Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

Miracles of Life is in the running for the £30,000 Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize.

From amazon.co.uk:
Synopsis
‘Miracles of Life’ opens and closes in Shanghai, the city where J.G.Ballard was born, and where he spent the most of the Second World War interned with his family in a Japanese concentration camp. In the intervening chapters Ballard creates a memoir that is both an enthralling narrative and a detailed examination of […]

OPENING LINE:
“In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’).
From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:
The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, published over the […]

The new book Sweet and Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens, by Mark Goodall has just been published by Headpress in the UK. The only blurb comes from Ballard and Goodall conducts a short interview with him on the subject:
‘An Exhibition of Atrocities’
excerpt:
Goodall: Can you recall any critical or other ‘professional’ reactions to […]

Mr Rent-A-Quote is at it again. “I prefer car washes and chinese takeaways” — another classic soundbite.
From The Telegraph, 14/5/06.
“Next month at Tate Britain, John Constable’s magnificent canvases of the English countryside will be shown together for the first time. J.G. Ballard, Jon Snow, Sir John Mortimer and others describe what his paintings mean to […]

Here at Ballardian we’re going to be doing an interview soon with Geoff Manaugh from BLDG BLOG about the influence of Ballardian ideas in the architectural realm, but in the meantime whet your appetite with this latest piece from JGB in the Guardian, about the modernists and the ‘architecture of death’.
A handful of dust
The modernists […]

From the Guardian, Saturday March 4, 2006.
“Look back at Empire
JG Ballard waited 40 years before writing about his experiences in a Japanese internment camp. Here he remembers how Hollywood hijacked his childhood memories to create a deeply moving film.
Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades […]

Over at the J.G. Ballard Yahoo Group, prominent Ballard scholar David Pringle informs us that the new 2006 paperback printing of JGB’s Empire of the Sun (the “Harper Collins Perennial Classic” edition) contains a new interview with JGB at the back of the book. As David says, “This covers mainly old autobiographical ground, about […]

From the Guardian, Friday September 23, 2005
“David Cronenberg’s films are full of images that make us recoil in horror. But what we are really trying to hide from is the whole messy business of being alive. By JG Ballard”
“Are we all, without realising it, taking part in a vast witness protection programme? Did we observe, […]

JG Ballard applauds Alexander Sokurov’s remarkable film portrait of Hirohito, from the Guardian, 13/9/2005
"Should the war against Japan ever have taken place? The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought a devastating response from the United States, and turned the European war into a world-wide conflict. Sixty years after Japan capitulated, the old […]

A JGB-quoting story from the Daily Telegraph, on the ‘news’ that popular glamour model Jordan is to ‘write’ two novels -
Several heavyweights of the literary world were impressed to have an unexpected new novelist in their midst.
JG Ballard, the veteran author of more than 30 books including Empire of the Sun, said: “I hope she […]

JG Ballard, the author of Crash and Empire Of The Sun, said the demand for female fiction was in complete contrast to the 1960s when men were the main buyers of novels. excerpted from the Telegraph, 24/7/05.
JG BALLARD SAYS: “I think 30 years ago, men were the main buyers of novels because they had the […]

From the Guardian, Saturday June 25, 2005
CSI … as characterless as life
It has no car chases, no shoot-outs, no emotions. So what makes Crime Scene Investigation so utterly compelling? The answer, writes JG Ballard, goes to the heart of our most basic fears.
JG BALLARD: “Television today is an ageing theme park, which we visit […]

Excerpted from the Guardian, July 23 2005.
JG Ballard used to skip class to watch Michael Powell’s extravagant, unsettling postwar movies. They taught him all he needed to know about the art of storytelling…
JG BALLARD SAYS: “Films, like memories, seem to re-shoot themselves over the years, reflecting our latest needs and obsessions. In many cases they […]

JG Ballard’s review of 2 books about Nazis.
New Statesman, Monday 4th July 2005 
“Strange though it is, our fascination with the Nazi era shows no signs of fading. Scan the shelves of your local bookshop and you will see more swastikas than Union flags, and many more jacket portraits of Hitler than of Winston Churchill. A […]