“Crash changed my life,” writes Simon Sellars. The co-editor of Extreme Metaphors (2012), a collection of JG Ballard interviews, Sellars is a self-confessed obsessive, a “Ballardian”. But Applied Ballardianism is no dry scholarly study of the bard of Shepperton. This brilliantly written genre mashup is ostensibly a memoir of the author’s obsession and his attempt to write a doctoral thesis on his idol.
Overwhelmed by self-loathing and disillusioned by academia (“my PhD was nothing more than a set of rusted and broken callipers for a crippled mind”), he plunges headlong into Ballardian “inner space”, a disturbing mirror world where reality and dream merge. He travels to Tangier to find William Burroughs’s “Interzone”, has close encounters with UFOs, searches for the spirit world in Japan, works as a gonzo travel writer island-hopping in the Pacific, and returns to his hometown Melbourne, (“built on the rubble of autogeddon”) where he prowls the freeways with a sinister Ballardian figure.
The thesis remains unwritten. Instead we have Applied Ballardianism – a wonderfully original mix of cultural theory, literary exegesis, travelogue and psychopathological memoir. As Ballard said, “Dangerous bends ahead. Slow down.”
