Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

Details of a new exhibition in London that “often plays with the constants of space and time”. It includes the work of Michelle Lord, whose “Future Ruins” series previously featured on Ballardian.

A man is trapped in an elevator for 41 hours, steadily losing his mind. But to you, he’s just another bug crawling around on a security-camera lens. What do you do?

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.

The final version of Thomas Cazals’ tribute, ‘J.G. Ballard: The Oracle of Shepperton’, has been released. It’s one of the stranger JGB ‘adaptations’ around, and is told with considerable flair and skill.

A repost of this tribute to Robbe-Grillet, with the addition of some extra quotes that either illuminate or obfuscate…

I am delighted to report that the book of Chris Marker’s La Jetée is back in print through Zone Books — and in hardcover, too. It will be out in (US) Spring 2008. Thank you, thank you: for years, second-hand copies were changing hands via Amazon and eBay for anything up to $400.
Unable to […]

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, including (so […]

Annoyed with myself, I set off along the narrow street, past the surveillance cameras that guarded the lacquered doorways, each lens with its own story to tell. Hidden perspectives turned Estrella de Mar into a huge riddle. Trompe-l’oeil corridors beckoned but led nowhere…
J.G. Ballard. Cocaine Nights (1996).
Every good Ballardian needs this: SurveillanceSaver, a screensaver that […]

‘Tourism is the great soporific. It’s a huge confidence trick, and gives people the dangerous idea that there’s something interesting in their lives. It’s musical chairs in reverse. Every time the muzak stops people stand up and dance around the world, and more chairs are added to the circle, more marinas and Marriott hotels, so […]

‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, directed by Peter Potter, is an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story of that name, produced as part of the BBC’s Out of the Unknown series of science-fiction dramatisations. But at that time film and television was just not capable of delivering the frisson that the best SF literature provided (it […]

Paul emails to tell me of this news item:
The European Space Agency (Esa) is after volunteers for a simulated human trip to Mars, in which six crewmembers spend 17 months in an isolation tank. They will live and work in a series of interlocked modules at a research institute in Moscow.
Once the hatches […]

Self-portrait: next to the M3 in Shepperton (photo: Simon Sellars).
Apologies for the down time this site has experienced since the Ballard conference. I’m still in England where I’ve experienced many Ballardian and sub-Ballardian moments (and even some non-Ballardian moments, would you Adam and Eve it?) including exchanging views on ‘torture porn’ with Rick Poynor against […]

OPENING LINE:
“Soon it would be too hot.”
From Amazon UK:
In the 21st century, fluctuations in solar radiation have caused the ice-caps to melt and the seas to rise. Global temperatures have climbed, and civilization has retreated to the Arctic and Antarctic circles. London is a city now inundated by a primeval swamp, to which an expedition […]

OPENING LINE:
“Above all, the darkness of the river was what impressed Dr. Sanders as he looked out for the first time across the open mouth of the Matarre estuary.”
Ballard’s fourth novel. My 1993 Flamingo version has quotes on the back:
Through a ‘leaking’ of time and a supersaturation of matter, a forest area in West […]

OPENING LINE:
“Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition — to which the patients themselves were not invited — was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.”
For many, The Atrocity Exhibition is […]

OPENING LINE:
“Soon after three o’clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London”.
This short novel represents the second installment in JGB’s ‘urban disaster’ trilogy (Crash was the first; High-Rise was to follow).
Architect Robert Maitland crashes his […]

by J.G. Ballard (1994)
The day-dream of being marooned on a desert island still has enormous appeal, however small our chances of actually finding ourselves stranded on a coral atoll in the pacific. But Robinson Crusoe was one of the first books we read as children, and the fantasy endures. There are all the fascinating problems […]