April 2009
R.I.P. JGB: Tributes from the Ballardosphere, part 4
Tue, 04/28/2009 - 10:22 — AnonymousPhoto courtesy of Steve Double.
JEANNETTE BAXTER, writer/academic
The KINDNESS OF JG BALLARD
I was fortunate enough to interview JG Ballard on a couple of occasions. What struck me most about our exchanges — and this is something I am truly grateful for — was the amount of time and effort which he’d clearly put into them. A day or so after faxing through my lists of questions, I would receive page upon page of incisive, provocative and witty comment. This would then be followed by a fat package in the post: Ballard’s original type-script (he diligently sent it as ‘backup’). To receive these original sheets was a real thrill because I could actually touch the editing process: alternative words and phrases had been pressed by hand into clumps of tippex (what might these chalky lumps conceal?). Even when, as he revealed so honestly in our final piece of correspondence, time was no longer showing itself to be his ally, JG Ballard remained enormously generous with the time he had left. Witty, generous, encouraging and k...
R.I.P. JGB: Tributes from the Ballardosphere, part 4
Tue, 04/28/2009 - 10:22 — AnonymousPhoto courtesy of Steve Double.
JEANNETTE BAXTER, writer/academic
The KINDNESS OF JG BALLARD
I was fortunate enough to interview JG Ballard on a couple of occasions. What struck me most about our exchanges — and this is something I am truly grateful for — was the amount of time and effort which he’d clearly put into them. A day or so after faxing through my lists of questions, I would receive page upon page of incisive, provocative and witty comment. This would then be followed by a fat package in the post: Ballard’s original type-script (he diligently sent it as ‘backup’). To receive these original sheets was a real thrill because I could actually touch the editing process: alternative words and phrases had been pressed by hand into clumps of tippex (what might these chalky lumps conceal?). Even when, as he revealed so honestly in our final piece of correspondence, time was no longer showing itself to be his ally, JG Ballard remained enormously generous with the time he had left. Witty, generous, encouraging and k...
The Girl's Guide to Kicking Your Career Into Gear
Wed, 04/22/2009 - 16:34 — Anonymous"Looking For a New Job?" -- video review of "The Girl's Guide to Kicking Your Career Into Gear", by Caitlin Friedman and Kimberly Yorio
...R.I.P. JGB: Tributes from the Ballardosphere, part 3
Wed, 04/22/2009 - 03:07 — AnonymousPhoto by Simon Durrant.
+ Share your tributes and memories of JGB.
TIM CHAPMAN, WRITER
I first read JG Ballard when I was 12 or so, after picking up Crash (with that lurid orange Chris Foss cover) at a village hall jumble sale. I occasionally wonder to what degree this might have affected my development.
Over the next decade or so, I picked up a few other titles, but none hit me with quite the same force. I just wasn’t struck by that intensity, that outrageous lucidity, which radiated from that battered paperback. But I gradually started to appreciate the subtler qualities of the writing, the humour, and the semi-detached perception. Gradually, his books started to just make sense to me. By the time I was living in a tiny flat in the dullest part of south London, barely writing a first novel and trying to find that elusive first job in journalism, I was a devotee.
So sometime round autumn 1996, I was thinking Ballardian thoughts as I trundled through the South Croydon wastelands towards an interview at so...
R.I.P. JGB: Tributes from the Ballardosphere, part 3
Wed, 04/22/2009 - 03:07 — AnonymousPhoto by Simon Durrant.
+ Share your tributes and memories of JGB.
TIM CHAPMAN, WRITER
I first read JG Ballard when I was 12 or so, after picking up Crash (with that lurid orange Chris Foss cover) at a village hall jumble sale. I occasionally wonder to what degree this might have affected my development.
Over the next decade or so, I picked up a few other titles, but none hit me with quite the same force. I just wasn’t struck by that intensity, that outrageous lucidity, which radiated from that battered paperback. But I gradually started to appreciate the subtler qualities of the writing, the humour, and the semi-detached perception. Gradually, his books started to just make sense to me. By the time I was living in a tiny flat in the dullest part of south London, barely writing a first novel and trying to find that elusive first job in journalism, I was a devotee.
So sometime round autumn 1996, I was thinking Ballardian thoughts as I trundled through the South Croydon wastelands towards an interview at s...
R.I.P. JGB: Tributes from the Ballardosphere, part 2
Tue, 04/21/2009 - 08:29 — AnonymousMichael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and Claire Walsh in September, 2006 (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock).
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MICHAEL MOORCOCK, AUTHOR
‘Jimmy’ to an early generation of friends, JG Ballard was as stoical in dealing with his painful cancer (which began with asymptomatic prostate cancer already widely spread by the time it was detected) as he had been when dealing with the sudden early death of his wife Mary. The telegram my then-wife Hilary and I received the day Mary died was typically laconic: MARY DIED TODAY OF PNEUMONIA. GREAT HEART. LOVE, JIMMY. I remember how, shortly after his return to England, he said he had to keep pulling to the side of the road on the long drive back from Spain when he began to cry; one of the few occasions he ever directly referred in conversation to his grief. Of course, he discovered that stoicism in the Japanese camp where he was interned as a boy and this tendency to redirect conversation away from his own problems remained with him all his life, even when he suffered from the cancer which eventually killed hi...
R.I.P. JGB: Tributes from the Ballardosphere, part 2
Tue, 04/21/2009 - 08:29 — AnonymousMichael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and Claire Walsh in September, 2006 (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock).
+ Share your tributes and memories of JGB.
MICHAEL MOORCOCK, AUTHOR
‘Jimmy’ to an early generation of friends, JG Ballard was as stoical in dealing with his painful cancer (which began with asymptomatic prostate cancer already widely spread by the time it was detected) as he had been when dealing with the sudden early death of his wife Mary. The telegram my then-wife Hilary and I received the day Mary died was typically laconic: MARY DIED TODAY OF PNEUMONIA. GREAT HEART. LOVE, JIMMY. I remember how, shortly after his return to England, he said he had to keep pulling to the side of the road on the long drive back from Spain when he began to cry; one of the few occasions he ever directly referred in conversation to his grief. Of course, he discovered that stoicism in the Japanese camp where he was interned as a boy and this tendency to redirect conversation away from his own problems remained with him all his life, even when he suffered from the cancer which eventually killed hi...
R.I.P. JGB: Tributes from the Ballardosphere, part 1
Mon, 04/20/2009 - 15:39 — AnonymousI have asked Ballardian contributors and associates for their thoughts on JGB’s passing. This is Part 1. Also see Part 2: Michael Moorcock; Part 3: Tim Chapman, Rick McGrath, Solveig Nordlund, Dan O’Hara, Dominika Oramus, Rick Poynor, David Pringle, Simon Sellars, Supervert and V. Vale; and Part 4: Jeannette Baxter, Mike Bonsall, Mark Fisher, Owen Hatherley, Mike Holliday and Nina Power. [ SS ]
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BENJAMIN NOYS, AUTHOR & THEORIST
‘The dreams that money can buy’
i.m. J.G. Ballard
The writer’s task is to invent the reality.
J.G. Ballard
The fact that an event has taken place is no proof of its valid occurrence.
R.I.P. JGB: Tributes from the Ballardosphere, part 1
Mon, 04/20/2009 - 15:39 — AnonymousI have asked Ballardian contributors and associates for their thoughts on JGB’s passing. This is Part 1. Also see Part 2: Michael Moorcock; Part 3: Tim Chapman, Rick McGrath, Solveig Nordlund, Dan O’Hara, Dominika Oramus, Rick Poynor, David Pringle, Simon Sellars, Supervert and V. Vale; and Part 4: Jeannette Baxter, Mike Bonsall, Mark Fisher, Owen Hatherley, Mike Holliday and Nina Power. [ SS ]
+ Share your tributes and memories of JGB.
BENJAMIN NOYS, AUTHOR & THEORIST
‘The dreams that money can buy’
i.m. J.G. Ballard
The writer’s task is to invent the reality.
J.G. Ballard
The fact that an event has taken place is no proof of its valid occurrence.
R.I.P. J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009
Mon, 04/20/2009 - 01:41 — AnonymousGoodbye, Jim…
As publisher of this site, my goal has always been to take J.G. Ballard as a philosopher, rather than simply a ‘novelist’. Sometimes this has truly angered fans and champions of his work, more often it has brought me into brilliant and inspiring contact with writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers and theorists who all see the world through that same Ballardian lens — and with Jim Ballard himself, who, along with his partner Claire Walsh, always remained supportive of the site.
Ballard articulates clearly to me the implications of living in an age of total consumerism, of blanket surveillance, of enslavement designed as mass entertainment. But he also speaks to me of resistance through irony, immersion, ambivalence, imagination — of remixing, recycling, remaking, remodelling.
Ballard embraces dystopian scenarios, including the archetypal non-space often characteris...
R.I.P. J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009
Mon, 04/20/2009 - 01:41 — AnonymousGoodbye, Jim…
As publisher of this site, my goal has always been to take J.G. Ballard as a philosopher, rather than simply a ‘novelist’. Sometimes this has truly angered fans and champions of his work, more often it has brought me into brilliant and inspiring contact with writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers and theorists who all see the world through that same Ballardian lens — and with Jim Ballard himself, who, along with his partner Claire Walsh, always remained supportive of the site.
Ballard articulates clearly to me the implications of living in an age of total consumerism, of blanket surveillance, of enslavement designed as mass entertainment. But he also speaks to me of resistance through irony, immersion, ambivalence, imagination — of remixing, recycling, remaking, remodelling.
Ballard embraces dystopian scenarios, including the archetypal non-space often characteris...