Will Self's Blog, page 51

Question Time

Will is going to be on the Question Time panel in Bristol this Thursday on BBC1 at 10.35pm with Justine Greening MP, secretary of state for international development, Stella Creasy MP, shadow home office minister, James Harding, editor of the Times; and Peter Hitchens.

The Happy Detective

Listen to Will Self reading his Late Night Tales four-part short story, The Happy Detective.

Modernism debate with Owen Hatherley

Concluding its series on modernism, the Southbank Centre in London is holding an event on Monday 3 December discussing modernist writing and thinking in modern culture.Will Self will chair a panel of writers and critics including Owen Hatherley, the author of Militant Modernismand A New Kind of Bleak. For further details and to book tickets, gohere.

You can read Will’s reviews of Militant ModernismandA New Kind of Bleakat the LRB here.

European Bookshop titles

The European Bookshop in Soho, central London now has a wide selection of foreign language editions of Will Self’s books, from a French edition of The Book of Dave (Le livre de Dave) to a Spanish edition of How the Dead Live (Cómo vivien los muertos). You can browse – and buy – the books here.

Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with JG Ballard

Will Self is one of the contributors to Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with JG Ballard: 1967-2008, recently published by Fourth Estate. The author Ian Thomson chose it as his book of the year in the Observer: “Impeccably edited, the book serves as a valuable coda to the work of one of the strangest and most haunted imaginations in English literature.”

To buy a copy of Extreme Metaphors for £15 (RRP £25) at Amazon, go here.

Madness of crowds: ‘To be honest, I’m good’

I’ve written before about those hideous, collective earworms – the nonce-phrases that clutter up our mouths then fall unbidden from our lips – and I make no apology for writing about them again; if you like – and if it makes it any more tolerable – think of this as a sort of nonce column, quite inadvertently repeated, with no more awareness being exhibited on my part as I type, than you have when you utter the words “to be honest”.

Yes, “to be honest”, it is without doubt the memede nos jours–...

Longford lecture

“Each year some 140,000 inmates pass through British prisons, of whom as many as 70,000 have some form of addictive illness. They move from one environment in which drugs are both sustenance and currency while crime is the means to pay for it, to another in which exactly the same is the case – only with greater intensity.

“Let’s assume that each of these inmates procures just a single gram of heroin while inside; this would imply that 70 kilos of heroin are smuggled into prisons during that ye...

The end of the typewriter

“It saddens me that Brother has packed up shop, but the last typewriter to roll off its very truncated production line was an electric model. I did enjoy the strange ultrasonic hum of my mother’s Brother electric in the 1970s, but while I may have begun typing at around this time, when I first began to seriously produce fiction on a typewriter it was on a manual — my by then late mother’s own Olivetti Lettera 22, which she brought with her from the US when she emigrated in the late 1950s.

“I s...

Real meals: Giraffe

Numbers of giraffes (Girrafa camelopardalis) in the African wild have more or less halved over the past decade, while the numbers of Giraffes (Restaurant pseudoglobalis) in the urban areas of Britain have more than doubled. I wonder if there may be some axiom at work here and that the inverse correlation is a fixed law. It would follow that anyone could start any old chain of crap restaurants, calling them – for example – Platypus; and so long as the namesake species was rapidly exterminated,...

The madness of crowds: Charity and the Savile case

Themot justeis oophagy, meaning that strange form ofin uteronourishment whereby embryos feed on eggs produced by the ovary while still in the mother’s uterus. There is speculation among ichthyologists – and sociologists – that oophagy may be preparatory for a predatory lifestyle, but in organisations such as the BBC it seems to serve no useful or adaptive function at all.

Ever since the Jimmy Savile paedophile story broke, we’ve witnessed one act of oophagy after another, as, within the capaci...