Cocaine Nights

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With Cocaine Nights J.G. Ballard seems to be telling us that the water is tainted but drinkable nonetheless. This book is a must read for anyone who has been affected by cocaine addiction. The founder of Cocaine Anonymous, Furic Henry provides readers with the original 12 steps that helped him get clean after years and years worth footage without success until he found sobriety through this program! Cocaine 101: A Short Guide to the Drug That Has Your Life in Its Grip is written by Dr. James L. Pease. The book helps explain cocaine to readers. It offers advice on how to overcome cocaine addiction, and how to stay away from it in the future. This book can help people understand cocaine addiction, and how to overcome it. Charles Prentice arrives at Estrella de Mar to rescue his brother Frank, who has been wrongfully imprisoned for the starting a house fire that killed several people in the resort. Except when he arrives he is confused to discover that while almost everybody claims to believe Frank couldn't have committed the crime, his brother has already confessed to the police; and when Charles presses him to explain himself refuses to allow him to visit any more. Charles decides to launch his own investigation and is drawn into the community of Estrella de Mar – its residents, its clubs and committees, and its surprising underbelly of exciting crime. Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

urn:lcp:cocainenights00ball:epub:046cb292-a4bb-4be6-b330-f4579012c87b Extramarc University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (PZ) Foldoutcount 0 Identifier cocainenights00ball Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t58d0pk6k Isbn 188717866X When I was a young writer in the 1980s, I read Ballard's luminous, erotic story collection The Day of Forever. It was so formally inventive that I would not have guessed it had been published in 1967. Nor did I know that the baffled conservative literary establishment of his generation had tried to see off his early work as science fiction. Ballard always insisted he was more interested in inner space than outer space. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis. All these years later, I still marvel at the eerie poetry of Ballard's prose. It lingers like a strange perfume over his concise, matter-of-fact sentences, more heightened in the earlier novels and short stories, but the bottom notes (petrol, anguish, desire, nightmares) are still present in the first three lines of his final and most didactic novel, Kingdom Come: "The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world …"

Cocaine nights is, in some senses, a precursor to Super-Cannes. Like Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes is set on the coasts of continental Europe and, also like Cocaine Nights, it features British expats living in an enclosed community. However, it is in this second novel where Ballard’s exploration of inner space, violence, and community reaches its peak. Startlingly plain reflections on the classic Ballardian tropes – birds, low-flying aircraft, pool after empty swimming pool – pepper the text. "I … felt that the ruined casino, like the city and the world beyond it, was more real and more meaningful than it had been when it was thronged.""I would see something strange and mysterious but treat it as normal.""The vast lazy planes that floated overhead were emissaries from another world." In the therapeutic reflection not a single person could begrudge him, might Ballard be banalising his own work? Might the cost of this, for the reader, outweigh the benefit?

So I stopped enjoying it. He lays the groundwork for his plot very thoroughly. He is like an advertising man. He is very persuasive and very plausible. But his words are a veneer laid over a corrupt underbelly that failed to convince. The twist at the end also didn't ring true. I’d find it hard to get aerated about people who’d smoke dope with their kids. I’d wonder who on earth would want their children to see their coked-up personality. I can see Kureishi’s point that MDMA is like a truth serum, so certainly best to avoid if you wouldn’t take one of those en famille. Boomers and generation X don’t really understand ketamine, so that would have to be the kids’ idea. I know drug technology has moved on a lot, but I still cannot in a million years imagine taking LSD with your treasured offspring, not least because it would result in intense anxiety about what you’d just done to their psychic ecosystem. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours? The perfect book, I suppose, has three things going for it: (1) great, realistic characters, who are transformed in believable, often desirable ways, (2) an interesting and perhaps unpredictable plot that holds our attention, not to mention holds water in whatever stream of reality the story finds itself, and (3) eloquent writing. It's Kafkaesque, only, instead of waking up as an insect, Charles wakes up as his brother in a community that manages itself on the basis of perversely incomprehensible rituals and conventions that recall "The Trial".

Cocaine Nights is the very definition of Ballardian fiction in which crime, sex and drugs are all amalgamated together in a frenzy of psychological experimentation. Other themes are also present, which have emerged in other works by J G Ballard such as the idea of incest and the links between the human psyche and criminal behaviour. Cocaine Nights is extremely similar to another of his works, Super Cannes, which follows a similar model of a man investigation a crime that has taken place at an exclusive resort. Though Cocaine Nights was written first and was very enjoyable, I much preferred both the idea of Super Cannes as well as the denouement of the novel. I fear that my enjoyment of Cocaine Nights has been stifled due to the fact that I loved Super Cannes so much and would go as far to say it was my favourite Ballard novel. And then what? asks Ballard. What happens when the boredom sets in? What do you do when the good life starts to look like a living death? I think the failure is in subject matter, making a creepy, alienated feeling into a book length murder mystery. I could have done without a lot of the exposition. I just want to read enjoyable prose, or find some kind of recognition in what I'm reading - even a Kafkaesque sort of recognised alienation.

The faint scent of bath gel still clung to my skin, the perfume of my own strangulation that embraced me like a forbidden memory. Seventeen novella-like chapters fictionalise the key phases of Ballard's life from 1937 to 1987, starting with his childhood in Shanghai where the rich, perpetually tipsy westerners play tennis, go shopping and sidestep the growing mound of refugee bodies felled by hunger, typhus and bombs. "To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme." Those last 15 words serve as a manifesto for all of Ballard's novels. Rampant drug binges and public murders are on the cards in this 90s amateur detective novel. And with the usual Ballardian pose, there’s more than meets the eye with these quirky Marbella residents. In his second novel JG Ballard drowned the Earth, in his third he burned it, and in his fourth he turned it to crystal. Between 1962 and 1966 he ruined the world three times – though he later made it clear that these works were not to be understood as "disaster stories", but as "transformation stories". "The geophysical changes that take place" in them, he said in 1975, "are all positive and good". The book is perfect for anyone interested in the history of cocaine use, addiction, and law enforcement. “The Fix” is an essential read for understanding the origins of the War on Drugs and its impact on American society. 5) The Cocaine-Free LifeCharles arrives in Marbella following his brother’s trial, who’s pleaded guilty to burning down a house containing five people – killing them all in the process. Charles isn’t convinced by his brother’s plea and sets out to play amateur detective in the case. The story bears very little resemblance to the human trajectory in Miracles of Life, but the calm candid tone, the matter-of-fact surprise at the quotidian in Miracles of Life, is the same as B's sedate astonishment at the empty city. The city in the emptiness of which, at last, contentedly, B could begin his work. The Cocaine-Free Life is a book that offers hope and guidance to those struggling with cocaine addiction. The author, who was addicted to cocaine for 30 years, shares his story of recovery and provides advice on how to overcome cocaine addiction. The book was written with the intention to help others who are facing similar challenges. Crawford. I hated him. I really did. From the very beginning. Too confident, too much of a smart mouth.. And how everyone seemed to give him the prize for Saviour of the Year! Oooh, how cute.. not. Well, it's hard to find a comparable author. Maybe a crime writer like Raymond Chandler? Maybe after The Drowned World, I'll have a better grasp of what I'm dealing with.