Will Self's Blog, page 16

Popping Out

Listen to Will Self’s story Popping Out at the BBC Radio 4 website here.

20 years in solitary confinement

Will Self is going to be giving a lecture at Brunel University London on March 16 at 5.30pm on the relationship between isolation and the novel. Could it be, he wonders, that the novel is the defining art form of the singular and unitary consciousness as self-conceived? If so, in a world in which we’re always connected, will there be enough isolation to provide its psychic substratum? Tickets are free but you will need to register here.

Madness of Crowds: Google’s ‘lucky seven’ maddened crowds

It’s difficult, simply sitting alone in a small room in south London, really to get a feel for how mass human behaviour is affecting the world. But it’s too cold in late February to go out much, and besides, by this point in winter, my sense of autonomy has been so savagely eroded that I fear for what little sense of individuality I have – if I stand next to as few as two others I can sense myself being sucked into a maelstrom of the masses. So, this week, I have decided to trust to algorithm...

Real meals: Patisserie Valerie

The other day, I bought a chocolate-chip cookie from a little boy called Rocco who had set up a stall round the corner, stocked with all sorts of buns, muffins and other home-baked goodies, in order to raise money for SportsAid. “How sweet is that?” I thought, as I handed over my dosh – but when I passed by again a few hours later, I found that Rocco’s little stall had transmogrified into just one of the hundreds of branches of Rocco’s Patisserie, all of which were decorated like a pseudo-Fre...

Selling space – Britain’s public spaces going private

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yMuZ6m9MeE

Will Self was on Channel 4 News this evening, talking about the privatisation of public space. He’ll be at the Space Probe Alpha event tomorrow at Potters Fields Park in London. The event is free and starts at midday. For more details visit their Facebook page here.

On location: Holidays in the sun

That we always kill the thing we love may be a tedious truism, but that can’t make us feel any better when the warm body that we once cuddled and cooed to is lying on the ground at our feet while our hands are bathed in its warm red blood. Last week, the head of the UN World Tourism Organisation, Taleb Rifai, spoke out, saying that travel as “a celebration of life” is under threat. Rifai, of course, was referring to tourism, rather than a broad idea of travel.

Apparently, global tourism rates...

On location: my students’ dérives

The academic requirement for the psychogeography module that I teach at Brunel University London is in two parts. First, there’s a fairly straightforward essay question that gives students an opportunity to display their erudition when it comes to the antics of the surrealists and situationists, or the high-flown ramblings of the English Romantics. Then there’s a special project. The idea for this is that the students undertake their own version of a dérive – the aimless drift through the cit...

Bristol Festival of Ideas talk on JG Ballard and the city

Listen to Will Self talking about JG Ballard and Future Cities in November 2015 at the Bristol Festival of Ideas.

On location: parakeets in London

One of the more bizarre changes I’ve witnessed over the past 20 years or so has been the vast increase in the numbers of Indian rose-ringed parakeets on my manor. Commonly referred to as the ring-neck parakeet, Psittacula krameri manillensis is a bird of such raucousness that were I to get my hands on one, I would cheerfully wring its neck.

I first noticed them when walking to the west of London in the late 1990s – at that time there were already flocks numbering in their thousands around Kin...

On the Thames towpath with Samuel Pepys

Will Self sets out along the Thames to rediscover the city chronicled by the famous diarist, in the Guardian here.