Face to Face: JG Ballard (Part One)

[@hypatia4754]

He was so prophetic about violence. Man is the most violent, dangerous animal on earth - with a death wish that overrides all rationality. One of the few people to explore this.

[@Warp75]

Yep.

[@willsi]

Thanks so much for all of these Ballard videos. He will be missed.

[@ja3551]

writing my dissertation on this great man, thank you fo much for putting this up!

[@RonaldMcMeekin]

What a great man he was a truly great writer and insightful human being.

[@netizencapet]

Inimmitable. His interview is downright priceless at almost every point...its tone and postulates form the perfect explanatory commentary to certain ambiguities in his best books. His 1960s and 1970s work (though you can toss Drowned World and Concrete Island straight in the bin), is more profound and carefully written than it first seems. Highrise, for example, has a ton of overlapping Freudian and Marxian spoofs that are turned in on themselves and the way Ballard, tackles projection and transference, where Laing/Royal/Wilder are the Ego/Superego/Id of a single imagination and where Laing is not conscious of the rapes and murders he commits on the middle floors are so masterfully articulated that only a few reads reveals that that is indeed what is transpiring. The very careful use of floor numbers as codes in helping solve the single identity of Laing/Royal/Wilder and his crimes and in forming the metaphor of a literal body from head to groin to toe, all mashed over by an intentionally vulgar Marxist division (one Marx would scrap, and Ballard knows this) into 3 class estates.

[@tedl7538]

33 years later and the violence fed into our homes through internet videos and social media is like Ballard's worldview on steroids.

[@ChristopherPoole-j9k]

Don’t understand him yet as only 29 pages high rise. I know he’s intelligent. But glad to listen to him and find

[@TheIkaraCult]

I feel like he started writing, his words buried themselves into the ground, and they popped up in front of me the second I opened his collected short stories.

[@derekspitz9225]

"... a map in search of a territory...' Brilliant! That territory turned out to be the web. Jim's had 20/20 future vision. Another glimpse into a fast approaching future are his shot fictions: Motel Architecture and The Intensive Care Unit.

[@silverapples75]

Having been born in a suburb of Manchester I can say he's right. Give me a Chinese internment camp any day.

[@shrimpfarmersunion]

"One of the greatest set of teeth of the 20th century."

[@Bbygirl2829]

Wish I could speak so beautifully.

[@bethelshiloh]

My reality is beyond this world.

[@JakesGuitarThing]

I don't think leaving a comment is obligatory.

[@scottsutherland9126]

"Constant leakage between the two."

[@SuperBagshot]

I know i'm living in a Ballard imagined world

[@paulies5407]

wait for 2020

[@carsonhaught9934]

A uniquely gifted but disturbing visionary - or is he just an interpreter or observer? Thanks for these vids.

[@1961axis]

Quite. Well it is almost as bloody expensive as the US now.

[@tomsega]

One of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, and all you have to say regarding him is that he had bad teeth? Pretty moronic.

[@bravoignition]

I wonder what he would have thought about the modern day.. I imagine the media world of today looks very different to what it did in 1989.

[@alexwastakenwastaken]

He only died a few years before you posted your comment!

[@chrish12345]

I guess you should feel lucky in a way that you were able to get so close to them and analyse them in such detail

[@DarkbeatBand]

J.G Ballard is a genius ... but looks like an episode of Mastermind!

[@bethelshiloh]

Morbidity

[@anthonycostine5067]

No it isn't.

[@scottvska]

It's a KZbin comment, not a letter to the New Yorker. What am I supposed to say? "One of the greatest novelist of the 20th century"? That's even worse.