Will Self was one of the judges of the Penguin Design Award, which was won by Kirsty White. Self said of her jacket design for Patrick Süskind’s Perfume that it was “continuously involving for the eye without being fussy – a beautiful fusion of the figurative and the pattern”. More details can be found on Penguin’s website here.
The latest Real Meals column:
The other afternoon I was cycling up the Mall when the Queen emerged from the gates of Buckingham Palace, so plumply erect in her customised Daimler that she resembled nothing so much as a cerise pouffe propped up in an old-fashioned Silver Cross perambulator. There was only a smattering of tourists about, but even so, they spontaneously formed a guard of honour and laid on a scattering of applause.
The latest Madness of Crowds column is here:
I seldom work in libraries, for all the obvious reasons: you can’t smoke, eat or drink, while the proximity of many lithe young bodies in tense repose inevitably tends one’s thoughts to the sexual. And then there are the books. Of course, when I was a young man, the books didn’t bother me so much, while the sexualisation of libraries was more extreme. Back then, I laboured under the healthy delusion that, although I could not be as well read as Coleridge (who was said to be the last man to have read everything), I might yet read all that truly mattered.
Apologies if you were directed here by a Google search, only to discover that you’re reading about a walk through the London sewers. But then, should I feel sorry? The Black Controller recently pointed out to me that Google canalises knowledge: forcing the surfer into a narrow bore of information, which is constituted by its assumptions about what you want to know, based on the frequency with which they’ve been hit before. Put simply, the more you surf, the more of the same old shit you skid across. No wonder the virtual world seems so pissy-samey.
The latest Real Meals column:
“We’re, like, regulars, aren’t we?” I said to the attractively goofy young fellow who takes the role of maître d’ in the new gastropub across the road from our house. He surveyed us slackly and replied: “Well, we want the place to be for locals, too.”
The latest Madness of Crowds column:
Peter Ackroyd, in his masterly biography of London, animadverts that the entire city is essentially a performance space, one in which the notorious actors fret and strut, while the London mob roils and moils through the streets, providing at once the extras and the audience for an organic production that is ever evolving down the ages. But if this is the case – and I think his analysis has considerable appeal – then what can we say of the audiences in more conventional theatres?
To the Barbican for our annual works outing to see the Michael Clark Company‘s latest offering. True, I am not a great connoisseur of modern dance, but I still have an instinctive feeling that Clark is a great choreographer (instinct, and Mrs S to apprise me). Woody Allen once wrote a savage spoof of avant garde ballet, attributing the most pretentious and ridiculous sentiments to these gyrations and curvets, but I sense nothing of that coming from Clark’s work, which seems all at once to fold the narrative into the symbolic, while wryly skipping around both with sheer kinetics. It helps, of course, that his troupe dances to the Velvet Underground.
You can watch Will Self talking about the Holderness coast on the Culture Show on BBC2 tonight at 7pm. For details, visit the BBC website here, or you can watch it again on the iplayer at the 50 minute mark here.
There will be an Audience with Will Self at the Guildhall Arts Centre, Grantham, 7.30pm next Thursday, June 17. For details and to book tickets, follow this.
In March I was on the panel for an edition of Question Time filmed in Canary Wharf. The big news that week — I say “big” but “awful” might be more accurate — was that Jon Venables, one of the ten-year-old boys convicted in 1993 for the murder of the toddler James Bulger, had broken the terms under which he had been released on licence and was being returned to jail. Now we have the further atrocity exhibition of two boys — aged 10 and 11 — convicted of an attempted rape on an eight-year-old girl. With such crimes as these, surely — we must collectively ask ourselves — it becomes possible to explain them only by positing the existence of some exceptional depths of inner darkness?
 Walking To Hollywood More info |
 Psycho Too More info |
 Liver More info |
 The Butt More info |
 The Book Of Dave More info |
 Psychogeography More info |
 Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe More info |
 Dorian More info |
 Feeding Frenzy More info |
 How The Dead Live More info |
 Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys More info |
 Great Apes More info |
 Cock And Bull More info |
 Grey Area More info |
 Junk Mail More info |
 My Idea Of Fun More info |
 The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis More info |
 The Quantity Theory Of Insanity More info |
 Sore Sites More info |
 Perfidious Man More info |
 William Burroughs - Junky [with essay by WS] More info |
 Alasdair Gray - Critical Essays [with essay by WS] More info |
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