My contact with these writers

This blog post is about writers I've had some sort of metaphysical 'contact' with, where I seem to actually make a connection with them despite them being dead or far away.... My mind was pretty fucked up when I had experiences with psychosis, so this partially explains me having contacted them.... Otherwise it might be new age voodooism, I don't know.

-------------------------

J. G. Ballard

Around November 6th of 2007 I stayed up for three nights in succession and, as a consequence, had very little control over my actions. My mother gave me a highly potent pill which had a strong effect on my brain. I became very anxious to know something, and rubbed my head desperately to reach a conclusion until I shouted out "CRASH, CRASH, CRASH," the title of a Ballard novel. My mother then told me that my English teacher had killed herself after hearing this and that her husband, a mathematician, was willing to receive some sort of answer. I wrote gobledegook until, amazingly, my hand moved without my control and it was Ballard's writing. What is amazing is that it didn't seem like my words; it was something along the lines of "I was trying to show [with 'Crash'] what young people such as Simon are capable of" until I intercepted this movement and wrote my own fucking gobbledegook... After writing this shite relentlessly I kept wanting Ballard's hand movement to return so that I could see what he would say about me, but it never happened... What's strange is that I have another memory of this night, but I don't know how it meshes with this incident, but I also remember that after having taken the potent pill my English teacher and a girl I had a crush on in school came in after I touched my penis. I thought that Ballard was controlling us and that he was going to make us have some sort of depraved sex... They were sat in two chairs in my room and I was in my bed; we remained in silence until the girl suddenly leaped out of the chair, closed her eyes and left the room. I got up to see what this was when the English teacher said "Don't". I felt the urge to piss, but seeing as I couldn't leave the bed I let it all ooze out.
When I was in an intensive care unit in Derby, I got a phone call and I shouted out "Who's there???" and I heard Ballard's voice say "Your long-lost friend." This voice sounded weak, cracked and wearisome... It sounded like someone in his deathbed. Later I found that he had prostrate cancer, so the fact that he was actually ill seemed to confirm that it was him then.

Julio Cortázar

In Cortázar's novel Hopscotch, there is an Argentinean writer called Morelli who carries out correspondence with readers from different parts of the world. One of them is a 'young man from Sheffield'. I am from this city, and I always have a tendency to seek out obscure art... What's more is that one of the main aspects of Cortázar's fiction is that coincidences and unequivocal, arbitrary events; he said that he always had some sort of 'contact' with the reader, too.

Sera cuestión de tiempo. Pero me siento bien, se acabaron los problemas con la portera. Nadietrae correspondencia, ni siquera la de Nueva Zelandia, con sus estampillas tan bonitas. Cuando se ha publicado un libro que nace muerto, el único resultado es un correo pequeno perofiel. La senora de Nueva Zelandia, el muchacho de Sheffield. Francmasoneria delicada, voluptuosidad de ser tan pocos que participan de una adventura. Pero ahora, realmente...

Paul Auster

The next night after the Ballardian incident, I was rushed off to a room in a psychiatric ward. My parents were next to me and I lied on the bed. I felt shattered, there was no hope. Then a person who looked just like Paul Auster and sounded just like Paul Auster came into the room with a woman who looked just like his wife. He handed me a white pill and said "Take this." One of the things I really kick myself in the head now is that I forgot what he said, but my dad said "I don't know much about Paul Auster, but I think he says.." and then Auster quoted somebody else. I was left on my own with an old woman guarding me... but that's another story.

Franz Kafka

I once wrote in a website "The four people I am truly genetically derived from are Mark E. Smith, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar".... Amazingly enough, I was flicking through a Kafka biography in the library and found that he also chose a list of four writers he was genetically derived from... I read this after compiling the list!

-----------------------

In my episode I also came across William Burroughs and polymath/director Alejandro Jodorowsky, but I should really be going to bed now...

Chilean football team of writers

Seeing as I chose an international football squad of writers, here there's a team of 11 Chilean writers. I have read a few Chilean writers, but I haven't read 11. This list will be completed with Internet assistance. Poets will be included as well as prose writers, because poetry has always been Chile's forte.

The current Chile squad is a 3-3-1-3 formation, so this squad will also have these tactics. The manager for these writers won't be me - it will be the current Chilean Manager, the great Marcelo Bielsa.

1. Gabriela Mistral (Goalkeeper)
2. Jorge Edwards (Defender)
3. Isabel Allende (Defender)
4. Hernan Rivera Letelier (Defender)
5. José Donoso (Midfielder)
6. Antonio Skarmeta (Midfielder)
7. Eduardo de la Barra ( Midfielder)
8. Pablo de Rohka (Attacker)
9. Pablo Neruda (Attacker)
10. Roberto Bolano (Midfielder)
11. Vicente Huidobro (Attacker)

Manager: Marcelo Bielsa

Football team of writers

I have always thought that it'd be a nifty idea to write a book of a football world cup of writers, where each country has a team of their best writers and they play each other. There's a funny Monty Python sketch where philosophers from Germany and Greece play each other.

This list of writers is international and is based on my own preferences, though I have only included writers who are deemed to be 'classics' and not contemporary. To avoid repetition, I won't choose all of the 10 writers I included in my recent list 'Top 10 writers'. It's a 4-4-2 squad.

1. Albert Camus (Goalkeeper)
2. Louis-Ferdinand Celine (Defender)
3. Aldous Huxley (Defender)
4. Samuel Beckett (Defender)
5. Georges Bataille (Defender)
6. Vladimir Nabokov (Midfielder)
7. James Joyce (Midfielder)
8. Jorge Luis Borges (Midfielder)
9. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Attacker)
10. Franz Kafka (Midfielder)
11. William Faulkner (Attacker)

Manager: Me.

I like but I don't like

I like Bach but I don't like Handel

I like Philip Glass but I don't like John Adams

I like Dostoyevsky but I don't like Tolstoy

I like Roberto Bolano but I don't like Isabel Allende

I like Godard but I don't like Rohmer

I like De Sica but I don't like Visconti

I like Los Jaivas but I don't like Congreso

I like Johnny Cash but I don't like Bob Dylan

I like De Kooning but I don't like Pollock

I like Stravinsky but I don't like Schoenberg

Miscellaneous lists

Top 5 Cortázar short stories

1. Circe
2. Continuidad de los parques
3. Lejana
4. Casa Tomada
5. Las Puertas del cielo

Top 5 Borges short stories

1. El Aleph
2. La biblioteca de Babel
3. Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
4. El milagro secreto
5. Las ruinas circulares

Top 3 Stravinsky periods

1. Russian
2. Neo-Classical
3. Serialist

Top 5 Zappa albums

1. The Grand Wazoo
2. Uncle Meat
3. The Yellow Shark
3. Civilazation Phaze III
5. Burnt Weeny Sandwich

Top 5 Godard films

This list might change when I see Le Mepris, which will be any week now.

1. Alphaville
2. Vivre Sa Vie
3. Week End
4. Breathless
5. Band A Part

Top 5 Universities I want to apply to

1. UCL
2. King's College
3. Manchester
4. Glasgow
5. Leeds

Top 5 Stravinsky pieces

1. The Rite of Spring
2. Symphonies of Wind Instruments
3. Symphony of Psalms
4. Les Noces
5. Pulcinella

Top 5 romantic composers

1. Late Beethoven
2. Hector Berlioz
3. Sergei Rachmaninov
4. Gustav Mahler
5. Frederic Chopin

Top 5 Werner Herzog films

1. Aguirre, The Wrath of God
2. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
3. Nosferatu, Phantom Der Nacht
4. Woyzeck
5. Encounters At the End of the World

Top 5 places to have coffee near Dronfield

Not only the taste of the coffee determines this list, but also the ambience of the cafe.

1. Coffee Central in Dronfield
2. Pumpking coffee in Chesterfield station
3. Graves museum cafe
4. Graves Park cafe
5. Costa in Chesterfield

Top 5 short stories by Saimon A. King

1. The Land of Dreams
2. Victoria Red
3. David Crapper and Mary Vagina's Love Affair
4. The Moon of the Mirror
5. Dream Stairs

Top 5 The Fall albums

1. Hex Enduction Hour
2. Perverted by Language
3. Bend Sinister
4. The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall
5. The Real New Fall LP

Top 5 beautiful French actresses

This is, of course, when they were younger. Now they're old hags and even (in Bardott's case) fascist.

1. Anna Karina
2. Isabelle Adjani
3. Jeanne Moreau

4. Catherine Deneuve

5. Bridgette Bardot

Top 10 directors

After my list of top 10 writers, I felt obliged to create one for directors. There are many other directors I like who I think are waaaaaaaaaaaaay better than Tarantino - Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock to name a few - but the reason why they don't appear is that I have only seen one or two movies by them. The criteria to get into this list is that I must have seen at least three films by the director in question. I know less about cinema than I do of literature, so this list may be less accurate and less representative of my tastes than the list of writers.

The 'three key works' I chose for each director aren't my own preferneces, but those generally deemed to be the most pivotal and important in each person's oevure.

10

Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino made non-linear story-telling fashionable, and mediated astute dialogue with visceral violence. He makes trashy fiction and B-movies simultaneously sophisticated and puerile. His films often feature unpleasant characters insidiously taking advantage of others.

3 Key works: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown.

9

Ingmar Bergman

Creating emotional dramatic films, Bergman addressed the human condition by exploring themes like spirituality and existentialism drenched by despair and bleakness.

3 Key works: The Seventh Seal, Persona, Fanny and Alexander.

8

Luis Bunuel

The grandfather of surrealist cinema, Bunuel produced a number of unforgettable eccentric oddities. The absurd permeates in his work, and characters often conform to unerring, bizarre situations without questioning them.

3 Key works: Un Chien Andalou, Los Olvidados, The Discreet Charm of the Buorgeise

7

Stanley Kubrick

Kubrick took every genre and re-invented, be it war movie or science fiction. He proved to be one of the most scintillating auteurs from the post-war Hollywood era.

3 Key Works: Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

6

Coen Brothers

Using their cinephile knowledge of films, the Coens encompass genres from screwballs to thrillers and always with an unquestionablt Coen signature. Their movies always make reference to film history, and always in an unpretentious and enjoyable way.

3 Key works: Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou, No Country for Old Men.

5

David Cronenberg

Injecting intelligence into B movies, sci-fi and terror, Cronenberg is the biggest exponent of 'Body Horror'. His films often involve characters experiencing hallucination and bordering into the brink of insanity.

3 Key works: Videodrome, The Fly, History of Violence.

4

Robert Bresson

Bresson's films explore ascetic themes in a fashion more literary than cinematic. His films are often are very sparse and minimalistic, but they result as greatly overpowering and emotional.

3 Key works: A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Diary of a Countrypriest.

3

David Lynch

Lynch conjures up intricately strange and enigmatic pictures, where the unconscious mind predominates and unquestionable and baffling events occur. The darkness resides hidden and latent beneath the serene comfort of suburbia.

3 Key works: Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive.

2

Werner Herzog

Often going to extremes to attain the unattainable, Herzog's film blur the distinction between fiction and documentary no matter what medium they're in. His films often feature obsessives in doomed quests or men with strange talents in specific fields.

3 Key works: Aguirre: The Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Fitzcarraldo.

1

Jean-Luc Godard

Godard deconstructed cinematic language in a way that broadened the possibilities of cinema. His films often consist of disjointed narratives or cinematic essays on political or aesthetic subjects. This can often be impenetrable and self-indulgent, or extremely absorbing and engaging.

3 Key works: Breathless, Pierrot Le Fou, Weekend.

------------------------------

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED WITH ALL THESE LARGE SPACES???!!!!!!!!!! FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK................... I may have to edit it again!!!!!!!!! AGRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

The remote edges #10

I'm not taking on board Doug's suggestion that he made in the last Remote Edges post. I don't want to have a couple of photographs every month, I want to have as many to cover the countryside surrounding me at a greater, extensive depth.

These are the last photographs taken with my old camera. They date from 11th of October, and I haven't been photographing since. I have a new camera which I got for christmas, and I'll hopefully be using it soon. One of the good things about this new camera is that it can store hundreds and hundreds of photos, so I can take it with me on my 2/3 day trips. I'm hoping to go out for a walk with my camera tomorrow, but with A2 examinations imminent I'll be having less and less time... I may have to postpone/cancel this blog post now and again... When A2 examinations and football world cup are over, I may be able to devote more time to my 'remote edges'.

-------------------------------------------------------