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.
