“Arriving at the Hove flat the film director John Hillcoat shares with his wife, the photographer Polly Borland, and their eight-year-old son, Louie, I’m met by a great pile of plastic toys dominating the huge Regency room. There’s a child’s drum kit, crates full of toy cars, space hoppers, a play stove … actually, there’s so much stuff it’s impossible to grasp with the eye, let alone enumerate. ‘Oh, gosh,’ says Hillcoat, in his soft Australian accent, ‘we’re having a material cull. We realised we hadn’t thrown anything out for years — since we moved here in fact.’
Monthly Archives: December 2009
Yule only regret it
“I’m not altogether sure Christmas dinner is a meal at all, let alone a real one; rather, it is the focus of all the faith, hope and joy – as well as the transgenerational neuroses and psychic dyspepsia – that we load on to that already heavily freighted barque ‘the family’. Granted, not everybody who eats Christmas dinner does so with their family, but even childless friends who refer to the rest of us – not a little contemptuously – as ‘breeders’ seem to end up pulling crackers and donning paper hats, thereby making up for a lack of infants by infantilising themselves.
Liver reviews
A couple of US reviews of Liver, published by Bloomsbury USA in hardback in the States, the first from the Washington Post, which said that the four stories collected here “are for those who like their stories brainy, cunning, hard-edged and diabolical”; and the second from the New Yorker, which said that the characters were, ahem, “difficult to like” …
WG Sebald lecture
Will Self is going to be giving the annual WG Sebald lecture at Kings Place in London on Monday 11 January at 7pm. Self will analyse Sebald’s Holocaust writing in the light of the evolving historical understanding of the Holocaust and the part the German people took in it. Self asks whether, when it comes to such crimes against humanity, it is possible for there to be a literature either by, or about, the perpetrators, and what purpose such writings might fulfil.
For further details and for tickets, which cost £9.50, visit the Kings Place website or the UEA website here.
Word magazine Q&A
There’s a Q&A with Will Self in this month’s Word magazine, in which he talks about the last decade – about regretting giving up the Observer restaurant reviews, why he’ll never appear on Have I Got News For You again and the importance of good journalism in the internet age, among other things.
Will Self and Ralph Steadman in Hove
On Tuesday December 15 at 6.30pm, Self and Steadman will be talking about their second collection of Psychogeography columns, Psycho Too, at the Old Market in Hove. Tickets cost £6 – for details, visit their website here. (Don’t be put off by the blurb that relates to the first collection – they’ll be talking about the latest one.)
19 Raptures
A snippet of Will Self’s contribution to the charity 19 Raptures, from the Independent.
Liver in America (redux)
Daunt Books, Chelsea
Will Self is going to be talking about Psycho Too at Daunt Books in Chelsea on Thursday December 10 at 7pm. For further details, visit the Daunt Books website.
Psycho Too reviews
A couple of reviews of Psycho Too; one by The Literateur; the other The Metro.