James Graham Ballard (1930–2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist who first became associated with the New Wave of science fiction for his post-apocalyptic novels such as The Wind from Nowhere (1961) and The Drowned World (1962).  In the late 1960s, he produced a variety of experimental short stories (or "condensed novels"), such as those collected in the controversial The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).  In the mid 1970s, Ballard published several novels, among them the highly controversial Crash (1973), a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism, and High-Rise (1975), a depiction of a luxury apartment building's descent into violent chaos.  While much of Ballard's fiction would prove thematically and stylistically provocative, he became best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young British boy's experiences in Shanghai during Japanese occupation.  Described by The Guardian as "the best British novel about the Second World War", the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg starring Christian Bale.  In the following decades until his death in 2009, Ballard's work shifted toward the form of the traditional crime novel.  Several of his earlier works have been adapted into films, including David Cronenberg's controversial 1996 adaptation of Crash and Ben Wheatley's 2015 adaptation of High-Rise.  The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's fiction has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments".  Ballard has had a notable influence on popular music, where his work has been used as a basis for lyrical imagery, particularly amongst British post-punk and industrial groups.  Examples include albums such as Metamatic by John Foxx, various songs by Joy Division (most famously "Atrocity Exhibition" from Closer), "High Rise" by Hawkwind, "Miss the Girl" by The Creatures (based on Crash), "Down in the Park" by Gary Numan, "Chrome Injury" by The Church, "Drowned World" by Madonna, "Warm Leatherette" by The Normal and Atrocity Exhibition by Danny Brown.  Songwriters Trevor Horn and Bruce Woolley credit Ballard's story "The Sound-Sweep" with inspiring The Buggles' hit "Video Killed the Radio Star", and the Buggles' second album included a song entitled "Vermillion Sands."  The 1978 post-punk band Comsat Angels took their name from one of Ballard's short stories.  An early instrumental track by British electronic music group The Human League "4JG" bears Ballard's initials as a homage to the author (intended as a response to "2HB" by Roxy Music).  The Manic Street Preachers include a sample from an interview with Ballard in their song "Mausoleum".  Klaxons named their debut album Myths of the Near Future after one of Ballard's short story collections.  The Sound of Animals Fighting took the name of the song "The Heraldic Beak of the Manufacturer's Medallion" from Crash.  The song "Terminal Beach" by the American band Yacht is a tribute to his short story collection that goes by the same name.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard



I ordered The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard from my public library and received the American edition with two new stories at the end.  See list of titles at https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1230016/TOC  My favorites tales are:  Prima Belladonna, Billennium, The Singing Statues, Deep End, The Subliminal Man, The Greatest Television Show on Earth, The Smile, and The Dying Fall.



farrago  noun  Borrowed from Latin farrāgō (“mixed fodder; mixture, hodgepodge”), from far (“spelt (a kind of wheat), coarse meal, grits”) (English farro).  A collection containing a confused variety of miscellaneous things. quotations ▼ Synonyms:  hodgepodge, hotchpotch, melange, mingle-mangle, mishmash, oddments, odds and ends, omnium-gatherum, ragbag  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/farrago



Politics and the English Language by George Orwell  One can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails.  I think the following rules will cover most cases:  (i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.  (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.  (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.  (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.  (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.  (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.  Read the 13-page document at http://public-library.uk/ebooks/72/30.pdf



The noun davit is derived from Middle English and Old French daviot, which is a diminutive of David, thus it means:  little David; maybe because those small cranes can handle a much bigger lifeboat.  (nautical)  A spar formerly used on board of ships, as a crane to hoist the flukes of the anchor to the top of the bow, without injuring the sides of the ship.  (nautical, construction)  A crane, often working in pairs and usually made of steel, used to lower things over an edge of a long drop off, such as lowering a maintenance trapeze down a building or launching a lifeboat over the side of a ship.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/davit



Officials said the trees must go—and the fight was on.  Grandmothers and teenagers of Lambeth, Ontario, mounted guard, boys swarmed in the branches and the author, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, was jailed.  The bizarre battle failed—but officialdom lost the war.  EARLE BEATTIE:  I SUPPOSE THAT the fate of a couple of dozen maples on Talbot Road North in the Ontario village of Lambeth is less than apocalyptic.  But not to me it isn’t.  After all, I went to jail trying to save those trees (only a few hours, but it could have been fourteen years).  And although in the end we didn't save the trees, we did accumulate, the hard way, some information that could help other sane people who are trying to stem the insane epidemic of tree-cutting, public and private, now being perpetrated in the name of “progress.''  The whole thing started in the spring of 1964 when the Lambeth village clerk came around to tell us that Talbot Road North was to become a four-block, $42,000 superhighway.  Actually it was a highway-designer’s nightmare:  a sixty-six-foot road allowance for two blocks along our semi-urban street, which bloated out to an eighty-six-foot right-of-way for another two blocks of rural residence to the village limits.  There it ended abruptly opposite a cornfield in open farmland country and narrowed back to the twenty-two-foot width of an old asphalt road. The clerk explained that the trees in front of our house, a handsome row of fifty-year-old maples, would have to be cut down to make way for the widening.  Several of the home-owners protested and I telephoned the county engineer, Boyd Arnold, and lodged our objections.  He replied that we should be happy to get the wider road.  We had lost the “battle of the maples” and it seemed the war was over.  But a curious and ironic circumstance was to snatch partial victory from defeat.  One of the residents, Homer Hart, who had been absent all summer, returned in time to uncover an old survey marker on his lawn, which dated back to 1916.  It showed that the wooden stakes the county engineer had driven along our frontage to mark the extent of the street widening were actually encroaching on our properties by four feet.  All of us began digging operations immediately and uncovered half a dozen similar markers which lined up with Hart's, some dating back to 1913.  Reinforced by this discovery, we took up new positions on the monument line and defied the authorities to cross it.  Incredibly enough, the county had not bothered to secure a proper survey for the road-widening, but had casually measured out thirty feet from the centre of the old asphalt road, plunked their stakes down on our property—and cut the trees down.  It turned out that the road had not been built in the centre of the road allowance, and thus it was not a valid measuring point.  Read the rest of the story at http://archive.macleans.ca/article/1965/1/2/the-villagers-who-went-to-war-for-their-trees  Link to The Lambeth Children O song by Malvina Reynolds at https://www.riseupandsing.org/songs/lambeth-children



http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2130  July 29, 2019