Stumbled across (while attempting to verify some terrorism statistics) on a rather entertainingly frothing right-wing blog -
Britain’s J.G. Ballard once wrote a book called Hello America. Now, if pressed to decode the value-weighted “gist” of that book without having read it, you might find all the data you need in the previous sentence. The two cited countries bear a grammatic-critical relationship, with Britain as the subject, America the direct object, and any number of transitive verbs not very nice indeed. Would it surprise you, for example, to hear that the Ballardian U.S. has become a continental sewage dump which 22nd-century Europeans set out to explore like hazmatted Everest junkies? Or that the Manhattan skyline – let us tread carefully here – has been blotted by a “200-storey OPEC Tower which dominate[s] Wall Street, its neon sign pointing towards Mecca”? The arid West gets the elemental treatment (always a J.G. hobbyhorse), with Las Vegas turned into a half-submerged Atlantis of wading fluorescent kitsch, “a violent mirror reflecting all the failure and humiliation of America.” (Yeah, I lost a bundle last time I was there, too.)
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Up for grabs, however, in the What-The-Fuck department is Ballard’s latest book — of quotations. Yes, quotations, which some twit called John Strausbaugh at the New York Times is good enough to review this week.
It had to happen eventually. A fantasist and cult doom peddler would earn himself a Bartlett’s of portable prophecies and gnomic runes about man’s inhumanity to man at the service of oppressive of bourgeois technology. The surprise is that this fantasist and cult doom peddler would be the one given such an honor.
You may remember the Ballard novel Crash, if for no other reason than it deprived you of a necessary and decorous right to use the cliche “car wreck” in describing its moral and stylistic content. The film adaptation, which could only have been directed by David Cronenberg, made James Spader creepy for life and non-vanilla sexual fetishes on the silver screen endurable only at foot level.
Why Ballard above, say, Asimov or Heinlein or LeGuin, for a Book of Quotations is unclear except to Mr. Strausbaugh.