Will Self has contributed an essay entitled The Joy Of Slow to Think Quarterly, an online magazine sponsored by Google with contributions by various figures from disparate fields. The theme of this issue is Speed. You can read the essay in full online.
Will Self: Essays
If I Ruled Television: Less is more
This is the speech that Will Self delivered at the Broadcast and Beyond conference on 19 May 2010 in which he addressed an audience of professional broadcasters and told them what he would do if he ruled television:
To me, if there’s a spirit of British television it’s this: a title sequence for a current affairs or news programme that unites the individual viewer with the commonality.
Crash: Homage to JG Ballard
In memory of JG Ballard, who died a year ago today, here is the catalogue essay that Will Self wrote for the Crash exhibition at the Gagosian gallery in London recently:
“Illuminated arrays glowed through the night, like the perimeter lights of a colony of prison camps, a new gulag of penal settlements where the forced labour was shopping and spending … ” So wrote JG Ballard in his final novel, Kingdom Come, a dissection of crap modern Britain before the bubble burst. In Ballard’s evocation of society drifting waywardly into an elective collective psychopathy, it is the shopping mall that is the cynosure – at once a temple of consumerism and biosphere that, poisoned by re-circulated air and piped muzak, becomes wholly decoupled from the dull Surrey dormitory towns that surround it.
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:
Lent talks
Will Self kicks off a series of Lent Talks on Radio 4 on Wednesday February 24 at 8.45pm, reflecting on the relationship between art and spirituality.
There is also a version of Self’s talk in the New Statesman here.
Sebald 2010 lecture
For all those of you asking to see Will Self’s Sebald lecture, it’s now available on the Times website here, not just in the TLS. Enjoy it while there’s no paywall … or you can listen to it here.
For those of you who can read German, there’s also an interesting review of the lecture by Gina Thomas at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Art for fiction’s sake
An essay by Will Self on the ever-changing relationship between the literary and visual arts from John Keats to JG Ballard from Tate Etc.
Free Thinking lecture
You can now watch, as well as listen to, Will giving his Radio 3 lecture, here.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe
Will has written about his pipe collection in his study for Granta.
Alison Jackson Confidential
Will has written an essay focusing on celebrity and our uncomfortable relationship to it for Alison Jackson Confidential, published by Taschen, which has been reprinted in the Daily Telegraph.