Ballardian

A few notes on Steve Severin, the Banshees, and Ballard…

A review of two academic articles written by Ben Noys on Ballard’s work, both analysing Ballard’s place in contemporary cultural production. This review also considers Mark Fisher’s recent Lacanian analysis of Basic Instinct 2, in an edition of Film-Philosophy edited by Noys, with its unearthing of intriguing Ballardian parallels.

Ballard comes in at no. 27 in the Times list of the Greatest British Writers Since 1945. But one thing baffles me…

A review of Demanding the Impossible, the Third Australian Conference on Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction, held at Monash University, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia, Dec 5-7.

According to William Viney, Crash presents a barrage of images that expresses collapse, dereliction, and waste; a seemingly endless carnival of sex and destruction; intoxicating, perverting, and desensitizing the reader, while Empire of the Sun can be seen as the terminus of Ballard’s treatment of waste, the epitome of all that has gone before. Although Ballard’s other works deal with the subject of death and the disposal of corpses, Empire of the Sun attempts to cope with this disposal on a mass-scale, or rather, during both war and peace, it explores the complex transition between the valued human being and lifeless, disposable cadaver.

Dominika Oramus reads Ballard’s work as a record of the gradual internal degeneration of Western civilization: though we are not literally living amidst the ruins, the golden age is far behind us and we are witnessing the twilight of the West.

Vale of RE/Search Publications fame has a new blog. No Ballard hooks yet, but doubtless there will be in the collapsible future.
Vale, after all, is the publisher of RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard, a stunning document of JGB’s work (along with the more recent JGB Quotes and Conversations volumes). RE/Search #8/9 centres around a series of [...]

A Melbourne rugby reporter, Ben Davis, is bashed on live TV while giving a report. Unsurprisingly, his attackers are caught, given the attack was broadcast to the entire nation. Ballardian? Absolutely. Let’s count the ways…

The basic tenet in Dominika Oramus’ new book on Ballard is that since the end of World War II western civilization has been merrily racing down the Highway to Hell in a white Pontiac; and all the evidence you need is in the fiction of J.G. Ballard.

Pertinent, in the wake of this and this:
Tired after my meeting with Zander, I sat down and ordered a vin blanc from the young French waitress, who wore jeans and a white vest printed with a quotation from Baudrillard.”
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J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes. (p. 88).
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As I’ve been taken to task regarding my last post about the J.G. Ballard Myspace profile, in hindsight I can see that my tongue had actually pierced my cheek, and for that I apologise. Just to clarify, my post was chiefly to comment on Myspace as an entity; my rant against ‘a terrible evil gated [...]

by Simon Sellars

Suburban Badlands: the Mill Park aftermath. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).
The system is self-regulating. It relies on our sense of civic responsibility. Without that, society would collapse. In fact, the collapse may even have begun.”
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J.G. Ballard. Millennium People (2003; p. 104).
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On the morning of 2 January 2007, Melbourne woke to disturbing [...]

i.m. Jean Baudrillard
by Benjamin Noys
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In the wake of Jean Baudrillard’s death, Ballardian presents Benjamin Noys’s essay exploring the ‘point of convergence between the writing of Jean Baudrillard and J.G. Ballard’. This is a slightly modified version of the article that appeared as ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard’, Ícone 9 (2006): 29-38, reproduced [...]

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, seductive [...]

Photo: Stephen Hughes.
Read recently…
+ Via Fanny Magnate, David Chandler’s essay on the work of photographer Stephen Hughes:
Over the last five years Hughes has worked all over Europe, developing an interest in what might be called ‘peripheral places’, sometimes places literally on the edge — of cities perhaps, or by the sea — but also pockets [...]

J.G. Ballard, in 1960, posing in front of his ‘experimental billboard fiction’.
On 5 May 2007, ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard’, apparently the first-ever conference on the work of Ballard, will be held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Guest speakers include the novelist Toby Litt; Roger Luckhurst, author [...]

Mark Dery is back online (thanks for the tip, Chris). The occasion? Unpacking My Library, a response to a request from Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz for a list of favorite books (as David says, “Two years later, he’s come through. And I’m grateful. ‘Unpacking My Library’ is a veritable wunderkammer of printed matter.”)
Yes, it’s [...]

No Fear of the Future, a new group blog that’s recently come on line, features a jaw-dropping analysis of celebrity culture from the talented Chris Nakashima-Brown.
It begins by outlining the Ballardian aspects of Operation Paget, the inquiry into the death of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed. Chris sets Paget up as the sequel to [...]

‘Obscene mannequins’. ‘Conceptual deaths’. The eroticisation of violence in the media landscape… the stunning ‘State of Emergency’ spread in the current Vogue Italia seems to come straight out of JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition…
Welcome to our first guest post, hopefully the beginnings of a regular series in which we invite bloggers from far and wide [...]

OPENING LINE:
“Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.”
If The Drowned World was the book which cemented Ballard’s literary reputation (in Britain, at least), then Crash was almost certainly the one which made him a non-entity in America’s eyes. Following on from publisher Nelson Doubleday’s outrage at an earlier Ballard story, ‘Why I Want to Fuck [...]