EXPERIENCED NANNIES WANTEDExperienced nannies wanted for care of 13 children ages 8-17 in the safe, comfortable, and perfectly controlled upper class environment of the exclusive Pangbourne Village.✰Position Description:The nanny is a specialist working in the family's home, responsible for all tasks related to care of the children. The nanny will serve as a loving, nurturing, and trustworthy companion to the children. The nanny will carefully maintain at all times the liberal attitude enforced by the parents and society of Pangbourne Village. The nanny will avoid being shot, stabbed, electrocuted, and/or run over by the children. The nanny will avoid surprise strangulation by Vietnamese bamboo traps set by the children. The nanny will shower the children with hugs, kisses, and positive affirmation on an ongoing, continual basis. ✰Major Responsibilities: *Create a stimulating, nurturing environment for the children; *Supervise and monitor the children's activities at all times and provide a minute-by-minute accounting of all activities throughout the day and evening including in the bathroom; *Prepare meals and bottles for, and feed, the children (regardless of age); *Dress the children (regardless of age); *Place the children down for naps and bedtime (regardless of age); *Bathe the children (regardless of age); *Change diapers (regardless of age); *Discipline the children, when necessary, with a preferred disciplinary regimen that includes naps, hugs, friendly pats on the head delivered with a half-smile that combines subliminal admonishment with the understanding that the child is otherwise practically perfect in every single way, followed by handfuls of spending money to allow the child to maintain a positive self-image after the disciplinary regimen; *Regularly remove bite marks left by children on wall corners, bannisters, headboards, and closet interiors; and *Perform additional positive reinforcement activities as needed.✰Job Qualifications and Requirements: *High school graduate required; PhD preferred. *Experience caring for children. *Experience treating teenagers like children. *English proficiency. *Comfort with status level of service position; lack of interest in upward social mobility. *Car, driver's license, auto insurance, and safe driving history. *Reliable, honest, and trustworthy. *Ability to keep children from, as they say, "running wild." *Ability to run very, very fast. *Ability to plan, organize, and multitask. *Ability to counter any plans and tasks organized by the children that could potentially lead to the violent massacre of all adults within Pangbourne Village. Safety first!✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰Pangbourne Village is a subsidiary of Ballard Microcosms Unlimited, Ltd™. Our model of absolute positive reinforcement at all times is delivered in the classic Ballard style, using the traditional Ballardian techniques of cool appraisal, ironic distance, postmodern pastiche, sardonic detachment, and small moments of gleefully vindictive humor at the expense of the affluent upper class and various soul-deadening institutions. Pangbourne Village... Where Nature Is Unnatural! Pangbourne Village... Where Nurture Rules And Nature Drools!Pangbourne Village... Where Teh Children Come First!As the saying goes: 'It Takes a Village'... Pangbourne Village!
Μια εντύπωση που με κατέλαβε λίγες στιγμές αφότου έκλεισα το βιβλίο είναι πως επρόκειτο για ένα μικρό ανάγνωσμα, μια καλή ιδέα, που χρόνια πια μετά την κυκλοφορία της δεν είναι δα και τόσο συνταρακτική - οι δυστοπίες, η αναταραχή εντός του σύγχρονου ανθρώπου, έχουν πολλάκις απασχολήσει τη λογοτεχνία. Κοντολογίς, συμπαθητικό. Ωστόσο, όταν καταλαγιάσει ο αναγνωστικός κουρνιαχτός μπαίνουν σε τάξη οι λέξεις, αυτό το λεκτικό στρίμωγμα ξεδιπλώνεται, αποκαλύπτοντας την αρχιτεκτονική της ιστορίας. Καλό είναι να παίρνεις το χρόνο σου, για να χωνέψεις ό,τι κατανάλωσες.Στα χέρια μας κρατάμε την καταγραφή των γεγονότων ενός αναλυτή της αστυνομίας, έτσι όπως ο ίδιος έζησε το μυστήριο. Η ανάλυσή του ξεδιπλώνεται μέσα από τις καταγραφές, τις έρευνες και από έναν Χολμικό διάλογο με τον όχι και τόσο συνεργάσιμο αρχικά συνάδελφό του. Το ενδιαφέρον κορυφώνεται στο κίνητρο του εγκλήματος, το οποίο προσδίδει τον κοινωνικό και προφητικό χαρακτήρα στο βιβλίο. Η κλιμάκωση φέρνει στο νου τις μεθόδους που πολλοί αναγνώστες θα έχουν συναντήσει στον Λαβκραφτ. Εδώ, όμως, η φινέτσα στην γραφή είναι καθοριστική, οι διάλογοι είναι έξυπνα τοποθετημένοι, το σκηνικό ανασυντίθεται μέσα από τις έρευνες με έναν ρυθμό ανατρεπτικό, εθιστικό.Εγώ παίρνω μαζί μου την εκπληκτική δεξιοτεχνία με την οποία ο αφηγητής ενσωματώνει την παραδοχή των κλειστών φρουρούμενων κοινοτήτων και καταλήγει σε μια δυσοίωνη αλλά και τόσο επίκαιρη κατάληξη. Η γραφή δε, μετρημένη, αποτελεί πρότυπο "show, don't tell". Τέλος, εξαιρετικός ο Μπάλαρντ. Θα αναζητήσω και άλλα του βιβλία.
What do You think about Running Wild (1999)?
This one felt like Ballard's heart wasn't in it. His fascination with upper class housing being a trap from which rich people can only escape through violence is an interesting one, but here the tone of the story changes too often and Ballard gives the details in such a flat way there's no way to invest in the story. I love the idea of children revolting at the idea of overly precious parents, but there's probably a better way to tell it than this. I'm still waiting for a book to match "High Rise." I guess I'll just work through Ballard's catalog until I find it...
—Jennifer
3.5 stars? This one is rather difficult to rate. Considered as a novel, it is somewhat under-realized; considered as a novella or even short story, its impact is greatly enhanced. The premise is compelling and, as is typical of Ballard, prescient: who else was writing so incisively (in 1988!) about the "despotism of kindness," about helicopter-parenting, cultures of surveillance, and technologies of networked fantasy? Michael Haneke's "White Ribbon" implicitly locates the germ of Nazism within the very coordinates of Protestant "decency"; in his film, a generation of monsters is born from a culture of extreme self-righteousness, austerity, and morbid authoritarianism. The moral blankness of Haneke's children, who in league commit a series of escalating horrors, mirrors the moral blankness of Ballard's, except that theirs is the product of a smothering attention, benignity, and mandatory happiness. The strap and the gold star are by this comparison revealed as two sides of the same coin. In this revelation the novel is extraordinary, whatever its formal deficiencies...
—Keith
At the heart of this book is a compelling insight into the consequences of living a false life, eliminating any element of human experience that might be messy, unpredictable, inconvenient -- any element that doesn't conform to superficially defined "perfection." The crime that carries the plot is interesting, but the real horror in this novella is what happens to young, developing humans who are cut off from reality -- who live in a state of "sensory deprivation." Ballard describes these young people as profoundly desensitized, and what follows from that is a sort of psychosis that's believable and quite chilling. Since this is a book of psychological mutilation, it's appropriate that the narrator is a psychiatrist.Ballard could have developed his bare-bones plot and characters more fully -- as they are, they're clearly just variables in an equation that's worked out step by step -- and possibly increased the horror of the narrator's insight. But his characteristic spare style avoids the pitfall of the mundane (unlike most "horror novels"), or rather makes the mundane horrific in completely unexpected ways, and prompts the reader to mull over the unspoken implications of the (possibly not entirely reliable) narrator's views long after finishing the book. Most importantly, anyone, anywhere, can fall into the trap of a false life and the psychic damage that comes with it. (Ballard's narrator lists members of the Manson gang, Mark Chapman, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the guards at Nazi death camps as examples, but they're the extremes -- the same dynamic can operate much more subtly, the people affected by it blending easily into mainstream society.)The luxury housing estate in Running Wild, and the events that take place there, are satiric examples that clearly set forth a paradox -- people living perfect lives, constantly surrounded by "love," are denied their humanity and become monsters. Understandably so. In every social class, in war-torn countries and peaceful ones, versions of this pathology -- the denial of humanity -- are happening all around us every day, perhaps in our own lives.A few plotholes detract from the inexorable logic of the story, but they're trivial compared to the suggestive psychological insights that haunt the narrator, and will, with luck, haunt the reader as well.
—Gray
