Extreme Metaphors

It would be no exaggeration to say that reading J G Ballard's Crash in my late teens had a substantial impact on my outlook on life.  I saw him speak a couple of times and he kindly signed my copy of The Kindness of Women (stupidly, I didn't take Crash with me) - I was also present at the NFT talk with JGB and David Cronenberg when the film of Crash came out and was banned by Westminster City Council; the book signing queue afterwards was long enough to put me off, another decision I've since regretted.

I've just finished Extreme Metaphors a collection of Interviews 1967-2008: the interviews in the first special Re:Search on JGB (partly reproduced here) were another huge influence in my younger days - so many stimulating ideas!  This latest volume is very repetitive but contains a lot of interesting (and prescient) stuff.  I seem to recall being surprised on seeing him being interviewed by Mavis Nicholson on her afternoon show in the 1970s, but that encounter doesn't appear here.  A few extracts:

With Frank Whitford in 1971:
'But technology in terms of videotape machines and so on may make it possible to have a continuous  alternative to direct experience, and I mean any alternative.  You can have this played back in a slow motion, or do you want it in infrared, or do you want it this and that.  Take your pick, like in a jukebox.  Technology may make it possible to have a continuous feedback to ourselves of information.  But at the moment I think we are starved of information.  I think that the biggest need of the painter or writer today is information.  I'd love to have a tickertape machine in my study constantly churning out material: abstracts from scientific journals, the latest Hollywood gossip, the passenger list of a 707 that crashed in the Andes, the colour mixes of a new automobile varnish.

With James Verniere in 1988:
'I think we're living in a landscape of enormous fictions, of which television is a major supplier.  The danger with TV is that it predigests and pre-empts any kind of original response by the viewer.  It just feeds the viewer a kind of reality.  (It has become, in fact, the new reality, just like processed food has become the staple diet of many people in the West.)  this force-feeding makes us rather like a lot of bullocks in a pen.  Reality now is a kind of huge advertising campaign, selling television's image of what life is about.  The real aim of TV is fulfilling its own needs.  Television is no longer an innovative medium here, and I imagine it's probably true in the States as well.'

(Do the) Charleston

Last night to Charleston, the former Bloomsbury Group country retreat, for an event that's part of a short story festival: Iain Sinclair talking about the life and work of his friend J G Ballard. The train to Lewes from Victoria after work was unbelievably crowded, at Lewes a volunteer-run bus took me to the house - the talks take place in a barn - saw Will Self here last year.

A very interesting talk concentrating on the short stories (which I happen to be reading at the moment anyway). He mentioned Heart of Darkness and by coincidence this morning I read a story entitled 'A Question of Re-entry' which was a definite Ballardian homage to Conrad's tale. At the same time I've been dipping into an anthology of the 'best-ever' SF short stories and on the whole I would say that the Ballard volume despite being by a single author is actually better, certainly better written than most of the other stories.

There were many mentions of the copies of two lost Paul Delvaux paintings that Ballard had paid to be recreated by an artist who also produced his portrait - in the NPG but not on display. On a short trip to Dunkirk a few years back we popped along the coast to the Paul Delvaux Museum, a curious place in a deceptively large underground gallery. Everything you would need to see by the Belgian surrealist is on display - there are very few of his works in British galleries - I love his eerie paintings of railway stations and trains. Sinclair also included an anecdote about William Burroughs telling him that his 'ugly spirit' had been exorcised in a sweat lodge - the shooting of his wife was assuaged by this incident. He says that the house in Shepperton is still intact with all Ballard's possessions, apart from the archive, which went to the British Library (see earlier post) and would make an unusual property for the National Trust to purchase should the family decide to sell it - a nice thought.

J G Ballard Archive

The archive of one of my favourite writers J G Ballard has been given to the British Library in lieu of £350,000 tax. Time to renew my lapsed membership I think.