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BALLARDIAN DIVERSIONS
So this is my first, and possibly last, real book! Available on Amazon now and good booksellers soon.
Inspired by JG Ballard's endlessly faceted works, I've been trying for decades to make new ways of understanding them, with some interesting results.
This book is a record of some of the experiments I've undertaken. More results can be found at digital-ballard.com
Many thanks to Rick McGrath for putting the book together and publishing it.
It's a new year and my Ballard bot, killed off by X, has risen like a phoenix into the Bluesky
Andrew Wenaus said in his excellent book The Literature of Exclusion:
"Bonsall's Twitter bots are the scouts sent ahead -- not into shopping malls, airports, or luxury high-rises -- but onto the internet to see how the future may unfold according to an inhuman psychopathology of algorithmic culture."
( https://www.amazon.co.uk/Literature-Exclusion-Dada-Threshold-Electronic-ebook/dp/B093P43P2R )
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
Was recovering from flu when this image came to me. An Xmas version of a Lego diorama of Ballard's Kingdom Come (2006) from the series here:
fentonville.co.uk/lego
Ennui is The Thing: welcome to the death-football of late-stage capitalism ... Light and heat without content. Football as something empty and frictionless, humans in coloured shirts waiting for life to happen. J.G. Ballard-ball ( via @ansiblemag.bsky.social )
"Malcolm Bradbury claimed that with Empire of the Sun ‘Ballard became an important mainstream novelist,’ and went on to compare him to Ian McEwan and Iain Banks – intending that as praise."
"Empire of the Sun was shortlisted for the Booker Prize – making Martin Amis feel ‘as if the street drug-pusher had been made chairman of DuPont pharmaceuticals’"
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/edmund-gordon/his-galactic-centrifuge
I like Alien as much as anybody else. I never saw this novel as being against sci-fi, but I didn’t see it as having an awful lot in relation to it either. I thought of it as space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space, with a slightly nostalgic sense of what’s disappearing.
Samantha Harvey on her Booker Prize winning novel Orbital
How on earth could one sit down to write a serious novel about the last Presidential election when the chief character himself was a fiction already created by somebody else?The task of the writer, therefore, it seems to me, is much more that of selection, of trying to work out, almost like a scientist, what the reality is behind this fictional mix, what points of interception there are which really explain what is going on in this huge novel we are living in
JG Ballard F Kermode interview 1970
The New York Times
J. G. Ballard, Secret Agent in Suburbia
A graphic tribute to the British novelist who documented the blight and brutality of the sleepy London outskirts from the 1970s into the 2000s
By Koren Shadmi - an illustrator and cartoonist based in Queens.
Review of JG Ballard's RUNNING WILD by Paul Finch (at bottom of page)
"The first thing to say about Running Wild, this famously prophetic mystery from the pen of one of the UK’s most visionary writers, is that it’s no straightforward thriller. Or indeed a straightforward mystery.
https://paulfinch-writer.blogspot.com/2016/08/when-stranger-danger-becomes-all-too.html
The Wind from Nowhere
(BBC Weather fault forecasts hurricanes across world)
