Thankfully we have ‘J.G. Ballard: Conversations’ to give those of us who will unfortunately never meet the man a decent flavor of just what sitting down and chewing the surreal intellectual fat with the Shepperton Seer would be like. ‘Conversations’ is one of two books on Ballard put out over the last year or so by San Francisco’s renowned iconoclastic press RE/Search Publications, run by V Vale, with the other being ‘J.G. Ballard: Quotes’. Both are just-under-A5-sized books sprinkled with artistic photographs pertaining to the subject matter under discussion and both are extremely good-looking pieces of work.

Unsurprisingly enough, given the heavy content clue in the titles, the former is a book of transcripts of conversations with the man and the latter a collection of quotes of his drawn from decades of his work and interviews. And they’re both absolutely great (here I must thank Vale for the review copy of each book he graciously sent me), essential purchases for any JG Ballard fan, or for somebody just looking for something deeply intelligent and thought-provoking to read and ponder and delight and educate or even bamboozle themselves with.

V. Vale has long been an admirer, supporter and publisher of Ballard’s work. In 1984 he put out his seminal ‘RE/Search 8/9: J.G. Ballard’ volume, an overview of the writer’s work and thoughts which helped immeasurably in raising the man’s profile in America. Vale looks upon Ballard as the world’s most relevant living philosopher, which I must admit is something I agree with him on. Whereas traditional philosophy has tried to focus against masses of contradictory historical evidence as man being a rational, thinking animal, Ballard has insistently consistently proved the converse. The early formative experiences in the Shanghai concentration camp which he underwent educated him early as to life’s hidden agendas and true madness trajectories, and he has provided a peerless psychological critique of humanity’s violent, psychopathological traits for decades now.

Once trained in psychiatry, the man is like a poacher-turned-gamekeeper who is now not above still stealing the odd chicken from its coop if he thinks he can get away with it or if it will amuse him, sometimes atrocity-exhibiting a harsh, teasing sense of buried black humor. This man knows people, knows the nasty side of humanity, has seen it firsthand, and he is not afraid to articulate unflinchingly what he sees. He is a truth-teller first and foremost and you can’t help but respect that, even if upon occasion you might wish he would say a bit more about love and trust and compassion and emotional bonds. But, given the harsh life he has led, his dark worldview is very understandable.

During Hurricane Katrina this year, reading disturbing reports of the devastated city, corpses rotting in wheelchairs by looted stores and shallow-buried coffins sailing grimly down newly created street-canals, I couldn’t help but think that the whole tragic nightmare was like something straight out of Ballard’s imagination. The man had seen capitalism-illusion-piercing intimations of natural destruction during WWII that the Western world would take decades to catch up on, caught up as we are in our comfortable electronic consumer (i)pods. Have to admit I sometimes wonder how entirely comfortable he is with the fact that he’s regarded in large part as a prophet and poet of devastation and alienation. But to regard him purely as such is to miss the point of a large part of Ballard’s psyche and thought processes in general. Because he’s clearly about much, much more than annihilation and nihilism, as any astute reader of his will know.

‘Conversations’ presents us with an excellent, illuminating series of conversations with or about the prescience friction, science fiction-writing mid-septuagenarian surrealist conducted by various people including V. Vale, Mark Pauline (of Survival Research Laboratories), Ballard’s Scottish archivist David Pringle, Joe Donohoe, children’s teacher Lynne Fox (who contributes a fine conversation about surrealism with Ballard, whom she interviewed for her master’s degree thesis) and others.

These are dialogs from which all frivolous subject matter fat has been removed, paring them down to the intellectual bone, and are very far removed from the subject matter of most daily chats. Have to say it was nice to see a more domesticated, normal side of Ballard on display too, with his cooing over babies or cats during talks upon occasion, because that’s a side of him we don’t get to see too often and it helps humanize him a bit. But if he’s as shy as he says he is, perhaps him not talking about his family or domesticity in the past has been a way for him to maintain his privacy about an aspect of his life that is very important to him.

With a loose grouping of the most recent conversations (from 2004, but still bang up-to-date in many ways) as being about the End of The Age of Reason, Vale lists the topics under discussion at the start of each interview/conversation for ease of reference. Thus we have deep-dish Ballard extrapolations on corporate media, George W Bush (regarded by Ballard as a psychopath because of his supposed conversations with God) as a religious and ‘free’ world leader backed by the neo-con rat pack, Hitler as a religious leader, Muslims vs Christians vs sanity, internet terrorism, psychopathologies of all shapes and sizes, music, recreational drugs, William S Burroughs…and on and on and on…any subject under the sun seems to be fair game for the man to have an informed, or at least original, opinion on.

I have always loved reading interviews with Ballard because, even if I do not agree with every dictum he puts forward (being Scottish I don’t agree much with his waxing lyrical about the supposed aphrodisiac powers of industry-and-society-destroying insane ex-prime minister Margaret Thatcher, for example), I always come away with something new to ponder. Thus I found myself reading this book over a couple of nights on my living room couch, stopping every couple of pages in amazement or confusion to digest what I had just ingested, reading some of it to my wife Ellen and starting discussions with her about corporate psychology and hierarchy as occasioned by the book’s discussion of them during the first interview. This whole book truly provided a lot of food for thought. I mean, you’re reading away and you come across something like this, from P102 and a discussion about the galvanizing effects of the anti-sociality of religion with V. Vale (emboldened text is presented as it is in the book, for ease of quote reference):

“V: What do you mean by “antisocial”? Do you mean that religions militate against a healthy society?

JGB: Absolutely. I was brought up in one of the very few societies on Earth which had no religious beliefs (and as far as I can tell, has never had any), and that is China. There’s a bit of animism and a bit of burning incense to ancestors, but there’s no belief in the supernatural – it’s rather like you and I talking about the spirit of Shakespeare – we don’t literally mean some sort of supernatural entity is floating around. When the Chinese talk about the spirits of their ancestors, they mean it as a metaphor – the Chinese have no religious beliefs. Confucianism is not really a religion at all, nor is Buddhism, and Taoism is not a religion in the strictest sense. There’s no supernatural element in any of those religions – which is why I like them. And the Chinese character is interesting for that reason.

It may be that the backwardness of China could be blamed on the absence of religion, because religions (whatever their faults) are energizing by virtue of the unconscious and psychopathic strains which enter into the individual’s mind and into the social mind. That is a very curious thing – that. Religions, for all they are to be campaigned against (if not actively despised) are vehicles for energizing psychopathic behavior. So it’s no coincidence that the fiercely Protestant countries of Northern Europe launched the industrial revolution and launched the United States, if you like. The Puritan fathers took that fierce Protestant work ethic with all its repressions and created the most dynamic society the world has ever seen.

So it may be that the absence of a religion in China acted as a sort of brake on that country’s industrial development…lack of religion may have had a restraining influence, turning China into a kind of eventless world. For something like 2000 years nothing happened! You read Chinese history, and nothing happened until 1910. There was this vast agricultural society run by a class of elite administrators who traveled around in sedan chairs…and nothing happened! Now and then they invented something like a moveable type of gunpowder or accurate timepieces, but they lost interest in them because there was no imagination to energize these discoveries. It’s very strange…”

Let’s face it, this is not the kind of conversation that you and I are likely to have with anybody we know! I read the above and put the book down, brain swimming in riptides of seditious intent and the inversion and perversion and subversion of a whole series of lifelong ideas about religion just lying in the dust, however briefly. Ballard may or may not be right here – notice his repeated use of the get-out clause ‘it may be’ – but extrapolative conversation like this is extremely useful, given the current cul-de-sac-and-sanity the world is in because of retro, Crusades-alike religious views. New ideas and ways of looking at old things are needed and can be extremely useful, and Ballard’s simple inversion of received wisdom about religions being peaceful psychological entities shows us how to think about things in new ways, taking nothing for granted, which is utterly invaluable and also deeply entertaining too.

The grand old rogue intellect man says a couple of times in this book that ‘Nothing is true, nothing is untrue’ (which, as Vale points out, is a slight updating of Hassan I Sabbah’s old dictum, oft-quoted by William S Burroughs, that ‘Nothing is true; everything is permitted’) which is a very, very broad statement, almost pointlessly self-negating (on one level it would make everything in this book untrue), but it’s useful in that it points out something very useful: we should never take anything as granted or for granted because, ultimately, nobody truly knows all that much about life and received wisdom is often just superseded philosophy from thousands of years ago.

And being reminded of this refreshing dictum in this overly-electronically-regulated age is very timely and necessary and empowering to the individual human imagination and original creative drive. Fuck it all; smash up every conventional or unconventional way of looking at the world because it’s all right and all wrong; today’s pathology is tomorrow’s norm, and, as Bukowski once put it, everything is just chance and shit and the strumming of the winds. Your worst is going to be probably better than their communal best, if the current state of the world is anything to go by, so you’ve got carte blanche to show the world what you’ve got it.

Go for it.

That’s how reading Ballard makes me feel, liberated and dangerous and spaced-out and amazed by life again and even uneducated. Look at that religion quote above. It could fuel a million days of freeform thought in a person; the man has clearly done a lot of DEEP thinking (must read a book an hour!) on anything-and-everything-and-nothingness, and we get to share the fruits of his thoughts, difficult to grasp (or even believe) as they may sometimes be. That’s no small thing, seeing as how there are so few people on this planet who have, personally, inspired me so much, both intellectually and in my own writings, educating me on many aspects of human nature that have helped explain a lot about life to me.

And it’s material like that in ‘Quotes’ which has helped in this inspiration. Here Vale and his co-editor Mike Ryan have tirelessly mined four decades of work and interviews and pronouncements from Ballard to bring us 416 pages of gold thought-nuggets from the rich motherlode seam of the writer’s ceaseless never-resting imagination. The quotes are grouped under headings like ‘Death of Reality, ‘Celebrity’, ‘Thoughts on Art’, Gated Communities’, ‘9-11’, ‘Car Crash’, ‘Ballard on Ballard’, ‘Commander of The British Empire’ (an ‘honor he turned down, refusing to be part of an empire the sun long since set on, and being a republican too), and ‘Violence’…to name but a few.

Again, in these compact, complex soundbites, Ballard can set the head spinning. If some of his ideas are bizarre or unworkable or even wrong, well, at least he makes the reader think, entertaining or enlightening them with his syllabic intellectual lighthouse beams at the end of the age of reason to help keep people from foundering on the jagged killing rocks of ignorance and apathy or cerebral complacency. Thus we get material in this book like (to give just a couple of examples, because there are many lines here that could be quoted wholesale):

“Religions emerged too early in human evolution – they set up symbols that people took literally, and they’re as dead as a line of totem poles. Religions should have come later, when the human race begins to near its end. Sadly, crime is the only spur that rouses us. We’re fascinated by that “other world” where everything is possible.” (Cocaine Nights, 1996)

“Cars cruised the curb, drivers staring ahead but communicating by some sixth sense with the pimps who stood with their backs to the road. Everyone trafficked in time, sex displaced into blocks of darkness, thirty-minute cages of the night where pleasure flared and was gone like a shooting star.” (Super-Cannes. 2000)

“There are people who are constantly rediscovering the world on a second-by-second basis, for whom every minute is a new excitement. Whether it’s a sort of naivete or not I don’t know, but I’ve always been one of those. I wake up in the morning and look out at Shepperton and I’m always amazed and think, “What is this?” (Independent, 1991)

“I am interested in the surrealists altogether, because I am a great believer in the need of imagination to transform everything, otherwise we’ll have to take the world as we find it, and I don’t think we should. We should re-make the world…The madman does that…the psychopath does that…But the real job is to re-make the world is to re-make the world in a way that is meaningful.” (Metaphores #7, 1983)

Let’s just examine those last two quotes briefly, because they are interconnected. Ballard presents himself as somebody who remakes the world constantly. You would expect this from a writer of science fiction or speculative psychological and societal fiction. But in identifying himself, or the use of the imagination, by proxy, with madmen and psychopaths, I think Ballard does himself and the imagination a disservice. Because the child also reinvents the world on a daily basis until senseless consensus reality grinds them down into a series of prepackaged psychological shapes and sizes, all the better to fit into conventionalized society with.

And there is an element of almost childish willful perversity in Ballard’s almost solipsistic refusal to accept the world as already read. He started off studying at Cambridge in England but hated it, embracing the surrealists and deviant art as a way of kicking against the pricks in that educational institution, but he has almost never grown up in a way (correlation would be his old pal William S Burroughs, who wrote in his Last Words that he was emerging from a ‘stormy adolescence’ in his 80s), becoming a professional agent provocateur as time and life have gone on, refusing to settle into conventional ways of life to a degree, and yet raising three children on his own and never descending the long dark isolated stairwell into madness. Quite an accomplishment.

And it’s this element of Ballard I referred to when I was saying he’s about more than just death and disaster and dementia. It takes courage and hope and mental autonomy (the most any of us can truly hope for in a world so regimented and regulated) to maintain the free intellectual life the man has kept into his 70s, and that’s deeply inspirational once again. It shows any of us that we don’t have to be beaten down or broken by life, that we can stay mentally agile for our whole lives.

You might argue that Ballard has kept his psyche agile and agitated because he doesn’t want it to alight into thinking about his damaged past, and there may be an element of that in it, but he’s devoted his whole life to the freedom of the human imagination at a time when contemporary society would much rather have somebody just consume prepackaged garbage blindly. And who can argue against this lifelong rebellion against intellectual stasis and decay? I personally applaud Ballard for it, even if his exploration of his own psyche’s darkness has sometimes led him and us into some pretty grim places we’d probably be better off not going (read: ’Crash’).

I wrote to JG Ballard from America in November 2005, enclosing two tapes of Burroughs reading ‘Naked Lunch’ to stir some old memories in the man. I wanted to ask the writer a few questions about the two new RE/Search volumes and what he thought of them. Purely by chance the package must have arrived on his 75th birthday on the 15th and he graciously took the time out on this special day to write back to me, his letter betraying a mind still agile and questioning at an age when many people have retreated into a cage-cave of TV watching and tending to flowerbeds or physical ailments. So presented below are his answers to my questions, followed by an interview with V. Vale about his patronage of this most inspirational of scribes. Thank you to both men for taking the time to answer my questions.

JG BALLARD MINI-INTERVIEW:

ARE YOU HAPPY WITH THE RE/SEARCH VOLUMES AND HOW THEY TURNED OUT?

Very happy – the publications put out by RE/Search over the years are unique in my experience – each book is an original concept of its own + together they form a kind of street anthropology of the late C20/early C21. Fascinating documentary material on all the byways of urban life – some extraordinary volumes more thoroughly researched than whole university departments.

(ABOUT ‘QUOTES’) HOW DOES IT FEEL TO LOOK BACK ON YOUR LIFE AND THOUGHTS COLLECTED IN ONE VOLUME THIS WAY?

Very strange – I keep dipping into ‘Quotes’ to see what I think about this + that.

ANYTHING YOU ARE PARTICULARLY PLEASED WITH HAVING PREDICTED?

Looking back, what depresses me is the whole softening of public life – Ronald Reagan, Blair + his culture of spin, the transformation of politics into public relations – it didn’t start with the Kennedy presidency, but that gave it enormous impetus.

ANYTHING YOU’RE NOT PARTICULARLY HAPPY WITH HAVING PREDICTED?

As above.

DO YOU EVER LOOK BACK ON SOMETHING YOU HAVE WRITTEN AND ARE SURPRISED TO HAVE ACTUALLY WRITTEN IT?

The past haunts writers – I never read my own fiction – the mistakes rise off the pages like flak.

ANY THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE DIRECTION OF WRITING?

New writers, like yourself, will always keep appearing, thank God, + shock + delight a new generation of readers.

V. VALE INTERVIEW

HOW DID YOU FIRST BECOME AWARE OF BALLARD’S WORK? WHAT WAS IT THAT SO IMPRESSED YOU?

1972-1973. Around the same time I discovered Situationism. I found a Grove Press hardbound remaindered in a downtown independent bookstore (which is sadly no longer there) on Maiden Street, San Francisco: ‘Love And Napalm: Export USA’ for only $1.98! It had a beautiful red dust jacket of a Mexican Dia de los Muertos sugar skull. I bought it because it had an introduction by William Burroughs (before he became William S Burroughs) and I was a huge Burroughs fan, mainly because of an ‘Atlantic Monthly’ article previewing ‘The Job’ – a book which became my “bible” for several years. As soon as I started browsing through ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ (UK name for ‘Napalm’– Graham) I knew I had discovered a major writer of courage…someone not afraid to tell the “truth.” Obviously, here was someone who read scientific books and journals…who was trying to apply scientific principles, unafraid of the direst consequences, to the genre of predictive fiction. In the dark days before the Internet, it took hundreds of hours to track down most of Ballard’s fiction – at that time my sole “hobby” was going to used bookstores – and there are still interviews and articles I have yet to locate.

WHY HAVE YOU BASICALLY TAKEN IT UPON YOURSELF TO BE BALLARD’S SPOKESMAN-CUM-CHEERLEADER?

Yikes! I am not, never have been, and never will be a “spokesman” for anybody – Ballard doesn’t need anybody to be his “spokesman!” Quel horror! Before Ballard, my primary influence (aside from Surrealism and Situationism) was Burroughs, who said, “My affections are not spread all over hell…” Early on, I decided to be extremely selective about who I deeply, truly, like. Additionally, I don’t like doing work which has already been done by someone else. It seemed that Ballard was virtually unknown, so in 1984 I published my “Ballard anthology/introduction” and in 1990 my illustrated ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ – kind of a dream come true, that. A few years ago I realized that ‘J.G. Ballard Quotes’ and ‘J.G. Ballard Conversations’ were books that absolutely needed to be published, and since nobody else did them, I did. My real dream was to do ‘The Collected Interviews of J.G. Ballard’, but I didn’t think that I could afford that…plus, the permissions-getting would be a small nightmare.

HOW LONG DID IT TAKE TO PUT TOGETHER THE ’QUOTES’ BOOK? THAT MUST HAVE BEEN A PHENOMENAL AMOUNT OF WORK, WHAT WITH PICKING OUT ALL THE SALIENT QUOTES IN IT FROM HIS BODY OF WORK. HOW MANY PEOPLE WERE INVOLVED IN THAT, AND WHAT WERE YOUR CRITERION FOR PUTTING THE QUOTES AND PUTTING THEM IN THE BOOK?

3 years. The whole ‘J.G. Ballard Quotes’ book wouldn’t have happened without the diligence of my assistant editor, Mike Ryan, not to mention my wife Marian Wallace, plus a whole host of friends who typed, copy-edited, made suggestions, and donated photos to this “cause.” The book looks professional, but is mad possible by the combined efforts of a company of “amateurs” engaged in creating a labor of love.

WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE MAIN SIMILARITIES – AND DIFFERENCES – BETWEEN BALLARD AND WILLIAM S BURROUGHS, HIS OLD LITERARY CO-CONSPIRATOR AND ANOTHER WRITER YOU RATE VERY HIGHLY?

Burroughs and Ballard aren’t afraid to tell you the “truth” and are minimally compromised by the human tendency to want to please others. They are loners, a bit isolated from the status-seeking rat-race of 99% of so-called professional writers on this planet who just want to network and to promote themselves, almost unscrupulously I’m afraid. Special effects on a surface level seem more important these days than “deep revelation”.

DO YOU THINK THE WORLD COULD PRODUCE ANOTHER BALLARD OR BURROUGHS, GIVEN THE VERY SPECIFIC CULTURAL MILIEU, TIMEFRAME AND SOCIETAL STRATA THEY CAME FROM? WHAT WOULD A CONTEMPORARY WRITER HAVE TO DO TO SHOCK OR AWE THE WORLD LIKE THEY DID? AND WHAT DO YOU PERCEIVE AS BEING YOUR AGENDA IN PUBLISHING THESE TWO NEW BOOKS OF BALLARDANIA?

It’s “easy” to become a new Burroughs or Ballard: attend Harvard or Cambridge, study for an M.D. degree, live for years in a non-Western society, train to be an RAF pilot, live through a World War or two, survive a prison camp, shoot your wife/lose your beloved wife just after your third child has been born…just kidding, and Good Luck!... It’s not shock and awe that’s important, it’s again, “telling the truth” in a kind of “causal” way…in the sense that, as Thoreau put it (paraphrased): “There are thousands hacking at the branches, while one hacks at the roots.” Most writers merely describe phenomena; Burroughs and Ballard try to elucidate deeper “root causes,” or better yet, use their imaginations to create genuine Surrealism… One of the biggest agendas of RE/Search is to try to illuminate what Burroughs called “The Control Process,” by which we are controlled, manipulated, and kept from realizing our fullest potentials.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PIECE OF BALLARDANIA YOU OWN?

My autographed copy of ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ hardback published in America as ‘Love And Napalm: Export USA.’

ANYTHING YOU’VE BEEN MOST (OR LEAST) IMPRESSED BY BALLARD PREDICTING?

The replacement of “real” experience by “virtual” or “mediated” experience…the colonization of millions of human brains by corporate imagery, soundbites and slogans.

HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHAT PICTURES GO INTO THE BOOKS?

Instinct. For example, I’m a fan of the notion that whenever you meet someone, within a half-second you know what they’re about in a very deep way. But then your superficial “rational” mind kicks in and invalidates your intuition. Years later, you realize you were right-on in that first half-second.

THE BOOKS ARE VERY CRITICAL OF THE GOVERNMENT. ARE YOU EVER WORRIED ABOUT THEIR REACTION? OR ARE YOU SAFE BECAUSE BUSH CAN’T READ?

Nobody reads books anymore, or “hangs out” in used bookstores… only the true elite, or the socially disenfranchised, or those true outsiders striving to be “artists.”

WHY DO YOU CENSOR SOME EXPLETIVES AND NOT OTHERS IN THE BOOKS?

I censored words that I felt would keep the world’s libraries from ordering my books. One of the major distributors to libraries would not distribute them otherwise. And I want my books to be available free of charge in more libraries; I will gladly send books free to libraries that do not have the budget to order them. Without libraries, I would not be publishing now.

HOW DO YOU THINK BALLARD’S WORK (AND INDEED KNOWING THE MAN) HAS ENRICHED YOUR LIFE?

Truth. Life is a continual search for truth, navigating through a dazzling media universe of lies.

ANY FUTURE PLANS TO PUT OUT MORE BALLARD STUFF? A BOOK OF LETTERS WOULD BE COOL…

I would love to publish at least (2) more Ballard books but I am superstitious about announcing a project before it is (almost) at the point of completion.

WHAT DO YOU THINK BALLARD’S MAJOR LITERARY OR THEORETICAL LEGACY WILL BE TO THE WORLD? HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT BEING A PART OF THAT?

History will judge. Just remember that at least 99% of “best-seller” authors from the last 150 years are now totally forgotten. There has only been mass literacy for around a hundred years. I just feel totally “lucky” that I was able to do projects with both Burroughs and Ballard. It can’t get better than this!

Graham Rae is a Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk, now resident in the US. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and am halfway through my first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 18 years now, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his ramble/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.