Ballardian

The publicity machine is warming up for Ballard’s forthcoming autobiography, Miracles of Life, due for publication February 2008.

First up, we have news of an event featuring Ballard at the Southbank Centre on Wednesday, 20 February 2008, at 7:30pm. Next, there is a new interview with him over at the Bookseller to promote the book.

Sample quotes from the interview:

The shock of coming to England in 1946 is something that has never left me. Very few people now remember quite how bleak life here was. Obviously, the country was exhausted by the war, and visibly shattered. Large areas of London and Birmingham and Manchester were bomb sites.

Surrealism had a big effect on me then, and still does. It explained things. Partly it was that war is surreal in its effects: the bus on top of a block of apartments, thrown there by a bomb; the whole wall of a tall building collapsed, so you can see dozens of flats, like a doll’s house, with the furniture still in place… if you looked at things through the eyes of the surrealist painters, everything was upside down and you got bizarre things being looked on as though they were completely ordinary.

A very important thing for me was being a medical student for a couple of years… Each of us had a little pine box which we kept under our beds containing a human skeleton. Mine was quite small and I was assured it was not that of a child, but of a peasant from Southeast Asia. These were the kind of dead I’d seen [in Shanghai] and now I slept in my bed with this coffin below me.

Note that elsewhere in this piece, Ballard is recorded as saying he wrote The Kindness of Strangers — not The Kindness of Women. Hopefully, that’s a transcription error.

[ Thanks Mike B. and Mike H. ]