JG Ballard – Page 30 – { feuilleton }

Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

The Singing Citadel (1970).

Michael Moorcock’s Elric books are being prepared for republication by Del Rey in the US next year. I’ve assisted with some minor parts of this preparation, including sourcing pictures from Savoy’s edition of Monsieur Zenith the Albino. (Anthony Skene’s albino anti-hero is a precursor of Moorcock’s albino anti-hero.)

Discussion of the Elric books with Dave at Savoy prompted my excavation of this battered Mayflower paperback from the retired book boxes. This slim volume collected four fantasy stories: the title piece (possibly the first Elric story I read), Master of Chaos, The Greater Conqueror and To Rescue Tanelorn…. I’d forgotten about the garishly strange cover, one of many that Bob Haberfield produced for Moorcock’s books during the 1970s. Haberfield is one of a number of cover artists from that period who worked in the field for a few years before moving on or vanishing entirely. The swirling clouds derived from Tibetan Buddhist art identify this as one of his even without the credit on the back; later pictures were heavily indebted to Eastern religious art and while technically more controlled they lack this cover’s berserk intensity. Haberfield’s site has a small gallery of his splendid paintings, including a rare horror work, his wonderfully eerie cover for Dagon by HP Lovecraft.

Searching for more Haberfield covers turned up these two examples, both part of the SciFi Books Flickr pool, a cornucopia of pictures by vanished illustrators. Browsing that lot is like being back inside the In Book Exchange, Blackpool, circa 1977. The digitisation of the past continues apace at the Old-Timey Paperback Book Covers pool and the Pulp Fiction pool. Don’t go to these pages if you’re supposed to be doing something else, it’s easy to find yourself saying “just one more” an hour later.

And in other Moorcock-related news, Jay alerts me today to the existence of an archive of New Worlds covers, something I’d been hoping to see for a long time. New Worlds was one of the most important magazines of the 1960s, mutating under Moorcock’s editorship from a regular science fiction title to a hothouse of literary daring and experiment. As with so many things in that decade, the peak period was from about 1966–1970 when the magazine showcased outstanding work from Moorcock himself, JG Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delany, M John Harrison, Norman Spinrad and a host of others. For a time it seemed that a despised genre might be turning away from rockets and robots to follow paths laid down by William Burroughs, Salvador Dalí, Jorge Luis Borges and other visionaries. We know now that Star Wars, Larry Niven and the rest swept away those hopes but you can at least go and see covers that pointed to a future (and futures) the world rejected.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer
• 100 Years of Magazine Covers
• It’s a pulp, pulp, pulp world

Sans Soleil

Chris Marker might be considered the Borges of cinema if that designation didn’t seem limiting, with its implication that literature is superior to cinema, that filmmakers only receive true qualification as artists through comparison to more venerable creators, and so on. Marker, then, is Marker, although who Marker is remains obscure, as this article notes:

Some say his father was an American soldier, others that he (Marker) was a paratrooper in the Second World War. Still others, that he comes to us from an alien planet. Or the future. Throughout his career, he has rarely been interviewed, and even more rarely photographed. It is said that he responds to requests for his photograph with a picture of a cat – his favorite animal.

The possibility that he comes from the future is a compelling conceit when his most famous work, La Jetée, is a very subtle film about time travel (later remade with a huge budget and no subtlety at all by Terry Gilliam as Twelve Monkeys). JG Ballard and others have enthused about La Jetée for years but my favourite Marker film remains Sans Soleil, a meditation on time, memory, travel and culture, blending documentary images with a semi-fictional (?) voice-over narrative that resists easy summary. In this respect it parallels some of Borges’ essays or “ficciones”; like many of Borges’ best works it manages to be both personal and universal, drawing connections which seem obvious until you realise that no one has pointed them out in quite that way before. An equally fascinating companion to Sans Soleil is Marker’s CD-ROM, Immemory, a Mac-only release that’s already out-of-date in software terms (and since Classic stopped working on my Mac even I can’t use it for the time being).

This site presents a critical reading of Sans Soleil as a rather disjointed web experience. And you can read the text of the film here. Needless to say, none of these are very satisfying at all without the accompaniment of Marker’s images.

JG Ballard book covers

In a similar vein to the Burroughs cover gallery, Rick McGrath’s site does the same for one of Burroughs’ followers, JG Ballard. The covers below are two typical examples using Surrealist art as their illustration, The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst and City of Drawers by Dalí. I’ve always loved the pairing of Ernst’s painting (my favourite by that artist) with The Crystal World, a design that Panther carried over to their 1968 paperback edition.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Ballard on Modernism

A handful of dust

The modernists wanted to strip the world of mystery and emotion. No wonder they excelled at the architecture of death, says JG Ballard

Few people today visit Utah beach. The sand seems colder and flatter than anywhere else along the Normandy coast where the Allies landed on D-day. The town of Arromanches – a few miles to the east and closer to Omaha, Gold and Sword beaches – is a crowded theme park of war museums, cemeteries and souvenir shops, bunkers and bunting. Guidebooks in hand, tourists edge gingerly around the German gun emplacements and try to imagine what it was like to stare down the gun sights at the vast armada approaching the shore.

But Utah beach, on the western edge of the landing grounds, is silent. A few waves swill over the sand as if too bored to think of anything else. The coastal land seems lower than the sea, and fails to echo the sounds of war inside one’s head.

More here.