Mariella Frostrup talks to Will Self about Liver on Sky Arts, which you can watch here.
What is human?
Interesting interview between Will Self and the geneticist and anthropologist Spencer Wells for Seed magazine, filmed in October 2007 at the National Arts Club in New York, in which they address the question, what is human? You can watch it here.
There is also a longer transcript of that interview, which you can read here.
Porn in the home – it’s the nation’s dirty secret
“One thing that seems to have been lost in the media blizzard surrounding the Home Secretary’s dodgy expenses claims is the nature of the ‘entertainment’ that was charged by Richard Timney – Jacqui Smith’s husband – to the taxpayers’ account. A whole slew of commentators – including feminists one might have expected to be in the van – have backed off from outright accusations of sexual immorality. There seems to be a large dose of ‘what you do in the privacy of your own home’ in circulation.
“I suspect that for women – whatever their attitude towards Smith as a politician – something feels disloyal about harping on about her husband’s use of pornography. Few women like the idea of their partner paying to view women performing sexual acts, whether in the privacy of their own homes or at a so-called lap-dancing club. But more than that, the sheer ubiquity of pornography in contemporary Britain makes it extremely unlikely that the male partners of any potential critics haven’t also done a Timney. To get at Smith and her husband involves picking away at their own private sores.”
Read the rest of Will Self’s Evening Standard column here.
The simmering discontent with the entire political class
“Surely the thing that really rankles about Richard Timney’s habits is not that he watches pay-per-view porn, but that he’s such a crap bookkeeper? With keyboard-clackers losing their jobs like Tommies going over the desktop no one can afford to have makeweights on the payroll like Timney, but Jacqui Smith has been dobbing him somewhere between 20 and 40 grand a year to play the part of her ‘constituency aide’.
“I don’t happen to think pornography is a victimless crime: on the end of that remote control button is not some free-spirited – yet entirely well-adjusted – nymphomaniac, but a collection of miserable and tranquilised emotional zombies.”
To read the rest of Will Self’s First Post column, go here.
Free Thinking redux
There’ll be another chance to listen to Will Self’s Free Thinking 2008 lecture on the subject of how the mind is portrayed in fiction, tonight on Night Waves, Radio 3, 9.15pm.
“Self argues that the way the mind is portrayed in novels is preposterous. Why are we so resistant to attempts to represent the mind as we really experience it, in all its terror, exhilaration and confusion? Are many of our finest novels designed to reassure us that we are ‘normal’?”
Get street wise – Big Brother is Googling you
“If Google’s aim is to be master of all it surveys, then the launch of Google Street View in the UK brings it that much closer to surveying, well, everything.
“Privacy campaigners have made a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner about the service, saying that blurring of number plates and faces is insufficient to protect individual anonymity.
“Personally, I can’t imagine for a nanosecond what use anyone could conceivably make of Street View, unless it was something nefarious or criminal. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, assures us that the service’s success proves that people ‘love to see what is going on in their local community’. Can he really believe that it’s better to do this online, rather than simply walk out the front door? Because that’s what I, in my hokey old way, call a street view.”
Read the rest of Will Self’s Evening Standard column here.
Tony McNulty’s expenses scam is nothing new
“I’d quite like Tony McNulty to resign from the Government and piss off back to Harrow. I treasure a vision of the pock-faced former Brownite hatchet man mooning about the parental home like an overgrown adolescent.
“No doubt from time to time one of his old parents would say to him: ‘D’you know what you’re going to do with your life now, Tony?’ And the former minister would just shrug his shoulders and mutter, ‘Dunno’.”
To read the rest of Will Self’s First Post column, go here.
Ape rights
A short audio clip of Will Self talking with Professor David Penny about the rights, or otherwise, of great apes on the BBC.
To gain our respect police must get out on the beat
“Sir Paul Stephenson has chosen a good issue with which to make his mark on London’s policing, saying that he wants his officers patrolling on foot and alone.
“He’s called for a renewal of the ‘uniformed governance’ of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, when the presence of individual officers walking the beat was the sine qua non of an ordered society.
“Personally, I’m all for Sir Paul’s proposal — but only so long as London doesn’t find itself going back to the future. I agree that the individual police officer, doing the rounds, chatting with the people on his patch, is the key to good policing.”
To read the rest of Will Self’s Evening Standard column, go here.
Our sozzled land
“I can never see the smug, lipless face and carefully cultivated blond tresses of the Work and Pensions Secretary, James Purnell — let alone read his name in print — without wanting to bodily remove him from the greasy pole he’s so intent on shinning up. There seems little the man will say that isn’t for the express reason of furthering his career.
“Take alcohol, for example. It’s not that Purnell displays any more liking for intoxication — legal or otherwise — than the rest of his Westminster colleagues, it’s simply that Purnell and booze go hand-in-hand, cavorting across the grey fields of contemporary public-health policy.
“It was Purnell who introduced 24-hour drinking to our sozzled land, and by golly, he’s not about to let go of the idea that it’s a — ‘hic’ — good thing. This alone explains why he has been first among the equally tipsy Labour ministers who’ve lurched to criticise Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, for daring to suggest that there should be minimum unit pricing for alcohol in Britain.”
Read the rest of Will Self’s First Post column here.
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