/lit/ - Literature

>>11939792
I wish there was a Ballard chart.

>>11939797
Why don’t you read his oeuvre and create the chart yourself you lazy bastard.

>>11940227
it's not that easy m8

>>11940234
Ill say, Atrocity Exibition isn’t an easy starting point. Its sort of stream of consciousness or psychedelic, I don’t know what the word for that is. It’s like Naked Lunch in its style, so hard to read like a conventional book.

I’ve heard that concrete island, high rise, and empire of the sun are his other major books. The first two being also pretty fucked up like crash, while eots is just like a war memoir.

>>11939797
First post, best post. I'm thinking about reading his stuff so I can read the new book about him.

>>11939797
>>11940234
You can group his novels

Apocalypse/earth-ending events: first four, Drowned World is his best

Psychedelic degenerates high on technology: Crash, High Rise, Atrocity Exhibition/Concrete Island, in that order. I didn't like Atrocity Exhibition. Concrete Island is still pretty weird and has a unique premise, but is written more conventionally, and it's not as good.

More conventional, set in warzones: Empire of the Sun, Day of Creation

Everything after that: dunno, haven't read any of them, but I've heard they're more like crime novels/thrillers

To be honest it's pretty hard to go wrong with Ballard. Just pick one of Crash/Empire of the Sun/Drowned World. He has a distinct writing style, if you like it keep reading.

Here's something from Empire of the Sun, after war has broken out and young Jim is wandering around the deserted streets, hiding from bandits adn soldiers and scavenging in abandoned houses to survive.

>Jim lay on the soft sawdust, with its soothing scent of pine. Through the open doors of the timber store he watched the navigation lights of the Japanese aircraft crossing the night. After a few minutes he was forced to admit that he could recognise none of the constellations. Like everything else since the war, the sky was in a state of change. For all their movement, the Japanese aircraft were its only fixed points, a second zodiac above the broken land

I stopped reading halfway through because it didn't seem like anything was happening. Does the story progress at all?

>>11940855
Huh, from reading it years ago I had a vague idea that the writing in Empire of the Sun was very unlike his speculative stuff. That passage is far more Ballardian than I expected.

>>11939792
Great little book there. I kind of feel like the thing is 99.8% of the readers can't get all the way into their heads, because that fetish is so unlikely, but you can make equivalencies between it and other experiences. I certainly feel like it's a book which takes me up to the limit of what I can feel for. Someone who goes in with only horror won't get much out of it.

>>11940234
I'd suggest:

> High Rise as start
> More psychopathology = Crash, leads on to Concrete Island
> More apocalyptic = Crystal World, leads on to Drowned World (more of the same), Vermillion Sands (sci fi direction)
> More reality-based = Empire, then Kindness of Women

That's all I've read, someone else can probably add more.

>>11941012
That's one particularly flowery bit, but his writing is very distinct, even if the subject matter is conventional. And there are the usual Ballardian twists: the lonely British kid prefers the honourable Japanese and the brave Americans to the servile Chinese and arrogant British, and loathes the end of the war because it means the end of the routine and relative safety of the prisoner camps.

>As he passed the tumulus he stopped to peer into the lidless coffins. The yellowing skeletons were embedded in the rain-washed mud, as if these poor peasants had been laid out on pallets of silk. Once again Jim was struck by the contrast between the impersonal bodies of the newly dead, whom he saw everyday in Shanghai, and these sun-warmed skeletons, every one an individual. The skulls intrigued him, with their squinting eye-sockets and quirky teeth. In many ways these skeletons were more alive than the peasant-farmers who had briefly tenanted their bones. Jim felt his cheeks and jaw, trying to imagine his own skeleton in the sun, lying here in this peaceful field within sight of the deserted aerodrome.

To add to >>11941037, I would also recommend starting with some of Ballard's short stories:

- The Concentration City, Chronopolis, Billenium, Having a Wonderful Time, The Intensive Care Unit: these are all kind of 'sociological' stories in that they take some aspect of modern life and extend it to gargantuan proportions.

Two other ones I really like but can't describe without giving them away are Thirteen to Centaurus and The Voices of Time

>>11941429
Although I've only read the Vermillion Sands stuff, I kind of felt like the stories stopped working for me after a while. He doesn't really have a lot of variety in his characters or plots and if you take on a bunch of them one after another it's sort of numbing even when the quality is consistently good. So I never bought pic related despite the good reviews

>>11940855
Read high rise and kinda hated it. Such a drag. Took me months to finish. Thought about giving his later work a shot...
>>11940775
New book? Which one?

Bump.

>>11941767
Crash is probably a better book, but it's in the same vein as High Rise. I'd recommend Empire of the Sun. Just a really amazing story and also sort of unlocks his personal psychosis by showing where it came from

>>11943337
I'll have to check it out.

How is the flowchart/guide coming along anons?

The best way to tackle Ballard is chronologically, although it is going to take a lot of effort.
I started with the complete short stories, which goes year by year, inserting longer works when I reached their year of publication.
This was a year or so ago, and I am only at the year 1980, but I can understand the thematic unity of all his works, and a I get a sense of what "Ballardian" is as an aesthetic and a philosophy.

>>11941767
I think they are referring to this

>>11947593
Yeah this is what I was referring to. I'll probably get it soon. Think it might be interesting to have it talked about here on /lit/.

>>11948973
I thought you were talking about this one. I got it even though I hated high rise like I said and haven’t read anything else by him. But I heard people I respect praising him as the writer with the best prognosis for our times. Outside and above the usual Orwell or Huxley circle jerk.

>>11949194
I haven't read much of himself either but you might want to go back and try a different "type" or content of his writing like the other posters here have discussed.

>>11949194
>this one
>pic apparently related
Uh... I'll guess Atrocity Exhibition?

bump

>>11939792
I read Baudrillard's take on it in S&S. Sounds really degenerate.

>>11949463
No, not that pic! I was replying to the poster that confirmed the book talked about earlier was ‘Applied Ballardianism’

>>11939797
I'll make one, hold up

>>11939797

>>11951851
i wasn't very clear, but if you enjoy one of the novels in the red box I'd recommend reading the one below it also

>>11951851
I always prefer them with annotations along the lines of 'more of the same' or 'if you'd prefer...', as it is I find some of your progressions here incomprehensible. Especially the position of Empire.

>>11941767
I'm a third of the way into High-rise and I'm loving it.
What didn't you like about it?

I'm checking this guy out today in my local bookshop, thanks for the suggestion frens I love you

>>11951876
Seconding this.
>>11952005
I love you too friend. Let us know what you think of him when you get to reading?

>>11947593
Anyone have this yet who can post at least the table of contents for starters?

>>11954105
I will tomorrow when the thread is still alive
>>11951902
I don’t remember that well really. I read it a few years ago because I heard a film based on it was coming out. Guess the plot was kinda slow and the prose was neither elegant nor captivating. Also thematically I very quickly rolled my eyes about the figurative and literal vertical class conflict and the living in a mall dystopia thing.
But maybe this is a brainlet approach, let me know your thoughts!

>>11954968
Ok thanks. I figure it's just the author breaking down various works for a lot of it though so I think I will have a lot of reading to do before I start on the book. Let me know if that's the case.

>>11951851
My head hurts trying to figure this out.

Ugly as fuck because I don't know what I'm doing, but how about this?

>>11956727
>I don't even like books
kek, pretty accurate

>>11955966
there does not seem to be a table of contents. I thought it would be an academic approach to his work but it's more like 100 blog posts about a Ballard influenced world view. a sorta travel journal with pop culture in mind, centered around Ballard.

>>11957699
Snap. I'm guessing there aren't really any academic approaches to Ballard out there? I might search for some journal articles or something later if the thread is still alive.

>>11956727
Eh this one seems usable.

>>11958347
Why would you guess that?

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/J_G_Ballard.html?id=bOwStAEACAAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y

>>11959143
Just seems to be not as popular as people here would lead you to believe.

bump

>>11960153
???

I don't see why that would mean there aren't academic writings on Ballard. /lit/ is clearly not academia.

>>11960153
>>11961753
...sorry, misread. Yeah, he'd be a niche subject in academia, clearly. But academia is full of niche subjects.

...but does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?

>>11939792
naw
the book is about humanities intrinsic obsession with violence & our cycles of abuse. Our libidos are fundamentally tied too our desire for destruction & we are destined to corrupt others the way we have been corrupted

>tfw got an erection while reading it

living in tokyo and reading it during long train trips is not a good idea

>>11963397
Like imagine reading the part in the car shop and at the same time this girl in a small skirt is sitting right in front of you almost revealing it all with her thighs pressing on the train seats.

>>11963397
Sounds like the start of one of those Hentai videos ya hear about man.

bump

>>11964942
Fucking sweet.

I've never actually read anything outside the urban disasters and apocalypse stuff. Comforting suburb of the soul sounds awesome though - recommended?

>tfw a good thread on /lit/

Sweet

>>11964942
Most impressive

>>11966292
>>11964942
...my only criticism would be that it makes the short stories look secondary. I think they're probably the best starting point, especially as they touch on all of the different 'types' you've identified.

>>11964942
>>11966295

I'd add that the Drowned World is way overrated in this thread and in general. Prose quality is lower than the later books and the imagery is played out. Crystal World is way cooler - Conrad-referencing setting, psychotic universal breakdown imagery. I feel like environmentalism makes people prefer the [unlikely] scenario in the former even though the latter is more exciting and original. Also, diamond crocodiles.

>>11966279
>tfw a good thread on /lit/ is randomly infected by Ontologicool posting.

>>11966266

The full quote is:
"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again … the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul."

The whole "suburb of the soul" stuff is supposed to be dystopian, perhaps more so than the scenarios in Crash, High Rise and Concrete Island.

>>11966937

The Crystal World is definitely the better novel, but The Drowned World is a more Ballardian one. It gives an early, unvarnished glimpse of the author's preoccupations with his quasi-Jungian idea of "deep time", his aesthetic affinity for surrealism, his use of the female character as the guide to the self-insert protagonist as he explores the rapid unraveling of a new world, his sociopolitical idea that the reality experienced by the middle classes is liable to collapse at any moment due to some unforeseen collusion of the primal and the technological. It's all there in The Drowned World.

>>11966295

Let me see if I can create a similar infographic for his short stories.

>>11968304
How big are the two short story volumes? I think I'd be tempted to just read them all together.

>>11941513
love this cover so much

bump

>>11968304
>similar infographic for his short stories
That would be cool- there's loads of them and they vary so much.

I'd say Voices of Time and The Terminal Beach (the stories, not the volumes) are essential. I also like The Drowned Giant although its magic realist style feels very different from most of his stuff.

>>11971373
...oh, also the (original?) short version of The Crystal World.

bmp

>>11972754
Stop bumping for fuck's sake. This is a slow board.

>>11973140
Yeah and 8-9 hours and passed and this was on like page 8 or 9 you fucking bitch. Bumpity bumpity because screw you asshole!

>>11973607
Keep bumping like that and you're going to Crash

>>11973644
Good thing that's my fetish ;)

This book made me want to masturbate furiously. So it was pretty good.

>>11974521
Did you though?

Any other good writers or philosophers similar to Ballard?

>>11976908
Baudrillard, maybe

>>11977012
I've always thought about this.

>>11977012
Is America still relevant? I like Baudrillard but I feel like this book might be a little outdated....

>>11978190
America was America in the 80s. It was America in the 1800s. A European could always look upon America and see it as its degenerate, smelly, uncouth cousin.

>>11978217
>Europestan calling America degenerate, smelly, and uncouth anymore.

Ballard was very much pro-American, at least in the early years. He wanted high modernism of mid century America (as exemplified by Freeways and High-Rises ) to displace leftover Victorian frumpiness from the British cultural scene.
This also explains his unusual trajectory as an author- he was drawn to science fiction mostly as tool to work outside the stuffy norms of literature in the 50s and was happy to abandon it when it was no longer necessary.
Even today Ballard remains an antidote to the pervasive crypto-primitivism in contemporary culture and this weird nostalgia for the pre-industrial that afflicts everybody from lefty hipsters to the alt right. He may have written bleak fiction, but his prose made raw concrete seem beautiful. His works aren't even dystopias as much as they are exaggerated explorations of new desires unearthed by technology. He predicted the rise of social media in many of his interviews, and could have easily written about it but that wouldn't have had the visceral impact of something like Crash where he creatively laid out how hyper-atomized individuals form identities around fetishes that are subliminally stoked by the landscape of modern media. To me, that novel is a symbolic condensation of all that goes on in FetLife and the weird parts of Tumblr on any given day, and its dream-like logic does more justice to the idea of fetishism than any amount of straightforward exposition would.

>>11976908
Burroughs

>>11980800
Interesting, start with Naked Lunch I'm guessing?

bump

>>11981481
Nah I suggest you start lunch clothed.

Finished this book not too long ago. I loved the vivid imagery throughout the whole thing. I've near read Ballard's "Atrocity Exhibition," but I imagine it is very akin to this novel, especially since "Crash" is somewhat of an atrocity exhibition in itself. While the book doesn't necessarily have a true plot, the situations and ideas presented in the book are extremely entertaining. I also think the concept of the combination of technology and the human sexual desire is very interesting, both literally and figuratively.

Just picked up Volume One of the complete short stories. Ballard feels underrated, was a great writer. Too literary for sci-fi, or just too difficult to pigeonhole as an author?

>>11984802
Probably both. Is there a good intro to the collection?

>>11984802
I genuinely feel like it's a gender thing. Most literary readers are women, Ballard doesn't market well that way. You occasionally see high tier British authors praise him and it's almost always the men, and in a way that probably doesn't attract female readers. Also, a weird name to drop at dinner parties.

>>11985374
>going to dinner parties
Lol

>>11980800

Their relationship with each other is nicely summed up here:
https://realitystudio.org/scholarship/william-s-burroughs-and-j-g-ballard/

Also: any interest in a Ballard MEGA... or is that against the rules here?

>>11986637
The question was why he isn't popular in general. Not with us.

>>11986794
all the interest

>>11954105
it is on the russian ebook sites or aaaaarg

>>11986794
I mean I think this is pretty close to a MEGA thread for him already. He also fits in nicely with the Comsotech stuff.

bump

>>11986794
lurk more newshit

>>11942400
>>11950853
>>11942400

Posting Ballardian images is a better way to bump.

>>11990733
This looks like an interesting take on the bait images.

/ourguy/ confirmed