The Oracle of Shepperton has perfectly predicted and described us, yet we ignore him. Paradoxically and even perversely, this is also predictable from a Ballardian viewpoint – the last thing we want is to be reminded of how ignorant and isolated, both individually and as a nation, we have become.
Increasingly I encounter younger people who live in this strange American mental prison – if it’s not on TV, at the Mall, or on the Internet, they don’t know about it. Foreign countries are viewed almost reflexively as automatically inferior to the USA, and only of brief interest, worthy at most of a quick sightseeing tour. It’s horrible to live here, actually. The literary, cultural, and intellectual wonders of the rest of the entire planet are viewed as insignificant. I had the similar good fortune as JGB had – by the chance employment postings of my father, I grew up as an expatriate, and returned to the USA as a fairly mature adolescent – and I still feel like a stranger in my own native culture, like JGB did upon his return to the UK from Shanghai and Lunghua camp internment. I also had the good luck to grow up with an early love of reading and art, especially science fiction and the European Surrealist movement.

One final personal anecdote that might interest my fellow Ballardians here who also feel strangely dissociated amid their own culture: My best friend -who has also lived in several countries and was the product of a cross-cultural marriage- had a girlfriend once that was wholly American, and had never known any other place. She was curious about me, and asked him once “Why does he just sit there all the time, doing nothing, for so many hours every day?”

It took him some time to realize what she was referring to, since I am in fact a normally active and social person. She was talking about my habit of reading constantly. To her, reading a lot and often going through several books a day, was “doing nothing”. This, my friends, is the sadly pervasive American cultural baseline: had I been going to movies, watching TV or immersing myself in the American habit of shopping for endless, useless consumer-culture garbage, that would have been “doing something”. But actually reading, acquiring knowledge, tapping into the vast storehouse of Mankind’s accumulated wisdom and insights that all writers from Aristotle to JGB have left us, was “doing nothing.”

There you have it: America today. If it’s not at the shopping malls, on television, or shown in the movies, they don’t know about it. Period, or as JGB might say in the British manner: “Full stop.”

Here in New York, which has some of the best bookstores in the world, you can usually find Crash, Emperor of the Sun, and Kindness of Women on the shelves. I’m guessing that Kindness was published because it was a follow-up to Emperor — but then Kindness wasn’t very successful, which may well have scared off other would-be publishers.

There is one bookstore — the Shakespeare & Co on Broadway in Greenwich Village — which regularly stocks the English editions of Ballard’s books. Maybe the manager particularly likes Ballard, or maybe his books sell because the bookstore’s primary clientele consists of NYU students. However, that’s literally the only place I know of that stocks a good selection of Ballard books. It is, as Mark says, inexcusable — especially given what other bullshit lines the shelves.

Given the relative lack of American interest in Ballard’s books, we should all be especially grateful to Re/Search for their long-term championship of his work. They’ve put out Atrocity Ex, which was difficult to find before ebay, interviews, conversations, etc. They’ve done Ballard and his readers a tremendous service. Hats off, Vale.

I hope Ballard doesn’t have too many regrets about this. He probably has more American fans than he realizes. Heck, even the clerk at the video store knew enough to ask “the one based on the Ballard novel?” when I asked if they had a copy of Crash. (They did! Apparently there is another film with the same title as well.)

Troy’s interview:
http://www.ballardian.com/light-painter-mojave-d-troy-paiva

Having said that, Ballard has never ‘cracked America’, even when he was published there. It’s a constant note of regret in his interviews from the 80s and the 90s.

With Millennium People and Kingdom Come, Ballard has turned his focus to England, and perhaps this is why those novels have not been published in the U.S. Admittedly, the British class system is something of an enigma to me, a lifelong Anglophile, so it is no surprise that publishers think these books would be lost on the rest of America, which normally assume that America is the center of the known universe. Still, much of what Ballard has to say about violence and consumer culture applies to both sides of the pond, and of course the rest of the world as well.

I also feel that DiFilippo is spot on with the comparison of The Day of Creation and The Drowned World. When I read The Day of Creation, I immediately thought it was something of a return to the style of all those disaster novels, especially The Drowned World and The Drought, sans the disaster of course. The surreal landscapes, the obsessive actions of the characters. His works have a remarkable internal cohesion.