Extreme Metaphors

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1. davidgerardSep 2023
   I also highly recommend Extreme Metaphors. It's a collection of interviews with Ballard where he tells you precisely what his writing is about.
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2. auxbussJun 2022
   Guy Debord wrote about this thoroughly in The Society of the Spectacle (1967)

   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/381440.The_Society_of_th...

   And Johnny Rotten: “Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Cheated?”

   J.G, Ballard talked about it a lot. See his interviews in Extreme Metaphors, rather than his novels.

   “I feel that the 1960s represent a marked turning point. For the first time, with the end of the Cold War, I suppose, for the first time the outside world, so-called reality, is now almost completely a fiction. It’s a media landscape, if you like. It’s almost completely dominated by advertising, TV, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as advertising. People’s lives, even their individual private lives, are getting more and more controlled by what I call fiction. By fiction I mean anything invented for imaginative purposes. For example, you don’t buy an airline ticket, you don’t just buy transportation, let’s say, to the south of France or Spain. What you buy is the image of a particular airline, the kind of miniskirts the hostesses are wearing on that airline. In fact, airlines in America are selling themselves on this sort of thing.

   "Also the sort of homes people buy for themselves, the way they furnish their houses, even the way they talk, the friends they have, everything is becoming fictionalised. Therefore, given that reality is now a fiction, it’s not necessary for the writer to invent the fiction. The writer’s relationship with reality is completely the other way around. It’s the writer’s job to find the reality, to invent the reality, not to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there. The greatest fictional characters of the twentieth century are people like the Kennedys. They’re a twentieth-century House of Atreus.”

   From a 1968 interview with Jannick Storm

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3. kepanoMay 2024
   In searching for the primary sources for the quotes in this article I found that "Extreme Metaphors" (ISBN 978-0-00-745485-3) seems to be the best collection of J. G. Ballard interviews.

   Quite a few are collected here:

   https://www.jgballard.ca/media/interviews.html

   One of the interviews referenced in the OP can be found here:

   https://www.jgballard.ca/media/1987_november_i-d_magazine.ht...

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4. r721Feb 2024
   There's also this: https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Metaphors-J-G-Ballard-ebook/d... ("A startling and at times unsettlingly prescient collection of J.G. Ballard’s greatest interviews.")

   I didn't read it though, just know about its existence from following Simon Sellars (of ballardian.com fame) on Twitter.

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