Will Self's Blog, page 30

Why Will Self is boycotting Picturehouse cinemas

Read about it here in the Evening Standard.

Will Self reading Shark

Real meals: Dirty Burger in Vauxhall

It’s pretty weird round my way at the moment: a sirocco of flight capital is blowing through, conjuring vast “luxury apartment” developments into being the way djinns are embodied by Arabian dust storms. The youngest and I went out for a little wander the other day and we were both intimidated by the tower cranes building themselves overhead. Each new parametrically designed and glassy moneymaker comes complete with an inbuilt restaurant – Riverlight, where a studio flat will cost you a modes...

Lullaby by Will Self

Claire Walsh (1941-2014)

Will Self has written an obituary of his friend Claire Walsh, editor, researcher and publicist and JG Ballard’s long-term partner, who died last week.

Radio 4 Appeal for Shape

Will Self presents The Radio 4 Appeal for Shape, a disability-led arts organisation working to improve access to culture for disabled people. For further information, visit the Shape website here.

On location: Wakefield

I arrived in Wakefield at what I assumed to be Westgate Station. It had been a null journey, the train leadenly clunking over the flatlands in the faint autumnal sunshine. The franchise on this route seems to have been acquired by East Coast, but the carriage I was in had that absurd Grand Central livery: the blown-up photos of Marilyn Monroe, the chessboards painted on to the tables. Really, the last thing you want when you’re heading for West Yorkshire is to be reminded of the existence of...

On Writers, Readers and Losing Our Minds

Listen to the talk that Will Self gave at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on 4 October, as part of the National Conversation, a version of which was published in the Guardian recently.

‘The fate of our literary culture is sealed’

‘Let’s think about reading – about what it’s like to read. And after we’ve thought about reading for a while, let’s consider writing – and what it means to write. There are many ways of reading: we scan, we dip, we skip and we speed through texts we know to be intrinsically dull, searching out the nuggets of information we desire as a bent-backed prospector pans for gold. In contradistinction: we are lost, abandoned, absorbed – tossed from wave to wave of language as we relapse into the words...

Newstalk interview

Listen to Will Self talking about Shark on Newstalk’s Pat Kenny Show in Ireland here or below (from about the 17 minute mark).