November 2: A Granta event at Foyles, London.
November 5: With Matthew de Abaitua in Notting Hill. Details here.
November 21: Shakespeare & Co, Paris.
November 23: The Thunderbolt, Bristol.
November 29: Tate Britain event about the films of John Martin.

December 1: A JG Ballard-themed night with John Gray at the Festival of Ideas, Bristol.
December 12: Idler Academy event with Noel Smith.

‘I myself am a latecomer to the serious appreciation of serious music – apart from jazz, which in the hands of practitioners such as John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk rises to the inventive musicianship and self-enclosed expressiveness of the greatest that small-ensemble classical music has to offer. Still, there comes a point in everyone’s life when it’s time to largely put away such childish things as electric guitars and harmonicas, and it may be precisely because I was in my 40s when I began to really hear symphonic music that I have approached the form altogether untrammelled by received ideas about it – a fancy way of admitting complete ignorance. There’s this, and there was also an intuition I had that my own practice as a novelist – when, that is, my mojo was properly working – had far more in common with how composers conceive of the symphonic, than it did with the lit-crit – let alone the “creative writing” – view of how it is writers actually write.’

Read the rest of Will Self’s piece for the Guardian on the symphony and the novel here, ahead of his talk at Kings Place in London this Saturday. Details here.

The Idler Academy, 81 Westbourne Park Road, London W2 5QH, Thursday 15 September, 6.30pm for 7pm, £20. Includes “free wine and dainty morsels”. Visit the Idler website for more details.

First is a talk on the enduring legacy of WG Sebald on Sunday 28 August from 3.30pm to 4.30pm at the ScottishPower Studio Theatre. Further details and tickets here.

Later that day he will be giving a talk entitled “Psychogeography with a stress on the psycho”, a Folio Society event, from 8pm to 9pm. For more details and tickets, go here.

Unfortunately, the world premiere of Alasdair Gray’s Fleck, on Monday 29 August, which Self will be partly narrating, is now sold out.

“Many writers are intrigued by the connections between musical and literary forms,” writes Self, “but it’s the more egregious attempts at synthesising the two – think of Anthony Burgess’s Napoleon Symphony – that tend to grab attention, usually because they so spectacularly fail both as literature and as ‘linguistic music’. I will be arguing that in fact key innovations in literature have resulted from the absorption and recasting of musical form, and that just as the programme music of the late 19th century was an enormous catalyst to the atonal revolutions of the 20th, so these revolutions were in turn hugely implicated in literary modernism.”

Tickets range from £9.50 to £14.50. For details, visit the Kings Place website.