Will Self's Blog, page 24

The total city

Interview with Will for 3am magazine in Paris, here.

A journey to the heart of Britain

I teach at Brunel University in Uxbridge on the outskirts of London – I’m not claiming I could have any academic job I wanted, but I did decide to work at Brunel for a reason, and that reason is Britain. Or, to be a bit more precise: Little Britain. The Brunel University campus was built in the 1960s, and to my way of thinking it’s a superb example of Brutalist architecture – Stanley Kubrick was certainly impressed, because he chose to shoot some of A Clockwork Orange there, the university’s...

Real meals: Spoons

For the past fortnight or so, I have been much exercised by the handsome “personalised spoon offer” that Kellogg’s has had blazoned on its Rice Krispies boxes. My youngest and I decided we very much wanted a spoon with our own slogan engraved on it and he began working on the words while I set about eating enough of the desiccated little blebs to justify buying the two further boxes we needed to obtain the “secret code numbers” required to unlock the spoon trove. On the back of these boxes ar...

Real meals: Pot Noodles

“To get up in the morning, in the fullness of youth, and eat a Pot Noodle – now that’s what I call vicious.” So Nietzsche wrote in 1889, shortly before his complete mental breakdown. Some scholars have attributed the collapse to the philosopher’s aggressive consumption of this instant snack food. He had already condemned the German people – in Ecce Homo, his crazed “memoir” – as bovine consumers of beer and sausages from whom no refinement of thought or feeling could be expected, and his move...

On location: Will Self’s Alley …

I take my commitment to public education and to presenting my work in new digital formats extremely seriously, which is why, from now on, each instalment of On Location will be accompanied by a riveting and informative film. The first of these, Will Self’s Alley, can now be viewed on YouTube.

It’s a five-minute film, shot in real time and unedited, which shows my point of view as I take a 35-yard walk along an alley near my house, the camera bobbing, weaving and corkscrewing down into the tan...

The madness of crowds: marathons

Granted, the only circumstances under which I’d run a marathon would be if I had to deliver news of a great victory by the Greeks over the Persians and there was no other transport available, but nevertheless I’m not against other people running them. My old mate Nick did the London Marathon some years ago to celebrate getting his breath back following decades of heavy smoking. I asked him what it was like, but he said that after 15 very odd miles, things became a bit of a blur. Certainly, wa...

On the general election

Watch Will Self and Toby Young discussing the general election result on Channel 4 News here.

Who Created Jihadi John? debate

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ntqn2Rsm3jw

On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks, the eminent neurologist and writer, whose many books have done perhaps more than any other body of work to explain the mysteries of the brain to a general readership, is a strong supporter of the “narrativity” theory of the human subject. Suitably enough – given this is an autobiography – Sacks restates the notion here: “Each of us … constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ and is defined by this narrative.” Elsewhere he asserts: “I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, i...

On location: Orkney

We waited by the corner of the choir and the south transept; our guide needed to fetch something. She returned with a plasticised flip-book that was full of photographs of a smiling and slightly adipose middle-aged woman striking various attitudes: standing on narrow stone spiral stairs, squeezing between ancient walls, and crouching to negotiate low and knobbly ceilings. I didn’t want to look at the photographs – but our guide insisted. “It’s for our insurance,” she explained. “We have to in...