I am a big fan of author J.G. Ballard, who wrote “Crash” and “Empire of the Sun” and a lot of other things. He was one of the first writers to really push the envelope of the obscene - even further than Borroughs did, in my opinion - his endless fascination with bodily injury and death and sexual perversion and the other disgusting things that we keep buried under the surface and never think or talk about, and his clinical descriptions of it - are truly groundbreaking.
It says on Wikipedia that in 2006 he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer which has spread to his spine and ribs. Does anyone have any more information that that? Is he at death’s door, as we speak?
I credit Ballard with helping me through some tough times in my own life. I struggled for a while with intense anxiety and hypochondria, manifested in obsessive fears about illness and death, and horrible vivid nightmares that felt more real than reality. After I read Crash and more of Ballard’s writing, I was motivated to embrace these elements of my life and accept their intensity as a powerful, life-affirming force, channeling the terror into my own writing, and controlling it instead of letting it control me.
Ballard is a hero of literature. When he dies, it will be a sad day.
Wow, yeah, Ballard is one of my very favorite authors. I was managing a bookstore in Chicago that hosted him for a reading, he was awesome, very polite and sweet. You’d never have pegged him as the author of “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race.”* The Atrocity Exhibition *is one of my desert island books.
Probably; if you read Miracles of Life you’ll see he’s pretty much put his house in order and is awaiting the inevitable…
Despite the necassarily downbeat ending, it’s a good read and throws more light on topics you might think have already been adequately written about.
I loved Empire of the Sun, both the movie and the book before I ever came to Shanghai.
[Hijack]The cathedral school he went to in the international settlement in Shanghai, just might be the school my daughter is attending in the fall. I’ll have to check. The cathedral is basically across the street from my office building. The Longhua area is just 2 or 3 miles away and where my twins are going to pre school. The internment camp is where the current botanical gardens are and I’ll have to check it out again since I didn’t know that.
I live in the old French Concession area that then became part of the International Concession [/hijack]
The Guardian carried an interview with him just last week. It mentions the cancer diagnosis and Miracles of Life, but also describes him living by himself in the house in Shepperton much as he was before. While the article was no doubt intended to give him his rightful due while he’s still around, it doesn’t leave the impression that his death, however looming, is necessarily immediately imminent.
And I do like the line in it that “The laying down of the M1 was much more important than anything Jimmy Porter’s father-in-law thought about this or that.” Classic Ballard.
I hope someday they make a bio-pic of the rest of Ballard’s life, picking up after the Empire of the Sun part. The best thing is that they could have Christian Bale play him again.