Death in the suburbs

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The latest Madness of Crowds column:

To Mortlake Cemetery for the funeral of an elderly acquaintance – it was only my second funeral in the past year or so and I was struck by the sparse turnout compared with the previous one, which had been for a considerably younger person. But then it’s difficult to reach a ripe old age without the windfalls having rotted away already, while the funerals of the young have at least this small compensation: they’re mostly pretty well attended, unless the deceased was especially loathsome.   More...

Why I hate Trafalgar Square

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“Without a shadow of doubt Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world. The fact that massed divisions of tourists feel compelled to ritually promenade across its pigeon-shat-upon York stone and head-banging granite is perverse in the extreme, because it’s not so much a place to hang out as somewhere you feel constantly in danger of being hung for treason, such is the discourse of power enshrined in its leonine and general-studded plinths and its admiral-spiked column.”

Read the rest of the article in Guardian Travel here.

Willpower review

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“From time to time, as if heaven-sent to annoy, someone will ask me if I’m self-disciplined when it comes to my work. I usually look witheringly at them and snarl, ‘What do you think? I mean, how do you imagine anyone writes a quarter of a million words a year for publication?’ The hapless fools then mutter about inspiration or some such rot before turning tail and fleeing. Good riddance. The life of the professional writer – like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist – is predicated on willpower. Without it there simply wouldn’t be any remuneration, period.   More...

Slow Life

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Men’s Health magazine have selected eight of Will Self’s columns written for the magazine to be showcased under the title Slow Life – several have been mentioned here previously. Follow the link to read all eight columns in full online.

Will Self in The Best Of Spike Magazine

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There are four vintage interviews with Will Self featured in the newly published Kindle ebook The Best Of SpikeMagazine.com – The Interviews, now available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Ranging from 1997 to 2002, the four interviews cover Will’s novels Great Apes and How the Dead Live as well as the short story collection Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys and the journalism collection Feeding Frenzy. The interviews with Will feature alongside conversations with JG Ballard, Ralph Steadman, Douglas Coupland, Quentin Crisp, Julie Burchill, Catherine Camus (daughter of Albert Camus) and more.   More...

Will Self On Psychiatry

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“… psychiatrists stand – whether they acknowledge it themselves and whether people collectively acknowledge it – at the threshold between happiness and sadness and between sanity and madness, between the particular and quotidian and the transcendent. This is a priestly role. You might say that a GP occupies a ‘vicar function’ and but I’m thinking more of the old religion, in terms of priests who manage the transition from the phenomenal to the numinal…”

An interview with Will about the role of psychiatry at Frontier Psychiatrist.

Real Meals: Christmas dinner

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Here’s the latest Real Meals column in the New Statesman:

Well, here we all are – this is the last Real Meals of 2011 and I for one would like to go out with a bang, rather than a whimper. My charming editor at the Statesman suggested that I might like to write something “Christmassy” but why would I want to do that? I made my feelings about Christmas dinner perfectly clear in this column at about this time two years ago and they haven’t changed one jot during the intervening months. Frankly, I’m about as likely to set out on the highways and byways of Albion as a sannyasin as I am to begin at the age of 50 rhapsodising about a meal I’ve never ever enjoyed or even seen the point of.   More...

Walking to Hollywood: paperback of the year

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The Independent has given Walking to Hollywood five stars in its paperbacks of 2011:

“The three essays collected in Walking to Hollywood are non-fictional travelogues that spiral slowly into abstraction, similar in many ways to the ‘psychogeography’ columns on which Will Self collaborated with Ralph Steadman.

“But here the tone is markedly different, the author’s usual Technicolor exuberance tempered by a monochrome melancholy. It is significant that Steadman’s illustrations have been displaced by the sort of black-and-white photographs beloved of WG Sebald; Self’s writing seems to have taken a darker turn under the German writer’s saturnine influence. Not that this book entirely lacks the old scatological mischief. Sebald, after all, is unlikely to have described car exhausts as ‘turbofarts’.”