Ballardian

Vale of RE/Search Publications fame has a new blog. No Ballard hooks yet, but doubtless there will be in the collapsible future.

Vale, after all, is the publisher of RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard, a stunning document of JGB’s work (along with the more recent JGB Quotes and Conversations volumes). RE/Search #8/9 centres around a series of long interviews with Ballard, in which the man himself is in superlative form, tossing off riffs about the future and sex and technology as casually as he watches an episode of CSI. Ballard seemed attracted to the freedom that Vale and his questioning cohorts provided, a stew of punk/industrial/S&M/occult flavours far removed from the literary preoccupations of Ballard’s previous interrogators.

RE/Search caught Ballard at just the right moment: on the cusp between serious cult status and burgeoning recognition as the author of Empire of the Sun, and attempting to reconcile the two in a serious stab at providing an overarching philosophy of the late 20th century; no wonder Baudrillard was impressed. Since then, Ballard has arguably recycled many of the themes unpacked at length in this volume, but they must have seemed like transmissions from the back side of the sun when the book first appeared.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of this publication. Aside from the interviews, not only did it collect Ballard’s mysterious collages and artworks for the first time, but it showcased some of the author’s most obscure short stories. It’s still highly recommended today.

The RE/Search website has excerpted a number of items from the book, including:

+ Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ Interview with JGB by Graeme Revell
+ Excerpt from Crash
+ The Atrocity Exhibition
+ Sixty Minute Zoom
+ From Shanghai to Shepperton
+ The Fourfold Symbolism of Ballard by David Pringle
+ Essay on J.G. Ballard by Graeme Revell
+ Ballard: Quotations
+ Table of Contents