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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
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.
The Wind from Nowhere
(BBC Weather fault forecasts hurricanes across world)
New Worlds No. 224
Lots of exciting material in this new issue. Pamela Zoline's article "Crashing Cars and Other Acts of Love" is a highlight. Zoline writes interestingly on Ballard's famous crashed cars exhibition in 1970 which she helped organize.
A story I hadn't heard before is her work with Ballard some months later on a Ballardian 'portrait box', containing books, photographs, manuscripts and even a live hamster!
"Crash", by JG Ballard, advertisement in the Nouvel Observateur of Monday July 29, 1974
"The first masterpiece of science fiction." Le Monde
"A real literary coup." L'Express
"Diabolically intelligent." Le Figaro
Were UK papers as enthusiastic?
( via @tnoisette elsewhere )
Microclimate cooling air vest, 1992
‘Some garments come with built-in ventilation and hydration tubing, giving wearers superhuman powers’
Posted by JG Ballard's daughter Beatrice in another place:
Another Prophecy Fulfilled
Published nearly 20 years ago, the visionary writer J. G. Ballard’s final novel foreshadowed the anti-immigrant riots that roiled the U.K. this summer
