Listen to Will Self in recent conversation with Dr Sebastian Groes at the Museum of London talking about the psychogeography of London here.
The Idler Academy
Those good people at the Idler have posted this capsule review of Will Self’s attendance at their academy this week, which you can read here. This also gives us an excuse to point you towards this fantastic 1993 interview with Will Self that was published in the Idler’s second issue.
Newsnight austerity discussion
Watch Will Self on Newsnight last night in discussion with Polly Toynbee and Jacob Rees-Mogg about the financial squeeze, a little after the seven-minute mark here.
Two short interviews and one longer one
There’s a short interview with Will Self in the Big Issue Scotland here, and an interview with Book Buzz in the States here around the publication of Psychogeography, which we overlooked at the time.
And a longer one too is available to listen to – Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place at the Los Angeles Public Library – here.
Open Book: Library cuts
A mountain of Montaigne
There’s a short, edited version of Will Self’s recent talk on Montaigne at the Institut français that can be seen here. There’s also a write-up of the event at the Literateur here.
Self recently wrote about a trip to the remote Orkney island of Rousay “fleeing a broken marriage and the physical objects of my addiction – if not the psychic furies that screamed attendance on them” and how he ended up reading Montaigne’s Essays for the first time. Here’s a little peak over the Times paywall:
“I had absolutely no preconceptions about Montaigne indeed, so ignorant was I of him that he was confused in my mind with Montesquieu, the Enlightenment political thinker (not a felicitous mistake, given that it was my failure to discourse on the latter that led to my failing the viva voce exam for my philosophy degree a decade before). And so it was without any forethought that I scanned the contents pages, listing essays on subjects as diverse as smells, silence and civil administration – then dived right in.
“Saving the feelings of three authors who have recently penned works intended to introduce new readers to the Essays, this, surely, is the best way to be exposed to him in all his joyful multifariousness. True, it’s not within everyone’s power to arrange for an uncomfortable exile simply to read a book, but then the Essays are no mere book, rather, as Sarah Bakewell makes clear with the title of her excellent synoptic biography of Montaigne, the Essays are an answer to the question that troubles all who are riddled by self-consciousness: How to live? Actually, I’d go still farther than that.
“Bakewell set herself the task of extrapolating from the Essays what biographical information is available, and others of Montaigne’s papers, the kind of answers that the sage would give to this question, as exemplified by his life and his thought. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, and Bakewell’s book is a concordance almost as vivified as the work it parasitises upon. She is particularly adept at placing Montaigne in his proper milieu: the savagely roiling 16th-century France beset by civil wars of religion, and in giving us a portrait of the man in reciprocal relation with the evolving fame of his Essays. She writes brilliantly on the afterlife of the writer – in particular his involvement with his “adoptive daughter”, Marie de Gournay, who became his first great editor, working from earlier editions of the Essays, annotated by Montaigne, to produce a definitive edition of what, for its author, was always an inchoate and evolving work.
“Bakewell is enlightening also on the ways in which Montaigne has been a writer for all literary and philosophical seasons: a humanist universalist to his fellow Renaissance men (such as Shakespeare, whose signature we have in a copy of the first English translation of the Essays), a Roman Catholic moralist – if a wayward one – to Blaise Pascal a feeling romantic to the Romantics, a source of succour to thinkers as various as Friedrich Nietzsche and Walt Whitman and so on, right up to a present in which we can, if we like, characterise the seignior of a wine-producing estate on the fringes of the Dordogne, who almost half a millennium ago had Latin mottos carved into the beams of his tower library that can still be seen, as a kind of protoblogger.”
Riddley Walker transcript
Pretty much a verbatim transcript of Self’s recent British Library conversation with Russell Hoban about his 1980 masterpiece Riddley Walker, for which Self wrote an introduction to the 20th anniversary edition, can be found here.
The deep topography of Nick Papadimitriou
There was a short feature on Will Self’s friend and colleague the “deep topographer” Nick Papadimitriou, who most recently helped with the research on Self’s The Book of Dave, that included contributions from Self, Iain Sinclair and Russell Brand on Newsnight last night. You can watch it again here – it starts around the 36-minute mark. Papadimitriou’s book Scarp is due to be published next year by Sceptre. His podcasts on Resonance FM can be downloaded here, and there’s a short clip from The London Perambulator here.
John Gray talk at the RSA
A reminder that although Will Self’s talk with John Gray to discuss his new book – The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death – at the Royal Society of Arts tonight is sold out, you can listen to it online at the RSA website here from 6pm. It’s also available as a free mp3 audio file, and you can watch it here too.
Birth of the British Novel
Watch Will Self talking about Jonathan Swift (and Martin Amis on Henry Fielding) in BBC4’s Birth of the British Novel here. Self’s contribution appears at about the 16-minute mark.
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