'why not leave it on the beach where it belongs?' (a sea-change)

'why not leave it on the beach where it belongs?...'

'the sea is like memory. however lost or forgotten, everything in it exists forever...'

- two quotations from a dialogue in prisoner of the coral deep by j.g. ballard from the short story collection the day of forever (panther science fiction 1967)

these two stories are early ballards. the simple tropes of surrealism are still present. 

in the title story of the collection,  the day of forever,  the earth has stopped rotating and the hero has moved to a deserted town on the border of between night and day, that dream/ dreamless state - ballard quotes the painters delvaux, chirico, ernst, the composer webern. 

the next story prisoner of the coral deep seems to echo something of this speech from the tempest. 

'full fathom five thy father lies; 

his bones are coral made;

those are pearls that were his eyes:

nothing of him that doth fade,

but doth suffer a sea-change

into something rich and strange...'

- william shakespeare, the tempest. 

the book itself (the day of forever) is a trade paperback (the text on its cover all lower case).  it is small and the text size is also annoyingly small (making reading it at night difficult). 

a young man's journey to viriconium

is the story that ends m.john harrison's viriconium cycle. we are in the seedy and run down present hunting for clues for a way to enter into viriconium. what might it be like to live in viriconium?

a comedy sketch suggests that old people should take a shoebox full of letters on the bus rather than cycle through old emails and texts on their phones. (perhaps they would in some ubik type world of technological regression). 

or maybe, it is suggested, we should all just look out of the window and daydream or be bored  or even just sit there and think (again). 

a coldish morning here.