Slang Editorial :: Never Underestimate The Value Of A Holla'

Monday, July 27, 2009
Crash Into You

Not sure how familiar many of you are with author JG Ballard--arguably one of a handful of the most important and famous British writers of the post-WWII twentieth century--but my friend Katie passed on this fascinating article on the publishing of one of his books and it's definitely worth a read. In my experience for whatever reason there seems to be a curious gap on Ballard-awareness in the minds of Americans--usually when I mention his name I am greeted with only blank stares; and, to be fair, I had never heard of him before studying in England in 2003 and reading his work in one of my courses.

Of course, when you mention his two most famous works, Empire of the Sun and Crash (the subject of the aforementioned article), those blank stares tend to turn into slow realizations, as both books were made into significant films by significant directors (Steven Spielberg and David Cronenberg, respectively) that received both widespread release and mainstream discussion. It is worth keeping in mind that even folks who've heard of or even seen these films have not read the actual books (and many people will tend to ask with trepiditation if by Crash I mean the other, gulp, 2004 schlockfest Crash).

One of the offshoots of a lack of American awareness of Ballard is that over the years US publishers have struggled to understand how to properly market and sell the man, whose work is admittedly difficult to characterize and harder to generalize. In the beginning, much of what he wrote crossed into the territory of science fiction, and at other times he was incredibly surrealistic and experimental; at all times he was at least suggestively post-modernist, but he never really fit the true post-modernist archetypes like many of his contemporaneous experimental peers of the era.

Ballard's work went all over the map, and it didn't help that his two most famous books included one that was semi-autobiographical and completely unlike anything else, and the other partially dismissed as obscene even in the increasingly free early 70s when it was written. This latter book, Crash, in particular posed a challenge as the desires of its subjects--one of whom "craves a union of blood, semen and engine coolant in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor"--cross into boundaries that Americans rarely feel comfortable discussing with emotional detachment or analysis.

The result: many many many different covers were printed to sell Crash, as author, publisher and audience differed in the attitude of what the book was about and how it should be sold to target readers. The two covers below include the conservative first cover on the left, which Ballard hated, and the fantastically expressive (and therefore UK-only) paperback cover, which Ballard loved best.

I've often thought from time to time how books covers influence my decisions to buy and read books*** and strolling through this article gives you a great sense at the lengths taken to define a block of text into an immediately judgeable package.

Two sample covers of Crash below--read the article to see the rest:

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And for those of you interested Ballard and his world, I would recommend that you poke through the crazy crowd-sourced love letter of a site that is Ballardian.com (where the above article comes from) and checking out the books Atrocity Exhibition, High Rise, and Cocaine Nights for a sampling of Ballard "deep cuts".

NOTES:

*** -- Confession: as a 13 year old, I purchased the Ween album Chocolate and Cheese from BMG Music Club exclusively because its hilariously suggestive cover made the newly pubescent Me feel crazed with excitement when looking at it. Incidentally I grew to enjoy the album and the band (though nothing else as much as C&C), but prior to purchasing I'd never heard a note of Ween or even read about them. Yep. Life Of Beaumont, defined brick-by-brick.

Labels: books, case studies, heroes, thoughts

posted by Nihilist Loves Hate, Hates Everything at 7/27/2009 06:40:00 PM 0 comments

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