The Daily Telegraph review of The Butt:
“Self writes here with an adroit impersonation of coarse exuberance that makes The Butt as readable as a blokeish airport novel (though with a fuddlingly large vocabulary). But just beneath the brash surface shimmer the unmistakable apparitions of Self’s masters: Swift, Voltaire and Lewis Carroll are all partly responsible for the ingenious, mephitic invention that is The Butt.”
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During the heady days of the boom, I used to opine regularly that the National Lottery was a tax on stupidity, the odds of winning the jackpot being so infinitesimal. But now the lean years are upon us, and the Government’s pre-Budget report has brought home to me what I’ve always really known: all our taxes are a tax on stupidity.
Read the rest of Will’s Standard column here.
Those good people at Resonance FM have provided us with a link to download Will’s interview, but we’re not sure how long it will be there for, so best visit sooner rather than later.
To read Will’s latest Standard column, go here.
Will is going to be on Resonance FM on Thursday November 20 at 4.30pm. He is a guest on Interesting Conversations. You can listen via 104.4FM or go to www.resonancefm.com. An MP3 version will be available to download later. Will is to discuss The Butt, Liver and “his intumescent back catalogue”.
To read Will’s interview with David Lynch, you’ll have to buy a copy of the December issue of GQ magazine. But it’s worth it, not least for the fact that Will claims to have cracked the meaning behind Lynch’s films …
Here are Will’s Penguin podcasts around the time of the Book of Dave in 2006.
Over the past decade, as British culture has become steeped in pop psychology, one expression has come to be bandied about with increasing abandon: “She’s in denial.” Much as I deplore such psychobabble, sometimes “in denial” is the mot juste. Since the British economy began to hit the buffers, while interest rates have been slashed and consumer demand plummeted, so people’s denial has increased. Of course, ours being an unequal society, this denial has not been spread about evenly; on the contrary, the highest concentration is among the richest and most powerful.
To read the rest of Will’s Standard column, click here.
Will is going to be talking about psychogeography and WG Sebald tomorrow at 6.30pm at The Gallery, Foyles bookshop, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, London WC2. Call 020-7713 0023 for tickets.
“I’d play Subbuteo with my mate Julian. I never owned a set myself. Our games were hideously competitive. That’s why I withdrew from all competition. I just don’t have the ability to cope with losing. As I recall, Subbuteo was surprisingly realistic. You could pass the ball accurately and pull off quite fancy tricks with it. You could certainly suspend disbelief in the game, though I remember finding the players’ large, hemispherical bases upsetting. Being an imaginative soul, I’d project myself into the position of the players. I almost felt as if I was dragging round a large lump of plastic that had been glued to my feet.”
Teenage Flicks: Memories of the Sub-beautiful Game, Dexter Haven Publishing, £6.99.
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