We never argue because we're never in the same place
In the redwood forest you're testing my will each day
To the new york island determined to get your way


Jackie Saccoccio, Portrait (Reverse), 2012

* J.G. Ballard was asked in 1992 by the editors of Zone to contribute to a special issue on the body, and suggested possible topics. Rather than tackle them one at a time, he provided short reflections on each of them. Here are some of the topics Ballard discussed:

War: The possibility at last exists that war may be defeated on the lingustic plane. If war is an extreme metaphor, we may defeat it by devising metaphors that are even more extreme.

Telephone: A shrine to the desperate hope that one day the world will listen to us.

Forensics: On the autopsy table science and pornography meet and fuse.

Hallucinogenic drugs: The kaleidoscope's view of the eye.

Pornography: The body's chaste and unerotic dream of itself.

The Warren Commission Report: The novelization of the Zapruder film.

Money: The original digital clock.

Personal Computers: Perhaps unwisely, the brain is subcontracting many of its core functions, creating a series of branch economies that may one day amalgamate and mount a management buyout.

Furniture and Industrial design: Our furniture constitutes an external constellation of our skin areas and body postures. It's curious that the least imaginative of all forms of furniture has been the bed.

Genocide: The economics of mass production applied to self-disgust.

* "When I write a sentence, oftentimes what I do is try to treat it like a kernel of popcorn. I'll keep packing more and more words in there. Sort of refine it, until it explodes. When it does, it has all this surface area. It's kind of complicated to trace the whole shape of the thing. But if you do, you get the whole round shape of it. And that's the way it has to be. Some of the earlier stuff is the most grammatically complex. I just try to come up with the right sentence for the right job." -- William T. Vollman