Will Self's Blog, page 45

Real meals: Bella Italia

In the 1970s, when the world was just as evil and scuzzy as it is today but my gastrointestinal tract had a certain innocence – and even freshness – there was a pizza joint in Hampstead with the predictable name (at least to the ears of our current era) of Pizzaland. I remember nothing much about Pizzaland’s food but the decor has lodged in my memory – “lodge” being wholly apposite, because it consisted of banquettes topped off with little pitched roofs like lychgates, a lot of wooden fretwor...

On public readings

“At an event organised by the Writers’ Centrein Norwich the other week, one of the volunteers – a woman perhaps a few years older than me – observed that when she was young writers were semi-mythical creatures, farouche, barely ever seen in the flesh, and their only spoor faded black-and-white photographs on the backs of their books.In some ways this was an exaggeration – there have always been writers (and by this I mean specifically fiction ones) – who’ve had a public profile. In the States...

Madness of crowds: When in Rome

“Caesar! We who are about to die salute you!” So, it is said, the gladiators of old addressed the Roman emperors before they went about the entertaining business of mutual butchering. It was drizzling and outside the grey-dun hulk of the Colosseum there was a small gaggle of modern Romans dressed up not as gladiators but as tacky-looking legionaries. I wanted to accost them and say: “You can do better than this: hanging around in this Gibbonian drag, hustling the odd euro by having your pictu...

Writers’ Centre Norwich podcast

Listen to Will Self’s talk at the Writers’ Centre Norwich last Friday:

Great Artists in Their Own Words

Listen to Will Self’s contribution to this BBC4 programmeabout the birth of modern art here (starts at the 21min mark and is available until May 29).

Real meals: Earworms at the Buffalo Grill

I once had lunch with the late Malcolm McLaren. It was during his short-lived run for the London mayoralty and I confess I can remember none of the following:a)where we ate;b)what we ate; I’d like to be able to say that both these amnesias were because of the strange and unearthly fascination exerted on me by the discourse of this famed bowdleriser of the Situationist International’sdétournement, but sad to relate I cannot recall;c)a single word that he said. This must’ve been in the early ye...

The Man Who Was Thursday

Listen to Will Self talking about GK Chesterton’s brilliant novelThe Man Who Was Thursday on Front Row here(at the 22min mark).

Dictatorship, Machines and 20th Century Classical Music

Read an edited version of the lecture that Will Self gave on Dictatorship, Machines and 20th Century Classical Music as part of The Rest Is Noise festival at the Southbank last Friday in Guardian Review here.

The madness of crowds: Thatcher’s funeral

At the time of Diana Spencer’s funeral in 1997, I remember writing this: “When the corpse of a 36-year-old woman is dragged around town on a cart you have to acknowledge something strange is going on . . .” My concern was to consider the death-drag as an example of how London acted as a stage set upon which collective fantasies of intimacy with power were being played out. Sixteen years on, the sentence requires only minor adaptation to establish the necessary degree of anthropological estran...

Wreford Watson lecture

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HR7bGcBEus

Will Self’sWreford Watson lecture,Decontaminating the Union: Post-Industrial Landscapes and the British Psyche, given at the University of Edinburgh last September, is now available to watch.