“My Mind’s An Ocean In Mona Lisa’s Hand
She Dreams A Hiding World Where The Water Runs Red
Tonight My Dreams Are Borne On Mona Lisa’s Breast
We’ll Walk A Burning World Where The Sun Shines Darkness”
This post must begin with an expression of regret for not delivering for you, dear reader. My intention was to post this morning with a new addition of Saturday Morning Time Machine. Sadly, I was unable to finish the story in the time that I had. Lately I have been wondering if perhaps that series of posts that I wanted to introduce wasn’t a bit too ambitious in concept. I love to write, but writing of any quality is time-consuming, and coming up with original stories – even short ones of Saturday morning cartoon caliber – isn’t something I’m going to rush through. I tend to be a fairly careful writer (despite my typos), and wanting to rehash an idea multiple ways, I got too drawn in to my own work and was unable to meet the deadline. Well, I still hope to deliver the finished product for next weekend, but honestly, I will have to evaluate this, as the dreaded 4th quarter – always the busiest time of year in my industry – is now upon us, and my workload is ramping up steadily.
And I’ll admit that Friday night I was occupied with something other than finishing my post: namely, the acquisition of an important new piece of hardware that I hope will improve future material for this blog. After work that evening, I met with Jason and we picked up our new iPhone 17‘s. You may recall this post from August 18, when, after over a week of absence, I revealed the cause: the stress of trying to recover from a self-induced “technology failure” that resulted in a scramble to save some important data. That incident ended in my buying an “interim phone,” a base-model iPhone 16 which I didn’t want and didn’t like and never intended to keep. Fortunately, I was able to bully my cellular carrier into offering me over 80% of what I paid for it as a trade-in, and yesterday I picked up the phone that I really wanted: the 17 Pro in “Cosmic Orange.”
The fiery color of this phone, unlike any I’ve owned, puts me in the mind of the opposite of the subject of that August post: from water to fire, in a revisitation of the early science fiction work of J.G. Ballard, whose third novel – the one following The Drowned World in 1962 – was The Burning World. Originally published in 1964 in a series of articles in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, a literary periodical of the type that are tragically no longer in existence, it was expanded and rewritten and published in book form in 1965 as “The Drought.”
I recall this book coming to my attention in my youth due primarily to the striking cover art of an early ‘70s paperback edition. It’s hard to miss the detail once you see it: the ’59 Cadillac tailfins jutting up out of the dust. At first glance they seem like pulp garnish, a way to sell a paperback with a splash of chrome Americana. But it’s much more deliberate than that. The 1959 Cadillac Eldorado was the apex of Detroit excess, an automotive cathedral of chrome and absurdity. By the mid-sixties, those same fins had already curdled into kitsch, relics of a culture that had overreached itself.
Ballard understood this better than most. For him – as well as for your humble blogger! – the automobile was never just a machine — it was a fetish object, a symbol of violence, eroticism, entropy. His 1973 novel Crash would make that obsession infamous, but the imagery was already alive in his earlier disaster novels. On the cover of The Drought, the Cadillac’s fins aren’t parked at a drive-in under neon lights — they’re stranded in a wasteland, half-buried in sand. What was once a dream of endless highways and consumer progress becomes a fossil, the dream-iron of America poking through the desert crust of a dying planet.
That’s the Ballardian punchline: the desert of the future, littered with relics of our chrome-and-neon past; A landscape where even our most flamboyant fantasies are reduced to debris. The Cadillac tailfins gleam like bones in the sun, less a promise than a warning — this is where progress goes when the world itself burns.
Grim stuff, eh? You know I try as best I can to avoid political subjects on this blog, treading into them only when I feel they bare directly on the hobbies this blog is about. Due to the tinderbox all around us in light of recent events, I have no intention of violating that demarcation now, commenting only on the appropriateness of the fire metaphor that the orange case of this phone puts me in the mind of, and of the wallpaper I chose for it, after a seamless migration from the previous phone. It’s nice when you actually plan to change your phone and the data transfer goes smooth smoothly!
To top it off, those lines – “The Drowning World,” “The Burning World,” are not here in deference to any kind of modern-day climate alarmism, but rather are a homage to the album I mentioned in the previous companion post: the “forgotten” 1989 Swans LP whose best track (IMHO), “Mona Lisa Mother Earth,” contains both phrases in its versus. It is my favorite song on a superb album, one that is tragically underrated… just like literary magazines, thought-provoking science fiction, and so many other things that we seem to have lost. I’m pleased to say that after months of deliberation, I finally decided to pay the significant price to obtain a first US printing of this record on vinyl, bearing the original bright blue and black UNI label and complete with the original inner sleeve with lyrics and a promotional sticker on the front. It wasn’t cheap, but it was well past time for me to add this artifact to my collection. Once upon a time, it was almost impossible to find, but with today’s modern technology, it’s the touch of a button away.
So no, this is not the Saturday post that I wanted to deliver, and for that I apologize. But at least you know that I am working on some new things as well as some old things, and acquiring equipment that I hope will make future posts more interesting: after all, the reason I wanted the iPhone 17 Pro is for the camera, and while I have only just begun to explore its capabilities, it already looks like it’s going to be amazing! I’m going to try to make it up to you tomorrow with a new Drag City Noir post I hope you’ll enjoy! In the meantime, check back with me during the week if you can, but don’t miss next Saturday, which is a make or break date for Saturday Morning Time Machine!
