Borges y Ballard
By Simon Sellars • Jul 3rd, 2008 •
Category: Ballardosphere, Borges, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, short stories
Borges y Ballard.
Archive for the ‘Borges’ Category
'What would Borges do?'
By Simon Sellars • Nov 21st, 2007 •
Category: alternate worlds, Ballardosphere, Borges, CCTV, film, inner space, paranormal, surveillance, technology
Image from Diet Soap #1. + Following on from my rapture at discovering the SurveillanceSaver software, here are some more portals onto mediated inner space. Chris Nakashima-Brown brings news of issue 1 of the fabulous zine, Diet Soap. The theme is Surveillance and there are poems, palindromes, fiction, reportage and lots of excellent collaged art, [...]
Minimal Concrete City for Sale: Serious Interested Parties Only!
By Simon Sellars • Sep 30th, 2007 •
Category: alternate worlds, architecture, Ballardosphere, Borges, gated communities, micronations, WWII
Traven stumbled into a set of tracks left years earlier by a large caterpillar vehicle. The heat released by the weapons tests had fused the sand, and the double line of fossil imprints, uncovered by the evening air, wound its serpentine way among the hollows like the footfalls of an ancient saurian. … One question [...]
Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard
By Mike Holliday • Jul 9th, 2007 •
Category: Borges, Brian Eno, film, Iain Sinclair, interviews, literature, Michael Moorcock, music, New Worlds, Shepperton, Steven Spielberg, William Burroughs
Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and JGB’s partner Claire Walsh in September, 2006 (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock). ———————————————— Interview by Mike Holliday ———————————————— Michael Moorcock has been a prolific writer and editor for the last five decades. Born in London, he was editing his first magazine by the age of seventeen, and started writing genre fiction [...]
City of the Immortals
By Simon Sellars • Jun 21st, 2007 •
Category: architecture, Ballardosphere, Borges, visual art
City of the Immortals, by Michelle Lord (2007). Besides Future Ruins, Michelle Lord is holding a second exhibition as part of the UK’s national Architecture Week. Titled The City of the Immortals, it’s based “upon the Jorges Luis Borges short story ‘The Immortal’. In a narrative series of photographic images, the fictional city Borges describes [...]
Fantastical Literary Celluloid Icons
By Simon Sellars • Apr 15th, 2007 •
Category: alternate worlds, Ballardosphere, Borges, celebrity culture, film, Philip K. Dick, television
Back in 1986, Kurt Vonnegut (RIP) made an amusing cameo in Rodney Dangerfield’s fake-fart laden masterpiece Back to School. But did you also know that William Gibson appeared in Wild Palms alongside Jim Belushi; that Philip K. Dick guest-starred in a 1971 episode of Bewitched; that Jorge Luis Borges stole the show in an ep [...]
RIP Jean Baudrillard
By Simon Sellars • Mar 7th, 2007 •
Category: academia, Ballardosphere, Borges, death of affect, Jean Baudrillard, speed & violence
According to French Education Minister Gilles de Robien: “We lose a great creator. Jean Baudrillard was one of the great figures of French sociological thought.” In the wake of Baudrillard’s death at age 77, with homeostatic news sources struggling to redefine hyperreality while churning out great steaming wads of the stuff, return to Baudrillard’s glistening, [...]
Another Atrocity: A 'New' Work by J.G. Ballard
By Mike Bonsall • Feb 17th, 2006 •
Category: Borges, features, medical procedure, pastiche
The Atrocity Exhibition is a collection of J.G. Ballard’s most extraordinary short stories. Written in the few years following the tragic death of his wife, they are his most difficult work, representing the extremes of anguish, desire, alienation and horror. Compact and repetitive, they pick over the same questions of psychopathology, sexuality and death in [...]
But JG Ballard doesn't write them anymore…
By Simon Sellars • Aug 24th, 2005 •
Category: Ballardosphere, Borges, short stories
From the Guardian: Wednesday August 24, 2005 "Keep it brief’: A new £15,000 prize for short stories suggests Britain is finally getting over its obsession with the novel. And not before time, says Aida Edemariam … [William] Boyd identified seven types of short story, beginning with the "event-plot story", one of its earliest forms, in [...]
