Will Self is going to be at the Monday Club, The Assembly on Elder Street in east London tonight discussing the question “What does living in London do to your brain?” with Matthew De Abaitua and the Guardian’s Alok Jha from 7pm. For further details and to book, go here.
Upcoming events
October 12: Sheffield, Off the Shelf festival
October 13: Birmingham.
October 14: Cheltenham.
October 19: Stand-up at Express Excess with Matthew De Abaitua at the Enterprise pub, Haverstock Hill, London. Simon Munnery will be on first.
October 29: Speaking at the Campaign Against the Arms Trade conference at the Conway Hall, London at 12.15pm.
November 2: A Granta event at Foyles, London.
November 5: With Matthew de Abaitua in Notting Hill. Details here.
November 21: Shakespeare & Co, Paris.
November 23: The Thunderbolt, Bristol.
November 29: Tate Britain event about the films of John Martin.
December 1: A JG Ballard-themed night with John Gray at the Festival of Ideas, Bristol.
December 12: Idler Academy event with Noel Smith.
Symphony and the novel
‘The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy – rather like a long-term marriage. At the securely comfortable end of the emotional spectrum we have those zeniths of song, the German lieder tradition, and high opera. In the best examples of both forms words and music appear utterly and indissolubly comingled. However, at the other end of this spectrum we have those kinds of music that attempt to be literary – so-called programme music – and those forms of literature that attempt, either through descriptive representation or emulation, to aspire to the condition of music. It is not my wish to denigrate works of these type, nevertheless there does seem to me to be an inevitable compromise – deterioration even – when an art form, rather than proceeding entirely sui generis, finds its ground in another form’s practice.
‘I myself am a latecomer to the serious appreciation of serious music – apart from jazz, which in the hands of practitioners such as John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk rises to the inventive musicianship and self-enclosed expressiveness of the greatest that small-ensemble classical music has to offer. Still, there comes a point in everyone’s life when it’s time to largely put away such childish things as electric guitars and harmonicas, and it may be precisely because I was in my 40s when I began to really hear symphonic music that I have approached the form altogether untrammelled by received ideas about it – a fancy way of admitting complete ignorance. There’s this, and there was also an intuition I had that my own practice as a novelist – when, that is, my mojo was properly working – had far more in common with how composers conceive of the symphonic, than it did with the lit-crit – let alone the “creative writing” – view of how it is writers actually write.’
Read the rest of Will Self’s piece for the Guardian on the symphony and the novel here, ahead of his talk at Kings Place in London this Saturday. Details here.
Cycling festival
The Idler Academy: Being There
Will Self returns to the Idler Academy for a symposium on walking to mark the publication in paperback of his book Walking to Hollywood (Bloomsbury). Self’s talk, Being There, will discuss the idea of using walking as a way of escaping “the man-machine matrix: that nexus of mass communication and transit that ensures we never really ever are where we are, but always being transported somewhere else.”
The Idler Academy, 81 Westbourne Park Road, London W2 5QH, Thursday 15 September, 6.30pm for 7pm, £20. Includes “free wine and dainty morsels”. Visit the Idler website for more details.
Edinburgh man
Will Self is once again appearing at the Edinburgh festival, at the following times:
First is a talk on the enduring legacy of WG Sebald on Sunday 28 August from 3.30pm to 4.30pm at the ScottishPower Studio Theatre. Further details and tickets here.
Later that day he will be giving a talk entitled “Psychogeography with a stress on the psycho”, a Folio Society event, from 8pm to 9pm. For more details and tickets, go here.
Unfortunately, the world premiere of Alasdair Gray’s Fleck, on Monday 29 August, which Self will be partly narrating, is now sold out.
The symphony and the novel
Will Self is going to be giving a lecture entitled “What’s my leitmotif-ation? Examining the formal properties of the symphony and the novel” on Saturday 8 October at 5pm at Kings Place in London.
“Many writers are intrigued by the connections between musical and literary forms,” writes Self, “but it’s the more egregious attempts at synthesising the two – think of Anthony Burgess’s Napoleon Symphony – that tend to grab attention, usually because they so spectacularly fail both as literature and as ‘linguistic music’. I will be arguing that in fact key innovations in literature have resulted from the absorption and recasting of musical form, and that just as the programme music of the late 19th century was an enormous catalyst to the atonal revolutions of the 20th, so these revolutions were in turn hugely implicated in literary modernism.”
Tickets range from £9.50 to £14.50. For details, visit the Kings Place website.
Cycling festival
Will Self is going to be one of the speakers at the Intelligence Squared Cycling festival on September 8, 6pm to 8pm, at the Royal Geographical Society, to “celebrate the endeavour and endurance, the risk and reward of this extraordinary partnership between man and machine”. Details here.
American Independence Day event with Martin Amis
On Monday July 4, Will Self and Erica Wagner will discuss the influence of America on the literature and culture of the 20th and 21st centuries with Martin Amis at 6.30pm at the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, Martin Harris Centre at Manchester University. To book tickets (£7/£5) go here.
ENO internet debate
Watch Will Self tomorrow night at 7.30pm in a live debate with Nico Muhly, Norman Lebrecht and Claire Fox at the London Coliseum, where they will attempt to answer the question: Are we making monsters? Tickets are free – call 0871 472 0800. Watch the film here.
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