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Mike Bonsall

@mbonsall.bsky.social

Ballardian | digitizer | concordancer | code art https://fentonville.co.uk/digital-ballard/

207 Posts711 Follower1263 Folgt
Justin Sherin@wychstreet.bsky.social · last wk.

His legs have bothered him for some time. There’s been no bigger influence on me in terms of my ideas about writing & acting, & he’s a total filmmaker - despite his kitchen sink reputation, a director of style, daring, & originality. www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ju...

Director Mike Leigh likely to retire after his next film due to illness

Film-maker’s drama Tender Loving Care ‘likely’ his final one as he manages myositis, a disease affecting immune system

theguardian.com

Mike Bonsall@mbonsall.bsky.social · last wk.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... 'How long does it take each signal to come through?' 'Only a few seconds. They're tremendously compressed laterally, of course. . .They were first picked up at Jodrell Bank about twenty years ago. Nobody bothers to listen to them now.' JG BALLARD - THE VOICES OF TIME

Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands

Astronomers warn it would tear the heart out of UK science, and leave a generation untrained.

bbc.co.uk

John Coulthart@johncoulthart.com · 3w ago

New blog post: Weekend links 839

Weekend links 839

Imaginary Numbers (1954) by Yves Tanguy. • "In all his writing, Ballard seems to embrace the opposed extremes of pulp genre conventions on the one hand and avant-garde experimentation on the other, while entirely rejecting the norms of conventional literary fiction that lie between these two extremes." Steven Shaviro reviewing The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of JG Ballard…

johncoulthart.com

J G Ballard bot@ballardbot.bsky.social · 4w ago

The sort of images that have appealed to me over the years: all the drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels, strange business parks, gated communities, and retirement complexes -- these are what I want to convey: the peculiar latent psychology waiting to emerge into the daylight.

Neville Morley@nevillemorley.eurosky.social · last mo.

"To say the data provided by the uni is a car crash would be to do a disservice to the essential formal and organisational properties of car crashes (thanks JG Ballard)." I am very much in favour of a union that includes Ballard references in its messages to members.

Future Revisitations@futurerevisited.bsky.social · last mo.

Today’s selection from Aldiss’s ‘Complete Stories’ tome was this exceptional mood piece from 1966, later utilised as the opening chapter of his novel ‘Barefoot in the Head’. It’s a far cry from the unconventional nature of the later chapters though! Illustration here by the fabulous Keith Roberts 👍

Line drawing Illustration by Keith Roberts of a Cathedral facade, which acccompanied Brian Aldiss’s story ‘Just Passing Through’ in a 1966 issue of the British magazine ‘SF Impulse’.
Mike Bonsall@mbonsall.bsky.social · last mo.

THE DROWNED WORLD - JG Ballard "Soon it would be too hot. Looking out from the hotel balcony shortly after eight o'clock, Kerans watched the sun rise behind the dense groves of giant gymnosperms" (Sorry, couldn't resist -- I blame the heat -- and I imagine you've seen much worse -- stay cool all)

photo of thermometer reading 33.6 centigrade and 38% humidity above cover of JG Ballard's The Drowned World. Another photo of first page of the book held open by a hand-held fan. The text reads: ON THE BEACH AT THE RITZ Soon it would be too hot. Looking out from the hotel balcony shortly after eight o'clock, Kerans watched the sun rise behind the dense groves of giant gymnosperms crowding over the roofs of the abandoned department stores four hundred yards away on the east side of the lagoon. Even through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was plainly tangible. The blunt refracted rays drummed against his bare chest and shoulders, drawing out the first sweat, and he put on a pair of heavy sunglasses to protect his eyes. The solar disc was no longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out across the eastern horizon like a colossal fire-ball, its reflection turning the dead leaden surface of the lagoon into a brilliant copper shield. By noon, less than four hours away, the water would seem to burn.
Mark Maguire@markmaguireb.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Back in the personal archives AKA “why the hell did I keep all this stuff in this box.” This is a clipping from JG Ballard in the Observer, December 1996, dismissing “The Case For Mars”: “… for all that superabundance of light years, an infinitude of nothingness is still nothing.” #MemoryLane

One dull step for man... J.G. BALLARD reviews THE CASE FOR MARS by Robert Zubrin. What happened to the Space Age? Its once heroic vision of our planetary future now seems little more than a mirage, fading across the sand-bars and concrete of Cape Kennedy like the ghost of a forgotten advertising campaign for las year's science-fiction blockbuster. Yet in 1957, I remember listening to the radio call-sign of Sputnik 1, relayed on the BBC bulletins, and the sense I had that this was the only news that mattered. As it raced around the planet its urgent tocsin seemed the harbinger of a new age, a rat-lying cry that summoned the entire human race to forget its differences and embark on its greatest adventure, the colonisation of the solar system and. (…) A curious feature of the Space Age was its lack of any real spin-off, its failure to excite the public imagi-nation, to influence fashion, consumer design or architecture. (…) Nevertheless, the dream of spacetravel endures. Robert Zubrin presents his proposal for a simple and affordable ($30 billion) programme for the colonisation of the red planet. Mars Direct, as Zubrin names his project (…) he insists on America's need to set itself the highest goals, to rekindle the lost frontier spirit and to think in the largest terms that the human mind can encompass, which (Zubrin) equates with the limitless dimensions of the external universe. But is pondering upon the universe really thinking on the largest possible scale? It may be a disguised way of thinking small - for all that superabundance of light years, an infinitude of nothingness is still nothing.
Carl Abrahamsson@carlabrahamsson.bsky.social · last mo.

For four consecutive Sundays, beginning July 5th, we will go through his life, literary work, and why it still has relevance today. ”The Psychosexual Pathology of Industrial Culture: The World of J.G. Ballard” HERE: www.morbidanatomy.org/classes/p/jg...

The Psychosexual Pathology of Industrial Culture:The World of J.G. Ballard: with Author Carl Abrahamsson, Begins July 5 — Morbid Anatomy

Four Week Class Taught Online Via Zoom Sundays, July 5 - 26, 2026 1:00 - 2:30pm ET (NYC Time) $150  Paid Patreon Members  / $175 General Admission PLEASE NOTE: Classes will be record...

morbidanatomy.org