Will Self

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On Britain’s relationship with its intelligentsia

May 8, 2011

“What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can’t help feeling that’s because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.

“Intellectuals do exist in this country and have existed. If you think of the Foucaults and Derridas in France, we have our Terry Eagletons and Colin MacCabes. People such as Niall Ferguson and Simon Schama: think of them what you will, but they’re not lightweights – though they’re not necessarily high-order theoreticians.

“I think the French example is instructive, and those of us who used to smoke Disque Bleus and wear rollneck pullovers rather relished the Rive Gauche atmosphere of public intellectualism. But you also have the odious spectacle of Bernard-Henri Lévy urging Sarko on to bomb Libya. Or André Malraux for that matter. There’s a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results. So there is something to be said for our more low-key intellectuals – someone exemplary such as Mary Warnock, who’s not only a very punctilious and thoughtful moral philosopher but I think has been very positively influential in a number of areas of public policy without ever needing to have that kind of cachet.”

Read the rest of the Observer’s New Review article here

Blair and New Labour: I told you so

April 18, 2010

‘During the 1997 election I put up a handmade poster in the house where I lived that read: “A Vote for Labour is Not Necessarily a Vote for That Sanctimonious Git Blair.” I-told-you-so is never an attractive quality, but while my sign may have been factually incorrect, I was spot-on when it came to the man himself, which was why my tick was placed elsewhere in 2001, 2005, and will be again come May.

‘I’d had a bad feeling about Blair since he’d begun sopping up the limelight as shadow home secretary; his posturing on law and order was reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s policy triangulation – an effective tactic, but utterly unprincipled. This was Blair’s underlying gittishness – but as for the sanctimony, it came off him in waves and I couldn’t understand why others on the left didn’t sense it. But people mostly believe what suits them, and when Blair told them they could have it all – unlimited economic growth spearheaded by unbridled capitalism and enormously improved social provision – they developed a faith strong enough to sustain them through the next 13 years of disillusionment.

‘Not me. On the May morning when party activists bussed in to Downing Street played the part of a deliriously happy flag-waving citizenry (while Tony and Cherie played the part of modest victors), I sat staring at the TV and suggested to my then girlfriend (now wife) that we might consider emigrating. Of course, we didn’t – we just moved to Stockwell. My attention was not focused on the Blair government during the first three years it was in office. The rock-bottom of my long-term alcohol and drug addiction had coincided – in a rather spectacular fashion – with New Labour’s election, and until I finally got clean and sober in October 1999, it was all about me – not him. I did, however, clock the egregious hamming it up for the cameras that Blair did after the death of Diana Spencer, and again I wondered, how could anyone be taken in?’

Read the rest of Will Self’s piece about New Labour from the Observer New Review here.

My body & soul

November 19, 2009

Are you healthy?
“I have the same sign on my office door that Field Marshal Montgomery had outside his tent during the desert campaign; it reads ‘I am 99% fit, are you?’ I’ve always been pretty fit. Even when I was a heroin addict I was a fit heroin addict.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s answers from the Observer’s My body & soul here.

My old man: a voyage around our fathers

July 1, 2008

This was published to celebrate Father’s Day, June 15 2008:

Will Self was born in 1961 and raised in an ‘effortlessly dull’ north London suburb. His father, Peter, held the chair in public administration at the London School of Economics. Self’s parents divorced when he was 18. He worked as a copywriter and a New Statesman cartoonist before his first collection of short stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, was published to critical and popular acclaim in 1991. Doris Lessing said of Quantity …, ‘absurdity unfurls logically from absurdity, but always as a mirror of what we are living in — and wish we didn’t.’

A while back I found myself staying with friends outside Lyme Regis. Looking out along the beach at Charmouth, where the 12-year-old Mary Anning, out fossicking in 1811, discovered the remains of an ichthyosaur, and so began the revolution in natural history that would culminate in Darwinism, a strange intimation descended on me: yes, I had been here before, although not for many years. In fact, not since I, too, was 12. I had come to Lyme Regis with my father but what really impinged on me was that we had walked there, from Taunton, a distance of more than 20 miles. From Charmouth we had gone on, via Bridport, to Cerne Abbas, where, after lying about on the celebrated Giant, we’d sat up late in a pub discussing the future of socialism with some holidaying miners. I couldn’t recall where the walking tour ended but I did remember long, hot days and many precocious half-pints of shandy (my father had a total disregard for licensing laws).

Ours was an ambulatory, ludic and pedagogic relationship. My mother and father separated when I was nine, and although my father ambled back to the family home from time to time, over the next eight years, until I went to university, we mostly met either at his club, the Reform on Pall Mall, where we played endless games of snooker and billiards or else took walking tours together.

I’m saddened, now, by the extent to which the animosity of my parents towards each other influenced my perception of my father. I tended to take my mother’s view of him: he was solipsistic, criminally self-absorbed, and incapable of true sympathy. He was a male chauvinist, and, despite his left-leaning politics, an unreconstructed upper-middle-class snob. Moreover, he was a cosseted mummy’s boy (my grandmother didn’t die until she was 96). But the truth was that I loved the long, gloomy afternoons at the Reform, and loved even more the walking tours. In fact, even though I couldn’t acknowledge it at the time, I loved my father.

He was a natural teacher — possibly a great one. He held the chair in public administration at the London School of Economics but his interests were wide-ranging: from metaphysics and political theory to urban planning and back again, and on those tramps he inculcated me with both his own analytic rigour and his love of happy disputation.

He was also a storyteller. When my brother and I were small, and would climb into his bed in the morning, he kept us enthralled with a saga about a giant called Edward who lived in a house on Hampstead Heath and worked as a consulting private detective. My father was the presiding spirit of something called the Carr Society (named after the crime writer John Dickson Carr), a group of like-minded men who pub-crawled across the Chilterns, telling each other detective stories they’d made up. When I grew older I went on one or two Carr Society walks and was called upon to spontaneously compose a story of my own — excellent training for a writer.

Growing up in the 1970s, I couldn’t help but be conscious of my father’s whiff of anachronism. He once announced that he would be taking me to Muswell Hill ‘to buy some dancing pumps’. He often called upon me to put on my ‘little jerkin’. He himself habitually wore grey flannel Oxford bags, tweed jackets and gabardine macs — no cagoule ever got near him. He was 42 when I was born so I only ever knew him in middle age, and his own character had been formed in the 1930s.

As I grew older — and wilder — my anger towards, and rejection of, my father increased. He could never understand my proclivity for drink and drugs. As I said, he had no time for licensing laws, and never objected to my drinking and smoking — both of which he enjoyed. ‘But,’ he would counsel me, ‘you should exercise moderation in all things.’ He himself had an unflappable and distinctly phlegmatic manner (although within seethed a distinctly Romantic nature). The strange thing is that while I recall violently arguing with him, and feeling enormous animosity when he was absent, right up until his death, aged 79 in 1999, we enjoyed each other’s company.

Not that we saw each other a great deal. My father emigrated to Australia in 1980. For a seemingly slow and orotund man he had a tremendous work ethic, and rather than take retirement in the UK he took up a new academic post at the Australian National University in Canberra. He was teaching up until 12 weeks before his death, and his last book, Rolling Back the Market , a critique of the slavish belief in free-market economics, was published posthumously.

When I went out to see him in Australia, or he visited England, our relationship always resumed its walking and talking course. He was a somewhat distant, but for all that loving, grandfather to the three of my children whom he knew, and one of the last recollections I have of him being in the house where I’m writing this was of him picking up his youngest grandchild. No mean feat.

I’ve said it before — and I’ll say it again: it always seems to me that we come to know our same-sex parents through the bodily and the involuntary through a kind of fossicking of our own physical strata. As we come to resemble our fathers, so we re-encounter the individual who reared us. I turned 42 four years after my father died. Since then, with each succeeding year I feel I’ve come to know him better and better: I feel him in my habits of mind and my physical quirks. I sense him in my capacity for companionable solitude — both writing and musing — and, naturally, I am aware of his presence, both within and beside me, as I set off on yet another long walk.

15.06.08

Chris The Saviour: Will Self on Chris Morris – The Observer, March 1997

January 29, 2006

Chris Morris’ Brass Eye turns satire into art of a very high order indeed

Will Self
Sunday March 9, 1997
The Observer

About halfway through Wednesday night’s final episode of Brass Eye (Channel 4), it began to occur to me that Chris Morris might possibly be God. The idea of a Morrisian deity is appealing for a number of reasons: it explains why the world is so consummately absurd it explains why there is little real justice to be had for the poor and the oppressed and it provides a convincing explanation for why public life in this country is dominated by talented mediocrities.

The sketch that occasioned this lurch of theism on my part was a typical piece of Morrisian excess. We were asked to take on board the idea that an utterly undistinguished, ring-road, provincial business had decided to incentivise its management by providing them with unlimited quantities of drugs. As the sketch began, we were treated to the sight of various middle-management types snorting lines of cocaine, toking on joints and shooting up smack (the managing director). Not only were all the paraphernalia and substances depicted with uncanny accuracy rare on television but the reactions of the drugged executives were also utterly credible.

Another comic might have dared this scenario but would have cut it short. Not Morris. As the anguished, bearded face of the new marketing manager went puce with the effects of excess cocaine and the camera stayed right on him, it became apparent to me that this was art of a very high order indeed. David Lynch used the same technique of dramatically over-extended emotion to telling effect in Twin Peaks, but both contemporary satirists have really borrowed the idea from the high avatar of absurdism Samuel Beckett.

As the new marketing manager fell out of the tedious boardroom gasping and retching, one of Morris’s henchwomen intoned in perfect cod voiceover: ‘Soon he will learn to maintain his levels.’ Maybe he will but I doubt Chris Morris ever will. Put starkly, this man genuinely knows no limits. His programme is the televisual exemplar of Yossarian’s motto in Catch-22: ‘Death to all moderators.’ I didn’t see a great deal of The Day Today, because its transmission coincided with my long period of box furlough but what I did see was both brilliant and congruent with the strange, satiric anti-persona that Morris developed during his radio days. Coming to Brass Eye was witnessing that most unusual and remarkable of phenomena: an artist who has grown and reached the height of his powers.

I had read the pieces about it I had heard the substance of the brouhaha. When, in the first episode of Brass Eye ‘Animals’ I saw Carla Lane, Jilly Cooper et al being not so much led, as driven up the warped garden path of Morris’s contempt, I, like any self-respecting bourgeois couch potato, thought: really, he has gone too far this time. Claire Rayner one of the spoofees writing in this paper, had the nous to be able to identify what it is about duping ‘real’ people into fake broadcast scenarios that might undercut the meaning and purpose of satire.

If satire exists to provoke moral reform in HL Mencken’s formulation, ‘To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’ then the muddying of the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ can only be conceived of as a perversion of satiric justice. But Claire Rayner, in her impassioned, self-regarding piece about her experience with Morris, got it wrong in one vital particular. It wasn’t us the afflicted who were being spoofed it was her the comfortable. In fact, I’ll go further than that: the reason why it’s legitimate to gull people like Rayner into making silly asses of themselves on television is that, in a very important sense, they aren’t real at all.

Rhodes Boyson is real-ish. He’s real enough for me to have seen him walking through the central lobby of the Houses of Parliament the other day. I looked into his guileless, headteacher’s countenance. I recognised him. I thought about it hard, but as ever it was a killing case of esprit d’escalier what I should have shouted at the mutton-chopped former Minister was: ‘Oi! Got any cake, Rhodes?!’ Because Boyson was credulous and bigoted enough to allow himself to be conned into deploring the effects of a drug called ‘cake’, on the Brass Eye episode that dealt with narcotics.

Morris in one of his numerous personae apprised all of the dimwits who fell for it that ‘cake’ was a ‘made-up’ drug. He called his pressure group founded to rid society of the evil of cake ‘FUCKD and BOMBD’ he described the effects of cake in lurid, pantomime terms that wouldn’t have convinced a 14-year-old ingenue.

So why did these people fall for such fakery? The Rayners, Boysons, Mad Frankie Frasers and Worsthornes of this world? Because they aren’t real people any more they’re hyperreal. They’ve made the Faustian pact of being that oxymoronic incarnation, ‘television personalities’.

You can always spot a ‘television personality’, even when they aren’t actually on television, because they carry their ‘made-up’ persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces. They are like nose-pickers for whom the wind has definitively changed.

All Morris has done is to give these unpersons an opportunity to demonstrate the fact that they’ll do anything to get a chauffeured car, a Styrofoam beaker of tea and five minutes in the green room goofing out with others of their ilk.

The other important point to be made about Morris’s elision of ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ is that it’s at the very core of his attack on television itself. What Morris realises is that television isn’t a ‘medium’ in any meaningful sense at all. Rather it’s a skein of different media imprisoned in a bogus proscenium. Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the ‘artistic’ potential of television qua television are equally deluded. There are filmic artists working in television, and there are dramatic artists there are costume and set designers there are actors. None of them are peculiar to the ‘medium’ all could be set in different contexts.

All except Chris Morris , that is. His savage truncations of Shakespearean English I particularly relished tags such as: ‘Whatever you forget about tonight’s programme remember this’ his fantastical nomenclature last week’s show included a slaughter man called ‘Gypsum Fantastic’ his subversion of the apparent logic of television graphics a bogus diagram featuring the heads of dead foxes and his own crazed demonism on screen a brilliant character actor acting the part of a brilliant character actor all of it testifies to the fact that this man is a true television artist perhaps the only one currently at work.

When the semi-fraudulent credits of the last episode of Brass Eye began rolling up, I turned to the friend I had watched it with and we both said almost in unison it’s a privilege to be alive when people such as Morris are at work. And as for his much-feted reticence and unwillingness to be made into a ‘personality’ himself well, you’d have to say that was the icing on the cake.

Elsewhere on the non-medium, the current torrent of superbly photographed wildlife programmes continued with The Eagle Empire (BBC1). Sea eagles hang out in the arctic north of Norway because they’ve been pushed back there by us. They’re partial to the odd eider duck and do lots of nifty fish-plucking from the waves. This Wildlife on One programme didn’t feature the staggering bird’s-eye photography we’d seen in Incredible Journeys, but it made up for it with astonishingly intimate and slow-motion photography.

There was that, and there was the ineffable presence of David Attenborough. He ended the programme on an up note, telling us that sea eagles were heading south once more, extending their empire after years of attrition. I dare say we’ll soon see one of the elegant birds being interviewed by David Jatt on Brass Eye.

Last Sunday, I did something nobody should ever do. I watched the omnibus edition of EastEnders (BBC1) and then I watched the preview tapes for all of last week’s episodes back-to-back. It was almost like having a soap opera that ran in real rather than virtual time (Pauline says: ‘I’ll just put on the kettle’ and then everybody waits in silence for five minutes while it boils) either that, or like watching The Family, the hideous soap opera Ray Bradbury created for his dystopic fantasy Fahrenheit 451. Viewers of The Family broadcast on three, wall-sized screens receive a copy of that day’s script, complete with their ‘own’ lines. At certain key moments in the action, all the actors peer out of the screen and say: ‘What do you think, Will?’ Or Paul, or Jenny, or whoever it is watching. Whereupon I find myself replying: ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t mind shagging Grant Mitchell, save for the fact that I couldn’t run my fingers through his hair. . .’

Will’s Latest Book

Will Self - Why Read
Will Self's latest book Why Read will be published in hardback by Grove on 3 November 2022.

You can pre-order at Amazon.co.uk.

Will’s Previous Books

Will Self - Will
Will
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Amazon.co.uk

  Will Self - Phone
Phone
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Amazon.com
Shark
Shark
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Amazon.com
  Umbrella
Umbrella
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Amazon.com
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being A Prawn Cracker
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being A Prawn Cracker
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  Walking To Hollywood
Walking To Hollywood
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Amazon.com
The Butt
The Butt
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Amazon.com
  Grey Area
Grey Area
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Amazon.com
Junk Mail
Junk Mail
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Amazon.com
  Great Apes
Great Apes
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Amazon.com
Cock And Bull
Cock And Bull
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Amazon.com
  The Quantity Theory Of Insanity
The Quantity Theory Of Insanity
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Amazon.com
The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis
The Sweet Smell of Psychosis
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Amazon.com
  My Idea Of Fun
My Idea Of Fun
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Amazon.com
The Book Of Dave
The Book Of Dave
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Amazon.com
  Psychogeography
Psychogeography
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Psycho Too
Psycho II
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  Liver
Liver
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How The Dead Live
How The Dead Live
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Amazon.com
  Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
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Amazon.com
Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe
Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe
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Amazon.com
  Dorian
Dorian
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Amazon.com
Feeding Frenzy
Feeding Frenzy
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Amazon.com
  Sore Sites
Sore Sites
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Amazon.com
Perfidious Man
Perfidious Man
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Amazon.com
  The Undivided Self
The Undivided Self
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Amazon.com
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