J G Ballard at Club Med

J G Ballard at Club Med

[I wrote about the novelist J G Ballard in April 2016. He was a writer preoccupied with what he saw as the frailties of the structures holding modern civilisations together, and the chaos and savagery that have the potential to emerge if those structures bend or collapse. He also detected in human nature a disturbing tendency to be drawn towards such anarchy. His fictions explore these themes in imagined closed, or closely-linked, communities that “go wrong” in horrible ways. Much though I enjoyed my stay in a Club Med resort, it immediately struck me as fertile ground for the Ballardian imagination…]

LORCA - CASA NATAL

Federico Garcia Lorca – Casa Natal

The life of Federico Garcia Lorca began only a short distance from where it ended. He was born just to the west of Granada and was killed and buried somewhere just to to the northeast of that city.

There was an ironic reason why he found himself, fatally, in the midst of one of the few successful Francoist uprisings in Andalucía in the summer of 1936. He returned to Granada from what he thought was the insecurity of Madrid on the verge of civil war, also to celebrate his and his father's name day. In Granada, he wrongly supposed, he would be safe among “his people”.