Monday 29 June 2009

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:


Sunday 14 June 2009

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