There will be an audience with Will Self at the Solihull Arts Complex on May 20 at 7.30pm – tickets cost £15. For further details, go here. But, be warned, as Solihull council says, it “may contain swearing”.
Monthly Archives: March 2010
Bulgakov’s The White Guard
‘On 18 April 1930, Mikhail Bulgakov ate his lunch in his Moscow flat and then lay down for his customary nap. However, he was soon roused by the telephone ringing, and shortly after that his second wife, Lyuba, came in to tell him that someone from the Central Committee (of the Communist party) wished to speak to him. Bulgakov assumed it was a malicious trick of some kind – such things were common at that time, a grimly antic precursor of the persecutions to come – but when he picked up the handset he heard a voice say, “Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov?” and, when he affirmed this, “Comrade Stalin will talk to you now”. Immediately afterwards Bulgakov heard a voice with a distinct Georgian accent – it was indeed the dictator on the line.
Broadcasting House: Psychogeography
A brief interview – starting around the 22nd minute – with Will Self about psychogeography on Radio 4′s Broadcasting House yesterday.
My search for a grown-up soft drink
“I think it ill behoves recovering alcoholics – among whose number I include myself – to complain about the mores of the great drinking majority. After all, we’ve had our fill, and we’d be well advised to shut up and take our sparkling mineral water like the good men and women we’d like to become.
“But then … there’s the use of that verb – drinking – to indicate alcohol drinking without any modifier being required; it’s tough living in a society where the very act of imbibing is synonymous with intoxication, and all the harder because the available alternative drinks aren’t so much soft as sugary gloop suitable only for inducing fits in preteens (or mixing with teens’ and kidults’ vodka).”
The return of Britain’s lynch mob
The latest Madness of Crowds column from the New Statesman:
The age of criminal responsibility in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is – as has been remarked on many times in the past few weeks – almost the lowest in the EU.
A child of 10 can be convicted of a criminal offence everywhere in Britain with the exception of Scotland, where an eight-year-old can be found bang to rights. Probably, given the deep-seated Calvinism of some Scots, they wouldn’t mind hauling a foetus from the womb and putting it on trial.
London +10 exhibition at the AA
Will Self has written an essay about London from 1989 to 2009 for the London +10 exhibition at the Architectural Association Gallery in London, which is on until March 26. For more details visit their website here. Here is the essay in full:
World Book Day choices
For World Book Day, Will Self was asked by the Times which book he’d like to give and receive:
“One to give: I would like to give JR Ackerley’s My Father and Myself to the entire Tory shadow cabinet. While ostensibly fashioning a memoir of a late Victorian bourgeois paterfamilias, Ackerley – who was arts editor for The Listener – turned out what is probably the most subversive book about British social mores and social hierarchy ever written. Both Ackerleys served in the Army, JR fought in the first world war, his father had served in the Guards and was a respected importer of bananas. However, Ackerley fils was gay, while Ackerley père was a bisexual former rent boy and a bigamist to boot. The brilliance of this book is that – rather like Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That – it shows how tissue-thin the narrative of power and ‘respectable’ class-consciousness always has been. The likes of David Cameron should read this book and think again if they believe hegemony to be part of their birthright.
De La Warr Pavilion
Will Self is going to be giving a reading at the De La Warr Pavilion on Thursday April 22 at 6.30pm, followed by a Q&A and a book signing. Tickets are free. For further details, visit their website.
Thunderbolt enlightening
A review of Will Self’s gig at the Thunderbolt pub in Bristol last month at Bristol Life.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Will Self has written in introduction for The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne by Visual Editions, a new London-based book publisher. The book, which is designed by A Practice for Everyday Life, is due out in June.