“Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions – on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets – simply aren’t up to scratch. It’s a dirty, thankless task, but someone has to do it; someone has to point out that, no, Inception wasn’t the last word in SF meta-sophistication, but rather a stupid person’s idea of what an intelligent film is like. And by the same token, as the Coen brothers’ True Grit comes galloping into our multiplexes surrounded by dust clouds of Stateside approbation, someone has to take a bead on the whole sweep of their careers, squint, and then if not exactly shoot them down, at any rate cold-cock the notion that the Coens are the great American auteurs of their generation, when, sadly, they are only a moderately clever person’s idea of what great American auteurs might be like.

“Either of the two films that preceded True Grit, Burn After Reading (2008), and A Serious Man (2009), would have been a career-finisher for a tyro writer-director. Halfway through the latter I asked my wife what she thought of it and she replied “Awful”. I demurred: “It’s pretty dreadful . . .”, and she shot back: “In what precise way does that differ from ‘awful’?” I set down this exchange because I think it encapsulates a lot of what has enabled the Coens to continue to ride high in popular estimation – and to win Oscars, rake in receipts and put bums on plush – which is that they are insistently likeable film-makers. Their likeability is such – and is projected in such a canny way through their nebbish male characters, and resourceful female ones – that it seems like a solecism to criticise them too strenuously.

“I’ve taken this line myself in the past. Recall: True Grit isn’t the only remake the Coens have shot; back in 2004 when I was writing regularly as a film critic, they brought out The Ladykillers, a remake of the Ealing Studios classic, with Tom Hanks taking on the role of the Professor, originally played by Alec Guinness. The film was pretty crap; the performances hammy rather than buffo, the narrative pace feeble rather than farcical – but such was the amiability of the exercise, and my own reservoir of affection for what the Coens apparently represent – namely, considered, intelligent, witty film-making in an era characterised by crassly merchandising blockbusters – that I gave The Ladykillers a decent review.”

Read the rest of Self’s take on the Coen brothers at the Guardian here.

“Each morning at approximately 8.45am any number of yummy mummies, trolling their kids and dogs across the balding sward of Clapham Common might witness this curious spectacle: a tall, slightly cadaverous man, pacing along at speed and ignoring the Jack Russell that nips at his heels while addressing an invisible interlocutor in heavily London-accented French.

“‘Non, elle n’est pas allée dans un magasin de chaussures,’ he tells his inner demons, and then, ‘Elle lui a dit bonjour’. Yes, it is indeed me, listening yet again to Chapitre Dix of the Berlitz audio tape. Indeed, I have listened to it so many times already that despite these playlets being brief and purely instructional I have come to harbour strange ideas about their characters.

“Take Sylvie Féraud, for example. It’s she who regularly cruises past Paris Modes during her lunch hour, and who ‘a vu un tailleur dans la vitrine’. She’s a haughty miss, Sylvie, and thinks herself several cuts above the sales assistant. When the poor girl says the suit she’s tried on is ‘merveilleux’, Sylvie almost snarls back, ‘Mm, c’est vrai, mais je trouve que la jupe est un peu courte pour le bureau.’ Hm, I’d like to take that Sylvie Féraud down a peg or two – if only my French were up to the job.

“But it just isn’t. I’m still keeping on with my lessons, and my teacher, Arlette, persists in taking me forward at a brisk pace. We’re on to the conditional tense now, so, if I had been in Paris last weekend I would’ve been able to liberally insult Sylvie Féraud – would’ve, were it not for the fact that I need Arlette to coach me through every temporal and hypothetical convolution, pursing her lips and gesturing frantically, as if by so doing she could force my tongue to dance like a faun in l’après-midi.”

Read the rest of the third part of Will Self’s Guardian Education series here.

“A few weeks ago, a famous – and famously beautiful – young novelist found herself unfortunately seated beside me at an otherwise impeccably Hampstead dinner party. Bemoaning the state of British arts in general, she animadverted concerning our undoubted satirical prowess: ‘It’s easy for us, it’s what we do – we just lift an arse cheek and out it comes.’ Actually, I’m not sure she did say the arse-cheek bit – but it was words to that effect.

“Esprit de l’escalier it may’ve been, but I found myself, days later, wondering why exactly it was that we should feel at all shamefaced about our singular collective ability to guy, to poke fun, to take the piss and otherwise generally excoriate. Now comes Rude Britannia, an exhibition of satiric art and cartoon which, if any were needed, provides ample confirmation of not just how deeply the satiric taproot is sunk into British soil, but how crucial its vigorous propagation has always been to our constitution – both political and psychological – while its massy canopy has, for centuries, protected our civil liberties, such as they are.

“Rude Britannia takes a broadly narrative and historical approach to graphic satire, while allowing for sub-sections to treat of the political, the bawdy and the absurd. Beginning in the mid-16th century, with text-heavy allegorical and emblematic prints, the exhibition canters brusquely through the great ribald explosion of the 1700s – Hogarth, Gillray, Rowlandson et al – on through the expansion of print in the Victorian era, and the concomitant democratisation of satire; then presents such wayward and decadent figures as Beardsley, before shepherding in the celebrated 20th-century cartoonists – Low, Scarfe, Steadman – eventually coming up to date with generous space allocated to such nominally “fine” artists as John Isaacs, Sarah Lucas and David Shrigley.

Read the rest of Will Self on an exhibition that celebrates the great British satirical impulse in art in today’s Guardian Review.

“Obviously the most important duty of our new prime minister is to acquaint himself with the circumstances of those whom he is about to immiserate. I suggest a brisk tour of the horizon of poverty and deprivation in order to ready him for the wielding of the axe. Why not begin with Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London? As an ex-public school boy he may find it easier to empathise with an Old Etonian on the skids – alternatively, Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier gives a journalistic – if still convincing – portrayal of what life is like for a working class deprived of both work and a social safety net. For a more elegiac account of poverty, try Knut Hamsun’s classic Hunger – the title says it all.

“Of course, it’s also important that the prime minister have some sympathy for all the non-doms and oligarchs who are hitting the skids – poor lambs. He should read (or, dare I say, reread) F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in order to grasp the febrile lustre of wealth (something I myself have long since ceased to suspend disbelief in).

“Supposing that there may be some attempt to rebuild a more equitable Britain after the recession, David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain gives a good picture of the swings and roundabouts of the Atlee administration as it tried to forge the welfare state with severely depleted public finances. Alternatively, the prime minister might like to keep his eye on how deep the roots of the current imbroglio actually are, and he could do this by dipping into some of the utopian fiction of the late 19th century. I particularly recommend Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000-1887, which was one of the bestselling novels of its time, yet is now utterly forgotten. Bellamy looked forward to an enlightened state capitalism in the Boston of the 2000s – now we look backward to benighted free-market capitalism. Bellamy’s hero slept for over 100 years due to a mesmerist’s accident – we seem to have slept for the past 30 years due to an accident in mass-hypnosis.

“Most importantly, though, the incoming premier needs to grasp the war-making follies of his predecessors, and the consequences of such unbridled imperialism both domestically and on those bombed back to the stone age. The great postwar Iraqi novel has yet to appear – probably due to the lack of paper, publishers etc – but until it does, why doesn’t the prime minister bite down on Kafka’s In the Penal Colony? It’s only a short story – so it won’t keep him from his red boxes – and it perfectly captures what happens when inexorable, righteous bureaucracy encounters yielding flesh and blood.

“It’s said that when prime ministers enter Downing Street they are confronted by terrible realisation. So, why not read Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, his classic account of how the drug L-dopa awoke victims of the post-first world war encephalitis lethargica epidemic in the late 1960s? This will get the PM in the right frame of mind to deal with a reality that he and his party have been strenuously in denial about throughout their election campaign.

“Lastly, I do think all folie de grandeur could be usefully vitiated by a read of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, which hymns the ineffable longeurs of a paper-pusher’s lunch hour – because, when all’s said and done, any prime minister is just another office worker, like most of the rest of us.”

Read the rest of the Guardian’s Advice for a new government here.

“I set out on my great adventure to the wilder shores of linguistic competence only six weeks ago – and yet already I feel I’m floundering. Those who read my earlier piece will recall that I had opted for the Berlitz method in order to take my French from the three-year-old-getting-along level: ‘Train station, where, go now, please?’ to one where, by the autumn, when I have a new book out in France, I would be at least capable of conducting a basic press interview.”

The rest of the second part of Will Self’s attempt to learn French is ici.

‘On 18 April 1930, Mikhail Bulgakov ate his lunch in his Moscow flat and then lay down for his customary nap. However, he was soon roused by the telephone ringing, and shortly after that his second wife, Lyuba, came in to tell him that someone from the Central Committee (of the Communist party) wished to speak to him. Bulgakov assumed it was a malicious trick of some kind – such things were common at that time, a grimly antic precursor of the persecutions to come – but when he picked up the handset he heard a voice say, “Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov?” and, when he affirmed this, “Comrade Stalin will talk to you now”. Immediately afterwards Bulgakov heard a voice with a distinct Georgian accent – it was indeed the dictator on the line.

‘The back story to this deranging phone call, during which Stalin – as was his wont with certain elite Russian creative artists – toyed with Bulgakov as a cat does with a mouse, is twisted around the fate of the writer’s play The Days of the Turbins; and the historical basis of that play itself is still further entwined, so that together these three narrative strands can be read as a sort of encryption – the dramatic DNA, if you like – of the USSR during this era. The National Theatre is currently reviving the play (under its original title, The White Guard). It is only the third British production ever, and the first since the collapse of the USSR, even though The Days of the Turbins was the most popular Russian stage play of the 1930s. On the occasion of its 500th performance, in June 1934, Sakhnovsky, the deputy director of the Moscow Arts Theatre, wrote to Bulgakov saying: “The Turbins has become a new Seagull.” Even so, its author was urged not to take a curtain call after the performance, as it might be construed as “a gesture”.’

Read the rest of Will Self’s piece in the Guardian Review about Bulgakov’s play The White Guard here.

Will Self’s 10 rules for writing fiction, from the Guardian Review:

1. Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work, which is all in …

2. The edit.

3. Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper, you can lose an idea for ever.

4. Stop reading fiction – it’s all lies anyway, and it doesn’t have anything to tell you that you don’t know already (assuming, that is, you’ve read a great deal of fiction in the past; if you haven’t, you have no business whatsoever being a writer of fiction).

5. You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing, and should be cherished.

6. Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is ­indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

7. By the same token remember how much time people spend watching TV. If you’re writing a novel with a contemporary setting there need to be long passages where nothing happens save for TV watching: “Later, George watched Grand Designs while eating HobNobs. Later still, he watched the Shopping Channel for a while … ”

8. The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can’t deal with this, you needn’t apply.

9. Oh, and not forgetting the occasional beating administered by the sadistic guards of the imagination.

10. Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.