Her concept of surrealism reveals an odd lack of imagination for a visionary, and I think the idea of the feminine in JG is all hers — a projection that desexualizes him. Check the portrait closely… if JG didn’t reveal much of himself, she envisioned it: he has been feminized and youthenized… bigger eyes, prissy lips, reduced cheeklines, softened dimple. And look at the background… more peeling wallpaper, as in The Mirror. An odd couple, indeed, and apparently one of the few women to escape JG’s charismatically seductive voice… he wasn’t a tamed tiger… she just ran faster.

The Baxter connection is also cool… and that last “funny” story… whoa… I wonder, can Dave Pringle zero in on the date JG got his mojo back? Great work, guys!

I couldn’t find anything resembling that description. Any ideas, anyone?

“Surrealism! What is Surrealism? In my opinion, it is above all a reawakening of the poetic idea in art, the reintroduction of the subject but in a very particular sense, that of the strange and illogical.”

PAUL DELVAUX, lecture, 1966

However, it seems that JGB wasn’t the only one to believe that the painting no longer existed. The Guggenheim describes it as “The Mirror (formerly Collection Roland Penrose, London; destroyed during World War II)” (see http://tinyurl.com/898zujs). And this catalogue from Sotheby’s notes that Delvaux himself believed that the painting had been destroyed in the war: http://tinyurl.com/6r6acah

Indeed, a fine presentation of some extremely fine work. Thank you for the introduction to the work of yet another gifted scholar.

Bravo!

For years I said one could see Dante’s Divine Comedy as a video game, and recently someone turned the Inferno into one. Entertainment Weekly even got a Dante scholar to critique the game.

‘The Drought’ and ‘The Drowned World’ are already released (along with David’s iconic artwork for Anthony Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’) and ‘The Terminal Beach’ will be released next Monday 24th October. ‘The Four-Dimensional Nightmare’ and ‘Flying to Wake Island’ will follow in the next few months and we’ll be exhibiting the prints at various venues in 2012. You can see four of David’s Ballard prints here:

http://www.wire-frame.net/fineart.html

I hope you like them, and thanks again.

Sucking d**k gives you caries!!!

If anyone has any info that they could share with me that would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You
Thomas

And Williams has done plenty of “experimenting” this past decade. It’s been his most varied work in years.

You wouldn’t call a line like that ‘acerbic’?

The ‘typically’ was reserved for Gerald Houghton; poor word order on my part.

http://www.theedge.abelgratis.co.uk/booksnonf/usersguidetothemillennium.htm

Don’t see what’s ‘typically acerbic’ about it, myself…

Some of the stories in vermillion sands prefigured sound art, and in there own warped way predicted many concepts that are currently explored. The sound sweep is another example of Ballard’s warped take on music. Interestingly, there’s that Buggles song “Video Killed the Radio Star” which essentially describes the narrative of that story, if you’re looking for it.

As far as musicians inspired by Ballard, I’m a fledgling composer myself (about to begin an MFA program at Mills college for electronic music), and have personally had his influence creep into my work. More so with noise/punk projects, but his work seems to not only articulate certain themes that are conceptually appealing, but also serves as a reference point that evokes a particular perspective.

All of this is not new.

Just imagine what might come next – something as mad as Chinese-themed micro-cities in capitals across the world? Oh wait….

Probably won’t read it again but I feel it’ll stay with me for a very long time.

Ironic that I finally read it the same year Ballard died. It is his own eulogy.

I got into Ballard as a young teenager in the ’70s, brought up in the outer-suburbia of London. Always liminal, his way of seeing the world is now something I make use of on an everyday basis in encountering the seeming madness of the word around us as it orbits the world within us. So, in a sense, I use a sort of ‘Applied Ballardianism’ in an ad hoc sort of way, and do so quite intuitively. I hope your book may help me shed more light on what I am doing!

Without Ballard’s work I would probably be more adrift than I am. ‘Dystopian’ applies more to the world Ballard enquires into, rather than his literature. He was a prophet, and one of no small importance. His time has come – it is here right now – an unavoidable point on the trajectory of the human psyche. Re-reading ‘High Rise’ I am shocked by how a book written in 1975 can descibe so eerily the world as it now is. And his wicked, bone-dry humour is part of the trick. There is delicous mischief in his finessed unpicking of psychological motives.

Thanks also for your great site. It is so good to know Ballard is gaining increasingly serious interest.

“I suggest that Gray’s apparent pessimism reflects the fact that he has been primarily concerned with counteracting ideologies and puncturing their attendant illusions; conversely, Ballard’s optimism was a necessity for a writer searching for a sense of meaning and purpose which might be available in our everyday lives.”

You then go on to suggest that one way to resolve the tension between Gray and Ballard’s attitudes is to “become what one is,” which I believe was Nietzsche’s credo. I would suggest an alternative to this individualism in the form of the philosophic ascent: in the work of both Gray and Ballard, there is the underlying conviction that reality is worth discovering, regardless of what it may reveal to us about our values and beliefs. Pessimism (and optimism) are instruments for the discovery of a reality that in our age has become stranger than any premodern fiction. Note the prominence of protagonists in Ballard’s late novels who are trying to solve a mystery in which they have a personal stake – how different are they than an anthropologist in a strange tribe, trying to grasp signs and acts whose meanings are elusive.

This a great article I’ll return to I am sure. The previous comment is strangely on the money, Super-Cannes strangely entered my collection recently..

Michael Moorcock ( new worlds editor for quite a while ) may be worth contacting also David – his website is good and he interacts with it – takes questions etc ?

Also what to agree with Simon Sellars she is a Icon equal to Gabrielle Drake.