One of my personal heroes died today.
“The superheroes of the future will be people who’ll challenge this condominium of boredom, and we’ll find that our Bonnies and Clydes will emerge to challenge the suburban values.”
–J.G. Ballard, JGB News, 1993
“I never said we should shy away from or retreat from technology. I thought that maybe we should embrace these apparently dangerous ideas and run them down, pursue them to the end.”
–J.G. Ballard, Blitz, 1987
“I visualized a series of imaginary pictures I might take of her: in various sexual acts, her legs supported by sections of complex machine tools, pulleys and trestles; with her physical education instructor, coaxing this conventional young man into the new parameters of her body, developing a sexual expertise that would be an exact analogue of the other skills created by the multiplying technologies of the twentieth century.”
–J.G. Ballard, Crash, 1973
Who but James Ballard would see the light from the Hiroshima bomb and think it was someone’s soul rising into Heaven?
When he died , what came to mind immediately was ,”Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan”. I remember how shocked I was as a teenager growing up on Long Island hearing that title from one of my fellow avant garde friends. That title alone was a rallying cry to shock and disturb those in the mainstream.I did immensely enjoy Ballard’s original novel and Cronenberg’s film treatment of the controversial,Crash. Not that it got me having romantic interludes in cars only to culminate in some kind of calamity resulting in injury! The idea of technology and sexuality inherent in the story is very fascinating. I have been involved in car crashes, one as recently as in February of this year and can only say that it is not that fun to collide with another car to to the least. It can be very terrifying, if anything. It is one thing to make love/and or get funky in a car while stationary(which is a primal ritual that most people go through) but another to derive sexual thrills from colliding into another vechicle while doing it. In essence, Ballard’s view of sexuality and techonology is very thought provoking because of the subject matter’s disturbing nature.
R.I.P. one of the most honest and subversive literary greats of this era…
stunning author. the loss of a great mind is always so dour…