Will Self's Blog, page 50

On Exactitude in Science

Listen to Will Self reading On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges at the Guardian here.

New JG Ballard biography

Will Self has written a new biographical entry for JG Ballard for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Read the entry here, or listen to it as a podcast here.

A Point of View: The British Vomitorium

You can listen to Will Self’s latest A Point of View, tonight at 8.50pm on Radio 4.

Madness of crowds: The art crowd

Oh, I do so hope, dear readers, that you don’t feel I’ve been neglecting you? I do try so very hard to give the impression that I’m a grounded sort of a fellow, with a proper appreciation of the follies of our age – but it’s difficult you see, when I’m in such a whirl. I’m just back today from São Paulo, where the deliciously modest and unassuming Tracey Emin had a littlevernissageat White Cube. I’d gone there from Hong Kong where I attended the opening last Thursday evening of Takashi Muraka...

A Point of View: Economics Priesthood

Listen to Will Self’s latest A Point of View on Radio 4 here, or read the transcript here.

Real meals: Zizzi

The “spatialisation of culture under the pressure of organised capitalism” is how the veteran critical theorist Fredric Jameson described the Westin Bonaventure hotel in downtown Los Angeles. This behemoth of a hostelry comprises a curious agglomeration of four giant squeezy bottles coated with mirrored glass grouped around a six-storey high atrium, up the sides of which shoot glass lifts. The Westin – which has a stand-still part in the epochal video-game series Grand Theft Auto – was, with...

The madness of crowds: Zizzi

The “spatialisation of culture under the pressure of organised capitalism” is how the veteran critical theorist Fredric Jameson described the Westin Bonaventure hotel in downtown Los Angeles. This behemoth of a hostelry comprises a curious agglomeration of four giant squeezy bottles coated with mirrored glass grouped around a six-storey high atrium, up the sides of which shoot glass lifts. The Westin – which has a stand-still part in the epochal video-game series Grand Theft Auto – was, with...

A Point of View: Digital Past

Listen to Will Self on A Point of View tonight at 8.50pm on Radio 4 or read a transcript here.

The madness of crowds: opera

The opening night of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May 1913 has gone down in the aesthetic annals as one of the most exciting art riots of all time: the premier example of an aesthetically challenged mob baying for the blood of the innovators. As Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes dancers circled the stage in wild khorovods, to the accompaniment of the atonal “The Augurs of Spring”, they trembled, shook, shivered and stamped.

According to Alex Ross in The Rest...

Alice and the caterpillar

Will Self recently chose Tenniel’s illustration of Alice with the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland as one of his favourite classic book illustrations:

“When I was a child my parents had a splendid edition of Alice in Wonderland with some of the Tenniel illustrations as shiny colour plates. I was obsessed by Alice – and the illustration that particularly gripped me was of the caterpillar sitting on the toadstool smoking his hookah. It’s easy to see why it exerted such a hold …”

To read the res...