Simon Sellars: Sleepy Brain Archives

A view of the ziggurat student quarters at Norwich’s University of East Anglia. This is Brutalism at its finest. (Photo: Simon Sellars 2007).

I woke on the train to Norwich.

I don’t know much at all about Norwich, except a bit about their football team. In John King’s book The Football Factory, the narrator, Tom, recalls how a gang of Norwich football hooligans beat him up after a game. He’s very bitter about it; he makes jokes about farmers and sheepshaggers when he talks of Norwich, out on the southeast coast, but experience tells me that wherever city slickers fear to tread, that’s where I want to be. I like edge culture, the margins, and London did my head in last time I was there (I was actually living there in 2001, trying to juggle a bad breakup and chronic unemployment and the city ate me alive, some kind of aversion therapy; it’s no place for troubled souls).

There was a stray newspaper next to a half-eaten cheese-and-egg sandwich. On the front page was a picture of the little girl, Madeleine McCann, who had recently been abducted in Portugal. The media had been whipping itself into a frenzy, strangely reminiscent of the all-in public mourning over Baby Diego in Children of Men. Footballers were joining in the campaign to ’save Maddie’ — King Beckham and so on. Somehow the whole nation was becoming complicit with guilt. I didn’t understand how a footballer pleading on television could suddenly jog’s someone’s memory about whether they’d seen the poor girl or not; or indeed whether the magic of Goldenballs could persuade the kidnapper to suddenly show remorse and hand her over. All I could see, given the level of hysteria that was building, were witchhunts on the horizon, trial by media, lynch mobs all around, and the same saturation coverage of the same wafer-thin conjecture over and over again — the kind of saturation coverage that Madeleine’s parents are now starting to realise is detrimental to their cause.

Baby Diego: public grief (still from Children of Men; dir. Alfonso Cuaron 2006).

I had to focus.

In Norwich I was to give a paper at a conference on the work of J.G. Ballard. I was slightly apprehensive. I commenced a PhD on Ballard 10 years ago, back when he was a guilty pleasure, a true cult figure. His influence was of course strong in cyberpunk literature and industrial music and culture, but he had barely penetrated academia. In some ways I felt like I was blazing a new trail back then — until I quit from exhaustion and walked away from it. Now ten years later, I’ve returned to university and I’m attempting to finish my thesis…and everything’s changed.

Ten years ago Ballard’s predictions seemed so weird, so uncanny, so exotic and seductive…I felt part of an exclusive club. Now his worldview is the air we breathe; some commentators have argued that Ballard’s influence on other writers, as well as musicians and filmmakers, has tailed off dramatically, that Ballard’s own writing is suffering from exhaustion. But that’s because the early 21st century is so very Ballardian. Ballard has lived to see the world he was writing about take shape around him, with its hypermagnified celebrity culture, with its obsession with death and torture as public spectacle, as entertainment, with its breed of ‘me me me’ posthumans welded to gadgets and consumerism, obsessed with the self to the exclusion of all traces of community.

I feel like I’ve been asleep for 10 years and have woken to find the mental landscape surrounding Ballard has completely changed. I’m 10 years out of the loop; most of the academics at this conference will have been at it for years. They’ll have lit crit on their side. All I have is observations on the world around me for ballast. Would it be enough? I’ve never gone in much for hardcore critical theory; I’ve tried to locate the subjects I write about in terms of influence, to contextualise them within the machinery of cultural production that surrounds them. For example, my own paper was on micronationalism and the vocabulary of secession in Ballard’s work, specifically the types of autonomous enclaves he has written about since his very early career, and the political potential of these ‘non-places’. I focused on how the later works — from Cocaine Nights onwards — were explicitly concerned with defending physical space, a process that leads to the actual secession of the Metro-Centre as a ’shopping republic’ in Kingdom Come, and I tracked the simultaneous real-world successes and failures of actual micronations, such as Sealand and the Hutt River Province. This of course was a direct result of my role as a co-author of Lonely Planet’s recent guide to Micronations.

My original idea for the conference was to look at two early Ballard short stories, ‘Track 12′ (1958) and ‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960), both specifically concerned with the psychological properties of sound and the ghosted layers of musique concrete that build up in concentrated technological zones — such as big cities. I was going to commission Mel Chilianis, a very talented friend of mine, to record a sound score based on those stories, which I would then play at the conference while examining the intent and context behind the source material. Mel was keen but in the end I plumped for micronationalism; it seemed logical, as I’d just completed the Lonely Planet book.

Never mind. I was sure it would all work out in the end.

I arrived at Norwich and checked into a B&B on Earlham Rd, run by a lovely couple. I love British B&Bs: tea and coffee next to the bed; flowery toilet seat covers. Hmmmm. After a good night’s sleep it was straight to the conference Saturday morning. No time to sight see; all I really saw of Norwich was Earlham Rd., at the end of which was the University of East Anglia, the conference HQ.

Another view of the UEA’s ziggurat, quite the finest Ballardian building I’ve ever seen (photo: Simon Sellars 2007).

The first day was fun. I ‘knew’ a lot of people from online and meeting them all in the flesh for the first time was a bit disconcerting to begin with. When all you know of someone is their online persona, it’s like you’ve been reading their thoughts, or you’ve been imagining their existence. To have them suddenly materialise in front of you after a year, two years, can verge on serious existential overload. Luckily, they were all nice people who liked a beer, so all was well on that score.

By and large the conference was most enjoyable and my paper, given on the Sunday, went well, although I was really kicking myself for not following through with the original ’sound design’ idea. For me, and this is well documented over at Ballardian, one of the more fascinating aspects of Ballard’s work is the influence it has had on filmmakers and musicians. Disappointingly, no one covered this at the conference. As I’d imagined, it was all firmly text based. So I had the chance and I missed it. Doesn’t matter — Mel and I will make that piece one day.

And that’s about it for Norwich. I did want to have a look around as it seemed a genuinely nice town, but my schedule was so tight. I was due to visit my sister in a few days and there were a few places I wanted to get to in between.

So I awoke bright and early Monday morning for a good start. I’d had a few drinks the night before to celebrate the end of the conference. I was a bit tipsy but nothing out of control, although I didn’t really remember going to bed. But that morning, as I pulled the bed covers back, I saw that the white sheets were completely covered in a sticky, brown…mass. I was mortified. I’ve seen Trainspotting. I know what happened to Spud the morning after. He couldn’t remember the night before either. Then he had his nasty accident. I was in shock. I didn’t know how to get out of this situation, as I hadn’t paid and there was no chance of just slipping away. I lay there for a few seconds, stewing in what I thought were literally my own juices.

And then it clicked. I’d slept on — and smeared — the complimentary chocolates that my lovely hosts had placed on the pillow. I felt one of the sweetest of all human emotions: sweet, sweet relief! God bless good old British B&Bs! I was still in a bit of a pickle, though. Sheepishly I trudged downstairs, apologised profusely and explained the state of the sheets. The good lady of the house replied, ‘Oh, don’t worry, love. Bet you thought you had a little ‘accident’, eh? That happens all the time.’

She peeked into the hallway. ‘Jim! We’ve got to stop leaving those chocolates out for the guests! It’s happened again!’

‘No love, don’t stop the chocolates,’ Jim called from the top of the stairs, ‘just don’t leave them on the bed!’

Jim saw me out. He said, ‘So you’re from Australia, eh? Big drought there’.

‘Yes, there is,’ I agreed. ‘It’s becoming quite a problem. The politicians don’t seem to know how to handle it. No one seems to.’

”Your government should be investigating the oceans,’ Jim said. ‘You know, desalination.’

Eureka! Maybe he’s right. I know there are environmental concerns with desalination, but maybe, just maybe, it’s preferable to this.

Jim had left me with a real poser, something I considered long and hard as I walked down Earlham Rd. to the train station. Then, as I passed the old Norwich castle, symbol of ancient military might, the rain came pouring down and there were newspaper sellers wearing cloth caps. I even saw an old timer pushing a barrow of what looked like fruit and vegetables. I thought of the old bloke reading the old-time Britain book on the train from Heathrow.

He would have liked it here.

Next stop: Cardiff (to be written up some time this week).

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