Ballardian

It’s been a bit quiet around these parts. Sorry. Something’s brewing, though…like a wind from nowhere, sweeping through London Town…

…:: Incoming (soonish)
+ News on next year’s International JG Ballard Conference
+ More interviews exploring the Ballard continuum across time and space
+ Guest posts from guest bloggers

Subscribe for notification of updates as they occur. Meanwhile…

…:: Picking Up the Slack
+ The full transcript of Toby Litt’s recent interview with JGB is now online (a severely truncated version previously appeared in Waterstones magazine). According to Toby, five days before he was due to interview JGB, he received spam with the subject: “Enter: Impress your girl with prolonged hardness, plentiful explosions and increased duration”. He says it was from a spambot calling itself “Ballard”. As JGB himself likes to point out, “Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences”.

..:: Random Gender
+ Here’s a delicious experiment from Matteo Bittanti, who has been experimenting with ‘gamics’, using videogame screenshots to create comics. He’s got good taste: he adapts Ballard’s Crash, using dialogue from the book, with Burnout screen caps (thanks, GameSetWatch).

..:: Synchromesh
+ I found this tantalising tidbit on the IMDB regarding Bruce Robinson’s early script for High-Rise:

Bruce Robinson, who is known mainly for ‘Withnail & I’ and ‘The Killing Fields’, wrote a script for this J. G. Ballard novel in 1979. It is unproduced and unpublished. It is just typical of ‘Hollywood’ to disregard this fact. I’m sure the current writer is good, but Bruce put a lot of work into it. He researched the architectural side of the story, as well as some particularly gruesome torture devices available to ‘ordinary’ people. He was commissioned by Euston Films, ending up writing a $35 million film. It was dumped because Bruce believed it would never be made. Here we are, nearly 30 years later, and it’s due to be released. Please read ‘Smoking In Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson’ by Alistair Owen, for more about this script.”

I want to know more about these “gruesome torture devices” — sounds a bit like he wanted to turn HR into a slasher pic. Bruce, you reading this mate? Send me your script: maybe we could adapt it here on the site, in a gamic stylee.

..:: Night of the Virtually Dead
+ An enterprising chap has whacked together some found footage, pieced it together with a voice over reading from Ballard’s super-short story, ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’, and bunged the lot up on YouTube. Not too shabby (thanks, Ryan Cole).