Outpost 13: The Atrocity Exhibition from Ballardian on Vimeo.

Eurydice in a Used Car Lot. Margaret Travis paused in the empty foyer of the cinema, looking at the photographs in the display frames. In the dim light beyond the curtains she saw the dark-suited figure of Captain Webster, the muffled velvet veiling his handsome eyes. The last few weeks had been a nightmare – Webster with his long-range camera and obscene questions. He seemed to take a certain sardonic pleasure in compiling this one-man Kinsey Report on her . . . positions, planes, where and when Travis placed his hands on her body – why didn’t he ask Catherine Austin? As for wanting to magnify the photographs and paste them up on enormous billboards, ostensibly to save her from Travis . . . She glanced at the stills in the display frames, of this elegant and poetic film in which Cocteau had brought together all the myths of his own journey of return. On an impulse, to annoy Webster, she stepped through the side exit and walked past a small yard of cars with numbered windshields. Perhaps she would make her descent here. Eurydice in a used car lot?

The Concentration City. In the night air they passed the shells of concrete towers, blockhouses half buried in rubble, giant conduits filled with tyres, overhead causeways crossing broken roads. Travis followed the bomber pilot and the young woman along the faded gravel. They walked across the foundation of a guard-house into the weapons range. The concrete aisles stretched into the darkness across the airfield. In the suburbs of Hell Travis walked in the flaring light of the petrochemical plants. The ruins of abandoned cinemas stood at the street corners, faded billboards facing them across the empty streets. In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac. He wandered through the deserted suburbs. The crashed bombers lay under the trees, grass growing through their wings. The bomber pilot helped the young woman into one of the cockpits. Travis began to mark out a circle on the concrete target area.

J.G. Ballard, Chapter One: ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, The Atrocity Exhibition.

Presenting ‘Outpost 13: The Atrocity Exhibition’, a video directed by Mark C and produced by Outpost 13: Stuart Argabright, Mark C and Kent Heine. The full 35-minute film is based on J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, and is part of a performance piece that debuted in Porto, Portugal at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, with o13 performing the soundtrack live.

The excerpt here features narration from Ballard’s text by David Silver with Jen Jaffe and Esther Ahn, and images by Robert Longo, Adrienne Altenhaus and others. o13 have also completed a 10-minute video, soundtrack and narration for ‘Time, Memory And Inner Space’, Ballard’s 1967 essay, with narration by Judy Nylon, once of the group Snatch and a former collaborator of Brian Eno’s, plus a CG video by Austrian artist Patrick Quick.

Recently, 013 have been performing The Atrocity Exhibition and ‘Time, Memory And Inner Space’ in New York with a live soundtrack and sound design.

Outpost 13:
Mark C: guitar, synthesizers, vocals
Stuart Argabright: synthesizers, laptop, vocals
Kent Heine: bass

Modelling and photography by Nicholas Cobb.

This was the first office building to be constructed at the business park, but after a bombastic overture the architecture that followed was late modernist in the most minimal and self-effacing way, a machine above all for thinking in.

J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Recently, London’s Royal Academy of Arts hosted the symposium Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space:

Acclaimed writer JG Ballard derived inspiration from aspects of the built environment that architectural convention and critics tend to overlook. His novels offer many insights into the flaws and consequences of the shopping centres, car parks, hotels, office towers and housing projects that make up so much of contemporary architectural endeavour. This forum traces several themes in Ballard’s literary analysis of the contemporary built environment, including the concept of spectacle and role of the media in contemporary society, and how “invisible literatures” such as scientific journals, technical manuals, pornography, advertising copy can be seen as a literary counterpart to pop art and the “brutalist” aesthetic of modernity.

Three longer papers are followed by a series of brief but powerful commentaries which each open up particular insights into Ballard’s work, and together explore how Ballard’s perceptions may challenge and inform contemporary architecture.

Film has now been posted online of each discussion, and we have reproduced the presentations below. You can also download mp3s of the talks.

The event was chaired by Jeremy Melvin. Speakers included John Gray, Nic Clear, David Cunningham, Nigel Coates, Matthew Taunton, Chris Hall, Joanne Murray, Dan Holdsworth, Tim Abrahams and Claire Walsh. Thank you to Static TV for supplying the footage.

..::: Previously on ballardian.com:

+ Re-Placing the Novel: Sinclair, Ballard and the Spaces of Literature, by David Cunningham
+ A Near Future: Nic Clear’s Tribute to JG Ballard
+ Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment
+ ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear
+ ‘Because we’re fucked’: Skinner vs Gray

Ballardian Architecture 1: John Gray

Ballardian Architecture 1 – John Gray from static tv on Vimeo.

John Gray, author and philosopher, identifies correspondences between Ballard’s work and Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle, discussing certain ramifications for contemporary economic and social phenomena.

Ballardian Architecture 2: Nic Clear

Ballardian Architecture 2 – Nic Clear from static tv on Vimeo.

Nic Clear, architect and lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, delivers a paper entitled ‘J.G. Ballard is an Enemy of the Architectural Profession’.

Ballardian Architecture 3: David Cunningham

Ballardian Architecture 3 – David Cunningham from static tv on Vimeo.

David Cunningham, University of Westminster, examines architectural aspects of Ballard’s prose, exploring corresponding tendencies in the writings of Iain Sinclair and W.G. Sebald.

Ballardian Architecture 4: Session 1 Discussion

Ballardian Architecture 4 – Session 1 Discussion from static tv on Vimeo.

Session 1 concludes with a discussion featuring speakers John Gray, David Cunningham and Nic Clear. The discussion is chaired by Jeremy Melvin, and features contributions from members of the audience.

Ballardian Architecture 5: Nigel Coates

Ballardian Architecture 5 – Nigel Coates from static tv on Vimeo.

Nigel Coates, architect and lecturer, discusses the influence of Ballard’s writings upon a number of his architectural projects, as well as reviewing work by some of his students at the Royal College of Art.

Ballardian Architecture 6: Matthew Taunton

Ballardian Architecture 6 – Matthew Taunton from static tv on Vimeo.

Matthew Taunton, author and academic, investigates Ballard’s 1960 short story ‘Chronopolis’, highlighting Ballard’s engagement with modernist urbanism and his response to Taylorism and Fordism.

Ballardian Architecture 7: Chris Hall

Ballardian Architecture 7 – Chris Hall from static tv on Vimeo.

Chris Hall, journalist and writer, analyses architectural aspects of Ballard’s short story ‘The Terminal Beach’.

Ballardian Architecture 8: Joanne Murray

Ballardian Architecture 8 – Joanne Murray from static tv on Vimeo.

Joanne Murray, lecturer and Birkbeck PhD candidate, discusses formal characteristics of Ballard’s art and writing in relation to New Brutalist architecture.

Ballardian Architecture 9: Dan Holdsworth

Ballardian Architecture 9 – Dan Holdsworth from static tv on Vimeo.

Dan Holdsworth, artist, discusses his photographs, highlighting architectural motifs and visual tendencies that reflect aspects in Ballard’s prose.

Ballardian Architecture 10: Tim Abrahams

Ballardian Architecture 10 – Tim Abrahams from static tv on Vimeo.

Tim Abrahams, journalist and Associate Editor of ‘Blueprint’ magazine, discusses Ballard’s Shanghai-set, semi-autobiographical novel ‘Empire of the Sun’ in relation to the Shanghai Expo 2010.

Ballardian Architecture 11: Session 2 Discussion

Ballardian Architecture 11 – Session 2 Discussion from static tv on Vimeo.

Session 2 concludes with a discussion featuring speakers Dan Holdsworth, Nigel Coates, Tim Abrahams, Chris Hall, Joanne Murray and Matthew Taunton. The discussion is chaired by Gavin Parkinson, and features contributions from members of the audience.

Ballardian Architecture 12: Claire Walsh

Ballardian Architecture 12 – Claire Walsh from static tv on Vimeo.

Claire Walsh, editor, researcher and J.G. Ballard’s partner, discusses Ballard’s life and interests in a presentation that closes the proceedings of the forum.

Lord Horror (1997). Image by John Coulthart.

Coinciding with our three-part interview with Michael Butterworth, David Britton and John Coulthart of Savoy Books, Ballardian.com is pleased to announce the Savoy Books Microfiction Competition.

NOTE: Due to popular demand, the Ballardian/Savoy microfiction competition deadline has been extended to 15 December. Winners will be announced in early January 2010, coinciding with Part 2 of the Savoy interviews.

UPDATED RULES: The rules are very simple: write a 100-word (or less) short story on anything with a ‘Savoyesque’ or ‘Ballardian’ theme (note: hyphenated words count as one word). If you are unfamiliar with Savoyesque themes, please see the interview with Mr Butterworth. For the dictionary definition of ‘Ballardian’, please see here. And if you would like to know more about writing microfiction (a.k.a. ‘flash fiction’), we recommend checking these links for all the ins and outs. Remember, you can use significantly less than 100 words if you wish — the so-called ‘six word memoir’, inspired by Hemingway, is pretty popular right now.

Limit of 2 entries per person.

The prizes (for 1st, 2nd, 3rd) have been very generously supplied by Savoy and cover all their bases: novels, CDs, comic books. Prizes for first: David Britton’s notorious and long out-of-print Lord Horror novel (currently fetching over US$800 for second-hand copies), the almost-as-rare The Truth About Horror, and the A Tea Dance at Savoy book; prizes for second: the books A Serious Life and Sieg Heil Iconographers; prizes for third: the Savoy Wars and The Waste Land CDs, plus the Fuck Off and Die comic book. For more information on these prizes, see below. Entries will be judged by David Britton, Michael Butterworth and Simon Sellars, and the winning entries will appear on ballardian.com.

The deadline is 5 December 2009 15 December 2009. Please use this contact form to send your entry. Don’t forget to include your name, story title and email address.

But why a competition and not just a giveaway? Because the idea of humanoids competing for something as outré as Lord Horror has a certain black appeal.

And why microfiction? Because Ballard in The Atrocity Exhibition and Butterworth in his ‘Concentrate’ stories could be said to be early adopters of the form. Also, because (yes, you guessed it) microfiction is extremely ‘hip’, ‘trendy’ and ‘à la mode’ right now.

FIRST PRIZE

1) A copy of Lord Horror (yes, the very rare, extremely notorious and long out-of-print novel, currently fetching over US$800 for second-hand copies; Savoy has kindly decided to sacrifice a file copy for Ballardian.com);
2) A really special, rare Lord Horror book, The Truth About Horror (Savoy’s second-rarest gem, published for private circulation only);
3) A Tea Dance at Savoy, by Robert Meadley.

Only one alternate history series confronted Nazism with appropriate originality and passion. Published by the independent Manchester firm Savoy, David Britton’s surreal Lord Horror and its sequels entered the mind of a deranged surviving Hitler whose visions grew increasingly insane. Britton’s graphic novel Hard Core Horror turned William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) into Lord Horror, while James Joyce became his brother, and his rival for the hand of singer Jessie Matthews. Britton’s narrative moved inevitably towards Auschwitz. The novel’s final issue, with its deliberately blank narrative panels among pictures of the concentration camp (followed by actual photographs of victims), was a silent memorial to the murdered, an indictment of our own moral complicity. Soon after they appeared, Hard Core Horror and Lord Horror were seized by Manchester’s vice squad. The books were destroyed and their author went to Strangeways, suggesting that successful Nazi alternate histories must take profound psychological, moral and physical risks.

Michael Moorcock, The Daily Telegraph.

“At the end of the 1970s, among innovative fictions by the likes of JG Ballard, the literary journal New Worlds included a handful of mysterious, highly accomplished pieces by one RG Meadley. Some were short stories; others illustrative collages, oddly captioned, like Victorian broadsheets issued from some parallel universe. As far as the literary arts were concerned, RG Meadley might then have vanished into such a universe, so this first volume of his writing is not so much long awaited as a total surprise. Such a book, we might have hoped, would collect his early work. Nothing so straightforward. Gorgeously designed, lavishly illustrated, A Tea Dance at Savoy is a collection — but of what? Gonzo journalism? Hallucinatory rhapsody? A “stew”, its author calls it, and so it is: a paranoiac-critical gallimaufry.”

Colin Greenland, The Independent.

SECOND PRIZE

1) A Serious Life, by D M Mitchell.
2) Sieg Heil Iconographers, by Jon Farmer.

“The main voices in A Serious Life belong to David M Mitchell—his evaluation of the books, records and comics produced by Savoy Books over the last thirty years—and the company’s founders, David Britton and Michael Butterworth, publishers of the eclectic, the maverick and the marginalised. Here they give their first ever extended interviews concerning the company’s history, and state their aims and intentions from Savoy’s inception in the early 1970s to the present day. Topics featured include their personal creations Lord Horror and Meng & Ecker, the 20-year confrontation of the company with the Greater Manchester Police Force, and the involvement of Index on Censorship and Geoffrey Robertson QC in the same, culminating in the defence of their works at the Royal Courts of Justice in 1996. Designed by John Coulthart.”

Savoy press release.

“This beautifully produced oversize paperback [Sieg Heil Iconographers] is the third in a series of Savoy biographies, or ‘manifestoes’… Savoy’s wayward eclecticism means that the books don’t overlap as much as you’d expect, each author providing his own idiosyncratic take on the company’s origins, output and obsessions, and while Farmer shares the rambling tone common to all three books, his bold, opinionated prose, enlivened by occasional flashes of brilliance, makes this the pick of the bunch. You may not agree with what Farmer writes, but his approach is so ballsy that the book is never less than entertaining, even with the absurd enthusiasm informing references to ‘eager jig gash’ and the following paean to Fenella Fielding: ‘I would crawl ten thousand miles over ground glass because of that voice, just to wank in her shadow.’ It’s also perhaps the most beautifully designed Savoy production to date (no mean feat considering designer John Coulthart’s characteristically high standards), the bounty of Lash Larue western posters and James Cawthorn fantasy illustrations rarely bearing any relation to the text but providing yet another version of the Savoy story to run alongside Farmer’s celebration.”

London Book Review.

THIRD PRIZE

1) Savoy Wars CD. Compilation of Savoy’s ‘greatest hits’.
2) The Waste Land CD, TS Eliot read by PJ Proby.
3) Fuck Off and Die. Another ‘luxury’ item from Savoy – a 160-page hardback comic book in b/w and colour, the follow-up to the notorious Adventures of Meng & Ecker. Written by David Britton and illustrated by Kris Guidio, with an introduction by Alan Moore and an afterword by Dr Benjamin Noyse. Jacket design by John Coulthart.

“Many of the songs [on Savoy Wars] are covers. But these are no ordinary covers. The original lyrics to Blue Monday are dropped in favour of Springsteen’s Cadillac Ranch, with Proby providing a deep Southern American drawl, as he does on the other tracks. Musically, there’s some amazingly seedy and muscular dance arrangements, which add a whole new spin to the songs. In particular In The Air Tonight, which actually sounds dangerously deranged and eminently listenable. Unlike the original. Savoy Wars is all the more fascinating by virtue of the people who crop-up on the various tracks: Melanie Williams (Sub Sub and now with her own solo deal), Rowetta (Happy Mondays), Denise Johnson (Primal Scream, Electronica, ACR and now also with a solo deal),Yvonne Shelton (Secret Society, Evolution, and another solo artist), Inner Sense Percussion, ’60s rock’n'roll vocalist Bobby Thompson and, of course, Proby. And regardless of Savoy’s joy of upsetting, shocking and generally winding people up, the label has produced some genuinely exciting, innovative and powerful pop songs. ‘Prime cuts of musical perversity’ is how Savoy describe it. A definition which is difficult to dispute.”

Chris Sharrett, City Life.

“PJ Proby’s collaboration with Savoy produced a number of intriguing recordings, including his versions of “Anarchy In The UK” and TS Eliot’s The Wasteland. “I had no idea who TS Eliot was,” says Proby. “But the more I do The Wasteland, the better I get.”

“One day the world will realise what a genius he is, and by then it will be too late,” Britton said. “Proby is a walking piece of art. His talent needs preserving for future generations.” After Britton’s mother died, the three gathered at her house at Saddleworth, overlooking the scene of the Moors Murders. There, with Proby larking about on the Zimmer frame that had belonged to the deceased, they worked on his single “Hardcore”, which, unless I’ve missed something, remains the most offensive record ever released. (“Everything y’all think is fun,” Proby once said, “I think is boring.”)

Butterworth says Savoy stopped working with Proby, “because he asked for £2,000 to read one poem. I said: ‘Jim: it’s only nine lines.’ He said, ‘Maybe – but you will have my voice forever.’”

Robert Chalmers, The Independent.

“[Fuck off & Die] is a black and excellent collection, sharp as gall, a fine display of Britton’s acid voice and splendid gallery of Guidio’s elegant and decadent designs. La Squab is a sophisticated howl of anger and disgust disguised as a Violet Elizabeth Bott tantrum, Minipops conceived by Bertolt Brecht with set designs by Harry Clarke and camera work by Leni Riefenstahl. A paedophobic gymslip gem, it should be on the shelves of anyone hoping to fathom the lurid, fractal mess of turn-of-the-century British culture, a must for those of us who cannot stomach Cute unless it’s gnawed down to the painful cuticle. Go out and order six more copies of this book immediately.

Tomorrow belongs to her.”

Alan Moore, from the introduction to FOAD.

From the files of Dr Ricardo Battista’s assistant, School of Specialization in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Melbourne, Australia.

“As Michael Jackson reached middle age, the skin of both his cheeks and neck tended to sag from failure of the supporting structures. His naso-labial folds deepened, and the soft tissues along his jaw fell forward. His jowls tended to increase. In profile the creases of his neck lengthened and the chin-neck contour lost its youthful outline and became convex.

The eminent plastic surgeon Ricardo Battista has remarked that one of the great misfortunes of the cosmetic surgeon is that he only has the technical skill, ability and understanding to correct this situation by surgical means. However, as long as people are prepared to pay fees for this treatment the necessary operation will be performed. Incisions made across the neck with the object of removing redundant tissue should be avoided. These scars tend to be unduly prominent and may prove to be the subject of litigation. In the case of Michael Jackson the incision was designed to be almost completely obscured by his hair and ears.

Surgical Procedure: an incision was made in Michael Jackson’s temple running downward and backward to the apex of his ear. From here a crease ran toward his lobule in front of the ear, and the incision followed this crease around the lower margin of the lobule to a point slightly above the level of the tragus. From there, at an obtuse angle, it was carried backward and downward within the hairy margin of the scalp.

The edges of the incision were then undermined. First with a knife and then with a pair of scissors, Jackson’s skin was lifted forward to the line of his jaw. The subcutaneous fatty tissue was scraped away with the knife. Large portions of connective tissue cling to the creases formed by frown lines, and some elements of these were retained in order to preserve the facial personality of the King of the Pop. At two places the skin was pegged down firmly. The first was to the scalp at the top of his ear, the second was behind the ear to the scalp over the mastoid process. The first step was to put a strong suture in the correct position between the cheek flap anterior to the first point, and a second strong suture to the neck flap behind the ear. The redundant tissue was then cut away and the skin overlap removed with a pair of scissors.

At this point the ear was moved forward toward the chin, and the wound was then closed with interrupted sutures. It did not matter how strong the stitches were behind the ears because that part of the King of Pop’s scarline was invisible in normal conditions.

Complications: haematoma formation is a dangerous sequela of this operation, and careful drainage with polythene tubing was carried out. In spite of these precautions blood still collected, but this blood was evacuated within 48 hours of the operation. It was not allowed to organize. In the early stages the skin around the area that had been undermined was insensitive, and it was not difficult to milk any collection of fluid backward to the point of drainage.

Scarring was hypertrophic at the points where tension was greatest: that is, in the temple and the region behind the ear, but fortunately these were covered by the King of Pop’s hair. The small fine sutures which were not responsible for tension were removed at 4 days, and the strong sutures removed at the tenth day. The patient was then allowed to have a shampoo to remove the blood from his hair. All scarlines are expected to fade, and by the end of three weeks the patient was back in social circulation.

At a subsequent operation after this successful face lift, Michael Jackson’s forehead wrinkles were removed. An incision was placed in the hairline and the skin lifted forward and upward from the temporal bone. The skin was then undermined and the excess tissue removed. The immediate result was good, but as a result of normal forehead movements relapse may occur unduly early after the operation. To remove the central frown line, the superciliary muscle was paralysed by cutting the branches of the seventh nerve passing centrally to it. A small knife-blade was inserted from the upper eyelid upward for 3 cm and then pressed down to the bone. External scars on the forehead often persist, and even in the best hands results are not always reliable. It was explained to Michael Jackson where the scars would lie, and the object of the intervention.”

Based on ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’, by J.G. Ballard.

“I feel a tremendous rapport with pop artists and in a lot of my fiction I’ve tried to produce something akin to pop art. For instance, I’ve just published a piece in New Worlds called ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’, in which I’ve taken the text of a classic description of a plastic surgery operation, a facelift, and where the original says “the patient”, I’ve inserted “Princess Margaret”. So I’ve done precisely what the pop painters did, using images from everyday life — Coca-Cola bottles, Marilyn Monroe — and manipulated them. The great thing about pop painters is their honesty. They’ve turned their backs on the traditional subject matter of the fine arts — which had hardly changed since the Renaissance — and looked at their own environment and decided: yes, the shine on domestic hardware, like the refrigerator or the washing machine, the particular gleam on the mouldings of a cabinet, the moulding of doorhandles, are of importance to people, because these are the visual landscapes of people’s lives, and if we’re going to be honest we’re going to use reality material instead of fiction. I want to do the same.”

‘Sci-fi Seer’, interview with J.G. Ballard, Penthouse Magazine, 1970, Vol. 5 No. 5 (pp. 26-30).

“The relationship between the famous and the public who sustain them is governed by a striking paradox. Infinitely remote, the great stars of politics, film and entertainment move across an electric terrain of limousines, bodyguards and private helicopters. At the same time, the zoom lens and the interview camera bring them so near to us that we know their faces and their smallest gestures more intimately than those of our friends.

Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures seem to offer us. How did Garbo brush her teeth, shave her armpits, probe a worry-line? The most intimate details of their lives seem to lie beyond an already open bathroom door that our imaginations can easily push aside. Caught in the glare of our relentless fascination, they can do nothing to stop us exploring every blocked pore and hesitant glance, imagining ourselves their lovers and confidantes. In our minds we can assign them any roles we choose, submit them to any passion or humiliation. And as they age, we can remodel their features to sustain our deathless dream of them.

In a TV interview a few years ago, the wife of a famous Beverly Hills plastic surgeon revealed that throughout their marriage her husband had continually re-styled her face and body, pointing a breast here, tucking in a nostril there. She seemed supremely confident of her attractions. But as she said: ‘He will never leave me, because he can always change me.’

Something of the same anatomizing fascination can be seen in [this] present piece… which also show[s], I hope, the reductive drive of the scientific text as it moves on its collision course with the most obsessive pornography. What seems so strange is that these neutral accounts of operating procedures taken from a textbook of plastic surgery can be radically transformed by the simple substitution of the anonymous ‘patient’ with the name of a public figure, as if the literature and conduct of science constitute a vast dormant pornography waiting to be woken by the magic of fame.”

Annotations: “Princess Margaret’s Face Lift”, J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), RE/Search edition, 1990.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Jimmy Ballard’s Hospital Review
+ Chariot of Fire: Preliminary Analysis & Damage Reconstruction of the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales

Photo by Simon Durrant.

+ Share your tributes and memories of JGB.

TIM CHAPMAN, WRITER

I first read JG Ballard when I was 12 or so, after picking up Crash (with that lurid orange Chris Foss cover) at a village hall jumble sale. I occasionally wonder to what degree this might have affected my development.

Over the next decade or so, I picked up a few other titles, but none hit me with quite the same force. I just wasn’t struck by that intensity, that outrageous lucidity, which radiated from that battered paperback. But I gradually started to appreciate the subtler qualities of the writing, the humour, and the semi-detached perception. Gradually, his books started to just make sense to me. By the time I was living in a tiny flat in the dullest part of south London, barely writing a first novel and trying to find that elusive first job in journalism, I was a devotee.

So sometime round autumn 1996, I was thinking Ballardian thoughts as I trundled through the South Croydon wastelands towards an interview at some obscure trade journal. At the interview, the editor noted that, according to my desperately padded CV, I was working on a novel. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘JG Ballard used to work here.’ I got the job.

That’s basically my Ballardian claim to fame — I used to do JG Ballard’s old job at Chemistry & Industry. Well, more or less — he was deputy editor, a role that didn’t exist in my time, while I was production assistant and reporter. The magazine was still at the same premises on Belgrave Square, surrounded by the same pubs and curved balconies of concrete hotels, and my desk was certainly old enough to pre-date the 1950s. I felt a certain kinship.

The one time I met the man himself was in February 1998 at the ICA, where he was talking about movies with David Leland. Afterwards, Ballard stayed on stage to chat with anyone who wanted to jump up and say hello, even as the ICA staff tried to clear the room for the next event. I said I was doing his old job and showed him my business card. He briefly reminisced about his own time there, and seemed genuinely pleased and interested to hear how things were going, some four decades after.

My plan to follow in his footsteps by rapidly finishing an acclaimed novel or two, then quitting work to write in creative seclusion, never quite worked out. But he remained an inspiration, in work and life. That long-unfinished first novel definitely bears his influence (along with Norman Mailer, another recent loss), though possibly not in ways detectable to anyone else. As an intensely visual writer, he’s also a constant presence when I’m out taking photographs. Whether in stories or pictures, that influence comes from his unique way of seeing — that forensic examination of the landscapes of the late 20th century, the disasters and psychopathologies, the art and the technology. That medically-trained analysis of the nature of the catastrophe, and the acceptance of it all.

Ballard’s also proved a near-infallible guide to a parallel world of literature (though, personally, I still can’t be bothered with Self or Amis Jr). Any book I might find while scavenging secondhand shops which carries an adulatory blurb from the man gets added to the pile. Equally, I’ve found various writers (from Nathanael West to John Gray) by other routes and been greatly impressed by them, only later finding that they’re also favourites of Ballard’s. And of course you could build a library out of the many other writers, artists, musicians and film-makers who’ve acknowledged their deep debts to the man.

Unlike many of the other folk adding their tributes here, I’m not a literary critic or academic (nor, to be honest, would I wish to be). I’m a fan, though I wish there was another word for that. And through my developing fascination with the man’s work, I’ve been privileged to meet, drink, and make friends with a whole bunch of fantastically creative and intelligent people, of all ages and professions, from as near as Sheffield to as far as Australia, who’ve all been equally enthused in their own idiosyncratic ways.

Apart from the infinitely explorable mass of his writing, I think maybe that’s the legacy of JG Ballard — the dispersed generations of people who might call themselves, in whatever sense, Ballardians. The readers for whom his writing and his vision just made sense. The saddest realisation is that there’ll be no more.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘When in doubt, quote Ballard’: An interview with Iain Sinclair

RICK McGRATH, WRITER & JGB ARCHIVIST

JG Ballard was inexplicably kind to me, even though I’ve long thought he perceived me in a sort of Mr Burns & Homer Simpson way, never really recognizing this perhaps mad chap from Toronto who insists on breaking the peace with odd correspondence. I first wrote JG in 2001, having finally tracked down his address, with questions about my copy of the Doubleday Atrocity Exhibition. His response, on two postcards, included the phrase “thought police”, and I was hooked on these phonics, and in the hope of receiving more sayings from the seer I tended to whisk off letters until the fall of 2008, when I received my last postcard on November 22, the same day as Kennedy was killed.

During the intervening years JG conversed on a wide range of topics, such as the production of ice wine in Ontario, my take on Kingdom Come from an advertising perspective, new information on the “Project for a New Novel”, the seven CBC plays of his short stories, and, perhaps most interestingly, about my trip to Shanghai in 2007 to visit his Amherst Avenue house and Lunghua camp home. He was both funny and instructive in his advice, suggesting he hoped “it was a McDonald’s or KFC” to my news that the Amherst mansion had been turned into a restaurant, and frugally advising I take a bus rather than a cab the seven miles from the house to Lunghua. One of his more charming gestures was to draw me a plan of the main floor of Amherst Avenue. Granted, he had once returned to view it in 1991, but I’m sure he did this plan from childhood memory, and it was not surprising when I arrived and wandered through the place to find his layout correct not only in position but in proportion. He was keenly interested in the pictures I sent him and probably less excited about my “report”, which he simply deemed “interesting”, no doubt because it was rife with ballardian figures of speech. The photos he studied “like a deranged estate agent”, and after pointing out the changes made to the original admitted to finally being relieved that the past had gone, that these cyphers of yesterday were now only preserved in his and a few other memories.

The trip to Shanghai had as strong an impact on me as reading, say, The Drowned World for the first time. It gave a real location to so much of the imagined landscapes, a focal point for the big bang of imagination that was to follow. It was almost voyeuristic to stand in JG’s childhood bedroom and try to imagine a well-dressed kid playing alone, but I soon discovered the temporal flux of Empire was located in the old untouched stairwells, a place where it was very easy to descend into memory and merge into Ballard’s formative past.

The child that became the man is still in a few memories. In 2008 I talked with fellow Lunghua child internee Irene Duguid Kilpatrick, and she still firmly remembers “young Jimmy” running with his gang of boys, and telling “outrageous stories” about “flying with the Japanese pilots” at nearby Lunghua Airport. In essence, she was outlining Ballard’s modus operandi: blend a great imagination with a proclivity to shock. Sound like a plan? Shanghai is where JG learned to love being a storyteller, and that child’s desire – and attention-compelling technique — stayed with him his entire career.

Tomorrow I go down to Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway, where Cronenberg shot the moving car scenes in Crash. I’ll have a flask of scotch with me, and I’ll drink a wee dram to the pleasure and influence JG has on my life. Thanks, kind man. Thanks for everything.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Like Alice in Wonderland’: Solveig Nordlund on J.G. Ballard
+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Review: Grave New World
+ It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad World
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard’s Cover Art

SOLVEIG NORDLUND, director of Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (based on JGB’s ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’)

I got the news about Jim’s death from a radio journalist who wanted me to comment on the loss. Loss? I have an excerpt of my interview with Jim on YouTube. During the night and the following day comments didn’t stop dropping in: RIP JGB, and, as an echo, RIP JGB.

It was like Voices of Time, an anonymous collective mourning in cyberspace.

Loss? JGB and his work is an enormous gift that will live forever.

Thank You, JGB

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Like Alice in Wonderland’: Solveig Nordlund on J.G. Ballard

DAN O’HARA, ACADEMIC/TRANSLATOR

I first read Ballard’s short stories when I was 8 or 9, an age young enough to care about the story alone, but too young to care about the author. Only later, perhaps when I was in my twenties, did I re-read Ballard with an uncanny sensation of recognition: these worlds, I knew; I had met these characters before. But then maybe that sense of recognition is common to all of Ballard’s readers, whether they’ve read him before or not. His fictions are universal, and his characteristic landscapes and motifs speak directly to an atavistic, Jungian collective unconscious.

So often does he describe an ethereal, transcendental aspect of the everyday world, demonstrating a kind of anarchic faith in the abstract, that there’s a thrilling sense of vicarious exploration in reading his stories; yet it’s a very specific exploration not into the unknown but into a structured, abstract world which exists beyond human perception. Perhaps Martin Amis put it best when he said that Ballard “seems to address a different — a disused — part of the reader’s brain”. In stories such as ‘The Terminal Beach’ or ‘The Overloaded Man’, Ballard comes closer to a coherent and original literary-philosophical statement than any English writer since Coleridge.

Lately, I’ve found that what keeps me reading Ballard is his style, that most ephemeral of all writerly qualities. I do not believe that he will find posterity solely for his ideas, though he has dissected the political, social, and psycho(patho)logical ambiguities of the West with more imagination than we deserve, and with more acuity than any other English novelist. I believe that we will come to value his consummate control of language, rather than his cathexis of car-crashes, or his ironic praise of shopping malls and airports as secular cathedrals. When automobiles and suburbs and all the tawdry grey concrete sprawl of the 20th and 21st centuries are forgotten, we will still read Ballard for his translucent, crystalline prose.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Le passé composé de J. G. Ballard’: JGB on Empire of the Sun
+ ‘Content in their little prisons’: J.G. Ballard on ‘The Towers’
+ ‘Violence without end’: An Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘I really would not want to fuck George W. Bush!’: A Conversation with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘Der Visionär des Phantastischen’: An Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘It would be a mistake to write about the future’: J.G. Ballard in Conversation with Jörg Krichbaum and Rein A. Zondergeld
+ Munich Round-Up: Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘You are Hochhaus!’: Ballard in Berlin

DOMINIKA ORAMUS, ACADEMIC

For many years now in Poland J.G. Ballard has been considered one of the most important contemporary British writers. It is significant that his texts started to be translated and published in this country in the days of communism, well before the world-wide success of Empire of the Sun. His early stories were published in science fiction magazines, and he made his name as an author of complex and beautiful studies of inner space. His texts that were translated into Polish in the late 1970s and early 1980s drew their inspiration from surrealism, and were full of dense similes and allusions to visual art. The first of his books to be published in Poland, a short story collection prepared by his translators and entitled Ogród czasu (“Garden of Time”), was very well received. For Polish readers Ballard became synonymous with the literary avant-garde and psychoanalysis-inspired phantasmagorias. He was also recognized as a writer for having elevated the disaster story tradition to the level of great art. When Empire of the Sun (both the novel and the movie) appeared, readers and the critics considered this war epic to reveal the “sources” of Ballard’s predilection for catastrophes.

In the early 1990s, after the fall of the “iron curtain”, most of his works were translated into Polish and his position as a writer of contemporary classics was established for good. Yet he was primarily considered a war novelist and an autobiographical writer, an opinion which is much too narrow. Only in recent years – following David Cronenberg’s film version of Crash, and with growing interest in Jean Baudrillard’s theories in Polish Academia — were Ballard’s other texts re-read and re-considered. The first studies of Ballard’s oeuvre have now been published and he is very popular today with both undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in mediascape and the culture of simulacra. J.G. Ballard, together with Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, are the most important English-language science fiction writers of the twentieth century.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Grave New World: Introduction

RICK POYNOR, AUTHOR & CULTURAL CRITIC

Like so many other Ballard admirers, I found him as a teenager. The Disaster Area came first and then, two or three volumes later, The Atrocity Exhibition, a book rigged for maximum mental havoc, like a stainless steel mind trap. I was obsessed with the surrealists then (still am) and here was a novelist citing Ernst’s Robing of the Bride, Tanguy’s Indefinite Divisibility, Dalí’s Impressions of Africa, as though the reader would, naturally enough, know these pictures already. The library hardback had a bizarre Dalí drawer-woman on the cover. I was half visual, half literary, torn between wanting to make images myself and wanting to write, and Ballard was the perfect author, a writer who loved art and wanted to be an artist, a hypnotic stylist who endlessly reverted to a private lexicon of visual themes, reworking them exactly like a painter.

No other contemporary writer has meant as much to me. Books by other novelists might excite for a while only to fade in time, but Ballard’s routines and rhythms, his terminal visions, pitched camp in my head and never moved on. It wasn’t just the luminescence of the writing; it was the example of the man: The violently productive imagination able to operate in the most ordinary domestic setting, transcribing the unthinkable in longhand, while taking care of the kids. The self-exile in suburbia that revealed, more than anything, his unwavering seriousness of purpose. The politely contemptuous distance he maintained from the careerism and managerialism that now dominate the arts. The rejection of honours bestowed by an outmoded system he declined to support. The likeable, almost garrulous good humour that underpinned the lethal accuracy of the social observations, psychological insights and provocations that he spun out to interviewers with effortless wit and style. The way he subverted his own educated virtues of reason, self-control and civic-mindedness with a readiness to pursue an idea to the outer limits, however alarming or offensive, and revel in it: a surrealist to the end. Above all, though, it was his ability to paint the mind’s canvas with ineluctable images of strangeness, disturbance and wonder, his world becoming ours.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Collapsing Bulkheads: The Covers of Crash

DAVID PRINGLE, WRITER/EDITOR & JGB ARCHIVIST

I interviewed Jim Ballard seven times, each occasion involving a visit to his house in Shepperton, over a period of 21 years, from 1975 to 1996. He was always most welcoming, very affable, and perfectly happy to give hours of his time. He loved talking, I think.

When I and a bunch of other people started Interzone magazine in 1982 he was very supportive — he promptly took out a subscription, and agreed to write us a story (“Memories of the Space Age”). He always renewed his subscription, for the next 22 years, and never failed to write an encouraging note to me on his renewal slip. He was a great supporter of the magazine all round, and gave us a couple of very nice quotes which we used in our publicity. Whenever I pestered him for permission to reprint something of his from an obscure source (“What I Believe,” “Project for a Glossary of the 20th Century,” etc) he always said “yes” and never asked for payment — although of course we did pay him for the original stories he wrote for us.

He was a kindly, generous man — which perhaps not many people realize fully.

I also met him on a number of occasions at publishers’ parties and other events in London. Most memorable, for me, were the launch parties Gollancz gave for Empire of the Sun in 1984, and for The Day of Creation in 1987. The guest-lists of those parties were pretty amazing, and, along with Ballard, I met a host of people there from Kingsley Amis to Kathy Acker. So many gone now — Angela Carter too.

I also met Jim Ballard’s partner Claire Walsh at some of those functions, and at this difficult time I think we should remember her especially: she must have had a nigh-unendurable few months.

It’s a devastating fact that he has gone. I’m surprised the world hasn’t blinked out of existence — like the tree that falls in the forest, how can it carry on without him to observe it (sardonically, of course)?

– David Pringle (writing on Day One of the Post-Ballard Era — a bleaker age)

SIMON SELLARS, WRITER/EDITOR, PUBLISHER BALLARDIAN.COM (This is the full version of a tribute written for the Evening Standard)

J.G. Ballard taught me about hyperreality long before Baudrillard — what is the motorway system in Crash if not the ultimate simulacrum? He taught me how to be ‘punk’, and of the jouissance of well-bred anarchy way before the Pistols — ‘I want to fuck Ronald Reagan’, he wrote, and so did I (I didn’t take him literally). He explained to me the implications of our wraparound media landscape with more daring and less sentimentality than McLuhan — The Atrocity Exhibition remains The Anarchist Cookbook for making dirty bombs in the mind. He demonstrated semiotics and the veiled reality of advertising to me with more verve than even Barthes — look to ‘The Subliminal Man’ for the purest explication. He opened my eyes to our apocalyptic surveillance/reality TV culture with more humour than Virilio — most explosively in ‘The Intensive Care Unit’, the darkest energy at the heart of the sun. He taught me that architecture, if done badly, is not just a machine for living in, it’s a cell block locked up in our connivance — High-Rise is the manifesto for breaking free.

Then he taught me to love the circular boredom of motorways — strength through repetition, a holistic recycling of memory that forms the model for a total program of resistance to capitalism…

…to love/fear malls, gated communities, feeder roads, micro-societies — anywhere that slips between the gaps, with the ambivalent emotion forever playing on the borderzones, crucial to keeping the mind free and agile.

He gave me a philosophy and a worldview that has sustained the darkest times, both internal and external…

…by teaching me to believe in myself and my addled imagination: always preserving the sovereignty of inner space, infinitely more preferable to the governances of madmen.

Thank you, JGB.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Index of Simon Sellars’s posts

SUPERVERT, PUBLISHER OF BURROUGHS SITE REALITY STUDIO

Given the “false,” “alternate,” and “conceptual” deaths envisioned in his most experimental work, The Atrocity Exhibition, it is difficult to accept the banality of J.G. Ballard’s demise. Biographically, it would have been satisfying to contemplate an alternate Ballard killed in the automobile accident he suffered two weeks after completing the text of Crash. “If I had died,” wrote Ballard in his memoir Miracles of Life, “the accident might well have been judged deliberate, at least on the unconscious level.” Instead, Ballard succumbed to prostate cancer — a sort of kick in the nuts for the writer who, imagining “sexual stimulation by newsreel atrocity films,” blithely described how the films were “shown to both disturbed children and terminal cancer patients with useful results.” Did he remember writing that on the day he received his diagnosis?

Whether Ballard is remembered as a novelist, a visionary, a stylist, or a philosopher (the “sage of Shepperton”), one thing is certain: his anatomist’s gaze was scalpel sharp. Ballard remained lucid even in the difficult art of self-analysis. He recognized, for example, that his era had drastically transformed the role of the writer. “The balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly,” he wrote in the introduction to a French edition of Crash. “We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind… We live inside an enormous novel.” For William Burroughs, the antidote was to “cut word lines.” For Ballard, “the fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.” How so? “He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives.”

Sadly, to contemplate Ballard’s death is to realize that the “options and imaginative alternatives” disappear with him. What new role would he have envisioned for the writer in a world where everyone seems to write — or at least to blog, comment, tweet, and send “text messages?” Would he have offered up a startling insight in interview? Composed one of his brilliant conceptual efforts? One imagines a short story with a title something like “Deleting the Facebook Account of the Last Writer in the World.” The protagonist, named Jim, decides that, in an age in which everybody “writes,” the true writer is he who erases (in much the same spirit as Robert Rauschenberg once created an artwork by erasing a Willem de Kooning drawing). He tries to delete every trace he ever left on the internet. He hunts down the subscribers of Ambit in order to torch their houses and thereby rid the world of every printed magazine containing his name…

But ultimately he discovers that there is one account, such as a Facebook profile, that he cannot delete. It’s bureaucracy. We’ve all run up against such inane dilemmas. “What do you mean I can’t delete myself?” But then, on another level, it’s parable. Ballard may be dead, but we refuse to grant him permission to delete the account he created with literature.

V. VALE, WRITER & FOUNDER OF RE/SEARCH PUBLICATIONS

I particularly hate it when “rebels” die — there are already so few of them/us. Sometimes it seems like virtually everyone you meet these days in the world is a slave to the profit motive/capitalist imperative: “What’s the meaning of life?” “To make money!” J.G. Ballard, and another of my relatively recently deceased role models, W.S. Burroughs, both refused to prostitute their writing, and they both refused to shmooze and “network” merely to further their “careers.” Both had a hatred of bourgeois hypocrisy and phony politeness, while at the same time being deeply polite and courteous, almost to a fault …

But for now, let us think of ways to publicly mourn one of the greatest thinkers and poets of the past century. By some irony, “The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard” is reportedly soon to be published in the United States, complete with two additional stories not included in the U.K. edition. Short stories, more than novels, may appropriately suit the trend of the increasingly shorter attention span of the human populace, who demand more flash ads, tiny videos and music quotations as they read their two-minute, two-page articles on the Internet. I suggest that for the next month (or year), readers shut out everything else and read ONLY J.G. Ballard novels, short stories, essays, interviews and reviews. Your mind, language, and outlook are guaranteed to be permanently altered…

“Death always presents the face of surprised recognition,” wrote William S. Burroughs. He also advised all of us to “Stay out of hospitals,” and “Avoid Doctors.” Well, even though I had been concerned about J.G. Ballard’s health after hearing two years ago that he had been diagnosed with “advanced” prostate cancer, I still felt a kind of unthinking complacency mixed with my concern: “Almost every humane male has prostate cancer when he dies; it acts very slowly and can take decades to kill a man.” To be honest, having seen him recently in October 2008, I really didn’t think he would die THIS SOON. And when I found out he had died — I had arrived home from a 9-hour bus trip today to hear the news on our answering machine — well, my first thought was, “There’s no thinker left alive that I can totally trust. They’re all dead.”

For the past two or more years Ballard had been undergoing state-of-the-art, high-tech treatment from a young doctor who reportedly was trying every new medical breakthrough remedy or procedure which promised “hope” for Ballard’s condition. Recently, however, Ballard had been rushed to a hospital, and after sustained care there had returned to the home to his longtime (40-plus years) companion, Claire Walsh. The latest word was that he had recently required around-the-clock care by visiting professional nurses, which sounded somewhat alarming. Still, I maintained calm. Now I wish I had tried to telephone him and talk one last time, even if just for a minute. I think I expected Ballard to live at least as long as Burroughs, who reached the age of 83, even after having been “a junkie” for years of his life. By a strange logic, I felt that since Ballard hadn’t been a junkie, he should live even longer than 83. Well, I was wrong. And now the world will miss his unique, witty, and sometimes acerbic commentaries on itself. We miss him and are grateful for his dark sense of humor and generous output.

..:: More Ballardosphere tributes:
+ Part 1: Ben Noys, Chris Nakashima-Brown & Mark Dery
+ Part 2: Michael Moorcock
+ Part 4: Jeannette Baxter, Mike Bonsall, Mark Fisher, Owen Hatherley, Mike Holliday and Nina Power

Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and Claire Walsh in September, 2006 (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock).

+ Share your tributes and memories of JGB.

MICHAEL MOORCOCK, AUTHOR

‘Jimmy’ to an early generation of friends, JG Ballard was as stoical in dealing with his painful cancer (which began with asymptomatic prostate cancer already widely spread by the time it was detected) as he had been when dealing with the sudden early death of his wife Mary. The telegram my then-wife Hilary and I received the day Mary died was typically laconic: MARY DIED TODAY OF PNEUMONIA. GREAT HEART. LOVE, JIMMY. I remember how, shortly after his return to England, he said he had to keep pulling to the side of the road on the long drive back from Spain when he began to cry; one of the few occasions he ever directly referred in conversation to his grief. Of course, he discovered that stoicism in the Japanese camp where he was interned as a boy and this tendency to redirect conversation away from his own problems remained with him all his life, even when he suffered from the cancer which eventually killed him.

Like many great visionaries, he had an enormous store of common sense and ordinary wisdom, which enabled him to raise the children and, as Fay, his daughter, said, always have the sheets washed on time, even if the baked bean was one of their almost daily dishes. In private he was a generous, affectionate, humorous friend who, even when he had very little money, would phone me if he heard I was broke and offer to lend me his last hundred pounds.

A couple of years after Mary’s death I was able to introduce him to Claire Walsh, who remained his companion for over forty years and selflessly nursed him through the final staqes of his very painful illness. His capacity for kindness and understanding is reflected in his moving and very honest memoir — Miracles of Life — which remains one of the very best books of its kind. I knew him casually in the late fifties and we became close friends from about 1960 on when we attended a conference of sf writers and, together with Barry Bayley, became very disappointed with what we regarded as the boring and rather commercial interests of our fellow writers. We discovered that we had a common interest in using the conventions of sf to write a kind of fiction which addressed what we perceived as the specific experience of post-war life, which the conventions of the modernist social novel singularly failed to address. We did not have much of an interest, except incidentally, in improving the sf genre as such, but of putting certain sf tropes to our own uses.

In this, we were inspired by the work of William Burroughs to whom I introduced him in the early 60s. His first evident break with the sf genre came when E.J.Carnell published ‘The Terminal Beach’. Carnell was reluctant to publish the story until Bayley and I insisted on it, just as Carnell published my own ‘breakthrough’ story The Deep Fix only when Jimmy persuaded him to run it. When I became editor of New Worlds in 1964, he wrote one of our two ‘manifestoes’ in the first issue I produced. That issue also carried the opening episode of his serial Equinox, which became The Crystal World, but I was keen to get him to do work closer to ‘The Terminal Beach’ and while ‘You:Coma:Marilyn Monroe’ was the first of these to appear in our companion magazine Science Fantasy, it was ‘The Assassination Weapon’, written, as I recall, a little earlier, which helped define the character of the kind of fiction we were to run increasingly, making a clear break with generic science fiction. These ‘condensed novels’ reflected a theory we had developed whereby iconographic figures, with their own dense stories, helped us carry many narratives in a very small space.

Jimmy produced a number of these narratives within a relatively short time during the mid-sixties, placing others with Ambit, a literary magazine run by Martin Bax whom we met at one of sf writer John Brunner’s parties and for which he became prose editor, commissioning me in turn! Others appeared in IT and Transatlantic Review, with whom we also had a relationship. They were collected in The Atrocity Exhibition published by Cape under the editorship of Tom Maschler, who had also been encouraged to publish Philip K. Dick after reading what New Worlds had to say about him. New Worlds also ran such stories as ‘The Assassination of John F Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’, an homage to Jarry, who was another of our enthusiasms. Our friend Bill Butler also ran his story ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, famously prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. Jimmy did not appear at the trial because he was asked to defend himself against charges of obscenity. He claimed that the story was intentionally obscene. This collection also featured the short version of Crash! which would later become the novel, and ‘A Plan for the Assassination of Jaqueline Kennedy’, the specific story which caused Nelson Doubleday, boss of the American publisher Doubleday, to order the US edition pulped. In the eyes of many, including me, this book contains Ballard’s finest and most innovative work. Together with Empire of the Sun, his autobiographical novel, it remains perhaps his best single work.

Although the literary press was quick to minimise his years as an sf writer, he made no effort to divorce himself from his sf roots, though preferring to call himself first a ‘speculative’ and later an ‘apocalyptic’ writer. His influence was seen in the work of several of his admirers including Martin Amis, Will Self, Iain Sinclair, M. John Harrison and Christopher Priest. Tending, in those early years, to rely on me to introduce him to fellow spirits, like Burroughs, Chris Evans, Eduardo Paolozzi and even his companion Claire Walsh, Jimmy remained a private, modest and rather shy man, a loyal friend who, in spite of being admired by some of our best known literary writers, avoided what he called ‘the literary crowd’ even more than sf conventions, living quietly at home in Shepperton which famously remained unchanged since the mid-60s, with his typewriter in one corner of the room and commissioned copies of lost Delvaux masterpieces in another, while a unicycle stood in his hallway.

At one time his back garden served as a pit in which he burned review copies (I remember him phoning me to complain bitterly that Fahrenheit 451 was NOT the temperature at which book paper burned) or as a jungle of sunflowers, which he had seeded. While unreliable sources, such as Lynn Barber, claimed he regularly took LSD, the only tab he ever dropped he obtained from me. I gave him some important advice about how best to take it which, somewhat typically, he completely ignored. The subsequent trip was so horrific, he never took another. Like many men of his generation, his drug of choice remained alcohol. It can fairly be argued that his vivid and intense imagination scarcely needed acid stimulus. Devoted to his children and becoming almost mystical when he described their births, he believed that the art of raising his three was to have a glue gun and a staple gun handy at all times, for running repairs and alterations.

While we by no means shared all the same enthusiasms, we remained close friends for fifty years, only very occasionally having our differences, and I shall miss him enormously.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard

..:: More Ballardosphere tributes:
+ Part 1: Ben Noys, Chris Nakashima-Brown & Mark Dery.
+ Part 3: Tim Chapman, Rick McGrath, Solveig Nordlund, Dan O’Hara, Dominika Oramus, Rick Poynor, David Pringle, Simon Sellars, Supervert and V. Vale.
+ Part 4: Jeannette Baxter, Mike Bonsall, Mark Fisher, Owen Hatherley, Mike Holliday and Nina Power.

+ Share your tributes and memories of JGB.

BENJAMIN NOYS, AUTHOR & THEORIST

‘The dreams that money can buy’
i.m. J.G. Ballard

The writer’s task is to invent the reality.
J.G. Ballard

The fact that an event has taken place is no proof of its valid occurrence.
The Atrocity Exhibition

We have all lived for a long time, in my case for my entire life, in J.G. Ballard’s head. Writing in the Introduction to the French edition of Crash, Ballard argued that the only ‘reality’ left for the writer to offer ‘in a world ruled by fictions of every kind’ was ‘the contents of his own head, he offers a set of options and imaginative alternatives’. The loss of J.G. Ballard is the loss of that ‘set of options and imaginative alternatives’ that his fiction consistently explored. We are left in world that is more radically constricted to those mediatised fictions that compose ‘the dreams that money can buy’.

..:: Ben Noys at Ballardian:
+ Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard/Ballard

CHRIS NAKASHIMA-BROWN, AUTHOR & CULTURAL CRITIC

In Miracles of Life, J.G. Ballard describes the unexpected joy of the birth of his first grandchild. He manages to do so in a uniquely Ballardian way, talking about the overwhelming peace that came from feeling one’s genetic duty had at last been discharged. For me that moment, more than any, helped me understand why Ballard had such a profound impact on me from the time I discovered him in my late teens: the way he rigorously applied his singular techniques of writerly psycho-pathology to dissect the deeper evolutionary and instinctual programming of the naked ape made insane by its modern mediated techno-context, while at the same time informing even his most brutal narrative laboratory experiments with absolute integrity and profound empathy. In the end, Ballard is for me the greatest ethicist of the 20th century. The one who came closest to answering the unanswerable questions of era now disappearing behind us, and helping scope out the guidebook for the future.

His death is a moment of great sadness. But for readers and colleagues it should be an opportunity to celebrate a life so amazingly well-lived, marked by fifty years of immense productivity, three distinct periods of work each of which leave a greater mark than most other single authors, exploding not only the boundaries of genre, but the disciplinary confines of literature itself to appropriate the territories of psychology, philosophy, and sociology. And a role model for other writers, as so well elucidated by Bruce Sterling in the interview we did for Ballardian in 2005:

Any reasons for optimism?

Well, yeah. I think it’s an optimistic thing that Ballard’s lived a long time. He’s sort of a great, spreading oak tree, really. If you had looked at the wild boys of the British New Wave in their heyday, you might’ve thought, “Oh, well, they’ll all hang themselves,” or “They’ll throw themselves into the sea like beatniks,” or “This will end in murder”. And if anybody was going to come to a wicked end, it would have been Jimmy Ballard – the obsessive, the psychotic crank, the man who’s staring right into the eyes of it. His condensed novels [collected in The Atrocity Exhibition] really have a freak-out quality to them. But he didn’t die of that. On the contrary, he just sort of fed on it. You can read his critical works now and he’s obviously in full possession of his senses. He’s funny, he’s on top of his game. He’s still an interesting guy to read even though he’s at an advanced age now. He’s got things to say that are remarkable and make you feel better about things and really demonstrate some analytical insight. I envy that. I hope that if I live that long I have that many marbles left in my little velvet drawstring bag. To me that’s reason for optimism. I don’t like to call it optimism, because as a futurist I think there’s something wrong with that term. If you say you’re optimistic or pessimistic about the future, it’s just giving you an excuse to place a patch over one eye and ignore half of the determining factors. You should struggle hard not to be optimistic or pessimistic about a future prospect. What you should do is be engaged and in command of the facts. So to be optimistic or pessimistic are really intellectual vices. But on the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with a role model.

Ballard is somebody who really has something to say. He’s saying it to a lot of different people. He’s never sold out, never wrote a cheesy trilogy. He had movies made of his books. He recovered. He didn’t care. They were okay movies, even. He had some money. His children grew to adulthood. He has grandchildren. He was never arrested. He hasn’t been in a jail or a clinic. He’s not Jeffrey Archer. He didn’t come to a bad end. He’s not an alcoholic. He has a life that many people would envy. And justly so. To that end, I feel very pleased about him. Not that I am an optimist about him or his worldview. I would not want him to have another worldview. I’m not going to criticise his sensibility. He’s a great artist. He’s given something very few people can give; in his case, he’s the only one who could possibly have given that. He gave a lot of it, it was good, it was consistently interesting. What more does one want?

..:: Chris Nakashima-Brown at Ballardian:
+ ‘Child of the Diaspora’: Sterling on Ballard

MARK DERY, AUTHOR & CULTURAL CRITIC

J.G. Ballard is gone, wheels-up from the abandoned airstrip of our imaginations, but his coiled brilliance will lie in waiting for just the right unsuspecting teenager — and there’s always one, in every suburb — who opens Crash to read the unforgettable lines, “Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash. During our friendship, he had rehearsed his death in many car crashes, but this was his only true accident.” She will read those lines, and 224 pages later, close the book dazedly, firm in the knowledge that her worldview has been shattered and wired back together, and for the darker better.

The sci-fi novelist William Gibson was one such teenager.

“I was so young when I first discovered Ballard’s work,” he told me, in an interview for my L.A. Weekly review of Ballard’s memoir, Miracles of Life. (The interview ended up on the cutting-room floor.) “Thirteen, fourteen. I probably read him before I read Burroughs, but only by a few months. I seem to remember Burroughs baffling me at first, too many moving parts, but Ballard seemed to have the keys to the kingdom. In retrospect it was like a lot of great foreign cinema that I hadn’t seen yet. Long pans without actors. I remember finding it all enormously welcoming, and calming somehow. He became a literary hero of mine without my ever having to think about it.

[...] Most ‘influence’ questions just cause me to shrug, but Ballard? Huge. And durable. More than anyone else, really.

My first work of fiction, ever, consisted of a single faux-Ballardian sentence: ‘Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, [ ] came to perceive the targeted numerals of the academy leader as hypnagogic sigils preceding the dream state of film.’ I worked on that for so long, months, that I’ve never forgotten it.”

Gibson’s unindicted co-conspirator in the cyberpunk insurgency, Bruce Sterling, offered his thoughts.

“He’s truly a great science fiction writer,” he told me, by e-mail. “One of the few. Lovecraft is also a great science fiction writer, and creates the same intensely visionary world, the same kind of lasting, all-devouring, even bewildering appeal. But Ballard certainly writes much better than Lovecraft. He’s a better artist.” Even so, noted Sterling, he remains a cult figure — ”globally notorious,” a “persistent critics’ darling” with a swelling following, but a cult figure nonetheless. “Ballard’s intelligence and surreal worldview simply intimidate readers,” said Sterling. “Most people who might read Ballard pick up one of his books, forge 30 pages in, become baffled and obscurely terrified, and never dare to open another one. Of course he’s a good writer, but he’s the strong stuff; nobody picks up six-packs of Laphroaig.”

Paradoxically, Ballard — the pathologist of the 20th century — was always an affable soul; the man who wrote “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” and who loved to scandalize journalists by rhapsodizing (tongue in cheek? we’ll never know…) about the Caligulan charisma of Margaret Thatcher was, at all times, the perfect gentleman. Nor was he ever less than witty, whether in my interviews with him or in all the others I obsessively read (a form of which he, like Boswell’s Johnson, was the incomparable master, tossing off apercus and deftly skipping insights across the surface of a conversation). To be sure, the well-rehearsed insights cycled around with reassuring regularity, but his fans were always glad to hear them; like the signature one-liners of some existential comedian, they never lost their ECT jolt, or at least their bracing buzz. Ballard was always able to play new variations on old themes, like Glenn Gould revisiting the Goldberg Variations. Not that he wasn’t willing, even at the end, to modulate into new keys. His curtain call, Miracles of Life, written while cancer gnawed, is the most exuberantly life-loving of all his books, ironically; a last review of the home movies with the children who, he insisted, raised him (after his wife died) and a passionate valentine to all the women in his life.

It is also a drily funny score-settling with Little England, whose rattletrap cars he described as “coal scuttles,” on first seeing them after moving back to Britain from China, and whose morose, “putty-faced” people had won the war but acted, he thought, as if they’d lost it. Ballard was perversely fond of America in the way that, say, Kafka or Baudrillard were; he regarded the U.S.A. with a kind of horrified delight, and loved best all that is worst about our theme-parked nightmare, which he reimagined in Hello America as a post-apocalyptic disaster zone, presided over by a President Charles Manson. And he cordially detested the class-conscious, parochial England of Prince Charles’s Poundbury and the Boy’s Own Paper, refusing Commander of the British Empire honors in 1993 with the withering quip that such “Ruritanian charade[s]” help “prop up our top-heavy monarchy.”

Yet, to this closet anglophile, Ballard was in some ways inescapably English: magnanimous in his support of younger writers (he blurbed both my books — extravagantly) yet reclusive in his personal life; generous of spirit yet, according to those who knew him best, fiercely private and, during the exhausting death march of the past years, stoic. In that sense, he represented the best of British reserve. In later years, with his domed forehead, jowls, and long, white hair curling over his collar, he looked like Charles Laughton in a Roman role — Juvenal, perhaps. And that voice! To this American ear, Ballard’s drawling delivery and plummy tone always sounded unmistakably donnish. The marriage of his matter-of-factly outrageous pronouncements with that Oxonian drawl, together with his elocutionary emphasis on certain syllables (presumably for dramatic effect) — a tendency to it-Al-i-cize a single syllable — was drily funny. I test-drove these impressions with the cultural critic (and Englishman) Rick Poynor, who agreed that ”Ballard speaks like an elderly…member of the well-off, professional, upper-middle classes — someone who might work as a doctor, a barrister, a banker, or indeed an Oxford don. He sounds like the kind of clubbable chap who would once routinely have been found, gin in hand, in members-only London gentlemen’s clubs. It’s a very English voice. It’s the accent of the ruling classes and we still love it in small doses (though I’m not suggesting JGB trades on this) because it suggests breeding, refinement and intelligence, and it reminds us of greater days. It’s perfect for delivering outrageous pronouncements.”

In the L.A. Weekly, I wrote, “It’s not yet time to write Ballard’s epitaph, but when it is, his poetic, almost liturgical credo, ‘What I Believe’ (1984), will do nicely:

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

Among the neurotic condos of Vermilion Sands; beside the concrete bunkers of the Terminal Beach, half-submerged in silt; across the manicured grounds of that sociopathic Club Med, Eden-Olympia; and in all the Sheppertons of the soul and Shanghai mansions of memory, flags are flying at half-staff.

..:: More Ballardosphere tributes:
+ Part 2: Michael Moorcock.
+ Part 3: Tim Chapman, Rick McGrath, Solveig Nordlund, Dan O’Hara, Dominika Oramus, Rick Poynor, David Pringle, Simon Sellars, Supervert and V. Vale.
+ Part 4: Jeannette Baxter, Mike Bonsall, Mark Fisher, Owen Hatherley, Mike Holliday and Nina Power.

ABOVE: Image via Hard Mag.

The following written interview with J.G. Ballard was first published in issue 1 of Hard Mag in 2005. It was conducted by Dan Mitchell and Simon Ford, the publisher and editor respectively of the magazine, and was intended to follow up some of the questions raised in Ford’s article about Ballard’s ‘Crashed Cars’ exhibition of 1970, published in the same edition. The article has since been revised and republished over at /seconds and if you’re unfamiliar with the exhibition, it makes for a great introduction. Meanwhile, the interview makes its first reappearance beyond the confines of Hard Mag here at ballardian.com.

Many thanks to Dan, Simon and Hard Mag for sanctioning this second wind.

Interview Date: March 2004 (1756 words)
Original font: Lucida Sans Typewriter Oblique (9-point)

Copyright Hard Mag 2005.

QUESTION 1
We’re interested in the reaction of the visitors to ‘Crashed Cars’. Do you think the work and a similar presentation today would elicit a similar response? Would an audience today be more detached and more self-conscious about their reactions? Are the reasons for going to such events different today from then? Was the audience likely to be more critical then? How did the audience see themselves then (today’s art world audience can be accused of looking to be seen looking good), were the visitors part of an elite, did you see them as sophisticated? Or perhaps as mere extras in a visual field dominated by your work (the grass to the cows)?

ANSWER 1
At the opening party there was wildly drunken reaction, and what seemed to be barely repressed hostility came bursting out. During the month on show the cars were attacked, daubed with paint and so on. Many visitors stared at them numbly. I don’t think there would be the same reaction today, 35 years later. Since then there have been so many provocations that the audience response to three crashed cars would be much more calm. People are still shockable today — as with the Myra Hindley handprints portrait — but nothing defuses a sense of shock more than the sense that it’s all been done before. Duchamp’s urinal would produce no gasps, in fact I think a [sic] saw it, or a replica, at the Hayward gallery some ago. No-one was looking at it. I said to my girl-friend that the only way to startle the audience would have been to urinate into the thing, which I think someone has now done. I don’t think today’s audiences are all that different. Apart from the Arts Lab regulars, the audience in 1969 were readers of International Times, rather than today’s Time Out, and people interested in any new ideas that might be floating about. They certainly weren’t extras — I was very keen to see their reactions to the cars. The whole thing was a psychological test, to see whether my hunches were sufficiently confirmed for me to go on and write Crash. They were. The show’s object was not to shock, but to prompt a response.

QUESTION 2
What would have to be done to create a similar response today, given the increased number of international artists, the larger scale of the art world, the many crossovers with global finance through sponsorship deals and the post-young British artist Tate Modern era/culture?

ANSWER 2
To shock people today is as easy as it ever was. Set up a situation that elicits pity sympathy and concern and then deride the sentiments — the Hindley portrait did that. But that kind of outrage has been devalued, and the artists with it. Besides, there are far more subtle ways of unsettling people. Think of the outrage that greeted the impressionists. Dali’s melting watches, Ernst’s eroded rocks are far more disturbing than anything dreamed up by the Turner Prize.

ABOVE: Ballard’s crashed Pontiac. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

QUESTION 3
Were the cars for sale as artworks? Did you see them as artworks, then and now? Were you asked or did you ever plan to do any more shows? What is your general attitude to the art world, did you ever want to be an artist?

ANSWER 3
They weren’t for sale, though there is a photograph of the Pontiac with a ‘£3500′ [sic] price tag in the windscreen, which I think was published in the Daily Mirror and was probably put there by the cameraman. The cars were certainly sculptures of a kind. I wasn’t asked to do any more shows. The Arts Lab closed for good soon after, and the 1970s began, a dreary decade. I saw the cars as a one off. I’ve always been very interested in painting and sculpture, which are a better key to the public’s imagination than the novel, a form that tends to resist innovation. In many ways the art world is ferociously competitive, far more than the literary world, whre [sic] writers are protected by their agents and can work in total isolation if they want to (like myself).

QUESTION 4
Was Euphoria Bliss the stripper/interviewer at the opening party? Do you have a copy or can you summarize what you described as the stripper’s ‘damning review’ she wrote for the underground paper Friendz?

ANSWER 4
No, the interviewer was not Euphoria Bliss, who was highly intelligent (and I hope still is) and completely tuned into the various projects I experimented with — stripping to a recital of a scientific paper at the ICA and so on. These were part of my then association with the magazine Ambit, for which I was trying to drum up publicity. Euphoria, who worked as a professional stripper, was extremely beautiful, and easy-going. The interviewer/stripper at the Arts Lab was recruited by someone at the gallery. She disapproved strongly of the cars, deciding that she would only appear topless (a fascinating response, it seemed to me at the time). A couple of drunken guests manhandled her in the back seat of the crashed Pontiac, and she claimed that they had tried to rape her. I can’t remember the review in detail or her name, but she was damning.

ABOVE: Euphoria Bliss holds court. Front row left to right: Euphoria, Eduardo Paolozzi, Ballard, Michael Foreman (art editor of Ambit) and Dr Martin Bax, editor of Ambit. We don’t know who the chaps at the back are. This photo was taken in 1972, at the Royal Academy of Art in front of a Paolozzi sculpture that was being exhibited.

QUESTION 5
Would you produce something similar to ‘Crashed Cars’ today? Has the car, at the same time as maintaining its position as the engine of capitalism, lost something of it’s power to signify by its very dominance and accessibility (for example, cars are smashed up for fun on quiz shows to aid the spectacle). Has the ‘crashed car’ taboo shifted, and if so to where?

ANSWER 5
I would if I wanted to test some idea, though I think those days are past for me. I think the car has retained its hold on us, partly by the way in which it elicits aggression and an illusion of freedom and partly because while driving we control the possibility of our own deaths. The Princess Di death took on extra resonance that would have been absent if she had died in a hotel fire.

QUESTION 6
Are you still interested in creating ‘posters’ that can be read as novels, or has the poster lost some of its power? If so what has it been replaced by?

ANSWER 6
Sadly, the economies of publishing are against the idea.

QUESTION 7
Was Millennium People intended as an attack on the middle classes? Compare to the 1959 short story ‘Now: Zero’, a text that kills its reader.

ANSWER 7
Not an attack, no. As one of the middle classes. I feel for their plight. Their rebellion in MP turns out to be pointless, since they are the last group who could hope to rebel — docility is in their bones. The book is about pointless violence, and pointless protest, which are increasingly around us today. It’s a waste of time looking for a motive, when the absence of a motive is the only point. This makes Hungerford, Columbine and so on impossible to predict. The Islamist attacks on New York and Madrid are another matter entirely.

ABOVE: JGB photo via Hard Mag.

QUESTION 8
Why blow up Tate Modern? Is it because it is now the representative site of contemporary high culture, an instrument of the massification of that high culture, and the ‘spiritual’ heart of new religion, a cathedral to the art of spectacle? Or is it a cultural Auschwitz? Would it be better to disseminate this culture far and wide, so there was a mini Tate in every shopping centre, or really dissolve the barrier between culture and life Helmut Newton photos used to sell Sainsbury’s economy baked beans?

ANSWER 8
My revolutionaries see Tate Modern as one of the ways in which the middle classes are brain-washed, along with education generally. (Not a view I share). The process of popularising doesn’t necessarily entail dilution or dumbing down — the Hollywood film was popular but highly original in its heyday. But the modern movement set out to be provocative and revolutionary from the start (Manet?), and popularising the avant-garde is bound to blunt the blade. The entertainment conglomerates that now rule our world can neutralise and absorb almost anything, and one needs educated feet to dance just out of reach of their embrace. People have done it — Dalí, Helmut Newton, Francis Bacon and others.

QUESTION 9
Are the middle classes really at fault here, squeezed as they are between the workers (soldiers, policemen, builders etc.) and the ruling elite who use the workers to maintain and build order? What else are they supposed to do? This comes close to a very important theme for Hard Mag, just what is the role of the middle class intellectual/artist/writer/thinker? What is the responsibility now? Have things changed much in the last 50-60 years? What would you be interested in seeing happen in the next 5-10 years? How far can you see things (such as the art spectacle, middle class attitudes of unfairness and intolerance) continuing to accelerate?

ANSWER 9
The middle classes aren’t at fault. They are the yeomen class, who have given loyal service to the feudal lord, refining their archery and swordsmanship, and now find that they are no longer needed, since the feudal lord has hired foreign mercenaries equipped with the new wonder-weapon, the flintlock. As for the special problems facing the middle-class artist — it looks as if alienation is going to be imposed on him whether he likes it or nor. Most artists and writers in the past have been middle-class, the surrealists to a man, with backgrounds similar to those of the Baader-Meinhof gang. However, the middle-class world against which they rebelled was vast and self-confident. Who today would bother to rebel against the Guardian or Observer-reading, sushi-nibbling, liberal, tolerant middle-class? I think the main target the young writer/artist should rebel against is himself or herself. Treat oneself as the enemy who needs to be provoked and subverted.

QUESTION 10
Is there a role today for an avant-garde? And if so what fields of operation are open to such an avant-garde? Is there the possibility for such an avant-garde within the art world and the world of publishing today?

ANSWER 10
Yes, though it won’t necessarily appear in the places we expect. Follow your own obsessions, use them like stepping stones. and with luck you’ll find your way into your mysterious inner self.

All the best,
J.G. Ballard

..:: MORE INFO:
+ Hard Mag

The exhibition JG Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium, celebrating the work and enduring influence of J.G. Ballard, opens tomorrow at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

Please enjoy the CCCB’s wonderful promotional film for the exhibition, a Lynchian, impressionistic cut up with main ingredients: Marilyn Monroe’s ghost, Ballard’s mellifluous tones, snatched Aphex Twin, what looks like James Dean’s car and a severe case of the night terrors.

And below is the prologue to the exhibition catalogue, a deep tribute to JGB composed by Josep Ramoneda, Director of the CCCB.

Here is the press release with fuller information on JG Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium, opening today at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).

EXHIBITION AT THE CCCB: J.G. Ballard: An Autopsy of the New Millennium

CURATOR: Jordi Costa
DATES: 22 July–2 November 2008
ADVISOR: Marcial Souto
SPACE: Gallery 2
PRODUCTION: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB)
DESIGN: Dani Freixas – Varis Arquitectes, with the collaboration of Pep Anglí
COORDINATION: Miquel Nogués

The CCCB presents the exhibition “JG Ballard. An Autopsy of the New Millennium”, from 22 July to 2 November 2008. The exhibition features the English writer of novels and short stories, considered one of the most intelligent, seminal voices of contemporary fiction.

The literary work of James Graham Ballard (Shanghai, 1930), the paradigm cult writer, has for some time now been looking ahead to dissect the world in which we are now living. His visionary imagination grew in the realms of dreamlike, subjective science fiction and gradually came to embrace an aseptic hyperrealism. Deep down, the themes are always the same: the keys of contemporaneity and the pathologies of our immediate future, as though he were carrying out the autopsy of a stillborn future.

J. G. Ballard has constructed a body of work marked by recurrent themes and obsessive symbols that is capable of transcending generic codes to decipher the present and propose plausible views of the future. This exhibition sets out to offer an itinerary through Ballard’s creative universe: his themes and obsessions, his dissection of the secret keys of the contemporary, the traces of his own life in his fictional body of work, his artistic and literary referents, and his precise, disenchanted intuitions of a future life governed by the concepts of aseptic anti-utopia and disaster.

The exhibition uses a whole range of supports to introduce visitors into the Ballardian world: stage sets, audiovisual installations, the complete library of Ballard’s writings, works by Ballardian artists and miscellaneous documentation.

The exhibition “JG Ballard. An Autopsy of the New Millennium” coincides with this year’s International Literature Festival, Kosmopolis 08. It is therefore included in the festival programme, which devotes a special section to Ballard.

K08 includes two sessions about the work of this English author and his influence on the contemporary cultural imaginary. The first looks at the influence of Ballard’s body of work on Hispanic writers, and the second centres on the English-speaking world, in the form of a dialogue about the various ways in which Ballard’s literature has struck a chord with new generations of writers who identify with the visionary aspect of his work. Participants: Paco Porrúa, Marcial Souto, Marta Peirano, Toby Litt, Bruce Sterling, Agustín Fernández Mallo and V. Vale.

Alpha Channel devotes a further section to Ballard, exploring the audiovisual production inspired by his literature.

Layout of the exhibition

WHAT I BELIEVE

Photo via RE/Search Publications.

The French magazine Science Fiction, edited by Daniel Riche, commissioned a text from J. G. Ballard in which he summed up his personal and artistic credo. The result, published in the January 1984 issue of the publication, was “What I Believe”, a summary of Ballardian poetics which synthesises the obsessions of the author and the ability of his writing to decipher the secret keys of the contemporary world, as well as its disturbing evolutive logic. The canonic version of the text in English appeared in the summer 1984 issue (number eight) of the British magazine Interzone. Below are some excerpts:

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

I believe in Tokyo, Benidorm, La Grande Motte, Wake Island, Eniwetok, Dealey Plaza.

J.G. Ballard

FROM SHANGHAI TO SHEPPERTON

Photo via CCCB.

Despite being fantasy fiction, the literary work of J. G. Ballard handles a repertory of images and obsessions that are closely linked to his own life. These early experiences were to mark his worldview and find a particular form of sublimation in his later literary output.

Son of chemist and textile entrepreneur James Ballard (1902-1967) and of Edna Ballard (1905-1999), J.G. Ballard was born in Shanghai General Hospital on 15 November 1930 and spent his early years in the comfortable surroundings of the international colony in the west of the city. The Japanese invasion of 1937 and the outbreak of World War II brought to an end the hitherto peaceable existence of a British community that ran its everyday life under the aegis of a nostalgia for Victorian society. Between March 1943 and August 1945 the Ballard family was held captive in the Lunghua internment camp.

In semi-autobiographical works such as Empire of the Sun (adapted for the cinema by Steven Spielberg) and The Kindness of Women, the writer revealed the origin of many of the obsessions running through his work. The atomic bomb on Nagasaki, how he adapted to life in a concentration camp and the series of deaths that marked his life (victims of bombings in the streets of Shanghai, the Chinese soldier killed by the Japanese at a train station, the first corpse he dissected in his years as a medical student, the Turkish pilot presumed dead during his years as a pilot at a Canadian base, the premature death of his wife and the death of a close friend) have a correlate in some of the most shocking scenes of his literary work.

The creation of his imaginary world has its epicentre away from the literary circles and bustling cultural life of London, in his home in Shepperton: a territory that the writer considers not as a soulless suburb but as a magical space whose inner light can be freed by imagination, as he illustrates in his novel The Unlimited Dream Company.

LANDSCAPES OF DREAM

Dali meets Ballard. Scan via The Terminal Collection.

J. G. Ballard’s formative years were marked by the attempt to reconcile his incipient literary vocation with the articulation of a voice of his own. His initial contact with psychoanalysis and Surrealist painting opened the door to the construction of a unique and totally distinctive artistic identity. As he saw it, explorations of the unconscious in the fields of science and art offered the most precise reading of the spirit of the time and had predicted some of the more obscure pathways of the 20th century. In the dreamlike, desolate landscapes of Surrealism Ballard recognised the images of his own inner world. His writing not only recreates many of the visions of Surrealism, it also reproduces some of its aesthetic strategies⎯superimpositions, mirroring, false perspectives, mutations⎯in order to explain the deep structure of the real.

INNER SPACE

JGB’s second ‘advertiser’s announcement’ for Ambit magazine. Scan via Mike Holliday.

After discovering science fiction as a reader during his years in Canada as an RAF pilot (1953-54), J. G. Ballard encountered in the genre the ideal framework for his literary creation. From the very first, his sudden emergence in the medium entailed a break with tradition and the dominant currents of the time. To his contemporaries’ technological optimism and fascination for the exploration of outer space, Ballard counterposed an immersion in inner space.

Ballard theorized his singular contribution to the science-fiction genre in an article published in 1962 in New Worlds magazine. “Which way to inner space?” represented a turning point in the evolution of the genre with consequences that only much later became evident. With his theory of inner space, Ballard established a distance between himself and science-fiction forerunners and many of his peers as he sketched out the future direction of the genre. Ballard conquered a new territory for the genre, highlighting the role of science fiction as a mirror of the present and a means to self-exploration.

DISASTER AREA

Photo by Ana Barrado.

The idea of disaster underlies Ballard’s entire body of work though it finds its maximum expression in works such as The Drowned World and The Drought. In the face of disaster, typical Ballard characters do not act like characters in a 1970s’ disaster film. Far from trying to re-establish order, Ballardian characters see cataclysm as a focus of attraction and seem ready to accept the rules that this new reality imposes, though this may mean renouncing their own identity, wisdom and, inevitably, survival. In this process, the characters will discover a number of hidden truths about themselves. What is happening is not so much self-destruction as the seduction of change and the tortuous path towards psychological plenitude.

The idea comes from Joseph Conrad, and in Ballard’s hands it becomes the basis for his particular conception of science fiction: a literature that speaks to us of radical changes in mindset, fundamental transformations in perception—in short, of the constant evolution of inner space.

TECHNOLOGY AND PORNOGRAPHY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

J. G. Ballard’s career entered a feverish state of change in the mid-1960s, following the premature death of his wife Mary Ballard from pneumonia in San Juan (Alicante). His traditional interest in the avant-garde and in experimental literature completely intoxicated his writing, which exploded in a radical switch to fragmentation, technical language and a taste for the abstract. The Terminal Beach (1964) blazed a trail that the later books The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) and Crash (1973) were to take to the limit. The author focussed on a form of contemporaneity marked by the death of feeling and a shift from a physical to a mediatic landscape in which reality and fiction are blurred. The more classical High Rise (1974), Concrete Island (1975), The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) and Hello America (1981) continued to develop this vision of an essentially psychopathological 20th century in which pornographic imagery, technological fetishism and dehumanised architecture converge in a traumatic cosmology.

ASEPSIS AND NEOBARBARISM

Photo by Ana Barrado.

It is significant, and deeply disturbing, that J. G. Ballard’s literature has moved from science fiction to the realist register without abandoning its main themes. The most recent passage in Ballard’s narrative work⎯opening with the novella Running Wild (1988) and for the moment closing with Kingdom Come (2006)⎯tours the aseptic architecture of gated communities, residential areas, technoparks, holiday villages and shopping malls in order to extend the terminal diagnosis of a humanity disconnected from its primary instincts. According to the writer, only injections of violence can disrupt the lethargy and make a new utopia possible.

THE BALLARD LIBRARY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

Here, the exhibition presents the first editions (in English) of the 42 books written by Ballard and offers visitors the chance to consult modern editions published in Spanish.

The Wind from Nowhere. Berkeley, New York, 1962
The Voices of Time. Berkeley, New York, 1962
Billenium. Berkeley, New York, 1962
The Drowned World. Gollancz, London, 1963
Passport to Eternity. Berkeley, New York, 1963
The Terminal Beach. Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1964
The Burning World. Berkeley, New York, 1964
The Drought. Jonathan Cape, London, 1965
The Four-Dimensional Nightmare. Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, 1963
The Crystal World. Jonathan Cape, London, 1966
The Impossible Man. Berkeley, New York, 1966
The Voices of Time. Berkeley, New York, 1966
The Terminal Beach. Penguin, London, 1966
The Disaster Area. Jonathan Cape, London, 1967
The Overloaded Man. Panther, London, 1967
The Atrocity Exhibition. Jonathan Cape, London, 1970
The Inner Landscape. Paperback Library, New York, 1971
Chronopolis and other stories. Putnam, New York, 1972
Love & Napalm: Export U.S.A. Grove Press, New York, 1972
Vermilion Sands. Jonathan Cape, London, 1973
Crash. Jonathan Cape, London, 1973
Concrete Island. Farrar, Jonathan Cape, London, 1974
High-Rise. Jonathan Cape, London, 1975
Low-Flying Aircraft. Jonathan Cape, London, 1976
The Unlimited Dream Company. Jonathan Cape, London, 1979
Hello America. Jonathan Cape, London, 1981
News from the Sun. Interzone, London, 1982
Myths of the Near Future. Jonathan Cape, London, 1982
Empire of the Sun. Gollancz, London, 1984
The Day of Forever. Gollancz, London, 1986
The Day of Creation. Gollancz, London, 1987
Running Wild. Jonathan Cape, London, 1988
War Fever. Collins, London, 1990
The Kindness of Women. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, 1991
Rushing to Paradise. Flamingo, London, 1996
Cocaine Nights. Flamingo, London, 1996
A User’s Guide to the Millennium. Picador, New York, 1996
Super-Cannes. Flamingo, London, 2000
JG Ballard. The Complete Short Stories. Flamingo, London, 2001
Millennium People. Flamingo, London, 2003
Kingdom Come. Fourth Estate, London, 2006
Miracles of Life. Shanghai to Shepperton. An Autobiography. Fourth Estate, London, 2008

BALLARDIAN ART

Image by Michelle Lord.

Ballard’s work represents an open-ended body of work that still has revelations in store for his readers.

On the one hand, Ballard functions as an oracle who is proved right with every day that passes.

On the other, he exerts an enormous influence on creators in all disciplines, from fantasy cinema to industrial music.

J. G. Ballard forms part of the small group of creators capable of inspiring an adjective. Collins English Dictionary defines the adjective Ballardian as “1. of James Graham Ballard (J. G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments”.

Proceeding from the most diverse realms of creation, artists who accept the adjective as a badge of honour are increasingly numerous. To identify oneself as Ballardian is to form part of a widening circle of initiates aware of the central role played by an author who is a stranger to labels and resists any attempt at classification.

At this point, the exhibition immerses us in the work of various authors to have been described as Ballardian: Ana Barrado, Ann Lislegaard, Michelle Lord and creators of home cinema using mobile phones.

GENERAL INFORMATION

DATES
22 July – 2 November 2008

TIMES
From Tuesday to Sunday and public holidays: from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Thursdays: from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Closed on Mondays except public holidays

PRICES

Admission: €4.40
Wednesdays (except public holidays) and group visits: €3.30
Free admission: under-16s, the unemployed, Friends of the CCCB and every first Wednesday of the month.
Concessions on Wednesdays (except public holidays) for senior citizens and students: €3.30

FURTHER INFORMATION
CCCB – www.cccb.org

CCCB PRESS OFFICE
Mònica Muñoz – Irene Ruiz – Lucia Calvo
Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona
93 306 41 23 / 93 306 41 00
premsa@cccb.org

..:: Previously on Ballardian…
+ Autopsy of the New Millennium: JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona

…:: FURTHER INFO:

+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballard at Kosmopolis
+ Official exhibition blog

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

Enormous thanks to Mike Bonsall, who once again has transcribed a Ballard interview from the BBC’s latest round of Miracles of Life promotions. From the Nightwaves program on Radio 3, it’s my favourite from this latest batch. The interviewer, Philip Dodd, engages JGB in such a way that a different spin is applied to the familiar elements from Ballard’s life. But he’s also wise enough to avoid the ‘Ballardian cliches’ that we know so well from Empire of the Sun, instead focusing on the really interesting strata of the autobiography where new and revealing information can be found.

His reference, “‘The skull beneath the skin’ as Eliot said of Webster…”, is to Eliot’s poem Whispers of Immortality that starts:

Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

…Webster being the gruesome Jacobean playwright of The Duchess of Malfi (who I only know from ‘Shakespeare in Love!).

I originally thought PD was saying that Walter Benjamin had written an essay called ‘The German Jew’, but that’s a description of him. The idea of the Angel of History comes from his essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Which does sound suitably Ballardian!

Finally, the reference to ‘the growing good of the world’ is in Middlemarch by George Eliot. Sorry if you already know all that, but I’ve learned a lot!’

M.B.

Philip Dodd: …Just two riveting writers on tonight’s programme, first Martin Amis ‘a man with acid in his inkwell’, to quote the New York Times, and second, JG Ballard — in my view, Britain’s greatest living novelist — who’s written a mesmeric autobiography:

J.G. Ballard: I was born in Shanghai General Hospital on the 15th of November 1930, after a difficult delivery that my mother, who was slightly built and slim hipped, liked to describe to me in later years, as if this revealed something about the larger thoughtlessness of the world. Over dinner she would often tell me that my head was badly deformed during birth, and I feel that for her this partly explained my wayward character as a teenager and young man (though doctor friends say that there is nothing remarkable about such a birth).

PD: …Now if Martin Amis, who was born in 1949, knows war and violence at second hand, It’s arguable that JG Ballard was marinaded in them. In his novel, Empire of the Sun, he wrote a fictional account of his childhood days living in Shanghai under Japanese occupation. Now he’s written his memoir, Miracles of Life, which offers an extraordinary account of the daily killing that the young Jim Ballard witnessed during the occupation, when for a time he was interned with his family. Reading Miracles of Life, it’s clear that those Shanghai years were the defining ones for the novelist’s imagination. It’s there that he first encountered a disintegrating city, an image that’s become such a powerful part of his iconography in novels such as The Drowned World, about a city dying into a beautiful lagoon. Miracles of Life is subtitled ‘Shanghai to Shepperton’, and it takes in not only his childhood years in Shanghai, but also the shock of coming to live in England in the late 40s, his time as a medical student at Cambridge — his description of the pathology class is worth the price of the book alone — his life as a door-to-door salesman, and in the RAF in Canada. But the book also includes very personally painful subjects, from his alienation from his mother and father, to the death of his young wife. When we met in a wonderfully noisy flat, I suggested that Shanghai, and his experiences there, clearly provided the stage for what would become his preoccupations; spectacle, sex, violence and death.

JGB: Death was everywhere, in a way that’s almost impossible to imagine. We lived in a suburban house — beggars died on our doorstep. And it’s impossible to imagine, living in Shepperton for example, or Tunbridge Wells in a comfortable house with nine or ten servants, and some elderly beggar, leaning against the wall in a drive and quietly dying, without anyone coming to his aid. Unbelievable, here, but it was all too believable then, I mean, it was routine.

PD: Was it because they were Chinese who were dying that your parents, in a sense, just took their dying for granted?

JGB: Yes, I think the fact that they were Chinese played a large part in it. Firstly of course there were so many Chinese; there had been civil wars from the 1920s onwards. From ’37 onwards there was the Japanese invasion of China. Millions of Chinese, destitute peasants for the most part, were struggling to get into Shanghai; why I don’t know because there was nothing there for them, nothing at all. Tens of thousands died on the streets every year; cholera, smallpox, typhoid were rife. I mean it was a place that sort of challenged every conceivable assumption that we now make about what constitutes civilised life.

PD: There’s this small boy, you, Jim Ballard, cycling his way, kind of, round the city and, you know, in this book you’re very tender towards your own children — after all the book is called Miracles of Life in response to your sense of the importance of children — and yet you as a child kinda face this and, the way you write about it, as if it’s just the wind blowing through the streets. This death, this boy – you — the younger self just kind of — just like rain.

JGB: I’d never known anything else; one has to bear that in mind. As far as my parents were concerned, they must have been shocked to the core when they first arrived in Shanghai in, whatever it was, 1929. I was never really able to draw from either of my parents any sort of answer to the question: Why didn’t we help that old beggar who was dying on our doorstep? What Shanghai proved was that kindness, which we place a huge value on — there, things were completely different. It’s very hard to convey — a kind of terminal world where all human values really have ceased to function. Every conceivable kind of, you know, entrepreneurial venture capitalism going full-blast. It’s very difficult to visualise a world were, sort of pity, didn’t really exist. Kindness didn’t exist, and could be dangerous. I think that’s something I learned very early on as a boy, to place too much reliance on kindness is a big error because it’s such an intangible thing, and the supply of kindness is finite and can be switched off.

PD: One of the things that’s very powerful in the book, and I think one of the things that binds together Shanghai and Shepperton is the sense that the world is a stage. Shanghai is this extraordinary stage that gets destroyed through the war and Shepperton, this blessed English suburb is a place where films are made, and this sense that actually beneath this staging is just that violence and to put it in the most blunt sense, just death.

JGB: I don’t want to give the wrong impression of the book but I think coming to terms with death is one of the main themes of the book. I mean, the death all around me; as a boy, in Shanghai, the death of Chinese, countless Chinese at the hands of the Japanese military, during the war itself, personal tragedy that brutally crossed my own life, the death of my wife, but also the experience of say, dissecting cadavers when I was a medical student in Cambridge, a very important phase of my life in fact, where I think I was trying to carry out my own work, a sort of — I don’t know how to describe it — a sort of restorative pathology. I was trying to sort of, analyse, what had happened to all the dead Chinese I’d seen, and used the cadavers in the dissecting room as, sort of, exploratory vehicles almost.

PD: ‘The skull beneath the skin’ as Eliot said of Webster…

JGB: Webster, yes.

PD: …is something very powerful in this book,

JGB: You know war is — a world war — is so dislocating, it shatters everything. Also one has to accept that violence in many ways is quite seductive, particularly when you’re in your teens. It’s not the glamour of violence that you see in Hollywood films. Violence — very clearly defines itself. The brutality of, say, Japanese soldiers towards Chinese civilians was really a matter of routine, you knew exactly what was going to happen. A couple of bored Japanese sergeants ride a rickshaw all the way from Shanghai, quite a journey, and then decide they don’t want to pay; more than that, they decide they’ll have a little fun, kick the poor rickshaw coolie’s only source of livelihood into matchwood and then they turn on him, kick him to death. I witnessed such an event. I mean, I think I knew exactly what was going to happen and everybody else did. Violence is very — it’s almost settling — there is no disputing it. It’s seductive in that it has a logic of its own — one almost misses it when it’s gone — a terrible thing to say, but there is an element of truth in that. One tries to recreate episodes of violence because they do tell a kind of truth — a final truth — about human beings and what we are.

PD: When you came to England, you register very well in the book, the kind of cataclysmic or non-cataclysmic shock of arriving in this place. The word that keeps coming up in the book is ‘it needed to change’ was that something you palpably and viscerally felt then?

JGB: Absolutely, I mean, I was so shocked when I arrived. You’ve got to remember that I was brought up on a huge and extremely potent mythology, the mythology of Chums annuals, of the Just William Books, AA Milne, Peter Pan, to some extent, the image of a middle-class England. I think there was a sense that this country had collectively decided to believe these nostalgic fantasies about itself, that shook me. Why on earth would anyone want to believe all this nonsense? Slowly, change arrived, actually I think it came across the Atlantic; supermarkets and motorways, it really didn’t change in a really radical way until the 60s.

PD: The word change now being polluted by a kind of a — Whig liberalism — a slow incremental change for the good; what George Eliot rather wonderfully once called ‘the growing good of the world’. I can’t think of anybody less, who believes in that than you, and one of the things — reading this book — I felt was that you want change and you’re future oriented, but actually you’re like the angel of history, Walter Benjamin’s great essay, the German Jew, who said actually that the angel of history is blown towards the future, but looking towards the past.

JGB: I think past and future were just so entangled in the minds of the English after the war. I don’t think they knew really which way they were facing. Some people can cope with nostalgia, I think the French, for example, do it very well, I think the Americans do. I think we, the English, do not cope well with nostalgia; it is used and exploited to buttress the class system.

PD: But somehow you’ve been formed, haven’t you, by the past, it’s not something you can let go of; you’re not a Whig historian who can just forget the past.

JGB: The past sits astride me like a — like a sort of crashed aircraft straddling a railway line, or a tank that’s sort of thrown one of its treads, the crew can rotate the turret, but not much more. I think I knew that change would eventually arrive. Because I’d been brought up in this ultra-modern city; I’d seen American cars, I’d seen modernity, whether in the form of art Deco architecture, cinemas, nightclubs and the like. I’d seen consumerism in Shanghai, going full blast, and I knew that it would arrive sooner or later. I remember going to see the This is Tomorrow show at the Whitechapel Gallery in, I think, 1956. That had an enormous effect on me. I’d just begun writing science fiction and Hamilton and Paolozzi’s exhibits in particular at the Whitechapel firmed the direction that I felt my own writing should take. They were celebrating consumerism — they were celebrating the art of the street — neon canopies over cinemas and the like.

PD: But that’s only half the truth of you because — I’m going to reach into a bag — where I’ve brought a book, which is an early book of yours, called Disaster Area, mid-60s book, rather wonderful book from mid-60s, but on the front is a charnel house on top of which are sat a few of Edgar Allan Poe’s ravens — there’s a darkness in you…

JGB: I didn’t pick that picture.

PD: …No, no I’m sure, but it’s a fair reflection of what the book’s about — there’s a dark side to you isn’t there?

JGB: Well, I mean a large part of my fiction has been an exploration of, you know, the dark side of the sun. Consumerism, you know, lights up the world — but it has its dark side. You know a large part of my fiction has been an attempt to show what happens at midnight, when the lights go out and a different set of lights — rather more lurid — come on. My more recent novels, over the last ten years, I’ve looked hard at what I see as the, sort of, the psychopathology of the city and the sort of social structures, the big office complexes and the like that, you know, that we now inhabit.

PD: There’s another book inside Miracles of Life, we’ve spoken very much about your — what I call the ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. But there is another book which is the book of two families. There’s the family you grew up in, and there’s the family that you had, your own children. And the early part of the Shanghai is an extraordinary kind of Proustian Remembrance of Things Past and then there’s a bluntness about your account of your parents that I found quite shocking.

JGB: I try to explain it in the book. I try to suggest that a lot of what seems to be callousness in my parents actually reflected a different, sort of different role, that childhood played then. Childhood was a gamble; it was a gamble for the child, but it was a gamble for the parents. So many children died in the era before antibiotics, so many children died without ever leaving childhood. Whereas today we tend to measure our success as human beings by our success as parents, parents felt, I think, to some extent detached. Parents felt towards their children in many ways — though it sounds bizarre — the way people would feel towards domestic pets. You love your Labrador dearly, but if it catches some ghastly, dog disease, and dies, you don’t blame yourself.

PD: I suppose the reason I ask that, I often think you’ve spent a lot of your writing life — flirting with confessional. I mean in Crash, 1973, you call a character after yourself; in Empire of the Sun the boy is called Jim. You’ve sort of outed yourself, at this late stage of your career; and even the cover of the autobiography there’s the picture of you, and a picture of you and your children on the back cover. What’s kind of compelled this revelatory, because you’ve always been the most frugal of people it strikes me with information about yourself?

JGB: I’m not sure if that’s altogether true. I think there’s no doubt that my ordinary, everyday life — my children have played an absolutely central role and have been much more important to me than being a writer really.

PD: You really believe that?

JGB: Yes, because whenever there’s been as a choice between the two, family life came first. You know, if they wanted me to watch Blue Peter, I watched Blue Peter — willingly; I wanted to watch it with them, even if that meant that I wouldn’t be able to type out a short story I was working on. I felt a commitment to my children once my wife had died that dominated everything. You know we’re all mysteries to ourselves, most of us have only a hazy notion of who we are we really are. Writing the particular sort of imaginative fiction that I write does tend to expose you to all kinds of hazards, you know, very easy to slip off the edge of the sidewalk and find yourself in the gutter. It’s very hard to understand, and I remember my wife — and I had a happy marriage — but I remember my wife reading some of my early short stories, and saying, ‘Why are there all these tormented marriages, with these strange and rather unappealing women – where do they come from?’ Poor husband sort of would hide behind his typewriter and say: ‘Errrr – well, you’ve got to understand; I’m not a realistic writer.’ But it is a point, you know — where do they come from? I wrote this Miracles of Life when I was 76, quite an advanced age, you know, I realised the very strange currents that make up a life.

PD: You could have ended the book other than you did, I mean, you’ve even shared with the reader that you’re ill, that you’ve got cancer and I kept trying to just work out — what had possessed you to do that — and I was thinking of Philip Larkin who didn’t even want to be told he’d got cancer.

JGB: People who’ve watched me sort of evolve as a writer know that my fiction is full of drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels that, you know, are highly significant elements in what makes up my world. I only wrote the autobiography because I knew I had advanced cancer. In fact my consultant, who looks after me, urged me to write. Once I’d embarked on telling the story of my life I had to press on until, sort of, the final chapter, and there was no point in hiding, hiding behind vague hopes of the future, because basically I hadn’t got a future. I think I discovered things about myself which I might not have done otherwise, particularly in my relationships with my parents. I think I have to face the fact that I didn’t really like them very much. I tried in my earlier fiction — and in my earlier life — I mean, to maintain a kind of neutral stance, particularly towards my mother. I mean it is perfectly possible she wasn’t a very nice human being, I don’t think she was. I don’t think either of them had that big an influence on me, one habit I’d learned from the the war, was that I’d have to look after myself. You couldn’t really rely on other people. One of the huge sustaining myths is that you can rely on your parents in a time of crisis, WWII showed me that this isn’t the case. I think that I was right to be honest, there would have been an element of deceit if I’d not mentioned it. After all, the final chapter is only two pages long, and it places everything in its proper position.

Original photography by Steve Double (Ballard) and Jerry Bauer (Self).

The indefatigable Mike Bonsall has kindly transcribed the Will Self segment on BBC Radio 4′s Open Book program; listen to the entire program on the Open Book website. Mike says: “Interesting to note the ‘quote’ from Millennium People at the start (and probably the second one), isn’t taken directly from the text but I’m guessing is a slice from an adaptation which ran some time ago as a short serial on Radio 4.”

The interviewer is Mariella Frostrup, the regular presenter of Open Book.

Reader: Outside Broadcasting House the demonstrators pressed closer to the entrance. A smoke bomb shot a gust of black vapour into the air. A startled security guard tripped over one of the barriers and fell to the ground. The protesters seized their chance and surged past him, forcing their way through the doors, led by one of the BBC producers who had come over to our side. They planned to invade the new studio and broadcast the manifesto of middle-class rebellion to the listening nation, mouths agape over their muesli.

Not the staff response to Mark Thompson’s recent BBC cuts, but JG Ballard’s vividly imagined revolt of the middle-classes in Millennium People. Will Self will be telling me about that book, and his passion for the work of JG Ballard…

Mariella Frostrup: …there’s a new book … from the novelist JG Ballard, but this is non-fiction. An autobiography dealing with his childhood in Shanghai, the trauma of World War Two, his family’s internment by the Japanese, his eventual move to Britain and a productive life spent writing in Shepperton. Much of this Shanghai story was included in the Booker nominated novel Empire of the Sun. But alongside more autobiographical work, he’s also renowned for his Science Fiction novels and more recently a string of very engaging books about the malevolent influence of a technologically obsessed society, the moral vacuum at the heart of modern life, and a middle-class who are, quite literally revolting. Well, to offer a reader’s guide to Ballard, and to help me pick my way through his work, I’m joined by one of his best-known fans, the novelist Will Self. Will — welcome. Ballard has produced a lot of work though; seventeen novels, and many many more short stories, so where would you invite somebody to start?

Will Self: I’ll declare my colours, I think he’s probably the most significant and influential — or among a handful of the most significant and influential — writers of the English language since the second war. So, why not read them in order? You could do that and get the full development. Perhaps an easier way in, and there’s nothing wrong with sometimes taking things easy, is a kind of autobiographical way into it. I mean many people — when Empire of the Sun came out and then a second sort of quasi-autobiographical novel, The Kindness of Women, which came out in 1991 — felt that these works recapitulated and explained a lot of the themes, the motifs, the kind of currents that ran through his more, in a sense attention-grabbing, fictional work, they saw what the genesis was. So you could start with those two novels and then work into the fiction from them.

MF: Because the books that preceded Empire of the Sun had mainly been what we might call, for shorthand, science fiction, hadn’t they? And they had been sort of post-cataclysmic novels about dystopian futures.

WS: Mmm, they are kind of apocalyptic. I mean he kicks off, Ballard, with this book The Drowned World which is astonishingly prescient like a lot of his science fiction. I mean Ballard, to get this straight, has always viewed his sort of science fiction as being concerned with inner, rather than outer space. He’s not death-rays or weird aliens or anything like that at all, he’s very much writing about parallel worlds that mutate out of our own or are latent within our own. And in the Drowned World, which really showcases this preoccupation, you have a strange journey, through a very recognisably drowned Britain really — so very astonishing prescient about global warming.

MF: And I think published in about 1962?

WS: ’62 is The Drowned World, and then you have The Burning World (or The Drought), The Crystal World, and then you get to another kind of thematic break in Ballard’s work, when he publishes The Atrocity Exhibition, which doesn’t have a conventional narrative, it contains some of his most extreme imagery of, kind of, physical discorporation. It maps out the territory of what Ballard has described as the Death of Affect, this kind of — I think like a writer who he was friendly with in the 60s and who he knew fairly well, William Burroughs — Ballard’s view was that in the post-Hiroshima era there had been this kind of death of feeling in western culture, and a lot of his shock-tactics and his extreme imagery, are aimed at mapping this landscape. Contained in the Atrocity Exhibition, is the kernel, the germ, of perhaps one of his most famous novels, Crash — there is a section of the Atrocity Exhibition entitled Crash — and then he goes on to publish Crash in 1973.

MF: Described by one critic as ‘the most repulsive book I’ve ever read’!

WS: It’s a book that carries with it this most astonishing penumbra. I know that one early editor that read it sort of suggested that Ballard sought psychiatric help. As many people will know, it’s a book about the relationship between sexual excitation and car accidents. It begins with this incredible description of how this man who pursues sexual kicks through car crashes, achieves his aim:

Reader: Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the limousine of the film actress, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a haemorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats when I pushed my way through the police engineers an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the film actress Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Vaughan had dreamed of dying for so many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights. As I knelt over Vaughan’s body she placed a gloved hand to her throat.

WS: Now, around this time another major theme I think begins to develop in Ballard’s work, which is this idea of a kind of dystopian critique of contemporary society and it begins with a novel called High-Rise. In High-Rise a war develops between the kind of lower-class tenants of the building and the upper-class tenants on the top. And this kind of social, almost political critique, Ballard develops through a series of books and it kind of goes on into the later kind of — tetrarchy, trilogy, I don’t know what – quartet, of novels which begins with Cocaine Nights in 1996 and is still running; it’s gone through Millennium People, Super-Cannes, and now on to Kingdom Come. That kind of social critique is another thing.

MF: One of my favourites, I have to say, is Millennium People and the notion of this kind of disenfranchised middle-class who decide finally that enough is enough. We’ve got a reading from that as well, maybe we’ll play it then I’d love to hear your thoughts on that book.

Reader: The residents of Chelsea Marina had launched a small crime wave on the surrounding neighbourhood, as executives and middle-managers gave up their jobs; there was an outbreak of petty thieving from delis and off-licences. Every parking meter in Chelsea Marina was vandalised and the council street-cleaners, traditional working-class to the core, refused to enter the estate, put off by the menacing middle-class air. Removed from their expensive schools, bored teenagers haunted Slone Square and the King’s Road, trying their hands at drug-dealing and car theft.

MF: It’s enough to have you setting your four-by-four alight isn’t it Will?

WS: Yes, it’s difficult to tell with Ballard exactly how far his tongue is in his cheek, or whether it’s wrapped right the way round the back of his head. I think the interesting thing about Millennium People perhaps, as opposed to the two precursor books, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes — which are kind of a piece — is that it’s very funny. It’s very, very sly and very, very funny. And he himself has been absolutely unashamed in professing his contempt and hatred for the metropolitan bourgeoisie, he’s always had this thing that he lives out at Shepperton.

MF: I can’t let you go — seeing as his new book, coming out in February, is an autobiography — without talking a bit more about the autobiographical work. Was that very straightforward in comparison? I mean Empire of the Sun — a pretty classic novel in most aspects?

WS: I think the thing about Empire of the Sun is that it is relatively straightforward; it seems to be a naturalistic novel. But in a way I’d sort of urge people coming fresh to Ballard perhaps not to leap in with Empire of the Sun. Read a couple of the other ones first, because it’s fascinating to come to Empire of the Sun and see that this is the crucible of his perspective of the world. His father worked in Shanghai; they lived in the kind of English canton there in a kind of wealthy upper-middle-class atmosphere in the late 1930s, and then the cataclysm of the collapse of Chinese society, of the invasion of the Japanese from the north. And he, you know he would see people dead on the streets on his way to school, the dead and dying, and then of course the internment by the Japanese. And so all of these images of, kind of, dystopian, run down, fractured societies and indeed his imagery of hyper-shiny technological futures comes out of the war. So all of that imagery is there once you’ve read some of the other books to kind of see what its genesis is in Empire of the Sun.

The companion book to Empire of the Sun is Kindness of Women. And many people feel that Ballard is perhaps a bit too heavy for their taste, a little too disturbing, a little too warped. Kindness of Women is all of those things and it’s also an extremely affecting book about love and about the impact of love on somebody’s life. This is a novel that actually kind of made me cry and that’s not something that I can say about many things apart from people treading hard on my feet.

ABOVE: Youtube uplink for Shanghai Jim (BBC Bookmark, 1991; produced by James Runcie).

NOTE: The following is a transcription taken from J.G. Ballard’s commentary for the documentary Shanghai Jim. It also transcribes the film’s brief interviews with his daughters, Fay and Bea, and the film’s direct quotes from Ballard’s work.

See here for Pippa Tandy’s appraisal of Shanghai Jim.

A week after Christmas I left Shanghai for ever. Some six hundred former internees, mostly women and children, sailed for England in the converted meat carrier. My father and the other Britons staying behind in Shanghai stood on the pier at Hongkew, waving to us as the Arrawa drew away from them across the slow brown tide. When we reached the middle of the channel, working our way through scores of American destroyers and landing craft, I left my mother and walked to the stern of the ship. The relatives on the pier were still waving to us, and my father saw me and raised his arm, but I found it impossible to wave back to him, something I regretted for many years. Perhaps I blamed him for sending me away from this mysterious and exhilarating city.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (71-2).

J.G. BALLARD: Many people have said to me, ‘What an extraordinary life you’ve had’, but of course my childhood in Shanghai was far closer to the way the majority of people on this planet, in previous centuries and in the 20th century, have lived than, say, life in Western Europe and the United States. It’s we here, in our quiet suburbs and our comparatively peaceful cities, who are the anomalies.

I described Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women as ‘semi-autobiographical’, which they are. Many of the events which took place are straightforward transcriptions of what actually happened to me. My first intact memories really date from 1937 when the Japanese invaded China, and all of Shanghai except for the International Settlement, and there was tremendously bitter fighting in and around the city.

Hans Gebruers as young Jim in Shanghai Jim.

I don’t ever remember being frightened. I think it was because we lived very protected lives as the children of Westerners in Shanghai. I was moving around the city, as it were, officially: I travelled everywhere in my parents’ car with a chauffeur. And unofficially, of course, I was always pretending to go and see a friend who lived in Amherst Avenue. And I’d ride on my little bike, I’d ride all over Shanghai in the most extraordinary way. I don’t know whether it was the magic of childhood that gave me safe passage, or the sort of a built-in arrogance of a Westerner who took for granted that he wouldn’t be harmed.

I felt a surge of excitement on entering Shanghai. 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. The garish billboards and nightclub neon signs, the young Chinese gangsters and violent beggars … were part of an overlit realm more exhilarating than the American comics and radio serials I so adored. … My father called Shanghai the most advanced city in the world.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (18, 19).

J.G. BALLARD: This is 31 Amherst Avenue, as it was — the house in Shanghai where I spent my childhood. Coming back to Shanghai for the first time since 1946 has been a very strange experience and of course the house is the strangest of all. I spent my entire childhood here, and I really came something close to adult life here. So it is a strange experience. I keep trying to think what would have happened had the war not taken place. I would have gone on living here, and probably would have gone on living in Shanghai. So I see around me here a sort of alternate life that I never actually managed to live because of the war.

Time had stopped in Amherst Avenue, as motionless as the wall of dust that hung across the rooms, briefly folding itself around Jim when he walked through the deserted house. Almost forgotten scents, a faint taste of carpet, reminded him of the period before the war. For three days he waited for his mother and father to return. Every morning he climbed onto the sloping roof above his bedroom window and gazed over the residential streets in the western suburbs of Shanghai. He watched the columns of Japanese tanks move into the city…

J.G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun (45).

J.G. BALLARD: It was very strange walking into my old bedroom on the top floor of the house because that still has its original blue paintwork, and I recognised the little bookshelves where I kept my books, my copies of Chums’ Annual, and Boy’s Own Paper, and all my American comics, and the bathroom attached to it. It was like a sort of time capsule, really, that I’d stepped into after all these years.

So much of ordinary life today is driven by the most peculiar psychological forces. In the case of my own fiction, there is an attempt as well to try to understand the changed nature of fiction and reality that constitutes our world.

Of all the places of wonder, the Great World Amusement Park on the Avenue Edward VII most amazed me, and contained the magic heart of Shanghai within its six floors. … A vast warehouse of light and noise, the Amusement Park was filled with magicians and fireworks, slot machines and sing-song girls. A haze of frying fat gleamed in the air, and formed a greasy film on my face, mingling with the smell of joss-sticks and incense. Stunned by the din, I would follow Yang as he slipped through the acrobats and Chinese actors striking their gongs.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (18).

J.G. BALLARD: All my characters spend their time constructing personal mythologies which can sustain their inner lives. My characters tend to be solitary, which is an unfortunate trait I think inherited from me, and they are experimenting with themselves as if they were…dreams.

Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adruft from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.

Jim had begun to dream of wars. At night the same silent films seemed to flicker against the wall of his bedroom in Amherst Avenue, and transformed his mind into a deserted newsreel theater. … Fragments of his dreams followed Jim around the city…

J.G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun (3).

J.G. BALLARD: Our sense of security in Shanghai came to an end without any doubt after Pearl Harbour, when the Japanese seized the International Settlement. Then it was quite clear that Western power had vanished, to all intents and purposes, and that the Japanese were masters now. I admit I admired the Japanese for their strength. I couldn’t help but compare the Japanese soldiers, and all boys’ hero worship, with the English officers, who surrendered without firing a shot in Singapore even though the British forces outnumbered the Japanese by three to one. I thought of these formative experiences all the time, sometimes without being aware of it, and it certainly filtered through into my fiction, and it’s only in Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women that I’ve written directly about my experiences here.

‘This Chinese high school…’; Jim Ballard re-enters Lunghua Camp almost 50 years on.

This Chinese high school, about eight miles south of Shanghai, was known during the Second World War as Lunghua Camp. And here, after Pearl Harbour, when the Japanese entered the war against the Allies, about 2000 British nationals, all of them civilians — a few Belgians, and about 50 American merchant seamen — were interned for nearly three years.

ABOVE: The roof of F Block: JGB shows us the way…

ABOVE: …to the old assembly hall at Lunghua Camp.

We’re standing on the roof of what used to be F Block, the main administrative building in Lunghua Camp. Over on the left you can just see G Block, where I lived with my family. That was one of the small family blocks in the camp. Every room had a family of four people.

This was the assembly hall, the old teacher training college in the 1930s. It was converted to an open-plan dormitory with a maze of cubicles of old sheets hung on bits of string. And I think probably about 100 people lived in there, all bachelors. Just through the trees you can catch a glimpse of one of the dining halls, which were in use for the first two years. Then to the right, the camp water tower. And over here is D Block, which is a larger version of the block in which I lived. That again is another family block.

This building, which housed on the third floor the Japanese Commandants offices, was a whole set of dormitories in which married couples lived. Again, it was a maze of cubicles made out of sheets and old blankets and heaven knows what.

I can remember the day we arrived, brought here in buses with our suitcases, and we brought our own bedding. This room was the room that my mother and father, sister and I shared for nearly three years. It was so crowded, in fact, that during the day my father, who slept there, raised his mattress against the wall so that we had a little space where we’d put up a card table and eat our meals. Otherwise there was just a door’s width between the beds. I slept over there, my mother there and my sister there. In a strange way I quite enjoyed my life here because I had so much freedom, and I was part of this very large nuclear family of 2000 people.

We got on very friendly terms with them. I remember wearing their kendo armour and duelling with them, hanging around their staff quarters, trying to look at their weapons which they were very careful not to let me handle. There was a certain sort of protocol for dealing with the Japanese; you never provoked them in any way.

I know that when the war ended there was an uncertain period of about two weeks when no one knew — the Japanese didn’t know — if the war had ended after the Emperor’s broadcast, or at least for a few days. And I remember deciding to walk to Shanghai, and I climbed through the wire and I set off northwards towards the western suburbs and Amherst Ave and reached a railway line, where I came across a tragic incident in which some Japanese soldiers were tormenting a Chinese to death.

On the concrete platform were four Japanese soldiers… Sitting with his back to a telephone pole, hands tied behind him, was a Chinese youth in a white shirt and dark trousers. Bands of wire circled his chest, and he breathed in empty gasps. … He seemed out of place on this rural railway platform, unlike the soldiers and myself. … The corporal worked swiftly, coiling lengths of wire around the Chinese and knotting them with efficient snatches of his wrists. … The railway line hummed in the heat, a sound like pain.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (55, 56, 61, 59).

J.G. BALLARD: We lived through very dangerous times. I think had not the atom bombs been dropped, there were plans, so we heard afterwards, for the Japanese to evacuate the camp and march us all up the country, to where they would dispose of us before they made their last stand against the Americans at the mouth of the Yangtze. In fact, this didn’t happen because of the sudden end of the war.

In Europe there’d been enormous cruelty during the Second World War, but in a sense it was explicable in terms of the evil of Nazi ideology; it all flowed from that. But in the Far East, where I was brought up, there was no explanation, and this was the curious thing. Enormous cruelty had taken place there. Millions of people had been murdered for no real reason other than an innate streak of violence in human nature. I think when I came to England I had this unfinished baggage. I wanted to make sense of my past life which I’d left behind. By 1949, when I went up to Cambridge, to university, and the Communists had taken over China, I knew I would never go back. But I had this huge, unresolved set of questions.

Originally I wanted to become a psychiatrist and I think it was a case, really, of ‘physician, heal thyself’. Psychiatry seemed one way of coming to terms, of merely understanding what all this was, and to become a psychiatrist I had to first become a doctor. So I spent two years as a medical student, cutting up cadavers. I think every medical student can remember the first moment, walking into the dissecting room: a strange cross between a butcher’s shop and a nightclub. It was quite jolting, even though I’d seen a great number of dead bodies, to see them actually laid out under this strange light in this rather theatrical way on these glass tables. In those days they were a faintly green colour, as a result of the formaline.

The strange thing to me, and I think this is true, they don’t actually look like the dead — they look like visitors from another planet. As you begin the process of dissection, you enter literally, and mentally and imaginatively, into the bodies of these dead men and women. I mean, as you separate the nerves and blood vessels and dissect muscles away from the bone, you are getting as close a look at another human being, in the physical sense and to some extent the imaginative sense, as you can ever do. I think it’s an enriching and powerful experience.

Dissection is a kind of erotic autopsy. … I imagined a strange act of love performed by an obsessed surgeon on a living woman, in a deserted operating theatre in one of those sinister clinics in the Cambridge suburbs. I would kiss the linings of her lungs, run my tongue along her bronchi, press my face to the moist membranes of her heart as it pulsed against my lips.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (91, 92).

Michael Troughton, playing a post-Shanghai Jim, prepares to get to the basic truth about humans.

J.G. BALLARD: It seemed to me that by dissecting the body, by understanding how all its various biological systems function, you were getting to some sort of basic truth about human beings. Of course, the brain lay beyond, but at least it was a start, particularly as the human body was surrounded with so many taboos — and still is — and of course in 1951 was surrounded by infinitely more taboos than it is now. It seemed a start, but after two years I’d had enough, and I still hadn’t found myself in England, which seemed to be a very very strange place, so for a few years I embarked on a kind of ‘catch as catch can’ existence, working for an advertising agency for a brief while; I went to Canada with the RAF as a trainee pilot for a while.

I left after about seven or eight months and decided I’d had enough of the air force. Flying had been interesting, and it had given me another set of myths to live by, all of which, oddly enough, fed into my fiction. Flying has always been a very important part of my fiction. I think it stems from my childhood and in particular the air war over Shanghai. I think the first sight of the American B29s, which began to bomb Shanghai in 1944, and then the fighter attacks by Mustangs that flew so low over our camp that I remember looking down at them from the second and third floor of our building during the air raids, flying within ten feet of paddy fields. I accept this idea that flight is a symbol of escape, but I think more than escape, of transcendence. It’s played a very important role in my fiction. My characters are forever dreaming of runways and looking into those skies, where they can transcend themselves, and from which, of course, in the mid- and late 20th century, life and death come in terms of nuclear weapons.

I think I’m assembling a kind of mythology for myself, a kind of substitute. I’d deliberately forgotten my China background by then; I never mentioned it to anybody. My wife, when I married her in 1954 or 55, I don’t think I ever told her that I was born and brought up in Shanghai, or if I did it was only in passing, and I hardly ever described it to my children.

The past had slipped away, taking with it my memories of Cambridge and Canada, of the dissecting room and … even of Shanghai. The warm light over Shepperton reminded me of the illuminated air that I had seen over the empty paddy fields of Lunghua as I walked along the railway line, but the light that filled the splash-meadow came from a kinder and more gentle sun. The children … who played by the stream had taken the place of the dead Chinese lying in the Lunghua creeks and canals. For the first time I was living in an endless present that owed nothing to the past.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (126-7).

J.G. BALLARD: We came here, my wife and I, in 1960. We had three very young children and we were looking for a house where we could bring them up, really in a sort of quiet suburb, so we saw there was a house advertised here, had a look around Shepperton, and found that in many ways it was a sort of tranquil and quite mysterious place. The river, which winds through Shepperton like a sort of great snake, all the gravel lakes here and the great reservoirs of the Metropolitan Water Board — you realise when you fly from Heathrow and look down on the place, this is a marine world. I think it was the right choice at the time, because Shepperton has insinuated itself into my fiction over the years.

I’d arrived at Vermilion Sands three months earlier. … Driving into the desert one day, I stopped near the coral towers on the highway to Lagoon West. As I gazed at these immense pagodas stranded on the floor of this fossil sea, I heard music coming from a sand-reef two hundred yards away … where sonic statues had run to seed beside a ruined studio. The owner had gone, abandoning the hangar-like building to the sand-rays and the desert.

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D’, in The Complete Short-Stories of J.G. Ballard (744).

J.G. BALLARD: When I started reading science fiction for the first time in 1954, I was unusual in that I started writing it at almost the same time. Science fiction I think was dominated by its sociological speculation. It was really interested in the present rather than the very far future, and it struck me that science fiction had the right vocabulary with which to explore the world in which we found ourselves living in the mid-1950s. It seemed to me a new kind of Britain was emerging, the first motorways, and above all the TV landscape that was being imposed on all this.

I mean, all the great issues of the day, at that time — the threat of nuclear war, the development of modern communication systems, in particular television, and the role computers were going to play, the transformation of the whole planet into a media landscape, the changing nature of fiction ad reality within that media landscape — all these were topics that were not covered in any way by, say, the English mainstream novel of the day. It struck me that here was an interesting field ripe for takeover, I felt.

In this overlit realm ruled by images of the space race and the Viet Nam war, the Kennedy assassination and the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, a unique alchemy of the imagination was taking place. … The brutalising news-reels of civil wars and assassinations, the stylisation of televised violence into an anthology of design statements, were matched by a pornography of science that took its materials, not from nature, but from the deviant curiosity of the scientist.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (190).

J.G. BALLARD: After I got married, and children began to appear, I needed some kind of much more settled life, so that I could write in the evenings and weekends so I took a job on a chemical society journal called Chemistry & industry, a weekly scientific journal. I was assistant editor of it. It was a good place to work because, of course, the office of any scientific magazine is the most wonderful mail drop. It’s the ultimate information crossroads. Most of it went straight into the wastepaper basket, but en route I was filtering it like some sort of sea creature sailing with its jaws open through a great sea of delicious plankton. I was filtering all this extraordinary material. I certainly remember reading with great interest the first scientific papers on the chemistry of hallucinogenic drugs — that was very interesting to me.

In The Kindness of Women I describe the central character, the narrator Jim, taking LSD as I did myself at about the same time in this house, something we all had to do, I think, in the mid 60s. It was a piece of real foolishness on my part — I wasn’t expecting the total derailment of my mind that LSD brought about.

They were soon within the body of the forest, and had entered an enchanted world. The crystal trees around them were hung with glass-like trellises of moss. … The long arc of trees hanging over the water seemed to drip and glitter with myriads of prisms, the trunks and branches sheathed by bars of yellow and carmine light that bled away across the surface of the water, as if the whole scene were being reproduced by some over-active Technicolor process. The entire length of the opposite shore glittered with this blurred kaleidoscope…

J.G. Ballard. The Crystal World (75, 68).

J.G. BALLARD: Domestic life, and family life, provided the background to what must have seemed to outsiders a very strange group of novels. But I think that background of domesticity, all the excitement of young children, is the anchor pinning my imagination to the real world.

LEFT: Fay Ballard. RIGHT: Bea Ballard.

FAY BALLARD: I think part of Daddy’s writing is all about how normal everything looks, but actually under the surface it’s not at all normal.

BEA BALLARD: I remember him doing the odd strange thing, like I remember he sprayed his shoes with silver paint one day, and then strolled around Shepperton, and Shepperton being a very kind of bourgeois, boring town, you know, all the local residents, you can imagine, were looking and thinking, ‘how weird’.

FAY BALLARD: When it was hot, I remember Daddy once stripping off and walking around the garden naked, which he thought was quite normal, but of course the neighbours all started looking and thinking, ‘Gosh, who’s that crazy guy next door?’

J.G. BALLARD: I’m very glad I was able to bring up the children myself. And I often say they brought me up. I imagine I had a kind of second childhood — I was able to relive my own lost childhood through them.

FAY BALLARD: I remember one particular point, which was when he obviously remembered a very very bright light in Shanghai, because even on a really hot, beautiful summer day he would have all the electric lights on in the house. And I sometimes used to say, ‘We don’t need the light on’, and he’d say, ‘Oh yes, we do, it’s got to be bright’.

J.G. BALLARD: In fact my wife caught pneumonia and died in Spain in a matter of hours, tragically. It was certainly something that no young father, or young mother for that matter, with two or three children, expects — the spouse to suddenly die without any warning. I mean, I felt at the time that nature had committed a terrible crime against my wife and my children. I think the death of my wife provided me with a sort of renewed impetus to, again, make sense of the arbitrary cruelty of the world.

A gentle conspiracy existed among my friends and publishing acquaintances, as they feigned not to notice that Miriam had vanished through a window of time and space. This silence reminded me of the cruel childhood game in which we pretended, without telling him, that one of our friends no longer existed — the poor victim would be ignored, stared through, excluded from any games.
…
Watching the national mourning of a stricken America after the assassination of President Kennedy, I almost envied his bereaved wife. Every moment of her grief was endlessly replayed and anatomised on television. Her husband’s death, like the murder of his assassin, was recapitulated in slow motion, frame by numbered Zapruder frame. She wore her blood-spattered skirt like a scream of rage at the world that had widowed her.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (174, 175).

J.G. BALLARD: I think it’s true that a lot of the machine-like, alienated sex that takes place in books like Crash or High-Rise is a reflection of my own sort of despair after the death of my wife and the peculiar, affectless quality of life the late 60s began to have, when I think it all began to come apart at the seams.

Each afternoon she would take me into the garden of the trailer park. Undressing herself, she made me memorise the trajectories of her body.

‘Placental Insufficiency’. Advertiser’s Announcement: A J.G. Ballard Production. Ambit magazine, no. 45, 1970.

After Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised.

‘A Neural Interval’. Advertiser’s Announcement: A J.G. Ballard Production. Ambit magazine, no. 36, 1968.

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire.

‘Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?’. Advertiser’s Announcement: Sex : Inner Space : J.G. Ballard. Ambit magazine, no. 33, 1967.

J.G. BALLARD: Sensation ruled the late 60s. It was like firing an electric current into the leg of a dead frog — all you were looking for was a larger and larger kick, and this kick could be provided by drugs, or films of car crashes, or pure sensation transmitted through television. People who worry about the violence that’s shown on television now have obviously forgotten the sort of commonplace scenes of dreadful violence that were shown on British television during, say, the civil war in the Congo, and the Vietnam War, and all this had a sort of deadening of the emotions, and it seemed to me that one needed to perhaps embrace this world, to see what would happen, immerse oneself in the most destructive element, in Conrad’s words, and see if one could swim in this new realm.

I discovered the true significance of the automobile crash, the meaning of whiplash injuries and roll-over, the ecstasies of head-on collisions. Together we visited the Road Research Laboratory twenty miles to the west of London, and watched the calibrated vehicles crashing into the concrete target blocks. Later, in his apartment, Vaughan screened slow-motion films of test collisions that he had photographed with his cinecamera. Sitting in the darkness … we watched the silent impacts flicker… The repeated sequences of crashing cars first calmed and then aroused me. Cruising alone on the motorway … I thought of myself at the controls of these impacting vehicles.

J.G. Ballard. Crash (1973; 10).

J.G. BALLARD: In my early fiction I was always much more interested in psychological roles than in what we conventionally think of as novelistic characterisation, because I was always interested in psychiatric case histories. They seemed to be closer to the truth about human nature than the kind of fully fleshed-up, so-called characters that you find in the conventional mainstream novel. In a psychiatric case history one’s getting to a mythic core of what makes up human nature — this is what I was interested in.

My characters are all driven by the need to find some sort of truth. They may have to construct this truth for themselves. They resort to a set of desperate stratagems, I think that’s common to so many of my characters. I mean, the characters may choose strange ways of finding salvation, but it’s salvation they’re all after. They’re obsessed with the need to find the sustaining mythology of their lives, to pursue that mythology to its logical end whatever the cost. They’re all embarked on these strange quests.

He strolled through the … arcades, noticing, as he did each morning, the strange contrasts between light and shadow… Somewhere in the crystalline streets of Mont Royal were the missing fragments of himself, living on in their own prismatic medium.

J.G. Ballard. The Crystal World (174).

J.G. BALLARD: People have said that my fiction has a strong negative strain but of course it’s a matter of perspective. I remember when I wrote my first novel, The Drowned World, the American publisher said, ‘Fascinating novel, Jim, but you have your hero at the end going south towards the sun and certain death, and these primeval swamps that he’s obsessed with. Why not have him going north towards safety, and finding fulfilment there.’ I refused, of course, and I said at the time, ‘Well, of course, he does find fulfilment. He’s living out the logic of his own mythology, of his own dreams. He wants to go south into self-annihilation. This is what the book is about, and what perhaps human psychology on one level or another is about.’ And I think most of my novels, in fact all my fiction, is a fiction of psychological fulfilment.

In front of Jim was Lunghua Camp, his home and universe for the past three years, and the suffocating prison of nearly two thousand Allied nationals. The shabby barrack huts, the cement dormitory blocks, the worn parade ground and the guard house with its leaning watch tower lay together under the June sun, a rendezvous for every fly and mosquito in the Yangtze basin. But once he stepped through the wire fence, Jim felt the air steady around him.

J.G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun (167).

J.G. BALLARD: I started writing about it in, I think, 1983, at that time something like 40 years after the events I was describing, which is, I often reflect, an extraordinary long time to wait to describe a crucial experience, a crucial period in one’s life. I think the explanation is that when I left China in 1946 I virtually repressed all memory of my childhood for all sorts of reasons, and gradually I think I realised by the end of the 70s that so many of the moments in my novels and short stories only made sense if they were seen in terms of an attempt to recreate Shanghai.

‘This little room…’

This little room is in fact probably as close as I’ll ever come to home, surprisingly. Since arriving in Shanghai a couple of days ago, we’ve had quite a struggle finding the camp. It’s extremely well hidden now, and of course I’ve really spent 45 years looking for the place, and in many ways this is the most important place in my life, there’s no question about it. I came to puberty here; I left the camp when I was about 15, and I came to something close to an adult mind in this camp. I saw, of course, adults under a great deal of stress, which was an education in itself. But there’s no doubt that this is a kind of settling of account for me, coming here. It is a coming to terms with the past and the sort of dreams that to some extent have sustained me during the last 45 years in England, where I’ve never really been all that at home.

And in fact I certainly, and to some extent, this camp has been my real home, to which I’ve always referred in my imagination.

He stepped onto the gangway, conscious that he was probably leaving Shanghai for the last time, setting out for a small, strange country on the other side of the world… Yet only part of his mind would leave Shanghai. The rest would remain there forever…

J.G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun (351).

J.G. Ballard, 1991.

Transcribed by Simon Sellars, with thanks to Mike Bonsall. Please be in touch with corrections.

TRIP: Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives
Manchester, 19-22 June 2008.

Call for Papers and Projects

* * Psychogeography *
* * Neogeography *
* * Deep topography *
* * Urban interventions *
* * Locative media *
* * Collaborative Mapping *

* * Between June 19 and 22, 2008, TRIP brings together artists, academics, movers, shakers, do-ers and dissenters in a unique event combining an interdisciplinary conference with a city-wide series of actions, exhibitions, and screenings. TRIP enables the previously separate worlds of theory and practice to interact, initiating new approaches and energies, and furthering techniques to take on and alter the physical environment.

* * Beginning as a reaction to the industrial revolution, the re-imagining of the city by romantics, bohemians, and avant-gardists evolved into a diverse range of strategies, practices and arguments, from the psychogeographic drift or derive to the artistic intervention. By the 1990s these were being utilised by artists, writers, activists, and historians, attempting to negotiate urban and rural space in the post-modern world. But practices developed in the twentieth century encounter a different world in the twenty first – a more observed and policed world on the one hand, a more corporate, globally-connected world on the other. Increasingly the body, social, individual and political, is the site of contradictory demands – the demands to consume versus the demands of control.

* * TRIP will be based at Manchester Metropolitan University, on the city’s main southerly corridor, Oxford Road. But we want events to take place throughout Manchester, in as wide a variety of spaces and venues as possible. Like many northern cities, Manchester is changing fast. Perhaps you want to critique the implications of “regeneration”, or perhaps you want to stimulate new ways of engaging with an increasingly consumerised environment. Maybe you’re passionate about the possibilities of inventive walking and drifting, or maybe you’re a performance artist aiming to change the energy of a public space. Wherever you’re coming from, TRIP wants to hear from you with your ideas.

* To submit a paper, you should send an abstract outlining your subject and the key points of your presentation.

* To submit an idea for an intervention, performance or a walk involving members of the public, please outline in one paragraph the aims and ideal locations for your project.

* To submit an idea for a gallery-based project, please outline in one paragraph the thinking behind your installation or work..

Please try to keep your paragraphs to a maximum of 200 words. And don’t forget your contact details.

Deadline for submissions: October 1st 2007.

Submissions should be emailed to:

* And for further information on festival announcements, walks, talks and events, please access http://trip2008.wordpress.com

The festival proceedings will be fully documented and recorded, and an edited volume of essays, art and photography will be published at a later date.

ABOVE: Cokliss/Ballard on YouTube

CRASH!

Director: Harley Cokliss
Writer: J.G. Ballard
Starring: J.G. Ballard & Gabrielle Drake

This a transcript of the meta-narration and voiceover from the film CRASH!.

See here for ‘Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon’, an appraisal of the film.

NARRATOR: In slow motion, the test cars moved towards each other on collision courses, unwinding behind them the coils that ran to the metering devices by the impact zone. As they collided the debris of wings and fender floated into the air. The cars rocked against each as they continued on their disintegrating courses. In the passenger seats the plastic models transcribed graceful arcs into the buckling roofs and windshields. Here and there a passing fender severed a torso. The air behind the cars was a carnival of arms and legs.

J.G. BALLARD: I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.

We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.

The styling of motor cars, and of the American motor car in particular, has always struck me as incredibly important, bringing together all sorts of visual and psychological factors. As an engineering structure, the car is totally uninteresting to me. I’m interested in the exact way in which it brings together the visual codes for expressing our ordinary perceptions about reality — for example, that the future is something with a fin on it — and the whole system of expectations contained in the design of the car, expectations about our freedom to move through time and space, about the identities of our own bodies, our own musculatures, the complex relationships between ourselves and the world of objects around us. These highly potent visual codes can be seen repeatedly in every aspect of the 20th century landscape. What do they mean? Have we reached a point now in the 70s where we only make sense in terms of these huge technological systems? I think so myself, and that it is the vital job of the writer to try to analyse and understand the huge significance of this metallised dream.

I’m interested in the automobile as a narrative structure, as a scenario that describes our real lives and our real fantasies. If every member of the human race were to vanish overnight, I think it would be possible to reconstitute almost every element of human psychology from the design of a vehicle like this. As a writer I feel I must try to understand the real meaning of a lot of commonplace but tremendously complicated events. I’ve always been fascinated by the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a car.

NARRATOR: Her ungainly transit across the passenger seat through the nearside door. The overlay of her knees with the metal door flank. The conjunction of the aluminized gutter trim with the volumes of her thighs. The crushing of her left breast by the door frame, and its self extension as she continued to rise. The movement of her left hand across the chromium trim of the right headlamp assembly. Her movements distorted in the projecting carapace of the bonnet. The jut and rake of her pubis as she sits in the driver’s seat. The soft pressure of her thighs against the rim of the steering wheel.

J.G. BALLARD: The close relationship between our own bodies and the body of the motor car is obvious. American automobile stylists have been exploring for years the relationship between sexuality and the motor car body, the primitive algebra of recognition which we use in our perception of all organic forms. If the man in the motor car is the key image of the 20th century, then the automobile crash is the most significant trauma. The car crash is the most dramatic event in most people’s lives, apart from their own deaths, and in many cases the two will coincide.

Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? Each year hundreds of thousands of people are killed in car crashes all over the world. Millions are injured. Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality? It’s always struck me that people’s attitudes towards the car crash are very confused, that they assume an attitude that in fact is very different from their real response. If we really feared the car crash, none of us would ever be able to drive a car.

J.G. Ballard in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

I know that my own attitudes to the crashed car are just as confused. The distorted geometry of this tremendously stylised object: let’s face it, the most powerful symbol of our civilisation. It seems to pull at all sorts of concealed triggers in the mind: the postures of people in crashed vehicles; deformed manufacturer’s styling devices (crashed General Motors cars look very different from crashed Fords); the stylisation of the instrument panel, which after all is the model for our own wounds. Driving around, each of us knows what is literally the shape of our own death.

NARRATOR: Regaining consciousness, she stared at the blood on her legs. The heavy liquid pulled at her skirt. The bruise under her left breast reached behind her sternum, seizing like a hand at her heart. She sat up, lifting herself from the broken steering wheel, uncertain for a moment whether the car windshield had been fractured. Against her forehead the strands of blood formed a torn veil. Above her knees, her hand moved towards the door lever. As she watched, the door opened and she fell out. Lifting herself, she held tightly to the car, feeling the pressure of the door slip against her hand. Turning, she stared at the waiting figure of the man she knew to be Dr Tallis.

J.G. BALLARD: I remember seeing some films on television of test crashes a few years ago. They were using American cars of the late 50s, a period I suppose when the American dream, and American confidence, were at their highest point. Metering coils trailed out of the windows and they had dummies sitting in them. They were beautifully filmed. They filmed them beautifully because they wanted to know what was happening. They weren’t interested in the aesthetics of the thing. These cars were in head-on collisions, right-angled collisions and sideswipes. And ploughing into other structures like utility poles. One could see four feet of metal suddenly become one foot. Filmed in slow motion, these crashes had a beautiful stylised grace. The power and weight of these cars gave them an immense classical dignity. It was like some strange technological ballet.

I remember looking at these films and thinking about the strange psychological dimensions they seemed to touch. They seemed to say something about the way everything becomes more and more stylised, more and more cut off from ordinary feeling. It seems to me that we have to regard everything in the world around us as fiction, as if we were living in an enormous novel, and that the kind of distinction that Freud made about the inner world of the mind, between, say, what dreams appeared to be and what they really meant, now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. All the structures in it, flyovers and motorways, office blocks and factories, are all part of this enormous novel.

Take a structure like a multi-storey car park, one of the most mysterious buildings ever built. Is it a model for some strange psychological state, some kind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre geometry? What effect does using these buildings have on us? Are the real myths of this century being written in terms of these huge unnoticed structures?

More exactly, I think that new emotions and new feelings are being created, that modern technology is beginning to reach into our dreams and change our whole way of looking at things, and perceiving reality, that more and more it is drawing us away from contemplating ourselves to contemplating its world.

J.G. Ballard, 1971.

Transcribed by Simon Sellars. Please be in touch with corrections.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon: an appraisal of the film.

J.G. Ballard at KURBgallery.

Please pass on to anyone who might be interested.

From Pippa Tandy & David Bromfield:

“From January 11 to 20 2008 KURB gallery, an artist run non-profit art gallery, studios and performance space at 310 William Street Northbridge, Perth, Australia, will hold an exhibition, forum, programme and events in celebration of J.G. Ballard.

Interested visual artists, writers, film-makers, performance artists and all others are invited to submit proposals and/or send works which might be considered Ballardian, as for example:

(adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (J.G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J.G. Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments (Collins English Dictionary)

We welcome any image, photograph, text, collage, movie, experimental novel, sound piece installation or performance instructions, semaphore, sculpture (singing or otherwise) cd, dvd, that can be sent here via email, post, balloon, submarine, bicycle pigeon or intercontinental ballistic missile…

Or presented in person at:

KURB gallery
310 William Street
Northbridge Perth
WA 6000
Australia.

No practical contribution will be refused, however unreasonable.

Contributors may wish to consider Ballard’s single reference to Perth, the most isolated city on the planet, the nearest thing we have to a moon base on the planet. They may also wish to reflect on the central role played by Perth and Australia in the Cold War and its aftermath.

We intend our exhibition to follow Ballard’s prescription for an autopsy on reality—

In a sense, I’m assembling the materials of an autopsy, and I’m treating reality – the reality we inhabit – almost as if it were a cadaver, or let’s say, the contents of a special kind of forensic inquisition… I regard all these as data which will play their role in whatever hypothesis I am proposing to offer, to explain the significance of mysterious and apparently unrelated objects, this huge network of ciphers, and encoded instructions – perhaps – that surround us in reality.

– J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Graeme Revell (Summer 1983)

BALLARD DEADLINES/GUIDELINES

There are no strict deadlines for this event; we will accept work for the exhibition and contributions to the forum up to January 11, the opening date for the exhibition. After that we will accept responses to the exhibition until the day it closes.

Forum Participants: November 30 2007

It would help us if participants in the forum could let us know their intention to participate by November 30 2007.

We do not expect that many will choose to travel to Perth. We are happy to read contributions and/or project or play tapes. Those who may intend to travel here should let us know. We will able to help with finding accommodation and so. Visitors should note that this is the sunniest, hottest period of the Australian summer.

Exhibition participants: January 5 2008

If would help us if exhibitors could let us have their works or instructions in any form by January 5 2008. For further information or to express interest please contact KURB at:

KURBgallery@westnet.com.au

or write to:

KURB gallery 310 William Street. Perth WA, 6000 Australia

Those who wish to follow up the range of our interests may like to read Pippa Tandy’s The ‘DNA of the Present’ in the Fossil Record of the Cold War—Through the Imagery of JG Ballard, Related Sources and Documents in Various Media.

+ MORE INFO: Ballard at KURB.

We look forward to hearing from you

Pippa Tandy & David Bromfield (co-curators: Ballardian Art)
(PS Pippa did finish the doctorate)”

“Television crime series…were filled with their huge carapaces, swerving in and out of alleys, reversing in a howl of burning rubber. Watched with the sound down, episodes of Starsky and Hutch resembled instructional films on valet parking”.

———————–
J.G. Ballard, 2005
———————–

Announcing the winner of our J.G. Ballard Pastiche competition, sponsored by the kind people at Harper Collins.

THE PREMISE
We know that as a struggling writer, J.G. Ballard originally moved to Shepperton to be near the famous movie studios, in the hope he’d be able to snare some scriptwriting work. Now picture a parallel world where Jim Ballard achieved that goal, becoming so successful that he relocated to Hollywood, where he became much in demand.

THE TASK
Write an imaginary 500-word extract from an imagined novelisation of Starsky and Hutch (either the original TV series or the recent movie)…as written by J.G. Ballard.

THE PRIZE
A copy of Ballard’s new novel, Kingdom Come, supplied by Harper Collins.

THE JUDGE
Lyle Hopwood, the reigning JGB Pastiche Champion. Lyle, of course, was the winner of Interzone magazine’s 1993 competition for “the best short extract from an imaginary novelization of the science-fiction movie Alien as it might have been written by leading British novelist J.G. Ballard”.

To help you on your way, we’ve reproduced Lyle’s winning story in — what else — the pastiche section. Sorry, Fredric.

THE CLUES
1) In his 2005 feature on CSI, Ballard wrote: “Television crime series…were filled with their huge carapaces, swerving in and out of alleys, reversing in a howl of burning rubber. Watched with the sound down, episodes of Starsky and Hutch resembled instructional films on valet parking”.

2) In his interview with this site Iain Sinclair declares, “Ballard’s a very easy writer to pastiche badly. I think he’s there with someone like Graham Greene as a stylist. There used to be a New Statesman competition to parody Greene’s style, and Greene came second when he entered”.

And the winner, as judged by Lyle Hopwood, is Steven Craig Hickman, whose entry is below. A copy of J.G. Ballard’s latest novel, Kingdom Come, courtesy of Harper Collins, will be winging its way to Steven. Runner up was Rocky Morrow, whose entry can also be found below. Special mention must be made of Rick McGrath’s entry, the movie poster at the start of this page: while it didn’t meet the requirements of the competition (sorry, we wanted text only), it’s certainly good enough to reproduce.

Many thanks to all who entered, and to Lyle Hopwood and Harper Collins, of course. Lyle’s comments on the top two entries follow Steven and Rocky’s ‘novelisations’.

———————————————————–

STARSKY & HUTCH: NOVELISATION BY J.G. BALLARD
Winner: Steven Craig Hickman

At dusk Starsky was still sitting in the cockpit of the Grand Torino like the pilot of an alien spacecraft. Unconcerned by the shifting tide of traffic advancing toward him across the blackened beach of this urban nightmare, he watched the luminous sun melt into the metalloid dreams of Bay City.

Hutch walked out of the shadows of the glass city like a new Apollo of the marketplace, flames sparking from his spectral torso as if the sun in one last desperate attempt to attain eternity had suddenly found in this strange flesh the perfected incarnation of a delirious thought.

Starsky held the key in his hand as if it were a secret accomplice to the dark mysteries of an arcane religion. He prepared himself for a final departure, one that would ennoble both himself and his partner into the greater mysteries of Time. The sparking flesh of Hutch moved steadily toward him as the neon dolphins flew above chromium air.

The last vestiges of the sun’’s decay flashed on the horizon like an angel of the apocalypse, as if to awaken the sleeping minds of all the lost souls before the great and terrible conflagration breaks over the glass sea of Time. In the finale every element of the universe, however abandoned, would take its place on this terminal stage in front of him.

As he watched Hutch suddenly rise into the air on luminous wings, he was reminded of all those ancient astronauts that still flamed above in their dead cages of steel like derelict gods thrown into the emptiness of this vast wasteland. He started the car and began moving toward his old partner in crime, the winged god of a new earth. He would embrace this flaming god of the sun one last time in a torsion beyond time.

————————————————————————————————–
LYLE’S COMMENTS: I particularly liked the length (short) of Steven’s story, the sheer compactness of similies per line and the impression it gave of absolute, almost mechanised intensity. It was, in more than one sense of the phrase, concentration city. And anything that ends with a sentence like that deserves a prize.
————————————————————————————————–

————————————————————————————————–
STARSKY & HUTCH: NOVELISATION BY J.G. BALLARD
Runner-up: Rocky Morrow

Starsky has begun to piece his world together. It has been three weeks since a traumatic cerebral injury rendered Detective Starsky an amnesiac. This report intends to inform the department head, Captain Harold Dobey, and his superiors of my partner’s present condition, a revolutionary cure suggested by a renegade mental health professional, and a possible danger.

I have been briefed by the doctors in charge of Starsky’s rehabilitation that mood swings are to be expected during this period of rediscovery. In particular, any presentation of depression and anger on the part of Starsky is to be understood and forgiven.

Starsky is sticking to the textbook. He is stubborn and refuses, almost violently, to be told point-blank of the particulars of his identity up to and including any information regarding his education, profession, sexual orientation, medical history, family history, military history, or the case of Starsky and I on Playboy Island parts 1 and 2.

He is certain that he will come back to himself.

According to notes provided to me by the trauma counselor, Lyndia Toxwater, David Starsky is open to learning about the present world. A quote from page 23: “He is a voracious reader of anything brought to him. The doctors tell me that he is not so much willing to ‘learn about the present world’ as he is trying to ‘lose himself in the written word’.”

The period of recovery for a person in Starsky’s situation is anywhere from a day to a lifetime. Toxwater suggested that an attempt be made to meet Starsky in the place where he most desires to be lost and, thus, is least resistant to being found.

Toxwater claims that the rate of success for this media neurotherapy is much higher than reported in the “big three” major mental health reference journals: Zepter and Hodges Illustrated, The New Journal of Disorders, and Abnormal Models (published in Spanish as The Aztec Cortex). Toxwater insists that there are at least a half-dozen medical journals dedicated to this, and related endeavors, in the Soviet Union. A telephone call to the Maywood Cesar Chavez branch of the County of Los Angeles Public Library was flirtatious but inconclusive.

With Toxwater’s advice in mind, I have placed the following three advertisements in several Los Angeles dailies:

Under the classification of Automobiles For Sale:

Must sell! Gran Turino red 2-dr
hardtop w/ white striping.
Chrome exhaust, bumpers, grill.
Great suspension, hugs road.
Perfect for the off-duty policeman.
Meets all fed regulations. New tyres.
Reply to box 4343 c/o this paper.

Under the classification of Miscellaneous For Sale:

Picture Yourself Watching This!
1970s era television.
Good condition, retro look.
Perfect for dedicated bachelor’s pad.
Reply to box 4343 c/o this paper.

Under the classification of Personals:

Have You Forgotten Yourself?
Sad SWM seeks Lonely SWM for
male bonding over cars, busting crime rings.
Slobs OK. Reply to Box 4343, c/o this paper.

It is my hope that “voracious reader” Starsky will see these “fragmentary allusions” (a phrase taken from a personal consultation regarding David Starsky with Lyndia Toxwater) and snap out of his fugue. As a bonus, all responses to box 4343 will be checked against our records for bail jumpers and fugitives. In the cases of paroled felons, any address change will be noted and filed.

Toxwater says that it is fortunate that the Los Angeles Police Department has chosen to not publicize David Starsky’s condition in local news media. A photograph of David Starsky accompanied by a caption with his name and medical condition would be a psychotraumatic event on a caustic level, effectively obliterating not only the progress that has been made, but also…

————————————————————————————————–
LYLE’S COMMENTS: I liked this as a story a great deal. It’s something that I would not be surprised to see published in a magazine (without references to Starsky and Hutch, of course). It works very well as a story and I found it engrossing and moving. I did not award it the prize for a similar reason: it was so engaging and the character seemed to have such an emotional need that I felt it was not quite Ballardian enough to take first prize. Excellent story, though, and the Ballard elements were carefully thought out and well rendered.
————————————————————————————————–

…LINKS
+ More Ballardian pastiche

The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content in many cases do not result in orgasm). The book opens: ‘A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition … was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses’.

The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments: ‘In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac, the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, Eichmann in drag, a dead child …’ The human body becomes landscape: ‘A hundred-foot-long panel that seemed to represent a section of sand dune … looking at it more closely Doctor Nathan realized that it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest …’ This magnification of image to the point where it becomes unrecognizable is a keynote of The Atrocity Exhibition. This is what Bob Rauschenberg is doing in art — literally blowing up the image. Since people are made of image, this is literally an expensive book. The human image explodes into rocks and stones and trees: ‘The porous rock towers of Tenerife exposed the first spinal landscape … clinker-like rock towers suspended above the silent swamp. In the mirror of this swamp there are no reflections. Time makes no concessions’.

Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image: ‘Each afternoon in the deserted cinema: the latent sexual content of automobile crashes … James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Albert Camus … Many volunteers became convinced that the fatalities were still living and later used one or the other of the crash victims as a private focus of arousal during intercourse with the domestic partner’.

James Dean kept a hangman’s noose dangling in his living room and put it around his neck to pose for news pictures. A painter named Milton, who painted a sexy picture entitled ‘The Death of James Dean’, subsequently committed suicide. This book stirs sexual depths untouched by the hardest-core illustrated porn. ‘What will follow is the psychopathology of sex relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations. This will allow the exploration without any trace of guilt of every aspect of sexual psychopathology’.

Immensely magnified portion of James Dean subsequently committed suicide. Conception content relates to sexual depths of the hardest minds. Eichmann in drag in a waste lot of wrecked porous rock.

– William Burroughs, preface to The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970