I remember, in my early twenties, visiting a friend who was detained under a section at the Friern mental hospital on the outskirts of north London. The low, brick buildings scattered about the greensward, the pathos of the mullions, the urine-coloured linoleum – it all made a desolate impression on me. Together with its sister establishment, the Halliwick, Friern was – depending which way you looked at it – a therapeutic community, or a gulag into which the non-functioning and the indigent inhabitants of the city could be dumped.

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You can read Will’s Standard column here.

29.07.08

Evening Standard, Journalism | No Comments »

Will’s latest Psychogeography column is here.

19.07.08

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Interesting little interview with Will in Brazil. And there is a second part too.

Interviews with Will, Television, YouTube | No Comments »

Will’s latest Standard column can be read here.

22.07.08

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The Butt - Will Self

See all books by Will Self at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com










Synopsis:
Tom Brodzinski is a man who takes his own good intentions for granted. But when he finally decides to give up smoking, a moment’s inattention to detail becomes his undoing. Flipping the butt of his final cigarette off the balcony of the holiday apartment he’s renting with his family, Tom is appalled when it lands on the head of one his fellow countrymen, Reggie Lincoln. The elderly Lincoln is badly burnt, and since the cigarette butt passed through public space before hitting him, the local authorities are obliged to regard Tom’s action as an assault, despite his benign intentions. Worse is to follow: Lincoln is married to a native from one of the rigorous, mystical tribes of the desert interior, and their customary law is incorporated into the civil statute.In order to make reparations to Mrs Lincoln’s people, Tom will have to leave his family behind, and carry the appropriate goods and chattels deep into the arid heart of this strange, island continent. Any of this might be bearable, were it not for Tom’s companion, forced on him by his enigmatic lawyer, the mixed-race Jethro Swai-Phillips.

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Psychogeography - Will Self

See all books by Will Self at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com





Synopsis:
Provocateurs Will Self and Ralph Steadman join forces in this post millennial meditation on the vexed relationship between psyche and place in a globalised world, bringing together for the first time the very best of their “Psychogeography” columns for the “Independent”. The introduction, ‘Walking to New York’, is both a prelude to the verbal and visual essays that make up this extraordinary collaboration, and a revealing exploration of the split in Self’s Jewish American British psyche and its relationship to the political geography of the post 9/11 world. Ranging from the Scottish Highlands to Istanbul and from Morocco to Ohio, Will Self’s engaging and disturbing vision is perfectly counter pointed by Ralph Steadman’s edgy and beautiful artwork.

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There’s been no confirmation yet but it looks as if the reclusive graffiti artist Banksy may have had his real identity revealed as 34-year-old ex-public schoolboy Robin Gunningham. You can understand why he went for nom-de-spraycan, if indeed Gunningham is the person responsible for all those subtly subversive images: the rats wielding rocket-propelled grenades along the Embankment, and the legend Do Not Paint Over This Graffiti by the Albert Bridge, to name but two.

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To read Will’s latest Psychogeography column, click here.

12.07.08

Independent, Journalism | No Comments »

For years now pressure groups such as Living Streets and the Ramblers Association have been urging the Government to produce a co-ordinated national walking strategy. With almost geological slowness a “discussion paper” has been circulated, limping from not very interested party to indifferent one. In the meantime, local authorities have pushed ahead with their own walking strategies. If you feed these words into Google you’ll come up with plans advanced by councils as various as Luton and Cheshire. Reading them is to stroll into a petrified forest of bureaucratic jargon, where a Sits (Sustainable Integrated Transport Strategy) sits on the rotten boughs of verbiage.

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