Re: RARA-AVIS: Re:Motel noir...

From: Sean Shapiro (ssshapir@yahoo.com)
Date: 15 Jul 2009

  • Next message: Steve Novak: "Re: RARA-AVIS: Re:Motel noir..."

    Maybe it's noir, maybe it's not. What about JG Ballard's short story 'Motel Architecture', described by Jason Cowley in The Observer:
     
    "In 'Motel Architecture' a man called Pangborn retreats from the world, spending his days alone in a solarium, amusing himself by endlessly replaying the shower sequence from Psycho on a bank of television screens (this story was written in 1978, before the age of video and digitised surveillance cameras). One day, he discovers there is an intruder in the solarium, eating his food and sharing his private space. Sometimes he catches glimpses of the intruder, his spectral presence and shifting shadows. Then a cleaning woman is found murdered in the solarium, lying in the 'familiar postures he had analysed in a thousand blow-ups'. Pangborn is terrified until, in a moment of blazing self-revelation, he realises he has always been alone in the solarium, that he is his own intruder, a stranger to himself and perhaps now a murderer, too."
      Sean Shapiro

          

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