Will Self

The past few weeks, both here and in the US, I’ve been trolling around promoting the collection of these pieces entitled, with rare percipience, PsychoGeography. Author events have a fairly rigid format, and it’s one that I’ve learnt not to monkey with over the years. It’s all very well coming on singing and dancing in a heliotrope jumpsuit, but your average attendees simply can’t absorb such a spectacle: they are like unto the Hungarian peasants, who, upon being shown an early cine film of a train, bolted from their seats lest the iron horse trample them to death.

A key component of the author event is the Q&A session. I always make it clear that anyone can ask me anything whatsoever, whether this be my views on literary matters, or simply a prurient enquiry into my personal life, such as you wouldn’t hazard with your closest friend. Needless to say, what often gets thrown at me is: “How did you and Ralph Steadman begin working together?” I then lie, saying that we met in a brothel in Patpong, where Ralph was squeezing ping-pong balls out of his vagina in order to pay for his drinks. This normally shuts them up, although the other evening in Bath a very proper lady, who looked as if she’d stepped from the pages of Northanger Abbey, did contest the notion that Ralph had ever visited Thailand.

In fact we were teamed by Ian Hargreaves, then editor of the New Statesman, during the 1997 General Election. Ralph had become fed up by the noxious vanity of politicians which meant no matter how savagely he caricatured their venal features, they still asked to buy his drawings. In retaliation, he resolved never to draw a politician’s face again, but only their legs. I was drafted in to do some copy to go with the legs. Ralph’s stratagem worked, and to my knowledge no one bought their leg picture. Ha!

All this is by way of introducing Ralph’s caricature of Hilary Benn in conversation with a pig at the recent UN conference on climate change held in Bali. Benn, perhaps one of our most conscientious environment secretaries to date, declined the £330 per night hotel suite laid on for him in favour of staying in a pig sty, and while the other delegates went on surfing trips, he built an eco-friendly geodesic dome out of pig shit and straw. Of course, such behaviour was soon seized upon by the trendy publicity-seekers who flock in the wake of these global beanos. Apparently Leonardo DiCaprio moved out of his suite and into a mouse’s nest, while Al Gore had to content himself with a lobster pot.

Pessimists, who believe that there’s little that can be done to reduce the human impact on global warming, predictably point to events like the Bali summit as confirming their bleak vision. How can it be, they ask, that flying 15,000 delegates, media types and soi-disant “green campaigners” around the world, in the process dumping a further 100,000 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, will really help to improve things? After all, this is equal to the emissions of the entire country of Chad for a single year!

This very point was made by a delegate to the summit, and luckily Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, was on hand to offer a timely solution: the carbon emissions of the UN conference could, he said, be completely offset by eliminating Chad altogether from the map of Africa. This proposal received near-unanimous assent from the Conference, the only dissent coming from the Chad delegation, which was unceremoniously hustled out of the venue and put to work by the Indonesian Government planting trees in West Timor.

The excision of Chad was achieved by the US corporation Halliburton, which deployed a scalpel with a blade 500km long, that sliced along the borders of Niger, Libya, the Sudan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon and Nigeria, leaving a neat wound. Besides the carbon offset, an unexpected – but beneficial – effect of getting rid of Chad has been a shake-down in regional political alignments, with stunned power elites and corrupt rebel armies joining together in the common cause: swapping their Mercedes for Toyota Priuses.

I think from the above you can see where Ralph and I stand on this issue: shoulder-to-shoulder and leg-to-leg, as usual. The benefits of pursuing a close collaboration with a fellow artist over many years is that you begin to anticipate one another’s thinking with almost uncanny precision. Sometimes I write a few words and Ralph consents to graphically embellish them. On other occasions – such as this – Ralph sends me a picture that is like a photograph of my very unconscious.

15.12.07

Lewes, East Sussex, where this column began all those horned moons ago. As I walk from the station under another horned moon I spy, standing outside a cosy-looking pub, the cuddly dolmen of Matthew De Abaitua. Thirteen years ago, Matthew – who is now a talented novelist in his own right – spent a six-month sojourn as my live-in amanuensis and secretary. It was a thankless task: so far as I can remember I was completely spark-a-loco. We were living in a tiny cottage in Suffolk, and I was given to harvesting opium from the poppies that grew wild in the field margins, then driving my Citreon deux-chevaux across the same fields, solely by the light of a horned moon, Matthew placidly crammed into the passenger seat.

Bizarrely, he retains affectionate memories of his secretaryship, saying that I taught him how to prepare lobster, and also impressed upon him the importance of convincing foreign journalists – who had come to interview me in my rural fastness – that we were an elderly lesbian couple, akin to the Ladies of Llangollen. But this lies in the past, nowadays Matthew and his burgeoning family are ensconced in Lewes, where come Guy Fawkes Day, the incomer crystal-danglers and the native hobbits make common cause: promulgating the anti-Popery of the local “firework societies”, which roll burning barrels of pitch down the tortuous medieval streets.

A couple of hours later, Ralph Steadman, who has materialised looking like Great Uncle Bulgaria with an attitude problem, is sitting on a stage in the local arts centre, taking an enthusiastic audience on a strange journey through the labyrinth of his creative unconscious. Juxtaposing his own projected images, with a staccato commentary, in the manner of Chris Marker’s La Jetee, Ralph imagines a conversation between Marcel Duchamp and Luis Bunuel, in which the venerable – and now, quite dead – Surrealists animadvert on the relationship between chance encounters, narrative and destiny.

Far be it from me to extol the virtues of my collaborator, but he’s definitely hit on something here – and quite brilliantly: the relationship between psyche and place can only, it occurs to me, be understood through such abrupt transitions. The memory is not Bayreuth – or even a multiplex – but a converted provincial church hall equipped with a PowerPoint projector, operated by a young man called Simon.

Nineteen hours later, I’m sitting in the front row of a lecture theatre at the Sorbonne in Paris, listening to Didier Gerard, a handsome young professor of contemporary English literature at the University of Perpignan, take a somewhat less enthusiastic – but for all that, I hope, engaged – audience on a strange journey through the labyrinth of his creative unconscious. Or is it mine? To begin with the only PowerPoint projection is this gnomic slogan: “Radical No Saying, Paradoxes and Contradictions of the WILL / SELF “, but Professor Gerard then supplies several disconcerting canvases by the German painter Neo Rauch that he feels evoke the same imaginative hinterland as my fiction.

Here we are, buried in the venerable foie-gras-coloured masonry of the Sorbonne a few score metres in one direction from Shakespeare & Company, publishers of Ulysses in the other, a few hundred from the Ile de la Cite, where the Situationists who coined the term “psychogeography” slept off their drunken derives. On our way in, Francois Gallix, the Sorbonne professor who has invited me to address this conference on contemporary inglit, pointed out the chapel, a stable for revolutionaries’ horses during the Terror, and where an annual mass is held for Cardinal Richelieu.

It was also in this courtyard, during Les Evenements of 1968, that the students camped for weeks, attempting to lie down on the Society of the Spectacle until it gave up the ghost. Francois, who was a young academic at the time, and who joined in the demands for direct, participatory democracy, recalls those days with a certain wry regret: “And now, with these recent disturbances we have over Sarkozy’s new education bill, well, yesterday the University was closed, the road was full of the police, and the students, they were split into two groups – one of which was fighting on the police side!”

Since my last visit to Paris, a mere six months ago, the Mairie has launched a bike-hire scheme. I never really believe these schemes work, but as I leave the Sorbonne in the winter lamplight there are scores of people – Parisians and tourists – toodling up and down the Boulevard St Germain on their eco-Noddy-bikes. At L’Odeon there’s a customised rank for the things right beside the statue of Danton, which, in turn, is right in front of a multiplex called the UGC Danton.

And there you have it, as we contemplate the arrival of 2008, and another year of speculative venturing, what is it that we can offer you save more of the same? To whit: a chance meeting between a dead fish log and a caricature on a picnic table.

05.01.08

At the Seneca Hotel, on Chestnut Street, Chicago, things are not going well. I’m without stoicism: my room is a chilly suite with glass-topped tables and a tomb-like kitchenette, wherein the elements rise up from the stove in sinister curls. When I turn on the electricity, they reek of burnt hair. If I don’t get out of the Seneca and walk, I’m going to do something gratuitously inhumane — which would be doubly bad, given that I’m here to attend the Chicago Humanities Festival.

I’m not getting on with the desk staff either — they’re brusque to the point of being rude. They couldn’t give a shit about my alarm calls or messages, and when I wither at them for helming a great concrete ship like this, with no internet access to be had — they wither right back. Nevertheless, when I ask how far it is to the nearest Wal-Mart, I do manage to spark some interest. “Whydjew wanna know that?” says one, and when I reply that I’m minded to buy some socks, she observes that, “There’s a Walgreens on the next corner.” I concede this — but it’s Wal-Mart I want, and I’m desirous of walking there. “Walking? That’s gonna take you, like, a million years.”

Quite possibly, I concede, then quote the hotel’s namesake: “If virtue precedes us every step will be safe.” Clearly, my interlocutor doesn’t know her Seneca, for she looks bemused. Then she consults MapQuest on her computer and prints me out a sheet: “The nearest is at forty-six hundred up on West North, it’s 5.7 miles away…”

“But that’s driving, right?”

“I guess.”

I estimate an eight-mile walk — at any rate, it takes me two-and-a-half hours at a good clip. It’s a sunny Sunday brunchtime and the downtown streets are thronged with big people in leather and silk pointing at big buildings in glass and steel. Then, as I plod out over Goose Island and under the Kennedy Expressway, everything begins to stretch out — including the homeless men who are sleeping beneath its squat piers.

Chicago is the grid city ne plus ultra: the principal avenues and cross streets are at mile intervals, with eight blocks to the mile. The numbering — both of streets and properties — is savagely ordinal, radiating from a fixed point. A Chicagoan will give you directions simply in hundreds, as above.

I meditate on this as I troll through the fringes of trendy Ukrainian Village, then the dinky clapboard streets of West Town. I’m walking to Wal-Mart to buy some socks, a) because I need them, and b) because in some occult way I believe this will bring me face-to-face with the primal profit drive that powers American society. If Chicago, with its triumphal skyscrapers, were to be upended, it would form a towering block graph on the southwest shore of Lake Michigan, and so fuse reality and representation.

Wal-Mart, the biggest company on earth, with its two million employees, and its annual turnover of $315 billion. When Dubya cut tax in 2004, the family of the founder, Sam Walton, made $9,500 an hour by this break alone. Walton catapulted this global empire of tat into the air, using the tedious gusset of a pair of two-barred tricot panties with an elasticated waist, after observing that if he bought said pants at $2 per dozen, and only marked-up a little, he could still make more profit on increased turnover.

Through Humboldt Park, empty save for cops and geese, then past the HQ of Illinois National Guard — a Babylonian burial chamber, complete with sentinel griffins — and on along North Avenue, for block after block, mile after mile. I am a tiny human pen describing a flat line past moribund storefronts, and empty lots, their fences strung with razor-wire. Is it fanciful to think that Wal-Mart has sucked the commercial life out of Austin and Gatewood, where — wouldn’t you know — the population is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic? Probably not: one economist, after remorseless number-crunching, reached the conclusion that over a 10-year period, the net impact of the business was to help keep just 20,000 poor US families afloat.

And then there it is, big, certainly — but not humongous. More like any old Asda that’s been bingeing on welfare cheques. Inside it’s a barn full of stuff for sale — nothing obviously malevolent. The coffee concession is called Uncle Remus’s, and there’s an offer on key lime pie. I buy my socks. I pay. I leave.

At the bus stop I fall into conversation with a guy who bums a cigarette. He’s on his way to work flipping burgers at a Wendy’s way over on the other side of town. “It’s aggravating work,” he explains between puffs. Aggravating and poorly paid — like Wal-Mart. Nevertheless, despite the fact he’s broke until payday, and he only has one tooth in his mouth, he could teach Seneca a thing or two about stoicism.

01.12.07

“When I see a guy lighting a goddamn cigarette as I come round the corner, I see a guy who ain’t taking the bus into town!” exclaims the bus driver, a competent black woman, who even as I feed my four one-dollar bills into the machine, is ramming the big, whooshing box up the ramp on to Route 101, heading north for San Francisco. “City of Industry” is the slogan picked out in big, white letters on the hillside ahead — presumably it’s some sort of riposte to “HOLLYWOOD”, but I doubt the Los Angelenos can read it at this distance.

It’s pointless to explain to the bus driver that this is a guy who’s down to three cigarettes a day, after a lifetime spent flying around inside a blue-brown cloud. In previous columns, I’ve animadverted on the way the space-time continuum is graduated by smoking, but now I’m down to three the shifts are dizzying: I was last embodied in dank Toronto, then I winked out of existence for a few hours, before being beamed down a white paper tube into smouldering California.

I’m absurdly happy. I may not be undertaking my favourite form of airport transit — walking — but I have eschewed the cab, and that has to be a good thing. Cabs suck: they’re the real culprits when it comes to urban disorientation. You aren’t merely hiring a car and driver — you’re hiring the cabby’s local geographical nous. No matter how hard you try to concentrate on where he’s taking you, you still end up subsiding into foggy supposition: this is somewhere you don’t know, and he’s going the long way round this agglomeration of ignorance.

But take the bus, and the mere act of finding the stop, looking at the route map, and then negotiating your way from the city centre stop to your hotel, will begin to make things legible. Dusk is falling as I turn the corner into Market Street, and I’m still happy to be reading the city, so happy that I swerve into a bookstore and buy a copy of Great Expectations, because I’m certain I have them.

The following morning the weather is set fair, and I resolve to walk to Sausalito. It’ll be a modest enough 12-miler from downtown San Francisco, dog-legging over the Golden Gate Bridge. Of course, I don’t have a topographic map, and although Nob Hill is in my face, I can’t find a way round it. I slave up the famously vertiginous streets, listening to the chains of the funiculars rattling beneath my feet. By the time I reach the North Point I feel like Herbie in The Love Bug. My bonnet is flapping, my oil is leaking.

It’s Sunday and the esplanade is thronged with walkers, joggers, bikers, crackpot preachers, and those ubiquitous denizens of American cities — in many ways their most typical inhabitants — the homeless, who have been tossed by the rampaging bull of commercialism, and compelled to wander the streets pushing shopping carts piled high with their fucked-up chattels. I bet they know where they are, though.

Up on the bridge there are still more walkers. Indeed, it occurs to me that this is more ambulatory activity than I’ve ever seen anywhere in the States before — except Manhattan. Perhaps this is what Americans need to galvanise them: something really big — but manmade — to walk over. Halfway across there are emergency phones advertising: “Crisis Counseling” (sic) “There is Hope. Make the Call. The Consequences of Jumping from this Bridge are Fatal and Tragic”.

The “tragic” is a nice touch, no? It places even the most commonplace suicide on a set of monumental proportions, enacting a Gotterdammerung of awesome scale, leaping from the very strings of this monumental lyre, as Aeolus himself strums them. But then again, presumably that’s why the most commonplace suicides are drawn to the Golden Gate, and the “tragic”, far from dissuading them, is likely to be the final confirmation of the rightness of their actiooooooooon!

Grim thoughts dog me as I double back under the end of the bridge, then trudge through the precincts of a coastguard station and on into Sausalito, where the houses are more shingled that anything has a right to be — unless it actually has shingles. There are these wooden excrescences, then there are the gift shops selling china knick-knacks and T-shirts, and “art” galleries shoving hideous daubs in my face.

I slurp down a dozen indifferent oysters at Spinnaker’s on the quayside. Dusk is falling across the bay. I feel moderately satisfied: at least I know where I am, even if the woman at the next table is having a nervous breakdown, sobbing noisily into her clam chowder. On the ferry back to San Francisco, the day-trippers light up the night sky with their camera flashes as we cruise past Alcatraz, imprisoning the empty penitentiary in their steely little boxes. Forever.

24.11.07

Ralph claims that this picture (right, in the Independent newspaper) faithfully reproduces a life-threatening encounter that he had with a grizzly bear during his most recent sojourn in Canada. According to Ralph, he drove the devilish bear off with his ink pot. It’s all lies, of course. I know because I’ve just been in Canada and I heard the whole story from several eye-witnesses who saw Ralph and the Grizzly together.

So, it’s not that Ralph was entirely deluded on the contrary it was inevitable that he would meet up with a grizzly sooner or later, as with global warming disrupting the environment of the far north, the ranges of the former (Artificer cantankerous) and the latter (Ursus arctos horribilis) increasingly overlap. We’ve all read tales of troublesome grizzlies venturing into North American cities, rifling trashcans for food and attempting swift – but brutal – congress with SUVs, just as we’ve all also read accounts of English satirists entering North American cities and pestering their inhabitants with visceral and disturbing graphic works. Most of us probably considered what might happen when the two species met up – although no one anticipated that they would fall in love.

I don’t know why Ralph is so coy about his inter-specific love affair with Griselda (for such, I have ascertained, is the name of “his” bear), because the previous year, during his time at the Harbourfront Festival in Toronto, the two of them were inseparable. Jim, the driver for the Festival (he says “Hello”, Ralph, by the way), picked them up together at the airport and drove them into town.

For the next three days, except when Ralph was required onstage at the Festival, he and Griselda were shut up together in Room 2146. Neither bear nor artist were seen to mingle with the other authors who gathered in the hospitality suite on the penthouse floor – leading them to suspect that Ralph was being huffy and stand-offish.

All except Kazuo Ishiguro who saw Ralph and Griselda swimming together in the hotel pool. “To be honest,” he told me recently, “I was a little bit fried. I’d pulled an all-nighter with Margaret Atwood. We got pissed and she used this computerised ‘long pen’ device that she’s invented to sign books at remote locations, to, ah, y’know, pinch people’s bottoms in European bookshops and otherwise generally molest them. It was childish behaviour, and I’m not proud of myself. Anyway, I thought I’d sober up with a sauna at around 6am, and went down to the spa on the fifth floor. There were these two enormous bear-like figures frolicking together in the pool …

“They seemed very affectionate. Steadman was sort of lifting the bear out of the water and tossing it about – or, as they say in Canada, ‘aboot’ – and from time to time he’d twang the strap of its bikini top. I was amazed, because I’d been for a swim in the pool myself, and the chlorine was so strong I’d spent the next four hours half-blinded, yet neither Steadman nor the bear seemed in the least discomfitted.”

“Discomfitted”, eh? I think the use of that very term alone confirms this indisputably as the authentic testimony of the Booker-prize winning author. But if any further verification were needed, we have the copies of Ralph’s room-service bills at the Westin Harbour. In three days, Room 2146 ordered up 27 club sandwiches, 18 cheeseburgers, 27 porterhouse steaks, 17 full breakfasts – and even requested the concierge that he simply “bring the goddamn wheelie-bin up from the kitchen”.

It’s fair to say that Canada is no longer the society it once was. Gone are the days when the entire culture was crimped by a dour – if polite – Presbyterianism, and sexual activity of any kind whatsoever was frowned upon. Nowadays, the Conservative Premier, Stephen Harper, is often seen at state banquets completely naked save for a strategically placed maple leaf and with a fetching beaver on his arm. Canadians explain their re-evaluation of all values with reference to changing climate – it never freezes anymore – and the high rate of immigration: Calgary is now the biggest Brazilian city in the world. In the US, those mad Manicheans would’ve put a stop to Ralph’s goings on, but such was the atmosphere of tolerance in Toronto, that he returned in September of this year, hoping to rekindle his passion. Only to discover that Griselda had run away with a Major League Hockey player, whose build was more to her taste. Hence Ralph’s defamatory drawing, and wish-fulfilment fantasy – both the work of a demented and rejected suitor.

10.11.07

Antony is going to Flevoland, where he’s erecting an enormous anthropoid statue, derived, as usual, from a cast of his own body. This one is going to be 25-metres high and welded together from the same steel girders used to build electricity pylons. We’re walking along the South Downs Way as he describes this to me: it’s a flat, grey day, and the grey-green humpbacked hills are like so many awesome cetaceans, migrating along the Sussex Weald.

There are pylons marching over the Downs, and as Antony discourses knowledgeably upon them, waving his long arms about, it’s difficult not to see them as wreathed in high-tension cable while the pylons stride along, slamming down one concrete boot after another, and occasionally snapping: “Very good!”

If Antony sees a polder, it only makes him bolder, and Flevoland has to be the biggest polder of them all – thousands of square kilometres of reclaimed Zuider Zee. To begin with, the pancake of drying silt, wrested from the sea, was settled by Dutch fundamentalists, the kind who believe buttons to be the work of Satan. Lowlands, low church – you get the photo. But Flevoland proved too much of a pays bas even for them, and they retreated.

By the late 1980s the ersatz towns of Flevoland were experiencing real social problems, as Surinamese immigrants were dumped in them, and in the absence of any light on the horizon – only dykes – turned to drug-dealing and violence. But now Flevoland is on the up: doughty Dutch burghers have encouraged the Surinamese to build a scale reconstruction of a Batavian fort – with a scale model of a Dutch East India ship moored alongside. It’s a nice – and very cloggy – conceit, this: a creation of land, and on it a recreation of colonialism there’s no terra more nullis than the bottom of the sea. Meanwhile wind farms have blossomed – hence Antony’s Homo pylonis.

I passionately desire to go to Flevoland – all the more so when John, the architect, reveals that he’s also off there on an unheard of site visit. John – as has been remarked in PsychoGeographies passim – usually takes such a lackadaisical approach to his metier, that’s he sometimes turns a corner to be confronted, unexpectedly, by a 10-storey building that he himself has designed, with no comprehension of how it got there. Flevoland is ideal for his conception of the built environment: a slate blanker than a sheet of paper or a VDU screen.

Once he’s there we exchange texts: “It’s appalling, every junk-food outlet and crappy postmodern building you’ve ever conceived of all in one place.”

“But can you walk across it?” I demand.

“Yes,” comes the reply. “But you’d go insane!”

Perhaps I already am insane, because while this is going on I’m far nearer to the Highlands than the Netherlands, driving north on the A73 from Airdrie, together with a squad of two small boys in camouflage kit, heading for yet another frenzied assault on Stirling Castle. But first, we stop off in Cumbernauld. This, the first of the Scottish new towns, was built in the 1950s to accommodate overspill from Glasgow’s bombed tenements.

Poor, poor Cumbernauld: poured and hammered into being in the white heat of Britain’s brief affair with Modernism – ever since, rejected and derided as the ugliest town in the land. Channel 4 viewers have even voted to have it blown up – without specifying evacuation first. Yet why such savagery? We can’t all live in Poundbury, or otherwise crawl up the Prince of Wales’s arse. Admittedly, it is a brilliant October day, but Cumbernauld doesn’t seem such a dreadful place to me in fact, it doesn’t even look like a town at all: but the biggest motorway service centre ever conceived of, straddling the A8011 like a steel and concrete cabre tossed by the McGods.

Cumbernauld has the distinction of having been Britain’s first shopping mall – and its first multi-level covered town. It may be derided now, because its penthouse apartments never found tenants and have cracked and spalled with time, but the mall remains, almost a kilometre of retail outlets! I take the boys to Greggs to liberate some doughnuts, and then we give the flightless smokers outside the Kestrel a swerve and head on to the Royal Burgh, where – to be blunt – we find the same thing.

With its princely apartments, vast kitchens, arching chapel and soaring great hall its garden, its battlements, and its Argyll and Sutherlanders’ regimental museum – not forgetting its plentiful retail opportunities (if, that is, you get off on shortbread and pipe bands), Stirling Castle clearly beats Cumbernauld as the first multi-level covered town in this neck of the woods.

En fin, I may not have made it to Flevoland, but I have proved – to my own satisfaction at least – that wherever you go in this world the Flevoland dialectic still obtains: a go-round of bricks and mortar as relentless as the waves in the North Sea. Very good!

03.11.07