“Daniel Franklin, the executive editor and business affairs editor at the Economist, is a tentative chap for a prognosticator. As well as editing this round-up of seers’ views of the four decades ahead, he and his co-editor John Andrews are also responsible for the Economist’s annual publication on the coming year ‘The World in …’. Perhaps it’s this workaday familiarity with the imperfections of futurology that makes Franklin so keen to distance himself from any great likelihood of being right.
Will Self: Book reviews
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.
Private Eye: The First 50 Years
Will Self has written a review of Private Eye: The First 50 Years by Adam Macqueen in the Guardian here.
Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital
‘In a typically razor-sharp exchange of dialogue that establishes – yet again – that The Simpsons provides the most coruscating illumination of contemporary mores, Lisa says to her grade-school teacher that “Good looks don’t really matter”, to which Ms Hoover replies: “Nonsense, that’s just something ugly people tell their children.” Stripping away the layers of irony from this statement we can reveal the central premise of Catherine Hakim’s book, which is that not only do looks matter, but that they should matter a great deal more.
The Psychopath Test
Read Will Self’s review of Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test in the Guardian here.
A review of Lewis Wolpert’s You’re Looking Well
“A couple of weeks ago I spoke at a seminar on ageing and fiction at Brunel University. My interlocutor was Fay Weldon, who in her 80th year is not only still writing herself, but also holds the chair in creative writing at Brunel. I’m not sure we had anything that insightful to say on the subject, but the audience seemed entertained. I hesitate to ascribe to Weldon the wisdom of the aged – because, inasmuch as she is weightily wise, she always leavens this with a wickedly dry wit; and besides, she seemed exactly the same to me as the first time I met her, which must have been 15 years ago, when she was a mere stripling of 65.
Aerotropolis review
“While John Kasarda shares the title page of this scientific romance masquerading as a work of urban theory, Aerotropolis was written by Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school, may be a peculiar sort of Johnson, but Lindsay, a business journalist, is nonetheless his committed Boswell. A Boswell who, in search of his subject’s zeitgeist wisdom, once mounted a three-week exploration of ‘Airworld’ – as Kasarda calls it – by jetting from terminal to terminal around the globe but never exiting through the door marked ‘arrivals’. Why? Because it is Lindsay’s belief that Kasarda is the most important urban theorist alive today, a man who has fully anticipated the shape the future city must have and who has moved to make it a reality.”
Rap decoded
A few peeks over Murdoch’s paywall to see what Will Self made of Decoded by Jay-Z and The Anthology of Rap edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois:
“I well remember hearing Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s The Message for the first time released in the United States and the UK in 1982, it charted here in August and got some airplay for a while before dropping out of earshot (although Stateside it went platinum in a month). At the time I had an early-adopting friend who earnestly assured me, while wearing a capsleeve T-shirt, that this was the shape of things to come. I didn’t think his taste in singles quite as laughable as his singlet, but nevertheless disputed it. However, nigh on 30 years later he’s been more than vindicated, for if any genre of popular music can claim to be a global soundtrack it’s rap, and if any popular art form can be said to have been genuinely influential on mainstream culture then it’s hip-hop.”
Teach us to Sit Still – it’s the real thing
Teach us to Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing by Tim Parks, Harvill Secker, £12.99
Do I have to say this? Yes, I suppose I ought: Tim Parks‘s digressive memoir of his debilitating but ultimately life-affirming struggle with pelvic pain made me leak a few tears, guffaw a lot, and besides quietly instructing me in some fresh perspectives – on such matters as Samuel Beckett and Buddhism (and that’s only the Bs) – ultimately taught me an eminently practical lesson about coping with age and mortality. Must I utter the blurbish cliché? Why the hell not: Teach us to Sit Still made me laugh it made me cry and it made me seriously think about taking up Vipassana meditation.
On Evil by Terry Eagleton
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?