Bit of a Ballard round-up of sorts - turns out there's a Ballard themed 'Crash' exhibition on at the Gagosian Gallery in Bloomsbury. The Guardian has pictures here.

I finished reading Ballard's book Super-Cannes the other day, It started out, as all his books do, with an excellent (if well worn) premise. The story chuntered on for a while in an interesting fashion, but I found myself worrying whether he was going to end the book in the gob-smackingly obvious way I was foreseeing...aaaand of course he did, and I was left seriously underwhelmed and generally suspicious of his authorly skills!

One thought I did have whilst reading the book though, and one that I guess is contentious - is that if one looks at Ballards work, it mostly deals with a riff on the way that he believes that humans have an inbuilt propensity to strive for perfection, whilst also having an inbuilt propensity for boredom and dissatisfaction, and both sides of human nature increase exponentially until a society progresses to a point that comes close to 'perfection'. Once this future point is reached, the society will smash itself.

My (probably unoriginal) thought was:

Could the First World War be seen as a 'Ballardian' response of the european moneyed classes to the perfect inertia of late victorian/edwardian society?

Is this post-post modernism? Here somebody out-Ballards Ballard by taking the time to perform cryptoarcheology on the fictional site of one of his better known stories, a traffic island on the Westway. Pretty interesting stuff eked out of meagre ingredients.

Here's an lovely set of bunker photos for your delectation...

"Walking along the beach some years ago, I noticed a dark structure emerging from the mist ahead of me," J.G. Ballard writes. "Three storeys high, and larger than a parish church, it was one of the huge blockhouses that formed Hitler's Atlantic wall, the chain of fortifications that ran from the French coast all the way to Denmark and Norway. This blockhouse, as indifferent to time as the pyramids, was a mass of black concrete once poured by the slave labourers of the Todt Organisation, pockmarked by the shellfire of the attacking allied warships."

"These bunkers were part of a system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death."