J.G. Ballard Conversations

by J.G. Ballard

A highly sought cultural commentator, J. G. Ballard has provided thoughtful remarks on the state of the world for decades. J.G. Ballard Conversations
brings together several of Ballard's latest interviews and gives
readers penetrating insight into the mind of one of the freshest
thinkers at work today. Covering topics such at the 9/11 terrorist
attacks, the evolution of sexual relationships, and our strange,
immersive...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1889307130
• ISBN13: 9781889307138
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: Re/Search Publications
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Another 'must have' book for the Ballard enthusiast.

"Re/Search 8/9: J G Ballard", which dates from 1984, is the single best book that's been published on Ballard. This latest offering from Re/Search brings us right up to date, containing a variety of interviews and discussions with the author taken over the period 1983 to 2004. There's lots here on Ballard's usual themes - psychopathology, death of affect, and so on. But the guts of the book lies in the three lengthy interviews in 2003 and 2004, in the course of which Ballard also visits such contemporary issues as 9-11, neo-cons, globalization, the end of the 'Age of Reason', and terrorism. As a counterpoint, there's a series of more informal, and often amusing, discussions that the Re/Search people have had with Ballard over the years they've been associated with him. Whilst the interviews don't quite reach the heights of those in "Re/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard", it's a worthy addition to Re/Search's portfolio of books by or about J.G.B., and a great companion to "J. G. Ballard: Quotes".

sparkling bathers in near-futuristic water-slide playground utopias somehow magically growing out of

The work that has earned J.G. Ballard his reputation as a prophet of the present runs the full gamut from the perverse to the catastrophic, from the utterly Surreal to the deeply personal. In J.G. Ballard Conversations, a new collection of interviews from RE/Search, Ballard exercises his trenchant observations live and uncensored. Running jags on the politics of paranoia are illumed with scientific/poetic clarity and a critical sense of the absurd on every page. But to say that Ballard is ahead of his time or a proponent of "science fictions" is misleading. The opposition that at one time may have existed between realistic fiction and "fantasy" or "science fiction" has been dismantled. Society's skewed relationship to realist fiction is explained by Ballard as the failing imaginations of contemporary men and women of letters to ascertain a world quickly leaving their ilk in the perfumed car exhaust. "I think realist fiction has shot its bolt--it just doesn't describe the world we live in anymore. We're not living in a world where you can make a clear separation (as you could, say during the heyday of the 19th-century realist novel) between the external world of work, commerce, industry and a fixed set of values, and the internal world of hopes, dreams and ambitions. It's the other way around--the external world is a fantasy nowadays. It's a media landscape generated by advertising, and politics conducted as a branch of advertising. There's an envelope of fantasy that is just pouring out of the air all the time, shaping all of our most ordinary perceptions... Fiction surrounds us--it's more than fiction, it's fantasy of a very peculiar kind that creates our environment. And to describe you've got to get away from realism. Yet the bourgeois novel survives and of course it's immensely popular--which is a bit of a problem." Ballard's ability to lay open our present like a surgeon with a scalpel never fails, although his often satirical wit more closely resembles a butcher hacking us to pieces on his block. The real gravity in reading Ballard's musings lie in mapping his recurring obsessions, which even in the candor of casual conversation articulate the core themes of his novels. Ballard literally seems pathologically transfixed with the collective pathologies of modern society, how these pathologies manifest themselves and grow through individuals and in culture at large. His often fatalistic perspective on how individuals may or may not be able to cope with this transforming psychological landscape is a major concern throughout much of Ballard's thinking spanning years of acute insight: On page 60, interviewed in 2003, 'I don't want to make an apocalyptic prophecy--I hardly ever do anything but make apocalyptic prophecies [!]--but I see elective psychopathy as the coming thing." Or on page 136 discussing the politics of unconscious media manipulation embodied in figures like Ronald Reagan, in an interview from the 1980s, "He cle

Converting Conversations.

This excellent volume from the seminal underground SF publisher RE/Search is a definite must for anybody who is a fan of JG Ballard or of intelligent, thought-provoking discourse in general. Transcripts of conversations with various people with Ballard from over a couple of decades veer, often presciently, over subjects as diverse as internet sex, 9/11, the psychology of George W Bush and Tony Blair, the Stockholm syndrome/masochistic victim mentality methodology necessary to keep Western society running, psychopathology, violence, literature, and a thousand other subjects Ballard always has an original opinion on. I found myself stopping frequently when reading this book to digest the information (overload) I had just ingested, and it certainly gave me food for thought and many interesting topics of conversation with my wife. Subsequent readings after the first reveal different layers of thought and theory after the initial culture shock of reading about things like religions regulating against a sane, peaceful society wears off. Buy this book. You won't regret it. Seriously. It certainly opened my eyes in a brilliant, innovative way to many latent strands and strains of faulty or faultline thought in modern life, and I'm definitely grateful for that. Check out www.laurahird.com/newreview/jgballardinterview.html for more information on this and J.G. Ballard Quotes.

CONVERSATIONS is a rich collection of Ballardian riffs

J.G. Ballard has spent most of his adult life quietly in a UK suburb. This collection of conversations is like being able to spend a surreal tea time with Ballard himself. Spanning discussions held in the early 1980s up through interviews held in the past few years, CONVERSATIONS is a compendium of Ballardian thought in the raw, composed freestyle like jazz music only between two people speaking. The 20 year time span allows a good perspective on how political and social patterns predicted by Ballard in his writing during the 60s and 80s have come to pass as cultural reality. A Cronenberg Brundlefly will be quite at home on the wall overhearing these conversations.