The ultimate post-Ballard post

Image via ALYCIA.

Yes, my best friend wrote it and he mentions me in it but *whatever* — we’re all writers and crazy and dogs, and this piece has blown my mind. Read the best Ballard obit to come out of all the limelighting and grandstanding by his so-called friends, publisher assholes trying to cash in, etc… This is a filthy literate piece of what it feels like to have Ballard under your skin. Read The Death of James Graham Ballard Considered as a Pornographic Spectacle or lead a life of quiet desperation from here on out — here’s a snip from the middle:

(…) In particular, Ballard was obsessed with media, and this seemed to inform his deviant ideas of sexuality in a way that would have been marginally abstract in the hands of a theorist or philosopher — but became dangerously visceral in the hands of a writer of science fiction who got going just as the genre began its savage turn from pulpy formulaic entertainment to weird fucked-up decimation of all society’s values. Ballard, for his part, hated the term science fiction, and the science fiction community took something like 10 to 20 years to stop desperately trying to ignore The Atrocity Exhibition. It was the cyberpunks who finally inserted this work into the science fiction lexicon. Ballard preferred the term “apocalyptic” to describe his work. He seems to have seen his more audacious work, for all intents and purposes, as a social-political assault on celebrity culture, media, and consumerism.

Which is all well and good, but his blatant treatment of deviant sexuality, when he went there, was a huge influence on more literary pornographers than I can count. The blatant assault on reason that is “Ronald Reagan” was a revelation to me when I read it in college. I had already been writing porn novels professionally; shortly after I read “Ronald Reagan,” I wrote my first piece of seriously fucked-up psychosexual death-obsessed porn. Does that make me a satirist? No, I’m a pornographer. And Ballard, at least in that work, was my godfather.

But for the record, The Atrocity Exhibition is probably too weird for most people to jack off to. Calling Ballard’s subsequent psychosexual work Crash “less weird” than anything is of questionable provenance, and probably calls my sanity into question. But the casual reader will find Crash, ultimately, a relatively straightforward novel with plot and characters, a narrative thread, and the kind of emotional arc that draws one into a story. Is it made any less traditional by the fact that it’s about a guy, coincidentally (I’m sure) named James Ballard, who gets off on car crashes, particularly celebrity car crashes, and becomes involved with a group of people who feel the same way? Maybe so.

In Crash, Ballard (the character) encounters a doctor whose main fantasy is to die in a head-on car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. This is not typical stuff either for porn or science fiction; it might be slightly more at home in the world of avant-garde literary fiction or the Decadent movement of the late 19th Century, but even there it’s beyond anything Alfred Jarry or the Paris Grand Guignol ever came up with. I think Baudelaire would have read Crash with his jaw on the floor. Oscar Wilde would have howled.

So consider that Violet tells me it’s the first book she ever jacked off to, and that while a young man I became physically aroused while reading it — to my great dismay. I know several other literary pornographers for whom Crash’s “satire,” or “psychosexual deconstruction” or “critical analysis of the 20th-Century Zeitgeist,” or whatever the fuck you wish to call it, translated directly into hard-ons and girljuice. (…read more, blog.blowfish.com)