{"id":1504,"date":"2009-08-08T21:18:24","date_gmt":"2009-08-09T05:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/08\/seattle-and-canada-ballard-pynchon\/"},"modified":"2009-08-09T14:36:25","modified_gmt":"2009-08-09T22:36:25","slug":"seattle-and-canada-ballard-pynchon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/08\/seattle-and-canada-ballard-pynchon\/","title":{"rendered":"Seattle and Canada. Ballard & Pynchon."},"content":{"rendered":"

So now I\u2019m back home from Clarion and a road trip to the Canadian Rockies. One slogan I forgot to tell them at Clarion: \u201cYou\u2019re not doing your job as an SF or fantasy writer unless your readers wonder if you\u2019re crazy.\u201d\u009d (The point of the slogan is that it’s interesting when a story goes too far, reveals too much, and dredges surreal images from the subconscious.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On the trip, I read J. G. Ballard\u2019s autobiography, Miracles of Life<\/em>\u2014my old pal Marc Laidlaw gave it to me, he came in to the Clarion workskhop and gave a fine presentation on his metamorphosis from SF writer to videogame writer at Valve.<\/p>\n

Ballard wrote his memoir in the last year or so of his life\u2014he was dying of cancer at age 77. It reminded me of how my own brush with death last year galvanized me into writing a memoir, albeit at age 63. Comparing my memoir to Ballard\u2019s (this mental exercise would be \u201cHow To Make Yourself Miserable, Lesson #701,435\u201d\u009d), <\/em>I worry that his life was more interesting than mine\u2014all of Ballard\u2019s stuff about Shanghai and the prison camp, and him seeing beggar at his boyhood front steps dying under an \u201ceiderdown\u201d\u009d blanket of snow. Oh well, I have to work with what I have.<\/p>\n


\n[Pyramid Mountain near Jasper, Canada.]<\/em><\/p>\n

I was particularly interested in Ballard\u2019s remarks about science fiction. I hardly know his SF\u2014I\u2019ve read bits of The Atrocity Exhibition <\/em>and of Crash<\/em>, but that\u2019s about it…well, I read his autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun<\/em>, too. I\u2019ll have to read more.<\/p>\n

Ballard remarks that SF is \u201cfar closer to reality than the conventional realist novel of the day,\u201d\u009d and that it\u2019s \u201coften as elliptical and ambiguous as Kafka.\u201d\u009d He says he\u2019s more interested in \u201cwhat now?\u201d\u009d than in \u201cwhat if?\u201d\u009d\u2014meaning that he wanted to use SF as a lens to understand the present, \u201clooking for the pathology that underlay the consumer society, the TV landscape and the nuclear arms race.\u201d\u009d <\/p>\n


\n[African sculpture in the Seattle Art Museum.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Ballard speaks of SF as having tremendous vitality, and being original, fresh, optimistic and positive. \u201cIt was a visionary engine … a hot rod … propelled by an exotic literary fuel as rich and dangerous as anything that drove the surrealists.\u201d\u009d He wasn\u2019t interested in space travel. \u201cIt seemed to me that psychological space, what I termed \u201d\u02dcinner space,\u2019 was where science fiction should be heading.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

This all set me to thinking about ways to try and write something fresh and outrageous, and I ended up sleeping badly one night, with a mixed-up Ballardian SF story cooking in my head. In my half-waking state, I was dithering between calling it \u201cGood Ideas\u201d\u009d or \u201cBad Ideas,\u201d\u009d and then settled on the latter.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

While I was still asleep, I saw the story as resembling what passes through my head while cruising the web, a series of (superficially) unrelated incidents, a cut-up based on a series of SF vignettes. But, once awake, I decided I\u2019d rather write a conventionally formed story, rather than one with an experimental form. I\u2019ll talk about my ideas for the story in a later post.<\/p>\n

In connection with the choice between classic and experimental forms, I think of the choreographer Marc Morris irritably saying, \u201cWhy is that whenever people improvise, it always comes out the same?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n


\n[Raven-like Mask of a Huxwhukw, by Mungo Martin, in Seattle Art Museum.]<\/em><\/p>\n

As another way of reawakening myself as a writer, I\u2019ve been reading Pynchon\u2019s old novel, The Crying of Lot 49<\/em>, and\u2014as so often with Pynchon\u2014it feels as if the Muse is talking to me through his work. It\u2019s \u201cfortunate\u201d\u009d that I happened to bring this particular book along for the trip\u2019s casual reading. Here\u2019s three quotes.<\/p>\n


\n[Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.]<\/em><\/p>\n

[Our heroine Oedipa Maas was wondering if there might be] \u201c…a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know…\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

[Oedipa\u2019s husband Mucho tells her,] \u201cI can … listen to anything and take it apart again. Spectrum analysis, in my head. I can break down chords, and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once…It\u2019s like I have a separate channel fo reach one…and if I need more I just expand. Add on what I need. I don\u2019t know how it works, but lately I can do it with people talking too. Say \u201d\u02dcrich, chocolaty goodness.\u2019\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

[A bum sleeping in a lineman\u2019s tent by phone wires hears] \u201c…litanies of insult, filth, fantasy, love whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word.\u201d\u009d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

It all fits—somehow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So now I\u2019m back home from Clarion and a road trip to the Canadian Rockies. One slogan I forgot to tell them at Clarion: \u201cYou\u2019re not doing your job as an SF or fantasy writer unless your readers wonder if you\u2019re crazy.\u201d\u009d (The point of the slogan is that it’s interesting when a story goes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1504"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1506,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1504\/revisions\/1506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}