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A new book of Ballard's non-fiction!
But don't you already have A User’s Guide to the Millennium?
Yes.
Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007 contains more, though.
Like what?
I don't know.
It's like a new box set of your favourite pop star featuring bonus tracks...only there's no barrel scraping equivalent of 'Born To Run' (Take 5, incomplete).
No, I know Bruce Springsteen isn't your favourite pop star but you get my point.
Ballard never wrote about music, as far as I know. Perhaps it wasn't as important to him as Surrealist art or William Burroughs. Still, if forced to imagine him listening to anything I would suggest Classical music playing quietly in the background whilst he conjures up beach scenes in dream landscapes (Debussy?) or Trad Jazz (quietly) as old-time nostalgia for an age he never knew.
Really, ideally, placing him at the birth of the Independent Group as a new sci-fi short story writer in the mid-50s the soundtrack should be Modern Jazz but he wasn't that hip. Like William Burroughs, he always looked like a businessman, a square from the suburbs, a conformist. That's the best disguise for a radical writer, ensuring nobody in the street will suspect and start asking questions. Shh...
Although he didn't write about music bands such as Joy Division,
The Normal and Cabaret Voltaire were undoubtedly influenced by him. Others too, no doubt, but not Gary Numan just because he wrote a song called Cars. Surely. But I don't know. Perhaps Gary new Ballard inside out.
Without having read all of this book I can say a highlight is his review of How To Achieve Sexual Ecstasy from 1969. He recommends the book, despite describing it as '...a nostalgic hymn to a kind of sexual garden of Eden' which fails to chime with looser attitudes of the day.
One thing's for sure, no matter how times and attitudes change, Ballard's writing will never feel outdated.
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