Will Self's Blog, page 43

Bookslam 57

Listen to Will Self reading from Umbrella and being interviewed in this Bookslam podcast (respectively at the 29min and 9min 30sec mark).

Real meals: Harry Ramsden’s

It’s a strong claim: “The best fish and chips in the world”; as is another bon – but ungrammatical – mot, attributed to the Master Fryer himself: “There is no chip ever cut by man which cannot be cooked to perfection in three minutes.” Taken together, these propositions suggest a sort of fried-food cosmology – or possibly a gnosis, because, if you want to acquaint yourself with Harry Ramsden’s second law of chipodynamics you’ll have to pitch up at one of his 30-odd restaurants, which are scat...

Thou Shalt Not Bore

Will Self is one of the contributors to this three-part Radio 4 series on The Sins of Literature. Listen to it here until 11 August.

Madness of crowds: Sports fans

You’ll be aware by now that of all the frenzied crowds that trouble my uneasy sleep, sporting ones bother me the most. I mean to say, to be crushed to death by a mob that is rampaging because tyranny flies at its backs has a certain justness, but to be stomped on by people driven berserk by a ball game would be a pitiful end. Sporting events by their nature embody the worst excesses of late capitalism: the spectators are mere passive consumers of the commodified prowess of the athletes and th...

Real meals: Frozen burgers

Standing in the sub-post-office-cum-convenience-store on the Wandsworth Road, I stared down into the Stygian depths of one of its freezer cabinets. Down there might be, for all I knew, the cryogenically preserved remains of Walt Disney – it looked capacious enough. What there were on the upper layers of the ice cap were ready meals of bamboozling cheapness: a “steaklet meal”, comprising meat, chips, beans and onion gravy for £1.69; a Birds Eye chicken burger for 32p (£1.28 for a pack of four)...

White Review interview

A long, wide-ranging interview with Will Self in the White Review.

Recreating Albert Hofmann’s Basel Bike Ride On LSD

Or:The Failure of the Psychedelic Revolution to so much as Slow for One Instant the Incessant Gobbling-up of the Earth by the Moloch of Globalisation Considered as a Solo Uphill Bicycle Race through Basel

This story begins in November 1979 inside a spire made from gaping mouths stitched together by their lips – mouths screaming the negation of all of hope, all of love, and even all of existence in its manifold entirety. Our scaly tale lashes across the years, taking in an episode during which...

Battersea Power Station

“‘Rome completely bowled me over!’ Hitler declared on returning to Germany after his 1938 state visit to Italy. Mussolini had laid on a grand night-time tour that climaxed in a visit to the Colosseum, which – according to Christopher Woodward in his excellentIn Ruins– ‘was lit from inside by red lamps so that, as if ablaze, it cast a bloody glow on to the grass and the ruddy brick ruins on the surrounding slopes.’?Descanting to Albert Speer, his pet pseudo-classical architect, Hitler explaine...

On Tarkovsky

Listen to Will Self talking to The Voice of Russia about his favourite film, Solaris, and its director, Andrei Tarkovsky.

Real meals: The Slug & Lettuce

Heading very slowly across town to the Slug & Lettuce in the Borough, I kept looking behind me to check that I was leaving a man-sized slime trail on the pavement. I was feeling pretty low on this, my 23rd Father’s Day. Not, you appreciate, that a fearless gastropod like me has any need for such marketing-led pseudo-festivals – although it did occur to me that not one of my little slime had bothered to mark the event with so much as a tweak of my antennae.

Ah well, I could rely on the Slug & L...