Flying icebergs, space elevators, and alien archaeology all appear in a new collection from “New Weird” master China Miéville. Review by Paul Di Filippo.
![The Atrocity Exhibition](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
The Atrocity Exhibition
136![The Atrocity Exhibition](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
The Atrocity Exhibition
136Paperback(Second Edition)
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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781889307039 |
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Publisher: | RE/Search Publications |
Publication date: | 06/01/1990 |
Edition description: | Second Edition |
Pages: | 136 |
Sales rank: | 343,842 |
Product dimensions: | 8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
“As Princess Margaret reached middle age, the skin of both her cheeks and neck tended to sag from failure of the supporting structures. Her naso-labial folds deepened, and the soft tissues along her jaw fell forward. Her jowls tended to increase. In profile the creases of her neck lengthened and the chin-neck contour lost its youthful outline and became convex.
“The eminent plastic surgeon Richard Battle has remarked that one of the great misfortunes of the cosmetic surgeon is that he only has the technical skill, ability and understanding to correct this situation by surgical means. However, as long as people are prepared to pay fees for this treatment the necessary operation will be performed. Incisions made across the neck with the object of removing redundant tissue should be avoided. These scars tend to be unduly prominent and may prove to be the subject of litigation. In the case of Princess Margaret the incision was designed to be almost completely obscured by her hair and ears.”
Table of Contents
- Chapter 1: The Atrocity Exhibition
- Chapter 2: The University of Death
- Chapter 3: The Assassination Weapon
- Chapter 4: You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe
- Chapter 5: Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown
- Chapter 6: The Great American Nude
- Chapter 7: The Summer Cannibals
- Chapter 8: Tolerances of the Human Face
- Chapter 9: You and Me and the Continuum
- Chapter 10: Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy
- Chapter 11: Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.
- Chapter 12: Crash!
- Chapter 13: The Generations of America
- Chapter 14: Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan
- Chapter 15: The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Ra
- Appendix:
- Princess Margaret’s Facelift
- Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty
- Queen Elizabeth’s Rhinoplasty
- The Secret History of World War 3
Preface
In this edition, the deconstruction of the narrative form is taken one step further by the inclusion of recently-written annotations. This amplification of text by the author himself, twenty years later, provides valuable (and poignant) clarification of important figures, events, places and other references which may have faded into undeserved oblivion. The interplay between the “real” author’s first-person annotations and the text provides a curious displacement of subject/object, reality and fiction.
Yet another level of “reality” is challenged by Phoebe Gloeckner’s precisely-drawn illustrations. Their realism dismantles “pornography” like Ballard’s text: as a series of fragmentary, alienated, passionless responses to a set of stimuli. A penis inside a mouth takes on the detached distancing of a medical lecture, its eroticism excised—just as an atrocity on the news is neutralized by the commercial that follows, resulting in deadened emotional response. Implied here is a critique of science as ultimate pornography, capable of reducing the ineffable—unique personal relationships, the source of our greatest delight—to objectified, purely functional commodifications.
As Ballard observes, “I think we’re all perhaps innately perverse, capable of enormous cruelty, yet paradoxically our talent for the perverse, the violent, and the obscene may be a good thing. We may have to go through this phase to reach something on the other side. It’s a mistake to hold back and refuse to accept one’s nature. In The Atrocity Exhibition, the fantasies of our epoch and of its technology lie ruthlessly exposed to light, evoking all the lyrical disenchantment of their failed promise.—V. Vale