January 2009
'Naive allegory; messianic tendencies'
Sat, 01/31/2009 - 06:19 — AnonymousGreat find from Pedro, who sent me a link to a Brazilian review of Kingdom Come — in the form of a comic strip!
Here is the rest of the strip.
And Pedro has kindly translated the text from the Portuguese, as follows:
British author JG Ballard became known for the 1973 novel Crash. The book, filmed by David Cronenberg in 1996, presents a group of people enjoying sexual pleasure in car accidents.
Another famous work is Empire of the Sun, about a boy who’s separated from his parents during the Japanese occupation of China in World War Two. The book was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987. (Balloon: Cadillac of the skies!)
Ballard comes back to the violent stylings of Crash in his new novel, Kingdom Come.
(Balloon: Technology and consumerism affect the middle class.)
The work is narrated by Richard Pearson, a forty-something unemployed adman going through a midlife crisis.
'Naive allegory; messianic tendencies'
Sat, 01/31/2009 - 06:19 — AnonymousGreat find from Pedro, who sent me a link to a Brazilian review of Kingdom Come — in the form of a comic strip!
Here is the rest of the strip.
And Pedro has kindly translated the text from the Portuguese, as follows:
British author JG Ballard became known for the 1973 novel Crash. The book, filmed by David Cronenberg in 1996, presents a group of people enjoying sexual pleasure in car accidents.
Another famous work is Empire of the Sun, about a boy who’s separated from his parents during the Japanese occupation of China in World War Two. The book was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987. (Balloon: Cadillac of the skies!)
Ballard comes back to the violent stylings of Crash in his new novel, Kingdom Come.
(Balloon: Technology and consumerism affect the middle class.)
The work is narrated by Richard Pearson, a forty-something unemployed adman going through a midlife crisis.
Creating new worlds
Thu, 01/29/2009 - 14:00 — AnonymousIt seems strange that in the SF & fantasy component of the Guardian’s ‘1000 novels everyone must read’ feature, Ballard is referenced extensively…
JG Ballard, the writer who brought SF into the mainstream, has remarked that “Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.” Ballard’s visions of “inner space”, Orwell, Huxley and Atwood’s totalitarian nightmares, Kafka’s uneasy bureaucracies, Gibson’s cutting-edge cool — all are examples of a literature at the forefront of the collective imagination. Every truly original writer must, by definition, create a new world. Here is a whole galaxy of worlds to explore.
…yet it fails to include a single Ballard novel
Creating new worlds
Thu, 01/29/2009 - 14:00 — AnonymousIt seems strange that in the SF & fantasy component of the Guardian’s ‘1000 novels everyone must read’ feature, Ballard is referenced extensively…
JG Ballard, the writer who brought SF into the mainstream, has remarked that “Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.” Ballard’s visions of “inner space”, Orwell, Huxley and Atwood’s totalitarian nightmares, Kafka’s uneasy bureaucracies, Gibson’s cutting-edge cool — all are examples of a literature at the forefront of the collective imagination. Every truly original writer must, by definition, create a new world. Here is a whole galaxy of worlds to explore.
…yet it fails to include a single Ballard novel
'Destruction of cities'
Thu, 01/29/2009 - 00:46 — AnonymousAt Dan Hill’s always-impressive City of Sound, a recent post returns to Dan’s interest in Ballard’s Drowned World, positioning it as the middle panel of a triptych of novels (including Shute’s On the Beach and McCarthy’s The Road) that depict the planet ’suffering some kind of apocalyptic event in different ways…’, each representing particular aspects of ‘denial’ that are in orbit around current debates on climate change. Hill suggests that all three works are ‘post-nuclear’, but isn’t it the case that the world in Ballard’s book has transformed due to ‘gigantic geophysical upheavals’, ie solar radiation? While in The Road, the low rumble of the percussive strike remembered in flashback could just as well be attributed to a meteor as much as a nuclear hit.
It’s a really intriguing post, however, and it would be great to see Dan expand it into a fullblown essay one day:
Clive Hamilton, in a brilliant essay in The Monthly on climate change denial, completes the Rumsfeldian square with his suggestion that ...
'Destruction of cities'
Thu, 01/29/2009 - 00:46 — AnonymousAt Dan Hill’s always-impressive City of Sound, a recent post returns to Dan’s interest in Ballard’s Drowned World, positioning it as the middle panel of a triptych of novels (including Shute’s On the Beach and McCarthy’s The Road) that depict the planet ’suffering some kind of apocalyptic event in different ways…’, each representing particular aspects of ‘denial’ that are in orbit around current debates on climate change. Hill suggests that all three works are ‘post-nuclear’, but isn’t it the case that the world in Ballard’s book has transformed due to ‘gigantic geophysical upheavals’, ie solar radiation? While in The Road, the low rumble of the percussive strike remembered in flashback could just as well be attributed to a meteor as much as a nuclear hit.
It’s a really intriguing post, however, and it would be great to see Dan expand it into a fullblown essay one day:
Clive Hamilton, in a brilliant essay in The Monthly on climate change denial, completes the Rumsfeldian square with his suggestion that ...
Top 10 Famous Contemporary Authors List
Wed, 01/28/2009 - 21:30 — AnonymousThe world is home to many famous authors. The trouble is: How to set the selection criteria for such an ineffable and unquantifiable thing as the contemporary literature itself ?
Furthermore, the various sources for reliable all-time-best-most-top and similar lists (such as Amazon, Publishers Weekly, BookSense, Nielsen BookScan, and various newspapers) tends to list references by books rather than authors, and all have different methods for tabulating their lists.
So before we took on this challenging and seemingly impossible task, we had to do some homework first.
Selection Sources and Criteria
Let’s pretend we are browsing in a bookstore, looking for our next reading. Our choice is not attached to any particular novel. We would rather like to refer to the list of contemporary authors for whom we could recommend just about any book they’ve written. These are the popular fiction writers whose hardcovers people buy the first week they come out. So let it be our first selection criteria.
Sonic boom
Tue, 01/27/2009 - 00:28 — AnonymousVia structures:
The first question from journalist Martin Conrads about J.G. Ballard’s short story The Sound-Sweep put [Bill] Drummond immediately on the defensive (”I don’ know it”), where he stayed for the next half an hour deftly deflecting all questions with charm if not aplomb.
Sonic boom
Tue, 01/27/2009 - 00:28 — AnonymousVia structures:
The first question from journalist Martin Conrads about J.G. Ballard’s short story The Sound-Sweep put [Bill] Drummond immediately on the defensive (”I don’ know it”), where he stayed for the next half an hour deftly deflecting all questions with charm if not aplomb.
JGB: A 'billionaire' in Shepperton?
Thu, 01/22/2009 - 00:25 — AnonymousI thought I’d share a lovely comment from Vicky, a reader of my Shepperton photo essay (which reminds me: I’m still to post the second part. I hope to do that very soon, even if it is almost a year late):
Growing up [in Shepperton] from 1987–1998 I knew the mysterious J G Ballard lived in the house next door to my sister’s best friend Tara. Your beautiful photographs bring back so many memories for me, especially the curly bridge from the end of my road. Living there and walking past his house every day I never once laid eyes on the man himself but so many stories circulated about him that he was almost like a mythical character. We believed he was a billionaire but he refused to leave his semi in Shepperton and that he had a car in his living room. I’m sure there were some nudist rumours too. Does he still live there?
A billionaire! Not quite…
One of the things I...
JGB: A 'billionaire' in Shepperton?
Thu, 01/22/2009 - 00:25 — AnonymousI thought I’d share a lovely comment from Vicky, a reader of my Shepperton photo essay (which reminds me: I’m still to post the second part. I hope to do that very soon, even if it is almost a year late):
Growing up [in Shepperton] from 1987–1998 I knew the mysterious J G Ballard lived in the house next door to my sister’s best friend Tara. Your beautiful photographs bring back so many memories for me, especially the curly bridge from the end of my road. Living there and walking past his house every day I never once laid eyes on the man himself but so many stories circulated about him that he was almost like a mythical character. We believed he was a billionaire but he refused to leave his semi in Shepperton and that he had a car in his living room. I’m sure there were some nudist rumours too. Does he still live there?
A billionaire! Not quite…
One of the things I...
Best Twitter Backgrounds & Themes Resources
Wed, 01/21/2009 - 20:47 — AnonymousIf you are not a graphic designer or if you are simply to lazy to do it for yourself, you can still make your Twitter presence magnificent by using a custom Twitter backgrounds and themes that you may find on Internet.
Interestingly enough, there are just a few sites offering free Twitter graphics and themes (backgrounds, avatars, logos, icons, follow-me buttons) and original Twitter wallpapers.
That’s why we decided to do some aggregation work in effort to present, in one place, the best free Twitter backgrounds and themes resources available online.
10 Most Useful Twitter Themes & Backgrounds Resources
- Twitter Gallery
Great collection of free twitter themes. Nice feature is click-of-a-button installation. You can also submit your own Twitter pics and ‘follow me’ buttons.
- Twitter Image
Wonderful gallery of ready-to-use, free Twitter Background images, including complete step-by-step instructions on adding the background image to your Twitter profile.
10 Most Original Twitter Designs
Mon, 01/19/2009 - 14:49 — AnonymousYou have certainly being astonished by the creativity of some Twitter users and their Twitter page designs. It must have inspired you to make some positive changes on your twitter home page as well.
That’s why we decided to compile a kind of a Twitter Scrapbook of the most originally designed Twitter pages out-there.
10 Most Original Twitter Pics & Pages
This is an unsorted list presenting the overview of design trends and the most original pages you may find on Twitter today:
Update: Times Crash Competition
Mon, 01/19/2009 - 11:36 — AnonymousOver on the forum, Gareth has posted an update on the competition held by the Times to design the cover for a limited edition of Crash. I thought I’d bring the info to the front of the site, as a few people have been emailing me for news.
Gareth says:
I emailed the Times of couple of times and put a few comments on the competition page but heard nothing. Snooping around the Harper Perennial website I located the email address of Siobhan Kenny, the Communications Director, next day I received the following response, the end is in sight?
“Dear Mr Buxton
I do apologise for the lack of update on the competition to design a cover for a special edition of JG Ballard’s Crash. Unfortunately, changes to our publishing schedule resulted in our not being able to put the special edition into production in 2008 as planned. Instead therefore we hope to publish the new edition, complete wtih the winner’s artwork, as part of the series of events celebrating the 25th anniversary of 4th Estate in 2009. As soon as the details are finalised, we will of course inform the winner and publicise it more widely togethr with Times Online.
We are sorry for this delay but we hope that the ...
