There’ll be another chance to listen to Will Self’s Free Thinking 2008 lecture on the subject of how the mind is portrayed in fiction, tonight on Night Waves, Radio 3, 9.15pm.
“Self argues that the way the mind is portrayed in novels is preposterous. Why are we so resistant to attempts to represent the mind as we really experience it, in all its terror, exhilaration and confusion? Are many of our finest novels designed to reassure us that we are ‘normal’?”
“If Google’s aim is to be master of all it surveys, then the launch of Google Street View in the UK brings it that much closer to surveying, well, everything.
“Privacy campaigners have made a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner about the service, saying that blurring of number plates and faces is insufficient to protect individual anonymity.
“Personally, I can’t imagine for a nanosecond what use anyone could conceivably make of Street View, unless it was something nefarious or criminal. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, assures us that the service’s success proves that people ‘love to see what is going on in their local community’. Can he really believe that it’s better to do this online, rather than simply walk out the front door? Because that’s what I, in my hokey old way, call a street view.”
“I’d quite like Tony McNulty to resign from the Government and piss off back to Harrow. I treasure a vision of the pock-faced former Brownite hatchet man mooning about the parental home like an overgrown adolescent.
“No doubt from time to time one of his old parents would say to him: ‘D’you know what you’re going to do with your life now, Tony?’ And the former minister would just shrug his shoulders and mutter, ‘Dunno’.”
To read the rest of Will Self’s First Post column, go here.
A short audio clip of Will Self talking with Professor David Penny about the rights, or otherwise, of great apes on the BBC.
“Sir Paul Stephenson has chosen a good issue with which to make his mark on London’s policing, saying that he wants his officers patrolling on foot and alone.
“He’s called for a renewal of the ‘uniformed governance’ of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, when the presence of individual officers walking the beat was the sine qua non of an ordered society.
“Personally, I’m all for Sir Paul’s proposal — but only so long as London doesn’t find itself going back to the future. I agree that the individual police officer, doing the rounds, chatting with the people on his patch, is the key to good policing.”
“I can never see the smug, lipless face and carefully cultivated blond tresses of the Work and Pensions Secretary, James Purnell — let alone read his name in print — without wanting to bodily remove him from the greasy pole he’s so intent on shinning up. There seems little the man will say that isn’t for the express reason of furthering his career.
“Take alcohol, for example. It’s not that Purnell displays any more liking for intoxication — legal or otherwise — than the rest of his Westminster colleagues, it’s simply that Purnell and booze go hand-in-hand, cavorting across the grey fields of contemporary public-health policy.
“Chloe dreamt that she was having sex with her father-in-law’s dog, Wystan, a particularly skinny and nervous whippet. The whippet’s claws scratched her shoulders and breasts terribly — his needle-sharp teeth nipped at her ears; what was going on down below Chloe could only intuit, not feel, but the idea alone sent alternating pulses of nausea and shame coursing through her subconscious.
“My mother always spoke, not contemptuously, but pityingly of those men who ditched their partners of long-standing in favour of a younger model. ‘I don’t understand it,’ she’d say. ‘At every stage of my life I’ve really only been attracted to men of my own age.’ Of course, some may say that this is all a matter of taste: there are those who relish a disparity in age just as there some who are drawn to others from different countries, or of different races. I’m not so sure; after all, if the analogy were really to obtain, we would have to concede that by and large our culture promotes one ethnic stereotype of beauty – because most certainly that is the case when it comes to age.”
In this week’s Sunday Times Will Self “sends up the aristocracy in a wildly eccentric tale about an heir who, when he can’t father a son, looks to his trusty whippet for a helping hand”.
“The splendidly named Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas is at it again, using her New West End Company — basically a shopkeepers’ association — to campaign for fewer buses on Oxford Street, Bond Street and Regent Street. True, her stated aim is to make the area more pedestrian-friendly but, I wonder, what sort of pedestrians does she have in mind?
“Not, you understand that we omnibus-lovers have anything to be ashamed of. After the dark days of the Eighties, when Thatcher proclaimed that anyone over 30 who was still riding the bus was, ipso facto, a failure, these red clippers on the tarmac ocean have enjoyed a surprising comeback. Now, thanks in no small measure to Ken Livingstone, the service in London is both frequent and — more importantly — used by the very acmes of success, such as myself.”