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Arthur Clarke – Fractals – The Colors Of Infinity part 1 of 6

Arthur C. Clarke 

Da Wikipedia, l’enciclopedia libera.

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (Minehead, 16 dicembre 1917 – Colombo, 19 marzo 2008) è stato un autore di fantascienza e inventore britannico.

Clarke è ai più noto per il suo romanzo 2001: Odissea nello spazio. Ispirato al racconto breve La sentinella (The Sentinel – 1948) dello stesso Clarke, il romanzo è in realtà cresciuto assieme alla sceneggiatura del film 2001: Odissea nello spazio realizzato con il regista Stanley Kubrick.

Clarke ha però al suo attivo una produzione letteraria assai estesa, tra cui la celebre serie di Rama, che alcuni considerano come una sorta di seguito di 2001. Esiste poi un asteroide (4923 Clarke)
battezzato così in suo onore. Sempre in suo onore è stata chiamata
"Fascia di Clarke" l’orbita geostazionaria della terra. Egli infatti fu
il primo che ipotizzò, in un suo romanzo, l’utilizzo dell’orbita
geostazionaria per i satelliti dedicati alle telecomunicazioni.
Trovandosi sulla fascia di Clarke tutti i satelliti televisivi, una
ditta tedesca di produzione di ricevitori satellitari ha pensato di
prendere il nome di Clarke-Tech e dunque anch’essa deve il suo nome
allo scrittore.

È considerato un autore di fantascienza hard o "classica", dato che una caratteristica saliente dei suoi romanzi è l’attenzione per la verosimiglianza scientifica.

Biografia [modifica]

Arthur C. Clarke incontra i fan nella casa di Colombo, 9 settembre 2005

Arthur Charles Clarke nacque a Minehead, nel Somerset (Inghilterra), il 16 dicembre del 1917.
Da ragazzo, Clarke si divertiva leggendo con trasporto ed entusiasmo
vecchie riviste di fantascienza. Dopo le scuole superiori (secondarie), non riuscì ad entrare in nessun college e di conseguenza iniziò a lavorare. Il suo primo lavoro fu di revisore dei conti per il governo.

Durante la seconda guerra mondiale, lavorò per la Royal Air Force come esperto di radar
e fu coinvolto nel successivo sviluppo del sistema di difesa radar che
aveva consentito alla RAF di vincere la battaglia contro gli invasori nazisti. Dopo la guerra si laureò al King’s College di Londra.

Il suo più importante contributo può essere considerato l’idea che i satelliti geostazionari potrebbero essere il sistema ideale per le telecomunicazioni: propose questo concetto in un articolo scientifico dal titolo Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage? ("Possono le stazioni razzo fornire una copertura radio mondiale?"), pubblicato su Wireless World nell’ottobre del 1945. Proprio grazie a questo contributo, l’orbita geostazionaria è oggi nota anche come orbita Clarke o fascia di Clarke in suo onore.

Nei primi anni quaranta,
mentre militava ancora nella RAF, iniziò a vendere le sue storie di
fantascienza alle riviste del settore. Lavorò anche, per breve tempo
come viceredattore (Assistant Editor) al Science Abstracts, prima di dedicarsi a tempo pieno al mestiere di scrittore (1951). È stato anche presidente della British Interplanetary Society ("Società interplanetaria britannica") e membro dell’Underwater Explorers Club ("club degli esploratori subacquei").

Dal 1956 ha vissuto nello Sri Lanka, a Colombo, dove è scomparso il 19 marzo 2008 all’età di 90 anni per una crisi respiratoria.^[1]

Il 26 maggio del 2000 è stato insignito della carica onorifica di "Knight Bachelor" in una cerimonia a Colombo per i suoi meriti nella letteratura. L’investitura veniva ritardata, su richiesta di Clarke, dal 1998 a causa di una accusa di pedofilia da parte del tabloid inglese The Sunday Mirror, accusa che fu comunque considerata senza basi dalla polizia dello Sri Lanka e ritrattata su carta poco dopo.^{[2] [3]}

A dicembre del 2007, in occasione del suo novantesimo compleanno (come dice Clarke «dopo aver completato 90 orbite intorno al sole») ha registrato un messaggio video ^[4] pubblicato su YouTube.

Opere [modifica] 

Ciclo Odissea nello Spazio [modifica]

• 2001: Odissea nello spazio (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968), Editrice Nord (ISBN 8842912484)
• 2010: Odissea due (2010: Odyssey Two, 1982), BUR (ISBN 8817136093)
• 2061: Odissea tre (2061: Odyssey Three, 1987)
• 3001: Odissea finale (3001: The Final Odyssey, 1997) 

Ciclo di Rama [modifica]

• Incontro con Rama (Rendez-Vous with Rama, 1973), Mondadori Urania n. 634
• Rama II (Rama II, 1989) coautore con Gentry Lee
• Il giardino di Rama (The Garden of Rama, 1991) coautore con Gentry Lee
• Rama rivelato (Rama Revealed, 1993) coautore con Gentry Lee 

Altri romanzi [modifica]

• Le sabbie di Marte (The Sands of Mars, 1951), Mondadori Urania n. 1 e 402
• Ombre sulla Luna (Earthlight, 1951), Mondadori Urania n. 145 e 522
• Preludio allo spazio (Prelude to Space, 1951), Mondadori Urania n. 19
• Isole cosmiche (Islands in the Sky, 1952), Mondadori Urania n. 54
• Le guide del tramonto (Childhood’s End, 1953), Mondadori Urania n. 467
• La città e le stelle (The City and the Stars, 1956), Mondadori Urania n. 158 e 456
• I guardiani del mare (The Deep Range, 1957), Mondadori Urania n. 278
• Racconti dal pianeta Terra (Tales from the White Hart, 1957)
• Polvere di Luna (A Fall of Moondust, 1961), Mondadori Urania n. 281
• Le porte dell’oceano (People of the Sea, 1963), Mondadori Urania n. 373
• Terra Imperiale (Imperial Earth, 1975), Mondadori Urania n. 688
• Le Fontane del Paradiso (The Fountains of Paradise, 1979), Mondadori Urania n. 796
• Culla (Cradle, 1988) coautore con Gentry Lee, Rizzoli
• Voci di Terra lontana (The Songs of Distant Earth, 1986), Rizzoli
• Il fantasma del Titanic (The Ghost from the Grand Banks, 1990), Rizzoli
• Oltre il buio della notte (Beyond the Fall of Night, 1990) coautore con Gregory Benford
• La luce del passato (The Light of Other Days, 2000), Rizzoli (ISBN 8817126322) coautore con Stephen Baxter
• L’occhio del tempo (Time’s Eye, 2003), Editrice Nord (ISBN 8842913561) coautore con Stephen Baxter
• L’occhio del sole (Sunstorm, 2005), Editrice Nord coautore con Stephen Baxter 

Antologie di racconti [modifica]

(elenco parziale)

• All’insegna del Cervo Bianco (Tales from the White Hart, 1957), Mondadori Urania n. 367 e 884
• Storie di Terra e Spazio (Tales of Ten Worlds, 1962), Mondadori Urania n. 1039
• Vento solare (The Wind from the Sun, 1972)
• Spedizione di soccorso, Mondadori Urania Classici n. 17
• La sentinella (The Sentinel, 1983), Mondadori Urania n. 514; NET (ISBN 8851521549)
• Racconti dal pianeta Terra (Tales from Planet Earth, 1990) 

Antologie che contengono suoi racconti [modifica]

Titoli pubblicati in italiano (elenco parziale)

• Otto racconti, Mondadori Urania n. 321
• Per tutti i diavoli dell’universo (1977)
• I grandi maestri della fantascienza 2 (The SFWA Grand Masters: Vol. 2, 2002)

Racconti [modifica]

(elenco parziale)

• Viaggiate via cavo (Travel by Wire!, 1937) – uscito come appendice ad Urania n. 844
• I nove miliardi di nomi di Dio (The Nine Billion Names of God, 1967)
• La stella (noto anche come La cripta) (The Stars, 1955, Premio Hugo nel 1956)

Citazioni [modifica]

Clarke formulò le seguenti tre leggi sulla previsione:

Note [modifica]

Altri progetti [modifica]

• Wikiquote contiene citazioni di o su Arthur C. Clarke

Collegamenti esterni [modifica]

• Scheda su Arthur C. Clarke dell’Internet Movie Database
• Bibliografia italiana
• (EN) Autori affini a Clarke su Literature Map

xxx 

Sfogliando i vari noblogs ho scoperto Please Kill Me (http://pleasekillme.noblogs.org/) il blog di una trasmissione radiofonica in onda su radio citta’ Fujiko la domenica dalle 22.30 alle 23.30. Ho ascoltato la registrazione della puntata del 2 dicembre 2007 e mi sono divertito molto. La sigla del programma, ovvero  Sonic Reducer dei Dead Boys e’ un classico punk rock del ’77. Inoltre nel corso della trasmissione vengono fornite varie informazioni sulla scena punk, i luoghi in cui si e’ sviluppata, i protagonisti, i vari promotori dei gruppi, ed altro. Nel blog in questione c’e’ anche una lista di libri da cui sono trate le informazioni lette nel corso del programma che cito qui di seguito:

PLEASE KILL ME – Legs McNeil Gillian McCain – Castoldi Dalai Editore

AMERICAN PUNK HARDCORE – Steve Blush – Shake Edizioni

PUNK! I Sex Pistols e il rock inglese in rivolta – Jon Savage – Arcana Editrice

PUNK 20 Century Rock and Roll – Dave Thompson – Collector’s Guide Publishing

PUNK E HARDCORE – Federico Guglielmi – Giunti

GUIDA RAGIONEVOLE AL FRASTUONO PIU’ ATROCE – Lester Bangs – Minimum Fax

CRASS ANOK 4U – traduzioni di tutti i testi, inediti, interviste, statements – a cura di Marco Pandin – Catfood Press 1984 

NON DISPERDETEVI – a cura di Oderso Rubini, Andrea Tinti – Arcana Pop 2003

USCITO VIVO DAGLI ANNI ’80 – Antonio "Tony Face" Bacciocchi – NDA Press 2007

MAN ENOUGH TO BE A WOMAN – Jayne County – Serpent’s tail 1995

TRACCE DI ROSSETTO – Greil Mrcus – Leonardo 1989

PRIMA PAGARE POI RICORDARE – Filippo Scozzari – Castelvecchi 1997

CBGB & OMFUG 30 years from the home of underground rock – Hilly Kristal and David Byrne – Abrams 2005

LUMI DI PUNK – la scena italiana raccontata dai protagonisti- a cura di Marco Philopat –   Agenzia X 2006

COSTRETTI A SANGUINARE – Marco Philopat –  Shake 1997

NEL CUORE DELLA BESTIA – Storie personali nel mondo della musica
bastarda – Stefano Giaccone/ Marco Pandin – Edizioni zero in condotta
1996

SHIBBOLETH my revolting life – Penny Rimbaud aka J.J.Ratter – AK Press 1998 

Ho letto attentamente la bibliografia in questione e devo ammettere che vi ho trovato vari titoli sconosciuti anche da un appassionato del genere come lo e’ il sottoscritto. Vorrei pero’ aggiungere ai titoli compresi nella bibliografia anche i seguenti libri con le relative copertine (clicca sulle imagini per ingrandire):

Punk – the original. A collection of materials from the firs, best and greatest punk’ zine of all time!

ISBN# 0-9647858-5-4

Trans-high corp. 235 Park Avenue South, 5th floor, New York, NY 10003

Re/Search #4/5: William S. Burroughs – Throbbing Gristle – Brion Gysin 

ISBN 0-940642-05-0 

RE/SEARCH publications 20 Romolo pl, Suite B San Francisco CA 94133 TEL : (415) 362-1465 FAX : (415) 362-0742 Email : info@researchpubs.com 

Re/Search #6/7: Industrial culture handbook

ISBN 0-9650469-6-6

RE/SEARCH publications 20 Romolo pl, Suite B San Francisco CA 94133 TEL : (415) 362-1465 FAX : (415) 362-0742 Email : info@researchpubs.com

Search & destroy #1-6. The complete reprint. The authoritative guide to punk culture – V. Vale, editor

ISBN 0-9650469-4-X

RE/SEARCH publications 20 Romolo pl, Suite B San Francisco CA 94133 TEL : (415) 362-1465 FAX : (415) 362-0742 Email : info@researchpubs.com

Stiv Bators, particolare della copertina; ho uno scanner piu’ piccolo del volume (dimensioni volume 38 cm x 25 cm)

particolare copertina (idem come sopra)

Search & destroy #7-11. The complete reprint. The authoritative guide to punk culture – V. Vale, editor

ISBN 1-889307-00-9

RE/SEARCH
publications 20 Romolo pl, Suite B San Francisco CA 94133 TEL : (415)
362-1465 FAX : (415) 362-0742 Email : info@researchpubs.com

Siouxsie, particolare copertina (idem come sopra)

particolare copertina (idem come sopra)

Simon Reynolds "Post-punk 1978-1984"

Edizioni ISBN, via Melzo 9, 20129 Milano 

ISBN 88-7638-045-0

James Stark "Punk ’77. An inside look at the San Francisco rock’n’roll scene 1977"

RE/SEARCH
publications 20 Romolo pl, Suite B San Francisco CA 94133 TEL : (415)
362-1465 FAX : (415) 362-0742 Email : info@researchpubs.com

Estratto:

If you were in a band in 1975 or 1976, you had to be in what the ‘local
scene’ was at that time or there was nowhere to play. That’s why we started
the Mabuhay. There was nowhere for anybody to go. We had to create our
own place to hang out, so that’s what we did. Before Mabuhay I never hung
out in clubs because there wasn’t a club scene. With the Mabuhay, you
just went there. You didn’t care who was playing because you went to hang
out.–Jeff Rafael, Nuns

There was no music scene going on in San Francisco when me and my friend,
Steve, moved out here from St. Louis. We moved into this little apartment
by Cala Foods on Hyde Street. We couldn’t play in the apartment because
of complaints, so we would go down to Polk St. and play for tips. That’s
where I met Kowalsky and one of the guys from Crime, and other people
who later became part of the Mabuhay scene.– Jimmy Wilsey, Avengers

In the late Seventies before Punk, it was easier for record companies
to put out Donna Summer-type canned music, disco, "Love to Love You Baby"
kind of stuff. Club owners felt that as long as they could get people
to pay a door charge to dance, then why should they have to deal with
the expense of presenting live entertainment?

The places that had live bands were booking hippie bands, more or less.
When the Mabuhay opened its doors to people like the Ramones, Dammed,
Blondie and Wayne County, people who started out in New York, it was exciting
for everybody. There had to be more than just a handful of people who
didn’t want to go to discos. They had no other place to go, so this was
an opportunity. It help prove to the city that not everything had to be
canned music. Bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols came through
with a kind of rebellious sound. It was something new. It wasn’t the same
old Savoy Brown, Sixties kind of bar band. It was a relief not having
to hear, ‘Love to Love You Baby’.–Ginger Coyote

THX 

Re/search edizioni: http://www.researchpubs.com/Blog/index.php 

Una lista di volumi consigliati da Underground Resistance (Detroit) 

da http://www.undergroundresistance.com/main/content/view/16/40/

Interstellar Reading List

(an incomplete and growing list, in no particular order)

   1. This Business of Music by M. William Krasilovsky and Sidney Shemel – This is the music BUSINESS and any and everyone thinking about getting into this needs to read this book.  Even if you find an old edition at a used bookstore, the information will still be accurate enough to put you miles ahead of the average knucklehead!
      
   2. Arrest The Music!: Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics by Tejumola Olaniyan – A profile of one of the most influential musicians in the world.  He’s the man who said, "Music is a weapon!"
      
   3. To Be Loved: The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown by Berry Gordy – For those who don’t know, this is the man behind the label that altered the course of the music industry and changed the world.  Before techno, before P-Funk, there was Motown.
      
   4. Techno Rebels by Dan Sicko – The primer.  Sicko gives an overview of the Detroit techno scene in intimate detail that nobody has been able to match.
      
   5. No No Boy by John Okada – Fictional account of a very real situation.  A man comes out of prison after WWII to find his world turned upside down.  The cost of resistance in the face of injustice.
      
   6. An Underground Education: The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Fields of Human Knowledge by Richard Zacks – The title pretty much sums it up.  Hilarious and disturbing, kind of like national politics.
      
   7. An Empire of Their Own How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler – There are so many ways to look at this book, and there are so many parallels to hip hop, techno, and a number of other industries.  Fascinating, and inspiring.
      
   8. Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas – A Puerto Rican brother gives an unflinching portrait of inner city life and the how screwed up race and ethnicity are in the US.
      
   9. Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the African-American in the Performing Arts by Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer – Ok, I’m going to have to disagree with the titling of this.  This book is about the history of American performing arts, period.  So much of "mainstream" entertainment has been borrowed and co-opted from "African American" arts, that the title can be misleading.  However, that the people portrayed are black, and that their work was magic, cannot be denied!
      
  10. Sex and Race by J. A. Rogers – This is a 3 volume set, but don’t let that deter you.  Rogers breaks down a number of racial stereotypes and digs deep into the myth of racial purity, from the "Old World" to the "New World" and explores why interracial mixing is part of the human experience.

xxx

da http://www.rickmcgrath.com/jgballard/jgb_beatsthebush.html

Collage by JGB 

JGB Beats Around The Bush…
And Finds Hollywood

JGB Interview by V. Vale

From his home in Shepperton following the November 2, 2004, US Presidential elections, J.G. Ballard wonders over the phone with V. Vale if there is something fundamentally flawed about the American take on reality.

V. Vale: I wanted to get your “take” on the neo-cons and Bush, and your perspective on what happened with this election in November, 2004.

J.G. Ballard: I’m sure you and your readers have had an absolute Niagara of comment on the subject, so I don’t want to give anything but one European’s perspective on it. But there’s no doubt that most people over here on this side of the Atlantic were hoping for a Kerry victory. There’s something very frightening about Bush and the neo-con group. Donald Rumsfeld is quite a scary figure — putting it mildly.

V. Vale: One feels that Bush and his closest advisors are entirely driven by emotions. They’re no longer driven by a reasoned analysis of where the world is going, and what the U.S. response should be. They’re driven by this visceral need to express their anger — you know, their anger and, really, rage at the world. One feels, listening to people like Rumsfeld, Bush himself, and one or two of the others like Richard Perle, that the world is seen as an extremely hostile place.

J.G. Ballard: And moreover, they want it to be a hostile place. They need enemies who can be challenged and then destroyed. This is a kind of psychology that people in Europe are very familiar with, going back to the psychology of people like Hitler and his henchman, and then to Stalin and the whole paranoid stance that both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes had towards their enemies. If they didn’t have enemies, they would soon invent enemies. Because they’re absolutely hung up — and I suspect Bush and the neo-cons, to a surprising extent, in a great democracy like the U.S., are hung up on this need to hate and this need to destroy. And of course it’s frightening, because where will it end? Today Iraq, tomorrow Iran, and the day after, hmmm… maybe France, you know, because given their mindset, there will be no shortage of enemies. I think there’s nothing particularly extreme about saying this. I think it’s what people over here perceive of as part of the dangers of this situation. Nobody thinks there is a connection between the 9-11 attack and Saddam Hussein. There’s no connection at all — it’s quite the opposite. Hussein was running a secular regime. Bush and Rumsfeld have created a kind of unstable regime dominated by religious fanatics in Iraq, of the Khadafi kind they thought they were getting rid of! So it is unnerving. It leads us to question many other areas of the American world view. Is there something fundamentally flawed about the American take on reality? I say that as a lifelong admirer of the U.S., by the way. But it does seem to me that a lot of the formulas that govern American life — in particular its entertainment culture — have leaked out of, say, the Hollywood films and into political reality. That’s frightening. I’ve got a feeling that Americans, who have always been admired and always been liked for the most part, don’t take kindly to being disliked. Unlike, say, the British and French, who have been disliked since the year “dot.” The Americans don’t like being disliked; the reverberations of 9-11 are not going to go away. I’m sure there will be other attacks of a similar kind and they will keep the pot boiling.

V. Vale: Yes. And these days, the Bush Team seems to basically dictate press announcements to the press as “news,” and then the news media just gladly print them without any critical stance or analysis. Recently in the news there was the declaration: “Well, we think Iran has weapons of mass destruction.” Obviously Team Bush is gearing up for an attack on Iran.

J.G. Ballard: Well, it does look like that. What’s worrying is that that will be an automatic response: “So, it’s going to be Iran next.” I can’t imagine American ground forces are going to roll across the border, but I can see strategic bombing attacks designed to destabilize the present regime and knock out their nuclear research installations. But, the consequences would be disastrous for the world economy if the huge oil supplies locked up in the Middle East were interrupted. God knows what will happen.

V. Vale: We saw a preview of that in Mad Max, didn’t we?

J.G. Ballard: Yes, absolutely. It’s a worrying time because Bush seems to delight in the sort of mythological version of himself which he’s created: the swaggering Texan who is supremely confident of his ability to stare down any mean guys who get in his way. Rumsfeld seems to come out of the same corner of the fairground. Some of the others, like Perle, whom we see a lot of on British television, and Wolfowitz whom we also see, are much more intellectual and they provide a smooth rationale. Something worries me. This goes back to the period of forty years ago when strategic planners in the Pentagon were heavily influenced by game theory, John Von Neumann and others. They seriously believed there was a window of opportunity that the U.S. should take while it still enjoyed nuclear supremacy. This was the time to strike, before the Soviet missile deployment would match the U.S.’s. From what one reads, serious thought was given to picking a fight with the Russians and then obliterating them! One sees something of the same mind-set at work today, and it’s a little bit scary.

V. Vale: [laughs] To say the least. Wow. I’m very cautious of conspiracy theories because you can drive yourself crazy — you will never really know who killed JFK, for example. But at the same time I’m very interested in the underlying thinking that doesn’t get publicized, like the game theory of John Von Neumann, who was the model for the title character in Dr. Strangelove. You don’t hear much about that anymore, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t go away.

J.G. Ballard: I think it’s come to the surface again, hasn’t it? It’s something I’ve argued for a long while. In my last novel, Millennium People, I was putting forth the proposition that nothing disconcerts people more than an apparently meaningless act. If a hostile act in particular has some sort of obvious point… if you’re an anti-globalization protestor and you picket the offices of some multinational company, or even if you blow up their showroom windows, everybody understands — they may disapprove, but they understand. But on the other hand, a meaningless act really unsettles people for obvious reasons, because we look for logic. To some extent, the tragic events of 9-11 constitute a kind of meaningless act.

V. Vale: What do you mean?

J.G. Ballard: I haven’t seen any convincing explanation of what Mohammed Atta and his fellow hijackers were trying to achieve. I mean, this is a spectacular blow against what we’re told is — was — an American symbol: the twin World Trade Center towers…

V. Vale: The WTC was a spectacular symbol of American economic dominance over the world, I think.

J.G. Ballard: I don’t think they were seen as such by the rest of the world. They were seen as two very tall buildings. I’ve never heard anyone refer to them. Now, the Empire State Building, and to some extent the Chrysler Building, had enormous symbolic value, which I remember back in the 1930s, soon after the Empire State Building opened for business. That stood for New York, and it stood for America. But I’ve never heard of the World Trade Center thought of in those terms. I’ve never heard anyone in any television program, documentary, article or book refer to the World Trade Center towers in the way, for example, that people always refer to the Pentagon as a threatening presence.

V. Vale: I think the WTC towers were elevated into this position of representing American capitalism after the event.

J.G. Ballard: Well, whether they were or not, the point is: the attack on them was really meaningless — it didn’t achieve anything, apart from killing a huge number of people. It was almost a meaningless act; the logic was difficult to follow. If you hated the U.S. so much, there were other and better targets, in a way: the Capitol in Washington, the White House, the Pentagon itself — one plane obviously wasn’t going to do enough damage; all four planes could have gone into the Pentagon. The symbolic value of an attack, say, on the White House or the Capitol would have been far, far greater. By comparison, the attack on the World Trade Center in New York was really… It almost comes into the category of a meaningless act… and it’s this that people find so unsettling. I think that when you’re faced with a meaningless act of that kind, the brain rushes around trying to find some sort of conceivable reason at work in the perpetrators’ mind. Although no one is prepared to come out and sort of back Samuel Huntington’s notion of “The Clash of Civilizations” — you know, the Christian West vs. Islam — people act as if the war against the Muslim world were already declared.

V. Vale: In fact, Bush constantly talks about war, doesn’t he? He refers to himself as the “War President.”

J.G. Ballard: Whereas in terms of the huge enormous unlimited power of the U.S. military, I would regard the invasion of Iraq as a police action. I mean, it’s degenerated into a kind of huge police action now — it’s a “law and order” problem. The reactive mechanism in Bush’s mind, and in the minds of the neo-cons around him, has been touched off. And also of course, the other thing that sort of worries us in Europe, is the way in which religious belief has begun to merge seamlessly into this sort of war mentality. That is something that is very scary, because it justifies anything. If “God” is on your side and you’re absolutely convinced of that, then you can do anything.

V. Vale: And justify anything you did.

J.G. Ballard: Absolutely. Going back to the Crusades and religious pogroms in Europe, the Dark Ages, the Inquisition in the 14th-15th century (or whenever), the religious wars… One doesn’t want to get too carried away, but there are unsettling echoes — put it like that. I think back to earlier American Presidents when I was younger — say, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower… one can’t imagine them ever having gotten into this war in Iraq. Or into this peculiar mind-set, this sort of “Religious Warrior” mind-set. They weren’t riding an emotional horse… The puzzling thing is: Why has this happened? Is there something within the American view of the world, the way that Americans think, that is responsible? In other words, has the genie escaped from the Hollywood bottle … and got out into the ordinary air we breathe? One can’t help wondering that. The logic that underpins Independence Day and Con-Air and all these films seems to be directing America today. I’m probably wrong, but that’s the impression that people have over here.

V. Vale: Definitely. Those popular films perpetuate, or inflict, a mythology, upon Americans … there are all these assumptions underlying those films.

J.G. Ballard: Yes, it underpins those films, and it underpins the American comics that I read in the 1940s. I remember reading Superman comics in 1937, 1938 in Shanghai, and the hero could transform himself — which Bush thinks he can do: he goes into the War Room in the Pentagon and he comes out a cross between Richard the Lion-Hearted and god knows who else. There is the idea that if what you’re doing is “right,” and “God” tells you so, you have unlimited power. That’s a very powerful combination, actually, if you happen to be President of the U. S., but it’s frightening for the rest of the world. I mean, I can imagine a world where everyone is so frightened of the U.S. that we all convince ourselves that we admire it absolutely, and will agree with everything America demands of us, but that will not satisfy the man in the White House at the time. What he needs — or it may be a she, although I would think that Hillary’s hopes are rather slender at the moment — I mean for eight years’ time, whenever. But there seems to be a need… Maybe it’s something as simple as the need for revenge — it’s hard to say. But I think it’s more than that; I think it’s the need to turn the rest of the world into a free-fire zone where anybody who puts his head up out of the nearest ditch is going to get it shot off. That way they’re “safe.” But, it may be a passing phase…

This interview was first published in Arthur Magazine, February 15, 2005, and was excerpted from the book, J.G. Ballard: Conversations. This book, and a companion volume, J.G. Ballard: Quotations, is now available from www.researchpubs.com 

Collage by JGB 

james ballard album

xxx 

Cape Canaveral – foto di Ana Barrado

scansioni di Re/Search N° 8/9 (edizione americana V/Search Publications, 1984) e di Re/Search edizione italiana J. G. Ballard (Shake Edizioni Underground, 1994)

Dalla quarta di copertina di Re/search edizione italiana:

“Ballard usa lo strumento fantascienza per confrontare  il software, cioe’ l’uomo, con, l’hardware del Ventesimo secolo, cioe’ Cape Canaveral, i razzi, la cultura della droga, le auto.
Ballard e’ in realta’ il cantore della terza rivoluzione industriale, eta’ in cui microchip e computer letteralmente invadono la vita quotidiana della gente: nell’eta’ mediale dispiegata, descrive la mutazione dell’uomo, le sue derive psicologiche, i flussi del tempo interno, gli erotici ibridi di corpi e macchinari, in scenari onirici techno-apocalittici.
[…]

La rivista californiana “Re/Search” e’ una tra le piu’ importanti della scena underground mondiale. Nata nel 1981 dall’humus del punk americano, ha saputo rapidamente imporsi per il rigore scientifico con cui ha analizzato i fondali immaginativi della cultura tecno-industriale contemporanea.”

trascrizione di THX

Collage di J. G. Ballard

links:

Ballardian – http://www.ballardian.com/

Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard

The Terminal Collection – http://jgballard.ca/