Sunday, April 19, 2009

Ballard Is Dead

From an interview with J.G. Ballard, by Graeme Revell:

"JGB: Actually, whereas classical mythologies, classical legends, tended to be concerned with explaining origins (where the world came from, how the planets were formed, how life itself was born), I think the sort of mythologies I'm interested in (in, say, Myths of the Near Future) are concerned with ends rather than with beginnings. Certainly they're projections. The title Myths of the Near Future exactly sums up what I think a lot of present writers, musicians like yourself (as far as I can tell), filmmakers, painters like, say, Francis Bacon, are concerned with: the mythologies of the future. Not myths which will one day replace the classical legends of ancient Greece, but predictive mythologies; those which in a sense provide an operating formula by which we can deal with our passage through consciousness - our movements through time and space. These are mythologies you can actually live by: how to cope with the urban landscape, the whole series of enciphered meanings that lie half-exposed within the urban landscape, within the communications landscape we all inhibit and to some extent contribute to. I'm interested in what I think of as a radically new set of mythologies that aren't concerned with the past, even in the sense that psychoanalysis is concerned with the past...".

J.G. Ballard, our Euripides, has passed away...

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