Showing posts with label JG Ballard. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

The Drowned World by JG Ballard / Review by Kingsley Amis

The Drowned World by JG Ballard – archive, 27 January 1963

In the third of a new series of reviews from the Observer archive, Kingsley Amis hails the second novel by the brilliantly imaginative science-fiction author

Top 10 books of eco-fiction

Kingsley Amis

Sunday 15 February 2019

James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and spent two years of his childhood in a Japanese prison camp during the second world war. The devastated city was the setting for several of his books, notably Empire of the Sun. The Drowned World, his second novel, established him as a major figure in the new wave of science fiction in the 1960s.

J.G. Ballard / The assassination of President Kennedy

John F. Kennedy

The Assassination

Of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered

As A Downhill Motor Race

J.G. Ballard

From the Evergreen Review Reader 1967-1973.
Originally published in Evergreen #96, Spring 1973.
From Love and Napalm: Export USA (Grove Press, 1969).

Author's note. The assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, raised many questions, not all of which were answered by the Report of the Warren Commission. It is suggested that a less conventional view of the events of that grim day may provide a more satisfactory explanation. Alfred Jarry's "The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race" gives us a useful lead.

Oswald was the starter.

From his window above the track he opened the race by firing the starting gun. It is believed that the first shot was not properly heard by all the drivers. In the following confusion, Oswald fired the gun two more times, but the race was already underway.

Kennedy got off to a bad start.

There was a governor in his car and its speed remained constant at about fifteen miles an hour. However, shortly afterwards, when the governor had been put out of action, the car accelerated rapidly, and continued at high speed along the remainder of the course.

The visiting teams. As befitting the inauguration of the first production car race through the streets of Dallas, both the President and the Vice-President participated. The Vice-President, Johnson, took up his position behind Kennedy on the starting line. The concealed rivalry between the two men was of keen interest to the crowd. Most of them supported the home driver, Johnson.

The starting point was the Texas Book Depository, where all bets were placed in the Presidential race. Kennedy was an unpopular contestant with the Dallas crowd, many of whom showed outright hostility. The deplorable incident familiar to us all is one example.

The course ran downhill from the Book Depository, below an overpass, then on to the Parkland Hospital and from there to Love Air Field. It is one of the most hazardous courses in downhill motor racing, second only to the Sarajevo track discontinued in 1914.

Kennedy went downhill rapidly. After the damage to the governor the car shot forward at high speed. An alarmed track official attempted to mount the car, which continued on its way cornering on two wheels.

Turns. Kennedy was disqualified at the hospital, after taking a turn for the worse. Johnson now continued the race in the lead, which he maintained to the finish.

The flag. To satisfy the participation of the President in the race Old Glory was used in place of the usual checkered square. Photographs of Johnson receiving his prize after winning the race reveal that he had decided to make the flag a memento of his victory.

Previously, Johnson had been forced to take a back seat, as his position on the starting line behind the President indicates. Indeed, his attempts to gain a quick lead on Kennedy during the false start were forestalled by a track steward, who pushed Johnson to the floor of his car.

In view of the confusion at the start of the race, which resulted in Kennedy, clearly expected to be the winner on past form, being forced to drop out at the hospital turn, it has been suggested that the hostile local crowd, eager to see a win by the home driver Johnson, deliberately set out to stop him completing the race. Another theory maintains that the police guarding the track were in collusion with the starter, Oswald. After he finally managed to give the send-off Oswald immediately left the race, and was subsequently apprehended by track officials.

Johnson had certainly not expected to win the race in this way. There were no pit stops.

Several puzzling aspects of the race remain. One is the presence of the President's wife in the car, an unusual practice for racing drivers. Kennedy, however, may have maintained that as he was in control of the ship of state he was therefore entitled to captain's privileges.

The Warren Commission. The rake-off on the book of the race. In their report, prompted by widespread complaints of foul play and other irregularities, the syndicate lay full blame on the starter, Oswald.

Without doubt, Oswald badly misfired. But one question still remains unanswered: Who loaded the starting gun?

EVERGREEN

Monday, May 8, 2017

Writers' rooms / JG Ballard

Photo by Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: JG Ballard

Friday 9 March 2007 10.03 GMT

My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of The Violation by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist I know, Brigid Marlin, to make a copy from a photograph. I never stop looking at this painting and its mysterious and beautiful women. Sometimes I think I have gone to live inside it and each morning I emerge refreshed. It's a male dream.

There are photos of my four grandchildren (one, along with a picture of my girlfriend Claire, is just out of shot). The postcard is Dali's Persistence of Memory, the greatest painting of the 20th century, and next to it is a painting by my daughter, which is the greatest painting of the 21st century. On the desk is my old manual typewriter, which I recently found in my stair cupboard. I was inspired by a letter from Will Self, who wrote to me on his manual typewriter. So far I have just stared at the old machine, without daring to touch it, but who knows? The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.

I have worked at this desk for the past 47 years. All my novels have been written on it, and old papers of every kind have accumulated like a great reef. The chair is an old dining-room chair that my mother brought back from China and probably one I sat on as a child, so it has known me for a very long time. A Paolozzi screen-print is resting against the door, which now serves as a cat barrier during the summer months. My neighbour's cats are enormously affectionate, and in the summer leap up on to my desk and then churn up all my papers into a huge whirlwind. They are my fiercest critics.

I work for three or four hours a day, in the late morning and early afternoon. Then I go out for a walk and come back in time for a large gin and tonic.

THE GUARDIAN

Writers' rooms / Roald Dahl

Writers' rooms / Geoff Dyer
Writers' rooms / Antonia Fraser
Writers' rooms / JG Ballard
Writers´rooms / Sarah Waters
Writers' rooms / Siri Husteved
Writers' roms / Jane Austen
Writers' rooms / Esther Freud
Writers' rooms / Michael Frayn

Monday, October 31, 2016

2012 / Books of the year

Photo by Ralph Gibson

2012

Books of the year

From Zadie Smith's new novel to Robert Macfarlane's journeys on foot and memoirs by Edna O'Brien and Salman Rushdie…
Which books have most impressed our writers this year?

The Observer

25 November 2012

John Banville
Novelist

Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot(Hamish Hamilton £20) is a wonderful book – literally, a book full of wonders – in which he takes to the world's pathways, from chalk downs and an estuarial mirror-world in England, to Palestine, Spain, the Himalayas. He has a poet's eye, and a prose style that will make many a novelist burn with envy. In a barbarous time, Macfarlane reminds us of what it is to be civilised.

La Folie Baudelaire (Allen Lane £35) by Roberto Calasso is an extraordinarily ingenious and learned study of Baudelaire and Baudelaire's Paris, "capital of the 19th century", and of the invention of modernism in literature and, especially, in painting. Only a mind as various as Calasso's would think to compare Manet's Olympia with a photograph by Weegee. One had thought they didn't write books like this any more, but Calasso does.

Ali Smith
Novelist

The great Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector once wrote that she wanted her writing to be like a punch in the stomach to her readers, "for life is a punch in the stomach". This year the life in Jenni Fagan's debut novel, The Panopticon (Heinemann £12.99), knocked the breath out of me, Peter Hobbs's In the Orchard, the Swallows (Faber £10.99) picked me up and dusted me down, and a reread of Brigid Brophy's 1967 novel The King of a Rainy Country (Coelacanth £10) boosted me better than any Omega 3.

Wendy Cope
Poet

My discovery of the year was the American novelist Shalom Auslander, who is brave, outrageous and very funny. I recommend his 2009 memoir Foreskin's Lament, as well as his 2012 novel, Hope: A Tragedy (both Picador £7.99).

Three of my favourite crime writers brought out excellent new books this year: A Room Full of Bones (Quercus £7.99) by Elly Griffiths, Kind of Cruel (Hodder £7.99) by Sophie Hannah and Broken Harbour (Hodder £12.99) by Tana French. And I enjoyed Glyn Maxwell's On Poetry (Oberon Masters £12.99) – occasionally mad but very interesting.

JG Ballard's daughter on the mother who could never be mentioned

When the artist Fay Ballard was seven, her mother died – and was never talked about again. Chris Hall meets the daughter of the novelist JG Ballard

Chris Hall

Friday 20 June 2014 15.00 BST

Farewell, Fay Ballard's drawing of her father, the novelist JG Ballard
- based on a photograph she took on the day he moved out of the family home at Shepperton.

"I remember my mother dying, quite vividly, and afterwards sitting in the car – a big old Armstrong Siddeley I think – and I was in the passenger seat and Daddy just cried and cried. After that, we moved forward – that was it." Fay Ballard, daughter of the writer JG Ballard, is describing what happened when her mother, Mary, died of pneumonia, aged 34, on a family holiday in Alicante, Spain. After the burial, her father drove Fay, her sister, Bea, and brother, Jim, home to England. Fay was seven years old.

Claire Walsh with JG Ballard in Paris, when Ballard was publicising his novel Empire of the Sun (1984).
Photograph: Sophie Bassouls/Rush

Claire Walsh obituary

Literary publicist and inspiration to the author JG Ballard, her long-time companion

Will Self
Tuesday 14 October 2014 14.41 BST

Claire Walsh, who has died of cancer aged 73, was a well-known figure in the London literary and artistic world of the 1960s and 70s. She was the long-time companion of the writer JG Ballard, and a valuable support throughout much of his writing life. According to Jenny, her daughter from a previous relationship: "[Ballard] explored ideas long before he got to the plot for a novel or short story, and my mother was the ideal intellectual sounding board to tease out his thoughts. She was voraciously curious with a gift for research; this fed Jimmy's imagination."

Fay Ballard / House Clearance Illustrations

Swimming cap.

"When I was drawing it, I gave it this very dark … almost like a dark cloud underneath the floral print. It's not that different to the flipper in that sense."

Fay Ballard:

House Clearance illustrations

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gallery/2014/jun/20/fay-ballard-house-clearance-illustrations

A selection of images from Fay Ballard's exhibition House Clearance about her father, JG Ballard, and her mother, Mary, at Eleven Spitalfields gallery

Chris Hall
Friday 20 June 2014 15.00 BST

Flippeer

"The flipper had been used as a doorstop since I was about 14 – it was my brother's – and there it was still, covered in a beautiful, fine dust. When people look at the flipper, they often say they see a woman there wearing some clothes. That's my unconscious working."

Origami elephant.

"We used to sit around this big Chinese table from Shanghai that his mother had given him and make origami puppets. I remember making an elephant with him. However, when I found the book there was no elephant in it – so was my memory playing a trick? I don't know."

Lemon

"When I went back to Shepperton in May 2008 the first thing I said was, 'Oh my God, you still have the orange!' and he looked at me and said, 'It's a lemon.' … I have the lemon at home and it's completely dried and you can shake it and hear the pips."

Chess Set. JG Ballard's childhood chess set from Shanghai in the 1930s, used during his internment by the Japanese and brought to England after the war where it lived on his study bookshelf.

Memory Box: About my Father 2012.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

JG Ballard / A brief survey of the short story

JG Ballard
Poster by T.A.

A brief survey of the short story part 26: JG Ballard

Ballard's eerie detachment, expressed via the manic repetition of a select few motifs, makes him more relevant now than ever

Chris Power
Thursday 10 June 2010 16.24 BST

Few English authors of the last 60 years have built more distinctive bodies of work than JG Ballard, whose archive is unveiled today by the British Library. He is – with Kafka and Borges – one of those few writers who can only be properly described by using an adjectival form of their surnames. The word "Ballardian" conveys dystopian modernity, claustrophobic psychodrama and the alienating, pathologising impact of technological advancement on the human psyche.

Ballard began publishing short stories in the 1950s, selling them to SF magazines such as New Worlds and Amazing Stories. Many readers disliked his enigmatic, literary take on the genre, as he noted in 2006: "Most readers of science fiction did not consider me to be a science fiction writer. They saw me as an interloper, a sort of virus that had got into the cell of science fiction, entered its nucleus and destroyed it." Despite this friction, Ballard was no Atwood – he remained "very proud" of being considered a science fiction writer. The medical metaphor above, incidentally, is typical of Ballard. Following the second world war, after leaving his birthplace of Shanghai and moving to England, he studied medicine with the aim of becoming a psychiatrist.

JG Ballard at his home in Shepperton in 1988.
Photograph by David Levenson

If a reader didn't already know that, they could surely deduce it. Traversing the 1500 pages of the two-volume Complete Short Stories (which is misnamed – some are missing), psychoanalysis soon emerges as what "science" really means in Ballardian science fiction. Just as his The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) sees characters' malfunctioning nervous systems externalised as highways, office buildings and helicopters, so throughout his work do psychological pathologies manifest as "real world" events.

As China Miéville wrote in a recent piece for the Nation, the observation that Ballard was more interested in inner space than outer space "suggests nothing much new, but it is a good bon mot and deserves to be repeated". Ballard's fascination with Freud – he called him, only half-playfully, "the great novelist of the 20th century" – and Freud's artistic progeny, the surrealists, resulted in the domination of his work by symbolism and febrile mental states. Like the rampant sonic sculpture of Venus Smiles (1957), these intertwined drives grow over everything else in Ballard's short fiction, which is peopled less by characters than by aggregations of psychosis, anxiety and desire.

Ballard took time to get good. While some of the early stories house tremendous ideas – a society where timekeeping is banned; a city where space is so scarce that broom cupboards are envied addresses – they are frequently sabotaged by clunky twists. One early story, The Voices of Time (1960), breaks this sequence, looking forward to later developments in the same way that The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race (1966) points to the paranoid satiric excess of The Atrocity Exhibition and 1977's The Dead Time tentatively excavates memories more fully explored in The Empire of the Sun (1984).

With its obsessive psychiatrist, its symbols cut into empty swimming-pool floors, its derelict weapons ranges and scenes of grotesque biological entropy, The Voices of Time surveys the zones into which Ballard's fictions would move later in the decade, and the dense network of leitmotifs with which he would populate them. Most importantly, the story shows him gathering the confidence to at least partly abandon plot. This development was of key importance in abetting the obsessive, destabilising atmosphere his later work would create.

That atmosphere is nowhere more pervasive than in The Atrocity Exhibition (1969). Both novel and story collection – Ballard preferred the former definition, but each of its chapters or "condensed novels" had been published individually as stories in the years prior to its release – the book moves through a cycle of psychotic fantasies and bizarre experiments enacted by Traven, a somewhat unbalanced mental-hospital psychiatrist who first appeared in the extraordinary 1964 story The Terminal Beach.

Throughout the collection Ballard's relentless repetition, which boils down to a series of symbols copiously deployed throughout his work (nuclear test atolls, deserted weapons ranges, dead astronauts, dead wives, the "psychic zero" of the desert, those haunting multitudes of drained swimming pools), takes on the eerie power of those depopulated afternoon piazzas portrayed by De Chirico (a painter whom Ballard, a particularly visual writer, frequently referenced alongside Ernst, Dali and Delvaux). What might be tedious in other writers becomes mysteriously freighted, his world ushered into life not with broad sweeps but with bullet-pointed, monomaniacal repetition. The book surveys the politics, sexuality and psychopathologies of the 60s and in doing so looks back across the decade to its closest cousin, Naked Lunch.

Ballard has a much-vaunted reputation for prescience, which is borne out by such stories as The Subliminal Man (advertising), The Watch-Towers (surveillance Britain), and the wonderful The Illuminated Man (ecological doom). Ballard himself rejected the judgment, claiming he didn't forecast future developments but wrote about the world around him – and yet modern life continues to converge, in remarkable and troubling ways, with his vision. As I was writing this, I learnt of a Channel 4 programme to be broadcast this summer in which a passenger jet will be crashed into the desert to analyse how planes react in such circumstances. Was news of the real occurrence of this supremely Ballardian metaphor a coincidence? "Deep assignments run through all our lives," he wrote in 1990. "There are no coincidences." The man is gone, but his strange world remains.

THE GUARDIAN