The Rumpus.net » j.g. ballard

The Rumpus Interview with Tom Kaczynski

Greg Hunter — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 20:17:34 +0000

A visitor to Tom Kaczynski’s Minneapolis home could be forgiven for expecting stockpiled batteries, a wall of canned goods, or other staples of the doomsday prepper’s inventory. The comics that compose Beta Testing the Apocalypse, out this month from Fantagraphics, are linked by themes of alienation and societal overreach, as well as the threat—or implicit promise—of impending disaster. And so it’s an obvious irony, but one that bears mentioning, that numerous well-stocked bookshelves and a scattering of coffee mugs are what actually fill Kaczynski’s living room, while an endlessly affectionate golden retriever rolls around the hardwood floor. The cozy arrangement might be understood as a benefit of dog ownership, or evidence that running a micro press—Kaczynski runs Uncivilized Books, publisher of Gabrielle Bell’s acclaimed 2012 collection The Voyeurs, from a home office on the house’s top floor—leaves little time to gear up for the End of Days, were Kaczynski also not welcoming, generous with his time, and open about his process and ambitions.

For these reasons alone, a visitor could probably guess that he is not a native Minnesotan.

Kaczynski was born in communist Poland, but the shadow of a British author looms conspicuously over his work: J.G. Ballard. As with Ballard, Kaczynski’s stories are fringe science-fiction narratives about base yearnings, otherness, and collapse, captured with stark monochrome palettes and spindly line work. In “Phase Transition,” a shut-in’s busted air conditioner inspires him to cast off his civilized shell. In “Million Year Boom,” a freelance designer helps engineer the creation myth of a global conglomerate and discovers the newest iteration of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones. And in “Cozy Apocalypse,” a couple attempts to disaster-proof its marriage, while markets crash and floods fill the suburbs.

These stories, and the nine others that complete Beta Testing, are the result of more than six years of work. They’re informed by Kaczynski’s time in Poland, then Germany, and then the United States, from the Twin Cities to New York and back again. Our conversation started at the beginning, and with the inevitable: cheap genre comics.

***

The Rumpus: You grew up with Polish sci-fi comics, as opposed to Marvel and DC books. Were comics easy to come by when you were a kid?

Tom Kaczynski: They were pretty widely available. Not in the way of American comics—you have these series that go on and on. It was more European-style: albums that would come out every now and then. There was a magazine called Fantastyka. It was a melding of [European comics anthology] Heavy Metal and a sci-fi or pulp magazine, because it had comics, but it also had short stories, serialized novels and things like that. And that had one of my favorite comics, Funky Kovol, a crazy science-fiction romp.

Rumpus: Did you gravitate toward sci-fi, or was that the dominant genre in Poland?

Kaczynski: Any genre you can think of over here, they had an equivalent over there. So if you had a policeman, he was a Communist Party member policeman, sometimes fighting capitalist criminals.

Rumpus: Were Western comics available at all?

Kaczynski: Not too many of them. Mostly other European comics. Like Thorgal, for example, which is a Viking comic—comes out of Belgium, but it’s drawn by a Polish artist, Grzegorz Rosiński. His work was really popular, partly because he was Polish. But there were also funny animal-type books; Asterix and Obelix; a French book called Kajko i Kokosz, which was this little Slavic village being attacked by Germanic tribes—pretty funny and weird.

Rumpus: Are many of these available in English? Or any kind of archival format?

Kaczynski: Not that I’m aware of. I’d love to bring some of the stuff over, now that I’m a publisher, but I don’t think any of it has made it over yet. Thorgal has, but that’s Belgian, so it has had Western exposure for a while. But not many things specifically Polish.

Rumpus: And what are the first comics from the United States you remember reading?

Kaczynski: There was an English-language library in Poland catering to people who were learning English, and they had one volume—a reprint volume, and I’m sure it must have been a British volume—of a Fantastic Four comic that had Spider-Man in it. It’s kind of hazy. I didn’t really see serialized American comics until I moved to Germany, where they were reprinted as books or sometimes again as pamphlets.

Rumpus: By the time you arrived in the United States, did you have an American genre comics phase, or were you deep into Dan Clowes—

Kaczynski: No, I went through [that phase]. I got into X-Men in Germany, and Spider-Man. I was reading Conan the Barbarian for a while, too. So when I moved over here, I was seeking out those comics. And when I realized there was a whole subsection of stores—comic book stores—there was no going back. This would have been late ’80s, early ’90s.

Rumpus: Were you making comics in any capacity?

Kaczynski: Once I started drawing comics, when I was eight- or ten-years-old, I just continued. Off and on, but I was always drawing something. I had my own characters, had my own super teams. I’d draw them, file them away.

Rumpus: Did you have a formal art education?

Kaczynski: Yeah. After high school, I went to college [at the University of Minnesota], and went into architecture. That was a pragmatic major if you were an artist. But at the same time, I was basically double-majoring with art, taking classes at the art department. But I feel like my art school experience is very similar to Art School Confidential, Dan Clowes’s comic. Architecture felt like it was a lot more useful for drawing, for conceptualizing the world, than my art education was.

Rumpus: When was your introduction to J.G. Ballard in all this?

Kaczynski: Ballard happened much later. I’d seen some of Ballard’s work in high school, mainly because I was interested in RE/Search publications. RE/Search was publishing these books on so-called industrial culture—books on Throbbing Gristle, William S. Burroughs, people like that. And they were also super into J.G. Ballard, and the book that they were publishing was The Atrocity Exhibition—which actually had amazing illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner, who’s also a cartoonist. But these were her medical illustrations, much different from her comics work. I think, for a long time, she was a medical illustrator, and they used her to illustrate Atrocity Exhibition. That’s a very difficult book. It’s very abstract, chopped up, and there’s a lot of found writing from a variety of scientific magazines. He’s kind of mashing up plastic surgery descriptions with political figures, things like that—it was a difficult read for someone at that age. It was very evocative, but I don’t think I was getting it. So I just assumed all his writing was like this: Naked Lunch-style…[similar to] all these things that I liked, but not anything that you could read in a sustained way without feeling overwhelmed.

So anyway, eventually I got back into Ballard—much more recently—and the book that I read was Running Wild. Which I didn’t like, but there was something about it…I didn’t like the book itself, but I liked something in the book. Enough that I picked up other stuff, and High Rise was one of the books that I picked up soon after that. And A Drowning World, and Crash. Concrete Island—all that stuff from his science-fiction era. And I just loved it, couldn’t get enough of it. I’ve pretty much read everything he’s written at this point. That just happened to be around the time I was drawing my pieces for [Fantagraphics serial anthology] Mome, and it ended up being very influential.

Rumpus: You and Ballard were both transported from one culture to another while fairly young, and I think for a lot of people, that turns them into observers of the world early on, examining structure and difference. Is that fair to say in your case?

Kaczynski: Yeah, I would say so. In my own experience, having lived in Germany and the U.S., you have to learn the local customs, translate that somehow into your own experience. Absorb it, try to understand it. Things like baseball, which I don’t think I’ll ever understand.

Rumpus: That’s not the first time I’ve heard someone not born in the States say that about baseball. It seems like baseball in particular is inscrutable to people.

Kaczynski: It’s just such a different game.

Rumpus: One line that struck me from the first story in Beta Testing, “100,000 Miles,” was, “Each complex is a scale model of some future megalopolis,” and throughout the book we see instances of an object or system standing in for an even larger system—worlds upon worlds of simulacra. Do you believe in any sort of binary between authentic and inauthentic modes of experience? A way of living humans once had that we’ve been separated from?

Kaczynski: I would agree with that in the sense that we lived in certain environments, and we’re separated from that. But even back then, we were still remaking whatever environments we were in to suit our needs, whatever those needs were. The word authentic is almost a negative term for me. Everything is a construct. Either everything is authentic or nothing is authentic, and I don’t know which one it is, but it doesn’t bother me one way or the other, you know? So I don’t see it as a binary; I see it as the way things are. I don’t think we’re in a place where we’re removed from some authentic experience, that we’ll never get back to, that we’ve lost, and that we’ll pay for it. We may pay for it anyway. If you look at archeology, you see all sorts of examples of humans destroying their environments and moving on. I don’t think it’s anything new—just the scale is different.

Rumpus: Over-farming is not unique to the twentieth or twenty-first century.

Kaczynski: Yeah, exactly. We’re just losing ground.

Rumpus: Speaking of places you can’t get back to, some of the pieces in Beta Testing are five or six years old now, and I wanted to know if you relate better to the newer pieces in the book than the older ones.

Kaczynski: I tend to dislike everything new that I’ve done. There’s always some kind of nagging feeling that I’ve missed something. For whatever reason, the newer work is always mildly incomprehensible to me. But after a certain period of time passes, I can look back at the stuff and say, “Oh, I can live with that. That’s not a bad story.” I mean, they are artifacts of their time, too. I’d have done things differently now, but you just have to live with the fact that you produce these artifacts and they become older and older, and your relationship with them changes. And that’s fine.

Rumpus: If you can have an anthropological relationship with your own work, that’s probably good for your mental health.

Kaczynski: Yeah. You produce these artifacts, and they go out into the world, and you don’t have to worry about them anymore. Occasionally you can mine them for something else.

Rumpus: “Phase Transition” is one of the instances in the book in which readers get a character with something primal inside of him, which is a motif you’ve almost made into your brand now with Uncivilized Books. Are you able to trace back your preoccupation with the primitive to any particular moments or texts?

Kaczynski: I don’t know. Ballard figures in, but I think it comes before that. I mentioned earlier that I was into Conan the Barbarian, and I liked Tarzan—the savage man in the civilized world, or vice versa. The tension going on.

One thing that I subscribe to in a weird way is, there’s a thing about high technology: it turns us into more primitive thinkers. Part of it is the magic nature of new technology. Even with a car, you can learn how to fix it—how to change the oil, how to maintain it. With a computer, it’s really a mysterious box. The components are so tiny—you can maybe swap them out, and that’s as close as you can get. You can’t really get to the underlying technology. Technology, as it gets miniaturized and more advanced, actually creates more magical thinking in us—we speak to our machines as if they were idols.

That’s part of the motivation. Technology that brings out more primitive ways of thinking. That’s partly what “Phase Transition” was about, partly what “Million Year Boom” was about. They were conceived around the same time.

Rumpus: It’s interesting that you emphasize technology, because I walked away from “Million Year Boom” wondering whether or not you believed in a connection between the making of art and these buried impulses. Which might sound obvious, but I think creating something is often equal parts raw expression, calculation, attention to detail—these things that are antithetical to the idea of the primal impulse.

Kaczynski: I’m not a primal type of artist. There’s all kinds of lore about what an artist is, how an artist creates art, how they come to their ideas. There’s this primal-urge theory, and then there’s this more academic [path], “You do these things and then you’re good at it.” For me, being a cartoonist is more about storytelling than about the art. I usually try to make my art as subservient to the story as possible.

Rumpus: Meaning that narrative coherence takes primacy? Clarity of storytelling?

Kaczynski: Yeah. Just the ability to tell a story, but also, I don’t feel like as much of a visual artist…I rarely have the urge to draw something. It needs to have some story behind it, even if it’s a single image. It needs to be narrative in some way. Any kind of impulse to draw generates from that. Comics to me are a storytelling medium. I’m not so much a formalist, playing with these boxes in random ways, deliberate ways, to break the narrative. In that way, I’m traditional, I guess—just telling stories.

Rumpus: In “The New,” readers get a rare face-punch moment, and a pretty visceral one. Knowing now that you grew up reading Conan, too, have you ever been tempted to do a more action-heavy comic?

Kaczynski: This may change with my work in the future, but I’m not as interested in violence…personal violence. Whereas obviously in some of my stories there’s a general psychic violence going on. But I’m not so interested in the visceral punch, the kick, hand-to-hand combat, someone getting shot, or whatever. I tend not to gravitate toward criminal stories. My girlfriend likes detective fiction, noir fiction, and I tend not to be interested in that. Partly because it is all about this raw, personal violence. Maybe there’s some aversion I should be looking into.

Rumpus: Is there anything you, as a reader, get out of Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit, some of the more violent indie or art comics?

Kaczynski: Yeah, there’s a visceral kick you get out of that. Prison Pit, it’s like, what is he going to come up with next? A kind of one-upmanship. You’re looking for the next panel to really blow you away. But at the same time, there’s a deadening effect that happens. I used to be into horror movies, violent movies, and after a while you become numb to that. Maybe that’s why I’m not that interested in violence in my own stories. I just stopped seeing that kind of material at some point. But I do admire Johnny Ryan’s comics. And I like Johnny Negron. He’s done some weird, violent, manga-inflected stuff recently. They’re almost like formalist exercises with violence as the subject matter.

I’m really drawn to Yuichi Yokoyama’s work. He’s a Japanese cartoonist. Basically nothing happens from a narrative point of view—it’s just sequence after sequence after sequence of something. One book is called Travel and it’s just these guys walking from train car to train car. You see the differences in the passing landscapes; you see different lighting as the time of day changes. But it’s basically just a walk through a train. And I feel like [the comics of Ryan or Negron] are very similar—they’re just using violence. I guess I’m just more interested in people walking through train cars than people punching each other.

Rumpus: The manga market might be more accommodating of formal exercises that aren’t about violence. I haven’t read basketball manga, for instance, but that it exists at all is amazing to me as an American comics reader.

Kaczynski: And there’s whole strips—Yokoyama again—of, you know, a character putting a coin into a vending machine. You see the process of something coming out of a vending machine.

Rumpus: “Cozy Apocalypse” from Beta Testing engages with masculinity, and “masculinity in crisis,” more overtly than your other works, and I was wondering if masculinity was the starting point of that story—something you knew you wanted to tackle—or if it was something you found yourself tackling as you went.

Kaczynski: It was not the starting point, but it kind of became [the focal point]. Like, I didn’t really realize what I was writing until I was deeply into it. The story’s about a pending apocalypse, but there’s also these weird marital things going on. And I find that those two things can be intertwined: the twilight of masculinity and this apocalyptic imagining of our world falling apart. I think those thing must be unconsciously connected in the story. Now that you mention it, I’m like, “Oh yeah, duh,” but that wasn’t my primary exploration.

Rumpus: And I’m sure there are things at, as a reader, I look for and project.

Kaczynski: No, it’s good. Because most people, when they talk about that story, they talk about the apocalypse part of it. You’ve pulled out something else…which seems obvious in retrospect.

Rumpus: In terms of process, you talked about the importance of clarity in your images, that they serve story. Do you find yourself writing captions first? Do your stories all start the same way.

Kaczynski: No, I have a pretty convoluted process. I’ve written comics in many different ways. Anywhere from writing a script, then drawing it, inking it; all the way to drawing sequences and then coming up with what’s going to happen in those sequences later. So a lot of times, the impetus for a story is a two-page sequence that I have in my head. A character is going from one point to another, and I want to show that. What’s happening during that time comes later. I figure that out at some point. Overall, I’ve written captions before, but mostly they happen after I’ve drawn something.

Rumpus: Much of Beta Testing features characters who have been numbed, who live in these highly corporatized capitalist prisons, basically. Did you have reservations about engaging in the marketplace as a publisher when you started Uncivilized, meeting capitalism on its own terms in a very direct way?

Kaczynski: That’s a difficult question to answer. One of the problems with capitalism—

Rumpus: And I ask it understanding that every one of us in the United States is a part of the process, is implicated in the excesses.

Kaczynski: Absolutely. My problem with capitalism as its defined is that it’s impossible to get out of. And that’s one of the problems with critiques of capitalism. It’s so completely consuming that you can’t really think your way out of it. Which is something I’ve thought in the past. That we’re doomed, trapped in this giant organism, and no matter how much you try to think your way out of it, you’re always going to be in it. You either believe that, and it’s a self-defeating thing, or you believe it’s possible to alter it in some ways, or that there is an outside.

Rumpus: Do you consider your work to be inherently pessimistic?

Kaczynski: That’s another difficult question. Because something I’m really fascinated by right now is utopias. Utopian thinking, coming up with alternative worlds where things work differently. I have two different tracts in how I work. Most of the Mome work is fiction—just straightforward fiction. As a writer, I’ll take certain positions that I don’t necessarily believe, but I will take them to whatever natural ending point I think they have. But I also do more essay-type comics. I don’t now if you’ve seen my Trans mini-comics, which are much more essay-like, where I can examine these ideas more directly rather than through fictional characters.

I feel like utopia, the idea of overcoming these giant societal structures, is present even in the very pessimistic work. There’s something there—an adjustment that happens [to the characters]. And to us it may look monstrous, but I don’t know if it would look monstrous to the characters themselves.

Rumpus: The character in “Phase Transition” seems to find some sort of peace or balance.

Kaczynski: Right. So I think there’s some kind of underlying optimism. But sometimes you have to dig deep.

***

First panel from “Cozy Apocalypse,” second panel from “Phase Transition,” third panel from “The New,” and “Noise: A History” in full, all featured in Beta Testing The Apocalypse, © 2012 by Tom Kaczynski.

Click here to read the first three pages of “Million Year Boom,” one of the stories featured in Tom Kaczynski’s new collection, Beta Testing the Apocalypse.

Introducing Anna Kavan

Michael Berger — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 23:30:42 +0000

There’s an indispensable book called About Writing by Samuel R. Delany. In the first essay he cobbles together an eclectic list of authors that, ideally, the aspiring writer should read. Because Delany has read everything, you can bet his tastes are wide and varied.

And it’s thanks to that book that I discovered Anna Kavan.

Born Helen Ferguson, she began writing while living in Burma in the 1920′s but then after her second marriage collapsed, she had a nervous breakdown and changed her name to Anna Kavan, a character in one of her novels. Thereafter her books took a decidedly surreal turn.

In fact, downright weird and hypnotic and deranged, at least based on the two I just recently read: Ice and Sleep Has His House.

Besides being the author of nearly a dozen bizarre and influential novels and story collections, Kavan was also a lifelong heroin addict, car enthusiast, world traveler, painter and breeder of bulldogs. Her life seemed to be one long fever dream that seeped, by way of her fictional persona, into her unclassifiable books.

Ice has been cited as an influence on everyone from J.G. Ballard to Doris Lessing to Elizabeth Wurtzel.

What’s it about? Well, in an unnamed country an unnamed man is driving around trying to find his true love, a frail albino woman who is perpetually haunted by demons. But the man’s quest is hampered by ice and snow and floods and ruins; in fact, it is verily the end of the world by ice that is deterring him time and again. And also other suitors, including an evil, ice-blue-eyed man named the Warden who is something of a warlord and a sadist.

The unnamed narrator is also obsessed with capturing the strange music of the lemurs. But this music, while it delights him, is a true torment for his albino love. The story flows in meandering, non-linear, dreamlike fashion and it casts a spell on the reader who goes for that kind of intelligent, fractured weirdness.

So on that note, go explore the weird world of Anna Kavan.

Tandem Reading: J.G. Ballard and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder

Michael Berger — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 00:30:39 +0000

Remainder by Tom McCarthy can only lazily be compared to Kafka or Murakami, Ionesco or Calvino. Really, there is an English dryness about it that is more like Graham Greene having a surrealist fit. Or Iris Murdoch as edited by Raymond Carver.

But the most apt comparison might be to J.G. Ballard.

Both Ballard and McCarthy map the maze of post-industrial civilization and isolate moments of transcendence, no matter how irrational such transcendence appears. For Ballard, absurdity begins in the casual, harsh contrasts that the average citizen confronts in his day to day life: a car wreck beneath a billboard advertising dishwasher detergent or a freeway overpass crawling with monkeys and parrots. Burnished landmarks of civilization can, in the wink of an eye, become ruins overrun by society’s castaways.

For McCarthy, a similar absurdity exists in the mind’s propensity to be blinded to matter, to the sheer superfluousness of it. And also to be, as he demonstrates so poetically, blinded by it. The sheer quantity of things makes any distinction between reason and madness perfectly arbitrary. Both authors pose a fundamental question: to paraphrase Krishnamurti, is it irrational to be unadapted to a profoundly irrational society? (“Profoundly sick” was Krishnamurti’s phrase.)

Based on some very fine praise given to it by Zadie Smith, I read Remainder two months ago and can’t stop thinking about it. Even dreaming about it.

Maybe because it’s a book about three things that I especially obsess over: matter, memory and happiness. And how these three “things” manage to exist in a minefield of negation and conflict which, in fact, is life itself. (I’ve never before encountered a book that renders concrete what is fundamentally abstract about our human experience.)

We all obsess about happiness but I do it in ways that I know are whimsical and impractical, just like the novel’s “protagonist.” My self-awareness tells me that my ideas of happiness fly in the face of the order of things. To persevere in my rebellion I have to be monomaniacal. Or make compromises and sacrifices.

Either way I’m constantly negotiating significance on a chaotic, overcrowded landscape littered with what is mostly insignificant.

The way of the former, the monomaniac is the harder path. It is easier to make drastic cuts to your vision than to go with it whole-hog and no holds barred. In this sense, money and resources helps, as well as similarly-obsessed conspirators. Remainder details a well-funded experiment in sustained monomania that any artist would envy.

Remainder is also about the way the mind, operating at a feverish level of awareness, sees in vertiginous detail all the pixels of reality for what they are: pixels, points, dots. No rhyme, no reason. You can connect them any way you choose and they’ll always be ones left over, or burnt out, or inoperable.

But this is also, paradoxically, the way of freedom: the freedom to create meaning out of fragments and work assiduously to make meanings cohere. Thus you have an object and a mission and, in this dance of invented purpose, an onus to find happiness. Viktor Frankl said as much in his masterpiece, Man’s Search For Meaning.

It’s a game that can have exhilarating or dire consequences depending on how you react to it. More often than not, connections will not be made, matter and time and energy will be wasted.

Remainder is an ode to nonchalance in the service of finely-wrought philosophical fiction. It builds like a joke, escalates into a densely-layered fable, and then blossoms into hysterical nightmare. But despite the mayhem it doesn’t lose its composure. Everything makes sense in Remainder, even what is often preposterous. You won’t think the same way again about deep fried liver or Starbucks or windshield wiper fluid or cats on a roof. If you want a physical text that authoritatively invades your subconscious and rewires your most precious preconceptions read Remainder right now.

I would recommend reading it in tandem with J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, an arguably darker, more obsessed dispatch from the far side of post-industrial madness. Or even Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company or Crash would be fine accompaniments. With Ballard you are always in the terrain of the infrastructure overcome by its Id; mankind’s attempt to impose order on matter results in an excess that nobody ever suspected.

(Throw in a little Beckett or Lydia Davis afterward and you’ll have a metaphysical soul-wound more gaping than James Woods’ chest in Videodrome.)

Honoring an Amazing Writer and Father

Michael Berger — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:05:22 +0000

“He had raised three of us single-handedly following my mother’s premature death when we were five, seven and nine. It was the 60s, when single fathers didn’t do that sort of thing. Most of his friends were sceptical. But he did raise us, as father, mother and much more besides.”

At Guardian Books, Bea Balard remembers her father J.G. Ballard who died last April. (Via Maud Newton)

Not only is the late J.G. Ballard swiftly becoming one of my favorite writers, but now the fact that the man audacious enough to write The Unlimited Dream Company and The Atrocity Exhibition, among numerous prophetic masterpieces, was a great father is nearly sending me into hysterics of admiration.

Admittedly it’s hard to not assume that cutting-edge, brave, controversial authors are child-abandoning, woman-beating train wrecks in their personal life so the fact that Ballard proves the opposite should be exemplary for young-ish, amateur writers like myself.

The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup

Seth Fischer — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:00:44 +0000

The book blogs had a great week — here’s some of what they have to say:

This is very cool. Check out The Underground Library, a community in which “books are given out to Members of the Library, who are asked to SIGN their name by the Due Date and PASS the book to someone who they think will like it..” (via)

Hemingway, Churchill fail computerized essay grading system. (via)

“Eschscholtzias” reads like a railway accident of its own – a fatal collision between Latin and German.” On “fossil poetry.” (via)

HTMLGiant’s got a great video on Raymond Carver.

“Who needs an agent? You do.”

“(J.G. Ballard) didn’t believe that human actions were rational or easily fathomable, and it was probably this, more than any view of history or aesthetic theory, that led him away from what he regarded as the staleness and artificiality of contemporary literature.” (via)

When a Writer Becomes an Adjective

Michael Berger — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:30:30 +0000

Kafka. Joyce. Woolf. Dickens. Nabokov.

All of these writers have become adjectives. (Arguably, “Kafkaesque” is the most overused one of the mix. And “Nabokovian” the least-earned moniker.)

Just last April, a prolific and prophetic English writer by the name of J.G. Ballard died.

At some point in the cultural multiverse, he too became an adjective and perhaps an adjective the most applicable to our own time.

“Ballardian”, according to the custodians of his extensive fansite, means “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”

Just a month ago, I read one of Ballard’s earlier novels, The Unlimited Dream Company which is essentially a two hundred plus page surrealist fever dream about a crazy fake stunt pilot who crashes his stolen Cessna into the provincial English suburb of Shepperton. Thought dead by the town’s citizens, he instead is miraculously and mysteriously revived and becomes something of a pagan-sexual Christ figure for the populace.

Thus he begins to transform the dull suburbs into an overgrown and demented Garden Of Eden.

Now after I finished the book I had to proclaim: this is the supreme fantasy. Especially for any of us who grew up in towns that were too boring for them, towns that hid their secrets all too well. Interestingly enough, Shepperton, England is a real suburban town and the place where Ballard lived for most of his later life.

The good people at Ballardian have created a fascinating photo essay of Shepperton in light of Ballard’s own writings. Here is part one. And, a year later, we are treated to part two.

I think Shepperton is critical in understanding and appreciating the idioms of Ballard’s own dystopian vision. Perhaps as important as his early life in Shangahai. And I often wonder how much of my own creative vocabulary has been inspired by my childhood spent in the desert burbs of San Diego where sprawling freeway canyons crossed paths with deserted military training bases and drained reservoirs.

This week also sees the release of the 1200 page long The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard.

And if you missed it, a week ago, Jonathan Lethem wrote a typically stirring appreciation of Ballard’s works, especially his short stories.

J.G. Ballard’s Pre-posthumous Memoir

M. Rebekah Otto — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:30:55 +0000

After eighteen novels and even more short story collections, J. G. Ballard directly approaches autobiography in his latest book Miracles of Life. (Read the London Guardian review here.) Though known for his dystopian science fiction, Ballard analyzes his own life with some surprisingly similar tools, principally Freud. LAWeekly labeled the book a “pre-posthumous memoir” because Ballard tells us, at the end, that he has been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. Read an excerpt and an interview here.

The Rumpus.net » j.g. ballard

The Rumpus Interview with Tom Kaczynski

Related Posts:

Introducing Anna Kavan

Related Posts:

Tandem Reading: J.G. Ballard and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder

Related Posts:

Honoring an Amazing Writer and Father

Related Posts:

The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup

Related Posts:

When a Writer Becomes an Adjective

Related Posts:

J.G. Ballard’s Pre-posthumous Memoir

Related Posts: