Concrete island

Re: cento per cento per centoMichele Aquila: [email protected]: [email protected]

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J. G. Ballard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia- 02.25 - [ Traduci questa pagina ]His family lived in a small area in G block, a two-story residence for 40 families. .... The main character of Crash is called James Ballard and lives in .... is also heavily influenced by the Bal-lard novels, Crash and Concrete Island. ...en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard - 98k - Copia cache - Pagine simili

J.G. Ballard: www.jgballard.com- [ Traduci questa pagina ]Chris Hall talks to J G Ballard about Millennium People, the middle classes and .... Through The Crash Barrier: A Reading of J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island ...www.jgballard.com/ - 42k - Copia cache - Pagine simili

Ballardian- [ Traduci questa pagina ]Mike Bonsall sets out on a mission to find The Real Concrete Island, and is surprised by what he finds: ‘Ballard must have walked the same streets that

se sono ancora in tempo,il mio contributo è un libro,

L’isola di cemento di James G. Ballard

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J. G. Ballard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia- 02.25 - [ Traduci questa pagina ]His family lived in a small area in G block, a two-story residence for 40 families. .... The main character of Crash is called James Ballard and lives in .... is also heavily influenced by the Bal-lard novels, Crash and Concrete Island. ...en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard - 98k - Copia cache - Pagine simili

J.G. Ballard: www.jgballard.com- [ Traduci questa pagina ]Chris Hall talks to J G Ballard about Millennium People, the middle classes and .... Through The Crash Barrier: A Reading of J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island ...www.jgballard.com/ - 42k - Copia cache - Pagine simili

Ballardian- [ Traduci questa pagina ]Mike Bonsall sets out on a mission to find The Real Concrete Island, and is surprised by what he finds: ‘Ballard must have walked the same streets that ww.ballardian.com/ - 71k - Copia cache - Pagine simili

Bibliographie de James G. Ballard- [ Traduci questa pagina ]Concrete Island NOUVELLES My Dream of Flying to Wake Island OUVRAGES PARUS EN 1975 ... The Best of J. G. Ballard NOUVELLES The Dead Time The Index ...www.allsf.net/Auteurs/Ballard/Bibliographie/Bib-Ballard.htm - 31k - Copia cache - Pagine simili

Sommaire des oeuvres de James G. Ballard- [ Traduci questa pagina ]D E J A M E S G. B A L L A R D. © Illustration M.Laverdet ... 1 Billenium; 2 Chronopolis and Oth-er Stories; 3 Cocaine Nights; 4 Concrete Island; 5 Crash ...www.allsf.net/Auteurs/Ballard/Oeuvres/OeuBal-lard.htm - 15k - Copia cache - Pagine simili J. G. Ballard | LibraryThing- [ Traduci questa pagina ](see complete list), James Gr. Ballard, et al J.G. Ballard, James Graham Ballard, ... Cocaine Nights 453 copies, 6 reviews; Concrete Island 366 copies, www.librarything.com/author/ballardjg - 173k - Copia cache - Pagine simili

J G Ballard - “Concrete Island”- [ Traduci questa pagina ]The concrete island onto which Maitland, the main character of Ballard’s novel, .... James Pat-terson And Michael Ledwidge Do Not Disappoint In Run For Your Life ... J-G-Ballard---Concrete-Island&id=817226. Chicago Style Citation: ...

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Title Information, Concrete island- [ Traduci questa pagina ]Control Number, 0224009702. Information Codes, 881228s W. Author, Ballard, J. G., James Graham. Title, Concrete island. Publisher, London, Cape, 1974 ...https://library.eastriding.gov.uk/02.../02_005_Ti-tleInformation.aspx?...Ballard%2C+J.+G... - 32k - Copia cache - Pagine simili

JG Ballard Bibliography of Secondary Literature - [ Traduci questa pagina ]La colpa come collante sociale nella narrativa di James G. Ballard”, ..... in J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island and The Unlimited Dream Company”, Eng-lishes, ...www.rickmcgrath.com/jgballard/jgb_secondary-biblio.html - 122k - Copia cache - Pagine simili

Concrete Island: J.G. Ballard: Amazon.co.uk: Books- [ Traduci questa pagina ]As I gradually devoured the masteful works of Ballard, Concrete Island was the one that gave me indigestion. Published on 18 Jun 2004 by kdonn2410 ...www.amazon.co.uk/Concrete-Island-J-G-Bal-lard/dp/009933481X - 199k - Copia cache - Pagine simili

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Concrete IslandFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A “concrete island” is also a term used to de-scribe a microclimate effect on some large cities, such as Tokyo.

Concrete Island is a 1974 English fiction novel by J. G. Ballard.

Plot introduction

A twisted adaptation of Robinson Crusoe, the story’s protagonist, Robert Maitland, a wealthy architect, finds himself stranded in a manmade ‘island’ (a section of fenced-off wasteland in the middle of a motorway intersection), forced to survive on only what is in his crashed Jaguar and what he is able to find. As his condition degrades, it soon becomes difficult to determine whether Maitland is finding sanity or watching his mind fall apart as he finds companions on the island and eventually decides to remain there and forsake his former life.

Adaptations/references in other media

The novel was adapted as a multimedia play by

German artists Stefan Kunzmann and Isabelle Jen-niches in 2002.

One of the chapter titles from the novel, “Burning Car”, provided the inspiration for a 1980 single by British electronic new wave musician John Foxx.

The lyrics to Jawbox’s song “Motorist” from the album For Your Own Special Sweetheart were inspired by the novel.

http://www.ballardian.com/content-in-their-little-prisons

“Content in their little prisons”: J.G. Ballard on “The Towers”

Ballardian: Concrete IslandInterview by Philippe R. Hupp.Translation by Dan O’Hara.

Ballard’s novels have always been translated into French with alacrity. His 1974 novel, Concrete Is-land, was already in translation in time for review in the January 1975 edition of the major Paris literary organ Magazine Littéraire, and Antoine Griset’s review was both penetrating and positive. Griset immediately connected the predicament of Ballard’s protagonist, stranded on an urban desert island between motorway intersections, with the extremes of social inequality within our society.

‘The image or the idea of a man dying of hunger only a step away from a haven of abundance is tragically familiar’, Griset writes, noting how absurd it is that such distress has become a banal commonplace. Whilst admiring the ‘immense talent’ of Ballard in transforming a vague, banal terrain into a hallucinatory hell — a feat also achieved in Crash — Griset observes that although Concrete Island may be a continuation of the earlier novel, this time the automobile is a mere symbolic pretext for an examination of the flip-

side of our ordered, automated, aseptic lifestyle.

Griset sees the real focus of Concrete Island as being on the flotsam of urban Man Fridays (or should that be ‘Men Friday’?) living in the in-terstices of modern cities: the invisible masses we observe daily from behind the safety of the windscreen or the office window. In the novel Maitland, an affluent architect who crosses this invisible barrier, decides to remain on the con-crete island, having triumphed over its obstinate vagrants. Yet Griset suggests that, if the Maitland who first arrived on the island dies and is trans-formed into a new, stronger version of himself, he also remains afraid to recognize his own true nature. In a brilliant insight into Ballard’s metafic-tional method, Griset implies that this transfor-mation of the protagonist is intended to provoke a similar transformation in the reader. Concrete Island is less concerned with awakening a new moral knowledge than with demonstrating the ways in which the mirror-world of own native bru-tality is just on the other side of the windscreen.

The following brief interview was printed along-side Griset’s review. Mostly concerned with the novel he was then in the early stages of writing, High-Rise, it does however contain an intrigu-ing reference to Ballard conducting research on the relation between criminal behaviour and the urban environment. Whatever the sources of this research might have been, it seems that it started a line of enquiry which became a central topos of

his writing, leading from Concrete Island through High Rise to Running Wild and the loose tetralogy bookended by Cocaine Nights and Kingdom Come.

Dan O’Hara

PHILIPPE R. HUPP: You’re in the process of writing a new novel called The Towers…

JGB: In fact I still haven’t found a title. It’s a book about what in England and the USA are called ‘high-rises’, these residential towers which can have forty or fifty floors or more. I saw a film about Poland last week, in which one complex of apartments had twenty floors and was a kilome-tre in length! I’ve been interested for several years now in new lifestyles which permit modern technology; skyscrapers have always attracted me. The life led there seems to me very abstract, and that’s an aspect of setting with which I’m concerned when I write — the technological land-scape.

Have you read The World Inside by Robert Silver-berg? It’s a novel in which people live in groups of 800 thousand in vertical cities. And Silverberg, instead of simply planting the people of today in a futuristic setting, is concerned with showing how their mentality and their social life would be affected.

I haven’t read that book, but what interests me is the present. I don’t want to extrapolate too far

– there’s the risk of becoming detached from real-ity. Although I did write a story a few years ago, ‘Build up’, in which one city occupied the entire universe. It’s a quite fascinating subject.

You’ve already examined housing schemes?

I did research before sitting down to write. For example, in cities, the degree of criminality is affected by liberty of movement; it’s higher in culs-de-sac. And high-rises are culs-de-sac: two thousand people jammed together in the air…

Entirely isolated.

Cut off from the rest of the world. In this kind of situation, all sorts can happen. Above all I’d like to examine the psychological modifications which occur without the knowledge of the inhabitants themselves, to see to what degree the mind of someone who drives a car or lives in a concrete high-rise has been altered. In the course of my investigations, I observed that there now exists a new race of people who are content in their little prisons, who tolerate a very high level of noise, but for whom the apartment is nothing more than a base allowing them to pass the night in comfort, as they’re absent during the day.

Will this new novel be as symbolic as Crash and Concrete Island?

I think it will be in the same vein, although this

time I’m no longer concentrating on one single character.

And after that, will you further continue your series on the ‘technological landscape’?

No. I don’t have an idea for a novel, but I’d very much like to write several stories that I haven’t had the time to write these last few years. And it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything in the way of imaginative narratives, romances…

http://www.jgballard.ca/interviews/against_en-tropy_1984.html

Against Entropy

Peter Ronnov-Jessen Talks To JG Ballard

Transcribed by Mike Holliday.

J.G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and in-terned by the Japanese from 1942-1946. After his release he came to England and for a short time studied medicine at King’s College, Cambridge. His previous novels include The Drowned World, The Crystal World, Crash and The Unlimited Dream Company. Empire of the Sun is his latest work, a war novel, to be published by Gollancz next month, £8.95.

PRJ: In some of your books you are preoccupied with post-industrial society. In The Ultimate City you depict two townships, Garden City and the Ultimate City itself. Whereas most people would say that the static pastoral of Garden City was an Eden realized, the protagonist obviously prefers the dynamic decay of the Ultimate City -- the entropy, to use that catch-phrase of the Sixties.

JGB: I don’t think that small section of New York (the city in question, though I never stated it) which he re-animates -- trying to recapture some-thing of the dynamism, aggression and freedom

for the imagination to soar that was so lacking in the small rural town where he was brought up - is exactly a zone of entropy. Quite the opposite: he sees life in Garden City as imagination stifled, he sees a complete absence of real freedom in this rural paradise. He returns to the ancient city across the bay, a city which holds within itself the possibilities, the tools, the means by which he can release his imagination. Of course, he finds there this old entrepreneur, an architect, an antiquated figure with all his dreams of giant engineering structures. Now Fuller represents the last of that generation who saw through engineering a way to tap man’s imagination, a sense of the dynamic possibilities of life. I don’t see the city as entro-pic. I endorse the quest by the young hero to find an alternative to that little paradise across the bay where human imagination is totally stifled. I don’t make any moral judgements about it. I think the world will always produce its Buckmin-ster Fullers and ‘Buckmasters’ and people like the boy, who are determined to strike out on their own and who need to release their imaginations in a particularly direct way, who dislike any kind of static society and its values (which are epito-mized in the great suburbs of Western Europe and the United States: death to the spirit).

PRJ: You live in a suburb.

[JGB] Yes. It’s a very good place to work because I’m reminded every moment of the day what the alternative to the imagination is.

PRJ: One could say that the dynamism represent-ed by New York is actually the dynamism of decay.

JGB: No, I don’t accept that. The city is aban-doned, and with it, suspended in time, is a whole set of formulae for expressing human energy, imagination, ambition. The clock has stopped, but it will be possible for the boy to start it up again, just as in the novel Hello America where the young hero does precisely the same -- except he attempts to do it on a continental level. It’s basically the same story, though again I point to the inherent dangers.

PRJ: There seems to be a sort of relish in the decay, doesn’t there?

JGB: I don’t think there is any decay. The America and the Las Vegas that the characters find in Hello America is not decayed - it’s just abandoned, which is a very different thing. In The Ultimate City things get out of hand, of course. It’s the classic story of Aladdin with the lamp, the sorcer-er’s apprentice, and so on. My young hero in both the novella and the novel hasn’t realized every-thing that the genie of the human imagination and human ambition is capable of achieving: once you give him the go-ahead, say the magic word and he leaps from the lamp, you may get more than you bargained for. So I’m making a judge-ment on human ambition and imagination in both works; I’m saying implicitly that the dark side of

the imagination emerges.

The novel is more specifically about America; the novella is basically about industrialization and the twentieth century, and it could be set anywhere in any big city -- Sydney, Cape Town (though in fact it’s New York). I don’t see post-industrialism as a matter of decay, either morally speaking or in the literal sense. That’s what’s interesting about it: it’s not that the society based on the machine, on technology, is crumbling in its social structures and moral values, rotting, decaying... No, that isn’t what is happening. It’s simply that one has evolved completely out of the whole system of values represented by the technological society, just as 150 years ago, at the time of the Indus-trial Revolution, people left the countryside and moved to the cities. This didn’t mean that the ag-ricultural life was decaying, that its moral values were in disrepute. Not at all, it simply meant that people had evolved to a state where they needed the city to fulfil themselves and their possibilities. Just as that has happened, I think people are now beginning to evolve beyond the possibilities of the large conurbations of industrial society -- with its built-in conformism of the mass-production line, of the shop floor -- and they want more individu-ality. So a second emigration is going on, certainly in this country and, I think, in the US and most countries of Western Europe.

People are moving away from the industrial base, in all senses, towards something more reflec-

tive and more private. The transformation of the home into a TV studio has taken place gradually - more and more electronic equipment, home video systems, TV cameras, video libraries. People are moving into a more private phase of self-explora-tion, and leaving behind the mass society that technology created 150 years ago. So entropy is the wrong word to describe the process at work in both The Ultimate City and Hello America. The clock stopped, but the machine is still there.

PRJ: You’ve said several times that the disasters your characters face lead them to a certain kind of psychic fulfilment. Maitland in Concrete Island, Ballard in Crash, and Laing in High-Rise may all be said to have staged the catastrophes themselves, to a certain extent. But what about Sanders in The Crystal World, Ransom in The Drought and Kerans in The Drowned World? To what extent would you consider a reading of these works valid which claimed that the natural disasters depicted are mere externalizations of the characters’ sub-conscious drives and desires?

JGB: I think that’s very fair. It is quite true that in Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise the charac-ters almost consciously create the disaster. That’s not true in the case of the other three books you mention, because of course it’s not possible for an individual to arrange for the icecaps to melt and London to be flooded, or for a drought to turn a whole hemisphere into a desert. But what would have happened to these characters had these

global disasters not taken place? It’s quite an interesting question. What would have happened to Kerans, Sanders and Ransom if there had been no melting icecaps, no crystallizing, or no drought -- what would they have done about their pow-erful compulsions? Presumably they would have contrived crises of their internal universe in some other way... but you’re right that in my first three novels the external disasters do seem to have been created by the characters in the same way as in the later three novels. It’s also a matter of interpretation, isn’t it? If you take The Drowned World, my hero, Kerans, is the only one to see the significance of the transformation going on. All the other characters in my first three books react as most ordinary people would: if the dam bursts, they run for the hills. It’s only the central charac-ter who sees the system of imaginative possibili-ties represented by the disaster.

PRJ: In traditional disaster stories the goal of the acting subjects is to subdue the object, the world, whereas your characters seem to want to merge...

JGB: That’s true. That’s part of the problem faced by the hero in all three books. Take Kerans in The Drowned World: by the time you go back to the sources of your being in the amniotic soup, the primal sea, of course you find the truth about yourself but you lose your individuality by merging into the great undifferentiated source of life.

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Title Information, Concrete island- [ Traduci questa pagina ]Control Number, 0224009702. Information Codes, 881228s W. Author, Ballard, J. G., James Graham. Title, Concrete island. Publisher, London, Cape, 1974 ...https://library.eastriding.gov.uk/02.../02_005_Ti-tleInformation.aspx?...Ballard%2C+J.+G... - 32k - Copia cache - Pagine simili

JG Ballard Bibliography of Secondary Literature - [ Traduci questa pagina ]La colpa come collante sociale nella narrativa di James G. Ballard”, ..... in J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island and The Unlimited Dream Company”, Eng-lishes, ...www.rickmcgrath.com/jgballard/jgb_secondary-biblio.html - 122k - Copia cache - Pagine simili

Concrete Island: J.G. Ballard: Amazon.co.uk: Books- [ Traduci questa pagina ]As I gradually devoured the masteful works of Ballard, Concrete Island was the one that gave me indigestion. Published on 18 Jun 2004 by kdonn2410 ...www.amazon.co.uk/Concrete-Island-J-G-Bal-lard/dp/009933481X - 199k - Copia cache - Pagine simili