Will Self's Blog, page 54

Madness of crowds: Bodie

Sometimes the crowd is the madness – at others it’s the absence of the crowd that is. Standing with the father of my youngest son’s schoolfriend we survey the prospect: a large triangle of close-cropped grass is bald-faced-on-to on two sides by semis of 1960s vintage – the contracting metal of cooling engine blocks ticks in the cool summer evening. There is a sense of spaciousness – exposure, even – at odds with the conurbation that we both know surrounds us.

“We’ve been here for over ten year...

Flytopia trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMubr1t69SE

A short trailer for Flytopia, based on Will Self’s short story from Tough Tough Toys … with music by Adrian Utley of Portishead.

Real meals: Wendy’s

As we drove down the broad stretch of Highway 9, which, under its guise as State Street, forms the main thoroughfare of Hurricane, Utah, my 14-year-old confided that he found the girl on the illuminated Wendy’s sign “disturbing”. I can see his point: with her ketchup-red hair and pigtails akimbo; with the upstanding and presumably savagely starched piecrust collar of her shirtwaist; with her stylised freckles and unbelievably joyful smile, the Wendy’s girl (who, one can only assume, is the ep...

Channel 4 News

Watch Will Self on Channel 4 News tonight at 7pm talking about his Booker-shortlisted novel Umbrella.

Will is also going to be on RTE1 on Thursday at 10.45pm. You can also watch him debating the legacy of the Olympics on Newsnight here.

Man Booker shortlist

Will Self’s Umbrella has made it on to the Man Booker shortlist, along with Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists, Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse and Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis.

To read a sample chapter from Umbrella go here.

The winner of the 2012 prize will be announced on 16 October.

Madness of crowds: Las Vegas

I was reading Jean Baudrillard’s meditation on Las Vegas – on an iPhone sitting in a sushi bar in the dead centre of the casino at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas. “It is in such a universe,” Baudrillard wrote of the modern mediatised world, “that what [Paul] Virilio calls the aesthetic of disappearance gathers strength, and that the following begin to appear: fractal objects, fractal forms, fault zones that follow saturation, and thus a process of massive rejection, of the abreaction or...

Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design

Will Self is going to be part of a panel discussion about physics and cosmology at the Royal Society tonight with Stephen Hawking, Dara O Briain, Athene Donald, Martin Rees and Adam Rutherford. To follow the debate, go to @DiscoveryUK or follow the hashtag #StephenHawking on Twitter.

Stephen Hawking’s three-part series Grand Design begins on September 13 on the Discovery channel.

Slump for sale

There’s a very rare, highly collectible first edition copy of Will Self’s Slump, published in 1985, for sale on eBay here, signed by Will. The cartoon strip originally ran in the New Statesman.

Robert Elms show

Listen to Will Self on the Robert Elms show on BBC London today at 2.30pm. Will is also appearing on BBC Radio Ulster’s Arts Extra at 6.30pm today.

More Umbrella reviews

The Spectator: “Umbrella is a magnificent celebration of modernist prose, an epic account of the first world war, a frightening investigation into the pathology of mental illness, and the first true occasion when Self’s ambition and talent have produced something of real cultural significance.”

New Statesman: “Umbrellais as much a novel about the historical slump of modernist fiction – and its potential reanimation – as it is about the fates of encephalics …Self has knowing fun with timing his...