Hear Will Self and the author Iain Sinclair discussing the meaning of psychogeography and its significance as a new genre of writing at the V&A lecture theatre in west London, Friday February 8 at 7pm.
Read Will’s latest Evening Standard column about McDonald’s latest attempt to ‘crawl back to respectability’ and why he won’t take his children there.
Listen to Will talking to Mariella Frostrup about the work of JG Ballard in her Open Book programme on Radio 4 at 4pm on Thursday January 31 (repeated from Sunday) or use the BBC’s listen again link.
To Video City in Notting Hill Gate, a fine emporium for the rental and purchase of videocassettes and DVDs. During my brief incumbency as this newspaper’s film critic I often called on them to obtain some obscure early Kurosawa. The same staff are behind the counter as when I joined 20 years ago and they offer the same olde worlde service: on this occasion heading into their musty vaults to disinter an ancient Tom Sawyer for my young shavers.
Fascinating reading and lecture from Will at the Google HQ in California. Will talks about psychogeography, Debords’s The Society of the Spectacle, the Romantics’ framing of beauty and how we can break out of mediated forms of experience, that takes in Laurence Stern, micro-worlds and the development of boulevards. The reading is from his latest book, Psychogeography, and is about his experience at US Customs.
Crumbling the progesterone into Cyril’s Pedigree Chum worked, and a litter of Jack Russell puppies duly arrived. Staying with Cyril’s human “owners” in the Vale of Pershore, my 10-year-old got up early and spent the morning with the little bundles of joy. He battened on to the spunkiest one of the litter, a bite-sized doglet he dubbed Maglorian. Why Maglorian? Well, the child has a considerable - and in my view, misplaced - affection for the works of J K Rowling, and apparently there’s a centaur called Magorian that lives in the Magic Forest adjacent to Hogwarts. However, Magorian, he explained, “sounds too gory”, so the “L” was inserted so that “he can be ‘Glory’ for short”.
Wet outside it may have been, but for many Londoners January has been a dry month. Lots of people, after the excesses of the festive season, make a point of renouncing alcohol for the first gloomy part of the year. Some will find abstinence unutterably tedious and stressful, others will experience it as a mild drag, still more will be pleasurably surprised by how easy it is.
Interview with Will in the New York Times about his walk from Kennedy airport to Manhattan, which also has a little picture gallery of his journey.
On a recent plane flight from Heathrow Airport, London, to Glasgow, I entered into a typical - but for all that grindingly depressing - altercation. I had been assigned the window seat, while the aisle was occupied by a man two decades younger and a head-and-a-half shorter than myself. I pointed this out to him and suggested that he might have some compassion for his elder, taller, better but he demurred, saying that he wanted to “get out quickly” at our destination. “What are you,” I snapped irritably, “a bloody brain surgeon?”
In July, when the ban on smoking in public buildings was introduced in England, I was in Brazil, a country where men are men (although often they have the secondary sexual characteristics of women), and they like to smoke cigars the size of Amazonian trees. They smoke them in restaurants, they smoke them in offices - they smoke them anywhere they damn well please. It’s as difficult to imagine a smoking ban in Brazil as it is a moratorium on commercial logging.
 The Book Of Dave More info |
 Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe More info |
 Dorian More info |
 Feeding Frenzy More info |
 How The Dead Live More info |
 Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys More info |
 Great Apes More info |
 Cock And Bull More info |
 Grey Area More info |
 Junk Mail More info |
 My Idea Of Fun More info |
 The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis More info |
 The Quantity Theory Of Insanity More info |
 Sore Sites More info |
 Perfidious Man More info |
 William Burroughs - Junky [with essay by WS] More info |
 Alasdair Gray - Critical Essays [with essay by WS] More info |
