Thank you for taking the time to write. We really appreciate feedback, but I hope you don’t mind me saying that I find your response to this review a little puzzling; you’re acting like Andrea has given RE/Search a bad review when all she’s done is made an observation about Ballard. As to implying that she may be a little ‘young’ to understand the politics of the Bush family, is 34 old enough to be well informed?

And while I don’t want to jump the gun and pre-empt Andrea’s response (I believe she will reply in due course), it seems to me that the observation she makes about Ballard and ‘Bush’ implies no misunderstanding on her part about whether it’s Bush snr or Bush jnr under discussion. Perhaps the fault lies in my editing; I took out quite a bit of context before publishing this review as it was some way over the word limit. Nevertheless, I’m no expert on American politics, but it does seem equally naive of Ballard to imply that any Bush has no media image; Bush snr certainly had a lot of skeletons in the closet that he skilfully downplayed to portray a folksy, All-American image.

In any case, this is such a small aspect of the review. It just seems a bit of a quibble to highlight it, as there’s so much more there that is really positive about the work you and RE/Search have done, and indeed about Ballard himself. Take your assertion that the average person in America still has not heard of Ballard. What you’ve done here is turn a positive aspect of the review — Andrea’s highlighting of the work RE/Search has done to raise Ballard’s profile, followed by a discussion of how Ballard is still supremely relevant today — and turned it into a negative! “No, you’re wrong Andrea, Ballard is not as famous as Mick Jagger, but we’ll take any review we can get”. Very strange!

I believe Andrea was speaking generally; given that Ballard was nominated for a Booker Prize and so on, you would have to agree that he is no longer ‘cult’ or ‘undergound’…in any case, the comparison with Jagger was clearly tongue in cheek. By the way, we’re based in Australia, not the UK as you state, a country where Ballard is possibly less read than the US.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the rest of the review. I feel we here at Ballardian have been pretty supportive of RE/Search on this occasion (and always, actually).

Again, many thanks for taking the time to write.

All the best from Australia,
Simon
http://www.ballardian.com

Thanks immensely for sending us the review which we easily could have missed.

Respectfully, i must offer an opinion counterpointing the review by Andrea Simonis. I focus on the paragraphs critiquing “J.G. Ballard Conversations.”

Andrea Simonis refers to Ballard’s “naive political” judgements, citing Ballard’s characterization of “Bush” as a politician who “doesn’t engage our emotions” with no “media image.” But Simonis has missed the context of that statement entirely. First of all, the interview was conducted in 1990, so the reference is to **George Bush Sr.** (G.W.’s dad) and the point is brought up by Ballard for the sole purpose of contrasting the then-new President to his predecessor Ronald Reagan (a favorite target of Ballard for decades). So, Ballard was referring to the dad, not the son now in office.

If you are interested in Ballard’s appraisal of the NEW Bush administration and the neo-cons in power, go to the very beginning of the book. In the very first interview conducted by Vale in 2004, the first question posed to Ballard is, “I wanted to get your take on the neo-cons and Bush, and your perspective on what happened in the last election…” Ballard gives just that over the next dozen or so pages of the book, elucidating his opinion of just how Bush uses the media to create an image of himself as a war president and religious zealot.

Bush may be perceived by his supporting electorate as a **religious leader.** While this opinion of Bush is not completely original–it is obvious after all–in the political climate of 2004. However, it holds a good deal of meaning for those familiar with Ballard’s stories. The collection “War Fever” immediately comes to mind, particularly the stories “A Secret History of World War Three” and “The Object of the Attack.” Both are stories about politics as media manipulation and the uses of religion, celebrity, technology and militaristic fanaticism as means for manufacturing deceptive new dictators and false prophets. Almost all of these stories were written in the early to mid-eighties, even though the book wasn’t published until 1990. Ballard is entirely aware of George W. Bush’s status as this kind of dangerous and slippery character.

As for Ballard’s thoughts on 9/11, his perspective is acute. I felt that there was a great deal of irony in Ballard’s initial response. When queried by the media for his thoughts, he claims “he didn’t have any” which implies for one that it was an event so unprecedented that it sends the mind reeling, and the only sincere way to respond is with baffled silence.

Also, considering Ballard’s status as a subversive eccentric, having the media call up at such a time can be a little like being baited for a witch hunt–which happened when the media asked Stockhausen for his opinion on 9/11. Nevertheless, Ballard’s opinions are abundant, and he goes on to explain 9/11 and terrorist acts as “the End of the Enlightenment” and sees them through the lens of Freud’s concept of the death drive (see pages 53-55). This opinion is truly and deeply pessimistic, because Ballard is insisting that what drives us to such extremes may be something that is fundamentally part of all human subjectivity. To wit, that a blame cannot merely be cast on the oppressors of the world, because the oppressed suffer from the same mechanism; that when humans appear driven to these extremes of collective pathological behavior, the death drive offers perhaps the only clear explanation.

There may be a frighteningly symbiotic relationship between a dictator and [his] subjects–just as deadly as between any enemies, to put it bluntly–so that when things get this bad, we may fatalistically rejoice in our own destruction as much as the destruction of others…

The problem of writing any review, under a deadline, is that it is difficult to find the time to “peruse” a book–in the original sense of paying attention to the extreme details. In this case, it is possible that the reviewer is young enough to not clearly distinguish the difference between the careers of George Bush Senior and his son, “G.W.” In this age of information overload, where the average U.S. high school student does not know who Eisenhower is, such an error is readily explainable. Our position is: we appreciate any review. And contrary to the assertion of reviewer Simonis, we are positive that the average person in America has never heard of J.G. Ballard; often, even among “well-read” demographic-types, Ballard’s name is barely recognized by Americans. He does not do “live” U.S.A. book tours, appear on Oprah, et al — and Americans simply do not read his articles and quotations which pepper the outpourings of the official British fifth estate in papers such as the Guardian. Ballard as famous as Mick Jagger–not.

Nevertheless, we want to end this by thanking Andrea Simonis for obviously devoting a considerable amount of time and energy into penning the first review received in the U.K. to date of the RE/Search non-identical twin volumes: J.G. Ballard Quotes and J.G. Ballard Conversations books…
–Leslie Hodgkins for the RE/Search staff