Next week, I’ll be speaking at Monash University’s conference Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe. I’m also helping to organise the event with Andrew Milner, and I’m looking forward to meeting our esteemed guests, among them Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Red Mars I have been re-reading and enjoying all over again. My paper is on Wednesday, 1 September, part of a panel representing Pia Ednie-Brown’s Plastic Futures project at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, RMIT University. The panel consists of Pia, myself and another SIAL/Plastic Futures colleague, Andy Miller.

My abstract is below. The title references my PhD subtitle from 2008, ‘J.G. Ballard’s affirmative dystopias’, and alongside François Roche, Greg Lynn and Ballard, I will touch upon the work of Nic Clear, Archigram, Bruce Sterling, Geoff Manaugh and Marion Shoard.

If you’re in Melbourne next week, please come along. Registration details are available here, and the full program is here. To whet your appetite, read Manaugh’s excellent interview with Robinson, which anticipates the key themes of the conference.

Simon Sellars: ‘Affirmative architectural dystopias: experimental relations between humans and the built environment’

In a time of environmental concern, architecture is dominated by the mantra of sustainability. This is the ‘new high priest of moralism’ according to François Roche, a ‘green wash’ cordoning off nature as a sterile theme park. But can alternative solutions be found within the archetypal dystopia, within the fraught intertwining of the human and natural worlds that negatively generates the utopian rhetoric of sustainability? In this paper, I explore recent architectural practice that explicitly deploys science fiction, utopia and dystopia to investigate experimental relationships between humans, the built environment and the natural world. Juxtaposing the SF texts of architects including Greg Lynn and Roche with the work of novelist J.G. Ballard, an influence on many practitioners within this new discourse, I consider the suggestion that the movement towards the ‘dystopian’ in these texts can perhaps be simply read as ‘embracing change’, a new relationship that generates a new outcome: ‘affirmative architectural dystopias’.

The Emergence of the Posthuman Subject

Early Bird Fee
2-3 July 2010

To be Held at University of Surrey, Continuing Education Centre (CEC), 2nd Floor Senate House.
Full Description
The Emergence of the Posthuman Subject
An Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of Surrey
2-3 July 2010.

Over the past two decades the theories and critical practices associated with the field of posthumanism have become an increasingly significant presence in the Arts and Sciences. Inspired by the radical innovation that period has seen in information and communication technology, philosophers and writers have hailed what amounts to a break with the humanist tradition that has underpinned western civilisation for over five-hundred years. The formerly absolute differences between human and inhuman, set out, for instance, by Rene Descartes in his Discourse on the Method, have blurred. It is now easy to imagine a machine that might think as rationally as a man and increasingly difficult to believe that an animal is little more than a machine, without the consciousness that makes suffering possible. With every new species discovered to possess language-skills, the capacity for logical thought, or the ability to make and use tools, some quality once cited as a trait which distinguished the human, a rational animal, distinct from the rest of creation, is dissolved. As Jacques Derrida noted in his final book, Cartesian Humanism in now in crisis; the traumas inflicted on the validity of the concept “humanity” by Darwin, Freud & Marx are at last beginning to change the way people perceive their world, permitting subjects in the west to cast off a “normative” category that has been used to suppress those modes of being not in line with the supposedly “natural” order characterising the “Family of Man”.

Posthumanist thought is therefore right at the heart of developments taking place in critical theory since the 70s. The posthuman is the point at which the most pressing concerns in gender studies, post-structuralism, cultural materialism & postmodernism converge. Crucially, posthumanism provides what is perhaps the one vital theoretical point of crossover for research taking place in the Arts and Sciences. Posthumanism can be defined as the attempt to think on how the latest technological innovations and the considerable advances that are even now taking place in the fields of physics and biology, impact on our concept of the human and on our perceived place in the world.

This conference presents papers from academics and postgraduates working in disciplines as diverse as Literature, Psychology, Philosophy, Anthropology, Film Studies, Palaeontology, Zoology, Theatre, and Theoretical Physics: on the Emergence of the Posthuman Subject. The conference is to take place at the University of Surrey, the institution at the forefront of space exploration technology in the UK, and situated right in the centre of the territory west of London criss-crossed by flight-paths and motorways celebrated as a source of endless fascination in key novels by JG Ballard.

Potential topics would include but not be limited to:

1. Key issues of discussion
the evolution of homo sapiens; the cultural assimilation of quantum physics and string theory; the emergence of cyborg sexualities; the shifting boundary-line between the Human and the Animal; the “avatar” and the virtual world;

2. Cultural and artistic prototypes and responses
the prototypes of the posthuman in the modernist movement; apocalyptic literature; the impact of information-communication technology on the form and content of film, music, literature and art; visions of the planet after the extinction of our species;

3. The work of relevant artists, scientists and philosophers
JG Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, Charles Darwin, Philip K. Dick, Jacques Derrida, R.D. Laing, William Burroughs, Italian Futurists, Isaac Asimov, Judith Butler, Steve Mann, Stelarc, Wyndham Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, Steven Hall etc, etc.

E-mail submissions and any questions to David Ashford (D.Ashford@surrey.ac.uk) and James Riley (rjer2@cam.ac.uk).

Landing Sites from Simon Sellars on Vimeo.

This is vaguely Ballardian… It’s my short film based on the ‘reversible destiny’ theory of the architects/conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins.

It was made for a seminar I taught at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, RMIT University, which attempted to weave connections between mythogeography/psychogeography and Arakawa and Gins.

Results from the seminar, including my students’ ongoing design work with Dr Pia Ednie-Brown, can be found here.

Text: Arakawa + Gins.
Music: Melanie Chilianis.

TURN UP THE VOLUME.

Click on the poster below for a closer look…

Ed Ruscha. Fountain of Crystal, 2009. Acrylic on canvas. 30 1/8 x 36 1/8 inches (76.5 x 91.8 cm).

CRASH: HOMAGE TO JG BALLARD

Press Release
Gagosian Gallery
6-24 Britannia St London WC1X 9JD
t. 020.7841.9960 f. 020.7841.9961

Gallery hours: Tue – Sat: 10:00am– 6:00pm

Thursday, 11 February – Thursday, 1 April 2010

Opening reception: Thursday, February 11th from 6 to 8pm

I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society.

JG Ballard

Gagosian Gallery London will present “Crash,” a major group exhibition opening on 11 February 2010, which takes its title from the famous novel by JG Ballard.

Ballard’s novels stand among the most visionary, provocative literature of the twentieth century, with his ominous predictions regarding the fate of Western culture and his insights into the dark psychopathology of the human race. This exhibition is a response to the enormous impact and enduring cultural significance of his work, following his death in spring 2009. Highlighting Ballard’s great passion for the surreal and his engagement with the artists of his own generation, “Crash” includes examples of his specific inspirations as well as works by contemporary artists who have, in turn, been inspired by his vision.

Ballard’s first published short story “Prima Belladonna” appeared in 1956, the same year as the celebrated Independent Group’s exhibition “This is Tomorrow” at the Whitechapel Gallery, which marked the birth of Pop Art in Britain. It was here, and in the work of Surrealists such as Salvador Dali and Paul Delvaux, that Ballard found the seeds of what he called a “fiction for the present day”. With its dystopian depictions of the present and future, its bleak, man-made landscapes and the recounting of the psychological effects of technological, social and environmental developments on humans, his work has resonated strongly among other writers, filmmakers and visual artists. The exhibition “Crash” brings together works by artists tuned to the Ballardian universe, from his contemporaries such as Ed Ruscha, Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol and Helmut Newton, to younger artists such as Tacita Dean, Jenny Saville, Glenn Brown and Mike Nelson.

The exhibition is organised in association with the Estate of JG Ballard.

List of artists: Richard Artschwager, Francis Bacon, JG Ballard, Hans Bellmer, Glenn Brown, Chris Burden, Jake & Dinos Chapman, John Currin, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Paul Delvaux, Cyprien Gaillard, Douglas Gordon, Loris Gréaud, Richard Hamilton, John Hilliard and Jemima Stehli, Roger Hiorns, Damien Hirst, Dan Holdsworth, Carsten Höller, Edward Hopper, Allen Jones, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Vera Lutter, Florian Maier-Aichen, Paul McCarthy, Adam McEwen, Dan Mitchell, Malcolm Morley, Mike Nelson, Helmut Newton, Cady Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Steven Parrino, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, George Shaw, Cindy Sherman, Piotr Uklański, Andy Warhol, Rachel Whiteread, Christopher Williams, Jane and Louise Wilson, Christopher Wool and Cerith Wyn Evans.

For further inquiries please contact the gallery at london@gagosian.com or at +44.207.841.9960.

More information here.

“You’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate”
- William Gibson, Neuromancer

“Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”
- J.G. Ballard

“Twitter is like little animated hieroglyphics in the margins of a working manuscript, offering obscurely breaking news”
- William Gibson, Twitter.

LINKS 8/1/10-14/1/10

Links etc harvested from my Twitter account.

2010-01-14 23:20:15
ballardian: I’m in love… Vincent Fournier’s photos of the “retrofuturistic space industry”
http://bit.ly/5oKwcp | http://bit.ly/5nMbWE
via @paleofuture

2010-01-14 23:06:16
ballardian: Finally, some sense. Re: Nitin Garg – “On both sides, a lot of hot air and finger pointing – a dialogue of the deaf”
http://bit.ly/5OAkbv

2010-01-14 22:57:26
ballardian: RT @Glinner: seen the blog devoted to exposing ad agencies who copy ideas from the interweb?
http://bit.ly/1VgNdo /via @cslyons

2010-01-14 21:27:37
ballardian: I miss the future… Geoffrey Hoyle’s 2010: Living in the Future children’s book (‘72), now digitised:
http://bit.ly/5dxd8u | via @bigstanno

2010-01-13 23:47:13
ballardian: Ballard’s Vermilion Sands…. RT @ethel_baraona: Book Review: Interactive Architecture |
http://tinyurl.com/y8ehh2b /we make money not art

2010-01-13 23:39:31
ballardian: RT @marcusod: Superb visual reporting. Big Picture’s heart-rending insight into the horrors of Haiti
http://bit.ly/7jMwZ3

2010-01-13 22:49:03
ballardian: Nick Sowers & the architecture of war: RT @soundscrapers: The End of the Grand Tour |
http://is.gd/6dtCL | my military travels in 2009

2010-01-13 21:53:24
ballardian: The Sweeney & Brutalism: “a hardhatted transition between decaying, smashed-to-fuck factory & modernist housing regen”
http://bit.ly/5HQZ79

2010-01-13 09:02:39
ballardian: @alanbenzie I’ve got this: http://bit.ly/5NW7Tb. Artemiev revising excerpts from Stalker, Solaris, The Mirror.

2010-01-13 09:00:22
ballardian: @paul_h_williams Yes, the Stanislaw Lem school of alien contact is very different from the James Cameron school!

2010-01-13 08:50:46
ballardian: My house, hopefully. RT @VariousArch @bryanboyer: What will be the 2000s gasometer? Ruins beautiful enough to renovate rather than replace?

2010-01-13 08:46:35
ballardian: My friend visited with his 2-year old daughter. I was playing Artemiev’s Stalker s/track. She wouldn’t stop wailing until it was turned off.

2010-01-13 05:16:29
ballardian: “The baggage reclaim hall was a Ballardian experience, when the arcane support systems of modern life stop working” http://bit.ly/6rBlxp

2010-01-13 02:36:23
ballardian: “Brisbane needs Dubai-scale high rise boom” Wow. Brissie must be the only city still looking to Dubai for inspiration:
http://bit.ly/6Q1Swm

2010-01-13 01:57:41
ballardian: RT @Glinner: Wow. I missed the “effective immediately” part RT @kalimkassam Google.cn now shows Tiananmen tank man pics
http://bit.ly/6jyfA0

2010-01-13 01:49:16
ballardian: RT @mrphoenix: Interview w/ 3rd & 7th creator Alex Roman:
http://bit.ly/5HkokQ
—-> film here for those who missed it:
http://bit.ly/8HU05q

2010-01-12 05:50:56
ballardian: Boo! RT @BoingBoing: Facebook blocks “Web 2.0 Suicide Machine,” now a cease-and-desist reported
http://bit.ly/7Kk8Ec

2010-01-12 05:31:54
ballardian: “Has the Internet changed your thinking?” Eno, Coupland, Dawkins, Shirky, Rucker etc
http://bit.ly/7m631w | http://bit.ly/7C6VfL
via @bruces

2010-01-12 04:31:35
ballardian: Zomia, Asia’s “shattered zone”, a region “deliberately constructed to keep the state at arm’s length”
http://bit.ly/4GEsxX | via @harikunzru

2010-01-12 04:28:35
ballardian: Oh dear, that’s a bit wrong… “Movie-goers feel depressed & suicidal at not being able to visit utopian alien planet”:
http://bit.ly/5y8nK2

2010-01-12 04:11:52
ballardian: More on mythogeogaphy from things magazine: “walking as exhibitionism”
http://bit.ly/63E599

2010-01-12 04:10:18
ballardian: Ha ha! On the other hand: the Web Suicide Machine! “Lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles”
http://bit.ly/5aLtCV

2010-01-12 23:20:50
ballardian: RT: @bengoldacre @iankatz1000: Stop press: Google ends censorship in China
http://bit.ly/7SzeIB

2010-01-12 23:20:00
ballardian: RT @daj42: The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion. Jaron Lanier rethinks “open” information culture {@nytimes}
http://bit.ly/4PYjWs

2010-01-12 22:38:02
ballardian: Must be out of touch: had no idea William Gibson designs bags:
http://bit.ly/kqHas (Check out the comments: who spilt blood in the water?)

2010-01-12 21:51:40
ballardian: “Porn more more valuable than politicians” … porn joins a long list, then…
http://bit.ly/62Pof7

2010-01-12 07:31:45
ballardian: RT @lyndons: Watched Ch9News for 1st time in yrs. Heard the word ‘Aussie’ 20x & only political news seemed to be contents of PM’s winecellar

2010-01-12 07:13:05
ballardian: Albert Speer Jr: “‘The Slums of the 21st Century Are Being Built in Dubai’” [Spiegel] |
http://bit.ly/8B5WkF via @archinect

2010-01-11 05:16:01
ballardian: More on Phil Smith’s mythogeographical process, including ‘mental exercises for sideways walkers’:
http://bit.ly/7a1j41

2010-01-11 05:13:06
ballardian: This is mythogeography, of a sort: Aussie rocker Billy Miller’s guide to old Melbourne footy grounds:
http://bit.ly/6Y6f0z | via @davegraney

2010-01-11 05:09:48
ballardian: Phil Smith’s new book, Mythogeography: Walking Sideways “levels of the city reflected back in the levels of the walker”
http://bit.ly/8rmn47

2010-01-11 05:01:54
ballardian: The Baja coast: “a peaceful getaway or a lawless frontier?”
http://bit.ly/7Keltf | via @centrifugalcity

2010-01-11 04:49:47
ballardian: “Burtynsky has a Ballardian eye for the incongruous, vast machine shapes out of place & time”
http://bit.ly/62wFgZ | http://bit.ly/5rWJL3

2010-01-11 00:22:09
ballardian: I visited Guam & thought there needs to be a film about its 2nd-class US status. And there is:
http://bit.ly/5ahDuy | via @soundscrapers

2010-01-11 00:13:32
ballardian: Man throws 2 bottles of acid from above into crowded Hong Kong tourist spot:
http://bit.ly/4wttpx

2010-01-11 22:49:14
ballardian: Not sure why I am doing this, but here goes: my thoughts on Twitter – “Defending the Indefensible”:
http://bit.ly/7ZzZEp

2010-01-11 22:20:04
ballardian: “Welcome to the age of robot reporters”:
http://bit.ly/6BjX1r

2010-01-11 21:26:32
ballardian: Just what was life like in the UK in ‘08? RT @somebadideas: the ancient ley lines of Woolworths
http://bit.ly/7k02bf | via @Richard_Kadrey

2010-01-11 21:21:16
ballardian: RT @GreatDismal: Twitter is like little animated hieroglyphics in the margins of a working manuscript, offering obscurely breaking news.

2010-01-11 20:37:14
ballardian: RT @lyndons: How Twitter was born: the first 140 users – guardian.co.uk
http://bit.ly/7m7cqe

2010-01-11 18:27:22
ballardian: ‘Journicide’ – the well-written story is becoming extinct:
http://bit.ly/4rgBAU

2010-01-11 17:57:29
ballardian: “Porn studios lead the stampede into 3D TV”:
http://bit.ly/83F8lL

2010-01-11 17:44:00
ballardian: Gothik/erotic. RT @johncoulthart: ‘Crash’, Bethany Shorb’s photo series inspired by JGB & The Normal’s Warm Leatherette
http://bit.ly/6YAexA

2010-01-11 13:03:16
ballardian: Last night, I dreamt I raced James Taylor for pinks.

2010-01-11 12:46:29
ballardian: Weird uplifting timeshifting downbeat phased Carl Sagan/Stephen Hawking lock-loop mashup:
http://bit.ly/L4WZg | via @paleofuture

2010-01-11 12:32:50
ballardian: Die Dubai, die… RT @LittleMonsta: Trailers for video game set in a Dubai reclaimed by the desert
http://j.mp/4ZBuij | http://j.mp/4nn3tW

2010-01-11 10:59:35
ballardian: RT @factmagazine: BBC’s Brian Eno documentary premieres this month:
http://bit.ly/52SYau

2010-01-11 10:09:44
ballardian: RT @bigstanno: Assault on Precinct 13 “I’ve got a plan, it’s called save ass. We jump out that window and run like a bastard” BEST LINE EVER

2010-01-10 23:43:12
ballardian: Radiophonic legends… rare photo of Delia Derbyshire & Daphne Oram, taken by Malcolm Clarke:
http://bit.ly/774QRY

2010-01-10 21:34:44
ballardian: Could you make it with Roxxxy? Sex robot with articulated skeleton, built-in cooling system and five personailities:
http://bit.ly/5e8GU8

2010-01-10 12:16:28
ballardian: “A bridge between imagination and reality must be built” – Raoul Vaneigem

2010-01-10 12:07:39
ballardian: “Piece now!” Watched Weather Underground doco. Fascinating period of history. Will follow up w/ a viewing of Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park.

2010-01-09 06:17:41
ballardian: Dr George Miller: from Mad Max to Babe & Happy Feet…. strangest career trajectory of any director?

2010-01-08 23:21:41
ballardian: Hey, all of you who like abandoned utopias, post-civilisation ruins & Ballardian malls in disrepair, visit Second Life!
http://bit.ly/7I2IAw

2010-01-08 23:08:42
ballardian: RT @theauteursdaily: Viewing (2′27″). RED RIDING trilogy, HD, opens w/blurb from @kpunk99:
http://bit.ly/5DN49J

2010-01-08 22:12:09
ballardian: Finally saw District 9. Wow! It’s not perfect, but it is GREAT. Owns Avatar. Oh, for a parallel universe where D9 rakes in a billion bucks.

2010-01-08 09:31:17
ballardian: Two reverse perspectives on the Nitin Garg murder, from within both countries involved:
http://bit.ly/8lCl6q | http://bit.ly/7eCnEd

..:: PREVIOUSLY ON BALLARDIAN:
+ Twitter: Defending the Indefensible

“You’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate”
- William Gibson, Neuromancer

“Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”
- J.G. Ballard

“Twitter is like little animated hieroglyphics in the margins of a working manuscript, offering obscurely breaking news”
- William Gibson, Twitter.

I’m aware that people think this site goes through fallow periods where it seems nothing is happening in terms of research into Ballard and Ballardian themes. But as I’ve mentioned before, I am posting nearly all links on my Twitter account and saving ballardian.com for longer posts and articles. I’m also aware that some readers don’t give two hoots for Twitter, but it works for me as a linksharing hive mind, ready and able to be plugged in for instant feedback. It may well be a “fad”, but as one of my students remarked last year, who cares? Fads serve to focus creativity. And he’s right. The aggregate clusters around a particular medium, breaks up, moves on to something else. What does it really matter if it’s gone in a year, two years, three? For the moment, Twitter works – Twitter is the lightning conductor.

Besides, with the likes of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling using it regularly, do I really need to justify it? Perhaps. Here is my perspective. Updating a blog is hard work; Twitter less so. You do it in down time. At least I do. I recently remarked that I had written around 42,000 words on Twitter in ‘09, less a boast but more an expression of surprise at the amount because it happened so intuitively. And if I can write like that, so quickly and honestly, then I should not be agonising over my forthcoming book — which, too, is supposed to be 40,000 words. I look back over many of those posts and can see clear and direct lines leading to, away and back to the articles, essays and chapters I wrote last year, as well as links, jottings and hurried notes about future projects and ideas. (And there are tools available to archive this stream, which can then be searched for keywords and themes.) When I was updating this site regularly with blog posts, I would agonise over getting a post right, sometimes spending so long that the moment would evaporate. The post would never get written, and the link/person/project I had found would be lost in the temporal backwash. With Twitter, I record the link quickly and go back to it later if need be. I align myself here with Geoff Manaugh, who writes:

Twitter is very obviously not the answer to everything, and it never should have been portrayed that way; but it also very obviously is not the death of humanism. Twitter is just another option for people to use when they want to take notes – and it’s no more exciting than that, either, to be frank. It’s a ball-point pen.

Get over it.

Still, some people will always snigger, that’s just how they’re wired. Today, you can still read articles in newspapers that go out of their way to denigrate the experience, their comments recalling exactly the criticisms levelled against blogs when they first became a popular interface. It’s supremely boring. As for me, I’ve heard it all before. I have one particular interlocutor (a friend, I might add!) who loves to belittle my experience. Here is the latest witticism, posted on another forum:

Simon did note recently that he’d written some 40,000 words on Twitter, which he saw as a very promising portent for the progress of his book. I didn’t think of the analogy in time to reply, but that’s like saying 2,000 quick wanks is good preparation for marriage.

Ho ho. Shut the door on your way out, dude. Oh, and turn out the lights.

In this exchange with one of his followers on Twitter, Gibson sums up the link between Twitter and creativity. He was asked if he was spending too much time on Twitter, when he didn’t spend nearly as much time as on his blog. The interrogator’s fear was that excessive tweeting would negate any potential new book from Gibson. Gibson replied: “I see zero adverse effect. In fact, quite the opposite. The blog was *work*. I do this [Twitter] in the *margins* of work. The other thing about twitter is all the web-browsing time it saves you. People do it *for* you. Twitter: like rattan bones *for your mind*!”

I know from experience that any reasonably popular blog most definitely is work. This site was only updated so much because I was writing my PhD on Ballard at the time, and I was completely saturated in the research material. Now, unfortunately, I have to make a living and sourcing and writing lengthy posts for free every few days doesn’t seem like such an attractive, or healthy, option. On this score, I like what Momus has to say about why he is stopping his own regular blogging. Its an explanation that resonates with my own feelings:

Because there’s a kind of tumbleweed feel to my Friends List these days, as people migrate to Twitter (and “ship” their inconsequential tweets back to the old haunt as if to place a big “Nothing to see here folks!” sign over both locations) or Facebook. Because I don’t feel that blogging either can or should be as big a part of the next decade as it has been of this one. Because I wonder what would happen if I put the energy I pour daily into this blog (and I’ve established a great working routine!) into something like a book, or something else … Because I’ve probably said everything I have to say about my opinions and worldview, on a certain level (which isn’t to say that the positions I’ve adopted have won or been accepted; many will never be). Because switching to another medium (fiction, for example) will be a way for me to put those views and hunches and feelings into new and fresh relationships with each other…

Because I don’t like the chain letter pressure to come up with something interesting every day, or the way that a couple of missed entries lead to a whole week in which nothing happens, and how I care about that and battle to bring the ratings back up. Okay, I’ve cited this before as a plus, calling it the Scheherazade Challenge, but look at poor Scheherazade’s motives for inventing a new tale every day: all the king’s other wives were killed. Is that the kind of pressure I want in my life? Have I considered gardening as a hobby?

But Twitter is like thinking aloud, occasionally to others, often to yourself. A brain stream that is sometimes inspiring, sometimes energising, sometimes dumb and silly, but always for the open-minded person creative in the way that only playful self-reflection and considered world-gazing can be. The other important note to consider is the network effect: a good deal of the links I post/tweet are sent from other Twitter users. I have 1500 followers — I repost that link, and even if it is picked up by a handful of those people, they may have many more followers than me, they retweet it to their followers, and the chain continues. The aggregate effect is the most phenomenally powerful element of Twitter. This is why news often breaks on Twitter before it hits MSM. So, I am indebted to the many kind users who send me interesting news and information, and I hope I’ve been able to add value in the same way. So if you’re intent on hating on Twitter, think of each user as a node or a switching station if that makes the experience any more palatable.

In short: to my mind, Twitter is the best research tool available at this moment in time.

Nonetheless, as a service to my Twitter-challenged friends — and to the loyal readers who visit this site regularly and who expect/want/would like to see new material/research/insights — each week I am going to try to post my previous 7 days’ worth of Twitter links and quotes, plus some observations. I’ll spare you the asides to other users and extended conversations: that’s a realtime conversational/feedback element that can’t necessarily be relayed here, but that must be experienced via Twitter itself, preferably through a client such as TweetDeck. I think this is also good practice for people who visit the site through an RSS reader and therefore can’t see the little Twitter box at the top right of the ballardian.com home page, and who may therefore never even know there’s any action at all over there.

So, my real motivation has never been to preach about Twitter, but simply to share some fairly interesting Ballardian/Ballard-inspired artworks, theory, social upheavals and projects that I have found (or disseminated), and that I hope you will enjoy also. But just to restate: ballardian.com is still alive, and reserved for articles, long posts, essays and photofeatures as they arrive from me and other contributors. There are many exciting features coming up, of which Paul Roth’s recent brilliant essay on Burtynsky is just the beginning.

So, let the link dumping begin. I’ll start from the new year. For the other 42,000 “wanks” from 2009, you’ll need to check the archives.

Jan 1, 2010-Jan 7 2010

2010-01-07 04:57:41
ballardian: “I look forward to the transformation of Britain into the ultimate departure lounge. After all, we have every reason to leave.” – JG Ballard

2010-01-07 02:14:05
ballardian: The Ballardian forum has been offline for months due to hassles with web hosts etc. Now, it has been revived! Enjoy: http://bit.ly/60Jcwy

2010-01-06 22:53:32
ballardian: I’ve been looking forward to SW myself… RT @geetadayal: A review I wrote on “Sonic Warfare,” a new book by @kodenine: http://bit.ly/4qx5uX

2010-01-06 22:49:09
ballardian: A Truffauldian dystopia would not care. RT @SpaceSyntaxGirl: RT @GreatDismal UK pensioners burning books to keep warm http://bit.ly/6GI8Ff

2010-01-06 22:32:17
ballardian: RT @bldgblog: Great photos of the rapidly decaying Biosphere 2 project, referencing “buildings that die,” Ballard & more: http://is.gd/5PlJE

2010-01-06 21:32:55
ballardian: “Like most CGI extravaganzas, it flares on the retina but leaves few traces in the memory” @kpunk99 on Avatar: http://bit.ly/63MNY2

2010-01-06 21:16:07
ballardian: RT @GreatDismal: Ballard would have so brilliantly articulated the nitrous eroticism of our full-body airport security scan imagery.

2010-01-06 12:56:37
ballardian: “Mutation or metamorphosis was taken for granted, indeed welcomed” Christopher Hitchens reviews Ballard’s shorts: http://tinyurl.com/ygjq3dc

2010-01-06 09:04:27
ballardian: Hawkwind, Ballard, Hieronim Neumann… “Flat block / of two dimensions / It’s a human zoo / a suicide machine” http://bit.ly/5d7fZM

2010-01-06 06:43:27
ballardian: “I’m an urban guerilla / I make bombs in my cellar / So watch out Mr. Business Man / Your empire’s about to blow” http://bit.ly/5LDtOi

2010-01-06 05:48:52
ballardian: Understand: the public is not the problem. First the Newark fiasco, now this: explosives smuggled onto plane in ‘test’ http://bit.ly/8q7wec

2010-01-06 03:37:52
ballardian: RT @Richard_Kadrey: Makers, wankers and vampires! RT @martyhalpern: The 10 most pirated digital books of 2009 http://tinyurl.com/yfhoy5r

2010-01-06 01:10:12
ballardian: “A time that no longer occurs” Will Viney, ‘The Romantic Ruin’ http://bit.ly/8AFvAr (also, Viney on Ballardian ruins: http://bit.ly/6Pd1K1)

2010-01-06 00:00:13
ballardian: There are some very strange spam bots patrolling Twitter. One retweets w/out attribution, and then announces it is unfollowing the victim…

2010-01-05 03:28:39
ballardian: Fabulous piece equating Burj’s “vacant stare” w/ the emptiness of the post-recession/post-apocalypse: http://bit.ly/5hymnv | via @bldgblog

2010-01-05 03:22:34
ballardian: RT @bldgblog: Weird new year’s reading: “nfantryman’s Guide to Combat in Built-Up Areas,” U.S. Army urban combat handbook http://is.gd/5IYAD

2010-01-05 02:46:58
ballardian: “Ballard’s stories… well made, full of supposedly contemptible components, yet irreducibly strange” Zadie Smith http://bit.ly/8ZY58Y

2010-01-05 00:37:20
ballardian: RT @johncoulthart: Expect babies or small children to be put to work as bomb mules from now on http://is.gd/5MhZI

2010-01-05 00:18:39
ballardian: RT @ColinPeters: two great panics that taste great together. Body Scan vs. Child porn law RT: @juliangough @Fergal: http://is.gd/5MhZI

2010-01-05 23:42:33
ballardian: RT @paleofuture: NASA’s 1965 press kit for the Gemini V mission [pdf] http://bit.ly/4Pa4OQ (via @alexismadrigal)

2010-01-05 23:14:53
ballardian: RT @stephenhero: RT @jojeda Parkour flip book-style http://post.ly/HKUV

2010-01-05 22:46:21
ballardian: Just discovered Google Chrome’s “incognito” function, which is wicked sick! Especially this bit: “Be wary of surveillance by secret agents.”

2010-01-05 22:24:33
ballardian: Pot, meet kettle… In the UK, “rich, swollen”, ISPs smack Bono down: http://bit.ly/6EQfxv | via @Glinner

2010-01-05 12:40:56
ballardian: “Foretelling human ends” – Ballardian.com: Paul Roth views Edward Burtynsky’s work on oil through a Ballardian lens http://bit.ly/5rWJL3 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
12:28
ballardian: RT @jimrossignol: More camera-confiscation madness from British police: http://bit.ly/5XOkB7

2010-01-05 11:01:32
ballardian: RT @timmaughan: The original #Avatar story – shame so much of this depth is missing: http://bit.ly/7o7xA3 (@MariKurisato)

2010-01-05 10:49:56
ballardian: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Lewis Carroll

2010-01-05 07:19:21
ballardian: “Time does not exist. The universe is static. Movement is an illusion.” – Julian Barbour, Killing Time (film) http://bit.ly/QBMOv

2010-01-05 06:30:30
ballardian: “The only way through a crisis of space is to invent a new space” – Fredric Jameson

2010-01-05 06:10:00
ballardian: RT @melchil: Janek Schaefer’s ‘Recorded Delivery’, sound-activated tape recording sent through British post http://bit.ly/5mAEyR 1995

2010-01-05 05:40:41
ballardian: The only thing better than William Basinki’s Disintegration Loops is William Basinski’s shortwave loops.

2010-01-05 04:34:23
ballardian: Delhi’s Raqs Media Collective – interstitial urban capillary veins: “conversing about the ‘debris of the unrealizable’” http://bit.ly/7SGros

2010-01-04 23:48:21
ballardian: Believe it when I see it… Dubai & Moscow’s rotating skyscrapers, “made possible by 79 giant wind turbines”: http://bit.ly/171p02

2010-01-04 23:44:05
ballardian: RT @soundscrapers: U.S. Military is Meeting Recruitment Goals With Video Games – But at What Cost? http://is.gd/5Mjqa

2010-01-04 23:40:45
ballardian: So the reports *are* true: the Newark airport lockdown *was* hell… Hey Jude sing-a-long: http://bit.ly/8Kful3

2010-01-04 23:11:38
ballardian: RT @johncoulthart: So if the Burj Khalifa needs to be bailed out in the future will it change its name again? Burj Walmart, Burj Tesco?

2010-01-04 23:08:44
ballardian: I feel sick… BASE jumping off the Burj (video): http://bit.ly/xc7cu

2010-01-04 22:54:36
ballardian: “Life is getting friendlier but less interesting. Blame technology, globalisation and feminism” http://bit.ly/4XydbF | via @cityofsound

2010-01-04 22:52:52
ballardian: I’m all for ‘injecting playful moments into the urban fabric’: PlastiCity FantastiCity design comp http://bit.ly/7ZlYA8 | via @pruned

2010-01-04 22:38:56
ballardian: Remember Pillars of Wisdom, Paul’s great film about Abu Dhabi’s artificial skyline? It can be downloaded w/ new s/track http://bit.ly/8zs3rd

2010-01-04 22:22:41
ballardian: Narrow Streets LA, a Fantasy Urban Makeover: “Century City, a Ballardian complex of futuristic ruins preserved intact” http://bit.ly/59HDFz

2010-01-04 22:19:56
ballardian: Disney’s RiverCountry Rotting in Fittingly Ballardian Way: http://bit.ly/87t3ns

2010-01-04 21:29:40
ballardian: RT @LittleMonsta: 10 Sci-Fi Weapons That Actually Exist http://bit.ly/8wq5EK

2010-01-04 21:13:10
ballardian: My mate Paul arrived just in time to see the Burj explode into life. Here’s his film of the opening – incredible stuff: http://bit.ly/8J1FWI

2010-01-04 21:08:30
ballardian: RT @jomc: “alpha fail” : man who says obvious and/or officious things in a booming voice with overwhelming confidence.

2010-01-04 13:22:53
ballardian: I’m off to bed now, to dream of the Burj…

2010-01-04 13:00:33
ballardian: Open lecture series, School of Architecture, Sheffield U: “emergence, dead-zones, edge spaces, terrain vague, subcults” http://bit.ly/4Fj7LE

2010-01-04 03:26:38
ballardian: Window cleaners on the Burj Dubai. Only 142,000 sq m to go. “Get a move on, lads!”: http://bit.ly/2E7CWS

2010-01-04 02:13:47
ballardian: @johnny_neurotic Vincenzo Natali, who is directing High-Rise, has apparently based the building’s design on the Burj: http://bit.ly/4CUHFV

2010-01-04 02:09:06
ballardian: Burj Dubai opens today: “designed so that those who so wish will never have to leave, or descend below the 108th floor” http://bit.ly/5qbbIa

2010-01-04 02:04:36
ballardian: Newark airport: this phrase scares me more than terrorism “this act breached the ’sterile’ sections of the terminal” http://bit.ly/59pMGQ

2010-01-03 23:26:35
ballardian: RT @ethel_baraona: Lost Formats Preservation Society http://tinyurl.com/loxvjr <------- reminiscent of @bruces's Dead Media Project

2010-01-03 22:48:13
ballardian: "Disneyland & Las Vegas rolled into one" - minus the people. Utopia pt 3: Sth China Mall (film): http://bit.ly/6ch9hn | http://bit.ly/7qBF1c

2010-01-03 22:30:58
ballardian: A model to believe in? The “slow-budget” film approach” http://bit.ly/843Hbh | via @christydena

2010-01-03 22:29:30
ballardian: @The_Art_Life I’m interested enough in Avatar’s ideas & tech to see it again. The debates are enlightening. At least film matters again.

2010-01-03 22:17:59
ballardian: Reading the comments = deja vu; will publishing learn from music biz mistakes? Ebook piracy increases http://bit.ly/6SUSnN | via @bruces

2010-01-03 11:15:51
ballardian: A quote for the times (again): “You’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, & you’re barely print-literate” (William Gibson, Neuromancer)

2010-01-03 10:54:26
ballardian: “The Burj Dubai – just the latest example of mankind’s edifice complex (Times): http://bit.ly/4yFuIY

2010-01-03 10:52:24
ballardian: Times: “Burj Dubai, the first superscraper, opens for business tomorrow – if it can find any” http://bit.ly/76rEYj

2010-01-03 10:13:01
ballardian: RT @morphocode: Beautiful parking structures: http://bit.ly/7rZvJD | also: http://bit.ly/rVZaL

2010-01-03 10:11:37
ballardian: @The_Art_Life Good pts re Avatar. Yet I still feel certain aspects undermined Av’s cleverest ideas. Twitter not best medium for elaboration.

2010-01-03 09:22:48
ballardian: Moorcock on Ballard: “There were fights, bad acid trips, wild drives through the London night” – http://bit.ly/4MGxm5 | via @johncoulthart

2010-01-03 08:19:37
ballardian: Backing up my Twitter account, I was astonished to find I’d written over 42,000 words on here in 09. Hope yet for getting my book done!

2010-01-03 08:14:07
ballardian: Great to see a savvy MSM Twitter angle for a change (NYTimes) “the real value is listening to a wired collective voice” http://bit.ly/7pIqmQ

2010-01-03 08:00:31
ballardian: Happy NY! After R.A. Wilson, my 2010 goal is to “create the happiest, funniest, most romantic reality-tunnel consistent w/ my brain signals”

After Robert Anton Wilson, my 2010 goal is to “create the happiest, funniest, most romantic reality-tunnel consistent with my brain signals”. And so the following is probably of no interest to anyone but me…

But here goes, anyway: for 2009, ballardian.com’s top 10 most-read posts, search terms leading to the site and links from other sites:

TOP 10 MOST-READ POSTS ON BALLARDIAN.COM FOR 2009
(Note that most of these are old posts, and, surprise, surprise: the X-ray porn comes in at no. 1; there’s depravity also at no. 5, 6 & 10. Good to see urbanism and film posts making a strong showing, too.):

1. ‘The fusion of science and pornography’ (WARNING! Exceptionally unsafe for work) – 1 July 2008

“Wim Delvoye’s ‘Kiss’ series of x-ray art echoes The Atrocity Exhibition and the illustrations of Phoebe Gloeckner. WARNING: this post is indisputably unsafe for work. No, seriously: you have been warned.”

2. Coming Never: Richard Gere as Blake – 7 May 2008

“Aside from the films of Empire and Crash, Ballard has had almost all his novels optioned for the screen at some stage. Suitors include Richard Gere, Samuel L. Jackson, Jack Nicholson, David Frost and a trio of scantily-clad cavegirls.”

3. Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon – 10 August 2007

“Although little known, Harley Cokliss’s 1971 short film Crash!, based on passages from The Atrocity Exhibition, has something even more prized, something else the Cronenberg and Spielberg adaptations could never have: it stars J.G. Ballard. With his brooding, hypermasculine presence, Ballard plays a version of Atrocity’s ‘T’ character alongside Gabrielle Drake, her own role a composite of the book’s archetypal ’sex-kit’ women.”

4. Michael Jackson’s Facelift – 2 July 2009

“‘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.’”

5. Dead Models – 31 October 2007

“A photo shoot for America’s Next Top Model, on the subject of dead girls. The judges’ comments have to be seen to be believed.”

6. Triple Transgression – 26 December 2007

“This disturbing photo feature focuses on peeping toms in Japan and Kohei Yoshiyuki, the photographer who documented them in the 1970s.”

7. ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear – 24 December 2008

“Nic Clear leads the remarkable Unit 15 course on the built environment at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. In this interview, Nic explains the course’s focus on the work of Ballard as a way to counter the lamentable state of current discourse on architecture. The article includes clips of six stunning films produced by students as part of this Ballard-inspired methodology.”

8. Crown Casino: ‘A snarling, digitised mutilation’ – 27 May 2009

“Simon Sellars, Mel Chilianis and Melb Psy take an audiovisual tour of Melbourne’s Crown Casino, seeking to map the coordinates of this micronational zone — consumer-driven control space with a raging need.”

9. R.I.P. JG Ballard, 1930-2009 – 20 April 2009

“Goodbye, Jim…”

10. Love Among the Mannequins – 15 January 2008

“Here’s a new campaign from fashion label Dsquared2, featuring sex with crash-test mannequins. But it doesn’t appear to be selling anything. What exactly *is* it selling? Note the photographer: none other than our old mucker, Steven Meisel.”

TOP 10 MOST-FOLLOWED LINKS TO BALLARDIAN.COM FROM OTHER SITES:
(surprise: no porn)

1. http://www.radiohead.com/deadairspace/index.php?a=469
2. http://www.jgballard.com
3. http://www.planetaki.com
4. http://www.metafilter.com
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Come_(Ballard_novel)
6. http://www.facebook.com
7. http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=7221
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard
9. http://twitter.com/ballardian
10. http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org

TOP 10 SEARCH-ENGINE TERMS LEADING VISITORS TO BALLARDIAN.COM:
(very surprised at the paucity of porn, also that ‘ballardian’ beats ‘jg ballard’)

1. ballardian
2. jg ballard
3. gabrielle drake
4. ballard
5. medical fetish
6. make love
7. computers internet blog
8. concrete island
9. ballardian.com
10. atrocity exhibition

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.

Although we never met in real life, I considered Mac Tonnies a great friend. We corresponded often via Twitter and email, and I interviewed him in 2007 about our shared passion for the writing of J.G. Ballard. Appropriately, given Mac’s status as a Fortean investigator, and the fact that we only ever knew each other disembodied via cyberspace, he would appear in my dreams as a man from the future who used black holes to travel through time. Mac was intensely interested in the paranormal, but he was a bigger skeptic than many who aren’t. It is this sharp intelligence that always made his writing so readable, filled with sharp angles and deep crevices, even when dealing with the most twisted theories.

Today, I’ve been informed that Mac was found dead in his apartment on Thursday. He will be greatly missed.

+ Mac’s blog, Posthuman Blues
+ Mac’s Twitter stream
+ Mac’s last interview on Coast to Coast

..:: Previously on Ballardian:

+ Crash! Full-tilt Autogeddon
+ Negative Acoustic Space: Ballardian Sound Art
+ A Ballardian Burial
+ Tribute to J.G. Ballard & Brian Eno
+ Escaping the Gaze: A Review of John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies
+ A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture: the John Foxx Interview
+ ‘Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard Connection
+ Cousin Silas: Another Flask of Ballard
+ ‘No One Dances in Ballard’: An Interview with Mike Ryan
+ A Premeditated Ballard Playlist
+ Crash: A Tribute to James Graham Ballard
+ Critical Mass: Sound, Story and Music in David Cronenberg’s Crash

Still from La Jetée (1962), dir. Chris Marker.

If you’re in Melbourne this Thursday, come and say hello! I’m giving a paper on Ballard, circular time and the nouvelle vague this Thursday, October 1, at 3pm 3.45pm at ACMI in the city. It’s part of the time.transcendence.performance conference, held over three days at ACMI and Monash University’s Caulfield campus. Guests include Stelarc (very exciting, for me), Brian Massumi and more. Here’s the conference blurb, followed by the abstract for my paper:

time.transcendence.performance brings together artists, designers and thinkers who work with time, to explore how they might inform each other. How do performers think time? How do thinkers perform time? What shared or different understandings are at work in the different practices?

Even before Aristotle wrote that time is the number of motion with respect to before and after, and Heraclitus observed that it was impossible to step into the same river twice, philosophers – Eastern and Western – have wondered about time. Is it real or just an abstraction? Is it reversible? Does it pass? Do we experience it directly? Is it relative or constant? Does it exist? So far, the consensus is that we do not have satisfactory answers to these questions.

More than an academic conference: the three-day program features public performances, exhibitions, installations, screenings and workshops.

‘CONFRONTING OURSELVES’: J.G. BALLARD & CIRCULAR TIME
Dr Simon Sellars
School of English, Communication & Performance Studies
Monash University, Clayton

J.G. Ballard’s oeuvre features numerous examples of self-contained societies that many critics perceive as disguised versions of Lunghua, the insular WWII camp he was interned in as a child. His novel, Empire of the Sun, widely seen as Ballard’s ‘authentic’ autobiography and the key to decoding his fiction, activated this perception. However, by cross-examining his body of work, I will argue that there is no definitive reconstruction of this wartime experience – rather, Empire should be viewed as Ballard’s life seen through the holograph of his fiction – and that, moreover, this holistic recycling of memory forms the model for a program of resistance to late capitalism. In wider terms, Ballard positions time as an artificial construct imposing control on the chaotic subconscious: the clock stops, past and future collapsed in the drive to homogenise the planet. Liberation derives from circular time – revisiting memory – and even sideways time, restaging and reinhabiting parallel worlds.

To illustrate this, the paper analyses Ballard’s affinity with nouvelle vague cinema — non-linear film technique, which, incorporated into the fabric of his work, reveals the ‘true’ nature of perception, time and memory. Ballard’s fiction is the fictional doubling of Deleuze’s work on the cinema of the ‘time-image’: both locate ‘nodes of resistance’ in post-war cinema, deploying the nouvelle vague as revealing the truth of the merger between the virtual and the actual. Focusing on repetition and déjà vu, the critical concept of revisiting and reinhabiting memory emerges in Ballardian and Deleuzian philosophy. Ballard’s malleable, circular Lunghua memories become a mutant psychopathology that focuses on inner mental states as reality and the external world of media and consumerism as irreality – a reversal that his work posits as the only viable antidote to an increasingly stylised and mediated post-war realm, the only effective form of resistance to totalising, naturalised systems of control.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Confronting Ourselves’: Ballard and Circular Time
+ Ballard and the Vicissitudes of Time

Of course, I have more expansive posts and features planned for this site, and as soon as our over-capitalised, over-casualised, overlapping labour force allows me a window of opportunity, I will post them.

Until then, 140 characters it is…

Photo courtesy of Steve Double.

JEANNETTE BAXTER, writer/academic

The KINDNESS OF JG BALLARD

I was fortunate enough to interview JG Ballard on a couple of occasions. What struck me most about our exchanges — and this is something I am truly grateful for — was the amount of time and effort which he’d clearly put into them. A day or so after faxing through my lists of questions, I would receive page upon page of incisive, provocative and witty comment. This would then be followed by a fat package in the post: Ballard’s original type-script (he diligently sent it as ‘backup’). To receive these original sheets was a real thrill because I could actually touch the editing process: alternative words and phrases had been pressed by hand into clumps of tippex (what might these chalky lumps conceal?). Even when, as he revealed so honestly in our final piece of correspondence, time was no longer showing itself to be his ally, JG Ballard remained enormously generous with the time he had left. Witty, generous, encouraging and kind: that’s how I remember JG Ballard.

MIKE BONSALL, writer/JGB archivist

At first sight Ballard perfectly fulfilled Flaubert’s dictum: ‘Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’ Sometimes his upper-class veneer felt more like a disguise, but mostly I think it was a kind of armour.

As Ballard said in his beautifully open and honest autobiography Miracles of Life: ‘I was happy with the prospect of becoming a psychiatrist, and knew that I already had my first patient — myself.’ When he left Cambridge though, he didn’t fail to study psychiatry, he went on to invent a new branch of it.

The complete dislocation of his comfortable life as a child in Shanghai led to his imagining the destruction of the earth in his first ‘disaster’ novels, such as the beautiful, haunting The Drowned World.

The death of his wife at a tragically early age redoubled his feeling that the world was without meaning. His cry of rage found form in the condensed novels that make up The Atrocity Exhibition and the novel Crash, which contain some of the most coruscating, inventive prose since William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. This work, and some would argue, the much more popular Empire of the Sun, put Ballard in the top rank of British writers in the late twentieth century.

Ballard was more than a writer, he was a scientist of the human spirit. He was Kali-like in his propensity to destroy his characters (and with them possibly all humankind). Confusingly, he was also Kali-like in being a ‘nurturing mother’ figure, enjoying enormously bringing up his children and, as his long-time friend Michael Moorcock revealed, being happy to lend a friend his last hundred pounds.

Ballard was kind enough to comment on my article about his early years as assistant editor of the scientific magazine, Chemistry & Industry, saying: ‘I’m very impressed by the high level of your detective work, even if it does make me feel a little like a deep-level spy being slowly exposed to daylight.’ Before going on to completely refute my arguments with a few well-chosen sentences. All done with such kindness and insight that I was left with a smile rather than a frown.

In his short stories Ballard’s intelligence, wit and inventiveness rivalled that of Jorge Luis Borges, as in the marvellous ‘The Index’, which consists entirely of the index of a book which may never have existed, written about a mysterious messianic figure who may himself never have existed.

In his later novels, Ballard became more openly satirical, imagining, for example, a half-hearted and hilarious revolt of the middle classes of Chelsea in Millennium People.

All too aware of the grim nature of the human condition, Ballard had the courage not only to look the frightening truth in the eye, he even embraced it. In doing so he turned catastrophe into something transcendent.

Claire Walsh’s moving tribute to him gives us a glimpse behind Ballard’s armour: as well as a great intellect, he had a great heart. He was a quiet, kindly, even shy, man who had seen too much inhumanity and desperately wanted to make sense of it. Our society is the less for his passing.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ The Real Concrete Island?
+ J.G. Ballard’s Experiment in Chemical Living
+ Another Atrocity? A ‘New’ Work by J.G. Ballard

MARK FISHER, writer/theorist

THE ASSASSINATION OF J.G. BALLARD

They wanted to kill Ballard again, but this time in a way that made sense. The British know how best to kill something, softly. Assimilation is sometimes the most effective kind of assassination.

“You say these constitute an assassination weapon?” So here they come again — all the familiar profiles, all the old routines. All that over-rehearsed musing about the supposed contrast between Ballard’s writing and his lifestyle and persona. All that central London cognoscenti condescension: he lived in Shepperton, he wore a tie and drank gin and yet he could come up with this — imagine that. As if it isn’t obvious that English suburbs are seething with surrealism. As if you could think for a minute that The Drowned World or The Atrocity Exhibition were written by anyone wearing jeans. Ballard mapped another America, another 1960s, one beyond the pleasure principle of rock n roll and its paraphernalia. (That was one of the reasons that Ballard should have been so integral to postpunk’s unlearning of r and r and to electro’s pursuit of a colder mechano-erotics outside rock‘s passional regime.) As if Ballard’s works could be mistaken as anything other than the work of a bourgeois — Ballard’s was to have unashamedly fixated on the psychopathologies of his class (so no Keith Talents here, only a litany of deranged professionals), a class which he had a special insight into because he was always semi-detached from it.

You: Coma: Princess Diana Assessing cultural figures by their alleged influence, their legacy, is an egregious postmodern tic — as if it reflected any merit to have inspired the Klaxons. Ballard is important precisely because it is completely unimaginable that any equivalent of his work could emerge from current conditions. As he made clear in his 1989 annotations to his most important work, The Atrocity Exhibition, he was a metapsychologist of the Pop age, his sensibility unsuited to the era of Reality, with its flattening fusion of celebrity and the hyper-banal. “A unique collision of private and public fantasy took place in the 1960s, and may have to wait some years to be repeated, if ever. The public dream of Hollywood for the first time merged with the private imagination of the hyper-stimulated TV viewer. People have sometimes asked me to do a follow-up to The Atrocity Exhibition, but our perception of the famous has changed — I can’t imagine writing about Meryl Streep or Princess Di, and Margaret Thatcher’s undoubted mystery seems to reflect design faults in her own self-constructed persona. One can mechanically spin sexual fantasies around all three, but the imagination soon flags. Unlike [Elizabeth] Taylor, they radiate no light. … A kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup.” Ballard’s 60s were inaugurated by the Kennedy assassination. The founding event of the media environment we live in now, in which consensual sentimentality has long since occluded Ballard’s death of affect, was Princess Diana’s car crash death in 1997. In his later novels, Ballard tried to get a grip on this mall-world of Ikea psychosis and shopping channel charismatics, but they never produced the same spinal charge as his encounters with the 60s telecinematic arcades presided over by Elizabeth Taylor and Ronald Reagan. Ballard’s most probing contributions in later years came in interviews and articles rather than in the novels: it was here that he identified retail parks and anonymous non-places as the authentic landscape of the twenty-first century, but he was not able to poeticise this hyper-banal terrain in the same way that he mythologised the brutalist concourses and high rises of the 60s and 70s.

A Pulp Modernist Magus What better way to destroy something than send in Martin Amis to praise it? Ballard was never a ‘good writer’ in the way that Amis and his admirers and cronies in urbane Brit lit, with their handcrafted sentences, their well-drawn characters, their concerned social commentary, were. The significance of The Atrocity Exhibition was to have obsolesced this machinery of mediocrity, which he eviscerated in his 1964 profile of Burroughs. “To use the stylistic conventions of the traditional oral novel — the sequential narrative, characters ‘in the round’, consecutive events, balloons of dialogue attached to ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ — is to perpetuate a set of conventions ideally suited to a period of great adventures in the Conradian mode, or to an overformalized Jamesian society, but now valuable for little more than the bedtime story and the fable.” But Ballard’s strategy in his best works was also opposed to that of another of his admirers and appropriators, Iain Sinclair. Whereas Sinclair transforms popcultural material into something opaque, obscure and hermetic, Ballard innovated a kind of pulp modernism in which the techniques of high modernism and the riffs of popular fiction intensified one another, avoiding both high cultural obscurantism and middlebrow populism. Ballard understood that collage was the great 20th century artform and that the mediatized unconscious was a collage artist. Where are his 21st century inheritors, those who can use the fiction-kits Ballard assembled in the 60s as diagrams and blueprints for a new kind of fiction?

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency

OWEN HATHERLEY, writer/critic

It’s enormously difficult to write about Ballard after his death, so inextricably formed have so many of us been by his peculiar obsessions. We can all tell similar stories — we all discovered him as teenagers, we all had our perceptions permanently warped by it. But what made this warping so effective is that Ballard took those parts of modern life – particularly our built environment — which we habitually don’t think about, and forced us to recognise how enormously strange they actually are. All those things ignored or excoriated as eyesores or hidden behind privet hedges, looked at anew – he was one of the 20th century’s finest deployers of what Viktor Shklovsky called ‘making strange’, the technique of estranging the mundane.

This is why it’s so odd to read him described as a ‘dystopian writer’, as many of the obituaries have. Rather, he celebrated the liberatory potentials of the multi-storey carpark, the tower block, the hotel strip on the Riviera, the moderne house on the outer reaches of Metroland with its surrealist interior. But the liberation he saw in them was not, contrary to the promises of their modernist creators, that they presaged a new, rational kind of man, but rather that they promised a new kind of glorious irrationality. In all of these ‘dystopias’, whether the Triassic London of The Drowned World or the primal penthouse of High-Rise, his protagonists always follow the logic of these places to their illogical conclusions out of choice, not because it is imposed upon them. When in the ’80s anathemas were pronounced on tower blocks, he stated his irreconcilable disdain for Postmodernist architecture, for any retreat from the new world.

In the last few years you could already see a certain tussle over Ballard, with some wanting to claim him as a realist novelist, others as an avant-gardist. I prefer to see him as an explorer of architectural space practically without rival, the space of Modernism in all its ambiguity, its promises and failures. We have to be vigilant against letting Ballard be assimilated into the Georgiana and Victoriana of Hampstead. His spirit resides in the vast glass atrium of the Heathrow Hilton, in the unreadable contours of a Watford car park, amid the overgrown creepers of the Barbican, in the sun-baked concrete of Brasilia, in the exploded landscapes of the New Brutalism, and in the the balconies of the Park Lane Hilton transmuted into the gill-slits of the dead actress Elizabeth Taylor.

MIKE HOLLIDAY, writer/JGB archivist

One of my favourite Ballard quotes comes from an interview a few years ago, when Hans Ulrich Obrist asked him whether ambiguity was a central theme in his writings. ‘I hope everything I have written is ambiguous,’ responded Ballard, ‘reflecting the paradoxical faces that make up human nature.’ To me, this is quintessential Ballard, and shows how his writings work as surreal explorations of our divided selves, from Kerans’ journey South to death and fulfilment at the end of The Drowned World, through the psychopathic hymn/cautionary tale of Crash, and ending with the consumers who pray before the very goods that are their hearts’ desires in Kingdom Come. Promise and threat, the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious, all coexist together, and meaning has to found in the gaps, in the angles, and in the strange linkages that our imaginations perceive. I think it also helps explain the apparent contradiction between Jim Ballard, the family man in Shepperton, and J.G. Ballard — ‘probably a complete fiction, my greatest creation’, as he once described his authorial self.

I’ve been reading Ballard for over four decades, thanks to a school teacher who set a science fiction reading list which included — along with Wyndham, Clarke, and Asimov — the Amis & Conquest ‘Spectrum’ anthologies. After I’d located one of these at the local library, the librarian stamped the book and handed it back with the comment ‘The Voices of Time is very good’. On reading that story, I had to agree — at 14, I found it rather bizarre yet somehow strangely inspiring, though I now suspect that I understood little of what I had read. My enthusiasm for Ballard continued after my interest in SF disappeared during the 1970s, but it’s only in the last few years that I’ve come to understand how sui generis he was as a writer, and how completely irreplaceable.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Three Levels of Reality: J.G. Ballard’s ‘Court Circular’
+ Ballard and the Vicissitudes of Time
+ A Home and a Grave
+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard

NINA POWER, writer/academic

I believe in the right to confuse middle England by being autobiographical,
Thus disconcerting Mail readers who might like Empire of the Sun but would take to the streets to prevent Crash being screened in cinemas, even though both films were shot in the wrong places.

I believe in not making my characters merely bourgeois.
I believe in the end of the world
But I also believe in boredom.

I believe in the fictional importance of scientific journals.
I believe in the cultural revolution of the middle classes, even if they’ll never have the guts to blow up the NFT.
I believe in never getting out of the car.

I believe in your obsessions. I believe that the inexistence of the universe means that JG Ballard is not, nor ever will be, dead.

..:: More Ballardosphere tributes:
+ Part 1: Ben Noys, Chris Nakashima-Brown & Mark Dery
+ 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

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.

Due to severe time restraints, I will probably refrain from posting much in the Ballardosphere section for the next few months. This was the regular blog-style section of the site where I posted news and links, however I’m currently too pressed with work to make regular blog-style contributions, so I’ll be switching (mainly) to Twitter for all news and links related to the Ballardosphere and to ‘Ballardian space’. Please check this site’s Twitter account for regular updates. The RSS feed for that is here.

Of course, the features, reviews, interviews and archival sections of ballardian.com will continue to be filled with content at irregular intervals.

Still, I haven’t been completely idle. There is a Last FM page associated with this site, which probably reveals the full extent of my recent procrastination — there’s always time to be completely bloody obsessive about music and fiddling with iTunes playlists. I have also been on Twitter, which I find hugely enjoyable — like discovering a secret passageway under the house filled with freaks and people who never sleep, my type of people.

This has all been feeding and tweeting away in the sidebar while I’ve been away, however I read a study of website optimization that claimed virtually no one bothers to read sidebars anymore, so I take it as read that that applies here (also many read this site through an RSS reader, meaning no sidebar content). Which is why I’m pointing it out.

Big, proper posts to come! Promise!

This first installment begins with a snippet from Can’s suitably decadent/enervated track ‘Future Days’, and later on drops PiL’s ‘Phenagen’ and another Can track, ‘Soup’, into the soundscape. Someone’s been doing their research into ‘Ballardian’ music!

Great find from Pedro, who sent me a link to a Brazilian review of Kingdom Come — in the form of a comic strip!

Here is the rest of the strip.

And Pedro has kindly translated the text from the Portuguese, as follows:

British author JG Ballard became known for the 1973 novel Crash. The book, filmed by David Cronenberg in 1996, presents a group of people enjoying sexual pleasure in car accidents.

Another famous work is Empire of the Sun, about a boy who’s separated from his parents during the Japanese occupation of China in World War Two. The book was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987. (Balloon: Cadillac of the skies!)

Ballard comes back to the violent stylings of Crash in his new novel, Kingdom Come.
(Balloon: Technology and consumerism affect the middle class.)

The work is narrated by Richard Pearson, a forty-something unemployed adman going through a midlife crisis.

Pearson has just lost his father in a shootout in the food court of a mall in Brooklands, a suburban city around Heathrow airport.

Arriving in Brooklands to investigate his father’s death, Pearson finds out that the city revolves around the mall, the enormous Metro-Centre.
(Balloon: It’s the St. Peter’s square of the shopping world.)

Aside from being a commercial center, the Metro-Centre attracts nationalist hooligans, dressed in St George’s cross t-shirts who riot and persecute immigrants of any ethnicity.
(Balloon: These chinks and turks are fouling up the country!)

Later Pearson discovers that a group of local notable figures that hate the mall might be behind his father’s death.

While the mystery remains unsolved, Pearson participates in Metro-Centre campaigns starred by David Cruise, beloved Brooklands actor, and transmitted through the mall’s own cable TV channel.

A bomb attack in the mall takes Cruise to the locale, in a sort of fascist State coup.

A series of events leads the Metro-Centre to be surrounded by the army, with the novel’s main characters and other three thousand people taken as hostages. The ending is cinematic.

Ballard explores well the dark side of the English suburbs, but his naive allegory of the effects of capitalism and publicity is undercut by the messianic tendencies it so criticizes.
(Balloon: Shopping as religion: the root of all society’s evils)

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Grand Theft Auto IV: Ballardian atrocities
+ ‘Audiopollution! They said it’d never hit us here…’
+ ‘Now Zero’ vs Death Note
+ ‘Enigmatic Engineering’ in the Wind from Nowhere

JG Ballard, the writer who brought SF into the mainstream, has remarked that “Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.” Ballard’s visions of “inner space”, Orwell, Huxley and Atwood’s totalitarian nightmares, Kafka’s uneasy bureaucracies, Gibson’s cutting-edge cool — all are examples of a literature at the forefront of the collective imagination. Every truly original writer must, by definition, create a new world. Here is a whole galaxy of worlds to explore.

…yet it fails to include a single Ballard novel in the accompanying list.

Still, mustn’t grumble: there is Toby Litt’s ‘Best of JG Ballard’ subsection instead:

When I read JG Ballard, I go into a particular kind of trance. The effect of his books isn’t comparable to those of any other writer. His prose, right from the beginning, has a mesmerising pace, rhythm and decorum all its own. Even more remarkably, Ballard has established his own set of visionary locations. Plenty of other writers now fictionally venture into multistorey carparks, airport hospital wards, decaying hotels, but they do so in the knowledge that they’re trespassing on Ballard’s territory. He was here first; he was the pioneer — back when these places were seen as totally unliterary. What could possibly happen on a motorway embankment that was of interest?

At Dan Hill’s always-impressive City of Sound, a recent post returns to Dan’s interest in Ballard’s Drowned World, positioning it as the middle panel of a triptych of novels (including Shute’s On the Beach and McCarthy’s The Road) that depict the planet ’suffering some kind of apocalyptic event in different ways…’, each representing particular aspects of ‘denial’ that are in orbit around current debates on climate change. Hill suggests that all three works are ‘post-nuclear’, but isn’t it the case that the world in Ballard’s book has transformed due to ‘gigantic geophysical upheavals’, ie solar radiation? While in The Road, the low rumble of the percussive strike remembered in flashback could just as well be attributed to a meteor as much as a nuclear hit.

It’s a really intriguing post, however, and it would be great to see Dan expand it into a fullblown essay one day:

Clive Hamilton, in a brilliant essay in The Monthly on climate change denial, completes the Rumsfeldian square with his suggestion that climate change denial is about “unknown knowns, the facts we know but push from our consciousness.” On The Beach is more about this form of denial than reconciliation perhaps. It’s closer to ‘interpretative denial’ than ‘literal denial’ or ‘implicatory denial’, in Stanley Cohen’s model from his States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering.
…
JG Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) concerns a form of attempted psychological adaptation, perhaps also as denial. Ballard’s vision depicts living organisms, including humans, regressing to a prehistoric consciousness, a form of long dormant lizard brain awaking and grappling for control of consciousness and subconscious, in parallel with the rampantly fertile flora of the Triassic era. This is hardly denial, consciously or subconsciously. Rather, a surely doomed attempt by the human mind to reboot itself into another mode more appropriate to the conditions, like DOS suddenly re-emerging from within Windows.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2007) is shattering, and one of the finest novels I’ve read. Certainly one of the most emotionally affecting. The protagonists in The Road are further advanced along this destructive linear progression. Indeed, further on down the road. They’re far removed from any possible form of denial. Their ash-cloaked dead world is one of grim realisation and numb despair.

Happy new year, indeed.

The first question from journalist Martin Conrads about J.G. Ballard’s short story The Sound-Sweep put [Bill] Drummond immediately on the defensive (”I don’ know it”), where he stayed for the next half an hour deftly deflecting all questions with charm if not aplomb.

Growing up [in Shepperton] from 1987–1998 I knew the mysterious J G Ballard lived in the house next door to my sister’s best friend Tara. Your beautiful photographs bring back so many memories for me, especially the curly bridge from the end of my road. Living there and walking past his house every day I never once laid eyes on the man himself but so many stories circulated about him that he was almost like a mythical character. We believed he was a billionaire but he refused to leave his semi in Shepperton and that he had a car in his living room. I’m sure there were some nudist rumours too. Does he still live there?

A billionaire! Not quite…

One of the things I really love about Thomas Cazals’ Ballard docudrama is the way it taps into this mythical strata, exaggerating it for supreme comic effect (but still with all the affection due our favourite writer). I think I agree with Toby Litt, who said on his panel at Kosmopolis that he sometimes wishes Ballard had never excavated at length his Shanghai background in interviews.

What would we be left with? How should we fill in the gaps, answer the questions asked of us by his work, without the distorting lens of biography? With musings similar to Vicky and Thomas, trying to make sense of this warped genius who seems to have drifted into our reality from a parallel dimension, where he is indeed enjoying a hearty laugh at our expense.

Gareth says:

I emailed the Times of couple of times and put a few comments on the competition page but heard nothing. Snooping around the Harper Perennial website I located the email address of Siobhan Kenny, the Communications Director, next day I received the following response, the end is in sight?

“Dear Mr Buxton

I do apologise for the lack of update on the competition to design a cover for a special edition of JG Ballard’s Crash. Unfortunately, changes to our publishing schedule resulted in our not being able to put the special edition into production in 2008 as planned. Instead therefore we hope to publish the new edition, complete wtih the winner’s artwork, as part of the series of events celebrating the 25th anniversary of 4th Estate in 2009. As soon as the details are finalised, we will of course inform the winner and publicise it more widely togethr with Times Online.

We are sorry for this delay but we hope that the greater prominence the book will receive by being part the 25th anniversary of 4th Estate will give the winner and the book more public profile.

Best wishes
Siobhan Kenny, Communications Director”

I also asked her to contact the Times and put an update on the competition web page, she agreed to arrange this.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Announcement: Crash Cover Competition
+ Crash Kama Sutra
+ Crash Cover Conundrum
+ Design a cover for Crash

Martin Pichlmair has written an interesting article for Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, ‘Grand Theft Auto IV considered as an Atrocity Exhibition’, that draws parallels between the controversial GTA and Ballard’s most experimental work:

This review outlines the intersections between Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North, 2008) and the British novelist J.G. Ballard’s experimental text “The Atrocity Exhibition”. Obvious parallels like the dominant roles of cars and carnage are supplemented by more subtle similarities. Grand Theft Auto is an “Atrocity Exhibition”, a deliberately instigated scandal, and a cynical masterpiece.
…
J.G. Ballard is convinced that science fiction authors should pursue the exploration of inner landscapes rather than be writing about adventures in outer space. Not unlike Grand Theft Auto, he seeks to articulate the pathology that underlies consumer society… Most of his novels exhibit civilisation in a state of disintegration, dystopian landscapes and protagonists unable to shake off their past. The hostile landscape acts as an expression of the personal struggle of the hero, its inhabitants gradually regressing into savages. The protagonist is the only constant, stubbornly sticking to his foredoomed path while elegantly sidestepping all dangers. Grand Theft Auto also tells the story of a man who keeps his path in a world bare of illusions.

Without wishing to distract from Martin’s eloquent argument, I wonder why Crash wasn’t considered alongside Atrocity (to which it can be considered a sequel) and Ballard’s 1968 exhibition of crashed cars, which Martin does refer to. Indeed, Atrocity blueprints the later novel in its chapter entitled ‘Crash!’, which, as Ballard explains, ‘was written a year before my exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory, and in effect is the gene from which my novel Crash was to spring’. Elsewhere, Atrocity records the first, enigmatic appearance of Vaughan, Crash’s ‘nightmare angel of the expressways’. In effect, Crash amplifies the tensions Martin rightly identifies as underpinning the Atrocity dynamic, such as ‘the psychotic principal character … who regards all other people as inhabitants of his mental landscape’.

Interestingly, the connection between the hyper-aestheticised violence of Crash and the elegant carnage of autogeddon-style computer games is something Matt Bittanti drew upon in his experiments with gamics, ‘the combination of comics and videogames’:

I love the idea of gamics, but I’m not really interested in storytelling, so for my first experiments, I decided to cut-and-paste various popular artifacts. “F.E.A.R. I.K.E.A.” combines the fetish for IKEA’s catalog with Monolith’s awesome FPS. “CRASH” is what happens when you play too much Burnout while reading JG Ballard’s stories; “WAR/GAMES” is about the ideology of games, while “SIM-BAUDRILLARD” is about… well, you get the drift, right?

ABOVE: Matteo Bittanti’s Crash, part 2.

The final version of my doctoral thesis on Ballard was accepted and submitted today. All that remains now is to formally graduate early next year. This ends a certain phase. I began the doctorate in 1995 at Monash University, but suffered a bit of burn out and walked away from it in 1997. I didn’t read Ballard for a long time after that (having forged a subsequent career as a travel writer) and only really became fully reacquainted with his work when I started this website up in 2005. If I was being honest, I realised I was disappointed in myself for not completing the degree, and I think the website was probably a subconscious desire to reconnect with this former life. Then in 2006, through the site, I came back into contact with my supervisor and began to entertain the possibility of returning.

In April 2007 I resumed the doctorate, even though I only had just 15 months left on my enrolment. I thought that I would be able to use much of the research and notes I’d completed the first time around, but soon found that while my thematic framework was intact, my focus on technology and the psychology of new media meant that pretty much everything had to be re-researched and rewritten, as obviously ‘technology’ has changed so much in the last 10 years. I also had to reacquaint myself with theory, never easy at the best of times. In effect, then, I’ve researched and written the thesis in just under two years, and I can tell you that is far from ideal! Madness descended… (and I have absolutely no doubt that some of that insanity was manifest in some of the more, uh, shall we say, ‘esoteric’ posts here on this site.)

The one thing that really got me through that incredibly tough slog was this website and the various people who have so generously shared, swapped and critiqued ideas about Ballard’s work. There has been some debate about whether academics should keep blogs, about whether they are a distraction from the ‘real’ work of writing theses and publishing articles, but I can say from my experience that I never would have made it without this kind of interaction — as moderator of the site, filtering this constant stream of information and ideas was worth at least double the time. There have been a fair few critics of the site, too, but even that has helped to sharpen ideas, hone instincts and keep the old ego in check. It has all been incredibly stimulating. For example, those rushed, sometimes embarrassingly naive posts of mine that were written with the purpose of getting thoughts down in the heat of the moment later, magically, germinated into more mature and thoughtful ideas that were incorporated into the thesis; plus there has been a fair share of opportunity in terms of being offered work, publishing opportunities and various collaborations as a result of getting those ideas out there. In short, for anyone contemplating a PhD, I would recommend keeping a blog or website for channelling research ideas of whatever description. Doing a PhD by research can be incredibly isolating and even soul destroying, but the online experience both opened my eyes and my world to a brighter future.

I don’t know how long this site will continue now that the thesis is done and dusted; however, I am currently developing several academic articles (as well as a few other creative projects) based on the thesis chapters, so it will definitely be around for some time yet. In any case, what started as a one-man blog has now developed into a magazine-style venture with a crew of irregular contributors — there is still plenty of life here, and even real potential for a print-publishing project as an offshoot, details of which must necessarily remain quiet at this stage.

Finally, while we’re doing this, there are so many people I need to thank, both as inspiration for the thesis and for supporting, contributing to and generally keeping this website a consistent, flexible and vibrant resource.

First and foremost, J.G. Ballard, of course, whose work has been a consistent source of inspiration in my life. Ballard’s writing to me is a design for living — I treat this wisdom very seriously indeed and with the greatest respect. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to interview Mr Ballard, and I can only hope that I have contributed in some way to an understanding of the incredible complexity of his work.

Secondly, my supervisor, Andrew Milner, who went out on a limb to bring me back into the doctoral fold; himself a scholar of utopias and dystopias, Andrew’s work has greatly influenced my own. Here, I’d also like to thank my examiners, Roger Luckhurst and Andrzej Gasiorek, who, to any scholar of Ballard, need no introduction. Their feedback has been invaluable.

Thirdly, there’s a long list of colleagues, contributors, interviewees, acquaintances, co-conspirators, friends, bloggers, writers, artists, Ballard fans and observers who in some way I’ve interacted with over the past two years, and who have helped to shape either the philosophy of this site and/or the worldview of my thesis, whether its submitting articles to the site, sharing ideas or simply providing inspiring examples through their own work. So, here’s the list … and with apologies to anyone I’ve forgotten …

Thank you to: Shahin Afrassiabi, Ben Austwick, Jeannette Baxter, Mike Bonsall, David Britton, Simon Brook, Jeff Busby, Michael Butterworth, Thomas Cazals, Tim Chapman, Melanie Chilianis, Nic Clear, John Coulthart, Jordi Costa, Cousin Silas, Crashman, Mark Dery, Gabrielle Drake, Ross Farnell, Mark Fisher, John Foxx, Niklas Goldbach, Mark Goodall, Steve Goodman, Julian Gough, Pedro Groppo, Alexander Gutzmer, Owen Hatherley, Craig Hickman, Mike Holliday, Cat Hope, Lyle Hopwood, Iraklis, Isabelle Jenniches, Chris Johnston, Martin Jones, Toby Litt, Dan Lockton, Michelle Lord, Damien Love, Geoff Manaugh, Rick McGrath, Joe McNally, Joanne McNeil, Russell Miller, Chris Mitchell, Dan Mitchell, Michael Moorcock, Rocky Morrow, Joanne Murray, Chris Nakashima-Brown, Solveig Nordlund, Benjamin Noys, Dan O’Hara, Dominika Oramus, Troy Paiva, David Pescovitz, Paul Plamper, Nina Power, Rick Poynor, David Pringle, Simon Reynolds, Gwyn Richards, John Rivers, Umberto Rossi, Mike Ryan, Andy Sawyer, Sam Scoggins, Keith Seward, Pablo Sgarbi, Andy Sharp, Jamie Sherry, Iain Sinclair, Ben Slater, Matt Smith, Phil Smith, Bruce Sterling, Steven (MelbPsy), Jack Strain, Johnny Strike, Raymond Tait, Pippa Tandy, Mac Tonnies, Andrés Vaccari, Justine Vaisutis, V. Vale, William Viney, Jonathan Weiss, Paul Williams and John Carter Wood.

Also, thanks to everyone who’s ever left a comment — positive or negative — in the comment box, and especially to the countless readers who have sent tips and leads for the Ballardosphere section — perhaps my favourite part of the site.

My thesis is dedicated to Leonie Naughton, who was my film tutor in my undergraduate and honours years and who was the greatest inspiration in my academic life. Leonie passed away in 2007 but her passion, humour, wisdom and intellect will never be forgotten.

For anyone who’s interested, here’s the synopsis for my thesis:

‘The yes or no of the borderzone’: J.G. Ballard’s Affirmative Dystopias
Simon Sellars
Monash University, 2008

SYNOPSIS

This thesis analyses the concept of resistance and the model of interstitial space in the work of J.G. Ballard. Here, ‘interstitial’ refers to the peculiar aspect of ‘being between’ that results from globalisation and from the propensity for consumer capitalism to efface distinctions between leisure, work and product. The concomitant failure of politics to ignite imaginations and loyalties suggests that individualism is on the rise as nationalisms become eroded. Boundaries and borders are in flux, not just as points on a map, but also in the unconscious, as played out in the virtual terrain of the media landscape. The result is an increasing desire to seek out transitional zones, the margins and borderzones where indeterminacy escapes and neutralises the homogenous, instantaneous communications and media network binding the planet. The thesis charts Ballard’s mapping of the indeterminacy of transitional space in examples from his oeuvre, returning to them in other chapters with a different perspective, for his work is not discrete, possessing instead a distinct, though indirect, relationship that invites reappraisal, dependent upon context. This relationship questions certainty by suggesting that consensual reality is an illusion, a temporal simultaneity within which are nested multiple subjective realities.

Ballard embraces dystopian scenarios, including the archetypal non-space often characterised as a deadening feature of late capitalism. But this is not simply a call for nihilism. Ballard’s characters are not disengaged from their world. Rather, they embody a sense of resistance that derives from full immersion, a therapeutic confrontation with the powers of darkness, whereby merging with dystopian alienation negates its power. This is predicated on concurrency: Ballard’s writing turns objectivity into subjectivity, opens up gaps where there is room for new subjects. His scenarios can be termed ‘affirmative dystopias’, neither straight utopia nor straight dystopia, but an occupant of the interstitial space between them, perpetual oscillation between the poles – the ‘yes or no of the borderzone’, to use a phrase from his work. Here, dystopia becomes the real utopia, and utopian ideals, typically represented as a stifling of the imagination, the true dystopia. He reinhabits the frame to present a clearinghouse in which corporate and national governance is overthrown and regoverned as a ’state of mind’.

With this in place, the thesis explores Ballard’s program of resistance using examples from six main enquiries: his reimagining of the literary genre of science fiction; his sense of micronationalism and secession; his mapping of architectural space; his deployment of cinematic tropes and techniques; his analysis of surveillance and post-consumerism; and his predictive sense of ‘prosumer’ media.

This is a bizarre match up: Mike Skinner of the Streets in conversation with the philosopher John Gray:

It seemed a good idea to put the pop star and the professor together, and so they met for a wide-ranging conversation — covering the art of storytelling and the imminent collapse of Western capitalism — in a north London pub hours before Skinner’s performance at the BBC Electric Proms.
…
MS: Isn’t it dangerous to say evil is natural?

JG: It’s the opposite. I’m a big fan of JG Ballard…

MS: I’m halfway through High-rise

JG: The very book I was going to mention! Ballard says that people from Catholic countries are less shocked by his books than people from Protestant countries, because they still believe in original sin – there are murderers and psychopaths inside us. It doesn’t mean you accept that state of affairs, it means you have rules and conventions which stand in the way. That’s what used to be called civilisation – though, of course, there’s nowhere that’s more than half-civilised. In general, I’m interested in looking at what’s happening now and trying to deal with it. For instance, climate change is not fully solvable…

MS: Because it’s natural or… because we’re fucked?

JG: [Laughs] Well, my best understanding is that the planet is not like a clock that we can wind back. Once the carbon is in the system, there are inexorable results. Also, there’s global dimming – the darkening of the skies by pollution, which also makes the world cooler than it would otherwise be. Getting rid of pollution too quickly could accelerate global warming.

Most greens are horrified by the thought that we can’t stop climate change, but that’s childish. Am I telling people to give up? No. In Holland, for instance, they’re giving back land to the sea and building more on stilts because they expect sea levels to rise… and I find that uplifting, even though it’s a very sober approach.

I don’t know about Skinner, but Gray’s had a lot of interesting things to say about Ballard in the past, often when he’s applying this particular world view that he’s explaining here to Skinner: that is, an acceptance of a certain level of chaos is necessary in order to survive. It’s therefore not hard to see why Gray admires Ballard. In the New Statesman in 1999, for example, he summed up JGB’s career somewhat more perceptively than most recent commentators: ‘Ballard’s achievement is not to have staked out any kind of political position. Rather it is to have communicated a vision of what individual fulfilment might mean in a time of nihilism’.

In 2000, on BBC Radio Four, he interviewed Ballard to promote Super-Cannes and again managed to diagnose the dark heart powering JGB’s work:

Super-Cannes seems to be … about the way that this individual need to … descend into the parts of ourselves that are not fully sane, that even contain a certain element of real madness, that this kind of … individual self-exploration can be co-opted by business, by government, so that types of behaviour and fantasy that in the past were forbidden become almost light entertainment, part of a new industry where we’re fed with brilliant, violent, strange, surreal imagery, but with the goal not of emancipating us, but of keeping us at the job, keeping us working… the liberation that comes with wealth, affluence, freedom of choice can be used as a tool of social control.

More recently, in his book, Black Mass, while not specifically referencing Ballard, Gray formulated a position that could equally apply to the peculiar character of Ballard’s dystopias, in which the characters create meaning from chaos, forging an alliance with the forces of darkness. Black Mass notes how utopian values specifically fuelled by religion and government have created human misery on a massive scale, up to and including the War on Terror. For Gray, what is needed instead is a realist perspective that rejects utopianism and instead accepts the fact that politics is meaningless and that conflict is inherent in human relationships:

A private realm protected from intrusion is part of civilized life, but some incursion into privacy may be unavoidable if other freedoms are to be secure. It is better to accept these conflicts and deal with them than deny them, as liberals do when they look to theories of human rights to resolve dilemmas of war and security.

Sound familiar?

I’m somewhat flattered. Diane Johnson, novelist and co-writer of the script to Kubrick’s The Shining, references ballardian.com in a review of Miracles of Life:

“Ballard’s novels, especially the early ones, have been treated by a range of serious critics, most notably in France. The late Jean Baudrillard, for example, wrote: ‘After Borges, but in a totally different register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the world that we will be dealing with from now on: a non-symbolic universe but one which, by a kind of reversal of its mass-mediated substance (neon, concrete, cars, mechanical eroticism), seems truly saturated with an intense initiatory power’.

In fact this initiatory power was to wane along with the avant-garde itself, which, also like Ballard, simply got appropriated by the antiwar movement and eventually absorbed into an accepting, even welcoming mainstream. Though he, Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, and others were striving for and finding a personal manner or experimental view, the Sixties mood of experiment seems to have had no legs. The experiments of the Sixties, like the experiments of the Thirties, were widely welcomed, and acceptance is after all a kind of abandonment, perhaps because if an experiment fails to generate a meaningful critical dialogue that can interest the writer himself, he has no context. He’s left alone with his manner, free to perfect it, refine it, parody, imitate, or discard it in relative isolation, and returns to find an audience that has conveniently broadened its views to include as readable and fashionable what was hard or odd at first. This is what seems to have happened to Ballard, now the center of a cult of enthusiasts who comment in the “Ballardosphere,” in books and articles, or via the Web site ballardian.com and elsewhere.”

Although I’m disinclined to agree with her later point that Ballard ‘has been embraced by the mainstream’. In England perhaps, but elsewhere?

[ archived at The Terminal Collection; original article at the New York Review of Books ]

‘Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard)’, screening at Autopsy of the New Millennium, Barcelona. Photos: Simon Sellars.

For you, I have unearthed a trove of information about ‘Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard)’, Ann Lislegaard’s digital interpretation of Ballard’s novel. Recall that in my Barcelona report, I raved about it — as an undisputed highlight in an already outstanding exhibition.

The Light Project in St Louis, USA, recently staged this work as part of a series of site-specific commissions that illuminated the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts at Grand Center in St Louis, USA. By all accounts, the show was a great success and I only wish I could have seen this mesmerising work projected onto urban space; the Light Project has archived photos and background information of the setup and subsequent audience reactions, and there’s an interview with Ann, in which she discusses Ballard and the inspiration she drew from the book. (Also available are sound bites from the interview.)

Ann Lislegaard preparing the Light Project staging of her work, ‘Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard)’.

I fully agree with her view of the novel: it’s a ‘mental space, a state of mind’, and that is really emphasised by her iterative work, which constantly chases its own tail. It’s shown on two screens, side by side, and takes place inside a modernist hotel which residually succumbs to the crystallising process described in the novel. Scenes loop back and subsequently fade and buckle from screen to screen under supersaturation of light, forcing you to constantly question the veracity of what’s come before, and where you are in the loop. Mirror images from one screen to another split off into parallel worlds/scenes, the same but not quite. It’s simply beautiful.

From the Light Project interview with Ann:

ROBIN CLARK: What is it about this text that inspired you to create your installation?

ANN LISLEGAARD: I was fascinated by the scenario, by the jungle location, and by the notion of a place in a constant state of transformation. Ballard is very much a conceptual writer and I think his idea for this novel is related to entropy, since the crystals are completely taking over, creating a sameness, a sort of all encompassing world of light and mirrors. Also, I see the Crystal World as a mental space, a state of mind.

RC: In different ways, the novel and your installation both circle around the idea of light as medium, as a scientific phenomenon that also has psychological and conceptual aspects. How are you using light as a material in Crystal World?

AL: I’ve worked with light in my sound installations, but light has never been the subject matter itself. In the past I always used light as an element in relationship to ideas of space, narrative and gender. Crystal World plays with the notion of too much light. The crystallization of the environment is expressed through light that becomes so bright that it bleaches out and creates its own kind of blindness.

If you’d like a feel for the piece, watch the video above — I don’t know much about its providence, except that it was uploaded to blip.tv and is described thus: ‘Backstage footage from Ann Lislegaard’s “Crystal World” at SMK, Copenhagen 20.03.2007. Condensed and dreamy, electronic soundtrack from un escargot vide’. Now, while this footage is low quality and hard to make out, it does give you a sense of the incredible, dislocating sense of perpetual motion that Ann achieves through her work. But I really don’t think that soundtrack is part of the original piece — I saw it at Barcelona in complete silence, and in my opinion it was much, much more powerful that way for obvious reasons to do with the psychological autonomy of interior, inner space etc etc. For a taste of that experience, follow this link for a four-minute excerpt of the work over at New York Magazine (sneaky NY Mag have encoded the vid in such a way that I can’t rip it and embed it here on Ballardian, so a link will have to do).

Lislegaard’s Left-Hand of Darkness. Photo courtesy Murray Guy.

Ann recently staged a visualisation of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, along with ‘Crystal World’, at Murray Guy in New York. This ended today, sadly, but hopefully both works will exhibit again in the near future.

From Murray Guy:

“Murray Guy is pleased to present two major digital animations by Ann Lislegaard: Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard), 2006 and Left Hand of Darkness (after Ursula K. Le Guin), 2008. These works comprise the second and third parts of a trilogy of 3D animations based on science fiction novels that began with Bellona (After Samuel R. Delany), exhibited at Murray Guy in 2005.

This trilogy continues Lislegaard’s longstanding investigation into spatial perception and cognition and, in particular, divergent forms of narrative. She draws here on science fiction not to illustrate its imaginative content but rather, as Frederic Jameson articulates it, because of science fiction’s potential to provide “something like an experimental variation on our empirical universe.” The works reference modernism and historical visions of the future to reflect on our present triangulation of space and knowledge and temporality; as a whole, they comprise a far-reaching investigation into the structuring of cognition in the digital age.

Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard) is a looping double screen animation showing a modernist glass hotel in a tropical jungle that is slowly invaded by crystalline growth. Text drawn from Ballard’s 1966 novel, which describes a viral crystal found deep in the rainforest that petrifies all organic matter, mingles intermittently with shifting digital images of shadows and the jungle seen from vague interior spaces. Taking the glass house as conceit for a modernist structuring of knowledge, Lislegaard’s animation directly references the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi’s 1951 Glass House, and the work of Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse, who investigated crystalline and organic structures as a means of articulating nonlinear time.

Set in a similarly extreme climate, Left Hand of Darkness (After Ursula K. LeGuin) is a three-channel projection that draws on LeGuin’s 1969 novel describing an icy planet populated by a single sex of androgynous humanoids. Pages of the novel are inscribed on top of another and rotoscopic images spin next to drawings of male and female genitalia. Here identity and behavior seem at once both paralyzed and in a state of constant flux; the novel’s radical re-imagining of gender is inscribed in a fluid space between cinema, architecture and writing. As in The Crystal World, Lislegaard works to reconfigure polarities—between interiority and exteriority, male and female, organic and inorganic—in an explosively horizontal digital terrain, where nothing aligns as we would expect.

Ann Lislegaard lives and works between Copenhagen and New York. Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard) was recently on view as an outdoor installation in The Light Project at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, and was originally commissioned for 27th Bienal de São Paulo in 2006. Lislegaard has had numerous solo museum exhibitions, including presentations at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2007); Statens Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark (2007); Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2004); Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland (2002); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (1999), among others. She represented Denmark at the 51st Bienniale di Venezia in 2005 and will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle opening in May 2009.”

He turned his attention to me, tapping the bundle of handouts in his grip.

‘Get all the paper you can, Ballard. Some of the stuff they give away — “Mechanisms of Occupant Ejection”, “Tolerances of the Human Face in Crash Impacts” …’

As the last of the engineers stood back from the test car Vaughan nodded appreciatively, and commented sotto voce, ‘The technology of accident simulation at the R.R.L. is remarkably advanced. Using this set-up they could duplicate the Mansfield and Camus crashes — even Kennedy’s — indefinitely.’

‘They’re trying to reduce the number of accidents here, not increase it.’

‘I suppose that’s a point of view.’

Ballard, Crash.

ABOVE: Recreation created in Crash Zone 8 by Neal Trantham, Nebraska Accident Reconstruction, LLC.

Do you think if Vaughan was alive today, he’d be using AutoCAD to design the optimum sex death of Elizabeth Taylor in a collision of flesh, technology, semen and engine coolant?

Two CAD programs, Crash Zone and Quick Scene, seem tailor-made (Taylor-made?) for this Maldoror of the Motorways, his penis scarred possibly due to a motorcycle accident…

For 10 years The Crash Zone has been the drawing program of choice for Accident Reconstructionists who insist on functionality, precision, and ease of use. The new Crash Zone Version 8 has even more tools for crash investigators, including easy 3D animations, a vehicle specifications database, skid analysis and momentum calculations, and an easy-to-use 3D body poser! No special training is required! Free Technical Support!

Are you looking for the easiest and fastest way to create accident diagrams? Do you want an affordable program that lets you finish a crash scene diagram in 10 minutes or less? Quick Scene is your answer!

Now you can quickly create professional-looking diagrams for all your routine collision reports in less than 10 minutes! Whether you need to create a quick sketch or an accurate, scaled diagram, then Quick Scene is for you. Version 4 of Quick Scene is easier to learn, contains many powerful features and is very affordable. Only Quick Scene has thousands of predrawn symbols AND a powerful Symbol Manager to help you quickly find the right symbol and place it at the proper rotation and size! Save hours by creating “intersection templates” for your area, then just re-use them over and over!

More at the CAD Zone.

[thanks, Geoff, for the link]

Over at the Transatlantis blog, there is an announcement of a new theme park patterned after Ballard’s work:

A new theme park is coming soon to Dubai. Named The Ultimate City, its theme will be the the world refracted through the many faceted crystal-like mind of writer J.G. Ballard. It will be distributed throughout the city to make it’s experience as much part of the urban fabric as possible. Some of the attractions will include:

• The Drowned World water park where guests can experience the rising sea levels of global warming as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.
• As oil rapidly becomes a scarce commodity, Crashland will become the only place to partake in the visceral and intoxicating power of the internal-combustion engine.
• Get closer to the nuclear power of the sun over the ozone free Terminal Beach, or descend into the cool shade of vintage Bikini Atoll concrete nuclear blast bunkers scattered among it’s sandy dunes.
• In a special arrangement with the Burj Dubai, a large section of the world’s tallest skyscraper has been reserved for High Rise: a paint-ball arena where guests struggle for advantage as they try to reach the top of the building.
• Other attractions will include: The Burning World, Concrete Island, and more.

Of course, this is not the first Ballard Park. As Ballardian readers will be aware, the original in Egypt closed due to entropy:

Egyptian Ballard World, developed by loyal Ballard fans for loyal Ballard fans, had everything the discerning JGB fan could possibly require: abandoned water bodies; derelict technology; dead monorails hanging against the sky like guillotines; construction works half finished, as if some terrible disaster had wiped out all traces of human life; masses of rubble and twisted metal forming complex cryptograms, their meaning inscrutable and remote, as if they were designed not for man, but for man’s absence…

More recently, however, British and Chinese versions are being planned to fill the void:

Ballard World will be the perfect day trip for stressed out Londoners. Advertised as “Families exploring inner space”, there’s enough going on for every age group; The little ones play hide and seek in an abandoned Shanghai mansion and roam around the inevitable empty swimming pool. Dad fingers the dented side panel of Jayne Mansfield’s crashed 1966 Buick Electra, while mom has a pina colada in a cocktail party that’s permanenently on the brink of getting out of hand.

Another Ballard resort on the outskirts of Shanghai, expected to open its doors in 2009, will consist of a minute replica of the London suburb Shepperton, with the Heathrow Hilton atrium as an entrance building. Other cities as diverse as Detroit and Rome have shown interest in opening a Ballard Park…

With all of these Ballard Worlds in development, the future is looking not so bleak after all: dystopia as aesthetic pleasure of the highest order, indeed.

Recently, I was seriously puzzled by an attack from an anonymous (of course) ‘academic’ (female) on another forum that branded the contents of this site as ’seething with testosterone’. Well, you make of that what you will, but it reminded me of an incident back when I first attempted my doctoral thesis on Ballard, some 12 years ago. I vividly recall delivering a paper at a postgrad seminar and being roundly attacked during question time by a woman who was disgusted by my support of such a ‘deeply misogynistic writer’. I remember replying that in Ballard, it’s actually the male characters that have a pretty hard time of it, and if anything their flaws are more magnified and on display, thus supporting my interrogator’s sense of outrage about male attitudes in a roundabout way if she could only bring herself to see it thus.

Related to this, there was something else going on about Ballard’s female characters, something to do with male inadequacy in the wake of female intelligence, that I couldn’t quite articulate at the time but which Joanne McNeil of Tomorrow Museum has perhaps nailed, in this recent interview over at Deep Glamour:

DG: Who are the most glamorous characters in science fiction?

JMcN: J. G. Ballard’s female characters are straight out of film noir, except a million times smarter. The only thing he obsesses over more than airports and drained swimming pools is feminine intellect. He barely describes their appearance, but instead gives them high-power jobs, introverted tendencies, and sharp wit. They are doctors, never nurses. They are usually thinking one step ahead of the male protagonist. He recognizes that intellectual curiosity and femininity aren’t contradictory. I mean, this is a man who confessed to a crush on Hillary Clinton in a recent interview. Susan Sontag so much adored his books she briefly planned to script and direct The Crystal World with Jean Seberg in a starring role.

Rosanna Arquette and Holly Hunter are two of my favorite actresses, but it was Deborah Unger who epitomized “Ballardian” for me in Crash. She was so perplexingly remote and intelligent. She’s not a bitch, but she’s not quirky, rarely smiles, and has a tentative way of interacting with other people. Unger’s mother is a nuclear scientist and she studied economics and philosophy in college. So she really is that Ballardian ideal analytic woman. That she’s as beautiful as she is makes it all the more disarming.

ABOVE: Granny takes a trip… underground.

ABOVE: London Fields Lido, by Gigi Cifali.

A group of Sydney architects are doing their best to rob us of a Ballardian future.

As BLDGBLOG wryly notes, said architects are rehabilitating ‘backyard swimming pools into subterranean “granny flats” … a spatially innovative, if unexpected, way to assuage Sydney’s growing housing shortage’… The regions 360,000 swimming pools would first be emptied of their water and then transformed, through architectural intervention, into a comfortable domestic space, “complete with a small bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom, garden alcove and rooftop windows.”‘

Imagine if this idea had caught on during Ballard’s formative years… No more disused, abandoned swimming pools; no more post-industrial anomie.

LEFT: Burroughs in 1963: ‘particularly spectral and menacing: a fitting mug shot for a literary outlaw’ (image via Reality Studio). RIGHT: Moorcock, from around the same era (image via Moorcock’s Miscellany).

Over at Reality Studio, there’s an excellent interview with Michael Moorcock, conducted by Mark P. Williams. Naturally, Moorcock is as insightful discussing Burroughs and the Beats as he has been analysing the New Wave and Ballard, and I think he sums up Kerouac for me, too:

I read two books while hitchhiking from Sweden to France and was starving by the time I got to Paris — On the Road by Kerouac and Brideshead Revisited by Waugh. I thought On the Road a bit of a wank and the Waugh a bit frozen in a time which meant almost nothing to me.

And then came Burroughs…

Read the interview for more on the intersection of three great writers (there’s quite a bit of detail on Ballard, also). And kudos to MPW for the weighty questions — to which Moorcock responds in kind.

MPW: Both your writing and Burroughs at this time would fall under what Jeff Nuttall described as “Bomb culture” (Nuttall, Bomb Culture, 1968), a peculiar reaction to the uncertainties and contradictions revealed in the post-1945 era, which he identifies particularly with the atom bomb. How much do you feel that the specific cultural circumstances of the mid-to-late-1960s, particularly in the Ladbroke Grove area, are reflected in the appeal of what Mary McCarthy calls Burroughs’ novel of “statelessness?”

Moorcock: Jeff was a bit older than me. I didn’t react much to the bomb. I wasn’t scared of it, maybe saw it as a useful symbol… and though I sort of went along with friends in the Ban the Bomb movement, I knew it wouldn’t be banned and rather relished the idea of it. I did see it as a way of keeping the peace. I shared this view with Ballard and Barry [Barrington] Bayley, the two writer friends I saw regularly and with whom I had most in common. Ballard had been liberated by the Bomb, as had [Brian W.] Aldiss, another friend. Ballard from the Japanese civilian camp and Aldiss from having to begin the invasion of Japan. I think I was born a little too late to worry. I had enjoyed the excitement of the V-bombs, the majority of which fell in SW London, where I lived, and had always felt slightly let down by peacetime. Few of my close friends gave much of a crap about the bomb. We understood sensibilities had changed and that we needed a new kind of fiction to deal with it, but we didn’t lose much sleep except, maybe, during the Cuban crisis. But even there our attitude was sort of elevated. I was more focussed on discovering a new kind of urban fiction.

I like the notion of the “stateless” novel and indeed you could argue I was looking for a form like that. Cornelius certainly reflects that. A novel which looked for a new form of identity? McCarthy was arguing from a more academic, conventional point of view. I was more practical, I think, in that I was trying to reclaim the “literary” novel for a general public, through sf. Burroughs, Bayley and Ballard all had an interest in taking certain ideas from sf for their own uses, as I did. So we were trying to marry popular and, if you like, elitist art, in much the way Michael Chabon and his Bay Area friends are trying to do today. I did assume Burroughs to be a writer with an audience amongst sf readers, for instance. It turned out that the sf audience, like the audiences for any genre fiction (including the middle-brow “modern” or even “modernist” novel) is deeply conservative and pretty much addicted to generic conventions. Repetition is what it needs, not innovation.

..:: MORE
+ ‘To Write For the Space Age’: Interview with Michael Moorcock by Mark P. Williams
+ A New Literature for the Space Age: Moorcock’s Editorial on Burroughs for New Worlds
+ The Cosmic Satirist: Moorcock’s review of Naked Lunch for New Worlds

Further to Mike Moorcock, Frendz and Hawkwind all turning up in Mike Bonsall’s brilliant excavation of Ballard’s neural motorway, and then the passing away of Jim Cawthorn, let’s return to John Coulthart.

John, who has designed a few Hawkwind record covers in his time, has unearthed a comic strip from the November 29th, 1971 edition of Frendz. It’s written by Moorcock and illustrated by Cawthorn, and features Hawkwind as sonic supermen.

See John’s post for more detail, and also the next page of the strip.

SONIC ATTACK
by Hawkwind
lyrics by Michael Moorcock
sung by Bob Calvert (with Lemmy)

In case of Sonic Attack on your district, follow these rules:
If you are making love it is imperative to bring all bodies to orgasm
simultaneously.
Do not waste time blocking your ears.
Do not waste time seeking a soundproof shelter.
Try to get as far away from the sonic source as possible,
but do not panic…

Use your wheels. It is what they are for.
Small babies may be placed inside the special cocoons,
which should be left, if possible, in a shelter.
Do not attempt to use your own limbs.
If no wheels are available, metal, not organic, limbs
should be employed whenever possible.

Remember, in the case of Sonic Attack, Survival means every man for himself.
Statistically more people survive if they think only of themselves.
Do not attempt to rescue friends, relatives, loved ones.
You have only a few seconds to escape.
Use those seconds sensibly or you will inevitably die.
Do not panic.
Think only of yourself…

These are the first signs of Sonic Attack:
You will notice small objects, such as ornaments, oscillating.
You will notice a vibration in your diaphragm.
You will hear a distant hissing in your ears.
You will feel dizzy.
You will feel the need to vomit.
There will be bleeding from orifices.
There will be an ache in the pelvic region.
You may be subject to fits of hysterical shouting, or even laughter.

These are all signs of imminent Sonic destruction.
Your only real protection is flight.
If you are less than ten years old, then remain in your shelter and use
your cocoon.

But remember:
You can help no-one else, No-one else, No-one else…

Cover scan via Moorcock’s Miscellany.

David Pringle reports that the fantasy and SF illustrator, James Cawthorn, has died. Cawthorn was a fixture of the New Worlds era, and had a strong link to Ballard’s work. He illustrated Ballard’s ‘Equinox’ for NW #142 (above), and also wrote in 1967 what is surely the very first JGB pastiche, a fragment entitled ‘Ballard of a Whaler’, for New Worlds #170. I’ve reproduced the piece below, in a move that is bound to enrage further the killjoys who have attacked this site for running the occasional pastiche in the past. But as ‘Ballard of a Whaler’ demonstrates, the Ballard pastiche actually has a long and noble history.

For more on Cawthorn and his work with New Worlds and Savoy Books, see John Coulthart’s commemorative post.

BALLARD OF A WHALER
by ‘J. Cawthorn’

Each morning Konrad would go down to the edge of the moraine and gaze across at the skinners stripping the blubber from the whales. Architectural rather than organic, the white bones of the stranded monsters traced the structural relationships of underlying strata with the world above the ice, counterpointing in their curved sequence the prismatic and crystalline complexity of the glaciers, embodying the forms of all sequential aspects of duration. Engrossed by their fundamental geomorphic resonance with the rib-cage of Ulrica Ulsenn, he did not immediately notice the towering figure of Urquart the whale-hunter by his side. The harpooner’s eyes were sombre and brooding and when he spun his eighteen-foot lance end-over-end in a characteristic gesture and drove it splinteringly into the ice, he betrayed by no flicker of a muscle that he had impaled his left foot.

New Worlds #170, 1967.

‘Like the suspended state of duty-free malls, a zone at once inside and yet outside the legal parameters of the country it exists in, Vaughan and [Crash's narrator] Ballard experience the motorways as weirdly detached from an embedded culture or history or morality’.

Roger Luckhurst, The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard.

From today’s news:

‘Japanese tourist Hiroshi Nohara is on a layover at the Mexico City airport. It has lasted almost three months, and he has no plans to leave…

“I don’t understand why I’m here,” he said through a visiting interpreter originally hired by a television station. “I don’t have a reason.”

The embassy can’t force him to leave, and since Nohara’s visa is valid all Mexican officials can do is wait for it to expire in early March. For reasons he can’t explain, Nohara has been in Terminal 1 of the Benito Juarez International Airport since September 2, surviving off donations from fast food restaurants and passengers and sleeping in a chair.’

Yes, I know precisely how he feels.

It’s a shame Guy never designed a Ballard cover. JGB, after all, appreciated Chris Foss’s lurid airbursh overload as it applied to Crash. Surely that’s not a million miles away from the Peellaert ideal?

[ via {feuilleton} ]

BELOW: Guy Peellaert’s cover for Diamond Dogs.

ABOVE: Photo by Steven Meisel.

ABOVE: Photo by Kohei Yoshiyuki.

Via Susannah Breslin (Boing Boing guest blogger), we learn that Ballardian favourite Steven Meisel is back with ‘a layout that was (supposedly) too hot to run in Vogue Italy, so we get to look at them on the internets. NSFW, unless you work in an orgy pit’. Writes Susannah, the shots were ‘inspired by … old school Kodak infrared flashbulb illuminated snaps of Japanese sexhibitionists and their peeping toms in parks that were shot by Kohei Yoshiyuki in the early ’70s’. Evidently, Meisel is updating Yoshiyuki for a dogging generation.

But what’s the deal with NY Mag trading on the perv value of Meisel’s rejection by Vogue, only to reproduce the pictures at such a small size?

In any case, it’s not as NSFW as this.

..:: Previously on Ballardian

+ Triple Transgression
+ Love Among the Mannequins
+ This Time It’s War!
+ Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency
+ JGB’s Sinister Marriage
+ Dead Models

By day the overflights of B-52s crossed the drowned causeways of the delta, unique ciphers of violence and desire.

J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition.

ABOVE: MotoArt’s B-707 Fuselage Room Divider.

Chris Nakashima-Brown emails to tell me about MotoArt, which produces SMOKING HOT furniture made from aviation parts. As Chris says: ‘The perfect extra touch for the Ballardian bachelor pad…’

I want the B-52 Office Ejection Seat … and the F-4 Phantom Coffee Table … Oh and the … oh, oh … ahhhh…

I think Troy Paiva might also be interested.

More info: MotoArt.

ABOVE: MotoArt’s F-4 Phantom Coffee Table.

ABOVE: MotoArt’s B-52 Ejector Office Chair.

Novelist, essayist and short-story writer J(ames) G(raham) Ballard was born in Shanghai, China on 15 November 1930. His family was interned by the Japanese during the Second World War, returning to Britain in 1946. Ballard read Medicine at King’s College, Cambridge, and later studied English at London University. He worked as a copywriter and was stationed in Canada with the Royal Air Force.

His first short story was published in 1956. This and many other short stories were published in science fiction magazines and were heavily influenced by the surrealist movement. The short story is seen by many critics as central to Ballard’s work, originating and developing themes and obsessions that progress through into his novels. The dislocated sense of time and space in these stories is located in his childhood experience of war and provides many of the images that have become associated with Ballard’s fiction: wrecked machinery, deserted beaches, crashed cars, abandoned buildings and empty, desolate landscapes – ’still-life arranged by a demolition squad’ as Ballard himself described his settings in an interview with BBC Radio 3 (‘Nightwaves’ 30 October 2001). Complete Short Stories was published in 2001, and a second volume of stories in 2006.

His early novels include The Drowned World (1962), The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drought (1965) and The Crystal World (1966). These were followed by more experimental novels, such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975), establishing Ballard’s reputation with both readers and critics as a cult avant-garde writer. His 1973 novel Crash, in which a car-crash provokes a disturbing series of obsessions in the narrator, was made into a film by David Cronenberg.

Ballard’s acclaimed and best-selling novel Empire of the Sun (1984) brought him to wider public attention. The novel drew directly on his childhood wartime experiences and won the Guardian Fiction Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. It was made into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1988.

Cocaine Nights (1996), a thriller set in a community of expatriates living on the Spanish Costa del Sol, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award. His novel, Super-Cannes (2000), a vision of corporate dystopia set in the south of France, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book). His novel Millennium People (2003), is a tale of violent political protest and social change.

J. G. Ballard lives in Middlesex. His latest novel is Kingdom Come (2006). In 2008, his autobiography, Miracles of Life, was published.

British Council: Contemporary Writers.

‘William Burroughs at his writing machine, New York, fall 1953. One of numerous, rarely seen photographs taken by Allen Ginsberg that feature in a special Gallery section of Naked Lunch@50, here Ginsberg’s Kodak Retina records a crucial moment for Burroughs, as he worked on the manuscripts of “Queer” and “Yage” before heading off towards Tangier and the writing of Naked Lunch… (Courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Trust and Stanford University Library.)’

[In 1960] a friend of mine had come back from Paris where Naked Lunch had been published by the Olympia Press, which was a press that specialized in sort of low-grade porn, but also published what were then banned European and American classics. Henry Miller, for example, was first published in the Olympia Press. And Nabokov’s “Lolita” was first published by the Olympia Press.

Anyway, it was a rather low time for me. I had just started out as a writer. I hadn’t written my first novel. And this was the heyday of the naturalistic novel, dominated by people like C. P. Snow and Anthony Powell and so on, and I felt that maybe the novel had shot its bolt, that it was stagnating right across the board. The bourgeois novels, the so-called “Hampstead novels” seemed to dominate everything.

Then I read this little book with a green cover, and I remember I read about four or five paragraphs and I quite involuntarily leapt from my chair and cheered out loud because I knew a great writer had appeared amidst us. And I, of course, devoured the book and every Burroughs novel. I think there were about three or four then in print from Olympia Press. I knew that this man was the most important writer in the English language to have appeared since the Second World War, and that’s an opinion I haven’t changed since. It was an encouraging moment. I mean, although my writing has never been along the lines that Burroughs set out, his example was a huge encouragement to me.

J.G. Ballard, 1997.

Ballard has made no secret of his admiration for Burroughs, and for Naked Lunch in particular. Can it really be 50 years since this alien work was first unleashed? I’m still trying to imagine the shock of coming upon a book like that in 1959. And I think I know where my next holiday will be…

According to nakedlunch.org:

2009 will see the 50th Anniversary of the first edition of Naked Lunch published in Paris in July 1959 by Olympia Press, which will be celebrated by the publication of Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays, edited by Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen and published by Southern Illinois University Press. The book, the first ever dedicated entirely to the study of Naked Lunch, includes contributions by over twenty writers, scholars, musicians and artists, and will be launched in Paris at the University of London Institute in Paris on June 30th 2009. The Launch will include a special concert by acclaimed singer and writer Eric Andersen, a contributor to the Anniversary book.

July 1-3, 2009 — there will be concerts, readings, and performances in a club in the Latin Quarter, as well as exhibitions in homage to Burroughs and his masterpiece. An important three-day critical symposium will take place at the University of London Institute featuring an international range of scholars and writers. The celebratory events will include dérives around the city and visits to key sites including rue Git-le-Coeur, home of the old Beat Hotel, and the Musée Eugène Delacroix, the artist’s last studio and a testament to the enduring influence of Moroccan culture on generations of artists and writers.

All these events will be taking place on the left bank of Paris, only a few hundred yards from where Burroughs, fifty years earlier, completed the manuscript of Naked Lunch. In July 2009, as an homage to Burroughs’ great work, the streets of Paris are the place to be…

nakedlunch.org is a website designed to mark the occasion, a collaboration produced by Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen, editors of Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays, and Supervert 32C Inc., creator of the William Burroughs site RealityStudio. It promises a near-future bounty of essays, testimonials, scene-by-scene analyses, discographies and bibliographical resources. Keep an eye on it.

By the way, I never knew until recently that Bowie based Diamond Dogs on The Wild Boys. I always thought he thought he was plundering Nineteen Eighty-Four…

But then again, I don’t recall Orwell writing about dog-men with huge genitals.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Get Lost’: Burroughs on Curtis
+ Bunker Tales
+ Horror Panegyric
+ William Burroughs:Preface to The Atrocity Exhibition

Photos by Filip Dujardin.

Junkspace, controlspace, blurred zones … Ballardian space (‘The Ultimate City’, in particular). BLDGBLOG on the ‘resampled space’ of Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin:

Filip Dujardin makes images of unexpected buildings – that is, he “combines photographs of parts of buildings into new, fictional, architectonic structures,” Mark Magazine explains.

The resulting projects look like old factory sites in the American rust belt – Mark describes them as “informal and often dilapidated structures with unspecified functions” – or, in some cases, new projects by LOT-EK, Simon Ungers, or OMA.
…
There seem to be multiple sub-themes, and even sub-projects, within the larger effort. There are surreal detached structures, for instance, like the image that opens this post, standing free amidst a recognizable but anonymous landscape. In some of these we see that even geological forms become subject to resampling. But then there are also what could be called a back series – that is, the backs of incredible buildings whose facades you can barely imagine.

These are groves of architecture, weird islands of form, like the city as seen from a rail line: sheds and retaining walls, stained by rain, their bricks chipped away behind piles of rubbish, their corrugated steel repeating ever onward in infinite ridges.

And if you’re in London this November, you could a lot worse than catch Geoff from BLDGBLOG in action at what sounds like two fascinating events. From BLDGBLOG:

On Monday, November 24, I’ll be hosting a live interview at the Barbican in London with director Michael Winterbottom, for a special screening of his film Code 46. You can read a bit more about the event – as well as buy tickets – here. This is part of an ongoing series called Architecture on Film, curated by the Architecture Foundation.

The purpose of the event is to talk about film and architecture – or, in this case, cities, urban design, memory, science fiction, landscape, globalization, and the built environment. As you can see from the list of locations used for the film’s production, Code 46 is very well-traveled, stitching together urban – and exurban – environments from London, Shanghai, Dubai, Hong Kong, and even the deserts of Rajasthan.

That the film achieves the feel of science fiction simply through a well-edited depiction of existing landscapes says as much about the film as it does about the nature of city-building today; perhaps one might only half-jokingly suggest that people build cities today in order to live inside science fiction films.

I’ve got two more events coming up in London, both on Wednesday, November 26. I’ll post more info about the first event in a bit. The second one, in the evening, has been organized by the Complex Terrain Laboratory, and it will take place in the J.Z. Young Lecture Theatre at UCL, inside the Anatomy Building on Gower Street. Here is a map.

I’ll be teaming up with Antoine Bousquet, Lecturer in International Relations at Birkbeck College, and author of the forthcoming book The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity to discuss our work in relation to space, war, and the city.
…
For my own part, I’ll be discussing a pretty broad swath of ideas about “feral cities” – what I like to call cities gone wild – ranging from Richard J. Norton’s seminal paper on the topic to Mike Davis’s research on “the Pentagon as global slumlord,” via reference to J.G. Ballard, Eyal Weizman, Stefano Boeri, Reza Negarestani, and many others.

More info here and here.

Hans Ulrich Obrist. Formulas for Now.

What do you get if you multiply sex by technology? The future (according to JG Ballard, in this book). Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, asked creatives and academics to invent a formula that summed up modern life: Jeff Koons, Richard Dawkins and Damien Hirst were among those to oblige. Out now. (Thames & Hudson).

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

Salvador Dali.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Barcelona as a guest of the Kosmopolis literary festival. On the 25th, I’m honoured to be appearing on a panel with V. Vale (RE/Search publications) and Bruce Sterling, discussing Ballard and the Ballardosphere. This is kind of unreal to me. The panel will be moderated by Jordi Costa, curator of the Ballard exhibition at the CCCB. I intend to post daily reports from the festival, and if any reader of this site is in town, let’s meet.

After, I’ve got a few days to spare and I hope to be able to make it to Figueras, Dali’s hood. This is on Ballard’s recommendation (see below). A photo essay will doubtless result, adding to my ongoing series of travel reports using Ballard as a neural guidebook. Previous installments: the North Pacific and Shepperton.

Barcelona’s a wonderful place. It’s worth going to see the big church, the Sagrada Familia. You should go to the Park Guell, which Gaudi designed. And you can walk around the center of Barcelona and see these apartment houses which he also designed, with their decorated railings. The Catalans have always had their own culture — it’d one of the oldest languages in Europe. Both Dali and Picasso came from Catalonia. It’s a very lively place — Barcelona’s a great city. If you’ve got a reasonable amount of money, the hotel to stay in is called the Colon, opposite the gothic cathedral (not the Sagrada Familia) there.

If you can afford to rent a car, you can go to Figueras, which is not that far — about 100 miles. It’s Dali’s home town, with a Dali museum. If you go about 10 miles further you can go to Cadaques, where Dali lives, which is worth visiting for its own sake. All the landscapes resemble the giant, lizard-like forms that you get in Dali’s paintings — you actually see them: ‘My God, he just sat on his porch and just painted those ancient rocks!’

I’ve been there many times. My girlfriend and I used to take our kids on holiday every summer (not always together). Spain is the place to take a vacation ’cause it’s near (Greece is a bit of an effort — it’s a long way to drive). Also, I enjoy driving across France. We’d go to a place called Roscas, near Cadaques, which Dali has used in several of his paintings. It’s very near Barcelona. Get a good
guidebook before you set out…

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by V. Vale and Andrea Juno, RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard, 1984.

But the only guidebook I will really need is this.

David Pringle: Have you read any modern horror – Stephen King, for example?

JGB: I enjoyed Clive Barker’s Weaveworld. He gave me a copy, and it was a pleasure to read. He’s an engaging, lively character. I liked him enormously – very lucid and intelligent and simpatico. But, I’m afraid, apart from the Barker, I’ve read almost nothing. No, I haven’t read Stephen King, though I enjoyed the TV movie of Salem’s Lot. I thought that was well done, but then I enjoyed the Omen films too. I know nothing about the world of horror. My reading of horror fiction is strictly Edgar Allan Poe and W W Jacobs and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

DP: Would you consider yourself a writer of horror stories?

JGB: You could say Crash is on the edges of horror fiction. I take it that, in horror fiction, the horrific effects are the object of the exercise. In the Gothic novel the clanking chains and creaking drawbridges and whistling pendulums are the object; the chill of terror and fear is the whole purpose. Whereas in a book like Crash I’m not out to make the blood run cold: I’m trying to look at the eroticism of the car crash and the way modern technology has infiltrated our minds, taken over a large part of our imaginations and created a world of very different values.

I’ve never thought of myself as a writer of horror. When you’re dealing with a sensational subject matter, where you’re showing radical changes with people making sudden discoveries about the reality of their lives in dramatic circumstances, where people are being plagued by intense mental crises (as they are in a lot of my fiction), you’re getting into an area close to horror fiction. The main props of the classic tale of terror were haunted castles and alike. The present day equivalents of haunted castles are psychiatric hospitals; the blade-tipped pendulum has given way to the scalpel in the neurosurgeon’s fingers. It’s not the evil potion in a dusty bell-jar that frightens us now, it’s the contents of the hypodermic syringe, and the needle that may not be too clean. The props have changed. There are sudden glimpses of the shocking and unspeakable in my fiction too, so there is a certain overlap.

David Pringle, ‘Memoirs for a Space Age’, 1990 interview with JGB in Fear magazine.

..:: Previously:
+ Ballardcraft: Ballard/Lovecraft
+ JGB vs HPL

Spain’s economic downturn means that its rampant property development is galloping way, way ahead of potential buyers. And this means ghost cities — in one instance just 750 people living in a development comprising 13,000 residential units. It’s a trend across the Iberian peninsula: Solveig Nordlund filmed Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude, her 2002 feature-film adaptation of Ballard’s ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’, in and around a similar development in Portugal. This was a very canny move on her part, welding this real-world urban slipstream with Ballard’s own disconnected un-reality in a story about dwindling population levels and the high strangeness of techno-capitalism.

Watch this BBC video report for more background on the current state of Spain’s ghost cities. The lack of company wouldn’t bother me. I’d move in there in a heartbeat. Imagine the solitude.

[thanks, Joe McNally]

Here’s an announcement of a new book, Militant Modernism, which I’m sure will appeal to Ballardian readers, written by Owen Hatherley of the fabulous architecture blog Sit Down Man, You’re A Bloody Tragedy. The following press release features endorsements from Simon Reynolds and Ben Noys, who have both featured on this site.

This book is a defence of Modernism against its defenders. In readings of modern design, film and especially architecture, it attempts to reclaim a revolutionary modernism against its absorption into the heritage industry and the aesthetics of the luxury flat.

Militant Modernism argues for a Modernism of everyday life, immersed in questions of socialism, sexual politics and technology. It features new readings of some familiar names – Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, Vladimir Mayakovsky – and much more on the lesser known, quotidian modernists of the 20th century. The chapters range from a study of industrial and brutalist aesthetics in Britain, Russian Constructivism in architecture, the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich in film and design, and the alienation effects of Brecht and Hanns Eisler on record and on screen.

Against the world of ‘there is no alternative’, this book tries to excavate Modernism’s other futures.

With svelte prose, agile wit, and alarming erudition, Owen Hatherley pries open the prematurely closed case of early 20th Century modernism. This slim and shapely, ideas-packed and intensely-felt book is neither a misty-eyed memorial nor a dour inquest, but a verging-on-erotic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Rediscovering the enchantment of demystification and the sexiness of severity, Hatherley harks forward to modernism’s utopian spirit: critical, radically democratic, dedicated to the conscious transformation of everyday life, determined to build a better world.

Simon Reynolds, Author of Rip It Up and Start Again – Postpunk 1978-84

A call to have the courage to be modern against all the current postmodern pieties of exhaustion and fragmentation, Owen Hatherley’s brilliant reactivation of the utopian impulses of the modernist avant-garde is Brecht meeting Ballard to create the science-fiction of socialism.

Benjamin Noys, Author of Georges Bataille and The Culture of Death

In short, he had access. JGB News therefore benefitted from occasional input from the man himself in the form of JGB’s replies to Pringle’s letters, answering various queries in his genial style. Now, Rick McGrath and Mike Holliday have onlined JGB News in its entirety: 25 issues in all.

There’s so much of interest in these pages, but what is humbling for me in rereading these is the fact that many of the discoveries we as Ballard students are making today seem to have been made by Pringle a few decades ago. Nothing, it seems, is new(s) under (let alone, from) the sun.

I submitted my thesis last Friday, and now it’s down to the examiners. I’m out of jail and in the halfwayhouse waiting for final parole. I can see a sliver of daylight through the crack in the angle between two walls. Coming up for air.

I’m sure there are many other cliches to describe the mindstate of the recovering PhD student. Also, there is much JGB news to catch up on. I hope to make a start on some new posts over the next few days.

Warm thanks to everyone who sent words of encouragement and advice over the past few weeks.

Simon

Upon I return, I have a whole raft of exciting posts planned including features on RE/Search Publications, Savoy Books, Nic Clear’s Unit 15 architectural/filmmaking program, and Ballard and Burroughs, as well as more photo essays (including the long-awaited part 2 of ‘Shepperton: Paradigm of Nowhere’), the complete and expanded version of Mike Bonsall’s Ballard concordance and at least two more competitions.

Many thanks to everyone who has supported the site so far. To those whose emails I haven’t responded to in recent times, I promise I will be more present once I get out on parole in just under a month’s time. Do please continue to send tips and relevant news items, and I’ll do my best to get to them upon my return.

I might try and rotate some archival material on the front page during the stasis, but if you can’t wait, dip into the archives. Here are some highlights from the past three years:

+ Rattling Other People’s Cages: The J.G. Ballard Interview
+ ‘Child of the Diaspora’: Bruce Sterling on Ballard
+ Ballardian Home Movie Festival
+ ‘Angry Old Men’: Michael Moorcock on Ballard
+ The Light-Painter of Mojave D: An Interview with Troy Paiva
+ ‘When in Doubt, Quote Ballard’: Interview with Iain Sinclair
+ Exquisite Corpse: Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon
+ J.G. Ballard’s Experiment in Chemical Living
+ Collapsing Bulkheads: The Covers of Crash
+ David Cronenberg’s Alien: Novelization by J.G. Ballard
+ ‘Der Visionär des Phantastischen’: An Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ Grave New World

Plus numerous Ballardosphere entries, for me the most fun (and sometimes disturbing) part of the site, calling into being strange incantations from the world J.G. Ballard has mapped for us.

Aside from the above highlights, there are numerous other entries (over 500 from around 25 authors) under these main categories:

+ Interviews
+ Reviews
+ Features
+ Archival

Enjoy!

As always, thank you J.G. Ballard.

Best wishes,
Simon

I saw George Romero’s zombie flick Dawn of the Dead for the first time at the Melbourne International Film Festival last night. What a super film. What a statement. And very, very funny too. And in fact very reminiscent of Kingdom Come, for Dead, like KC, also features a sealed-off shopping mall in which a band of resistance fighters attempt to restart a micro society, sustained yet ultimately imprisoned by the trappings of consumer capitalism.

The mall in both Ballard and Romero becomes a city, a country, a galaxy, a self-sustaining micronational state seceding from reality, a State of mind absorbing and zombifying all it touches, and the faceless, cartoonish football hordes in KC are consumer zombies as much as the walking dead in Romero are metaphorically intended to be.

Yet, if you tweak your perspective just a little, the survivors in both could conversely be read as the oppressors, the old world clinging to its accumulated wealth, hording it for themselves in the face of the zombie attack — an all-devouring, ever-growing underclass.

For Romero, like Ballard, is nothing if not a master of ambivalence.

The most Ballardian part of the film is when the survivors seal off a department store — privileged retail space — from the zombies in the mall’s concourse, ie the tacky public domain. The survivors turn on the store’s muzak and roam the aisles to take whatever they want from the limitless, yet depthless wonders of consumerism, free to act out their decadent bourgeois fantasies, setting up their attic space with expensive furniture and luxury TV sets, even though the apocalypse that has blighted the outside world means there is nothing to watch anymore.

Watching this sequence, I could almost imagine yet another parallel world in which KC was written in the late 70s, and George Romero, the master of guerilla filmmaking — an aesthetic and a philosophy that informs the guerilla responses in his storylines — had become the first director to adapt Ballard for the big screen, setting the tone for future Ballard adaptations to come: raw, uncompromising, revolutionary, and shot through with the blackest humour, the perfect defence against insanity.

In short: how Ballard’s books, and Romero’s films, appear to me.

Myself and Dr. Shivdeep Grewal have organised a half-day conference with the title ‘J.G.Ballard: imaginary scientist’ that may be of interest to some of your site users. It is intended to be the first of a series of half-day conferences on ‘writers of wrathful science’ (others are Houellebecq, Burroughs, and Ernst Jünger). It is from 1 – 5 pm at Brunel University on 7th September, 2008. The website for further details is: thinklink.capcog.com.

Writers of ‘wrathful science’
If you are interested in crossovers between literature, science, and philosophy then you may be interested in this series of half-day conferences on ‘writers of wrathful science’ such as J.G. Ballard, Michel Houellebecq, William Burroughs, and Ernst Jünger.

First conference …
13:00 – 17:00 hours, 7th September 2008 at Brunel University, Fee: £10

J. G. Ballard: imaginary scientist
J. G. Ballard is a prominent chronicler of the near future.
He may also be thought of as an ‘imaginary scientist’.
This conference will focus on his role as a writer of ‘wrathful science’.
Programme Details

To register for this conference …

by email (easiest & preferred): thinklink@capcog.com with jgb as the subject
by phone: 0560-065-5277 and leave contact details incl. email address
by SMS (i.e., mobile text message): 07786200161 (prefix your message with 30120259 ) and leave contact details incl. email address

More details at thinklink.

Over at Fantastic Journal, Charles Holland has a fabulous post that begins with a rumination on the 1:43 scale model of JFK’s presidential limo sitting on his mantelpiece, and makes its way to a very perceptive analysis of the nature of conspiracy theory as it applies to Ballard’s Atrocity short, ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’:

Ballard’s story differs from conspiracy theory in an important respect. Although, like them, it uses collage and displacement – the sliding in one of one scenario for another, storylines and characters cut and pasted from alternative worlds* – it works through absurdity, highlighting the seam between the accepted reality and the absurd version he posits in its place. Ballard’s story uses collage as an avant garde device of radical disjunction and violent displacement… Conspiracy theory strives for truth, but one that always slips away. By casting doubt on truth in the first place it inherently unbalances itself. Despite its controversy at the time of writing, Ballard’s story is as much a satire on conspiracy theory as it is a tasteless deflation of the importance of the event itself.

More at Fantastic Journal.

What I would therefore like to do is to extend an invitation to any reader to submit appraisals of up to 1000 words on any Ballard title. If you’re interested, please drop me a line saying which book you’d like to work on.

Let’s make this bibliography a vibrant and dynamic guide to JGB’s complete works.

ABOVE: Troy self-portrait.

Via Boing Boing (via Telstar Logistics):

Photographer Troy Paiva has a new book out, and it’s chock full of superb nighttime photos taken at abandoned military bases, aircraft boneyards, auto junkyards, and other wonderfully desolate places. Troy’s book is called Night Visions: The Art of Urban Exploration, and it makes heavy use of his favorite photo technique: Iong-exposure nighttime shots that uses only natural moonlight and simple flashlights to capture ruined night scenes in spooky detail.

The pictures in Night Visions look great, and this Friday, August 1, Chronicle Books is throwing a party to celebrate the its release in San Francisco at the 111 Minna Gallery from 7 to 9 pm.

Troy was, of course, recently interviewed here on Ballardian and Chronicles Book is also the publisher of another Ballardian interviewee, Geoff Manaugh (whose BLDGBLOG book will be out next year).

ABOVE: Drowned World exhibit (photo: Rick McGrath).

Further to his enthralling Letter from Barcelona, Rick McGrath, our white-suited man on the ground, has now posted many more of his photos from the Ballard exhibition.

They come with captions and are helpfully organised into separate autopsy folders.

…:: FURTHER INFO:

+ More exhibition photography from Rick McGrath
+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballard at Kosmopolis
+ Official exhibition blog

…:: Previously on Ballardian:

+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballardoscope: some attempts at approaching the writer as a visionary
+ J.G. Ballard: In the Raw
+ JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona

J.G. Ballard: Update
Because we were overwhelmed by the tremendous quality, as well as the sheer quantity of entries, the judging of this competition is taking a great deal longer than originally planned. We wil be posting a picture gallery of the most impressive images from the very strong shortlist later this month.

[ thanks, L.J. ]

… Previously:
+ Crash Kama Sutra
+ Crash Cover Conundrum
+ Design a Cover for Crash

Simon Sellars investigates whether connections can be found between the oeuvre of HP Lovecraft and that of JG Ballard. The post comes up with only “…vague parallels between the two writers”… The post misses out on a pair of short stories which evince quite clear parallels between the two writers: HP Lovecraft’s 1927 short story “The Color Out Of Space” and JG Ballard’s 1964 short story “The Illuminated Man”. In both stories, a cosmological event infects a rural area, warping color, threatening to mutate the world… Both stories highlight the vulnerability of man in an inhumane cosmic environment…

Both Lovecraft’s and Ballard’s story focus on a fictive world into which classificatory ambiguity is introduced by a cosmological event — by a deus ex machina. In both stories, the effect is contagious, and threatens to mutate the world. In Ballard’s story, it is made clear at the very beginning of the story that the effect is spreading on a cosmic scale…

Where the two stories differ is in the attitude of the protagonist towards the ambiguity. On the one hand, Lovecraft’s surveyor is repelled by the cosmological pollution. Ballard’s protagonist on the other hand is attracted by the boundary-dissolving effect, and in the finale of the book seeks to dissolve the boundaries of his own self…

To recapitulate: both stories present a numenous cosmological event which destabilizes classificatory boundaries in a rural area. In both stories, ‘warped color and light’ are the central metaphor for this destabilizing effect, which both attracts and repels. Other than Simon Sellars, I’d say that the parallels between these two stories are far from vague: they are clear and distinct.

Much more at SD.

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

Here is some much-anticipated and very exciting news.

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. It will feature stage sets and audiovisual installations inspired by Ballard, a library of Ballard’s writings, and works by Ballardian-inspired artists, filmmakers, sound artists and more.

It runs from 22 July to 2 November 2008 and coincides in October with Kosmopolis, Barcelona’s annual international literary festival at the CCCB. For 2008 Kosmopolis will feature two sessions devoted to Ballard, thereby integrating itself within the exhibition. The first session looks at Ballard’s influence on Hispanic writers and the second focuses on his influence in the English-speaking world. Participants in these sessions will include Paco Porrúa, Marcial Souto, Marta Peirano, Toby Litt, Bruce Sterling, Agustín Fernández Mallo, V. Vale … and, gulp, myself (as a late addition, so my name is not yet on the website in case you’re wondering if I’m making it all up). I feel privileged to be among such esteemed company, and I hope I can do ballardian.com — and of course Mr Ballard himself — justice among this selection of sheer heavyweights!

There has been a little more crosssover with this site and the exhibition. I was more than happy to help the organisers with some of the research needed to set ‘Autopsy of the New Millennium’ up. This site’s focus on Ballardian-inspired visual art, for example, led to some of the artists I’ve featured (including Michelle Lord) being invited to exhibit their work at the CCCB, and the contestants in our 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies will also have their 1-minute films screened throughout the exhibition’s run. In addition, the CCCB are running another Ballardian Home Movie competition, the Catalan version, inspired by ours, and once the exhibition is over I will be hosting those movies over here. Finally, I wrote the catalogue notes for the Home Movie screenings and also curated and wrote the catalogue notes for a selection of Ballardian sound art and music to be played in various cubicles throughout the exhibition.

To celebrate the opening of this wonderful event, I will be devoting most of this week and sporadic posts throughout the next few weeks to a selection of articles to do with the autopsy being performed on the new millennium at the CCCB. This will include an interview with the exhibition curators, a fabulous essay on Ballard’s significance written by the Conference Commissioner, Jordi Costa, a video made by the CCCB to commemorate the event, an interview with Solveig Nordlund, the director of Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (Low-Flying Aircraft; 2002), the little-seen Swedish/Portuguese Ballard feature adaptation that will be screening at the exhibition, roving reports from our man on the ground, Rick McGrath (whose massive collection of rare and valuable Ballard first editions will also be on display), and perhaps the catalogues I wrote for the sound art selection accompanied by a mixtape/muxtape of selected tracks.

Of course, also visit the official exhibition blog for much more information as the exhibition goes on.

From the CCCB:

This exhibition offers an itinerary through Ballard’s creative universe: his times 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 dystopia and disaster.

Ballard’s work represents an open-ended body of work that still has many revelations in store for his readers and the capacity to throw light on the course of our future. An author with an enormous influence on later generations of creators in all disciplines, from fantasy cinema to industrial music, Ballard is the author, among many other works, of The Empire of the Sun and Crash, adapted for the cinema by Spielberg and David Cronenberg, respectively.

The sections of the exhibition are:

• “What I believe”
• From Shanghai to Shepperton
• Landscapes of Dream
• Inner space
• Disaster area
• Technology and pornography
• Asepsis and neo-barbarism
• Epilogue
• Bibliographical area
• Ballardian art

…:: FURTHER INFO:

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

Photo by Dr Champagne.

Work has started on a Black Plaque for Robert Vaughan, anti-hero of JG Ballard’s Crash. When English Heretic started one of its intentions was to commemorate psychopaths. Of course, the aim was never so obvious as to glorify serial killers in the tired tradition of industrial culture, but to draw attention to the archetype of the psychopath, the immutable weird of the nightmare. There is no better example in modern fiction than Ballard’s hoodlum scientist, fallen TV angel of the M4 corridor.

As part of the project a sister blog has been set up: The Hoodlum Scientist’s Fieldbook.

Though the idea of a Black Plaque for Vaughan was seeded at the beginning of English Heretic, much of the recent impetus and structure for the research has been inspired by the wonderful Ballard related blogs and articles constructed by Simon Sellars at Ballardian, Nina at Infinite Thought, and Owen at Sit Down Man, you’re a bloody tragedy.

The first location research centres around Northolt in Middlesex, which Ballard’s genius somehow manages to transform into the erotic suburb of a Paul Delvaux painting. The following entry is a personal rendering of Northolt through English Heretic’s Ubu absurd lens…the usual obsessions: toponymic conspiracy; Osirian descent, urban Fulcanellian hermeticism…

In carrying out these researches I would love to hear and have join in, collaborators who share an interest and passion for Ballard. The project is a conscious homage to the great man himself.

English Heretic celebrates the self-saucing psychopath, the Hoodlum Scientist, Dr Robert Vaughan, voyaging to the dark heart of Crash, the M4 corridor, in ‘Final Churches of the Northolt Apocalypse’, this oversaturated photo essay, stalking the alien underbelly of tombstone streets and derelict petrol pumps…

I am terribly flattered to be linked to this crew. Both Nina and Owen are writers that make me feel like I’m forever catching up, such is their skill, while English Heretic is one of the more compelling blogs I’ve run across of late.

This photo essay from the good doctor is suitably lurid and pulpy, like the acid scene in Crash. Like Chris Foss’s cover for Crash. A strange and obsessive incantation… and something is stirring beneath the tarmac.

Photo by Dr Champagne.

The cars in the afternoon light look that school of dead dolphins duped into Falmouth bay by Naval sonar or so the conspiracy went.

More at English Heretic…

This strange and poetic film, directed by Chris Marker, is a fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photomontage, and creates in its unique way a series of potent images of the inner landscapes of time. Apart from a brief three-second sequence — a young woman’s hesitant smile, a moment of extraordinary poignancy, like a fragment of a child’s dream — the thirty-minute film is composed entirely of still photographs. Yet this succession of disconnected images is a perfect means of projecting the quantified memories and movements through time that are the film’s subject matter.
…
This familiar theme [time travel] is treated with remarkable finesse and imagination, its symbols and perspectives continually reinforcing the subject matter. Not once does it make use of the time-honoured conventions of traditional science fiction. Creating its own conventions from scratch, it triumphantly succeeds where science fiction invariably fails.

J.G. Ballard ‘La Jetée: Academy One’, New Worlds, 1966.

Chrismarker.org is an randomly-compiled, taxonomically naive and hopefully useful archive of ruminations, bibliographic & filmographic notations, untimely meditations, mnemonic minutiae and other glosses on the cinematic, written, photographic and multimedia work of world-citizen & time-traveler Chris Marker.

We welcome contributions in short article form from the global village that Marker helped to map. We also welcome Chris Marker news, links, memorabilia, aphorisms, quotations, images and stray insights. Contributions from animals are welcome too, of course, including but not limited to cats, owls, giraffes, emus and elephants (слоны).

ABOVE: Still from La Jetée (1964; dir. Chris Marker).

Meanwhile, we leave the academic penal colony – to which we once belonged and from which we no doubt still bear the scars – to crunch through the seemingly inevitable canonization process, as it has done so well with Walter Benjamin. That may be just what awaits epigonically for the rare few who scribble & bricole in a deep, careful, dedicated, crafty and continuous manner with a master’s brilliance and an asystematic approach, in whatever medium, ahead (or outside) of their time.

You may notice that some of the material initially appearing on this site is a port of resources from the old and crumbling edifice of silverthreaded presents chris marker, once housed at a so-called tilde account at silcom.com, now still hanging around for old time’s sake at a nowherenear relevant domain called vajramedia.com, in and amongst the rubble of a disastrous project once known as Cinema Paranoia. Upon this shaky base we build, quoting mostly, writing little, ever fascinated by and admiring always the oeuvre of Chris Marker, le plus célèbre des cinéastes inconnus.

Chris Marker: Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory

ABOVE: Still from Sans Soleil (1983; dir. Chris Marker).

ABOVE: Ballard, late 60s. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

Vermilion Sands is a kind of cross between Palm Springs and Juan-les-Pins, a version of the leisure society we were about to enter, though for some reason we stopped and turned away at the door. Music by Brian Eno, metal foil architecture by Frank Gehry, dreams by Sigmund Freud, decor by Paul Delvaux.

J.G. Ballard, Literary Review, 2001.

Vermilion Sands is a synthetic and synaesthetic landscape of psychotropic houses that respond to their inhabitants’ desires and fears, singing sculptures, and a place where everything in sight seems to glitter, to take on the qualities of crystal, a flickering chromaticism suffusing everything from stairways to hair colour and eye pigments… could there be here a sort of affirmative retort to the insistence that all Modernist or utopian communities inevitably end up in dystopia?

Owen Hatherley, ‘Ballard’s Banlieue Radieuse’.

It is a great injustice that Eno tends to be best known for either the “invention” of ambient music or for putting a slightly avant-garde gloss on sundry rock superstars. His records, and attendant theories, in the decade from 1972 to 1982 exhibit an astonishing range of modes and ideas, from the preening glam rock of Here Come the Warm Jets to the opiated drift of Discreet Music, the apocalyptic My Life in the Bush of Ghosts to the deliberate blankness of Music for Airports. Without Eno as catalyst and protagonist, the landscape of popular music would be a far less interesting place: he popularised, through his own records and work with Bowie, Talking Heads and others, noise, sampling, studio-as-instrument, surface over “depth” and manifold other strategies against what was, by the early 1970s, a form in danger of becoming a hidebound arena of proper songs played on real instruments.

Owen Hatherley, ‘Father of Invention’.

ABOVE: Dionysian Eno. Photo via Kontrapunkt.

In another corner of his mind [Eno] was inventing ambient music. Recuperating from an accident, he asked a friend to leave a harp record on, and the one working speaker let its faint strings blend with wind and bird-song. Subliminally, he recognised that this was music. Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) announced a theory with, as the title suggested, much in common with JG Ballard’s eerie mundane modernity.

Nick Hasted, ‘Brian Eno, the professor of rock’.

SIMON SELLARS: You casually injected something interesting into our correspondence — that you see Ballard and Brian Eno as ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century.’ I’m now going to pin you down and ask you to elaborate.

SIMON REYNOLDS: That’s slightly over the top, isn’t it? I wonder if it really stands up. Then again, as thinkers specifically about culture, in the British context, I can’t honestly think of too many rivals. Certainly as people who came out of the Sixties but came into their prime – as artists and as influences – in the Seventies, they are these towering figures, I think.

One of my fantasy projects that I toyed with for a while was a book on Ballard and Eno. They do seem of a type in some ways and they are patron saints of postpunk to an extent. But the project founders immediately owing to the fact that they are so eloquent about what they do and such brilliant writers, that there’d be zero role for any critic or commentator. There’d be very little to mediate or interpret, as they’ve said it all, so much better. They know what they are doing. I suppose you could historicize them, contextualise them. Ballard with the milieu he emerged out of in the Sixties, which was based around the ICA, right? And Eno with the UK art schools.

In some ways the affinity seems as much temperamental as anything ideas-based. There’s this wonderful Englishness. You imagine they would get on like a house on fire, trading ideas over whisky and soda in the Shepperton living room. One thing they both do is take ideas from science and set them loose in culture, find applications. Ballard is like a British McLuhan, except much better because he’s a far better writer, and a better thinker too – more original, more convincing. Eno is almost like a British Barthes, in some ways.

‘”Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling”: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard connection’.

ABOVE: Ballard, mid-70s. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

SIMON SELLARS: When I interviewed Simon Reynolds, he said that Ballard and Brian Eno are ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century.’ Given that Ballard and Eno are two of your major influences, do you agree with him?

COUSIN SILAS: I’ve never really considered Ballard or Eno as thinkers. To me one writes incredibly atmospheric music, the other writes incredibly atmospheric fiction. Both Ballard and Eno are probably my strongest influences, but their influence is very tenuous, difficult to explain. They both invoke that certain mood of isolation. Isolation is a funny thing: it can be forced upon one, or be self-invoked. It seems in today’s world, the last thing you’d really expect is isolation, and yet even in the busiest of places, there are attributes and situations where one can feel it totally. Self-invoked isolation is where the person chooses to step back, away from all the social interaction and so on, to become, in some respects, a suburban exile. I can relate to a lot of Ballard’s fiction and it’s much the same with Eno’s music, although to a lesser extent — Eno isn’t as consistent, and his vocal albums are something else. I don’t mind them, but for me it’s stuff like Music for Films, Apollo, Another Green World, plus a couple of his ambient albums and the two he did with Harold Budd that contain some of the most moody and atmospheric music there is.

‘Cousin Silas: Another Flask of Ballard’.

ABOVE: Eno in 1975. Photo via Creative Technology.

SIMON SELLARS: How successful do you think Brian Eno’s Music for Airports was in providing a soundtrack to Ballard’s ‘future cities’? Eno wanted – in part — to reassure travellers who might be contemplating their death in a possible air crash, although Ballard seems to see the modern airport as a self-sufficient organism that already possesses this inbuilt function.

MIKE RYAN: If no airport is using his music, then I guess it was not successful. I own that CD, but I’ve never sat through the whole thing. I just get bored with it. If I want to contemplate death, I want complete silence, which of course we never can achieve. John Cage once recounted his experience in an anechoic soundproof chamber. When he was in there he asked the sound engineer what all that whooshing and thumping was that he could hear. Turned out that it was the blood rushing through his veins and his heart beating.

In regards to ‘future cities’, judging by recent articles by Nick Tosches and Mike Davis, it sounds like Dubai is the city of the future. Eno should do ‘Music for Dubai’ and see if it catches on. Maybe he could be the first Dubai superstar in the post-Las-Vegas world.

‘”No-one Dances in Ballard”: An Interview with Mike Ryan.’

ABOVE: Ballard in 1991. Photo by Craig McDean.

ABOVE: Appollonian Eno. Photo by Tom Pilston.

ABOVE: London After the Rain. Image via BLDGBLOG.

News from BLDGBLOG:

onedotzero is hosting a film event this Saturday in London, promising “futuristic visions of London” and “surreal urban worlds.” Screenings will include Ben Marzys’s short film London After the Rain, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 at The Bartlett. The event costs £8.60, and things kick off around 8:45pm at Southbank.

From Unit 15’s brief:

J G Ballard is one of the most original and distinctive authors of the last part of the C20th, and beginning of the C21st. His writing has encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis to technological fetishism and augmentation, and from urban ruination to suburban mob culture, and he has pursued these topics with a wit and inventiveness that is without comparison.

His understanding of architecture, and architects, and his prophetic visions make Ballard one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns.From the description of futuristic houses that empathise with their inhabitants, to the bleak characterisation of gated communities consumed by sex, drugs and violence, Ballard’s world is highly prescient and ruthlessly unsentimental. Rather than examining specific texts, Unit 15 will be following themes implicit in Ballard’s writing.

Unit 15 will also be examining filmic interpretations of his writing, particularly David Cronenburg’s ‘Crash’ and Jonathan Weiss’s ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, and to a lesser extent Steven Spielberg’s ‘Empire Of The Sun’, we shall also be looking at films inspired by Ballard’s work especially Iain Sinclair’s ‘London Orbital’. In short we shall be examining all aspects of culture that can be considered ‘BALLARDIAN’.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Architectures of the Near Future

ABOVE: Disch, photo by Jamie Spracher.

SF writer Thomas M. Disch committed suicide on July 4, and was described by John Clute as ‘perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers’. The obits have been noting Disch’s involvement with the New Wave of British SF, and Joanne, of Tomorrow Museum, writes to tell me of Disch’s admiration for Ballard.

Joanne says:

You’ve likely heard the sad news of Thomas M. Disch’s suicide. Although they are very different writers stylistically, Ballard and Disch seem to appeal to the same readers. And Disch was very much a fan of Ballard’s. I pulled a few quotes from Disch’s book about science fiction ‘The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of’. He devotes several pages of it to Ballard. Remarking on the New Wave, Disch writes of:

‘Ballard in the role of T.S. Elliot, the genius in residence, and Moorcock as Ezra Pound, a Svengali for all seasons, ready to welcome anyone in the club who might in some way advance the cause. They were essential to each other (and to the cause), for without Moorcock and New Worlds to beat the drum, Ballard’s work would have appeared in only those few avant-garde venues receptive to the transgressive fictions of non-Establishment writers … and without Ballard’s conspicuous and then prolific talent to showcase, the New Wave and New Worlds would never have reached escape velocity.’
…
‘Ballard, in erasing the rocketship from his fiction, and along with it the notion of outer space as the new frontier, found a new subject matter for SF: the present in, as it were, its futuristic aspect. He could look at the world around him — suburban Shepperton — with the radical innocence of someone whose home town had been a Japanese internment camp. And everything was strange. The sports car that he owned and drove around like a kamikaze pilot was a good deal stranger and more vivid than any rocket ship, which existed, if at all, only as a TV image among a host of other images….Why not build a future from those images rather than the do-it-yourself kits of traditional SF?’

Later, Disch writes about meeting with Ballard when he was 26. Interestingly, David Pringle doesn’t believe it happened the way Disch says. (Pringle also calls Disch the “second-greatest iconoclast” of science fiction after Ballard):

‘His several meetings with J. G. Ballard in 1966 and after, we are told, “took the invariable form of a trip to the Shepperton train station south of London and then a terrifying ride with Ballard at the wheel of his sports car. At his home, a dilapidated, infinitely cluttered bungalow that he shared with his two children, Ballard, fuelled with whisky, would deliver an oral version of his private gospel. Sad to say, I remember not a single oracle from those occasions, only a sense that the man was, as advertised, a genius hard-wired to the Zeitgeist.” Memory may play even the greatest truth-tellers false, and as one who has visited the same house on half a dozen occasions from the 1970s to the 1990s I can testify that Ballard lives in a classic British semi-detached, not a “bungalow,” and that he raised three children there throughout the 1960s, not two; also I can vouch for the fact that JGB’s front door is less than five minutes’ walk from Shepperton station (which lies west of London, not south), so why a car-ride was necessary I can’t imagine. As for the drinking and hairy driving of the period following his wife’s death in the mid-1960s, Ballard has described those things himself in several interviews — and has even fictionalized them, in a chapter called “The Exhibition,” in his novel The Kindness of Women (1991); so, no surprises there — except, perhaps, for the revelation (if true) that JGB once drove a sports car.’

Joanne has included her own tribute to Disch over at Tomorrow Museum:

He will get the audience he deserves. I see other gay writers as well as women and non-whites, and just about anyone who has felt like a genre misfit, really responding to his work and taking influence. Heck, “slipsteam” is already deeply indebted to him.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one day his name is as popular among teenagers as Vonnegut’s. It is just too bad it didn’t happen while he was alive.

I’ve thought of bringing it back precisely because the site has built up more of a readership since then, and with it ample chance for discussion. Anti-spam tools are better now, too. But also because I am in the last stages of writing up my doctorate and time is beginning to constrict: updates might be very slow over the next few months, depending on how stressed I become.

I don’t want the site to freeze during that time so a forum should keep discourse ticking over nicely.

PS: I should mention that I will still be adding features and articles from other writers during this time, so to anyone who wants to contribute, please get in touch.

ABOVE: Jorge Luis Borges and J.G. Ballard, somewhere in the 60s possibly in 1972 (many thanks to Lucho G. in Argentina for supplying this scan).

Borges writes what he calls ‘condensed novels’. He argues, with some truth, that since the essence of most novels can be told in a few minutes … it shouldn’t be necessary to give the whole book but only a description or review of it or essay about it.

James Colvin [pseudonym for Michael Moorcock], ‘Mainly Paperbacks’, New Worlds #160, 1966.

These condensed novels [in The Atrocity Exhibition] are like ordinary novels with the unimportant pieces left out. But it’s more than that — when you get the important pieces together … not separated by great masses of ‘he said, she said’ and opening and shutting of doors, ‘following morning’ and all this stuff — the great tide of forward conventional narration — it achieves critical mass as it were, it begins to ignite and you get more things being generated. You’re getting crossovers and linkages between unexpected and previously totally unrelated things, events, elements of the narration, ideas that in themselves begin to generate new matter.

Ballard, interviewed by James Goddard and David Pringle, ‘An Interview with J.G. Ballard’, J.G. Ballard: The First Twenty Years, 1975.

At my age nobody loves you for your prose style, just as nobody loves a beautiful woman for her kind nature. Obviously, I’m not the first writer to reach a larger part of the audience because of the movies. That’s happened many times before with many other writers. Serious writers, as opposed to popular writers, who have become well-known without movies being made from their books, are very rare. It’s only a writer like Borges whose fame is not dependent on any movie.

Ballard, interviewed by Richard Kadrey and David Pringle, Interzone #51, September 1991.

Short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit. At its best, in Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that will glow for ever in the deep purse of your imagination.

Ballard, introduction to the Complete Short Stories, 2001.

I certainly began as a short-story writer — the best way of learning one’s craft as a writer and something denied to so many young novelists today, when the short story seems, sadly, to be heading for extinction… Sadly, I think most people have lost the knack of reading them, perhaps under the baleful influence of TV serials and their baggy, unending narratives. The greatest short stories, by Borges, Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury, are nuggets of pure gold that never lose their lustre.

Ballard, interviewed by Sebastian Shakespeare, ‘Pure imagination, the most potent hallucinogen of all’, The Literary Review, 2001.

MH: You’ve already mentioned Burroughs. Which other authors did you most admire at that point, and how do you believe they influenced what yourself and Ballard were writing?

MM: Burroughs, like Borges, showed us what it was possible to do. Neither Borges nor Burroughs were available to us until about 1960 or so. I first heard Borges’s stories related to me by a Spanish-speaking Swede while hitch-hiking from Uppsala to Paris. It was a while before City Lights, I think it was, brought out the first translations. Burroughs wasn’t a disappointment, when we finally met him, but Borges was. Burroughs pretty much lived as he wrote, while Borges was a rather conservative man with a keen interest in G. K. Chesterton.

Michael Moorcock, interviewed by Mike Holliday about Ballard and New Worlds, ‘Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard’, Ballardian, 2007.

In Crash, there is neither fiction nor reality — a kind of hyperreality has abolished both… After Borges, but in a totally different register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the world that we will be dealing with from now on: a non-symbolic universe but one which, by a kind of reversal of its mass-mediated substance (neon, concrete, cars, mechanical eroticism), seems truly saturated with an intense initiatory power.

Jean Baudrillard on Ballard’s Crash, ‘Two Essays: 1. Simulacra and Science Fiction. 2. Ballard’s Crash’, SFS, 1991.

ABOVE: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

[In The Atrocity Exhibition] Traven explores what most people would regard as pretty frightening pornographic imagery; he explores with the kind of eye of a forensic pathologist. He treats sexual desire as if it was something stretched out on an autopsy table; he takes a woman’s body and dismantles it – not literally, but almost literally – and constructs a kit which is literally that. I mean inside of a suitcase, as you show in the film, there is a set of the key elements that we respond to when we become sexually aroused – a pair of latex breasts, nipples, detachable pubic hair…

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Weiss in 2006, commentary track on The Atrocity Exhibition (2000; film directed by Weiss).

Peter C. emailed to tell me of his discovery of the work of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, whose ‘Kiss’ series of x-ray photographs involved Delvoye asking friends to ‘paint themselves with small amounts of barium (that liquid used in x-rays for digestion and such like) and then be “photographed” having sex in medical clinics. The resulting images are… striking’ (according to Joseph Brett).

Peter says:

I feel a bit weird submitting this, and you might not find it relevant at all, but I just discovered this “X-Ray Porn” and it, for whatever reason, reminded me of Ballard! It’s rather striking how unpleasant it is!

Actually, it’s very relevant, given Ballard’s medical background and his observation in the introduction to Crash that we live in a time in which ‘Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography.’

Elsewhere, he elaborates, suggesting that we are:

moving ever closer to that junction where science and pornography will eventually meet and fuse. Conceivably, the day will come when science itself is the greatest producer of pornography. The weird perversions of human behaviour triggered by psychologists testing the effects of pain, isolation, anger, etc. will play the same role that the bare breasts of Polynesian islanders performed in the 1940s wildlife documentary films.

JGB, quoted in Linda S. Kaufman, Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture, 1995.

Of Ballard’s books, it’s The Atrocity Exhibition that most clearly makes the case for this fusion, something the RE/Search edition of Atrocity brilliantly enhanced with its anatomical art from Phoebe Gloeckner, art that very much anticipates the spirit of Delvoye’s ‘Kiss’. See for yourself: I’ve interspersed some of Gloeckner’s illustrations with a few of Delvoye’s x-rays, along with the usual allotment of Ballard quotes (although I think the one heading this post says it all, really).

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

A preoccupation with forensic detail characterises [Ballard's] writing: one thinks of the numerous accounts of sex in his extraordinary autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women. “I placed my hands on her hips and began to kiss the small freckles on her abdomen and the spiral scar whose pearly silver curved around the small of her back and ended below her appendix. This marked her kidney operation 10 years earlier, the Anderson-Hinds resection of the renal pelvis.”

Mick Brown, ‘From Here to Dystopia’, Telegraph Magazine, 2 September 2006.

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

Traven sees pornography as a kind of hyper-analytic response to sexuality. Normally, traditional sexual activity involves a sort of warm bath where physical activity and a world of mental affections blur into each other, and give rise of course to a huge number of problems. Traven takes the view ‘What is actually going on?’ — his own body and the body of his wife and of his on-off girlfriend, Karen Novotny, he sees their sexual identity as a mystery that needs to be decoded and dismantled. He sees pornography, which is emotionally neutral — pornography is sex with the emotions deleted — pornography is a useful technique for exploring what exactly is going on when two people copulate, when a penis enters a vagina, when a hand embraces a breast, when fingers explore clefts (which are obviously geometric structures which powerfully cue innate responses laid down in the central nervous system a hundred thousand years ago). Pornography is a way of dismantling all the excrescences that have grown around this sexual activity at its most basic, and finding the actual sort of operating elements.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Weiss in 2006, commentary track on The Atrocity Exhibition (2000; film directed by Weiss).

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

Science is moving into an area where its obsessions begin to isolate completely its subject under the lens of its microscope, away from its links with the rest of nature. This is always the risk with science as a whole. The pornographic imagination detaches certain parts of the human anatomy from the human being and becomes obsessively focussed on the breast or the genitalia, or what have you. That sort of obsession with what I call quantified functions is what lies at the core of science; there is a shedding of all responsibility by the scientist who is just looking at a particular subject with a tendency to ignore the contingent links.

JGB, quoted in Jeremy Lewis, ‘An Interview with J.G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review, Volume 20 Numbers 1&2, 1991.

PS: Good old Wim, when not tattooing pigs, even turned the ‘Kiss’ series into a stained-glass window…

Wim Delvoye
Euterpe, 2002
steel, x-ray photographs, glass, lead
78 3/4 x 31.5 inches
200 x 80 cm
SW 02299

Reader Martin Jones has been following the recent film posts on this site, and emails to tell me of his own film-related ‘encounter’ with JGB.

Martin writes:

Attached: JGB note dated 25.5.94. It reads:

“Dear Mr Jones, Thanks for your happy notion of the life-time novel, and for the kind comments on my writing — I wish you the best of luck with your degree course — incidentally, it’s not true that I would sell options on the telephone — film rights, as you’ll soon discover, are fanatically fought over by agents, and mine have always been handled by my agent. Best, J.G. Ballard.”

Some background. At this time I had just undertaken a second interview for a place on a university screenwriting degree course. Having no academic qualifications I was taking an ‘A’ level in English, and to be honest, was thoroughly bored with the books we were studying — Susan Hill, Thomas Hardy, Hamlet — although ironically I appreciate them more now than I did then (I would have been 23); I wanted to get back into reading for pleasure, and a re-read of The Kindness of Women was top of my list. I decided to write to Ballard, and did so via his agents (found, pre-internet, in a reference book in the local library). Around the same time he had made a comment in The Daily Telegraph on Moby Dick that struck a chord with me, and so I opened my letter with an enthusiastic ramble on the subject of the ‘life-long novel’, and how a person could be issued with just one weighty tome at birth, to be devoured throughout their years. I also mentioned a comment one of the interviewers had made (actually the head of the course at the time) after I had been asked which authors I liked, namely, that there was a time when producers would ring JGB out of the blue, hoping to option one of his books, and more often than not he would sell the rights over the telephone! The course leader added that he had tried to buy the rights to High-Rise this way.

Thought this might make a curious addition to your film post. An interesting detail about Ballard’s reply is that it was posted in a second-hand envelope, with his name scrawled out and my address put beneath it, and sealed at the top with sellotape. Also, I was quite surprised that his home address and phone number were on the note paper.

On a similar subject, two years ago I contacted him again. Around the beginning of 2006 I found out that my publishers, Headpress, were releasing a book by Mark Goodall entitled Sweet & Savage: The World Through The Shockumentary Film Lens, and that JGB contributed a short interview on Gualtiero ‘Mondo Cane’ Jacopetti to it (it is reprinted in Headpress 27). I saw an opportunity and swiftly sent him a synopsis and art (by Rik Rawling) for the book I was (and indeed still am) working on at the time, Saturn In Retrograde: Counter-Culture Murder, Bad Trips & Demon Fantasies, in the hope that he might show interest and pen a foreword for it. It was not to be, however, and by swift return of post I got a postcard that — prophetically — began, “Powerful stuff, buit I’m afraid this I’ll have to pass — old age and fear of death — but best of luck…”

My second choice enthusiastically took up the task: author, anthologist and filmmaker Michel Parry. I’m sure he won’t mind being a close second to Ballard!

Incidentally, I did the three year degree course, but never fell into the turgid waters of the TV and film world, as it was then.

Cheers,
Martin

ABOVE: Eltham Lido, by Gigi Cifali.

Curiously, the house we moved to had a drained swimming pool in its garden. It must have been the first drained pool I had seen, and it struck me as strangely significant in a way I have never fully grasped. My parents decided not to fill the pool, and it lay in the garden like a mysterious empty presence. I would walk through the unmown grass and stare down at its canted floor. I could hear the bombing and gunfire all around Shanghai, and see the vast pall of smoke that lay over the city, but the drained pool remained apart. In the coming years I would see a great many drained and half-drained pools, as British residents left Shanghai for Australia and Canada, or the assumed ’safety’ of Hong Kong and Singapore, and they all seemed as mysterious as that first pool in the French Concession. I was unaware of the obvious symbolism that British power was ebbing away, because no one thought so at the time, and faith in the British Empire was at its jingoistic height.

J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (2008).

Here are some more Ballard-evoking images: drained swimming pools as photographed by Gigi Cifali in his Absence of Water series.

Via BLDGBLOG:

The photos here are all by Gigi Cifali, who originally trained as a topographer, from a series called “Absence of Water.” The images document the disused pools of London – and there are many more of these photos to be seen over at Polar Inertia or on Cifali’s own website.

I’m reminded, though, of a great line from J.G. Ballard’s novel Empire of the Sun:

“Jim watched Mr. Maxted sway along the tiled verge of the empty swimming pool, curious to see if he would fall in. If Mr. Maxted was always accidentally falling into swimming pools, as indeed he always was, why did he only fall into them when they were filled with water?”

Why, indeed.

ABOVE: Erith Pool, by Gigi Cifali.

Royal, eyes almost closed, one hand gripping Laing’s shoulder, pointed towards the swimming-pool.

In the yellow light reflected off the greasy tiles, the long tank of the bone-pit stretched in front of them. The water had long since drained away, but the sloping floor was covered with the skulls, bones and dismembered limbs of dozens of corpses. Tangled together where they had been flung, they lay about like the tenants of a crowded beach visited by a sudden holocaust.

Disturbed less by the sight of these mutilated bodies — residents who had died of old age or disease and then been attacked by wild dogs, Laing assumed — than by the stench, Laing turned away. Royal, who had clung so fiercely to him during their descent of the building, no longer needed him, and dragged himself away along the line of changing cubicles. When Laing last saw him, he was moving towards the steps at the shallow end of the swimming-pool, as if hoping to find a seat for himself on this terminal slope.

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise (1975).

ABOVE: Uxbridge Pool, by Gigi Cifali.

For the next ten days the expedition pressed on down the New Jersey Turnpike, heading south-west towards Washington. The endless ribbon of the highway unwound into the haze, lined with mile after mile of abandoned cars and trucks. Each evening they left the road and spent the night in one of the hundreds of empty motels and country clubs along the route, resting around the drained swimming-pools that seemed to cover the entire continent.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

ABOVE: Weldstone Pool, by Gigi Cifali.

During the night the swimming-pool had drained itself. Jim had never seen the tank empty, and he gazed with interest at the inclined floor. The once mysterious world of wavering blue lines, glimpsed through a cascade of bubbles, now lay exposed to the morning light. The tiles were slippery with leaves and dirt, and the chromium ladder at the deep end, which had once vanished into a watery abyss, ended abruptly beside a pair of scummy rubber slippers.

J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (1984).

ABOVE: London Fields Lido, by Gigi Cifali.

Car parks surrounded a shopping mall lined with stores and restaurants, and I pointed with surprise to the first pedestrians we had seen, unloading their supermarket trolleys through the tail-doors of their vehicles. To the south of the plaza lay a marina filled with yachts and powerboats, moored together like a rnothballed fleet. An access canal led to the open sea, passing below a cantilever bridge that carried the coast road. A handsome clubhouse presided over the marina and its boatyard, but its terrace was deserted, awnings flared over the empty tables. The nearby sports club was equally unpopular, its tennis courts dusty in the sun, the swimming pool drained and forgotten.

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights (1996).

ABOVE: Flooded London, by Squint/Opera.

You don’t need me to tell you what these images evoke…

‘Do you know where we are?’ he asked after a pause. ‘The name of this city?’ When Kerans shook his head he said: ‘Part of it used to be called London; not that it matters…’

The bulk of the city had long since vanished, and only the steel-supported buildings of the central commercial and financial areas had survived the encroaching flood waters. The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting tides of silt. Where these broke surface giant forests reared up into the burning dull-green sky, smothering the former wheatfields of temperate Europe and North America. Impenetrable Mato Grossos sometimes three hundred feet high, they were a nightmare world of competing organic forms returning rapidly to their Paleozoic past, and the only avenues of transit for the United Nations military units were through the lagoon systems that had superimposed themselves on the former cities. But even these were now being clogged with silt and then submerged.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962.

Via De Zeen:

Film and media studio Squint/Opera has created a series of images depicting imaginary scenes in London in 2090, when rising sea levels have inundated the city. The Flooded London series depicts the city as a “tranquil utopia”. Five images will be on show at Medcalf Gallery in Clerkenwell, London from 20 June for a month, during the London Festival of Architecture. Exhibition details are on the festival website.

His name still echoed faintly in his ears as they began their search of the building. He took up his position at the stairwell at the centre of each corridor while Riggs and Macready inspected the apartments, keeping a look-out as they climbed the floors. The building had been gutted. All the floorboards had rotted or been ripped out, and they moved slowly along the tiled inlays, stepping warily from one concrete tie-beam to another.

Most of the plaster had slipped from the walls and lay in grey heaps along the skirting boards. Wherever sunlight filtered through, the bare laths were intertwined with creeper and wire-moss, and the original fabric of the building seemed solely supported by the profusion of vegetation ramifying through every room and corridor.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962.

Only a few feet from the surface, they drew closer, emerging from the depths like an immense intact Atlantis. First a dozen, then a score of buildings appeared to view, their cornices and fire-escapes clearly visible through the thinning refracting glass of the water. Most of them were only four or five storeys high, part of a district of small shops and offices enclosed by the taller buildings that had formed the perimeter of the lagoon.

Fifty yards away the first of the roofs broke surface, a blunted rectangle smothered with weeds and algae, across which slithered a few desperate fish. Immediately half a dozen others appeared around it, already roughly delineating a narrow street.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962.

Each book by J. G. Ballard is possibly his best book. Enviable, admirable Ballard! His subtle, brutal, cerebral, intoxicating Love & Napalm, which I have just finished reading, therefore seems to me his best book. Ballard, who used to write about the future, has observed that today’s America, America of the Vietnam War is science fiction enough. Important, necessary Ballard!

Thanks, David P.

Also see Jean Seberg, part 2.

Ballard, too, is in on this, but from the reverse perspective… ‘Once we get away from our sense of serial time into, say, some more complex notion of time — time perceived as a simultaneity — we are beginning to reach the threshold of a larger mental consciousness of the kind that’s perceived by mystics…’

Well, earlier today, no sooner had I posted David Pringle’s snippet about Jean Seberg and The Crystal World, than none other than Jonathan Rosenbaum himself, the catalyst for this obscure slice of Ballardiana, immediately stopped by to leave a comment. This was in answer to David’s query about the identity of Jonathan’s ‘friend of mine who was a friend of Seberg’s’:

The friend of mine who was a friend of Seberg’s is/was Edith Cottrell. She still lives in Paris, and works, I believe, as an agent. I haven’t seen her in years, but through another friend we exchanged emails several month ago.

Intrigued, I Googled ‘Edith Cottrell’ and ‘JG Ballard’ and came across the following on Jonathan’s personal website:

It was … at the Cannes festival in the early 70s that I told Susan [Sontag] about the screenplay I’d been commissioned to write adapting J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World for a fledgling producer, Edith Cottrell, who owned the rights and was hoping to find someone interested in directing it. “I’m interested,” Susan declared, and back in Paris I wound up spending an afternoon with her in her garage flat behind Nicole Stéphane’s house, engaged in what I suppose could be called a script conference. She wasn’t too enthused about what I’d written so far, but insofar as I’d been interested in the script mainly as a way of paying my rent—and had so little confidence in it being filmed that I wasn’t even making a carbon copy—I could hardly blame her. Still, the prospect of working for Susan made it much more interesting, so I eagerly went off to follow her suggestions about making the whole thing “sexier,” not realizing at the time that her own interest in the project most likely evaporated on the spot. She was rather awkward in explaining this when I finally managed to reach her again on the phone, and by the time she’d arranged to return a copy of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men that I’d lent her, it finally dawned on me that we wouldn’t be having a second script conference.

Imagine that: Susan Sontag directing Jean Seberg in an adaptation of The Crystal World. I am sure Ballard would approve. Not only would he be well aware of Seberg’s star power, given that he is a long-standing admirer of Godard, the director who first brought her extraordinary qualities to the world, but he has written approvingly of Sontag’s criticism:

I commend Susan Sontag’s brave 1969 essay (‘The Pornographic Imagination’), though I would go much further in my claims. Pornography is a powerful catalyst for social change, and its periods of greatest availability have frequently coincided with times of greatest economic and scientific advance.

JGB, notes to The Atrocity Exhibition.

But that’s not all. In David Pringle’s own 1979 interview with JGB, the following was revealed:

Pringle: Did you happen to read Susan Sontag’s book On Photography [1977], or have you seen the TV programme based on it?

Ballard: No, neither.

Pringle: It seemed to me a lot of the ideas about the way we use cameras had been anticipated in your fiction, in stories like “The Sixty-Minute Zoom” for instance.

Ballard: Oh, yes. No, I haven’t read that. I’d like to because I like the sound of
her. She’s been extremely generous about my fiction, said the most complimentary things about it. From what I’ve read of her criticism she’s a first-class critic, with a very rare sensibility, absolutely in tune with a lot of the goals that I think writers and critics should set themselves and few do. I admire her enormously. I’m happy there are correspondences.

David also tells me that Sontag had ’supplied Grove Press with a hearty endorsement for their edition of Love & Napalm: Export USA back in 1972′ (Love and Napalm being the American retitling of The Atrocity Exhibition).

And of course, there is Sontag’s well-known appraisal of JGB: ‘One of the most important, intelligent voices in contemporary fiction.’

So there you go: the virtual bleeding into the actual once more, cross-linkage of transient layers galore. In the words of Uncle Monty in Withnail and I, ‘Give in to it, boy, it’s like a tidal wave!’

Many thanks, Jonathan.

ABOVE: Jean Seberg as Louise?

Ballard archivist David Pringle knows of my obsession with Ballardian film and he has supplied me with a few more crumbs. Searching for Ballardiana on Google Books, David came across a reference to a book called Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (2004, 480 pages), by Jonathan Rosenbaum, an American film critic.

The reference contains the following passage about a film of The Crystal World that never was, (un)starring Jean Seberg. David says: ‘Unfortunately it tells us no more about the Ballard film project. Who the film producer “friend of mine who was a friend of Seberg’s” was, Rosenbaum doesn’t say. Still, it’s an intriguing, and specifically-dated, piece of information for the
JGB films-that-never-were file. Just think — if this production had gone ahead, it might well have starred the great but tragic Jean Seberg. Joan of Arc herself!’

“… in Paris on the afternoon of March 17, 1973, I met Jean Seberg at her apartment on rue de Bac. [...] A friend of mine who was a friend of Seberg’s had hired me to adapt a J. G. Ballard novel, _The Crystal World_, for a film treatment — the only scriptwriting I have ever done. After I did about half the work, the pages were shown to Seberg for a second opinion. Seberg had recently tried her hand at screenwriting and was interested in looking at some of the efforts of others. A meeting was called at Seberg’s flat. I arrived first and was delighted to discover that Seberg — hobbling about in a plaster cast, having recently broken a leg — liked my treatment just fine (though I suspect it was mediocre at best; I had so little confidence that the film would ever be made that I didn’t even bother to make a copy of the treatment for myself). The upshot was that I was hired to complete the treatment. I still knew that the film would probably never be made, but from that point on I mentally cast Seberg as my heroine.”

Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema, 2004, p205-206.

I loved Jean Seberg in Godard’s Breathless — so iconic it almost hurts to watch. Imagine: she might have rivaled Gabrielle Drake as the ultimate Ballardian anti-heroine. But I had no idea of Ms Seberg’s tragic life until David showed me the wiki link on her. It’s put me in a sad mood.

David also pointed myself and Dan O’Hara to a detail in an article on Ballard by Gerald Houghton, published in the zine Adverse Effect, in which it is claimed that:

The great screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer [Two-Lane Blacktop] reputedly discussed adapting High-Rise for the unorthodox director of Stranger than Paradise and Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch.

Dan went digging and found this interview with Wurlitzer in Arthur magazine:

Arthur: Do you agree with William Burroughs when he said that it’s mostly bad books that make good movies and vice versa?

RW: Well I always prefer, if I’m stuck with adapting a book into a film, to work with a bad book. Because making a book into a film is like cutting up a body. You have to be ruthless about it. So with a bad book you’re much freer. With a good book you want to protect it, do it justice in some way. I just went through that experience trying to adapt a J.G. Ballard book. I changed it a lot. And it’s sort of fortunate that the English producer was appalled by what I did. [laughs] So I’m off that case. And I feel relieved. But I’m not so much of a purist that I can’t do it to one of my own books.

Wow! Two-Lane Blacktop, the greatest existential road movie ever made… head-on with Ballard. I’m delirious. But wait — Wurlitzer’s statement is ambiguous. Is he saying High-Rise is a bad book because he changed it a lot? (bearing in mind he’s saying that with a good book, he wants to ‘protect it’, whereas with a bad book he’s ‘much freer’?). Hmmm, maybe not such a good idea, then.

Finally, Tim C. provides this snippet:

Think this is news. The press release for Brad Anderson’s new film, ‘Transsiberian’, notes of the director:

“Projects in development include: an adaptation of J.G..Ballard’s novel Concrete Island; and a musical called Non Stop to Brazil.”

Anderson’s best known for the really rather good ‘The Machinist’, starring none other than young Jim himself, Christian Bale.

Have to disagree with you on the worth of The Machinist, there, Tim — it looked great but I thought the so-called ‘twist’ was even more obvious (and cliched) than The Sixth Sense’s. Young Jim lost all that weight for nothing.

‘The Metro-Centre is secure … Withdraw all army units … Repeat, the Metro-Centre is secure … We have hostages … Repeat, we have hostages …’
…
I stared at the heavy shield, and helped the elderly man to the chair by the enquiry desk. He thanked me and said: ‘Your foot’s bleeding.’

‘I know. Tell me — are we sealed in?’

‘It looks like it.’

‘The North Gate entrance?’

‘I imagine that’s also closed.’

‘And the side exits?’

‘Everything. The car parks and freight entrance.’…

‘…these shopping malls haven’t learned how to cope with violence. When they do…’

‘War will move into the world’s consumer spaces? That’s quite a thought. Up till now, buying a washing machine has been a safe option…’

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

In the latest attack in Gauteng, a policeman was critically injured in a shoot-out with a gang of 12 bombers armed with AK47 and R5 assault rifles. In the early hours of Friday morning the gang took control of a parking lot at Bracken City shopping centre, in Brackenhurst, south of Johannesburg. They took about 20 people hostage before blowing up a First National Bank ATM.

“They were like a mini army. The shoot-out ensued when the police heard the explosion and came to investigate,” police spokesman Steady Nawa said.

News report, the Times (South Africa), 2008.

When Iain Sinclair and Will Self appeared on stage together earlier this year to talk about psychogeography, chaired by Kevin Jackson, I wondered what mystical forces aligned for this event to come to pass, given that Sinclair on a couple of occasions has publicly expressed the view that Self has got ‘absolutely nothing to do with psychogeography’.

Enter Steve Barfield of the University of Westminster, who informs me, ‘Well, writers say all kinds of things …at different times … is probably the shortest answer. But why not look at the full transcript of the VAM conversation, that is now published in the Literary London Journal. I edited the transcript for the journal from the recording with little tidying up of grammar and footnoting for the reader and the Guardian review was a wee bit wayward to my mind. But it’s journalism, after all, they didn’t have the tape and Self and Sinclair spoke at breakneck speed. Nothing mystical about the event, I’m afraid, the intention was to bring them together to interrogate the term [psychogeography] and see what happened!’

Thanks Steve — you are absolutely correct to point out that writers say different things at different times. Let’s not forget that Ballard himself told the Guardian in 1999 that ‘Most television is remarkably good, bearing in mind that it is a popular entertainment medium, but Melvyn Bragg poses a problem of his own making. The South Bank Show is a classic example of dumbing down: most television trivialises the already trivial, but the South Bank Show trivialises the serious, which is far more dangerous.’

To which Bragg responded: ‘I find this snobbish, offensive and depressing, particularly as I admire Ballard’s work and thought better of him. It’s also wrong. I think that a programme on UB40 is every bit as serious as a programme on Harold Pinter. We did both last season and neither was trivial… I am genuinely interested to know if he can tell me how any of those programmes fit his lazy smear… Unless JG Ballard can prove his point, his comment stands as no more than a sad and sour little swipe.’

Yet seven years later, both men amiably faced off on the South Bank Show to celebrate Ballard’s life and latest novel, Kingdom Come.

But back to Self and Sinclair: the transcript does indeed make interesting reading, not least for the way in which Sinclair now seems to go out of his way to praise Self’s work! Also, there’s quite a bit of chat about Ballard as an inspiration to both:

Will Self: It’s interesting what you were saying Iain, about in Jim Ballard’s memoir, about this weird period where he would only walk for what he reckoned was his personal horizon …

Iain Sinclair: His personal horizon … for his own height and I don’t know how he calculated that. But in Shepperton you are on the flat I suppose. He’d seemed to work out that three-quarters of a mile would do him. So he went three quarters of a mile in every direction and he got to know the area intimately.

Will Self: Because he was on a driving ban.

Iain Sinclair: Yeah, for a year. But he said it completely changed his life, because he decided he just wasn’t going to use public transport, it was horrendous. To get into Notting Hill or Hampstead where he wanted to see people was just such a hassle, he wouldn’t do it. So he then became a recluse in some ways. The upside of it was that he wrote more and better — and presumably he was coming towards the period of writing Crash. And, secondly, I think because he now had to walk rather than just leaping into the car, he actually released different kind of energies and it was a wonderful thing. This notion of horizon, a personal horizon, is obviously very important. And the whole culture, the mainstream culture, has followed him into acknowledging the significance of the airport fringe. Ballard says that London is a suburb of Heathrow rather than the other way around, everything you need is out there. This does seem to be true and you walking there, Will, pays homage to this concept.

It’s a lengthy conversation, the anecdotes flow thick and fast, and I have to say that Sinclair and Self do seem to bounce off each other. The audience questions are good, too, and I especially liked the point made that the psychogeographical revival in England in the 1980s seemed to coincide with the rise of CCTV and surveillance culture, with the act of walking perceived as an act of resistance — disappearing from view in the age of perpetual telesurveillance.

There’s also a rambling Sinclair story about Orson Welles, widening the psychogeographical frame to include not only this Hollywood maverick, but also none other than Mr Lemmy Caution himself — Eddie Constantine — and the ubiquitous aura of Godard and Alphaville:

Iain Sinclair: I was telling you earlier about the figure of Orson Welles, the great American director, who pitched up in Hackney in the 1950s to make a play, he was rehearsing a play about Moby Dick — which, incidentally, was J. G. Ballard’s favourite novel. [Orson Welles, Moby Dick – Rehearsed (1955) –ed.] Welles came out of the theatre and found these old ladies who were living in an alms house, the Spurstowe alms houses, and he decided that he would shoot a documentary piece. So he shoots this interview with these old woman — of course the alms house is now gone, the only record of it is this fragmented film by Orson Wells. He put the film together as a series of little essays or home movies which were shot in Paris, Spain and London. [Orson Welles, Around the World with Orson Welles (1955) originally made for BBC television. –ed.]

So it was 1955, and he goes into a Paris bookshop and here are those psychogeographers and Lettrists [Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the 1940s by Isidore Isou, inspired by dada and surrealism –ed. ] and they are reciting incantatory poems, and it is just extraordinary that the date is ‘55 — and from Welles moves into a nightclub where the American actor Eddie Constantine, who later emerges in Godard’s Alphaville, is sitting with a hat on, looking sinister and grinning and then there is Jean-Paul Sartre. So there’s a weird cultural stew that appropriates this term psychogeography, which is a way of thinking and dealing with how the city emerges. It didn’t mean a lot to me then, and looking back I find, in documentaries that I was involved with at that time, the term used with more frequency was psychopolitics. I’m not sure what it meant, but people like R. D. Lang and Ginsberg and Paul Goodman and Gregory Bateson were all using this term constantly …

Read the rest of the transcript at the Literary London site.

This post also gives me the opportunity to post a snippet from ‘The Gnome Zone’, another transcript featuring Sinclair taken from a program broadcast on BBC radio in 2006 about the warped nature of English suburbia, hosted by Richard Weight:

WEIGHT: Someone who imagines such events in his work is the novelist, J.G. Ballard, himself a suburbanite.

SINCLAIR: J.G. Ballard’s become the great sort of sage of the suburbs, living for years and years in Shepperton. And Ballard, sitting there and thinking about what the suburbs are, says that they are very interesting because whatever we’re taking on in terms of Ikea furniture, kind of Swedish design, modernism, the use of the Internet, making pornographic movies at home—whatever it is you do to kind of create some sort of shock to your imagination, get you out of boredom and inertia, will happen in the suburbs rather than in the centre. That’s his pitch. And to react against this inertia and boredom that is endemic to that place, you have to come up with solutions like acts of subversion.

Finally, for those wanting even more Sinclair, Greg emails to tell me of ‘Babylon Afterburn: Adventures in Iain Sinclair’s The Firewall’. This is Robert Bond’s 30-page, 12,000-word essay on Sinclair’s latest book of poems, posted over at Jacket magazine. I’ve not had the time to read this, although a quick glance tells me that although there’s no Ballard, at one point Bond compares Sinclair’s work with the post-punk sensibilities of early Fall and Public Image Ltd. (inevitably, Ian Curtis pops up, too), and uses the work of Simon Reynolds (previously interviewed here on ballardian.com) to make the point:

The affinity of Sinclair’s poetic to the post-punk ecology points to a general attempt, throughout the early 1980s, to renovate urban spiritual energies through the evolution of a post-lyric, visionary populism. A quick look at the titles of Simon Reynolds’s books of music history — such as Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock and Energy Flash — tells us that he is the archivist of youthful, energetic, supernaturalism in popular music. Post-punk is just the latest area within which he has delineated the radical transcendence offered by contemporary music’s spiritual energy, and found precisely that visionary populism which is lacking in so much contemporary poetry, the lyric category, and present-day Protestantism.

Intriguing, and I look forward to reading more.

PS: Speaking of psychogeography and music, Jude Rogers in the Guardian was recently spotted championing a so-called ‘psychogeographic rock’ movement, supposedly including the likes of Belbury Poly and the Ghost Box crew. But isn’t this music hauntological? Were Reynolds’ and Fisher’s efforts all in vain?

Rogers describes psychogeography as ‘the study of the spooky effects of the geographical environment on individuals’, which is quite the paraphrase…

‘Psychogeography is the study of the exact effects of the geographical environment, controlled or otherwise, on the affective behaviour of individuals’ — Guy Debord.

What was that Sinclair said about creating a monster?

..:: Previously on Ballardian…
+ Bluewater, Round 2
+ Your mission…
+ ‘Obeying the surrealist formula’: Iain Sinclair & Hermione Lee on Ballard’
+ Iain Sinclair’s Ballard biography
+ ‘When in doubt, quote Ballard’: An Interview with Iain Sinclair
+ ‘This most astonishing penumbra’: Will Self on J.G. Ballard
+ Random Ballard: Will Self/JGB mashup

ABOVE: Kevin Levell’s entry.

We still have no official announcement on the Crash Cover competition, but responding to my enquiry, Kevin Levell wrote to tell me of his own entry. Referring to the unpublished Henry Yee design I previously pointed to, Kevin says: ‘I hadn’t seen this approach with dummies, but it’s remarkably similar to my entry in the final competition…’

Kevin also says, ‘I’ve done a number of searches but have uncovered only a few other entries. My fave is Leona’s but good luck to all who entered anyway.’

I’ve included these below (myself, I love Kevin’s).

ABOVE: Leona Clarke’s entry.

ABOVE: Daniel Gray’s entry.

ABOVE: George Pollard’s entry.

San-Zhr Pod Village. Photograph: Craig Ferguson.

The Tomorrow Museum is a new blog that I have really been enjoying. It’s curated by Joanne McNeil, a freelance writer on science and technology, and Jerry Brito, an academic researcher. Their brief is to ‘explore how technology, science, and economics are affecting the fine arts’ and the tendency is towards longer, thoughtful posts.

Joanne has just posted a great piece on ‘the world’s strangest housing communities’, an overview of micronational estates the world over. Joanne includes Alphaville in Brazil, patterned after Godard’s film and a place where the residents watch TV Alphaville, a 24-hour telesurveillance channel composed of nothing other than people coming and going into and out of the estate. This is my idea of heaven.

Joanne opens the piece with a riff on Super-Cannes:

“People at Eden-Olympia have no time for getting drunk together, for infidelities or rows with the girlfriends, no time for adulterous affairs or coveting their neighbor’s wives, no time ever for friends,” Wilder Penrose says in J. G. Ballard’s Super Cannes. The “great defect is that there is no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.”

Many of Ballard’s later novels investigate the coven-like nature of suburbia — gated communities, high rises. The architecture and technologies designed to save us time and make our lives easier, only dull our senses. Or, as Gang of Four put it, “The problem with leisure, is what to do for pleasure.” Penrose, the psychiatrist in Ballard’s fictional French business park, believes there’s a science to it: “Part of the mind atrophies. A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither from neglect. Once you dispense with morality the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics. You’ve entered an adolescent world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers you wear.”

Ballard isn’t the only writer to explore these themes. Jingoism at the backyard level is the target in TC Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain. Neal Stephanson wrote about “burbclaves,” lots of franchised nations in suburbia. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower takes place in a walled Los Angeles suburb. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino sees housing communities optimistically as chocolate boxes. Then again, every example comes from the main character’s imagination. Here are several examples stranger than fiction…

In addition to Alphaville, Joanne goes on to detail the mythical Midgetville in Virginia; the quasi-religious compound Auroville in India; the peopleless pod city of San-Zhr in Taiwan (very Ballardian — to paraphrase JGB, a ‘city designed not for man but for man’s absence’); and the fake Orange County in China.

San-Zhr is amazing. It’s an SF-tinged housing project, a network of multicoloured pods that was abandoned in the 1960s just before completion due to a number of unexplained deaths. According to photographer Craig Ferguson, the ghosts of these dead workers haunt the site:

As news of these accidents spread, no one wanted to go there, even to visit, and the project was subsequently abandoned. The ghosts of those who died in vain are said to still linger there, unremembered and unable to pass on. The complex was left in its unfinished state because no amount of redevelopment will bring people to the area due to superstitions about ghosts, and it can’t be demolished because destroying the homes of spirits and lost souls is taboo in Asian culture.

Craig managed to persuade some locals to get him into the site and he’s published a series of remarkable images detailing his visit. In my former life as a travel writer, I myself might have spent a night there.

One further remark about Joanne’s article. She says that the fake Orange County, rather than patterning itself after the US gated community, should model itself on Melbourne instead, referring to a Treehugger article that lauds Melbourne’s pro-pedestrian and bicycle culture. Yes. As a Melbourne resident I’d love to visit overseas simulacra of my home town. I think then my mind would finally explode in an inverted subjective/objective feedback loop overload. But the Treehugger article only explores Melbourne’s inner city. The suburbs are a different matter. Perhaps the overseas versions might weed out the worrying strain of Mad Max style behaviour that sees cyclists as game to be hunted.

But then again, such behaviour inspired Mad Max itself, one of the finest films ever made.

Oh I don’t know. You decide.

Photograph: Eamonn McCabe.

There’s a new interview with JGB in the Guardian, conducted by James Campbell. It’s short, it lazily rehashes the same old stuff about Ballard’s house and (perhaps as a result) it is filled out with asides from M. John Harrison, Iain Sinclair and others.

James Graham Ballard is a large man with mischief in his eye and the social manner of a retired civil servant. At 77, he is portly, with grey hair curling on to his shirt collar. He has a full-on way with a good chablis – “More! More!” – but is considerate enough to inquire of his guest: “Do you have a motor car out there? We don’t want you to be killed.”

Ballard encountered Burroughs, whom he greatly admires as a writer, on a number of occasions. “A very strange chap.” Sinclair feels that “the two men, respectful and appreciative, never quite understood each other when they met. Both were set so deep in their visions. Other figures are aliens or rivals.”

He explains that his most recent novel, Kingdom Come (2006), “posed the question: could consumerism turn into fascism? The underlying psychologies aren’t all that far removed from one another. If you go into a huge shopping mall and you’re looking down the parade, it’s the same theatrical aspect: these disciplined ranks of merchandise, all glittering like fascist uniforms. When you enter a mall, you are taking part in a ceremony of affirmation, which you endorse just by your presence.” Consumerism “has to a large extent replaced art and culture in this country. The principal entertainment industry nowadays is soccer which, with its marching supporters’ groups, is not that far removed from fascism.”

Every now and then I get sent links to articles about Ian Curtis that mention Ballard. While I find Curtis interesting I try to refrain from posting about him as I don’t really think there’s much to be said about the Ballard connection that hasn’t been said before. Curtis nicked the title to the Joy Division song ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ from Ballard but wrote the lyrics before he’d read the book. An early New Order song called ‘The Him’ takes its title from a passage in The Atrocity Exhibition (the book, not the Curtis lyric) but is supposedly a tribute to Curtis, not Ballard. Crash is on Curtis’s bookshelf in Anton Corbijn’s recent biopic. I accept that for Curtis, Ballard was more of a portal than a direct influence so really what else is there left to say?

But Curtis and Burroughs seems a different story, perhaps more substantial, certainly less well worn. Over at Reality Studio a fat dossier has been compiled to flesh this out, drawing on previously published documents as well as new research and email questionnaires with the likes of David Britton of Savoy Books and Richard Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire.

The dossier pays special attention to the infamous moment when Joy Division and Burroughs found themselves on the same bill at a gig in Belgium. Curtis approached Burroughs, who, so the story goes, told him to ‘get lost’. As RealityStudio notes (and subsequently interrogates):

To anyone familiar with Burroughs, the thought of him telling a fan to get lost is perplexing. Burroughs tended to be unfailingly courteous, even a touch “old world” in his manners. Typically he was generous with fans and admirers, particularly with young men as handsome as Ian Curtis. What could have prompted such an exchange? Was Curtis insulting? Burroughs in a bad mood? Were there mitigating circumstances?

Take note, too, of Britton’s snarky dismissal of the Curtis legend:

I’m afraid Joy Division never meant anything to me… My cronies and I thought it was “crying shit in your underpants” music. Student angst. A glib dismissal, I knew at the time, but it was a comfort to think like that. Despite what [Jon] Savage says I’m pretty sure that Ian wasn’t much of a reader. A skimmer at best, but with the ability to read the right stuff and quote from it. For a Macclesfield lad, quite an achievement, I suppose… [But] JD have stood the test of time and have proved to be something far more substantial than I at first perceived. But can one be wrong, and also be right? Is it “Transmission” or “Papa Oom Mow Mow“? But at least it’s better to have JD representing Manchester music than Freddie and the Dreamers.

Also on offer at RS are the interviews Burroughs and Joy Division gave just before the gig to En Attendant magazine, available in both French (JD; WSB) and English (WSB; JD) versions.

All of this, as usual, is well worth checking out. The RealityStudio empire has really been cranking up the volume of late.

“Dr. Robert Vaughan.. Maldoror of the motorways, he has a scarred penis, probably from a motorbike accident…”

So, the idea is to use Google Earth to map out the various locations. Below is a screenshot of where I think the death of Vaughan occurs. Interesting to see that there now appears to be a Concord monument. I’ll dig out the book reference later, would be good to come to a consensus about locations – make alternative suggestions. It would be good to share google earth map defs… I’ll look at doing this shortly (click on image to expand it, to get a better idea)

On the deserted roof of a Northolt multi-storey car-park, I waited by the balustrade. In the rear seat of the car Vaughan arranged her limbs posture of the dying cashier.

I can’t find any evidence for a multi-storey car park from google earth, so maybe a poetic representation might be worthwhile… a collage approach possibly, find a derelict plot of land in Northolt and superimpose a suitable car-park… virtual town planning, after all as Ballard says the job of fiction is nowadays is to recreate reality!

Leigh P. emailed to tell me of this odd stamp sci-fi set issued in Sam Marino in the late 90s. Among the hard-SF names like Clarke, Heinlein and Asimov are not only Ballard but also Burgess and Orwell (both of whom, as far as I’m aware, wrote just one ‘SF’ novel apiece, while Ballard distanced himself from the genre a long time ago).

Leigh says:

I was procrastinating earlier (I’m in the process of completing a doctoral thesis, so this has indeed become somewhat of an artform) when I came across a picture of a bizarre 1998 stamp issue from San Marino, which depicted Ballard’s ‘The Drowned World.’ It might be worth posting something about it for philatelically-inclined Ballardians out there. Or not.

Thanks Leigh. I know what you mean about the procrastination. Not only am I also labouring through the last stage of a doctorate, but it’s taken me two months to get around to posting this.

In the words of Burgess, appy-polly-loggies!

Here’s the info (via the JGB Yahoo list):

Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J.G. Ballard

Series Editors: Jeannette Baxter, Sebastian Groes, Sean Matthews

Editor: Jeannette Baxter

J.G. Ballard is one of the most significant British writers of the contemporary period. His award-winning novels are stock features of school and university reading lists, yet the appeal of Ballard’s idiosyncratic imagination is such that his work also enjoys something of a cult status with the reading public. The hugely successful cinematic adaptations of Empire of the Sun (Spielberg, 1987) and Crash (Cronenberg, 1996) further confirm Ballard’s unique place within the literary, cultural and popular imaginations.

Although J. G. Ballard is known primarily as a novelist, he is also the author of over one hundred short stories, a number of which have been adapted for television and theatre. For the first time, Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J. G. Ballard places a discussion of Ballard’s short stories alongside readings of the major novels in order to explore issues of form, narrative and experimentation.

Another defining element of this volume is its coverage of Ballard’s extensive catalogue of cultural journalism. Over the course of five decades, Ballard has written for publications as various as The Daily Telegraph, Playboy, the Guardian, Time Out, New Worlds, The Times and Vogue. Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J. G. Ballard is the first study of its kind to explore Ballard’s significance as a cultural commentator, and to investigate the relationship between his creative and critical writings.

Whilst offering fresh readings of dominant and recurring themes in Ballard’s writing, including history, sexuality, violence, consumer capitalism, and urban space, this edition of Contemporary Critical Perspectives engages with hitherto unexplored questions of post 9/11 politics, terrorism, neo-imperialism, science, morality and ethics.

Contents:

General Introduction: Jeannette Baxter (UEA)

Biography/Chronology: Jeannette Baxter

Chapter 1: Brian Baker(Lancaster) ‘The Geometry of the Space Age: J. G. Ballard’s short fiction and science fiction of the 1960s’: a reassessment of J. G. Ballard’s early work.’

Chapter 2: Jake Huntley (UEA) ‘Re-reading The Atrocity Exhibition.’

Chapter 3: Sebastian Groes (Liverpool Hope), ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton: Place and Space in the Work of J. G. Ballard.’

Chapter 4: Corin Depper (Kingston), ‘Death at Work: The Cinematic Imagination of J. G. Ballard.’

Chapter 5: Umberto Rossi Mind is the Battlefield: Reading Ballard’s ‘Life Trilogy’ as War Literature

Chapter 6: David Pringle, ‘The genres of J. G. Ballard’s non-fiction.’

Chapter 7: Jeannette Baxter (UEA), ‘Visions of Europe in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes’

Chapter 8: Philip Tew (Brunel), ‘The possibilities of sacrifice, the certainties of trauma: J. G. Ballard’s Postmillennial Fiction.’

An interview with J.G. Ballard by Jeannette Baxter

Can anyone shed light on this?

While we’re waiting, I’ve uncovered a few related items that will be of interest…

I’ve previously featured book designer Henry Sene Yee, so I was interested to see the following on his blog:

I found these early ideas I had for J.G. Ballard’s CRASH on a bunch of SyQuest 44 MB cartridges. Sketches by Stanley Martucci of Griesbach / Martucci.

The first one was to depict crash test dummies in Kama Sutra poses. I wanted to illustrate a chart of multiple positions but Sales thought that this would never fly in Wal-Mart so I never got beyond this sketch stage. Hmm, when was the last time you saw J.G. Ballard’s sold in Wal-Mart?

There’s another of Henry’s Crash designs in that post, and there are more of his Ballard covers (that actually got published) here.

And this from Alex Pines:

This was the first assignment for my Advanced Design 2 class at MICA. I missed putting in some other stuff, but this is a pretty broad overview of my process for this project. I really just wanted to see how a post like this would look in a blog format.

1. Project Description
Design a book cover for one of J.G. Ballard’s novels. Research Ballard’s books and read essays by Rick McGrath and Rick Poynor.

2. Research
The novel I picked was Crash. Crash was written in 1973 by Ballard. It is one of Ballard’s more controversial stories. The story is about car-crash fetishism. The characters are sexually aroused by staging and participating in car crashes. The main character is Dr. Robert Vaughn, a former TV scientist. In addition to reading about the story, I gathered images of all the previous covers.

Alex goes on to detail the various rounds he undertook to get to a final design, with examples from each and his rationale along the way. I found it very interesting to negotiate. I wonder if Alex knew about the competition, though?

Alex’s Crash covers: second round.

Over at Barnes & Noble, SF writer Paul Di Filippo makes a valiant attempt to get Americans interested in Ballard, making some pertinent remarks about market forces in the US:

One of the most visionary, autocatalytic, and influential writers of the past five decades, a genuine nonpareil and prophet, a true diagnostician of our postmodern malaise, is courageously but inexorably dying of advanced metastatic prostate cancer at the age of 77. He announced this sad news in the concluding chapter of his autobiography, published in February of this year.

But if you’re an American reader — even if you’re a fan of this author’s many classic books and knowledgeable about his career — chances are good that you don’t know this sad fact, that you simply haven’t heard. That’s because the author is British, and his autobiography, in the eyes of U.S. publishers, has merited no U.S. edition — no more than his last two neglected novels did. And North American press coverage of his plight has been limited to a few genre journals… a sad testament to the privileging of marketplace concerns over art, and also a hurtful slight to a writer whose main topic, in whatever elaborate guise, has always been the American Century.

‘J.G. Ballard. Essay by Paul Di Filippo’, Barnes and Noble, 2/6/2008.

It’s great to see Paul champion Kingdom Come (after all, it has only recently survived a fresh round of new-pleb point-scoring):

[In Kingdom Come] Ballard’s complex brief, simplistically rendered, maintains that the banishment of spirituality and the suppression of many primal human drives in favor of status seeking and the most limited hunter-gatherer reflexology has resulted in a crippled and clinically insane culture — a culture fated to erupt in irrational and often violent compensatory ways.
…
Ballard’s stock troupe of actors who have been his loyal partners forever — brutishly intellectual doctors, damaged femmes fatales, Fisher King sacrificial heroes — speaking their often hilariously out-of-sync lines, enact a perverse vest-pocket apocalypse. As always, Ballard’s vivid metaphors entice, and his acerbic aperçus provoke…

‘J.G. Ballard. Essay by Paul Di Filippo’, Barnes & Noble.

Paul’s passion for Ballard’s writing is obvious, drilled into every line, and while none of the info will be new to readers of this site (the piece is ostensibly used to promote both Kingdom Come and Miracles of Life), think of it as smart-bomb planted in the fertile plains of the mighty Barnes & Noble. Let’s hope the message gets through one day (and hopefully before 2080, when Ballard predicts America will fall into ruin):

A Blakean Cassandra honored in his own country, Ballard deserves equal laurels in America, a dream country whose portrait and influence he has so indelibly etched in his books, and which exists in no truer form than in his skull.

‘J.G. Ballard. Essay by Paul Di Filippo.’

Paul’s been a long-time champion of Ballard’s work and his imaginative criticism is notable for the fact that it pays equally incisive attention to the less well-known artefacts in Ballard’s armoury. In this 1990 article, for example, Paul links The Drowned World with The Day of Creation with pleasing results:

Nowhere, I believe, is the nature of Ballard’s art more evident than in the simultaneous junction and disjunction between one of his oldest works, The Drowned World, and one of his latest, The Day of Creation. What I would like to do here is, first set forth the similarities — ranked roughly in importance from most significant to least — in a kind of catalog for our hypothetical exhibition, and then deal with the differences between the two works — which, in the end, are almost more important than the recurrent themes and patterns.

In no way do I mean to suggest that the latter work is some rip-off or mere re-write of the earlier piece, anymore than one Dali canvas is a rehash of another simply because both contain soft clocks. In fact, The Day of Creation strikes me as the more mature and esthetically satisfying of the two, although lacking The Drowned World’s obsessive, world-shattering dementia.

Twenty-Five Years Of Drowning: Mapping J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World onto The Day of Creation. Paul Di Filippo, Quantum Science Fiction & Fantasy Review, No 37, Summer 1990, pp 13-15.

It’s well worth reading.

Also worth scrutinising is Paul’s wonderful 1991 interview with Ballard, which cheekily renders the conversation as a cut-up anatomy textbook (an anatomical marriage of science and pornography of course being one of Ballard’s main obsessions):

III. “WHENEVER I HEAR THE WORD ‘ART,’ I REACH FOR MY CHECKBOOK.”

The TRIFACIAL NERVE may be affected in its entirety, or its sensory

1) Have you ever read a contemporary genre fantasy? If so, do you feel saddened by the degeneration of the fantasy mode from the work of such visionaries as George MacDonald and Charles Williams and David Lindsay to its current state of endless Tolkien-trilogy ripoffs?

I don’t read either fantasy or SF anymore. Tolkien has had a disastrous influence.

or motor root may be affected, or one of its primary main

2) What do you think of the current state of SF?

Much healthier since the arrival of the so-called cyberpunks. They [are] An important sign that SF is returning to reality again. Most encouraging.

divisions. In injury to the sensory root there is anaesthesia of the

3) Do you find any validity in the term “postmodern,” as applied to fiction, architecture, etc., or do you believe it is merely a facade for retrogressive techniques and concerns?

Yes, [it's retrogressive]. Bogus nostalgia and theme-parkism, as far as architecture is concerned. As for the novel, post-modemism represents a dead-end, a desperate admission that the author has nothing to say and can only think of evermore devious ways of disguising the fact.

half of the face on the side of the lesion, with the exception of

4) What has happened to the experimental urge among writers? Can you point to a single innovator equal to, say, Beckett, among contemporary authors?

Burroughs [is such an innovator]. [But] bourgeois life is crushing the imagination from this planet. In due course this will provoke a backlash, since the imagination can never be wholly repressed. A new surrealism will probably be born.

‘Ballard’s Anatomy’, an interview by Paul Di Filippo, Science Fiction Eye, 1991.

Thank you very much, Paul Di Filippo!

Illustrations by Ferret, from Paul DiFilippo’s interview with Ballard.