Ballardian

Leonard Pierce participates in Coudal Partners’ Field-Tested Books project, “our version of the Heisenberg principle: reading a certain book in a certain place uniquely affects a person’s experience with both. The writing you’ll find here is grounded in that idea. You won’t find any book reviews here. You’ll find reviews of experience”.

Leonard’s choice is JGB’s Crash…with unpredictable results.

“J.G. Ballard’s CRASH
Field-Tested by Leonard Pierce in Reagan Airport in Washington, DC

October 14th, 2001: D.C.’s National Airport (actually, Reagan Airport, but that name is still much reviled by a few holdouts, the modern liberal equivalent of the old conservatives who called Franklin Roosevelt “that man”). I have never seen an airport in such a state. It’s nearly deserted; I’m waiting to return from Natural Products Expo East, the first trade show to open in the capital since the terror attacks in September, and the airport has only been open for ten days. Flights are still limited to a dozen or so a day; the hallways and runways are equally empty, the innumerable shops and restaurants are closed, and uniformed, rifle-toting soldiers seem to outnumber passengers and workers by a two-to-one margin. It’s eerily like being in a zombie movie; there’s something profoundly unsettling about being in a center of commerce like a shopping mall or an airport when no one is there.

Not surprisingly, my flight is delayed, so I pass the time by enjoying a novel I picked up at Chicago’s O’Hare airport before I came out to Washington — J.G. Ballard’s visionary novel of our complex, often-eroticized relationship with technology, Crash. Though, really, ‘enjoying’ isn’t the right word; it’s not really a novel one ‘enjoys’ in the breezy, entertaining way you might expect from an airport fiction purpose…”

The full article is here.

>> Buy J.G. Ballard’s Crash from Amazon.