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Elizabeth Taylor and JG Ballard

Simon Sellars has collated some Ballard Taylor quotes http://www.ballardian.com/rip-elizabeth-taylor-a-ballardian-primer some of the quotes + comments below "As Catherine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office." - Ballard (elizabeth taylor as media spinal nerve - her absence is not so much an option of mourning the foreign as it is an evisceration of posthuman dependance - the eniwetok Marshall Island h-bomb site (technical tragedy) is paired with the Paris fun fair luna park (technical banality) - likewise freud (representational tragedy) is paired with taylor (representational banality) - the saturated technical stimuli where technique and representation collapse together, as do the tragic and banal) media death is no death at all - it is in fact a kind of catastrophist (re-evoking the pre-Darwinian evolu

Batracho and Naturalism

As part of this critical evaluation Goethe wrote a short epistolary novel in 1798 entitled Der Sammler und die Seinigen (The Collector and His Circle). The letters characterize different responses to art and contain a criticism of amateur art, especially the mixing of media, the tendency to naturalism, and subjectivism. There are defining characteristics of literary naturalism. One of these is pessimism. Very often, one or more characters will continue to repeat one line or phrase that tends to have a pessimistic connotation, sometimes emphasizing the inevitability of death. For example Bernard Bonnejean quotes this passage of Huysmans where the symbolism of death is visible, such an allegory, in a portrait of old woman: [...] une vieille bique de cinquante ans, une longue efflanquée qui bêlait à la lune, campée sur ses maigres tibias [...] crevant les draps de ses os en pointe[2 Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia, 1835 satirical sequel by Giacomo Leopardi to Homer's Batrachomyoma