Ballardian

Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come, a dystopian account of consumerism as a type of ’soft fascism’, received lukewarm reviews and suggestions that the author was, perhaps, finally losing his touch. Others were eager to point to parallels between it and events around us: aggressive car commercials, racist behaviour by sports fanatics. In this article, Mike Holliday re-examines Kingdom Come and asks: can we really equate consumerism with fascism?

For Ballard surrealist art was one of many possible routes to inner space. But inner space in its quintessentially Ballardian form needed something other than surrealist reproductions on the covers of his books. This was the challenge facing David Pelham, when Penguin’s Ballard titles came up for reprint.

Ballard’s writing has a strong connection to visual art. It informed his work and led to him befriending some of the leading artists of his time, while in turn his work has influenced today’s crop. As Ben Austwick reports, the exhibition Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard represent these diverse strands in a haphazard, yet always interesting fashion.

I’ve finally captured my impressions of Barcelona and Kosmopolis, with main ingredients: Lou Reed, Claire Walsh, Laurie Anderson, Kafka, Brecht, Dali, brilliant public space, Ballard, and the sheer unbridled thrill of one of the most amazing cities in Europe.

I’m off to Barcelona to talk about Ballard with Vale and Bruce Sterling as part of the Kosmopolis literary festival. If you’re Catalonia-bound, come and say hi.

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.

Transmission from Barcelona stop Having a wonderful time stop I believe in nothing stop Lost in surreal image machine and deep-blue-drenched corridors stretching to infinity stop Startling comma perverse visuals stop Rare books and writing stop Exhibition a raging success stop JGB would be proud stop Full letter to follow comma Love Rick end transmission

For this upcoming exhibition, the International Project Space in Birmingham will be transformed into the J.G. Ballard Centre for Psychopathological Research, “an institute built to interrogate the New Psychology explored in Ballard’s fiction.”

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

Vintage Ballard photos now online from RE/Search Publications.

by Dominika Oramus

World’s first hydrogen bomb explosion, Eniwetok Atoll, 1952.

Dominika Oramus teaches Brit.Lit. professionally at the University of Warsaw. The following is Part Two of the introduction to Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, her post-doctoral thesis. Grave New World currently exists as a (very) limited edition [...]

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.

There has been a Ballard backlash. Here are two of the more aggressive memes.

Ballard vs The Blogosphere
Ballard was recently interviewed by the Guardian in a series on writers’ rooms. In this feature he said, ‘The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old [...]

Interview by Simon Sellars.
Simon Reynolds is one of the most recognisable music critics around — or at least his style is, not least for its willingness to tackle pop music as an art form worthy of sustained intellectual discourse rather than as a fleeting moment of adolescent flash. Reynolds breaks new ground, melding unbridled [...]

Here I present the latest wrapup, not as extensive as I would like as I’m currently in Dubai trying to locate my missing passport, while entertaining the thought of spending a few days, maybe a week in the non-space of the Dubai International Airport until it turns up (hopefully a week; I’m trying to embrace [...]

‘If Dali Had Painted Angelina Jolie’, by 14. Copyright 2006.
I’ve just discovered the Gallery of the Absurd, maintained by the artist known simply as ‘14′ and devoted to her sharp, witty and frightening caricatures of A-list celebrities. There’s TomKat recast as TomRat — two furry, grotesque rodents cradling their hideous offspring; there’s The Three Disgraces: [...]

Ballard’s study (photo courtesy the Guardian).
Rhys emailed to point my attention to a series in The Guardian entitled ‘Writer’s Rooms’, currently featuring J.G. Ballard:
My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of The Violation by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I [...]

Interview by Simon Sellars
Rick McGrath is a writer and former adman. He is also the curator of what may be the world’s largest collection of J.G. Ballard first editions; he’s the ‘go-to man’ whenever a TV station or glossy mag does a rare feature on Ballard and needs some book covers. Rick has written [...]

OPENING LINE:
“All summer the cloud-sculptors would come from Vermilion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West.” (from ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’).
I’m not covering every one of JGB’s short-story collections in this bibliography — with the release of the Complete Short [...]

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 [...]

Thanks to Ben from the JGB Yahoo Group for pointing me to this “quite stunning set of aerial photographs of Mexico City. Hard to believe none of these are computer generated.”
They are indeed incredible: an amazing Ballardian quilt of patchwork suburbs; rows of multicoloured, identical houses as far as the eye can see; and bizarre, [...]

What might have happened if J.G. Ballard had used his medical training to its fullest potential and become a doctor rather than a writer? Well, there would be no pen name for a start; ‘Jimmy Ballard’ would be a different man indeed, as Johnny Strike discovers. In this fascinating snapshot into an alternate Ballardian universe, [...]