Will Self's Blog, page 48

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...

A hurricane of denim, guitars and fucking great music

Introducing Ivan Self’s heavy metal blog (“A young rock music fan seeking his place in the world”) –ivanself.tumblr.com.

Club Inégales Klezmer CD

Will Self is going to be reading texts by Kafka tomorrow night for the launch of Notes InégalesKlezmer CD –the musical realisation of Will’s digital essay Kafka’s Wound at thespace.lrb.co.uk. Club Inégales, 180 North Gower Street, Euston, 8pm. For more details, go here.

Triviality is more oppressive than tyranny

On March 11 at 7pm,Will Self will be on a panel at Brunel University as part of its public lecture series discussing the motion “Triviality is more oppressive than tyranny”. For more details, go here. The event is free and requires no booking.

Kafka’s Wound Up For A Gong

Will Self’s innovative ‘Kafka’s Wound’ digital essay for The Space has been selected as a contender for the “Best Digital Humanities blog, article, or short publication” award. Please vote at DHAwards.org before midnight on Sunday 17 February 2013. Will Self’s project entry is the last one on the list for that award.

About the awards: “Digital Humanities Awards are a new set of annual awards given in recognition of talent and expertise in the digital humanities community and are nominated and...

The Madness of Crowds: Spectacular events

As I write, the traffic is still backed up from the Wandsworth Road – I can hear an occasional frustrated honk from a trapped van man, or the stifled yawp of an emergency services vehicle threading its way through the metallic mesh. I’ve only been out this morning to walk the dog: a turd-bagging totter around the block, but even here, several hundred yards away from the actual road closure, there are sheepishly bemused drivers diverted away from the flock.

Yesterday morning I was sitting on th...

#heathrowderive

Will Self and his Brunel students will be going on adériveto Heathrow airport on Monday 4 February from 10am to 4pm, and will be tweeting using the hashtag#heathrowderive.

The comfort of being an armchair anthropologist

‘InBarry Lopez‘s haunting, poetic book about the hyperborean realms,ArcticDreams, there’s a magnificent story about an Inuit family who are washed out to the seas on a calved iceberg. Nothing is heard of them for about 30 years, until one day they rejoin the rest of their tribal group. The reason for their prolonged absence is this: it has taken them this long, on the deserted island where they fetched up, to hunt the seals, narwhals, whales and assorted other fauna, required to provide the s...

From Our Own Correspondent

To listen to Will Self talking about a recent visit to Bucharest for Radio 4′s From Our Own Correspondent, go to the BBC iPlayer here(at about 7 mins 30 secs).

Real Meals: Le Pain Quotidien

‘‘Which,” I asked the nice young man in Le Pain Quotidien, “is the most daily of your breads – by which I mean the most popular?” To his credit he wasn’t fazed: “The baguette,” he replied, “absolutely – we sell many more of the baguette than any of the others.” This seemed a shame to me, because the other loaves had a pleasingly rustic air about them – great cartwheels of goldenpain ancien, reposing on equally golden wooden shelves, the whole reminding me not so much of a boulangerie in La Fr...