Rick McGrath’s Letter From London: The JG Ballard Memorial

All photography by Rick McGrath.

Sunday, November 15, 2009, 3:45pm, The Founders Pub, London.

Dear Simon,

Greetings from London! Hope all is well with you. I’ve just attended the long-anticipated JG Ballard Memorial celebration at the Tate Modern and now I’m catching my breath — and a few beers — at a nearby Thames-side pub with fellow Ballardians David Pringle, Mike Holliday, Vale, Marian Wallace and Gee Vaucher. We’re having a wonderful time — wish you were here.

Left: Toby Litt.

But let’s start at the beginning. We have time to order some Alsatian off the barbie. For the first two days in London I actually wondered if somebody’s god was sending us a message, as the elements did their best to batter us with the kind of weather that resembled a vicious blend of The Drowned World and The Wind From Nowhere. Running from doorway to doorway in search of a tube entrance, I kept stumbling through the usual detritus: soggy cigarette ends, broken umbrellas, empty condom packs. I kept wondering where JG might have visited to inspire The Drought. Certainly nowhere in the UK.

The day of the Memorial, however, broke bright and sunny and warm — a good sign and a fitting description of the events to follow.

The plan was for everyone to meet at the Tate Modern at 11am for an 11:30 start. I overtook a walking Toby Litt about a block away and together we made our way to the top floor of the Tate’s east wing where a substantial crowd had already gathered, spritzers in hand, strung out along a glass and steel corridor that emptied to a large anteroom with a commanding view of old London to the north and the high tech security guards of Canary Wharf to the east. I kept looking down to the Thames, though, hoping to see a bit of wing floating by from a light airplane. Not today. The venue might also have reminded some of Royal’s penthouse suite in High-Rise, but regardless of the number of people fighting their way up the stairs it was an appropriately Ballardian venue, made even more so by the Tate’s current show of “Pop Life: Art in a Material World”, featuring Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. Synchronicity? Perhaps.

Claire Walsh.

It was in this enormous space the 100 or so celebrants convened for the Memorial – tributes to The Man from JG’s family, friends, colleagues and admirers on what would have been his 79th birthday. The area was liquid with light and the format was a simple stage and microphone with flanking video screens. We sat in chairs that fanned in a wide arc along the length of the room. Our mistress of ceremonies was Bea Ballard, and after thanking the event’s organizers — her sister Fay, Claire Walsh and JG’s agent, Maggie Hanbury — away we went.

Our speakers — 13 in all, four reporting in by video — gave us a wonderfully Ballardian triad of facts, stories and myths about JG, and I couldn’t help thinking that once again Life is reflecting Art, unconsciously reproducing his Atrocity Exhibition structure of the public, the personal, and the symbolic. His work, his life, and his myth were the topics we wanted to hear about, and Simon, no one was disappointed.

Hold on. We’ve just had a discussion here at the pub, and Mike has suggested that this three-part structure may also be the most appropriate for this re-telling. Vale? Dave? You agree? OK. Planes do intersect.

THE PUBLIC

Will Self.

The celebration of JG’s work is also the celebration of his deep impact and the shock waves he sent through the literary community, emphasis on the later generations. And then there was that second wave of carpet bombing in the 1970s, the one that resonated with punk, with the abandoned, with RE/Search, with architecture, with the whole explosion of everyone’s quantification and eroticism of the “outer world of reality”. Unfortunately, Simon, the room held mostly literary types, so JG’s influence on the Ballardian arts was not addressed. Never mind. What was missing in breadth was made up in breath. “A touchstone of authentic genius,” Will Self intoned in his best British boom, “my single most important mentor and influence.” Will also commented about the length and consistency of JG’s oeuvre (pronounced as if it had 14 syllables), and how JG rarely left the road he most preferred, the one where he was caught in the wet headlights ironically waving a warning flag to a population already asleep at the wheel. He’s been at it, Will said, from his early changing planet stories to his last four novels of wacky westerners, that quartet or warnings about the dangers of boredom associated with living behind gated minds and programmed lives.

Not to be outdone, but still a tad cagey about it, Martin Amis beamed in on video to announce JG was “uniquely unique”, and spoke at length about JG’s art and his high place in the pantheon of imaginative writers. He was the only speaker who basically concentrated on JG the writer, rather than the man, and it was good to have him there even in video, although the final effect was a bit Intensive Care Unit, if you know what I mean.

JG’s life story has long been part of the public domain, and The Man did make an appearance, appearing onscreen in segments from the BBC documentary of his 1991 return to Shanghai. We see an obviously emotional JG standing in the yard of his family home on Amherst Avenue, wandering through the rooms, wondering about that second life he might have had if the war had not occurred and he stayed in the terrible city. Then the famous scene at Lunghua where he stands in the cramped room in G Block his family of four called home for three years. This is the closest thing to what I call home, JG told us, “I came close to an adult mind” here. We were treated to one other bit of Ballard before the day was over: the organizers had obtained a video of the What I Believe light display shown at Barcelona, and once again we were all reassured the power of the imagination can remake the world. In a way, that’s why we were there.

THE PERSONAL

Fay Ballard.

Here’s the heart of the matter. The angles between the walls. Let’s start with the daughters, Fay and Bea. Both talked exclusively about their relationship with ‘Daddy’ and their rather envious home life among the muck, movies and manuscripts. Fay, the artist, spoke first, and I was amazed and amused when she announced she would simply read out a series of thoughts, a verbal collage of unstructured memories. Perfect, I thought. It’ll be just like an Atrocity Exhibition list. And it was. Bea, also, offered up her remembrances, but took a more organized approach, mixing the humour with tales of darker times, such as the passing of her husband, and how she relied on JG’s help and experience from his own tragedy, and now even that support is gone. Sobering. And from Bea we have another inkling of JG’s self-deprecatory nature when he described himself as domestically “slattern”, when in reality the organisation level was probably at full Lunghua. “You can clean a house in five minutes if you don’t make a fetish of it”, JG once told her. I got the feeling the regimen was simply an extension of JG’s life: work hard, play hard.

Other Jimbits? JG never or rarely replaced or updated anything in the house. Nor did he throw much out, viz a peeled orange that had stood on the mantelpiece for 40 years. The daughters remember the clacking old typewriter and JG perched over it, speaking aloud the words he’s typing. Spending an entire summer naked in his back yard. Watching a tape of Double Indemnity together on TV, all the lights out, and talking about Civilization and Its Discontents. JG doing surrealist paintings! Constant encouragement for all their enthusiasms. Acceptance of a menagerie of pets, including Bea’s rat. Chinese dinners with — get this, Simon — lobster and noodles. A serious approach to education. Bear hugs. The unicycle. Trips to the movies after school. Ahh, memories.

Michael Moorcock.

Mike Moorcock stayed on this plane for his presentation, too, after he managed with some difficulty to negotiate passage to the stage with his crutches, and then actually alight it. Mike stayed Mike, fumbling thru masses of folded paper to find his notes, and then regaling us with stories of domesticity rather than literary appreciation and New Worlds gossip. It was very interesting to hear stories of JG’s early days, and nowadays Mike treasures most his memories of their times in restaurants, pubs and kitchens, wives at one end, Mike and Jim at the other, with all “forever arguing”. Mike had to put up with “cobblers” from his wife, JG with “you know that’s not true, Jim” from Mary. If you were eavesdropping you might think they were plotting the overthrow of SF, except nothing happened because no one could agree. Alpha males, no? When Mary died Mike was there for JG, not only helping him out of his “closed down” fugue, but ultimately introducing him to Claire — “the best possible choice for Jim” — and finally becoming each other’s editors — “logrolling”.

By far the most famous of the name-brand personalities to attend was Steven Spielberg — I got to sit right beside him! Ha, just kidding. Steve and the two Empire producers also attended, albeit in pixilated form, and gave an obviously glowing, but also somewhat underwhelming appreciation of their brief time together. They liked having JG around to help in the “dimensionalizing” of the book, whatever that means, and, of course, they had lots of fun shooting him in the Shanghai party scene, even if that clip was cut.

Steve’s warm memories of JG were also shared by Crash producer Jeremy Thomas, who recalled JG was unusually generous to his film adaptors. His memories involved food and cars, the former being a meal he enjoyed with JG in Cannes after Crash was panned, or should we say skewered? The latter involves a ride he gave JG in a Ferrari, and The Man reaching out to fondle the dashboard leather. A fellow “petrol-head” Jeremy called JG, a secret connoisseur of car magazines, “the equivalent of centerfolds in Penthouse”. I think he’s confusing the author and character here a wee bit, no?

Thomas made way for the enthusiastic and entertaining V Vale, who flew in from his RE/Search offices in San Francisco to breathlessly relate his stories of how he first became aware of JG and his immense appreciation for The Man: “He’s the Shakespeare of the Twentieth Century, the bard of Shepperton”, Vale pronounced, much to the glee of the audience. I’m toasting Vale right now, Simon, for that great line! Dressed in his trademark all black (as he still is), Vale began by confessing he started off as a Burroughs man, and first became aware of JG in 1974 when someone told him Bill had written a preface to a book called Love & Napalm: Export USA. He read it and experienced a life-changing moment. In 1978 Vale interviewed both Bs for the 10th issue of his seminal punkpaper, Search and Destroy. He then realized he had “spent his entire life preparing to meet JG Ballard”, and Burroughs slipped to second place. Cheers, Vale, and thanks for pointing out the obvious to the locals.

Left: V. Vale. Right: Bea Ballard.

After Vale the long, lean and lanky body of Will Self undulated itself to the microphone, and Will amused us all by reading out a handwritten letter –- actually, two of JG’s ubiquitous postcards — he received 16 years ago. Will had written JG, tentatively suggesting he might be the man to write a screenplay for Crash. The reply was short on encouragement, but long on suggestions: JG recommended Will immediately go out and buy a book called The Black Box, which featured the final recordings of crews involved in aircraft crashes. “I’m thinking of writing a novel based entirely on black box recordings,” JG enthusiastically wrote, then suggested it might be a technique Will might try. “He was always suggesting story ideas to me,” Will intoned in a lazy, eccentric drawl oddly reminiscent of JG’s dulcet tones. “I knew it was because he had already thought about it and had abandoned the concept”. Much laughter. Will also revealed a bit of JG’s horror of all things literary and fête. When JG won a PEN Award four months before his passing, it was Will who accepted on JG’s behalf. When he delivered the award, JG took pains to warn Will about the “tweedy” side of the literary world — “It’s very good of them to give me the award but we must always remember” (here, Will’s voice drops conspiratorially) “they are the enemy”.

Left: Jonathan Waxman. Centre: Chris Petit. Right: James Ballard, Jnr.

A very interesting speaker was Professor Jonathan Waxman, JG’s oncologist, who movingly re-emphasized JG’s stoicism and bravery, usually expressed as endless concern for others rather than himself. I kept wondering if this Doctor was anything at all like the endless Doctors who passed through JG’s fiction. He didn’t look like he’d ever been to Africa, though. We learned of the closeness between JG and Claire near the end, although even these emotional moments were subject to JG’s wicked one-liners, such as the time Jonathan called up to see how things were going. “Claire’s been absolutely magnificent,” JG replied, “but then I have to say that, as she’s sitting opposite me cradling a Luger in her lap”. Or his description of chemotherapy being akin to “continually eating bad oysters”.

THE PSYCHE

Left: Bill Spencer.

This is where these planes intersect, and images are born. Or, in this case, reinforced, as blending the public and private in JG is essentially the basis of his creative technique. JG has said himself his greatest story is his life, and the image I think we all will carry forward is of a bifurcated genius — generous family man on the one hand, hard-drinking shockwave rider of a writer on the other. Unique, to paraphrase Amis. My takeaway image was the vid of JG at Lunghua, white hat, white suit, looking suspiciously like someone who firmly expects to see their 14-year-old self appear around a corner. When I got home I patted my brick from G Block.

And that was basically it for the tributes, although they might have gone on all afternoon given the guest list, which included Iain Sinclair, Chris Petit, Toby Litt, Tom Sutcliffe, Maggie Hanbury, Marian Wallace, Joan Bakewell, Solveig Nordlund, Peter York, and JG’s friend from his Cambridge days at the Copper Kettle, Bill Spencer, looking sharp in a hot pink bow tie. Yowsers!

Direct family members who were in attendance but didn’t speak included James Ballard, Jr. — who shares many physical similarities with JG — and JG’s sister Margaret.

Absent or unable to attend were Brian Aldiss, Emma Tennant from Bananas, Hilary Bailey, Martin Bax and Michael Foreman from Ambit, and academics such as Roger Luckhurst, Jeanette Baxter and you.

Left: Iain Sinclair.

What else did I find out during the informal chit-chat afterwards? A few items you may find interesting. Remember all those stories about JG taking his manuscripts out to his back yard and burning them after the book was published? I asked Bea Ballard about this, and she looked at me like I had been in the care of Dr Nathan. No, they haven’t been burned — the girls have all that stuff. Good news. Toby Litt was saying he’s heard the ICA is negotiating with the CCCB in Barcelona in an attempt to get the Autopsy exhibition in London. Their space is quite a bit less than the 90,000 square feet the CCCB lavished, so we’ll see what transpires. I was also approached by Claire Walsh and Gee Vaucher regarding another proposed Ballard exhibition the ladies are planning for a subterranean exhibition at Waterloo. So, perhaps things are picking up in the UK after all.

The memorial ended as these events normally do, Simon, with a sort of time trickle of people down to the remaining few — us, of course — followed by a vote to repair to the nearest bar to discuss the experience, which we’re now doing. Interestingly enough, all of us at the table agree the event was also a sort of Rubicon, a boundary we have now crossed which marks the end of mourning JG’s passing to celebrating his extraordinary life, his loving and generous personality, and, of course, his amazing legacy of work.

It was a helluva day. I’m glad I was there.

Cheers,
Rick.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘What exactly is he trying to sell?’: J.G. Ballard’s Adventures in Advertising
+ ‘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

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?

Photo: Simon Sellars.

Sorry for the long absence — I promised ‘daily updates’, well, that didn’t happen. It’s taken me ages to get my thoughts down about Barcelona and Kosmopolis because the experience was so rich, but contributing factors included jet lag, computer problems and a lengthy spell of writer’s block. But mainly it was the richness and how to process it. Kosmopolis was the best literary festival I’ve attended for the intrigue in the program as well as for the organisation — even as one of the lesser participants (in terms of career and achievements), I was made to feel like a king. The Kosmopolis team are a genuinely interesting, creative and dedicated bunch and this transmits into every facet of the show. Thank you Jordi, Miquel, Barbara, Teresa, Juan, Marta and everyone else!

Arriving in Barcelona is a sensory delight. The rhythm of the city is completely different to Melbourne. You get a valid sense of this via traffic flow, the true index of civility. In Barcelona cyclists are treated as road vehicles with equal rights on the tarmac, and traffic signals for both vehicles and pedestrians are adhered to insofar as it facilitates smooth egress for all. This does not mean a nation of automata. When there are no cars, for example, pedestrians cross against the lights, and vice versa it’s the same with vehicles. The police don’t seem to mind. It’s organised chaos (the traffic flow is dense and perpetual, and seemingly balancing on a knife’s edge) and it works. This idea of ensuring harmonious flow by treating rules as guidelines, with the safety of right of way observed above all, seems a simple and obvious point, but in Australia in inner-city areas traffic flow can often be bloody chaos with everyone lockstepping onto their neural GPS to the total exclusion of the rights of others. When I compare the two situations, I think of Barcelona as an organism that knows how to breathe in, and when to breathe out, and that can regulate its breathing for an easier life and stress-free relaxation; I think of urban Australia as a heart-attack victim with fatty arteries and severely constricted breathing.

This can also be indexed by the approach to alcohol. If people were drunk and out of control on the streets of Barcelona, they kept it very well hidden. Is binge drinking popular there? I wouldn’t have thought so. In Melbourne, smashed beer bottles are a common sight on the streets and broken glass is everywhere in the inner city following Friday and Saturday nights. In Australia the government wants to tax alcohol to combat this, to make it so expensive that it will be prohibitive to have more than a few drinks, thereby taking out as collateral damage those who are responsible and who can handle their drink. This is the Nanny State in motion, proffering band-aid solutions that do nothing to get to the heart of the problem, which is cultural and is rooted in Australia’s frontier approach to binge drinking. Try to limit people’s enjoyment of wine in Spain and see how far you get. Alcohol is not the problem in Australia — the problem is social. I felt safe walking around Barcelona at midnight, because there’s none of the paranoia and edginess that is increasingly a feature of Melbourne street life. Instead, there is conviviality — more on that later. I’ll even declare this despite having my wallet stolen on La Rambla just two days into my stay. I was with Mike Bonsall, who was in town for the festival as a punter (along with Tim Chapman and Mike Holliday; great to see you all!). We’d ingested a few drinks and I just didn’t think. Stupidly, I put my wallet in my back pocket, even though I’ve worked as a travel writer and I’ve written on travel scams and dangers — including putting your wallet in your back pocket on La Rambla. So, before we knew it, we were running the gauntlet of a large group of young women who began groping us (!) — ‘Oooh la la, come home with me, baby’. We would have been in their clutches for no longer than a minute before breaking free, but I knew straight away my wallet had gone. The girls had gone, too, melted away into the crowd. But it didn’t ruin my trip because Barcelona’s delights far outweigh its petty crime. Every city has its hazards and I was warned about this one, but I let my guard slip. I don’t think I should blame Barcelona for that idiotic lapse in concentration. Besides, there was an upside. The next day, Teresa from Kosmopolis took me to the police station and gave me a guided tour of the neighbourhoods we passed through, pointing out beautiful historical architecture on the way and filling me in on the unique character of each area. Thank you so much, Teresa — for your wonderful company, it was worth losing my wallet.

Detail from Andrés Hispano’s ‘Autoscan’ installation, at the ‘Autopsia del nou Mil.leni’ exhibition at CCCB, Barcelona. Photo: Tim Chapman.

For the first few days I explored the Ballard exhibition. Unfortunately I had an unfamiliar camera with me so my most of my shots, taken in low light, were unsatisfactory. Of course, Rick McGrath was at the opening of the exhibition back in July and he took many excellent photos, so please refer to his batch in lieu of mine. As for descriptions, I won’t go into too much detail given that McGrath has covered the ground thoroughly in his report, so well in fact that much of it felt very familiar on first visit. What I will say though is that it is an impressive achievement, and one of the most imaginative displays of its type that I’ve seen. I saw the Kubrick exhibition when it came to Melbourne and this matches it, perhaps even surpasses it, because it gives free reign to creative interpretation of Ballard’s metaphors, and all on a budget a fraction of the Kubrick. Jordi and his team have allowed their imaginations to run wild and this has resulted in something quite stunning, in particular the skeletal car body buried in sand. One thing Rick didn’t really comment on was Ann Lislegaard’s black-and-white computer-art rendition of themes from The Crystal World — I spent almost an hour sitting in a darkened room watching this creation, with its looped 3D scenes of interiors and outdoor scenes bathed in an ambience that morphs from light to shade, seemingly crystallising at the meridian into shards of solid, jagged matter. Punctuated with quotes from Crystal, one of Ballard’s most lyrical works, this was a stunning monument to the fashion in which JGB attempts to reorder the senses to provide a deeper, more meaningful existence that cuts against the grain of convention.

Jordi Costa on the left, me on the right. Photo: Tim Chapman.

LEFT: Claire Walsh, circa 1968.

In a very pleasant surprise, Claire Walsh, JGB’s partner, was a last-minute guest of the festival and I was thrilled to meet the face of two of Ballard’s advertiser’s announcements. Jordi Costa and the CCCB’s Miquel Noques took Claire on a guided tour of the exhibition and V. Vale and I were able to tag along. Claire was full of interesting background regarding some of Ballard’s most famous works. For example, discussing Ballard’s crashed-car exhibition, a focus of one of the autopsy rooms, she echoed JGB’s description of the confrontational aspects of the show. Claire was at the event and she emphasised that it was meant to shock, that it was meant to jolt people out of their complacency. According to her, JGB’s oft-repeated descriptions of a drunk, confused and enraged audience were no exaggeration — the public had never butted up against a man of Ballard’s dark intelligence before. Intriguingly, the effect was echoed in the present exhibition, held under similar circumstances — I’m told that in Spain Ballard is virtually unknown, and that many people attending this exhibition were witnessing his work for the first time. Combine this with the fact that Jordi and his team pulled no punches in framing Ballard’s work, presenting often queasy images of medical procedure, wartime horrors and mediated violence, and the effect sometimes approached a similar level of outrage. In the guestbook, there were examples of patrons expressing their anger at the imagery on display — ‘The worst exhibition I’ve ever seen!’ (on the same page as another quote: ‘This is the best exhibition ever’); ‘Scandalous!’; ‘This man is sick!’ — nestling comfortably alongside the words of praise (which far outweighed the negatives, of course). There were also, perhaps predictably, just a few too many examples of mutilated and mutated penises.

‘Frank Ghery [sic] rules’: guestbook hijinks at the Ballard exhibition. Photo: Simon Sellars.

Before we entered the exhibition, I realised I’d forgotten my camera battery so I raced back to the hotel to get it. Downstairs I saw Lou Reed, Kosmopolis’s star guest, sloping laconically through the CCCB lobby followed by a tightly coiled media scrum. He looked very bored in that distinct Lou Reed way, and I was struck by the image of him standing stock still against a Kosmopolis banner while scores of paparazzi took pictures, their flashes firing simultaneously. At one point Reed stretched his palms slightly outwards, while retaining the same rigid face, before puffing his chest out. This image made me recall old interviews where he would talk about channelling feedback from his guitar in the same breath as he would eulogise the mech-human jolt of messing with the nervous system through systematic methamphetamine abuse. Watching him bathed in a hundred flashes, I saw him as a creature raised under electric light, feeding off the popping bulbs, absorbing the photo-synthetic light into his body, allowing it to course through his veins to produce a pure artificial being harnessed to the electric sun and to the raw power of the media. The ever-popping flashes illuminating his body were so rapid and intensive, I expected his bones to start glowing beneath wafer-thin skin.

LEFT: Lou Reed: electro-shock therapy. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

This was on the Thursday, and until his performance with Laurie Anderson on Friday night, I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye, in and around the CCCB courtyard, heading his entourage, a study in ‘jaded’, causing a commotion with the crowds, at one stage roped off in an enclosure like a zoo exhibit, bored and expressionless, waiting while the fans lined up for his book signings and while rubberneckers like me watched him studying his fingernails. I’m not the biggest fan of his music, save for the Velvets, but his real-life presence was so inorganic, so bloodless in a completely compelling way, it had to be tracked and followed. It was pure celebrity reaction in action (although, funnily enough, I’d never imagined Lou Reed as inhabiting that rarefied level; he always seems ‘cult’ to me… let’s face it, he’s no Jagger) and I noted the delicious juxtaposition of the virtual Ballard on the top floor of the CCCB, a man who has dissected the celebrity process with clinical and unerring precision. I imagined his presence radiating pure waves of insight down on the proceedings below.

On Friday night Lou and Laurie read Catalan poetry and writing, which was utterly bizarre. I’m not sure of the background of this event, or of how and why it happened. Do Lou and Laurie have a connection to Catalonia? I can’t say. All I can tell you is that Lou was on stage at Kosmopolis while Laurie was at the University of California, Berkeley, reading her parts in a live video feed projected on a massive screen behind him. No music, no singing. Lou sounded as if he was reading from the usual tales of heroin, transvestites and Warhol back in NYC — there was that same, familiar raspy drawl that everyone associates with him — whereas Laurie was more engaging and injected multiple personalities into her reading. The whole set up was so strange. When Lou would turn to her, dwarfed by her image, and she would smile benevolently back at him, it seemed like a fairy tale in which Lou, a dark knight, had been shrunk to size by a Queen who wanted to keep him all for herself. But they are in love, I know it’s not like that, I just had a sensory blipvert channel jump induced by the scale distortion and the jumbled spatial dynamic.

Lou and Laurie: telepresent love. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

There was a funny moment when Lou mispronounced a list of Spanish surnames and place names, and the audience erupted into laughter. But the biggest cheer was reserved for the duo’s reading of the Yellow Manifesto (1928), written by Salvador Dali, Lluis Montanyà and Sevastià Gasch. A futurist ode to the extremes of the imagination and to the beauty of machinic art, it occurred to me that it was surely an influence on Ballard’s ‘What I Believe’:

We have eliminated from this MANIFESTO all courtesy in our attitude. It is useless to attempt any discussion with the representatives of present-day Catalan culture, which is artistically negative although efficient in other respects. Compromise and correctness lead to deliquescent and lamentable states of confusion of all values, to the most unbreathable spiritual atmospheres, to the most pernicious of influences… Violent hostility, in contrast, clearly locates values and positions and creates a hygienic state of mind.

After reading through the Manifesto, with its litany of things to be smashed, Lou quipped: ‘I wonder what they’d think of the internet?’ With its call to dismantle bourgeois complacency and the blandness of youth in favour of Catalan independence based around the beauty of enigmatic art, the Yellow Manifesto is a powerful call to arms that clearly still has relevance in today’s political climate. Indeed, I saw anarchist and independence graffiti everywhere in Barcelona, as in the following example, which was stencilled onto a series of mobile-phone advertisements. At first I thought it was actually part of the ad, in a depressingly familiar instance of corporations co-opting revolution, because it was so accurately placed in the exact same spot each time, until I twigged that the stencil artist had actually targeted this particular ad for whatever reason.

‘Anarchy in Catalonia, it’s coming sometime and maybe…’. Photo: Simon Sellars.

When they’d finished their performance, Lou looked up at Laurie and they had a little telepresent moment together, strong love coursing through a hi-def internet link; Laurie gave Lou a radiant smile and made little pincer-like movements with her fingers at him, clearly some kind of secret sign, and he smiled sheepishly at her, this woman who is perhaps the only person in the world that can make Lou Reed self-conscious.

The Ballard segment of the festival kicked off with a panel, ‘Postcards from the Interior Space’, chaired by Jordi and featuring Marcial Souto, Agustin Fernandez Mallo, Marta Peirano and Toby Litt. Unfortunately no one told Mike B and I that the translation of the Spanish/Catalan speakers was being transmitted through portable headsets, so we sat through most of the session in bemusement, perking up when Litt spoke in English. This was a Ballardian experience in itself. Understanding Litt only, we attempted to decode the questions and replies from other speakers that led to Toby’s answers. Sometimes we got it and sometimes the old brain would go into freefall, much the same as it does when it reads Ballard and must submit to the process of unworking the similes and parallel narratives that form the shifting strata of his work. Litt told the audience that the foreword he wrote to a forthcoming volume of academic essays had been rejected on the grounds that it wasn’t likely to entice people to read more Ballard, given his position, which is that it’s impossible to truly understand or truly ‘get’ Ballard’. From there, Toby suggested that all academics have got Ballard wrong. He then read the rejected foreword (which he revealed was finally accepted as the afterword to the book), which built an extended metaphor around the notion of Ballard tunnelling out from the ground under his Shepperton house. Funnily enough, perhaps even appropriately enough, given Toby’s main point about academia, I can’t pretend I fully understood the analogy.

‘Postcards from the Interior Space’: Marcial, Agustin, Marta, Jordi and Toby. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

Litt also referred to psychogeographical interpretations of Ballard, mentioning Will Self, but said he had problems with this angle, with writing about London in this way. I have sympathies with both academic/theoretical and psychogeographic readings of Ballard, but I also agree with Litt when he says that Ballard translates because he maintains a floating parallel world on top of the ‘physical’ world of his novels. It’s a good point, but why then criticise specific readings of Ballard? Surely the indeterminate, open-ended nature of JGB’s writing supports, even encourages, this in its drive to resist categorisation? Well, that’s my position anyway, that this open-endedness generates a program of resistance. Litt also critiqued readings of Ballard that accept Ballard’s version of his life as the truth — I presume Empire of the Sun is the reference — and said he wished that Ballard had never expanded upon his Shanghai childhood in interviews, so that readers would be forced to confront his parade of surrealist war imagery and violent technofutures on their own terms. I do understand what he means — I’d read Atrocity, Crash, High-Rise and Concrete Island before Empire or the bulk of the interviews, and they did seem like the work of mad genius bleeding through into the frame from a parallel dimension. But even now, with the full weight of Ballard’s history informing my study of his work, I see his autobiographical retellings as another fiction to be decoded. His obsessive restaging of the Lunghua theatre is a form of circular time that again resists definition, resists commodification, resists classification — a guerrilla war against the type of ‘eventless present’ that he sees as a by-product of consumer capitalism and its drive to erase history and collapse the future into the present.

There, I’ve just given you the gist of what I spoke about on the panel the next day with Jordi, Vale and Bruce Sterling, where I felt unusual, but happy, appearing as the ‘academic’ among two larger-than-life personalities. Vale showed a 10-minute film of his work with RE/Search and the relationship with Ballard he has forged, and then talked about Ballard’s role as visionary and dreamer. Bruce talked about Ballard’s influence on his own writing and on cyberpunk. But I’ll leave further summaries for now, as I believe Tim C is preparing a transcript of the talk which I hope to post here soon.

‘Myths of the Near Future’: Me, Bruce, Vale, Jordi. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

After the panel, we had a beer in the courtyard. In another welcome surprise, Iraklis from Athens showed up, with his mate Antony! Iraklis is a long-time reader of ballardian.com, from around 2005 onwards, so it was great to meet him. We had an interesting chat about the public perception of Ballard; it seems the situation in Greece is the same in Australia in that he is still regarded as a ‘cult’ author. Perhaps he is. I think Mr Ballard should be proud of getting under people’s skins so thoroughly. It was here that we saw Robyn Hitchcock wandering around with his guitar. He was due on stage that night but was serenading random strangers in the meantime, and we watched him perform a Doors song for a small child, who was clearly delighted and/or bemused by this colourful man. The next night I saw a selection of Catalan poets at the CCCB’s Cafe Europa, and they were doing very interesting things with collage sound and sampled voices. My favourite was the guy who attempted to replicate the way we hear our own voices and the process by which it is filtered through the vibrations of the skull and ear canals, rendering it completely different when heard on a recording. I hate hearing my recorded voice, so this was repellent and fascinating for me. He related all this to the way we cannot trust our own interior voices and memories, which may or may not be creations and constructs of the media — Catalan poet, meet J.G. Ballard. Another poet repeated combinations of words and phrases and looped them through a bank of samplers, creating music from the beauty of the Catalan language. I find it a nice language to listen to, and I chose not to hear the translations on the portable headsets this time. I wanted to free-float and concentrate solely on the musicality of the phrases and intonations, the meaning of which I was clueless, but the poetry of which I immediately and instinctively responded to.

Robyn Hitchcock does his wandering troubadour thing in the CCCB courtyard. Photo: Tim Chapman.

Afterwards, talking to the MC, this poet said something interesting, about how he prefers ‘ignorance’ to ‘knowledge’ because with ignorance, interesting ideas emerge. He gave the example of people who believe that white wine removes blackberry stains or that spirits are good for headaches; in the gap between perception and recognition, ignorance occurs and new and surreal juxtapositions emerge that inspire radical art and thought processes. These performances again put me in mind of the Yellow Manifesto and how it really sums up the appeal of Kosmopolis, with its focus on grassroots, independent, innovative and creative literary ideas. There were no real superstars at this festival, but instead successful writers and artists who have proved that you don’t need to sell your soul to make it. In this respect Ballard, a true maverick, is the perfect fit.

Lydia Lunch at Cafe Europa. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

Lydia Lunch was also appearing on this night, as she now lives in Barcelona. She performed a spoken-word piece to a fractured jazz-rock soundtrack, typically angry and very ‘fuck you’ and all about the war on terror and global conflict tied in with Spain’s history of conflict. After, she said to the MC that she chooses to live in Barcelona because in the US she would be reminded every day of the hypocrisy of that society and the violence it wreaks on its citizens. In Barcelona, by contrast, she says that every day people wake up and forget about the horrors of the past because each day is seen as a new chance to drink, fuck and forget. To my surprise, I found myself agreeing with this angry and loud American called Lunch: there is indeed a mood of relaxed optimism in this city and it touched me even on my brief stay. It invigorated me in fact, and in the week-and-a-half since my return I’ve been inspired to make a number of important and long-delayed changes to my life and lifestyle, which are already in motion, a direct result of my nine days in Barcelona and the deep impact it and Kosmopolis had on me and the possibilities I can now envisage for creative work that is symbiotic with a healthy inner life.

ABOVE: Kafkaesque. Photo: Simon Sellars.

ABOVE: Brechtian. Photo: Simon Sellars.

If you are a writer, or literary minded, how could you fail to love this city? I came across stencils of Kafka, and graffiti that quoted large chunks of Brecht. It’s a city made for walking, for inspiring thought. The back alleys and side streets are immersive and the architecture across all styles is superb. I walked many kilometres each day, directionless but always finding something to inspire. I did so much walking and uncovering of back streets that I didn’t make it to any of the Gaudi attractions (I’ve been to Barcelona before, and did the whole Gaudi thing, so I’d subconsciously made the decision this time around to see the more of the quotidian fabric of the city instead).

Gala, is that you? Photo: Simon Sellars.

It was during one foray into a back street that the lady in this shot came into view. She saw me taking photos of buildings and stopped right in front of me, extending her walking stick out towards me, smiling radiantly all the while but not saying a single word. Look at the amazing way she is dressed and that face that knows all: she looks like a female Dali. She struck this pose as soon as she saw me, as if to say: ‘Hey! What about me? I’m the finest architecture here’. For a moment I wasn’t sure what she was doing and then I realised she was offering herself as a model to be photographed. As soon as the shutter clicked, she turned on her heel and walked briskly away, still smiling that same brilliant smile, still uttering not one word. And that is what I love about Barcelona, the casual surrealism that is woven into the fabric of the place. Included with the pack given to Kosmopolis participants was a series of monographs published by the CCCB that explored urban space and the need for a vital public space in order to maintain a healthy society. One, ‘Collective Culture and Urban Public Space’ by Ash Amin, is especially relevant. Amin writes about the need for a ‘post-human perspective’ on urban space that brings together ‘the most promising examples of surplus made to work as such’:

These would include bazaars and shopping malls in which difference is treated as a virtue, streets and squares of free and safe mingling, parks and other recreation spaces resonating with vitality and mixed use, libraries and schools that sustain public interest and reach out to the reluctant, bus shelters and car parks that are not the dumping ground for the dregs of society, buses and trains that work and offer a pleasant experience to the travelling public. Here, the qualities of multiplicity, conviviality, solidarity and maintenance can be expected to crowd out malfeasance, reinforcing a sense of shared space.

It is no accident that Amin had been commissioned by the CCCB to write about public space. He repeatedly emphasises conviviality as the key to a healthy and dynamic urban fabric, and as I was reading this, I thought, ‘That is Barcelona’. Whatever problems there may be with the Spanish government or economy, what Barcelona in particular has is convivial public space, and I, like Lydia Lunch, would be willing to give up many other things to experience that on a daily basis.

I have a final observation about Barcelona: I have never seen so many young men on crutches in any city I’ve visited. Are Catalan males very sporty, are they just really clumsy, or do they have very brittle joints?

The Dali Museum. Photo: Simon Sellars.

On my last full day in Spain, I travelled to Figueres to see the Dali museum. I am staggered by how popular his work continues to be. The queues and crowds were massive and the whole complex was like a warped theme park, Disneyland nightmares for the masses. There were plenty of school groups there and I could only think that being introduced to Dali at a very young age must be a very good education indeed, exposed to images of young virgins being auto-sodomized by their own chastity and labia-faces. This is what I mean by casual surrealism, which appears to be threaded into the Catalonian DNA.

And now it’s encoded into mine. On the way home, I picked up some British newspapers at Heathrow to find that the UK was in the midst of the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand/Andrew Sachs scandal.

And every time I read the name ‘Georgina Baillie’, I was convinced they were referring to ‘Georges Bataille’.

ABOVE: Barcelona street scene. Photo: Simon Sellars.

ABOVE: The thrill of it all: nu-architecture at Port Olympic, Barcelona. Photo: Simon Sellars.

..:: Soundtracks to inner space: Future Engineers, ‘Studio Mix 2007′; Underground Resistance, ‘First Galactic Baptist Church’; The Martian, ‘The Stardancer’; Simple Minds, ‘Themes for Great Cities’; PiL, ‘Radio Four’; Lalo Schifrin, ‘Jaws Theme’; Ennio Morricone, ‘Come Maddalena’.

London has always been a palace of sexual varieties: both the hub of Britain’s sex trade and the chamber in which, since the advent of the printed word, debates about liberty, repression and obscenity have raged and (occasionally) been resolved. It’s the country’s erotic centre – its G-spot, if you will. Which is why Time Out decided it was high time to consider the ways in which sex has been celebrated by London writers down the centuries.

Our Top 30 chart of London’s rudest writers collects, in a single heaving but well-ventilated space, the authors we feel have contributed the most to our understanding of the city’s complex sexual psychology. What do we mean by ‘rude’? Boldly transgressive as well as pornographic (after all, anyone can be pornographic), seductive and titillating as well as obscene and, always, well written.

One of the functions of nostalgia is to purge the past of elements that don’t chime with our limited sense of how people once lived. So it’s salutary, and oddly bracing, to be reminded that dildos were around in the sixteenth century (Thomas Nashe) and that ‘cunt’ (okay, ‘queynte’) was a slang term for female genitalia in Chaucer’s day.

But don’t just take our word for it. Our saucy scribblers come endorsed by some of London’s finest contemporary writers, including Martin Amis, Sarah Waters, Will Self and Jilly Cooper.

So put down your whip, unbuckle that gimp mask and let’s begin…

28: JG Ballard
Our foremost chronicler of dystopian modernity, Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930. He announced recently that he has advanced prostate cancer and that his latest book, the memoir ‘Miracles of Life’, will be his last.

In his own words
‘The crushed body of the sportscar had turned her into a being of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its dying chromium and leaking engine-parts, all the deviant possibilities of her sex.’ (‘Crash’)

Toby Litt (author ‘Corpsing’, ‘I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay’)
‘It’s no discovery, of course, that cars are objects of desire. But it took Ballard to go that logical extra step: if cars are going to get it on, then they need to crash. This isn’t just about Volvo-protected voyeurism, it’s about exchanging body fluids upon impact, it’s about suicidal interpenetrations. Ballard takes thing-sex to the point of polymorphous perversity. Anything can be sexier than sex – buildings, airplanes, deserted swimming pools. Even Shepperton. Or, as Ballard would insist, especially Shepperton.’

Here’s the full list:

1 Walter, aka Henry Spencer Ashbee
2 Alan Hollinghurst
3 Kenneth Tynan
4 Algeron Charles Swinburne
5 Thomas Nashe
6 John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester
7 William Shakespeare
8 Geoffrey Chaucer
9 Gerald Kersh
10 John Cleland
11 Havelock Ellis
12 Hanif Kureishi
13 Sigmund Freud
14 Henry Fielding
15 James Boswell
16 William Wycherley
17 Daniel Defoe
18 Mark Ravenhill
19 Geoff Nicholson
20 Maxim Jakubowski
21 Oscar Moore
23 Sebastian Horsley
24 Molly Parkin
25 Stewart Home
26 Mary Robinson
27 Patrick Marber
28 JG Ballard
29 Lady Caroline Lamb
30 Anthony Neilson

More at Time Out.

And for a different view on the erotic potential of Crash, see here.

[ via Feuilleton ]

Sunday September 2, 2007
The Observer

How did we miss these? Far from the fame and glamour of the Booker and bestsellers is a forgotten world of literary treasures – brilliant but underrated novels that deserve a second chance to shine. We asked 50 celebrated writers to nominate their favourites.

The Wind From Nowhere (1961)
JG Ballard

Thousands of books are undervalued by the general public. Far rarer are those undervalued by their own authors. And rarer still are those the authors dislike so much that they suppress them. Graham Greene wouldn’t allow his first four novels to be reprinted. And Jeanette Winterson has done her best to turn her second novel, Boating for Beginners, into an unbook. Harder to understand is JG Ballard, who always refers to The Drowned World as his first novel, whereas it was, in fact, The Wind From Nowhere. His reluctance to admit authorship is almost certainly due to having knocked it out in a mere two weeks. But it’s not a bad book – recognisably Ballardian in subject and form. Also, it stands as the first part of Ballard’s Disaster Quartet. Each of these books – The Drowned World, The Drought (aka The Burning World) and The Crystal World are the others – is based on one of the four classical elements: air, water, fire and earth. By refusing to admit The Wind From Nowhere into his corpus, Ballard leaves this quartet maimed. But maybe that’s the whole point.

Nicola BarkerToby Litt

NicolaToby says this ‘unbooking’ is a rare phenomenon, but I can think of a similar example in music: Kraftwerk. They went even further than Ballard, burying their first three albums, refusing to release them on CD and wincing in horror whenever an interviewer dares to mention them.

But not even Ballard or Ralf or Florian can resist the recombinant power of late capitalism, where every ‘dog’ must have its day (even ones that have been kicked by their owners as much as these ones have).

Woof, woof.

UPDATE: It’s Toby Litt who brings us this snippet, as John Coulthart informs me. I was so fixated on nabbing the Ballard stuff, I didn’t even notice Toby’s name above the entry. Apologies all round. Anyway, it’s no surprise — Toby waxed lyrical about ‘Wind’ in the interview Gwyn and I did with him, saying this:

[The Wind from Nowhere] seems to be very much the start-point for his oeuvre, if you want to call it that. It’s certainly not comparable to, say, Graham Greene’s disowned novels — which, from what I’ve read, aren’t only very badly written but are also acutely anti-Semitic. As Ballard started with the four elements [in his first four novels], it seems odd and imbalancing to leave one of them out. Everyone realises it’s an early novel.

By the way, Ballard’s archivist David Pringle would take exception with Toby’s repeated assertion that Ballard’s first four novels are patterned after the four elements. Here’s what David said about that notion in a recent discussion:

Looking again at that Wikipedia entry on JGB, here is an example of a myth which, in my opinion, really ought to be killed:

“Several of Ballard’s earlier works deal with scenarios of ‘natural disaster’; most notably a quartet thematically based on the four Classical Elements of Aristotle, featuring The Wind From Nowhere (Air), The Drowned World (Water), The Crystal World (Earth), and The Drought (Fire).”

In what sense does _The Crystal World_ represent earth? Crystals are earthy, are they? What makes them more earthy than, say, the sand of _The Drought_?

Ballard has never, anywhere, to the best of my knowledge, stated that those four novels were based on the four classical elements. Apart from anything else, such a schema would give far too much prominence to _The Wind from Nowhere_, a quickie hack novel which he has effectively disowned (as the Wiki entry in fact makes clear elsewhere).

The notion that the “four elements” underlay those four novels comes from a specific, dubious source — an article by one Anthony Ryan entitled “The Mind of Mr J. G. Ballard” (the title is an allusion to Edgar Wallace’s _The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder_), published in _Foundation_ no. 3 in March 1973. It’s not a very good article, but it was Ryan — who, as a critic, has not been heard from
since, as far as I know — who tossed out the notion that in some way JGB’s first four novels were based on the four classical elements of Aristotle.

My own essay, “The Fourfold Symbolism of J. G. Ballard,” written quite independently of Ryan’s (which I hadn’t seen), was published in the following issue of _Foundation_ — no. 4, dated July 1973. The fourfold symbolism I talked about had nothing to do with the four classical elements. Inspired in part by Northrop Frye and his studies of Blake, I was talking about the symbolism in Ballard’s fiction, as I saw it, of Water, Sand, Crystal and Concrete — as best exemplified in _The Drowned World_, _The Drought_, _The Crystal World_ and _The Atrocity Exhibition_. (I paid no attention to _The Wind from Nowhere_.)

My essay, and Ryan’s slightly earlier essay, swiftly became confused in some people’s minds — and the myth was born that Ballard’s “fourfold symbolism” was somehow based on the four classical elements.

Not true! I never said it. Ballard never said it. Only Ryan said it (or he said something like it).

I wish now I hadn’t used the word “fourfold” in the title of my essay!

Toby Litt is an English novelist who published his first book, Adventures in Capitalism (a volume of short stories), in 1996, when he was 28. He’s since won praise for the dark inventiveness of his writing, a combination of cinematic prose, apocalyptic imagery and sharp wit that freely dissects contemporary relationships and the sociopathic glue that binds them. Litt’s latest book, Hospital, was released in April, and was likened in a recent review to ‘Stephen King, in his gory horror phase, scripting a feature-length episode of Holby City.’

Given that he’s one of the special guests at this weekend’s J.G. Ballard Conference at the University of East Anglia, we thought we’d quiz Toby on his relationship to Ballard’s writing.

G.R. & S.S.

———————————————————————————————————-

GWYN: Ballard famously eschews ‘dinner party London’ in favour of the orbital suburbs, both in his fiction and in his life. Your work, on the other hand, has emphasised the drudgery and boredom of growing up in the suburbs (I’m thinking of Beatniks in particular). Do you agree with Ballard that the suburbs are where the ‘real’ England is?

TOBY: Clearly, it’s not in one place. That’s the reason why England is such a good subject, because it’s a hugely large number of subjects, all under the one heading. My understanding of Ballard is that he’s being slightly paradoxical: the suburbs are usually seen as innately conservative (small ‘c’), but they are where new phenomena are constantly emerging — rather than in the smug centre, which prides itself on being ‘cutting edge’. And because these phenomena are suburban, and widely accepted almost immediately, they aren’t seen as in any way interesting. In this, I think Ballard is right. Hanging on to a sense of the weirdness and extremity of everyday life is very difficult. Particularly in empirical England which lives in constant denial of being weird or extreme.

GWYN: What you mean by ‘empirical England’?

The traditional values of England are often seen to be those of scepticism, common sense and conservatism. These are often contrasted to the values of France, which, from this English point of view, appear perverse and paradoxical, or the values of Germany, which appear metaphysical, obfuscatory and generally dubious. This strain of thought is particularly strong in English philosophy, right up to the present day. A philosopher like G.E. Moore wouldn’t have got started in Germany. And in France he’d have been taken to be some faux naïf prankster.

GWYN: Could you give us some examples of the weirdness and extremity you mentioned?

I’ll give you one idea of extremity. I was at Birmingham airport last week, and along came a stag party. The groom-to-be was dressed as the tooth fairy. He wore a pink leotard, a tutu and a silver plastic tiara. He was carrying a can of Special Brew. Nobody paid him much attention. He was a perfectly normal emanation of suburbia. He wasn’t in any way extreme. Nor was what he was going to get up to in the next week.

Everyone’s in denial. Or they’ve been sectioned.

GWYN: Is there a particular phase of Ballard’s career that you think has produced his best work?

TOBY: An invidious question. I will answer by saying that I think that there is a particular rhythm to Ballard’s sentences. It was there right from the start (The Wind from Nowhere; I don’t understand why he disowns this), and it’s still there now. But, to my ear, this rhythm in his writing was most distinctive in The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise. His rhythm now seems to me slightly faster, slightly less sure of itself.

SIMON: I agree with you about The Wind from Nowhere; I re-read it recently and found it surprisingly decent. There’s a real sense of psychological disintegration, of claustrophobia as the survivors hole up; the ambient menace of the wind was terrifically drawn.

TOBY: Yes. It seems to be very much the start-point for his oeuvre, if you want to call it that. It’s certainly not comparable to, say, Graham Greene’s disowned novels — which, from what I’ve read, aren’t only very badly written but are also acutely anti-Semitic. As Ballard started with the four elements [in his first four novels], it seems odd and imbalancing to leave one of them out. Everyone realises it’s an early novel.

GWYN: What’s your favourite Ballard?

TOBY: The Drowned World. I find the imagery very satisfactory. But Crash probably had the most influence on my own writing. I put it in the acknowledgements to Corpsing, because I felt the influence should be openly acknowledged.

GWYN: Corpsing has sections that read like ballistics reports, describing the path of a bullet through someone’s body in minute detail. Like Ballard, do you read and find inspiration in invisible literature?

TOBY: Yes — medical textbooks. There’s quite a bit of that in Hospital. But I am probably more influenced by non-literary non-verbal sources: paintings, music.

SIMON: I read where you said critical theory was another influence — Deleuze, in particular. What’s the appeal there? Does theory feedback into your writing?

TOBY: I have been reading Deleuze in the past couple of years, yes. Both in his own books and those he wrote with Guattari. It’s important to remind yourself that there are many different ways of thinking. I find the French theorists fascinating. Much more so than any English philosophy of the same period. It is an assault on common sense. I tend to assume that common sense, because it’s common, is wrong. I don’t believe the truth is simple.

When we looked upwards we saw beneath us a sky of rosebushes, gravel paths, equipment and thick, healthy, but slightly too-dry grass. (Not that it would ever go razor-edged and cut you. It was too purely English for that. Tensed between thumbs, it would give a farty vibrato like that of a badly beaten-up cello.) The ground above us, on the other hand, was blue, blue as the deep end of a very wide swimming pool. A swimming pool seen not from the diving board, but suspended motionless above it. Suspended so that no shadow is projected down, and there is no idea of edge at all. A swimming pool splash-virgin, quite unruffled. At the horizon, a rough line of oak trees was interrupted halfway along by the leap of pylons and wires.”

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Toby Litt. Deadkidsongs (2001).
——————————————————————-

Original cover ideas for Deadkidsongs.

GWYN: Like Ballard in Running Wild, you’ve dealt with pre-meditated murder committed by children — in Deadkidsongs. What draws you to writing about violence?

TOBY: I really don’t know. It may be that I feel that everyone is capable of violence — if only imaginary violence. To portray the world honestly, you have to include that.

GWYN: As a father, do you worry about violence, especially in the wake of recent moral panics to do with inner-city London?

TOBY: I try not to. But it’s not merely moral panics. The corner shop at the end of my road was recently robbed by a group of six or seven men, each one of them carrying a gun. They hospitalised the guy working behind the till — hit him several times on the back of the head with the butt of a pistol. I probably worry more about a general callousness — callousness as entertainment.

SIMON: That worries me, too. In Australia recently, there was a case where a group of school kids sexually assaulted a girl, set a homeless man on fire, filmed it all, sold it to their mates on DVD, and uploaded parts to YouTube. Discussing this case, Stephen Smith traces this strand of ‘callousness as entertainment’ back to Abu Ghraib, and the desensitisation of images of torture. I’m guessing you’d agree with his very Ballardian conclusion, that ‘violence has become part of consumerism’…

TOBY: I think we could go further back, and become even more Ballardian. How about the Kennedy assassination? Perhaps what we need to do is realise how consumerism has become violence, and nothing but violence. That was, perhaps, the message of Kingdom Come. However, in talking about these things, an even longer perspective is sensible. In the eighteenth century, crowds used to attend executions; criminals were placed in the stocks, entirely at the mercy of the mob. Capital punishment was probably the most entertaining thing people saw from one end of the year to the next. Clearly, a festival atmosphere surrounded these deaths.

What seems, to me, to have changed is an unmistakable feeling that unless the victim is seen to be suffering, a prank isn’t really funny. If you look at English film comedies of the 1940s, they appear to be almost entirely without ill will. In fact, they are based on a kind of communal good humour, rather than any kind of wit. This continued into the fifties, though that may be where things started to change. No-one actually wanted Norman Wisdom to suffer permanent injury. Maybe it was the Angry Young Men who first admitted they wanted someone to be bloody well hurt.

SIMON: Stephen Smith uses Kingdom Come to bolster his argument. Similarly, in your interview with Ballard, you suggested the book is ‘more directly political’ than Ballard’s previous work. Why, then, do you think KC — so attuned to today — wasn’t so well received by the majority of critics?

TOBY: Probably because it is so easy now to read Ballard in a Ballardian way. By which I mean, people are very inward with his thought. He is always going to be compared with himself, with his own previous bests. And because the Ballardian reading places a value on the extremes, most readers following this logic will compare Kingdom Come to The Atrocity Exhibition or Crash, and find it lacking. It isn’t as extreme. It isn’t ahead of it’s time – it’s, as you say, ‘attuned to today’. Accurate social commentary is less sexy than prophecy.

The point is that what see as threatening about the all-pervasive and all-powerful consumer society is that it’s not any specific individual who is responsible for anything nasty that may happen in the future. This is a collective enterprise. All of us who are members of consumer society — all of us are responsible, in a way … I think it may be that in the future we’ll be dominated by huge masochistic systems. Soviet Russia was an example of this. I mean, people tolerated their own abuse because for some reason they wanted to be abused. Someone says in [Kingdom Come] that the future is a system of huge competing psychopathologies. I’d say that was true of the 20th century. It sort of sums it up, in a way. So I’m not talking about an individual impetus that will drive the engine. This engine has been assembled, and will be started, by everyone probably working unconsciously.

————————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Toby Litt, 2007.
————————————————————————————-

When I said that Kingdom Come was ‘more directly political’ I meant that it would be fairly easy to make a case for it as an anti-fascist novel. Yet the seductions of a different kind of techno fascism in Ballard’s earlier novels, those containing his deranged leader-figures, are more convincing — perhaps because they are, on occasion, almost given in to. You don’t know what’s really going on, morally. The glamorous psychopaths seem, at least, to have energy going for them. They are often surrounded by wastelands of apathy. In such circumstances, the person who makes change — however objectionable — is always going to be a delight of sorts.

GWYN: Would you like to see any of your books filmed?

TOBY: I would be happy to see any or all of them filmed. So far, there have only been short films made from short stories.

GWYN: Some of your most vivid and memorable writing takes the form of short fiction. In your Ballard interview, he bemoaned the recent lack of places to publish short stories. Do you find this as well?

TOBY: I agree. However, I think the American scene — with which ours is often compared — can be immensely smug. It is easier to be published in anthologies, over here, than in magazines.

GWYN: What can be done to improve the situation?

The only thing that can really be done is developing an audience specifically for short stories. I think it’s there, if only because of the number of people now attending creative writing courses.

GWYN: What do you appreciate about the shorter form, as opposed to novel-length fiction?

TOBY: It is a far less reasonable proposition. Hospital is an attempt to be unreasonable at novel length. But, most of the time, a novel requires the novelist to moderate their extremity.

GWYN: Some of your writing — particularly some of your short stories — are experimental in form; you use internet culture and email as narrative in the ‘Betamax Boy’ story in Adventures in Capitalism, for example. Where, if anywhere, do you see the best current avant-garde/experimental fiction?

TOBY: I don’t really believe in literary experiments. If a writer writes experimentally, that suggests they don’t know what the outcome of their experiment will be. Whereas, when I write, I have a fairly good idea of the outcome, I just don’t know what the effect will be — on readers. That’s a very different proposition. If I misjudge, I misjudge the readers rather than the work itself.

GWYN: In Ghost Story you begin with an apparently autobiographical, long introduction and make it clear that the novel is based, at least to some extent, on your own experiences. Ballard has, of course, written extensively about his life, in a highly fictionalised form, in Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women. In the latter, especially, it is not clear to what extent he projects his own obsessions and character types onto the people around him, and to what extent events have influenced his fiction. Presumably all novelists base ideas and characters on people and events from their own lives, but does this work the other way around as well? Do you ever interpret reality through your own fiction?

TOBY: It’s all I do.

SIMON: Ballard recently said in a couple of interviews that he thinks internet culture has a tremendous vitality. And in your recent interview with Ballard, you spoke about the MySpace phenomenon. As a writer, and a successful one, how have you found your experience on MySpace, in terms of interacting with your audience? Has it been beneficial?

TOBY: I have a better sense of my audience now, I think. Whether that is a good or a bad thing, I’m not sure.

SIMON: There’s a bit more to it than that, though, isn’t there? Didn’t readers of your MySpace blog suggest characters for Hospital?

TOBY: There was a competition to suggest names for characters who might have appeared in Hospital. But that was only after the book was completed, and I’d put a full list of Staff & Patients online. Two real-life readers do appear in the book, because they bid for that dubious privilege at so-called ‘Immortality Auctions’. The money went to charity, and Peter Dixon and Melanie Angel went to Hospital.

SIMON: Can you see yourself opening up sections of your work to readers in the future?

TOBY: I may, at some point, show readers work in progress, to see how they react. At the moment, though, I’m happy to work in private. Over the past few years I’ve read episodes from my next book (called I play the drums in a band called okay) out at festivals. The reaction led me to make a few changes.

SIMON: Do you find MySpace addictive? Your MySpace Doppel idea suggests that you’d like to go deeper and further into the whole social networking aspect. Could you explain a bit about the Doppel concept and how you think it would enhance the MySpace experience?

TOBY: It was the idea that instead of just searching for a single thing you have in common with another MySpace user (My Chemical Romance, for dull example), you could compare the entirety of your profile. In this way, you could find someone who had pretty much identical tastes in everything. That’s why they’d be your doppelganger.

This idea has already been nixed by someone at MySpace. Apparently there are child safety issues. Paedophiles might pose as fans of The Sugababes.

I do find MySpace addictive. I may stop.

GWYN: How do you see the state of fiction writing in this day and age? Are we in a positive place?

TOBY: The state of publishing is not good. A lot of pseudo-literary writing is passed off as the real thing. The real thing is very rare. But that’s always been the case. There is a real problem that many readers are offended by anything which asks them to work. Books must go to them, not the other way round. I’m sure that, from the point of view of the future, much of our fiction will seem simplistic and banal. Any decent novel should require rereading, probably more than once.

GWYN: What do you mean by ‘pseudo-literary writing’?

TOBY: Writing that makes no genuine attempt to extend what writing is capable of.

Around Nurse Swallow, the Trauma Team was moving smoothly into action. To her left, bending over the patient’s held open mouth, anaesthetist Sarah Felt slid a breathing tube down into the trachea. Patricia Parish, one of the most senior team-members, inserted a cannula into a vein in the left forearm, then attached the long plastic tube flowing out of a transparent saline bag. Other nurses moved swiftly in and out, bringing things, removing them.

Opposite her, standing back a little, Surgeon John Steele looked calmly on – it was not yet his time.

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Toby Litt. Hospital (2007).
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SIMON: In Hospital101, a list of 101 influences on Hospital, you include Ballard’s High-Rise — how so?

TOBY: In that the book is, to a great extent, the biography of the fabric of the building rather than of any particular character in it.

GWYN: You’re a guest at the Ballard conference at the UEA in May. What can we expect from your talk?

TOBY: I’m taking part in a panel. So, I’ll wait to see what questions come up. We should be discussing the most recent books.

SIMON: You actually took the creative writing course at the UEA, didn’t you? Was that helpful as a way into your professional writing career?

TOBY: It got me my break. Malcolm Bradbury chose four of my stories for an anthology called Class Work. It contained writing from the twenty-five years he’d been teaching there. Once that happened, I had a publisher approach me. Up until that point, I’d had about five years of solid rejection.

SIMON: Any final words on Ballard?

TOBY: I’d just like to say I admire his writing immensely. I think he is unique among British writers for the consistent extremity of his vision, and his willingness to engage with the stuff of now.

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..:: MORE INFO

+ From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard
+ Toby Litt interviews J.G. Ballard
+ Toby Litt on MySpace
+ Toby Litt homepage
+ Short film of Toby Litt’s short story, ‘Rare Books & Manuscripts’

Speakers include: Professor Philip Tew, Professor Mark Currie, Dr Roger Luckhurst, Toby Litt, Professor Jon Cook, Professor Vic Sage, David Pringle, Raymond Tait, Simon Stevenson, Eunju Hwang, Corin Depper, David James, Dan O’Hara, Valentina Polcini, Rick McGrath, Mitchell R. Lewis, Paul March-Russell, Fabienne Collignon, Joanne Murray, Sam Francis, Rina Arya, Jennifer Cooke, Emma Whiting, Ricarda Vidal, Pippa Tandy, Umberto Rossi, David Ian Paddy, Jake Huntley, Owen Hatherley, Simon Sellars, Jeannette Baxter, Rick Poynor, Herve Lagogue, Mark Williams, Mike Bonsall, Kathleen O’Donnell, Alistair Cormack, John Carter Wood, Mike Doherty, Martyn Colebrook, Angie Chau, Jennifer Hui Bon Hoa, Mark Fisher, Paul Newland, Sebastian Groes, Valentina Fenga, Francesca Guidotti.

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+ Mike Holliday and Rick McGrath (with help from David Pringle, Matt Smith and Umberto Rossi) have been getting busy with a series of discussions centered on each of the nine main chapters of The Atrocity Exhibition.

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+ Cousin Silas returns with Ballard Landscapes 2, another volume of masterful dark-ambient soundscapes inspired by Ballard’s greatest works.

Download the entire album plus artwork for free.

…:: Ballard Landscapes 2
Track Listing:

1. The Sands Of Shepperton
2. Crumbling Infrastructures
3. Cloud Sculptor
4. Dawn – Utah Beach
5. Rusting Gantry
6. Love And Bullets For Bobby & Jack
7. Motel Architecture
8. Concrete Islands
9. The Sign Of The Radar
10. Abandoned Motorway
11. Vermillion Drift
12. Drained Swimming Pools
13. Burning Wreckage
14. Schematics For Terminal Seventeen
15. The Death Of Reagan
16. Capsule Retrieval
17. Island Gardens
18. After The Hurricane

Released via Earth Monkey Productions.

‘Earth Monkey Productions is a non-profit making net label based on Barrow Island in Cumbria. It releases free music with a focus on experimental, electronic, sound art and spoken word and seeks to promote these art forms to wider audiences both within Cumbria UK and internationally. It will also be promoting collaborations between artists and putting on some great shows.’