Will Self's Blog, page 44

In the High Seas of an airport

Listen to Will Self on the Today programme (at the 1hr 50min mark) talking about the current plight of Edward Snowden, presently in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, with the sociologist Saskia Sassen,who has some fascinating things to say about the concept of the High Seas as it relates to zones where national laws do not apply.

Full Metal Jacket at the ICA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYxEIyNA_mk

Will Self introduces a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket at the ICA in London at 7pm on July 9. For further details, go here.

Madness of crowds: 3D films

You can fool all of the people for some of the time, then some more of the time, and then – even with the benefit of hindsight – they’ll have been fooled for so long that it will constitute, de facto, all of the time. This, at any rate, seems to be what’s happened with 3D movies, which any objective person will tell you are shit: the image of, for example, a skull on the screen bearing a closer relationship to the anamorphic one in Holbein’s The Ambassadors than anything death-like rendered c...

New Statesman columns

Some recent New Statesman columns:

Real meals: Wong Kei

Madness of crowds: Why I can’t stand Clare Balding

Real meals: Harvester

Will Self: A Critical Dictionary

Dr Jeannette Baxter,a senior lecturer in English atAnglia Ruskin University, was one of the contributors to Will Self and the Art of the Contemporaryin March, the first conference on the work of Will Self. Here she introduces her Critical Dictionary:

Critical Dictionary: Or My Idea of Fun by Jeannette Baxter

“A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meanings of words but their tasks.” –Georges Bataille

“Surreal” has become something of a standard term for reviewers when describing the wri...

On failure

“To attempt to write seriously is always, Ifeel, to fail – the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short. It is this failure – a ceaseless threnody keening through the writing mind – that dominates my working life, just as an overweening sense of not having loved with enough depth or recklessness or tenderness dominates my personal one. It follows that to con...

Solaris 35mm screening

There are still some tickets to see Will Self introducing Tarkovsky’s Solaris tonight at the Curzon Renoir at 7.30pm here.

The madness of crowds: The government quarter

“Yesterday’s anti-colonialists are trying to humanise the generalised colonialism of power. They become its watchdogs in the cleverest way: by barking at all the after-effects of present inhumanity.” So wrote the situationist Raoul Vaneigem in The Revolution of Everyday Life, his manifesto for an insurrection of the felt, the experienced and the real against the collective, the mediated and the fake. Vaneigem’s book was published in 1967 but it reads as fresh as ever: it is a bracing indictme...

Self & I

Will has written before about the time he spent living with Matthew De Abaitua – his “live-in amanuensis” –in the 1990s, most notably in the Independent in 2008:

“Thirteen years ago, Matthew – who is now a talented novelist in his own right – spent a six-month sojourn as my live-in amanuensis and secretary. It was a thankless task: so far as I can remember I was completely spark-a-loco. We were living in a tiny cottage in Suffolk, and I was given to harvesting opium from the poppies that grew...

i-D interview

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSTvD9OaIAM

An interview with i-D ahead of one of Will’s recent Bookslam appearances, talking about music.