‘Whose Street? Joyriders Versus Jaywalkers’ by Peter D Norton

What Giedion called “anonymous history” – the pathology of everyday technology – is a glimpse behind the curtain, a Burroughsian “naked lunch”, the moment you see exactly what’s on the end of your fork. A given is shown to be a complicated fiction, a plotted assemblage of dreams, nightmares and designs. There are few clearer examples than “Whose Street?”. Today, streets are for cars and pavements are for pedestrians and we are so accustomed to this arrangement that it is regarded as the natural order. When the car first appeared, streets were shared, and motor and foot traffic mingled. It was carnage, and a debate played out. Cars won, pedestrians lost. It could easily have gone the other way, and Norton shows why it didn’t.

In Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, MIT Press, 2008

The View from the Road by Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch and John R Myer

Car culture did have its possibilities and opportunities, though, but we didn’t exploit them to their fullest. The View from the Road is a remarkable prose poem, and also a study of the nature of storytelling, the way that narrative unfolds and develops and unifies. However, it is primarily – there’s no denying it – a thesis on highway design.

Appleyard, Lynch and Myer look at the way that the road is experienced by the motorist in terms of what makes it enjoyable and satisfying, as opposed to monotonous or jarring. They examine it as a drama, or a piece of music, with a view to teaching highway engineers how to consciously “write” that pleasure and satisfaction into their creations. Essentially they create a new narrative language for something we all experience – and, most remarkably of all, they propose a notation system for that language, as if a highway could be expressed like a piece of music.

(MIT Press, 1965)

‘Bureaucrats’ by Joan Didion

Staying in the car for a moment: the freeway experience, specifically the American freeway experience, and ultra-specifically the Los Angeles freeway experience, is often associated with three (non-American) Bs: Ballard, Baudrillard and Banham. Didion’s short take is one of the best, though, considering not only the “total surrender” and “narcosis” of Los Angeles freeway driving, but the difficulties in monitoring and regulating such a system. From inside the hushed, windowless Caltrans control room, she watches officials grappling with what should be a simple bureaucratic matter of infrastructure management, but are unable to comprehend its emotional dimension. The technology of the 20th century runs into the problem of the 21st.

Collected in The White Album, Simon & Schuster, 1979

‘Crisis’ by David E Nye

‘Bureaucrats’ was written in 1976 – ‘Crisis’ looks at 1977, and covers similar ground, as postwar certainties gave way to Ballardian postmodernity. Nye tells the story of the USA’s power grid by looking at its failures, chiefly the New York blackouts of 1965 and 1977. The former was a curiously festive affair – the latter, described in ‘Crisis’, was something like a test-run for the apocalypse. The same city, similar only 12 years apart. What had changed?

In When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America, MIT Press, 2010

‘Something Should Be Done?’ by JK Galbraith

I have read The Great Crash, 1929 at least six times – my copy of it is falling to pieces from the strain. It tells of how the 1929 Wall Street Crash unfolded, ushering in the Great Depression. But in order to tell that story, it has to explain how a great many very learned, important and rich men came to believe fairytales and fantasies that collapse was impossible. As such, it’s an absolutely riveting tale of human folly, with endless parallels and lessons. Chapter 3, “Something Should Be Done?” presents an unnerving moral conundrum. Even as doubts began to form in the minds of those with the power to do something to alter the course of the market, they did nothing, and we find out the various reasons why. Galbraith writes:

The real choice was between an immediate and deliberately engineered collapse and a more serious disaster later on. Someone would certainly be blamed for the ultimate collapse when it came. There was no question whatever as to who would be blamed should the boom be deliberately deflated.

Who would volunteer for that duty? No one wanted to cause the crash, so everyone let it happen.

In The Great Crash, 1929

‘Park’ by Keller Easterling

In the park’s sterile political zone, its own civilization may begin again from the beginning…

Easterling’s parks are not places of rest and recreation: they are the nodes and hubs of the modern economy, the container ports, distribution centres, warehouse complexes and economic special zones that form the infrastructure of the 21st century. Automated, exclusionary, politically and cultural invisible, the park is the world – the rest of us live in the hinterland. This is visionary stuff, not least when it invites us to view the park not as a flow of goods but of data: the network economy made flesh.

In Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades, MIT Press, 2005

‘Straight, Gay, or Binary?’ by Mark Dery

In the Orr interview, Ballard said that the future would be “sex times technology”. Mark Dery is one of the most consistently fascinating writers ploughing (excuse me) that Ballardian furrow today, and it’s a great shame he is not more widely celebrated. A number of his essays looking at the libidinal aspects of modern technology and culture could have been included here, not least ‘Slashing the Borg’, which looks at the people who find Star Trek’s hiveminded cyborgs sexy. But ‘Straight, Gay, or Binary?’ stands out as a queer history of computing embedded in the answer of an outwardly trivial question: is HAL 9000 gay?

In I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, Minneapolis University Press, 2012

‘The Lives of a Block: The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and the Empire State Building’ by Rem Koolhaas

Koolhaas again. No regrets. Delirious New York is a book that almost all architects have on their shelves but few outside architecture have heard of, let alone read. That’s a shame. It’s an exercise in backplotting the “accidental genius” of the greatest American city. If you wanted to end up with New York, what rules would you apply, what conditions would you create? But its section vary widely, and in Lives of a Block, Koolhaas unpacks the meaning of hotels. “A Hotel,” he writes, “is a plot” – not a plot in the sense of a site, or a block, but a narrative, a human drama, “a cybernetic universe with its own laws generating random but fortuitous collisions between human beings who would never have met elsewhere.”

In Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, 1994, Monacelli

‘Underground Aesthetics: From Sublimity to Fantasy’ by Rosalind Williams

Notes on the Underground is one of those books you find yourself referencing and recommending everywhere – in the span of a month last year, I found myself quoting from it in two separate essays on wildly different topics. ‘Underground Aesthetics’ shows how the subterranean went from being a place of ugliness and terror to being an place of “magical beauty” and an object of romantic delight, by way of a fascinating discussion of sublimity and the gothic. It is an astonishing piece of imaginative prose, completely enchanting, in a book that deserves to be read by everyone. 

In Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination, MIT Press, 2008

‘The Garden Party’ by Katherine Mansfield

For most of high school, I hated short stories. It might have been the kind of stories we were taught—at an all-boys school, a certain kind of masculine New Zealand short story was favoured—but in class we always approached the form as a kind of puzzle, an allegory where, if you worked out the right symbolism, the story would spit out the ‘correct’ answer. Then, in my final year, I had a brilliant teacher who gave us the stories of Katherine Mansfield. Reading ‘The Garden Party’ for the first time, I realised stories could be like poetry—emotionally and syntactically complex—and at the same time, do all the storytelling work of a novel… just in a smaller, denser, more powerful package.

Mansfield remains a touchstone for me, both as an Aotearoa New Zealand writer whose professional life was centred in the UK, and as an example of the way the best stories gesture outwards, refusing a simple, allegorical answer.

First published in Saturday Westminster Gazette, February 1922. Collected in, amongst others, The Collected Stories, Penguin 2007. Read it online here)

‘Letter to a Young Lady in Paris’ by Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn

It wasn’t until university that I would find confirmation of my “short story as poetry” theory, in the transcript of a talk given by Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar published as ‘Some Aspects of the Short Story’. Here, Cortázar describes the short story as a “snail of language, a mysterious brother to poetry in another dimension of literary time.” More persuasive than Cortázar’s theories on this front, though, are his stories themselves. Shadowy figures take over a family house, a tiger stalks a countryside villa, a man slowly metamorphoses into an axolotl: these were not the realist fictions of the nineteenth-century, not even the poetic intensity of Mansfield—these stories were transporting, fantastic, and true.

‘Letter to a Young Woman in Paris’ shows both of Cortázar’s major strengths to their best advantage. The conceit of the story balances the surreal with the convincing in a way few other writers can manage. And the narrative itself is perfectly paced, with voice and structure pulling you towards the precipice you both crave and hope never to reach.

Included in Blow-Up and Other Stories, Pantheon 1967. For another translation online, see here

‘Candy Glass’ by May-Lan Tan

‘Candy Glass’ stands out amongst the dazzling stories in May-Lan Tan’s Things to Make and Break for two reasons. One is formal: unlike the other stories in the collection, which look fairly standard, ‘Candy Glass’ is presented as a script (it’s fitting—the story follows the relationship between an aging actress and a younger stunt double).

The other is stylistic. Tan handles long stretches of time superbly. Her dialogue is at its sharpest and most knife-edge in this piece. And I suspect that, if you were to re-edit this as a conventional story, the language would still stand out as almost filmic, it is so beautifully, immersively visual

In Things to Make and Break, CB Editions, 2014. Now also published by Sceptre

‘Pages from Cold Point’ by Paul Bowles

Before I read any of Paul Bowles’ stories, I had the vague impression his works were like dark, more adult versions of a Tintin story, replete with white travellers in exotic lands who meet sticky ends. Certainly this is how his contemporaries viewed him in the 1950s: as an adventure writer first and foremost.

And if you wanted to read this kind of ‘Paul Bowles,’ there are plenty of stories you could choose. But Bowles’ best works are psychologically and emotionally rich: claustrophobic and twisted, with protagonists pushed to the brink, on the verge of collapse. Like Cortázar’s story, ‘Pages from Cold Point’ uses an epistolary form—here the diary, rather than a letter—to slowly ratchet up the narrative tension. And though, like many great short stories, this hinges on a turning point, where the reader only belatedly sees they have misunderstood the relationship at the heart of this story, the revelation is not a gimmick, but the dark truth essential to Bowles’ vision of the world.

Collected in The Delicate Prey, Random House 1950; Ecco Press 1972. Note: this story was omitted from the first British edition of Bowles’s stories, on advice from Somerset Maugham that it might lead to censorship or prosecution

‘Camp Cataract’ by Jane Bowles

I am constantly surprised that Jane Bowles’s fiction is less well-known (and less regarded) than her husband, Paul’s (though, like many readers, I came to her by way of Paul). This is in part a matter of scale: Jane’s published stories number less than ten to Paul’s excess of one hundred (though the collection Everything is Nice brings together fragments, sketches, and an excised section of her novel, Two Serious Ladies, that works brilliantly as a self-contained narrative). But where Paul is inconsistent, each of Jane’s stories is a perfectly formed strangeness, a queered, compelling insight into small, daily actions that give way to yawning depths.

Her descriptions of the waterfall in ‘Camp Cataract’ showcase her ability to summon the sublime not through poetic description but brief, alienating observations. And though the characters in this story might superficially resemble the outsider-protagonists of Carson McCullers’ stories, I am inclined to agree with Bowles’ assessment: that McCullers’ “freaks aren’t real”—at least, they aren’t as real as Jane’s isolated, unconventional women.

Collected in Plain Pleasures, Peter Owen 1966, and republished in Everything is Nice, Sort of Books 2012