Going through old correspondence, I came across a collection of cards and letters from a hero - J G Ballard.

That Ballard took the time to respond to my daft letters and notes, questions and queries, says much about the man’s character and greatness. Moreover, during the 10 years of our intermittent correspondence, Ballard was always kind, gracious, encouraging and helpful - an example we all can learn from.

The first, dated April 27 1993, was written on a postcard of Carel Willink De Zeppelin, the blue ink (probably a Pentel pen) has faded somewhat, but still visible is the thanks for kind words and the short story, which he over-praised as “a powerful + original piece of work”. His kind encouragement was unmerited, but I’d be more interested in finding out about him. He wrote off The Kindness of Women:

‘...which is about my writing as much as my life - my life seen through the spectrum of everything I’ve written.’

21/11/94

Dear Mr Gallagher,

Many thanks for your letter from LA - I think probably

you

should make the documentary about the city - I on the whole rather enjoyed the week i spent there some years ago - but then no one mugged me or shot at me on the freeway - part of the problem there have been too many films about LA on TV over the recent years.

Thanks for reading my stuff -

All the best,

J G Ballard

 
One more from Ballard, after the jump…
 

Hunter S. Thompson at work in his ranch in Aspen, 1976
 
Since Mark Twain battered out the first typed manuscript in 1883, writers have had a love affair with their typewriters. To mark the end of the manufacture of these instruments for creativity, the Guardian published a fine selection of key writers at work on their typewriters.
 

Patricia Highsmith at work in her home in Moncourt, near Fontainebleau, in 1976
 
More key writers after the jump…
 
With thanks to Ken Cargill, via the Guardian
 

James Graham Ballard was born today in 1930. 

In a career that spanned 6 decades, the Visionary of Shepperton wrote some of the best and most important speculative fiction of the past century, from The Drought, The Drowned World through Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, High Rise, and The Unlimited Dream Company to Empire of he Sun, Super Cannes and Kingdom Come.

His death last year robbed the literary world of one of its most thoughtful and original thinkers.

This in-depth interview with Ballard was filmed in 2006, as part of Melvyn Bragg’s The South Bank Show and covered the writers background, influences and unique, dystopian vision:

Ranging from his earliest experiences living in China as a child and subsequent imprisonment by the invading Japanese army, through his early and wholly abortive career in medicine - though he says that that experience was totally beneficial to his writing career and that everyone should spend at least some time studing anatomy. Then on through his long career as a full time writer. Starting in 1962 when he gave up his then job as an assistant editor right up to the present day.

Subjects covered are the influence of Surrealist painting in the imagery of his work. How the sudden death of his wife affected his life, work and family. And the impact of his most controversial novel, Crash, which inspired one publisher’s reader to write “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish” - which Ballard took as a huge compliment.

Other contributions in the show come from the likes of Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Martin Amis, all of whom are confirmed Ballard fans.

 
The full interview with J. G. Ballard after the jump…
 

 
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Scotland carried out a series of social experiments, which dealt with an acute housing shortage caused by the sudden increase in the post-war population. Over two decades, thousands of working class families were moved out of slum tenements, from the city of Glasgow, into a series of New Towns, literally modern housing schemes, scattered across the country. 

In 1947, East Kilbride was designated as Scotland’s first New Town, with the aim of bringing together “new methods of production and assembly in order to create dwellings, serving humanity and also reflecting a type of technological progression.”
 

 
More from Hedgefund after the jump…
 

Weird illustrator John Coulthart reports on the Ballardian, dead-America landscapes of http://www.alexisrockman.net/. Of course you can put “Ballardian” before anything and I’ll look at it, but this is particularly good stuff.

Alexis Rockman?