Will Self has written a big piece for the Guardian’s Review section, published tomorrow, writing about his preoccupation with scale, tracing his interest in it from his short story Scale through to his new book, Walking to Hollywood. Read the article here.
Ilkley literature festival
Will Self will once again be appearing at the Ilkley literature festival on Monday October 11 at 7.30pm at the Kings Hall to talk about his latest book, Walking to Hollywood. Tickets go on sale on August 31.
Audio exclusive: The Minor Character
I went to dinner at the McCluskeys’ and the Brookmans were there, as usual — and the Vignoles as well …
An exclusive for the website this. Listen to Will Self reading The Minor Character, an unpublished short story, which will be part of his collection of short stories, The Undivided Self, to be published by Bloomsbury USA in October. Self recorded The Minor Character while he was narrating an unabridged audio version of Liver, which will be published by Whole Story Audio Books in September.
“Exile, Joyce famously noted, is a necessary precondition for art. If so, Self must feel himself abundantly exiled. He’s half American, but writes as sublimely and mercilessly about London as anyone in his generation. He’s half Jewish but has a keen eye for the hypocrisies of organized Christian religion. He’s a merciless skeptic about the sacred cows of liberal humanism, who occasionally writes with considerable tenderness, and who is also loyal to his friends and family in ways few tender people are. You are about to reap the rewards of this abundance of Selfish exile … there will be work here that alarms you, dazzles you, makes you laugh out loud.”
From the introduction to The Undivided Self by Rick Moody, NYC 2010.
Literature, History and the Humanization of Bioethics
An interesting paper entitled Literature, History and the Humanization of Bioethics by Nathan Emmerich (Bioethics, 9999 (9999) 2010) quotes from Self’s Leberknödel story from Liver. The full text can be obtained here, but this is the relevant section:
“There is little doubt that literature can be a tool for the teaching of bioethics. Consider this passage from one of Will Self’s short stories:
“Joyce washed down the chocolate sludge with a second gulp of the bitter anti-emetic. ‘Do please remember’, Dr Hohl said, ‘that any of these times, Mrs Beddoes, you are able to make the mind change, yes?’ He had said this at least three times before, and on each occasion Joyce had relied, ‘I understand.’ It was, she grasped, the very call and respond of assisted suicide: Dr Hohl was the priest, announcing the credo, and she was the congregation of one that affirmed it.”
[Will Self, Liver, p85]
“It is difficult to express or imagine what the reality of an assisted suicide clinic might be. One can imagine all sorts of contingencies and eventualities which, from the perspective of analytic philosophy, can be dismissed as not being fatal to the possibility of an assisted suicide clinic being moral or ethical. Yet in this passage, Self expresses one concern with such clinics which is that they may become banally ritualized; where well meaning mandated opportunities to bring a halt to proceedings actually become automated, ritualized steps along the way. In doing so he illustrates the challenge this aspect of ethical regulation brings to actual practice. His work also presents the alienation of the self from the self as a consequence of the protagonist being taken out of her home and of her own country in order to access the services of this clinic. Moral insights presented in literary form can of course cut both ways in ethical argument or, perhaps more often, present and engage the reader with an uncertain, ambivalent and ambiguous moral landscape. In this instance the representations of literature contextualize and particularize the assisted suicide clinic and, in doing so, can give one pause for thought in a debate often characterized by entrenched positions and polemical argumentation.”
‘Tis Pity He Was a Horsley
To Sebastian Horsley’s funeral at St James’s in Piccadilly. I first met Seb in the early 1990s, he was living in Mayfair in order – or so he maintained – to be near to the prostitutes. He had the dead-white face of a Weimar cabaret compère, and the lisp of a studied aesthete. When we went out to the cash point together to get money for the dealer, Seb revealed that he had a loaded revolver back at the flat. I was furious – I’ve never liked guns, and guns and crack cocaine (as history seems to bear out), are seldom a good combo.
I can’t say I ever exactly warmed to his publically cultivated image: yet underneath the dandiacal shtick – which was time- as well as shop-worn – there lurked a sensitive, kind, tormented man. On top of addiction (itself a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder), Seb was riddled with the gamut of repetitive counting, hand-washing and magical thinking. He took smack because he was an addict, for sure, but I think he also used it to silence this psychic Babel.
He climbed on and off the wagon many of the rest of us managed to ride – but in this there was no disgrace. Less easy to take was the attitudinising – at least when you understand, as I believe I do to my marrow, that once someone has crossed the line, far from being a lifestyle choice (albeit of an arid and unprofitable kind) intoxication is nought save a pathology. I saw Seb as trapped inside a performance that he was powerless to give up – one that did for him in the end.
We joined the cortege at the top of Lower Regent Street and followed the horse-drawn hearse past Bates, the hatters. There was a representative sample of the existentialist inhabitants of the inner city: suited and booted sub-Goths twirling skull-topped canes, demi-whores in corsets with BDD (Breast Dismorphic Disorder). Stephen Fry offered me a large, soft, cool, moist hand and greetings, and then observed that we were unlikely to see the likes of such a funeral again in Soho. Unkindly, I suggested that he might prefer us to be dropping like gaudy flies, if spectacle was the object.
In fact, Stephen’s address to the mourners was measured, calm, only a little wry, and quite moving. He didn’t play to the gallery who look upon the likes of Sebastian Horsley as some kind of freak show. Seb was predeceased by a few weeks by Michael Wojas, ex-proprietor of the Colony Room, the private members club where he often hung out. I knew Michael back in the day, and used him – quite unashamedly – as the model for the barman, Hilary Edmonds, in my story Foie Humain from Liver.
As I said in the story, the real tragedy of these Soho denizens was not that they belonged to some kind of avant garde, but that the cultural revolution they spearheaded was carried forward without them: as outside in Old Compton Street everyone got gayer and happier, inside the Colony Room everyone got sadder and older. Wojas died of chronic alcoholism at 53, Horsley of a heroin overdose at 47. There’s no way you can paint up either death as anything but miserable and futile.
Edinburgh book festival
Will Self is going to be at the Edinburgh book festival at 9.30pm on Sunday August 29 and will be reading from and talking about his new book, Walking to Hollywood (which can be ordered from Amazon here). Titled “The dreams and fantasies of an obsessive-compulsive flâneur”, the event costs £10 (£8 concessions).
“Self’s mordant satire is at the peak of its form in a new triptych, Walking to Hollywood, a potent mixture of memoir and invention, which centres on his passion for wandering on foot around cities. Eventually Self decides to take a walk on British land that is about to be consumed by the sea.”
To book a ticket and to find out more, go here.
The Butt audio book
The Whole Story Audiobooks’ unabridged audio book version of Will Self’s novel The Butt will be available from July 1. For more details, visit Amazon here. Arena magazine said: “Epic and bitterly funny, this stew of satire and linguistic wizardry is everything you’d expect from Britain’s master of misanthropy.”
Walking to Hollywood
Bloomsbury filmed Will Self in a teaser for Walking to Hollywood – a mixture of fact, fancy, memoir and invention – which was published on September 6 2010.
“Walking to Hollywood is an extraordinary triptych in which Will Self burrows down through the intersections of time, place and psyche to explore some of our deepest fears and anxieties with his characteristic fearlessness and edgy humour.
“In the autumn of 2007, Self became ill with an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The first part of the book is ostensibly the account of a curative journey to Canada and the USA, but in fact the record of a nematode’s progress, as the worm of obsession – with scale and packing and the ‘stuff’ of our lives – bores through a mind in extremesis. It is a journey that leads to three suicide attempts.
“On his return to England, Self put himself in the care of Dr Zack Busner, one of the originators of The Quantity Theory of Insanity. As the symptoms of OCD diminish, the obsession with his own inability to suspend disbelief in narrative art forms takes over. Self convinces himself that film itself is dead and becomes determined to find the murderer of the medium he once loved. ‘Walking to Hollywood’ is the story of his week-long 120-mile circumambulation of Los Angeles which led to his abduction by members of the Church of Scientology, a passionate affair with Bret Easton Ellis, and mortal combat with the reanimated corpse of Walt Disney.
“Back in London, the writer recovers from his flamboyant psychosis of the summer, only to become aware of a new malaise. Prey for some years to ordinary amnesia, Self now realises he is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. However, remembering that Holderness in East Yorkshire has the fastest-eroding coastline in Europe, the writer decides to take a 40-mile walk over a weekend in late July, a walk akin to a magical rite and one that no one would ever be able to replicate.”
Sky Arts Book Show: Liver
Watch Will Self on the Sky Arts Book Show talking about his short story collection Liver among other things here.
David Eagleman talk
At the Conway Hall (conwayhall.org.uk) in central London, on March 25, Will Self was in conversation with David Eagleman, the neuroscientist and author of Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. It was a case of an eager Eagleman versus a stoical Self.
Sum’s 40 mutually exclusive stories are, said Eagleman, a critique of certainty, a “meta-message” shining a flashlight around the “possibility space”. Self gently ribbed Eagleman on his neologism of “possibilianism”, which he said didn’t exactly trip off the tongue and that, besides, it reminded him of the word bilious. He told him he preferred his own coinage – “radical agnosticism”.
Self admitted at the beginning of the talk that “It’s a drag that we’re more or less in agreement” in terms of a debate, and clearly Self was more interested in any epiphany that Eagleman might have had, or any emotional backstory to the book. In that regard, Sum turns out to have more of an intellectual inspiration.
Self talked about the shock of nursing his dying mother when he was still in his 20s and of her death, and that it was this epiphany, along with the birth of his first child, that propelled his writing, starting with the short story The North London Book of the Dead from The Quantity Theory of Insanity: “I saw myself becoming a neutered bachelor, who would be wearing a cardigan and still living at home at the age of forty, but it wasn’t to be.”
Self said he saw Sum as a book very much about this life rather than the afterlife. Intriguingly, Self also suggested that the Dignitas-inspired story Leberknödel, from Liver, could be viewed as an afterlife story too.
To watch the whole talk, visit the Intelligence Squared website here.
There is also a review on the New Scientist website here.
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