[Prestidigitweeze]

Funny, because I feel the same way about Henry Miller that you do about Sade. Again, this is personal taste and not meant to be corrective or authoritative.

My problem with Miller is that he actually believed the prostitutes who told him he was incredibly virile and handsome and amazing in bed, and wrote journals filled with second-hand certainty about what seemed to me to be transparently unreal and therefore fragile self-representation.

It's one of the worst insults I can think of for any novelist, since they're supposed to understand people to some degree, and it could be his epitaph: He believed what prostitutes told him about himself.

The late novelist Kathy Acker used to teach writing exercises at Cal Arts based on Sade (they were great exercises, BTW; I've used one of them with other writers I know).

It's a mistake to think he only writes from the point of view of the sadist. His real point was to play with people's preconceptions and outrage, and to so destroy the reader's identification of good with likable characters that you can't even find the author's POV. If Sade were as juvenile as you suggest, he wouldn't have helped to shape the course of modern literature and theory for the past two hundred years.

That doesn't mean I agree with books like Philosophy of the Bedroom. It means that Sade is a polemical model (see Roland Barthes writings on Sade).

If you only know Ballard from Empire of the Sun, then with all due respect, you really don't know Ballard, who was at least as experimental as Burroughs. This is not an insult, as no one can read everything. I myself have read very little.

Empire of the Sun is an autobiography, comes very late in Ballard's career and, to be honest with you, I never actually made it through the entire book because the style isn't really that of the Ballard I know (though it's interesting to know that his haunting the graveyard of an airfield as a child is probably the source of his lifelong technofetishism and tech revulsion).

The books Ballard wrote in the 60s and 70s were so controversial that the publication of one of them -- The Atrocity Exhibition -- was stopped in America when a buyer wandered through the publisher's warehouse, picked up a copy (it was to be called Love and Napalm Stateside) and read the heading, "Why I Want to F--- Ronald Reagan" in boldface. This was long before Reagan was President, but the book stopped production that day. I recall seeing early copies in hardcover in a glass case at a local bookstore. They were rare by that time.

The last thing I loved by Ballard was Running Wild, a novel that pretends to be an interpretation of recordings of the lives of a group of children who murdered their parents. This is announced at the beginning of the book, so I'm not giving anything away.

The Atrocity Exhibition, Vermilion Sands were two of the books that shaped me as a child. Another was The Lime Twig by John Hawkes, who was until his recent death (in my incredibly humble opinion) one of the greatest living stylists in the English language. Other writers I loved: The Nabokov of Pale Fire, Thomas Bernhard, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and Borges's Ficciones.

Anyone is free to hate any or all of these writers and I won't argue against them until I know their reasons. I believe there are good reasons to love or hate virtually anything. After all, we don't all take the same vitamins and medications, nor can we all digest the same food. Why should literature be any different?

One of Ballard's biggest defenders was Anthony Burgess, who used to assert Ballard's superiority to Burroughs in interviews as well as at least one essay. Which isn't to say he's right, but only to show that I'm not alone in considering Ballard important.