Ballardian

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 [...]

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 [...]

Over at BLDG BLOG, we’ve been invited to set up shop in a container city. A wonderful proposition, given that BLDG BLOG consistently honours Ballard’s urban disaster trilogy with the real-world architectural applications it so artfully maps out. From a recent BLDG BLOG post: I can’t end … without quoting J.G. Ballard; it’s like a [...]

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, [...]

OPENING LINE: “I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’). From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally [...]

Over at his blog, 2ubh, sometime Ballardian contributor Tim Chapman describes how a truck, ‘drifting without signalling’, lopped off the front of his Saab. Tim wasn’t injured, and, he asserts, ‘contrary to the expectations of casual readers of Ballard, [there were] no sexual frissons to speak of’. No doubt, when he included photos of the [...]

Playboy has announced its ’25 Sexiest Novels of All Time’, with Crash coming in at No. 5. That’s remarkable, considering the manuscript was initially rejected by a publisher’s reader with the warning, ‘This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish’. From Playboy: “Crash by J.G Ballard (1973) Plot: Group of Londoners discovers that they [...]

Porn sites love Ballard; I swear our site statistics turn up the oddest links. Enough to make a clean-living chap like me faint from shock. A hardcore fetish site called Goregasm linked to our ‘JG Ballard: Live in London‘ article. Upon following the link back, I discovered a corner of the web that was fairly [...]

A head-on collision Monday sent Sen. John Ensign and an aide to the hospital. Ensign and the aide who was driving were taken to Sunrise Hospital with minor to moderate injuries, police said. A hospital spokeswoman said there was no record of Ensign being admitted. Ensign spokesman Jack Finn said the Nevada Republican and a [...]

In 1970, Ballard put together an ‘exhibition’ centred on a number of crashed cars that had been retreived from a London scrapyard. The background to the exhibition, its wider place in Ballard’s ouvre, and the effect on attendees, are all examined by Simon Ford in an article published in the online journal /seconds: “Ballard’s choice [...]

by Annik Hovac GRAVITY’S PEAK IS SURVIVABLE “About midnight, Diana walks out, all green eyes and friendly breast velocity. Dodi, her Prince, is there to sweep her away from the insatiable paparazzi.” The following extract is presented by the JG BALLARD INSTITUTE for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra. “On August 31, 1997, Princess Diana [...]

Review by Andrés Vaccari CLICK HERE FOR MORE PHOTOS FROM AMPLIFICATION. Amplification A book of photographs by Jeff Busby. 3 Deep Publishing ISBN 0-9580508-2-1 Review by Andrés Vaccari This handsome and hyper-glossy coffee table book concerns the unpleasant subject of automobile accidents. It’s impossible, of course, to put out a book of photographs of wrecked [...]

Another interview with Cronenberg puffing ‘A History of Violence’, with a different take on ‘Crash’ – Q: When Crash came out, a lot of people took it literally and thought it was stupid — how can you get turned on by a car crash? — instead of thinking of it as a metaphor. I mean, [...]

Over at who2.com, they write: “Ballard, like actor Matthew Broderick, is an honorary member of our loop Death By Car“. He’s joined by the usual Ballardian suspects – Princess Di, Jimmy Dean – as well as the likes of ‘Left Eye’ Lopes.

NBC News Link "CHICAGO — Bond was denied Friday for a 23-year-old woman accused of intentionally ramming her car into another vehicle at a Skokie intersection in a suicide attempt, killing three men from Chicago and injuring three others. Jeanette Sliwinski was charged with three counts of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated battery [...]

by William Burroughs (1970) The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual [...]