Will Self

Will Self’s fantasy dinner party

Frankly, any dinner party is a fantasy to me nowadays. I was pretty disaffected from the polite pissing contest that constitutes the average middle-class munch-fest long before the pandemic, but the past couple of years have seen the psychic equivalent of sticky tape printed with “POLICE CRIME SCENE” stretched across this particular zone of sociality. So it’s with considerable pleasure that I retreat into a purely fantastical one.

I’ve chosen to whine and grine my guests in the Circular Hall at Lambeth Town Hall. Why? Because it’s local to me — I’ve lived in this area of sarf’ London for a quarter century this year — and its Edwardian elegance contrasts with the busy central Brixton streetscape which can be seen from its ocular windows. The Reliance Arcade and the entrance to Electric Avenue (of which more later) are both in view while the Academy music venue, where I saw one of my guests, Martina Topley-Bird, give an extraordinary performance with Tricky in the late 1990s, is only a trip and a hop away.

Topley-Bird’s ethereal voice was the skylarking that soared above the rocky soundscape of the late nineties, which was about the last time I truly felt the pulse of the zeitgeist. It will be a pleasure to dine with this remarkable artist, who went on to have an equally brilliant solo career. I’ve also invited Eddy Grant because he was not only a pathfinding black artist in the Britain of the 1960s, but he also subverted the teeny-boppy “Baby Come Back” (his first big hit) by recording that paean to all things anarchic — and the Brixton riots of 1981 in particular — “(We’re gonna rock down to) Electric Avenue”.

Obviously, I’m interested to see how Margaret Thatcher, whom I’ve resurrected to be my sommelier for the evening, will react to Grant’s presence. But we won’t find out much, because as my paid employee I’ve instructed her to say nothing to my guests beyond polite requests as to what they’d like to drink and tasting notes on the beverages.

Find out who Will’s other guests would be at the FT here.

The aerotropolis of Heathrow

Each year at the start of the autumn term, I lead my students on a walk from Brunel University, about three miles from Heathrow as the jet flies, to the boundary of Europe’s busiest airport.

Our route passes through the rundown area of West Drayton, a desert with windows in which everything costs 99p. Though the airport is a leading regional employer, many of its skilled workers prefer to live in the Chilterns or along the river in Windsor or Henley. Former manufacturing districts such as Hayes on the M4 corridor — once home to EMI and a host of hi-tech interwar businesses — now have to survive on a drip-feed of zero-hours contracts for frothy-coffee dispensers and airline meal assemblers.

My students and I then plunge into a tangled hinterland of abandoned landfills, car breakers’ yards and travellers’ sites — home to Heathrow’s ancillary trades, which include the detention centre for those economic migrants unfortunate enough not to make it all the way to market.

Before the tunnel leading into the terminals, we reach the picturesque village of Harmondsworth — which, if the recommendation of this month’s Davies commission is heeded, will be severely truncated by a third runway for the airport. At its centre sits the Great Barn, an astonishing 15th-century grain storage facility dubbed by John Betjeman the “cathedral of Middlesex”. As an administrative area, Middlesex is long gone — yet the Great Barn survives, for now, beautifully intact. If the commissioners have their way, English Heritage, which acquired the Barn three years ago, may well have to up posts and move it.

Read the rest of this article at the FT, here.

Umbrella – An introduction and ‘The Rules’

For US readers of Umbrella, here’s Will on how he researched his latest novel, which is a good introduction:

“Whenever I reach the end of a novel – and I mean the very end, when the second set of proofs have been corrected, and the button at the printers, for good or ill, has been pushed – I find myself plagued by a very particular and almost hallucinatory condition that I’ve dubbed – with exactitude if not felicity – ‘everythingitis’. The distinguishing feature of everythingitis – which it shares with certain bizarre mental states that afflict the overly zealous adepts of Zen meditation – is an obsessive need to review the content of the entire world, both physical and psychic, to check whether it has been incorporated into the text just completed. Are there puddles in the novel? Do adolescent girls flick back their hair at least once? And, if so, have the lobes of their ears – or lack of them – been described? I must stress: everythingitis covers everything, and as any novel that is genuinely ambitious tries to be a synecdoche of the world, so the malaise ramifies and ramifies: the novel may be set among disaffected teenagers in Zurich in 2006, but following its inexorably pathological logic, might there be a case for including at least a faint echo of the impact of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 on the Byzantine aristocracy?”

Visit the FT’s website here for the full article.

And for those who really want to drill down into the text, here are Donna Poppy’s copy editing rules for Umbrella:

  • Italic has been used for “ejaculatory” thought – that is, thought that seems to pop out from the ordinary narrative, either because of its figurative qualities, or because of its heightened emotional qualities, or both. Hence things that would normally be in italic – everything from titles to foreign words – appear in roman. Snatches of song and verse are also italicised, as are named individual letters.
  • Enclosing inverted commas are, for the most part, absent from the book. Dialogue is preceded by a short dash only when the rule’s presence is necessary to avoid confusion, ie when the speech in question is without a verb of saying or some other obvious indicator of speech.
  • Long dashes (em rules) indicate temporal shifts or mood shifts, and can be thought of as aspirations – that is, breaths – in the text. Shifts in point of view are deliberately without signals of any kind. Additionally, em rules also stand in for one or more omitted letters within a word, in the conventional way.
  • Short dashes (en rules) indicate new thoughts. If a new thought starts mid-sentence, so does the en dash – which accounts for why it sometimes appears after the closing comma in a clause. Short dashes also indicate that a line of dialogue has been interrupted or broken off – hence –? –. –! all appear.
  • ?No semicolons.

Umbrella interview and pieces

As the publication of Umbrella on August 16 nears, Will Self talks to the Observer about his new Man Booker-longlisted novel (and, briefly, his next novel, which will be “Jaws without the shark”.)

Will has also written a piece in the FT about what he terms “everythingitis”, which he feels every time he finishes a book, and how he conducts his research. There’s also a long piece here that he wrote for the Guardian Review about modernism and how he got going as a writer.

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