Will Self's Blog, page 25

Why Will Self is voting Labour

Via the Guardian (and Oscar Wilde).

The madness of crowds: screens on planes …

I never watch movies or TV or play video games on planes. Why? Because those fag-packet-sized screens that they implant in the back of the seats are actually displaying the thoughts of the person sitting in front of you. It isn’t seemly to intrude on another’s thoughts – we’ve all read our Freud and we know that beneath the thin, smooth veneer of socially sanctioned self-awareness (I am an upright, decent, sincere, moral person . . .), there seethes a fetid-fiery pit of the libidinal imaginat...

New events spring and summer 2015

29 April: Magna Carta and Commemoration with Will Self, 7pm, United Reform Church, High Street, Egham.

1 May: An Audience with Will Self, 6pm, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, University of Southampton.

17 June: The Internet is not the answer: Andrew Keen in conversation with Will Self, 7pm, The Idler Academy, 81 Westbourne Park Road, London W2 5QH.

On vaping

You can read Will Self writing about his addiction to vaping at Esquire magazine here.

On freedom and determinism

You can listen to an edited version of a recent Guardian Live talk between Will Self and John Gray here.

On location: Maps, territories and train toilets

Can I be alone in finding the new toilets on trains peculiarly unsettling? There is something about all those buttons and lights, about the way the curved door groans shut, that contrives to make these smallest rooms feel provisional and exposed. I miss the heft and security of a toilet door you can shut and bolt manually: what automation gives, it can so easily take away, leaving your buttocks exposed to the commuting multitudes.

Anyway, I was meditating on this the other day as I wandered a...

Madness of crowds: individuals and society

In his story “An Outpost of Progress” – a prototype for the novella Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad writes of his colonialist protagonists that they were “two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organisation of civilised crowds”. This perspective on the crowd is alien to us; we are perfectly prepared to believe that the crowd “dehumanises”; that when we find ourselves in a stampeding herd of crazed people, we ourselve...

On skyscrapers

Read Will Self writing about the meaning of skyscrapers for Guardian Review here.

Real meals: Virgin snack boxes

Sometimes I ask myself in all sincerity – is Richard Branson real? Please note, the question is not “Is Richard Branson for real?” (the sort of locution he himself might have used back in the days when he edited Student), but rather: “Does he exist in any meaningful sense at all?”

I continue to ask myself this question even though I have actually met Branson and shaken him by the hand. Seeing wasn’t believing – nor, it appears, was touching; Branson will have to work much harder than Jesus Ch...

The Purple Revolution by Nigel Farage

Read Will Self’s review of Farage’s “commonplace little tome” Purple Revolution here at Guardian Review.