Handle with care

An interview with J. G. Ballard published at the Guardian a couple of days ago doesn't break much new ground; however, with Ballard, as ever, the old ground is interesting enough to hold your attention rather well.

Seated before his reconstituted Delvaux, Ballard is at home with his paradoxes. "Just because you're right, it doesn't mean you shouldn't be viewed with great suspicion." The gifts of modern life, the "mod cons" that have brought a kind of freedom to the inhabitants of the western world, "are gifts that come in poisonous wrapping paper. One has to handle them very carefully. But that's true of most of the valuable things in life."

Too true.

Selected previous posts on Ballard:

"Nightmares at Noon"

"More thoughts on rampant pathologies, modernist ziggurats and countless rabbits"