Grumpy Old Men
Posted by Chris M on February 27th, 2006The official BBC homepage for the television series Grumpy Old Men, on which WS occasionally appears.
Archive for February, 2006
Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys - SpikeMagazine.com review
Posted by Chris M on February 27th, 2006Robert Clarke, April 1998
“In his new collection of short stories, Will Self once more welcomes us to the terrifyingly trenchant world of the literary recusant. With his usual irreverent wit and unrestrained surrealism, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys sees Self move from the ridiculous to the downright absurd through a mixture of high art and low life, leaving in his wake a darkly satirical collage of contemporary fiction.”
Self Destruction: SpikeMagazine.com interview
Posted by Chris M on February 27th, 2006SpikeMagazine.com, May 1997: Chris Mitchell talks to WS about Great Apes and the aftermath of the Prime Minister heroin airplane incident:
“”People understood intuitively at that point that to have an animal that was close to human but not human threw into turmoil a whole set of categories about cosmology and the Chain of Being,” he explains. “Swift was the first of a long line of satirists in the eighteenth century to have ape fantasies and construct ape worlds; there’s a Dutch version of it, a German version - it became a very enduring theme. So I’m not so much writing in the tradition of Swift as standing this long tradition of ape fantasies on its head.”
Pre-Millennium Tension: SpikeMagazine.com interview
Posted by Chris M on February 27th, 2006SpikeMagazine.com, April 1997: Robert Clarke talks to WS about Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys:
Dead Man Talking: SpikeMagazine.com interview
Posted by Chris M on February 27th, 2006SpikeMagazine.com, October 2000: Chris Hall talks to Will Self about How The Dead Live:
Biting The Hand That Feeds: SpikeMagazine.com interview
Posted by Chris M on February 27th, 2006SpikeMagazine.com, January 2002: Chris Hall talks to WS on the publication of Feeding Frenzy:
“CH: Why did you only interview women?
WS: I like women! Dammit, I like women!
CH: You gave Margaret Beckett the full treatment didn’t you?
In the nick of time
Posted by Chris H on February 23rd, 2006Psychogeography 3
My friend Noel “Razors” Smith is in prison, serving a life sentence for armed robbery under the “two strikes and you’re out” ruling. His tariff is 11 years, which means he still has a minimum of nine to serve before release on license. Noel is inclined to view the sentence as harsh, given that he never hurt anyone during his blags, or even had a bullet in the chamber that was aimed at them. But his victims doubtless take a diametrically opposed view, and I can see their point.
On peages
Posted by Chris H on February 23rd, 2006Psychogeography 2
It’s worth considering that the first theoreticians of the railway saw rails and locomotives as essentially component parts of a single machine. The patents lodged in the early years of the 19th century were for rails with projecting “teeth” which meshed with cog-wheeled engines. Initially it was thought that smooth steel wheels on smooth steel rails wouldn’t provide the necessary traction, but even when this was proved wrong, the French coinage “chemin de fer” still caused problems for Gallic late adopters: “Il y en croient que ces routes sont pavees avec des plaques de fer,” wrote one bemused commentator in 1820, “mais ce ne pas cela de tout …”
Dissolving the matrix
Posted by Chris H on February 23rd, 2006Psychogeography 1
I’ve taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography. So this isn’t walking for leisure - that would be merely frivolous - or even for exercise, which would be tedious. No, to underscore the seriousness of my project, I like a walk that takes me to a meeting or an assignment; that way I can drag other people into my eotechnical world view. “How was your journey?” they say. “Not bad,” I reply. “Take long?” they enquire. “About 10 hours,” I admit. “I walked here.” My interlocutor goggles at me; if he took 10 hours to get here - they’re undoubtedly thinking - will the meeting have to go on for 20? As Emile Durkheim observed, a society’s space-time perceptions are a function of its social rhythm and its territory. So, by walking to the meeting I have disrupted it just as surely as if I’d appeared stark naked with a peacock’s tail fanning out from my buttocks while mouthing Symbolist poetry.
Illimitable Australia
Posted by Chris H on February 23rd, 2006Psychogeography 110
You left me last week in a playground on the esplanade at Cairns in Northern Queensland. I say that with some authority, but the truth is that I left you sitting at your kitchen table reading about me and my four-year-old swinging in the antipodes, whereas in fact I was in frosty south London. I still am - that’s psychogeography for you. Like some bizarre typing bee, I like to store up my memories of hotter, sunnier climes so that I can write about them through the long, crepuscular winter days.
