Will Self is going to be at the Monday Club, The Assembly on Elder Street in east London tonight discussing the question “What does living in London do to your brain?” with Matthew De Abaitua and the Guardian’s Alok Jha from 7pm. For further details and to book, go here.
Author Archives: Chris H
Loose Ends
Will Self is going to be talking about his new ebook, The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker, £1.99, on Radio 4′s Loose Ends tonight at 6.15pm.
Real meals: The Lorelei
The latest Real meals column from the New Statesman:
“. . . they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas”
So writes Jorge Luis Borges in Tlön, Uqbar Orbis Tertius, in my – not especially humble – opinion, among the finest pieces of short fiction ever written. In conceiving of a world of philosophical idealists, for whom the persistence of objects in space and time is as preposterous as mysticism to Scotto-English empiricists, Borges gets close to explaining my response to the Lorelei, a pizzeria/coffee bar on Bateman Street in Soho, London.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker
Penguin has just published an ebook of Will Self’s collected Real Meals columns, The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker, for the bargain price of £1.99.
“Most food writing and restaurant criticism is concerned with the ideal, with how by cooking this, or dining there, you can somehow ingurgitate a new – or at any rate improved – social, aesthetic and even spiritual persona. I aimed to turn this proposition on its head, and instead of commenting on where and what people would ideally like to eat, I would consider where and what they actually did: the ready meals, buffet snacks and – most importantly – fast food that millions of Britons chomp upon in the go-round of their often hurried and dyspeptic lives.”
The madness of crowds: Shops
The latest Madness of Crowds column:
My kids as a rule don’t say the cutest things, but the weirdest. As a result, I’ve learned to strip-mine ruthlessly their inchoate brains for ideas – which is why, presumably, they can’t wait to leave home. My youngest is still only ten, so he can’t get away, and I’m glad of that because he’s proved especially helpful in furnishing topics for this column. Yesterday morning, on our way to his school, as the bus grumbled along the Wandsworth Road, I asked him if he could come up with anything for this week’s Madness of Crowds. He thought for a second or so, then said: “What about all those shops that open knowing that they’re going to have to close down again?”
Robert Lockhart 1959-2012
“Robert Lockhart, who has died aged 52 after a heart attack, was a musician to the tips of his nimble – and invariably heavily nicotine-stained – fingers. A piano virtuoso, he retired from concert performance early in his career to concentrate on composition, and became both an eclectic and effective composer for theatre, film and television, as well as creating freestanding works for ensembles ranging from the string quartet to the brass band.
“An unashamedly ‘pre-sampling’ composer, Lockhart savoured working with musicians above all else, and his flair for arranging and conducting in the studio ensured him a steady stream of commissions which, although often requiring only workmanlike undertones, his often deeply personal music frequently managed to soar high above.
Real meals: Domino’s pizza
The latest Real meals column:
For those of us not so much bitterly disappointed by the Obama presidency as predictably disillusioned (I knew he’d gone to the dark side when he snuggled up big-time to the lokshen soup lobby), the GOP primaries present a somewhat ambivalent spectacle. On the we-like side there’s the spectacle of one clown after another performing political pratfalls, but on the we-no-like recto is inscribed the saddening truth that to win against any of the current contenders – Gingrich included – would be like beating a dolphin at table tennis: it’ll say nothing whatsoever about the incumbent’s record except that he can, at least, hold a bat.
Death in the suburbs
The latest Madness of Crowds column:
To Mortlake Cemetery for the funeral of an elderly acquaintance – it was only my second funeral in the past year or so and I was struck by the sparse turnout compared with the previous one, which had been for a considerably younger person. But then it’s difficult to reach a ripe old age without the windfalls having rotted away already, while the funerals of the young have at least this small compensation: they’re mostly pretty well attended, unless the deceased was especially loathsome.
Why I hate Trafalgar Square
“Without a shadow of doubt Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world. The fact that massed divisions of tourists feel compelled to ritually promenade across its pigeon-shat-upon York stone and head-banging granite is perverse in the extreme, because it’s not so much a place to hang out as somewhere you feel constantly in danger of being hung for treason, such is the discourse of power enshrined in its leonine and general-studded plinths and its admiral-spiked column.”
Read the rest of the article in Guardian Travel here.
Willpower review
“From time to time, as if heaven-sent to annoy, someone will ask me if I’m self-disciplined when it comes to my work. I usually look witheringly at them and snarl, ‘What do you think? I mean, how do you imagine anyone writes a quarter of a million words a year for publication?’ The hapless fools then mutter about inspiration or some such rot before turning tail and fleeing. Good riddance. The life of the professional writer – like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist – is predicated on willpower. Without it there simply wouldn’t be any remuneration, period.