Will Self's Blog, page 26

Question Time

Will Self is going to be on Question Time tonight at 10.45pm on BBC1 with Conservative culture secretary Sajid Javid, Labour’s shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna, Liberal Democrat peer Shirley Williams and Dia Chakravarty of the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

In search of the blues

All You Need is Cash is a 1978 TV mockumentary written by and starring Eric Idle of the Pythons and his long-term comic collaborator Neil Innes. In the film, The Beatles are satirically reformed as The Rutles, but as well as taking an affectionate swipe at the Fab Four (re-dubbed The Prefab Four), Idle and Innes extended their comic vision to the British blues revival of the early Sixties.

In one sublime scene, the hapless reporter journeys to the Mississippi Delta to uncover the origins of T...

Northern Lights 2014

On location: statues

The 20ft-high statue of brave Achilles that stands at the southern end of Park Lane, beside Hyde Park, wears a curious aspect. The first male nude statue to be erected in London since the Roman era, it was cast from captured French guns and dedicated by “the women of England to Arthur, Duke of Wellington and his brave companions in arms”. The women of England turned out when, in 1822, Richard Westmacott’s statue was conveyed through the streets to its plinth; however, it isn’t recorded whethe...

The Nature of Time

Listen to Will Self’s latest A Point of View on Radio 4 here, or read it here.

The madness of crowds: monitoring extremism in universities

On 2 February a crowd of maddened professors wrote to the Guardian to protest against the government’s latest counterterrorism and security bill, which was being hustled through parliament with unseemly haste. The larval bill has now emerged from its neo-Gothic chrysalis to become a beautifully inelegant act. What the professors were so crazy about are the provisions in Section 5 that place an obli­gation on their universities to assist the police and security services in monitoring extremism...

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

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

Watch a live stream of Will Self’s lecture discussing the themes of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Royal Opera House tonight at 7.30pm here. For more details, visit their website here.

At the British Council Literature Seminar

Watch Will Self talking about a care home for the novel, rather than death, the meaning of his novella Leberknödel and much more:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_CA0IAtBlo

Also, Will gave a reading from his latest novel, Shark, which is published in paperback on 5 March by Penguin:

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

Real meals: revolving restaurants

I once ate in a revolving restaurant in Minneapolis but only because it was midwinter, too frigid to venture out, and the spinning eatery was atop the hotel I was staying in. Anyway, I alighted from the lift and stood gawping, awed, as empty tables and rigid napery sped along a horizon snaggle-toothed with high-rises and swollen over by snow clouds. Once seated, I could observe the rather skilled footwork required by the waiters as they moved from orbiting table to focal servery and back, inc...

Malled: 60 Years of Undercover Shopping

Listen to this Radio 4 Archive on 4 programme where Will Self visits “an out-of-town mall of the mind”.