Ballardian

This should have been included in yesterday’s wrapup, but wasn’t.

+ BALLARD/BURROUGHS

This very brief interview with Ballard (scroll down to the end of the V. Vale piece to find it) slipped under my radar when it came out earlier this year, but is definitely worth mentioning for the little extra light it sheds on one of the main, parallel figures in Ballard’s career — William S. Burroughs. Here, ‘Scottish scribbler’ Graham Rae quizzes JGB about his relationship with WSB, and receives this immortal anecdote in return:

I met [Burroughs] … at his St James Street flat … he cooked a tasty roast chicken … and then demonstrated with the carving knife where best to inflict a fatal stab wound — he kept away from the windows, claiming that the CIA/Time magazine were watching him from a disguised laundry van. In some 20 meetings we never discussed anything literary.”

[thanks, Supervert]

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+ PENCIL ART

And in news just to hand, Ballard spills his guts to the Telegraph’s Mandrake column:

Understandably for an author whose most famous work, Empire of the Sun, failed to win the Booker Prize, J G Ballard is fed up with artistic awards.

“There are too many of these kinds of prizes and they are distracting,” he tells Mandrake. “It is like a minor public school where everyone gets a prize for something.”

The 76-year-old novelist, whose acclaimed Cocaine Nights was beaten to the Whitbread Prize in 1996, says of the Poet Laureate, disparagingly: “People like Andrew Motion are given awards but I can’t think of a memorable line he has written.”

For good measure, he adds: “You hear the hype surrounding the Turner Prize and you think the judges must have discovered another Jacob Epstein. Then you realise it’s for someone who has put a pencil on top of another one or who has switched a light on and off.”

Ouch! What a grumpy old man.

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Now, move on to the rest of the Ballardosphere wrapup (part 6).
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