiate more time for contemplating the universe. Pogue, an Air Force officer, explained his actions and those of the crew as just wanting more time to look out the window and think. In Science News (1985), he said the flight had made him “much more inclined toward humanistic feeling toward other people, other crewmen [...] I try to put myself into the human situation, instead of trying to operate like a machine”. While his reasoning baffled ground controllers, who thought perhaps the strike was a sign of depression, the chance to reflect on what must have been a unique and aweing set of circumstances definitely seems like something worth fighting for.

In Focus: Science Fiction - University of Leeds Event

Date: Saturday 29 March 2014

Time: 11am - 12pm

Venue: Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds

To coincide with a current display, 'Dreams of a Low Carbon Future' (10 February - 31 March 2014), this discussion will highlight works from the Science Fiction Collection, held in the University of Leeds Library's Special Collections.

There will be the opportunity to see early pulp magazines, illustrated volumes and rare editions of highly influential works of SF literature. Come along to learn more about these futures past and the history of the collections. A short presentation will be followed by questions and discussion.

For directions to the Gallery, please visit: http://library.leeds.ac.uk/art-gallery-visit

The Reader Speaks

In June last year (see my Digital Library post), I publicised the Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories covers by Frank R. Paul, available to view via the University of Leeds' Digital Library.

In that post, I mentioned that Paul's distinctive style became closely associated with these and other Hugo Gernsback publications. Now more than six months later I wanted to follow up with another Paul-related interest story by going beyond the covers of the magazines and into the obsessive, paranoid, and often downright strange territory of readers' letters. Most of these early pulps had a section devoted to readers' letters and the SF magazines were no different. 'The Reader Speaks' was a forum for fans to show their appreciation, or consternation, at the stories featured in each issue. But it was a letter from a Morris Miller of Brooklyn, NY, in an edition of Wonder Stories from January 1934 that drew my attention, primarily for its subject matter:- the artwork of Frank R. Paul. In his letter, Miller writes:

The attractive cover of the November issue depicts most remarkably the superb ability of its creator, Frank Paul, whose work, by the way is becoming less fantastic and more convincing, as well as within the bounds of reason. But I hate to have to see him draw an insensible picture like the one which appeared on the May 1933 cover. I hope the editors try their best to avoid such absurd means of arousing wonder in those not acquainted with our mag. I guess that is about all it can do. I also note the much improved lifelikeness in the faces of characters drawn by Mr Paul.

This is not the only topic covered in the letter, of course; there's a summary of the reader's favourite stories, a request for a science news section and speculation about the existence of canals on Mars:- 'perhaps they are not canals but some other super-structures which may account for everything...' However, the editors make it their first priority to address the comments relating to the cover artwork, responding with:

You seem to like our covers, like the majority of our readers, but there are a few who claim that they are too ‘gaudy’ or ‘loud’. We do not deny the fact, but we do say that it is necessary in order to have a newsstand sale. These covers are very attractive and draw the eye of passers-by, who may be persuaded to buy the magazine because of this fact, and thereby we acquire many new science-fiction fans who would not now be acquainted with the magazine if it weren’t for this. If we took a vote, we’d probably find that a large percentage of our readers were introduced to science-fiction by the cover of Wonder Stories.

Here, a debt is acknowledged to Paul's covers for drawing the eye and exciting interest in a potential 1930s SF reader. It's easy to imagine how these distinctive images would stand out on a crowded newsstand but perhaps this would be small comfort to a reader like Miller. The oddest thing is that a comparison of the 'attractive' November issue and the 'insensible' May issue reveal (to my eye) few discernible differences, although I could be missing something. For a man that can make sense out of canals on Mars, maybe a robot with tentacles is not too much of an imaginative stretch. But a flying man? That's evidently a bridge too far...

Insensible May issue

Attractive November issue