Will Self's Blog, page 47

Intelligence Squared debate

Watch Will Self debating gun control with Peter Hitchens and others live here tonight at 7pm.

Real meals: Costa Coffee

How to describe it? How to articulate the effect provoked in me by these artfully aligned and textured surfaces? The task is worthy of Henry James or Wallace Stevens – some master of the intersection between social velleities and individual desires; but alas, there’s only me, and as usual I’m off my tit-shaped head on caffeine, and so barely equal to the task.

Still, here goes: there is herringbone-patterned woodblock, yes, and it’s on the floor, uh-huh. Then there’s some aluminium trim and af...

Modernism Redux on Radio 3

Will Self broadcasts an imaginary archive of modernist radio and discusses the influence of modernism today.

In a secret laboratory underneath the BBC archive there is a small room containing a special machine. It’s a BBC prototype “RP-1 Ethermatic remitter”. An experimental machine designed to retrieve (“remit”) past radio signals back out of the air. Although partially successful during field trials in 1922 it was never made fully operational … until now.

Will Self has been given access to th...

Sussex Against Privatisation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmLGq6Odu7g

Will Self speaking at a recent Sussex Against Privatisation event at Sussex University.

One & Other York interview

Interview with Will Self for One & Other York, oneandother.com, in PDF form here.

Will Self spring events

Monday March 11: Public Lecture Series, Brunel University: “Triviality is More Oppressive than Tyranny”, 7pm, Lecture Theatre, Eastern Gateway Building.

Wednesday March 20: Theatre Royal York, in conversation on Umbrella,8pm, yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

Saturday March 23:Museum of London, in conversation with Sebastian Groes to round-off a Roehampton University conference on Will’s oeuvre, thememorynetwork.net.

Wednesday March 27: Intelligence Squared debate on gun control,intelligencesquared.com.

Th...

A walk through Britain’s flag-waving heartlands

‘Back in the tail end of2009,Nigel Faragestepped aside from his leadership of theUnited Kingdom Independence Party to concentrate on challenging the speaker of the House of Commons,John Bercow, in the parliamentary elections of 2010. In a characteristically forthright statement, Farage said that Bercow “represented the worst” of a legislature that had “broken the trust” of the British people. In due course Bercow, a somewhat maverick Tory, was returned to parliament and the speaker’s throne,...

Real meals: Wetherspoon’s

I once asked Martin Amis how an interview had gone with a particular journalist and he thought for a moment before shrug-sneering, “Well, y’know, he was a Tim.” When I was a kid we used to stop on the school run to pick up the son of the then MP for King’s Lynn, Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler (not so much a wet as utterly saturated, he was the only Tory to defect to the SDP in 1981). Brocklebank-Fowler junior was called Tim, and my sadistic brother and I would tease him: “Timmy-Timmy-Timmy,”...

The madness of crowds: Large gatherings

At Paddington Station, where one occasionally finds a stray bear with a label around its neck reading: “Please introduce me to a life of prostitution and drug addiction,” the train departures board operates at a laggardly pace. By which I mean to say that the platform number for the train to West Drayton will mostly only be displayed five minutes before departure. As the platform is usually number 13 or 14, this necessitates a brisk walk of 500 yards in order to make the train. Even I, a spri...

Real meals: Swiss McDonald’s

I was in Basel so I thought I’d check out some raclette, a melted-cheese experience that defines Switzerland as surely as the hollowed-out Alps full of Nazi gelt and aggressively policed recycling schemes (in Zurich, you are fined for using the wrong bag). Yes, yes – I know, it was fondue that was once promoted as the Swiss national dish but that was before the 1970s, when the runny gloop flowed into the interstices of the British class system. Raclette sounded a bit more real to me: I liked...