In Memoriam J.G. Ballard

This is a post that has been waiting unfinished for weeks. Although Ballard died two months ago now, I still want to pay my respects and maybe turn someone onto his amazing writing which was so much more than the Empire of the Sun...


J.G. Ballard was a writer who dealt in dystopias, dreams (mainly nightmares), disorders (mainly mental and sexual) and drugs. At the same time he was a family man who raised two daughters alone, spoke with a plummy accent and never let anything more adventurous than whisky and soda past his lips.

By the time he died on 19 April 2009, Ballard had published 19 novels, a dozen or so short story collections and countless other pieces. Even in the last months of his life he continued to write, producing a book on the cancer which was killing him called Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life.

I first came to Ballard in my early teens, attracted by the shocking titles (example: "The Asassination of President Kennedy considered as a downhill car-race", "Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan") and the eerie, moody atmosphere of the work: perfect for a teenager.

I remember particularly the wonderful, crepuscular atmospheres of the collection Vermilion Sands, short stories set in a world that has stopped turning, and in which what remains of humanity inhabits a narrow, twilit strip of desert, plundering abandoned supermarkets for strange, luxurious provender and lost in lonely reverie. What this stuff said to a confused fifteen-year-old I can no longer accurately say: but it affected me deeply and helped to mould an aesthetic that still haunts me.

The early novels are also electrifying in their strangeness, their unconditional embrace of the other. Take The Drowned World, with its poetic descriptions of a London utterly submerged, or The Crystal World, with its too-literal fantasy of everything turning to rubies, diamonds and emeralds.

But despite these novels, Ballard was largely ignored by a literary community obsessed by novels of society and manners, neither of which figured greatly in Ballard's work. Where they did, they were indicators of an inner sickness or mental aberration: the calm smooth surface of a society was for Ballard like a glass motorway barrier dulling and attenuating the whoosh and the roar of unleashed humanity, as shown in novels like High Rise, Crash or the later Cocaine Nights and Super Cannes.

Finally though I just wanted to register my appreciation and wonder for the body of work that Ballard produced. To explain and describe each book would take longer than this occasional blogger can handle, but I'd like to give a personal list of favourites, my recommended reading:

Novels:

The Drowned World
The drought
Hello America
Super Cannes: A Novel
Unlimited Dream Company
High Rise
Crash
The Atrocity Exhibition
Empire of the Sun

Short stories

Vermilion Sands
The Voices Of Time
Low flying Aircraft and Other Stories
Myths of the near future

The other Athens

I think that most people have already seen enough pictures of the Acropolis, Temple of Zeus and so on, but when do you get to see the other side of Athens, from the really scuzzy to the frankly strange? Is Greece the only country where they sell shoes (not medical footware, mind you) in pharmacies?

From Athens April 2009

From Athens April 2009

From Athens April 2009

From Athens April 2009

Are you sitting comfortably?

High above Athens stands the Church of Agios Isidorou. From here, sitting on benches that form a horseshoe of seating around the diminutive church, you can look down on the breathtaking spread of the city, born of the unfortunate union of reinforced concrete with laissez-faire urban planning.

As you sit, you can also enjoy amusingly phrased signs like this one, attached to the back of the pole that holds up the strings of fairy lights that illuminate the church at night. It says: "Peak hours may necessitate that you let other people sit on your lap."
Get set for peace, love and understanding.

Two suns fail to dazzle

Is it just me? All over the web people are blogging the praises of the second Bat for Lashes record, Two Suns. I rather like it too, but I feel that reviewers are going a bit overboard with their praise (e.g. Pitchfork).
It's a very pleasant record with some strong songs, and Natasha Khan has a great voice. Everything here is going in the right direction. But overall I find it rather too slight, rather too conventional for all the praise it's getting. It's good, yes. But not great.

A comparison with one of my favourite recent albums, Under Byen's 2007 LP Samme Stof Som Stof, is perhaps instructive. Here we see a band that have truly mastered their medium (through 15 years of hard work), and for whom conventions are not restrictions but toys to be played with or ignored as required. Natasha Khan is on the right track and definitely a talent to watch for the future. And that's the good news: this album might be good, but the next one can only be better.

Bat for Lashes will play at the Kulturkirche in Cologne on 18 May
View event info on last.fm

The real Ras Tafari

The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuściński

Rating: 3 of 5 stars
I suppose that I have been spoilt by Ryszard Kapuściński in the past, but while The Emperor is certainly a fine piece of writing it doesn't reach his usually high standards.

Perhaps it's in the very nature of the exercise, for The Emperor is a book of reminiscences, retelling the last days of Haile Selaisse's rule in Ethiopia, from the perspective of mainly minor officials and servants.

The result is a book of peculiarly matt surfaces and vague description. For me the palace, with its lackeys, its fawning "notables" and horrid, grabbing dignitaries never really comes alive, mediated as it is by the memories of feeble, defeated men.

So while I can't recommend the book unconditionally in terms of style or as a good example of Kapuściński's art (he simply isn't present enough here), I can certainly recommend it as a study in the morally degenerative effects of power. So if you're looking for a good primer on how to become morally degenerate once you have attained absolute power, this might be a good place to start.

View all my reviews on goodreads.

No guns, no dogs - them's the rules

Bulgaria may be part of the EU, but there are still things about the country that distinguish it from most others in Europe. One of them is the "No Guns" stickers that are found on the doors of bars, clubs and even shopping centres.
And indeed Sofia, the country's capital, does have a higher level of gun crime than many other comparable cities. But do you think that the Sofia gangstas will see the signs and leave their shooters (and hopefully their pit bulls) in their SUVs? Somehow I doubt it...

What we did on our holidays: Part 1 - Serbia

It might seem a little eccentric to take the train from Cologne to Sofia in Bulgaria, but then again, maybe I am a little eccentric. En route plenty of interesting things happened, including random bag searches by obstreperous border guards and thievery in the small hours (I'll tell you about it later). There was also plenty to see. I was particularly impressed with the mysterious and beautiful Serbian countryside and the affecting state of disrepair of the railway stations. The pictures below come from my Sony-Ericsson mobile phone, by the way.