'How far do the landscapes of one's childhood, as much as its emotional experiences, provide an inescapable background to all one's imaginative writing. Certainly my own earliest memories are of Shanghai during the annual long summer of floods, when the streets of the city were two or three feet deep in brown silt-laden water, and … Continue reading An Inescapable Background
Tag: J.G. Ballard
Oceanic Volumes of Water
'Epochs drifted. Giant waves, infinitely slow and enveloping, broke and fell across the sunless beaches of the time-sea, washing him helplessly in its shallows. He drifted from one pool to another, in the limbos of eternity, a thousand images of himself reflected in the inverted mirrors of the surface. Within his lungs an immense inland … Continue reading Oceanic Volumes of Water
Overheated Air
‘A hundred feet above the roof of the mesa, they hung like the twisted pillows of a sleepless giant. Columns of turbulent air moved within the clouds, boiling upwards to the anvil heads like liquid in a cauldron. These were not the placid, fair-weather cumulus of Coral D, but storm-nimbus, unstable masses of overheated air … Continue reading Overheated Air
Particle Physics
'Vorster watched the paraplegics racing their wheelchairs around the basketball field. Two years earlier, while driving home one evening, he had seen Cosmos 253 breaking up on re-entry. For half a minute the sky had been filled with hundreds of glowing fragments, like an immense air force on fire. Vorster stood up as the audience … Continue reading Particle Physics
Ballard Heights
‘Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.’ High Rise, JG Ballard
Games
'Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.' Roberto Bolano Years ago, I knew someone with ambitions to be a writer. Like many of us, this friend - let's call him Felix - brimmed with curiosity and youthful ambition, and, as Fitzgerald writes of a novelist character … Continue reading Games
Terminal Realism: Kathy Acker and William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Zadie Smith
'The writer's task is to invent reality.' J.G. Ballard. On a recent trip to Heathrow, I travelled along the Westway. It's been a few years since I headed out on that road, not since a friend of mine passed his driving test and we made a specific trip out west with Low by David Bowie … Continue reading Terminal Realism: Kathy Acker and William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Zadie Smith
Absence Club 