Review of The Butt (now out in paperback, Bloomsbury, £5.99) in the Telegraph: “You can always trust Will Self to take a mildly amusing conceit, blow it up to seemingly absurd proportions and produce something of lasting comic value. The Butt is pure Self, pushing satire to its limits and beyond. A man holidaying in an unnamed country flips the butt of his cigarette off the balcony of his apartment on to the head of another man, which is treated as assault, which carries draconian penalties, which?…?But why give away such a splendidly barmy plot? Just read it.”
Nick Griffin and his pea-brained saddos
“The British National Party are always whining about how the ‘media pigs’ distort their honest yeoman words into sinister neo-fascist claptrap, and demanding they be given serious consideration. The other night, listening to the midnight news on Radio 4, it seemed to me that they’d got what they asked for.
“It was a dispassionate report about a meeting of BNP candidates for the European parliamentary elections. Nick Griffin, the party fuhrer, had said that he didn’t mind picking up protest votes because of the expenses scandal – the British public had every right to protest.
“Now, it won’t be long before Labour MPs and ministers crawl out of the non-ideological woodwork where they spend most of their time hiding, and begin their own plainting. They’ll be telling the electorate that we must vote Labour, however disillusioned we may be with the Government’s record, if only to keep the BNP out.”
Read the rest of Will Self’s Firs Post column here.
Roundhouse appearance
Will Self is going to be reading from The Butt, out now in paperback,
at the Roundhouse in Camden on Tuesday May 12 at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £6.
Here is the Observer’s review of the show, and a couple of bloggers’ too, here and here.
In defence of London
“An American travel website is warning travellers off our fair city on the grounds that it’s ‘dirty’ and the cuisine isn’t all it might be. While it isn’t usually my style to enter this sort of fray – I am, after all, a dual citizen – I feel I must speak out.
“I know I’m not alone in thinking that the boom years led London to have a somewhat bloated self-image: we began to think in terms of the City traders’ bunce; if we were property-owners, we fell prey to the delusion that money in bricks and mortar was also cash in the bank; we ignored the widening gulf between rich and poor.
“But while all of this may be true, we never lost our sense of integrity or civic pride. London was the first of the world cities – and it remains one of the greatest. I’ve travelled extensively in the States and while there are some cities that indisputably have a character of their own, for every San Francisco or New York there is a Dallas: a plantation of homogenous skyscrapers and shopping malls that, for sheer blandness, makes Basingstoke look like Baghdad.”
Read the rest of Self’s Evening Standard column here.
Daphne du Maurier festival
Will Self will be appearing at the Daphne du Maurier festival, Fowey, Cornwall next Friday, May 15. Visit their website for details.
The pygmies fighting for Gordon’s job
“If there’s any drawback to political schadenfreude I’ve yet to discover what it is, and while pessimism may not make you popular it sure as hell means you’re likely to be right more often than those who, following Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, believe that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
“So, we come to Gordon Brown, who, for years in advance of his ascent to the highest office in the land, I was stigmatising as the Anthony Eden de nos jours.
“It didn’t need much historical acumen to grasp the parallel, for, like Eden, Brown had spent the best years of his career waiting for a golden apple to fall into his generous lap, while lacking either the courage to fight for it, the guile to swipe it, or certainly the principle needed to say, ‘Sod this for a game of soldiers’, and walk away, hopefully together with a sizeable chunk of his party.”
To read the rest of Will Self’s First Post column, go here.
The Spirit of Jura
Piece in the Times in which Will Self is interviewed about The Spirit of Jura, a new anthology celebrating the island where Orwell wrote 1984 and Animal Farm to which Self has contributed – he spent a month at the Distillery Lodge there in 2007 writing this specially commissioned story.
‘I’m always that wordy bastard and Martin’s the great high stylist’
Interview with Will Self in the Eastern Daily Press last month.
UEA talk
Giving working class kids a large vocabulary won’t save them from poverty
“The name ‘Sir Jim Rose’ sounds like a solecism to me – surely if you accept a knighthood your moniker should reflect your nobility? Either style yourself Sir James Rose or stick to Jim. Still, not only does his very name embody a linguistic error, but Rose – a former head of Ofsted – has the temerity to be launching a campaign aimed at ‘helping’ those who don’t speak like what they oughta.
“It’s all part of his overhaul of the national curriculum for 7-11 year olds. Rose’s proposals place a strong emphasis on teaching children to ‘recognise when to use formal language, including standard spoken English’. A Government-backed report has identified what it terms ‘word poverty’, and suggests that up to 50 per cent of primary pupils in some areas have speech and language difficulties.
“The solution is for speaking and listening to be considered as subjects in their own right; Rose’s recommendations will build on the £40m Every Child a Talker programme which was launched last year.”
Read the rest of this article here.
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