Ballardian

Dan O’Hara back-translates an interview with JGB originally published in French in 1985. As the interviewers observe, Ballard was almost the subject of a French cult due to Crash. Asking why there are no car-crashes in Empire of the Sun, they reveal a very suggestive lacuna, with Ballard replying that even when one characteristic theme is absent from a work, the underlying emotion may remain the same, expressed by different means. Choice of metaphor is merely a matter of tone

Dan O’Hara back-translates a brief interview with J.G. Ballard, originally published in French in 1975. Here, Ballard discusses the research he did into the link between criminal behaviour and urban environments, a seed of insight that would sustain his writing right up until Kingdom Come.

Here’s another republished interview, this time from 2005 as Mitchell and Ford probe JGB about his infamous 1970 ‘Crashed Cars’ exhibition, which elicited drunken aggression from its bemused audience.

With thanks to Headpress books, here’s an interview with JGB conducted by Mark Goodall in 2006 for his book Sweet & Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens. The interview covers JGB’s admiration for the Mondo Cane films of Gualtiero Jacopetti, so-called ’shockumentaries’ that in their artfully faked scenarios present what Ballard terms ‘an elective psychopathy that would change the world (so we hoped, naively)’.

This is the latest in Dan O’Hara’s back translations of German Ballard chats: an interview with JGB from 2005. This may well be the only time Ballard has been asked to consider the lyrics of Kanye West.

Dan O’Hara is back with another translation of a German Ballard interview, this time from 2007 with JGB in priapic, puckish form.

Another installment in Dan O’Hara’s re-translations of archival German Ballard interviews: a 1982 conversation conducted by Werner Fuchs and Joachim Körber.

This is the second of Dan O’Hara’s re-translations of JGB interviews originally published in German. This one dates from 1976, and in it Ballard provides comment on Russian writers and explains how film technique infiltrates and influences his own writing.

Dan O’Hara has re-translated three interviews with JGB, originally published in German in the 60s, in which Ballard provides absorbing insight into his enviro-disaster trilogy: The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World.

Here’s the last in our batch of transcripts of recent Miracles promotions: James Naughtie’s interview with JGB for BBC Radio 4.

Here’s a transcription of the BBC Radio Front Row review of Miracles, presented by Mark Lawson and featuring Iain Sinclair and Hermione Lee.

This one’s a transcript of BBC 2’s Newsnight Review segment on Miracles of Life. It features Tony Parsons, Julie Myerson and John Harris and is presented by Kirsty Wark.

Here’s a transcript of Philip Dodd’s recent BBC Radio 3 interview with JGB.

Will Self was recently interviewed on BBC Radio 4 by Mariella Frostrup about his admiration for J.G. Ballard’s work. Here’s a transcript of that interview.

This is an English translation of an interview with J.G. Ballard by Alexander Gutzmer, originally published in German by Welt am Sonntag, 3 June 2007.

Damien Love interviewed J.G. Ballard in September 1996. At the time Ballard was one of only a very few people in the UK to have seen David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash, which was wrapped in a controversy that was baffling then and seems truly mystifying now.

Photo by Simon Sellars
This transcript was first published in Sub Dee Magazine (no. 5 Summer 1997), a print project I was involved in long before Ballardian. At the time, J.G. Ballard’s career was in the ascendancy after what was perceived to be an average period in his writing. Cocaine Nights had just been released and [...]

by William Burroughs (1970)
The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content [...]