The Stocking
Here are Ballard’s picks for rival papers [thanks, John C.]. In the Observer, his best books of the year: The most enjoyable book was St Peter’s by Keith Miller (Profile), a witty and entertaining...
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How to Build a Utopia in Your Spare Time
The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars. I recently gave a paper on Ballard at Demanding the Impossible: the Third Australian Conference on Utopia, Dystopia and...
View ArticleAckroyd, Ballard, Amis, Moore: 'four points of blokish energy'
Just came across this snarky but amusing comment from reader Nabakov over at Aussie left gruppo blog Larvatus Prodeo: Damme, Ackroyd just keeps pumping them out doesn’t he? He must have a whole crew of...
View ArticleMore on Sinclair and Ballard
I’ve just come across news of a collection of essays, City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair. It came out in April 2007, but completely flew under my radar. If you click on ‘sample pdf’ at the bottom...
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Porcine Psychopathology
‘the narcissism of things’, by infinite thØught. infinite thØught is a blog of critical theory that’s not afraid to use ‘mock’ tactics, ie, it can have a laugh and be unforced, hilarious and poignant...
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‘Obeying the surrealist formula’: Iain Sinclair & Hermione Lee on Ballard
Photo by Jennie Middlemiss. Here’s a transcription of the BBC Radio Front Row review of Miracles, presented by Mark Lawson and featuring Iain Sinclair and Hermione Lee. It’s a more shallow treatment...
View ArticlePsychogeography? Psychopathology, maybe…
In this Guardian review of a recent V&A talk, the reviewer mentions Ballard’s tribute to Iain Sinclair and Will Self in Miracles: Towards the end of his new memoir, Miracles of Life, JG Ballard...
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The Ballardian Primer: Car Parks
Braun Headquarters, Melsungen 1986-92 by Stirling Wilford & Associates with Walter Nageli. Photo courtesy BD Online. I’m supposed to be participating in a documentary on car parks. Right now I’ve...
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1971: Year of the Drake
From outer space to inner… LEFT: Gabrielle Drake in UFO. RIGHT: Ms Drake in Crash!. Pringle: [In Crash!] you were playing opposite a professional actress, so it wasn’t as though it was purely a...
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Your mission…
One of the country’s most acclaimed novelists has called for the Bluewater Centre, in Kent, to be obliterated. In London Orbital, a film inspired by Iain Sinclair’s book of the same title to be...
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Bluewater, Round 2
Bluewater: photo by James Boardman. Further to yesterday’s post on Bluewater shopping centre, Michael Collins in the Guardian reports on the construction of Ebbsfleet, “Britain’s first new town of the...
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Strange Fiction
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe. There’s a new interview with JGB in the Guardian, conducted by James Campbell. It’s short, it lazily rehashes the same old stuff about Ballard’s house and (perhaps as a...
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'His personal horizon': Sinclair and Self on Ballard
When Iain Sinclair and Will Self appeared on stage together earlier this year to talk about psychogeography, chaired by Kevin Jackson, I wondered what mystical forces aligned for this event to come to...
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Escaping the gaze: A review of John Foxx's Tiny Colour Movies
ABOVE: Stills from ‘The Projectionst’ by ‘Alan Marker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies). In Melbourne a few months back, I had occasion to see John Foxx’s live soundtrack performance and presentation...
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"Paradigm of nowhere": Shepperton, a photo essay (part 2)
All photography by Simon Sellars. Bizarrely, it has been almost a year since I posted the first part of this photo essay. There are so many loose ends dangling from this site, frayed and incomplete...
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Re-Placing the Novel: Sinclair, Ballard and the Spaces of Literature
Image: JG Ballard and Iain Sinclair in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002). by David Cunningham There are few concepts in contemporary social and cultural theory whose meaning...
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“Driven by Anger”: An Interview with Michael Butterworth (the Savoy...
Michael Butterworth in the Savoy office, 1998 (photo by Ben Blackall). Interview by Mike Holliday. This is the first of a proposed 3-interview series. Parts 2 and 3, featuring David Britton and John...
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Rick McGrath’s Letter From London: The JG Ballard Memorial
Rick McGrath’s Letter From London: The JG Ballard Memorial All photography by Rick McGrath. Sunday, November 15, 2009, 3:45pm, The Founders Pub, London. Dear Simon, Greetings from London! Hope all is...
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“Enthusiasm for the mysterious emissaries of pulp”: an interview with David...
Back-cover sleeve for “Blue Monday”, by Lord Horror with the Savoy Hitler Youth Band. Interview by Simon Sellars. This is the second of a three-interview series about Savoy Books. It discusses Savoy’s...
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“Enthusiasm for the mysterious emissaries of pulp”: an interview with David...
The author of Lord Horror. Interview by Simon Sellars. This, the second of our three-interview series with Savoy luminaries, covers the company’s musical and spoken-word output. Part 1, with Michael...
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Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space
Modelling and photography by Nicholas Cobb. This was the first office building to be constructed at the business park, but after a bombastic overture the architecture that followed was late modernist...
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‘A temporarily tame tiger’: Brigid Marlin on J.G. Ballard, Paul Delvaux and...
J.G. Ballard in front of Paul Delvaux’s ‘The Violation’ (as reproduced by Brigid Marlin). Photographer unknown. Interview by Andrew Bishop. Ballardian presents Andrew Bishop’s previously unpublished...
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The J.G. Ballard Book: An Interview with Rick McGrath
Rick McGrath is a Ballard aficionado native to Canada (home of Cronenberg, the Baron of Blood, lest we forget), the publisher of the website jgballard.ca and a long-time contributor to ballardian.com....
View ArticleObserver Books of the Year
JG Ballard talks about Ian Sinclair’s latest book “Edge of the Orison” in the Observer, Sunday 27th November: “Iain Sinclair walks every inch of his wonderful novels and psycho-geographies, pacing out...
View ArticleJ.G. Ballard to Contribute to New Iain Sinclair Project
Judging from this recent interview with Iain Sinclair, it appears that Ballard is to write a piece for an upcoming anthology of writings about London, to be published by Hamish Hamilton. Petit,...
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"Thirsty Man at the Spigot": An Interview with Jonathan Weiss
by Simon Sellars Victor Slezak as ‘T’ in The Atrocity Exhibition Ballardian presents an exclusive interview with Jonathan Weiss, director of The Atrocity Exhibition, the film based on the J.G. Ballard...
View ArticleJG Ballard: Psychonaut of Inner Space
These days, with all manner of theorists, futurists, architects, musos, journos, self-mutilators and even UFO freaks claiming JG Ballard as one of their very own, it’s easy to forget that the man with...
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A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture: The John Foxx Interview
by Simon Sellars an image from John Foxx’s Cathedral Oceans project John Foxx, the former lead singer of Ultravox, is an undisputed electronic music pioneer. Before Midge Ure came along, the band’s...
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'When in doubt, quote Ballard': An interview with Iain Sinclair
Interview by Tim Chapman Iain Sinclair at the Barbican. Photo: Tim Chapman, © 2006. Iain Sinclair has been acclaimed as one of Britain’s most visionary writers and as an incomparable prose stylist. His...
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Cocaine Nights (1996)
OPENING LINE: “Crossing frontiers is my profession.” From the 1996 Flamingo edition: “To an outsider, the retired British residents of the Spanish coastal resort of Estrella de Mar belong to an...
View ArticleSinclair, Greene & Ballard
If you enjoyed our Sinclair interview and are curious to place a voice to the text, or you just need an entry point into Sinclair’s work, listen to Radio QBSaul, which podcasts “audio theatre, poetry,...
View ArticleJG Ballard on ITV's South Bank Show
JG Ballard appeared on the South Bank Show on ITV in the UK on Sunday. There was a long interview with JGB conducted by Melvyn Bragg and filmed at Shepperton Studios, plus an overview of Ballard’s...
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Rattling Other People’s Cages: The J.G. Ballard Interview
Interview by Simon Sellars JG Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy. In the year that this website’s been in operation, it seems to have had a momentum — a secret logic — all its own. Our interviews with such...
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Win A Copy of Kingdom Come: Write A J.G. Ballard Pastiche
This site’s pastiche section has always been one of our most controversial. Some readers see it as an affront to Ballard himself, but no doubt these wet blankets are devotees of theorist Fredric...
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The Politics of Enthusiasm: An Interview with Geoff Manaugh
by Simon Sellars Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission. Geoff Manaugh is a writer and essayist whose work has appeared in Contemporary, Space & Culture, Blend, Lumpen, Inhabitat,...
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From Shanghai to Norwich: An Interview with Jeannette Baxter
J.G. Ballard, in 1960, posing in front of his ‘experimental billboard fiction’. On 5 May 2007, ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard’, apparently the first-ever...
View ArticleMore on Liddle and Ballard
REMINDER: The ‘call for papers’ deadline for ‘Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard’ is three days away. See here for details, and here for more on the conference. J....
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Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard
Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and JGB’s partner Claire Walsh in September, 2006 (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock). ———————————————— Interview by Mike Holliday ———————————————— Michael Moorcock has been...
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Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon
by Simon Sellars CRASH! (1971) Director: Harley Cokliss | Writer: J.G. Ballard Starring: J.G. Ballard & Gabrielle Drake I wasn’t satisfied by just writing SF stories, you see. My imagination was...
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Iain Sinclair's Ballard Biography
I reread Iain Sinclair’s BFI book on Cronenberg’s Crash recently as research for my article on the Crash! short film. I have to say I am amazed the BFI ever agreed to publishing it in a series about...
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BallardoTube
I’ve created a YouTube outpost for this site. It’s divided into six channels: (1) J.G. Ballard Interviews; (2) J.G. Ballard Documentaries; (3) J.G. Ballard Adaptations; (4) J.G. Ballard’s Top Ten...
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Architectures of the Near Future
In my interview with BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh, I mentioned that I’d love to see Ballard taught in architectural schools. Geoff enthusiastically replied, ‘I would love to do this — it’s actually a...
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Grave New World: Introduction, Part 1
A-bomb explosion, Bikini Atoll, 25 July, 1946. I’m a scholar, I teach Brit.Lit. professionally at the University of Warsaw. My PhD (1999) was on Angela Carter and it got me a job there as assistant...
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Three recent reviews
by Simon Sellars The following are the full versions of three book reviews originally published elsewhere in edited form. The BLDGBLOG Book, by Geoff Manaugh. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2009....
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