Will Self and Ralph Steadman will be at the Studio Theatre, the Roundhouse, Camden on November 10 at 7.30pm to talk about their second collection of Psychogeography columns in the Independent, Psycho Too (here’s a brief review from Publishers Weekly), which is dedicated to the memory of JG Ballard.
Monthly Archives: October 2009
Libraries are for literature, not lattes
Piece in the Herald, ahead of Will Self’s appearance at the North Lanarkshire Words festival on Thursday October 29 at the Motherwell library, 7.30pm.
A critical essay on Leberknödel from Liver
Liver Let Die
Will Self’s newest collection, Liver, contains a novella, Leberknödel, that is set in Zurich and has a protagonist called Joyce Beddoes. Call me an obsessive Irishman, but put “Zurich” and “Joyce” together and you automatically come up with James Joyce, who wrote a number of chapters of Ulysses in Zurich, died and is buried there. The link seems obvious to me. When you discover that Self’s Joyce eats a meal at the famous Kronenhalle (James Joyce’s favourite hangout and the place where he ate his last proper meal) and that she has reserved a plot in Fluntern cemetery (the very same cemetery where James Joyce lies buried), then you know that the sequence of coincidences is not a sequence of coincidences. Strangely, in British reviews of Self’s book in the likes of The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent and the Times Literary Supplement, not one critic has picked up on this. If the allusions to James Joyce were simply decorative then perhaps the reviewers could be forgiven for leaving it unmentioned. But to miss the ghostly absence of James Joyce in this occult novella is to read a different story then the one Self has written.
Mobile phones: The Stockholm syndrome
“I vividly remember my first experience of hands-free mobile phones. It must have been around 1998 in Stockholm. I arrived by night, in the teeth of a blizzard, and distinctly shaken up by having flown from London sitting between the pilots of the SAS flight. I was, shamefully, on a press junket, and this was the only seat available. I wandered the concourses of Stockholm airport waiting for my onward connection and absolutely freaked by the numbers of soberly dressed businessmen who strode about the place gesticulating and talking aloud, even though there was no one there.
Bird watching
Short piece by Self in the New York Times about English girls who put the “It” in Brit.
Will Self on Roald Dahl
Will Self has written about Roald Dahl ahead of the new film of Fantastic Mr Fox for tomorrow’s Guardian Review. The newspaper will also be giving away a free CD of the children’s story read by the author himself. You can read the piece online here.
Will Self in conversation with Grayson Perry
The artist Grayson Perry will be in conversation with Will Self on Monday November 9 at the British Library, 6.30pm to 8pm, tickets cost £6, concessions £4. For further details go here.
Will Self and Martin Amis: Sex and Literature
An interview Self gave ahead of the Sex and Literature talk at Manchester University, can be read at City Life. There’s also a review from the Manchester Literature Festival Blog.
KFC: More cluck for your buck
“Chicken, chicken! Every place I go there is chicken, every step I take, wishbones and drumsticks crunch beneath my soles, while the blisters in battered old chicken skin crepitate eerily. If, as I do, you live in a large city, you’re never more than a few feet away from some disjointed portion of a poultry carcass. If, as I am, you’re the owner of a dog, you’re never more than a few seconds away from having to shove your hand down its throat to try to retrieve a splintery bone.
Guardian Hay Festival at Kings Place
Will Self will be talking to the Guardian’s literary editor, Claire Armitstead, at Kings Place on Sunday 25 October at 2.30pm as part of the Guardian Hay Festival. Tickets cost £4.50. Other speakers include Martin Amis, Hanif Kureishi, Steve Jones and Fay Weldon.
For more details, visit the Kings Place website.