Death of a Dystopian, my article on the life and work of J. G. Ballard is up on Reason. “His writing is obsessed with the territories where the organic meets the inorganic; it is absurdist, bleak, vivid, and awake to the psychological effects of media and manmade landscapes. In the words of the novelist Martin Amis, ‘Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different—a disused—part of the reader’s brain.’”
“It’s about the speed of our lives and how it can only result in a crash.” — Hussein Chalayan, on his swimsuit printed with paintings of car accidents.
“It’s like a porno movie made by a computer: It downloads gigabytes of information about sex, it discovers our love affair with cars, and it combines them in a mistaken algorithm.” – Roger Ebert’s astute review of Crash. Another good point: “Take out the crashes and the injuries, and substitute the usual romantic movie story line, and it would be easy to understand this progression.”
“Science-fiction writers can’t write about popular culture, even high culture, without trotting out their own self-importance… If you’d look at most science-fiction practitioners, they basically come across like a Nashville hat act. They’re hicks.” – Bruce Sterling
“[The} career path of most young (successful) writers goes something like this. Go to university – preferably Oxford or Cambridge – and read English. While there, start writing novel and get a few pieces published in the university magazine. Move to London after graduation, start a creative writing postgraduate degree and pick up some work reviewing books for the literary supplements while tidying up the fourth draft of your novel. You then get your novel published, which gets a few kind reviews thanks to the contacts you’ve made and sells precisely 317 copies.
But someone, somewhere offers you a contract to write a second novel and your career is up and running. From then on you have a meta life. You write because you write, not because you necessarily have anything interesting to say. You probably actually write quite well, but you are trading on style, not substance, because you’ve never actually done anything much beyond writing.
The point about Ballard is that he had style and substance. Like writers such as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, Ballard had paid his dues in the real world and his writing had a psychological and experiential depth because of it. His truly was an interesting life, interestingly lived.” – John Crace (via.)
“It may be that we thrive when certain of our relationships are drained of emotion, that we may then be able to explore our lives more fully, because emotions tend to act as a brake. They reinforce the status quo. They set up a kind of tyranny rather like the psychology of a very small child, which may be entirely governed by passionate emotions that are in fact very limiting. It’s only when the child learns to control its emotions that he can begin to explore all sorts of interesting possibilities at the other end of the nursery.” – JG Ballard in a 1997 interview in Frieze.
From The Valve, a very interesting contrast between JG Ballard and David Foster Wallace, who in his review of War Fever writes “J.G. Ballard is not a great fiction writer, but he is an important one.” Says Scott Eric Kaufman, “The coldness Wallace speaks of in Ballard’s prose is utterly unlike anything you find in Wallace’s own work. Even when his narrators speak, as he claimed Ballard’s do, in a ‘flat, scholarly narrative voice, [with] an air of lab technicians looking at stuff under glass,’ the result never resembles the clipped, clinical speech of which Ballard was a master—for in Wallace, such disinterested precision is always affected. But without Ballard, there would have been no Wallace; in fact, without Ballard, contemporary literature would look very different.” That DFW just couldn’t get it, is probably why I was never a fan of his work.
“Everything that everybody else was bored by or appalled by, he was excited by. He wasn’t really interested in English literary parties and kept himself outside that. He was bored by the heritage of Central London and, unlike other writers, never wanted to talk about what he was writing. He preferred to talk about ideas, or some weird news cuttings he had brought along. Living out in Shepperton for so long, he was one of the first to undersand that the psychosis of suburbia was a fascinating thing to pursue… Where other people were terrified by the consumerist culture he saw it as exciting, something he could manipulate, shredding it and making his own world out of it.” – Iain Sinclair on JG Ballard.
“My fear is that in a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.” – JG Ballard. You can find something quotable in every interview with him. Right now I’m listening to a BBC interview recorded about the time Super-Cannes was published. Listen especially to what he says about London and the past vs. London suburbs and the future. And love this quote: “The majority of people living today…lived lives [like I did in Shanghai]
It’s here where I live now today in the suburbs…that is strange by world’s standards.”
The LA Times on what was to be an exclusive Florida gated community. Now developers “believe they have a chance to help local government purchase and preserve this stretch of waterfront… Chelius and Size spoke about the native plants that could be restored — the sabal palmetto palm, the seagrape trees, the three native species of mangrove. With the vegetation would come more native animals, more birds.”
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