Listen to Will Self talking on Radio 4 about texting and textspeak.
Monthly Archives: March 2009
The IRA didn’t die, it was supplanted by al-Qaeda
“If a week is a long time in politics, then a decade must be aeons. So it seemed to those of us who had followed Northern Irish politics during the 1970s and 80s, when, post-9/11, the archetypal terrorist became a Muslim. Or, to put it more strongly, for some people terrorist – or at any rate, terrorist sympathiser – and Islamic became synonymous.
“And then, after the 7/7 London bombings, the equivalence became even more complete because these weren’t just shadowy foreigners but our very own home-grown killers.”
To read the rest of Will Self’s First Post column, go here.
Title fight
You can watch Will Self on the BBC’s Money Programme here, first broadcast last night, talking about the book publishing industry.
Julie Myerson, a suitable case for treatment
“I was once on a panel that gave a prestigious award to Julie Myerson for her first novel, Sleepwalking, an elegantly overwrought account of an abused woman who begins a passionate affair. Myerson has said there are autobiographical elements to it, but if so they were properly obfuscated by the routine devices of fiction. She since seems to have forgotten that all good fiction is a form of psychic autobiography: there’s no need to give such revelations the seeming authority of fact, when fiction speaks with greater authenticity.
What texting owes to the literary enlightenment
Chris Addison explores the links between modern-day text-speak and the language of the 18th-century literary enlightenment. He examines the expressive elements of text language, or “textese”, and how it can be seen to echo a ludic art form that became popular in the Romantic era, via insights found in the letters of Jonathan Swift and later works by Lewis Carroll and James Joyce.
The programme will be broadcast on March 10, Radio 4 at 11.30am and will feature contributions from Will Self and Ian Rankin, the poet Scott Tyrell and professors Jeremy Tambling, John Sutherland and David Crystal.
Flagellating Sir Fred will not save Gordon Brown
“It’s not just Harriet Harman, it’s the whole tarnished gang of New Labour ministers that make me feel that I’ve stepped into a time machine and been whisked back three millennia to ancient Judea. If these Pharisees had their way, Sir Fred ‘the Shred’ Goodwin would be wearing a pair of goat’s horns as he was herded, bleating furiously, over a nearby cliff.
“True, the High Priest Gordon Brown and his Archimandrite Jacqui Smith have moved to distance themselves from Harman’s more outrageous assertion that retroactive legislation might be employed to shear the Goodwin’s golden fleece, but our so-called leaders remain wedded to the idea that they can somehow maintain their own authority by scapegoating the bankers.”