Watch Will Self taking part in The Secret Life of the National Grid on BBC4, a new three-part series “charting the development of Britain’s national electricity grid and how it sparked modern Britain into being – transforming our landscape, our politics and our lives”. It starts on Tuesday at 9pm.
A weird, piratically themed Cornish pasty takeaway outlet has mounted a sustained assault on English railway terminuses and high streets. Casting my eye over the mock-treasure map of store locations on the West Cornwall Pasty Company’s website, I counted 40 of them between the Tamar and the North York Moors. I’d been creepingly aware of the pasting being dished out by the pasties – their black-and-yellow livery has been ousting the tricolour of Delice de France and other such baguette bars for some time, and a year or so ago I even found myself buying one of the buttock-shaped savouries.
There are four classic interviews with Will Self featured in the newly published Spike Magazine PDF — a 600 page anthology of the best interviews, features and reviews from SpikeMagazine.com that’s completely free to download.
The interviews with Will cover Great Apes and the 1997 General Election; the short story collection Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys; How The Dead Live; and the journalist collection Feeding Frenzy.
There’s also numerous interviews with other authors that may be of interest to Will Self fans, especially the JG Ballard interviews about Cronenberg’s movie adaptation of Crash, and also the novels Rushing To Paradise, Millennium People and Super Cannes.
I listened to Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour party conference while at stool the other day. This was purely serendipitous: a function of the dispensation of my digestion, the location of the lavatory and my wife’s bizarre interest in such things (conference speeches, that is, not my digestion). Not to gross you out or anything, but had I not been so engaged, I doubt I would have managed to concentrate for more than a few seconds – for whatever else Miliband Jr may be, he’s a worthy successor to Tony Blair, that air-guitarist of political rhetoric.
Listen to Will Self being interviewed by Bruno Rinvolucri as he takes him on a two-part tour of the sewers of Brixton on Tunnel Vision Thursday October 14 at 4.30pm on Resonance FM (resonancefm.com), where they will discuss “the spatialisation of human waste, the architecture of sanitation, excremental stalagmites and stalactites” among other things. If you don’t live in London, you can still listen to it live on their website. Read Self’s blog about it here.
The Guardian: “You see suddenly that, beneath the apocalyptic humour and fizzing contempt of Walking to Hollywood lies the iron will and cold, self-inspecting intelligence of its author. All along the book has been about death.”
The Spectator: “The conversations with Scooby-Doo, the made-up characters, the sex, lies and videotape – this is a landscape contoured, almost in whole, by Self’s imagination … It is, as always, a place crammed with a Devil’s Dictionary’s worth of wordplay, and with an unerring tendency towards the absurd and perverse … Walking to Hollywood is certainly an engaging enough breakdown on the part of its author. Just make sure to approach it with all the professional detachment of a psychiatrist.”
Listen to Will Self and Martin Amis (and others) talking about putting themselves in their fiction from the Guardian Books podcast here.
Listen to Will Self being interviewed after his appearance at Bookslam recently and also to him giving a reading from Walking to Hollywood.
From time to time, I succumb to one of the great delusions of the modern world: namely that a gadget or device will allow me to do something I’ve been doing for years faster and more efficiently, thereby gifting me more of the kind of time I so desperately need: down time. This is how mobile phones, netbooks and now e-books have all entered my life. Each time, I discover that said gizmo does nothing for me and then swear that I’ll never make the same mistake again, but I can’t help it – it’s like a coup de foudre; I see an advert or hear the twittery spiel of some deranged early adopter and off I fly into computer-generated fantasies of techno-adequacy.
Is Nick Clegg the verruca of British politics? I only ask – in fact, it’s something I asked Sadie, a nice woman who held my gnarled and calloused foot between her parted thighs for half an hour in a south London consulting room early this week, then charged me £28 for the privilege. I hasten to add that Sadie’s thighs were sheathed in denim and far from being a fetishists’ assistant, she was a chiropodist.
 Walking To Hollywood More info |
 Psycho Too More info |
 Liver More info |
 The Butt More info |
 The Book Of Dave More info |
 Psychogeography More info |
 Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe More info |
 Dorian More info |
 Feeding Frenzy More info |
 How The Dead Live More info |
 Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys More info |
 Great Apes More info |
 Cock And Bull More info |
 Grey Area More info |
 Junk Mail More info |
 My Idea Of Fun More info |
 The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis More info |
 The Quantity Theory Of Insanity More info |
 Sore Sites More info |
 Perfidious Man More info |
 William Burroughs - Junky [with essay by WS] More info |
 Alasdair Gray - Critical Essays [with essay by WS] More info |
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