Can you spot which “erotic scene” is written by Will Self?
Underground, Overground review
‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to convey – surely the apposite word – the full extent of my love of the London tube. It’s a love that exists prior to any sense I have of an estrangement from the world – I suppose if I were inclined to all that Freudian malarkey I’d say that the tube is not “other” to me, for it – or possibly she – is no mere transitional object, but my very internalisation of Mother London herself. Let me expand: I grew up about 10 minutes’ walk from East Finchley tube station, and I cannot properly remember a time when I didn’t travel by tube. That said, the first regular journeys I clearly remember were when, aged about eight, I began going to school in Hampstead. My older brother and I would travel the five stops to Camden Town, change to the northbound Edgware platform, and go the further three stops to Hampstead. A more direct route was to take the 102 bus to Golders Green, but while I liked the 102 well enough – and especially the breakneck plunge from the back platform as the Routemaster caromed on to the station forecourt – I loved the tube.’
Read the rest of Will Self’s review of Underground, Overground by Andrew Martin at the Guardian Review here.
The Queen: she’s boring
“The truth is that the pictures are almost insufferably dull. If you’re a monarchist you’d be better off staying at home, painting a Union flag on your living room wall and watching it dry than venturing out to see this tat. And the principal reason why the images are so banal and uninteresting is because, gasp, nobody – least of all the artists and photographers who confected them – knows the sitter at all well … these snappers and daubers have difficulty with depicting the Queen’s personality, because – gulp! – she’s a perfectly ordinary, rather uncultured, rather sporty, elderly upper-class Englishwoman, who just happens to be a monarch. In two words: she’s boring.”
Read Will Self’s review of The Queen: Art and Image exhibition at the Guardian here.
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s egregious slur
“Years ago I appeared on Newsnight with Jacob Rees-Mogg and we had a little barney – I think I accused him of being both a snob and a nob, and he, taking umbrage, asked me to explain what defined these derogatory appellations. I think I told him that it all basically came down to cufflinks; that in the great index of social classification – inscribed up there on a Laputa-like cloudly domain – the wearing of cufflinks really marked a man off as a snob and a nob.
“Years later I don’t really stand by the cufflink classification – I’ve acquired a pair of my own, although they don’t really fit; I do, however, stand by my estimation of Rees-Mogg, who’s made the headlines again this week with another of his egregious slurs against the left, damning us all as ‘socialist Yahoos‘.
“Clearly at whichever charitable foundation of a fee-paying school Rees-Mogg attended, they didn’t give their pupils much of a grounding in Swift’s oeuvre …”
Read the rest of Will Self’s piece on Jacob Rees-Mogg’s egregious slur at Cif here.
Walk: The talk
The Guardian has published an edited version of Will Self’s inaugural lecture as professor of contemporary thought at Brunel University, which can be read here or in Guardian Review tomorrow.
Megachange: The World in 2050 review
“Daniel Franklin, the executive editor and business affairs editor at the Economist, is a tentative chap for a prognosticator. As well as editing this round-up of seers’ views of the four decades ahead, he and his co-editor John Andrews are also responsible for the Economist’s annual publication on the coming year ‘The World in …’. Perhaps it’s this workaday familiarity with the imperfections of futurology that makes Franklin so keen to distance himself from any great likelihood of being right.
“In his introduction to these 20 essays by his colleagues he says that, while identifying the trends that are transforming the world right now is eminently possible, foreseeing how they may shape the world in 2050 is ‘absurdly ambitious. History is littered with prophecies that turned out to be utterly wrong.’ He then cites just two of these clunkers: the radical journalist HN Brailsford writing in 1914: ‘My own belief is that there will be no more wars among the six Great Powers,’ and the Economist Irving Fisher predicting a stock market rise a week before the 1929 crash.
“Indeed, throughout the whole of Megachange, the impossibility of predicting the future is a strange and persistent lament, ever encouraging the reader in search of experts prepared to boldly go there to chuck the book into the nearest bin. But for all that, the examples of failed anticipation listed here are remarkably few – excepting Matt Ridley’s bizarrely tendentious rant in the concluding essay, of which more anon.”
Read the rest of Will Self’s review of Megachange here.
Robert Lockhart 1959-2012
“Robert Lockhart, who has died aged 52 after a heart attack, was a musician to the tips of his nimble – and invariably heavily nicotine-stained – fingers. A piano virtuoso, he retired from concert performance early in his career to concentrate on composition, and became both an eclectic and effective composer for theatre, film and television, as well as creating freestanding works for ensembles ranging from the string quartet to the brass band.
“An unashamedly ‘pre-sampling’ composer, Lockhart savoured working with musicians above all else, and his flair for arranging and conducting in the studio ensured him a steady stream of commissions which, although often requiring only workmanlike undertones, his often deeply personal music frequently managed to soar high above.
“His film credits were extensive, but particularly notable were his work on John Schlesinger’s Cold Comfort Farm (1995), and his long association with the director Terence Davies, for whom he worked as musical director on the films Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992) and The Neon Bible (1995). Davies’s meditative and elegiac films about a Liverpool working-class family were appealing to Lockhart, who was born and brought up in Wigan and never quite adjusted to what he viewed as the terminal effeteness of the south-east. Other film credits included Andrew Grieve’s On the Black Hill (1988) and the thriller Vicious Circles (1997).”
Read the rest of Will Self’s obituary of his friend the composer and pianist Robert Lockhart at the Guardian here.
Why I hate Trafalgar Square
“Without a shadow of doubt Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world. The fact that massed divisions of tourists feel compelled to ritually promenade across its pigeon-shat-upon York stone and head-banging granite is perverse in the extreme, because it’s not so much a place to hang out as somewhere you feel constantly in danger of being hung for treason, such is the discourse of power enshrined in its leonine and general-studded plinths and its admiral-spiked column.”
Read the rest of the article in Guardian Travel here.
Willpower review
“From time to time, as if heaven-sent to annoy, someone will ask me if I’m self-disciplined when it comes to my work. I usually look witheringly at them and snarl, ‘What do you think? I mean, how do you imagine anyone writes a quarter of a million words a year for publication?’ The hapless fools then mutter about inspiration or some such rot before turning tail and fleeing. Good riddance. The life of the professional writer – like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist – is predicated on willpower. Without it there simply wouldn’t be any remuneration, period.
“It could be because I spend all my working life deploying most of the supposedly novel strategies detailed in this book that I found it quite so annoying – or it could be because I waste rather more of my supposedly freer time struggling with the application of the rest. Either way, the cumulative effect of reading page after page of this pap sapped my willpower something fierce, and willpower – as Baumeister and his amanuensis Tierney never tire of telling us – is a strictly finite resource. Before I read Willpower I was an Odysseus who needed no lashing to the mast of life. Temptations? I laughed in their face. If you presented me with a stark naked and lascivious Kate Moss, her belly-button brimming over with Peruvian flake cocaine, I would simply have told her to rub in the talcum powder then cover up.”
Read the rest of Will Self’s review of Willpower at the Guardian here.
On the death of Russell Hoban
“A few years ago, charged with writing a new introduction to a 25th-anniversary edition of Riddley Walker, I called the author, Russell Hoban, at his behest. A frail-sounding voice answered the phone, and when I explained who I was, Hoban fluted: ‘Would you mind calling back in half an hour or so? My wife and I are about to watch Sex and the City.’ I put the receiver down chastened: here was a man in his 80s who had more joie de vivre than I could muster in hale middle age.
“Born in 1925 in Pennsylvania to Jewish Ukrainian immigrants, Hoban was the rarest kind of writer: his works displayed complete diversity of subject matter, allied to a compelling unity of voice. Best known for Riddley Walker, perhaps the post-nuclear-apocalypse novel sans pareil, he wrote 15 other adult novels and many more for children. In the 1970s when I was first beginning to buy books for myself, Hoban was a member of a distinguished list at Picador, whose larger format paperbacks with full-bleed graphic covers were the hip thing to have on your bricks-and-boards bookcase.”
Read the rest of Will Self’s tribute to Russell Hoban, who died on Tuesday, at the Guardian website here.
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