the concrete islander is no more

R.I.P., and three cheers for the man who, like Elizabeth Jolley after him, was told his writing was fully sick.
Via Martin Edmond at Luca Antara, this 1997 article for Salon on William Burroughs, where J.G. Ballard famously wrote that:

'The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters.'

Touchingly, Neil Gaiman (he of #Neil Webfail fame) writes that he felt if he said nothing on his blog, it might keep Ballard alive a little longer.
 And speaks feelingly of how terrifyingly ordinary the man was:

"... I don't know what or who I had been expecting, but Jim Ballard, then, and whenever I met him after that, was terrifying in his ordinariness, like the protagonists of his high-rises and drowned worlds, like the man on the motorway island."

The Guardian is all over it, demonstrating with minimal effort how an online newspaper space can do all the book news work if it really wants to. Stories I enjoyed included this one, where Ballard describes his writing space, which included a painting he looked at nearly every day,(fittingly, a copy of a destroyed original), and a chair he probably sat on as a child.
Here he tells how the pram in the hall saved his writing.

I haven't checked yet, but this interview with music writer Simon Reynolds at Ballardian in 2007 may have assisted Reynolds in compiling his recent article for Salon.
Here's a fine excursion from some time ago by our very own David Tiley into Ballardian landscapes - don't forget to look at the Detroit Blog link.

And finally, let the true believers speak. Here's the opening of Simon Sellars' interview for Ballardian in 2006.

Here’s a man who admits he doesn’t read novels; instead he devours ‘invisible literature’: marginalia, copywriting, medical journals, psychiatric reports, Ikea catalogues. He’s influenced by Freud, film noir, science fiction and Surrealist paintings; film, more than anything. To compare him with some literary type who practices the art of ‘tight plotting’ and ‘well-rounded protagonists’ is woefully inadequate. Reviewing KC in the Telegraph, David Robson wrote: ‘The plotting is clumsy … and the violence, integral to the whole design, belongs to the world of comic-strips’. Well, yes. Precisely. Honestly, do we still live in an age where popular culture is considered second-rate to the almighty ‘novel’? Funnily enough, it’s Robson rather than Ballard who puts me in mind of my 78-year-old father, who refuses to watch The Simpsons because ‘cartoons are for kids’.

The whole of the Ballardian site is a treasure trove, enjoy.