Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

Reviewing Miracles, the Age newspaper drops a clanger. Still, I wouldn’t mind visiting ‘Shaghai’ one day…

This is the second of Dan O’Hara’s re-translations of JGB interviews originally published in German. This one dates from 1976, and in it Ballard provides comment on Russian writers and explains how film technique infiltrates and influences his own writing.

Here’s the last in our batch of transcripts of recent Miracles promotions: James Naughtie’s interview with JGB for BBC Radio 4.

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

This one’s a transcript of BBC 2’s Newsnight Review segment on Miracles of Life. It features Tony Parsons, Julie Myerson and John Harris and is presented by Kirsty Wark.

Here’s a transcript of Philip Dodd’s recent BBC Radio 3 interview with JGB.

This post is given over to recent links readers have sent me. ‘Ballardian’ or not? You decide.

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 […]

Will Self was recently interviewed on BBC Radio 4 by Mariella Frostrup about his admiration for J.G. Ballard’s work. Here’s a transcript of that interview.

Still from Hari Kunzru’s interview with J.G. Ballard. © Waterstone’s Books Quarterly.
Waterstones is featuring a video interview with JGB, conducted by Hari Kunzru to promote Miracles of Life. There are no surprises here. Kunzru asks Ballard about the relationship of Miracles to JGB’s semi-autobiographical novels, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, and […]

The Times is featuring an extract from Ballard’s forthcoming autobiography, Miracles of Life. There’s also an accompanying interview, in which it’s revealed that Ballard has been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer.

From the BBC World Service:
World Book Club - J.G. Ballard (Radio)
(24 January, 2008)
January’s guest is J.G. Ballard talking about his novel Empire Of The Sun with Harriet Gilbert and a studio audience. Each month an internationally renowned author discusses their most celebrated novel with presenter Harriet Gilbert. To be part of the audience and […]

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 […]

Above: the Ballard family’s former house, now lit up in the colours of capitalism. Photo: Rick McGrath.
“Do you believe in synchronicity?” Andy asked. “That’s the 10 o’clock signal for today’s national anniversary. Sirens are blowing all over the country right now.” He leaned in, conspiratorially. “It was precisely 70 years ago today the Japanese attacked […]

Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun (more at YouTube.)

by Pedro Groppo

EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1987)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard
Starring: Christian Bale, John Malkovich

Whereas the sensibilities of J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg, who directed Crash (1996), seem to overlap and complement each other, one would be hard-pressed […]

ABOVE: Youtube uplink for Shanghai Jim (BBC Bookmark, 1991; produced by James Runcie).

by Pippa Tandy

SHANGHAI JIM (1991)
Director/Producer: James Runcie
Executive Producer: Nigel Williams
Starring: J.G. Ballard, Michael Troughton, Hans Gebruers

See here for a transcript of J.G. Ballard’s commentary from the film.

DOCUMENTARY FILMS about the lives and works of artists have many different functions. They may describe their […]

Over on BallardoTube, the “China Odyssey” doco on the making of Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun has appeared. Ballard features prominently.
Don’t forget part two.
[ thanks Pedro! ]

Left: Ballard’s author pic from the Varsity student newspaper (image & PDF courtesy Rick McGrath).
Mike Holliday has uploaded J.G. Ballard — A Collector’s Guide, an in-depth information resource designed “as a ‘helping hand’ to anyone interested in collecting books, stories, and other material by the British author J. G. Ballard”. There’s a lot of […]

JG Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy.
On 14 September 2006 JG Ballard gave a reading from his new novel, Kingdom Come, and talked to Robert McCrum of the Observer at the Institute of Education, London — the evening was presented by Blackwell. Looking rather dapper and displaying a sharpness and wit that puts people half his age […]

OPENING LINE:
“Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.”
There’s not much left to say about the autobiographical Empire, perhaps Ballard’s most popular book and the work that catapulted […]

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 […]

Photo by Simon Sellars
This transcript was first published in Sub Dee Magazine (no. 5 Summer 1997), a print project I was involved in long before Ballardian. At the time, J.G. Ballard’s career was in the ascendancy after what was perceived to be an average period in his writing. Cocaine Nights had just been released and […]