I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.~Jay Gould

JG Ballard

by: hhex65

Tue Apr 21, 2009 at 22:51:46 PM MST

JG Ballard died Sunday. This is always like shouting in a bucket but I feel a loss (and a debt.) They had a rare copy of The Atrocity Exhibiton at my university library. I saw it just scanning through the Bs and recognized the title from a Joy Division song. Needless to say this writer helped me keep a grip on sanity in the good old early eighties hogwash-- he'd been an ad copywriter, a fully functioning fellow, with an eye like that. Nice to know there were people out there. Again, his work was something that I was fortunate to discover. And it truly helped sustain me, I'll admit it. I'm a person-of-the-book after all. My heartfelt thanks to him. My own favorite books by JGB are Concrete Island, The Atrocity Exhibition and Super Cannes. I've never seen the movie of Crash but the book is great, I saw the movie Empire of the Sun but haven't read the book. He even had his own word: ballardian, meaning that which evokes the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments and landscapes.

NYTimes Obit

hhex65 :: JG Ballard

Tags: review, hhex65, (All Tags)

Print Friendly View

Send As Email

JG Ballard | 1 comments

sad news (0.00 / 0)

I loved Ballard's writing, and even more that, his ideas. His vertigo-inducing ability to take contemporary conditions to their logical, horrible conclusion.

I remember reading a book of his short stories during slow lunch shifts at this seaside resort hotel where I worked as a waiter a couple summers. A nice study in contrasts, serving Brandy Alexanders to elderly Canadians then reading about a horrible experiment in sleep deprivation gone awry. I love Crash, but the two I recall most vividly are RUNNING WILD (typically prescient novel about kids in gated community who become homicidal from being too well cared for) and HIGH RISE (the pitch might be an adult version of Lord of The Flies in a high-end luxury apartment building).

His characterization of Ronald Reagan's face as "vaginal" is enough to make him a hero.

He also wrote a novel called THE DROWNED WORLD which, for some inexplicable reason, was also the name of Madonna's 2001 tour.

by: gsmoss @ Wed Apr 22, 2009 at 15:23:29 PM UTC

JG Ballard | 1 comments

Make a New Account

Forget your username or password?

NEW! NOW!

THE HOWLING HEX
WILSON SEMICONDUCTORS

Etc

*2012*

Drag City

About::Contact

Archive 04-06

rxconor 09-07

..........................

Howling Hex
hats, bags, shirts, keychains
via Cafe Press

Haiwei Sun
13 Zhongshan St
Guiyang City GuiZhou
851 4355128