In 1959, Martin Bax, a London writer and pediatrician, launched a literary magazine that would eventually shake the foundations of the world, or rather of reality and its often chaste representation.
The magazine was called Ambit, and among its collaborators was the then-glorious (and rare) James Graham Ballard, not yet the author of Empire of the Sun, but already the Exhibition of Atrocities, The Submerged World, and Crash, where contemporary dystopia, the ongoing world darling of the end, the not-so-subtle doom of turbocapitalism and screen consumerism, the darkness (and Evil) that nestles in both. He would tell Ambit with his stories, but also with his ideas. Ballardian ideas, that is, reconstructive ideas.
Beatriz García Guirado and Andreu Navarra have re-loaded Ballard (H&O Editors) to Bax, a contest to distinguish the best poem or story ever written, that’s extraordinarily delicious, mutant, and basic – and now we’ll see why. offered, Ballard is under the influence of any medication, including baby aspirin. The winner was the brilliant Ann Quin, with a story that, in the words of García Guirado y Navarra, “seems to have been conceived on a world-class ayahuasquero trip despite having only taken birth control pills.”
In the story, a man is followed by his three ex-wives on his journey through the American desert through a hallucination and hallucination – housewives’ orgies, managers delivered to machines.
radical experiment
His intention was to go where he hasn’t been yet. Making the world the object of a laboratory and writing, a soulless mad scientific dreamer, and their fusion becoming an intervention that will take literature elsewhere, a strange place where alienation will replace any certainty. frightening and violent, illogical, intolerable towards doubt. The authors call it a field for radical experimentation to argue that not everything is invented. And that’s exactly where Ballard reloads, like the sniper of the illuminating piece, non-biography and non-essay, firing like a kind of ever-changing hybrid of fiction and non-fiction with a single center: life and Shepperton’s work.
Designed to be some of the author’s widest hits, they expand in such unexpected directions that they’ve been chasing each other from the start and explode at one point. Sometimes the stories feel like you’re reading an on-going, sometimes-splitting author’s unreliable autobiography, sometimes just a prophecy that comes true, and sometimes you’re reading a novel by JG Ballard, it’s being written because it’s being written. Written from the moment it appeared. And here is the value of writing that transcends boundaries—all boundaries—in search of itself: it explores an uncharted wild path, in this case one that sees the author as a kinetic totem.
One before and one after
Beatriz García Guirado and Andreu Navarra, whose indomitable Los pies frios (Slopper) is not to be missed, thus illuminate a new approach to a writer, while at the same time initiating an experimental thinking of the world. And fortunately, he writes the inevitable.
For Ballard, there was a before and after in the representation of what hides the seemingly happy world of consumer goods, the simulation of plasticized postmodern life. And this becomes all too evident in his many and many children in Ballard Reloaded, which begins in the Alicante cemetery where his wife, who died on vacation at a very young age, was buried and left him in charge of the three children he had raised alone. many different ways.
To Ballard, who has always lived between the apparent and the frightening – he was also raised in a central part of the United States in Shanghai, British and in a Japanese concentration camp in Shanghai. Japan invaded China, the year 1943-, now he was interested in the concept of what-now what–that is, the concept of consequences—hence his obsession with accidents—because his life was basically nothing more than one accident after another. -all seemed fine, and they suddenly stopped: his perfect childhood, his perfect marriage-and his work, which was so impressive, knew how to elevate it to a universal concept (alert), which allowed us to explain what was still there. It happens, today, all the cruel and cruel time.