Comments on: 'Genius eye for the killer detail': Parsons, Harris & Myerson on Ballard

By: Richard Booth

Richard Booth — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:55:19 +0000

Newsnight review had knowlegable critics compared to those appearing on

FIrst Tusday (www.abc.net.au/tv/firsttuesday)

An insult to have Judith Lucy attemting a critique on Ballards perhaps final work.

There appeared to be no appreciation of previous output and the comments simplistic and uninformed.

By: Mark Lyndon

Mark Lyndon — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:52:59 +0000

I had a very interesting discussion with JGB himself about this programme. Back in the nineties, a cretin called Paulin as well as the grotesquely overrrated Greer had dissed Supercannes. The appalling Paulin acccused JGB of being anti-European. He kept repeating the mantra like a mindless parrot.
JGB, quite rightly regarded the programme as a “Muppet Show” I could only concurr.
Nothing in the intervening period has changed.It is still a complete waste of the license fee.

By: Crispin Kipper

Crispin Kipper — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:14:51 +0000

Despite being the poor-man’s Nick Hornby, Tony Parsons always surprises me as being one of the more inteligent commentators on this programme – although that’s not saying much! Julie Myerson’s a fairly middlebrow author who usually comes across as a bit of a ditz. John Harris is your typical pretentious music journo – I’m assuming he started reading Ballard with Cocaine Nights, thinking it would be a drugs-based novel.

By: m.bonsall

m.bonsall — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:02:17 +0000

I wonder if this goes some way to explaining Parson’s gushing:

‘…the research for his new novel, My Favourite Wife, took him away on endless trips to Shanghai.

Of late, family time has actually been pretty limited and this is before an international book tour begins. Yuriko, 15 years his junior, used to be a translator. Now, fortunately, as Parsons puts it, “What she does is, like, the home and the kid.” Though Parsons is given a clear run to bring in the bacon, you do feel he’d give it all up if Yuriko, who was born in Japan, wanted a lifestyle change. “I love living in London,” he says, “but if she said what we really need is to move, I’d do it. I’d go. We could make that work.”…

…But it’s worth sticking around for, just as it’s worth reading his novels, especially the latest, because it’s almost impossible to believe that someone can be quite so emotionally open about love, sex and death, heavily bracketed by fidelity and infidelity. Parsons should be minister of state for family. Despite his rock’*'roll past, those years as an NME gunslinger, coupled up with screechy Julie Burchill, and the subsequent decade as a struggling single dad (looking after their son Bobby) and serious lad about town, what makes Parsons’ heart tick louder than ever, and what has made his novels so successful, is his all-consuming belief in the power of family and familial love, and especially loyalty to one’s children.’

Whole article: http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/sunday-review/arts-and-books/tony-parsons-does-his-writing-still-have-emotional-resonance-782227.html

So does Parsons see himself as the heir to Shanghai Jim?

By: Simon Sellars

Simon Sellars — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:39:12 +0000

well, i’m in australia (germaine’s alma mater) and i barely know of these people (i know of parsons a bit but not much and i know what’s become of him since the NME).

but i feel your pain. i just don’t get what these people add to a discussion of ballard. i mean, has parsons ever come out as a fan or a critic of ballard in the past? you tell me — you’re in england — and i’d really like to know, because i don’t think him or the other two have much to say. myerson even admits she doesn’t know of his novels, and harris forgets the name of the ballard book that supposedly made a big impact on him.

really, what’s the point?

By: Ian Parkinson

Ian Parkinson — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:43:51 +0000

Can’t stomach any of the above ‘critics’, nor Newsnight Review. I’m pleased for JGB and his family if he sells loads of Miracles and then reissues because of the publicity, but this is the programme that had Germaine Greer on saying that surrealism was an art movement directed largely at the service of nothing.