Tuesday 23 January, 2007

Just like The Doors song (you know the one I mean)*

Last weeks Ms fits saw signs of the impending apocalypse. These included the fact that Kylie has been too ill to perform, power blackouts, and the breakup of Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake.

A few months ago, as I mentioned at the time, I saw Crazy Fish.

Then there's been Victoria's weather: heat, snow, flash floods and, of course, fire () and the destruction of more than a million hectares and possible extinction of many species of animals and plants. Smoke covering our city in gloom(). Then last night, as the pall finally lifted, was this:

I've just read The Road, and now am reading JG Ballard's The Drought, which was originally entitled The Burning World. It's a novel in which the rain has stopped thanks to a kind of surreal Gaia theory in which the oil and pollution in the sea has risen to the surface and sealed the sea off to protect it from further abuse. Thus no rain. And in this stricken, over-heated, drought ridden world, the fires begin. Articles have been written about how, give or take a fanciful flourish, this novel's vision is coming to pass.

'For the next three days the fires continued to burn in Mount Royal. Under a sky stained by an immense pall of black smoke, like a curtain drawn over the concluding act of the city, the long plumes rose high into the air, drifting away like the fragments of an enormous collapsing message.' (The Drought, Flamingo, 1965, p. 42)

*If you don't know the one I mean, you'll find the lyrics here.

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