Will Self on Reading in the 21st Century

An interview with BBC Newsnight

[Source]

Find Will Self on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Roth and the fate of the Great American Novel
• Paul Auster: Why Roth is wrong about the novel
• Will Self on Literature and Visual Arts
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers

Five Minutes With... Will Self

A short BBC Interview

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self's Tips for Reading Aloud
• Will Self: Using a Typewriter
• Will Self reads from Umbrella
• Will Self: Debating The Digital Essay
• Will Self on Umbrella

Invocations of Modernism: Q&A with Will Self

UCL, Bedford Way · 5 June 2013

Will Self

From Birkbeck, University of London (thanks to Cathryn Setz for the link):

The novelist Will Self has become one of Britain's most prominent voices in literary and cultural debate. His most recent novel Umbrella (2012) opened a discussion about the viability of literary modernism as an imaginative resource for contemporary writers. In this session at Birkbeck, University of London, Dr Dennis Duncan will be in conversation with Will Self about his writing, the challenges of the contemporary and the legacies of modernism.

When: 5 June, 6pm
Where: UCL, Bedford Way, Rm LG04
Booking: No booking required - first come, first seated.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self's Tips for Reading Aloud
• Will Self: Using a Typewriter
• Will Self reads from Umbrella
• Will Self: Debating The Digital Essay
• Will Self on Umbrella
• Will Self on Himself

Will Self's Tips for Reading Aloud

Excerpt from an article in The Telegraph

Will Self. Photo: Rex.

From The Telegraph:

What has changed in the past 30 years is that it has become impossible for the rump of the literary profession – those middling sorts (of sales, that is, not necessarily of brow) – to earn a reasonable living simply by writing books. The abolition of the net book agreement in the 1980s heralded two simultaneous developments: a vertiginous integration of book distribution and retailing, and a simultaneous collapse in the formerly steep-sided pyramid of critical authority. To put it bluntly: the punters would no longer buy what they were told to buy by literary types, and in any case, there were no longer cosy little bookshops in which they could order these recommendations. As for writers, whose earnings had been artificially maintained by a price cartel, there were only a few options available: the time-honoured promenade of Grub Street, some altogether non-literary job, or an ignominious – and often soul-destroying – retreat into silence.

The advent of the web, and a generation for whom free creative content is – quite literally – a given, has only intensified these pressures; but actually for the duration of my career, if you wanted to make a success of being a literary novelist (a synonym for not especially high-selling) you’ve had to be willing to work very hard indeed at publicising and presenting your own work to the public. And a key part of that publicising and presenting has been the reading of your works aloud. In the early 1990s when I began publishing, the standard literary tour consisted of doing a circuit of chain bookshops – Waterstones and latterly Borders – and reading to whoever bothered to pitch up. The author’s presence in provincial towns was designed to stimulate local media attention, and so units were shifted. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self and Others on W. G. Sebald
• Will Self: Using a Typewriter
• Will Self reads from Umbrella
• Will Self: Debating The Digital Essay
• Will Self on Umbrella
• Will Self on Himself

Will Self and Others on W. G. Sebald

Four writers share their 'reveries of a solitary walker'

W. G. Sebald. Photograph: Ulf Anderson

From The Guardian:

WG Sebald, who died in a car crash in 2001, was an inspired essayist, quite as much as he was a novelist; indeed, I often think of his most achieved fictions – Austerlitz, and The Emigrants – as writing that tests the limits of both forms, blending them together at their margins with a kind of vaporous diffusion of their creator’s lucidity, so entirely are the invented and the real fused together. This essay on the last years of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s life exhibits all of Sebald’s strengths as a writer – and all of his strange, gnomic, secretive foibles. Ostensibly a straightforward account of Rousseau’s exiled wanderings, it begins with his first glimpse, in 1965, of the Ile Saint Pierre in Switzerland, where Rousseau spent the first period of his stateless exile, and where he claimed – in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker – that he was happier than he had been anywhere else. [Read More]

To read James Woods, Iain Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane on Sebald, visit Guardian Review here.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: W. G. Sebald
• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self on Sebald and the Holocaust
• Why You Should Be Reading W. G. Sebald

Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967-2008

An interview with Simon Sellars

Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967-2008

From The Quietus: 'Extreme Metaphors having been in the public sphere for just over a week, the book's editor and Ballard aficionado Simon Sellars discusses the relevance of the collection and its subject to contemporary culture with Quietus literary editor Karl Smith' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: J. G. Ballard
• Browsing the J. G. Ballard Archives
• J. G. Ballard's Top Ten Writers
• J. G. Ballard: How I Write
• Will Self, 'My hero J. G. Ballard'

Will Self: Using a Typewriter

On the writer's love of his Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter

Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter

Will Self talks to ShortList Magazine: 'People are deceived into believing that writing on a computer is faster, but it’s not. Using a typewriter is more disciplined; you don’t have the distraction of thinking, ‘I’ll go online and look up what oven gloves made of fur look like.’ Also, the technology is more durable. But what really drove me to the typewriter was the aesthetics. I don’t like what computers look like now. I’m obviously just old and crusty.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self reads from Umbrella
• Will Self: Debating The Digital Essay
• Will Self on Umbrella
• Will Self on Himself

Will Self on Himself

'He’s quite antagonistic, he’s completely up himself and he uses all these long words'

Will Self

Jimi Famurewa (ShortList) talks to Will Self (link via 3:AM Magazine):

“He’s quite antagonistic, he’s completely up himself and he uses all these long words,” says Will Self when tentatively asked what people think of him. As descriptions of his own public persona go, it’s one most would struggle to argue with. “That’s fine, it doesn’t bother me,” he says with a smile. “They can think what they want.”

That conspiratorial smirk nods to the fact that – from the moment he arrives at the appointed Soho café, wheeling a folding bicycle and trying to procure a chair outside – Will Self isn’t what you expect. The intellectually imposing writer and professional curmudgeon we’ve heard about mostly fails to materialise during ShortList’s hour-long interview. He’s funny, friendly and, whisper it, quite nice.

“People can’t assimilate that,” explains the 50-year-old, cramming a roll-up into a plastic cigarette holder. “The idea of light comedy and heavy literature bamboozles [them] because they want you to be one thing or another. It annoys people. But that’s all right.” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self reads from Umbrella
• Will Self: Debating The Digital Essay
• Will Self on Umbrella
• Clive James interviews Will Self
• Will Self Interview: In Confidence

Will Self: Debating The Digital Essay

A free 58-minute video exploring the issues surrounding interactive digital texts

Will Self at the London Review Bookshop, 6 September 2012

From The Space (link via will-self-com): 'Will Self discusses a range of issues provoked by this digital essay with Nicholas Spice and Helen Jeffrey from the London Review of Books, and Dan Franklin, Digital Publisher at Random House. Is this unique digital essay a proto-form for a new type deeper engagement with long form content on the web? What can Modernism tell us about the digital storm sweeping through our world? How might collaborative digital authorship move forward? What next?' [Watch]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self, Kafka's Wound: A Digital Literary Essay
• Will Self: Kafka's Wound
• Will Self: Kafka and Dissonant Bohemia
• Do Books have a Future? An Interview with Robert Darnton

Will Self reads from Umbrella

A video introduction and extract from the Booker nominated novel

Will Self introduces his new novel, Umbrella.

Will Self reads from Umbrella (link via 3:AM Magazine) [Source]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self on Digital Distractions
• Ten Rules for Writing Fiction
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Will Self interviewed in The Paris Review

Will Self: Kafka and Dissonant Bohemia

Kings Place, London · 7 October 2012 · 2:00pm

Notes and Letters

From Kings Place:

Kafka was said by his friend Max Brod to have such a tin ear that he couldn’t distinguish between Tanhauser and the Merry Widow - yet Brod also asserted that this was because his readings of his own prose were so perfectly modulated that they employed all of his great musicality. Which was the truth?

And can it be that Kafka was immune to the aural impact of the distinctively Czechoslovakian brand of musical Modernism, one that, to the contemporary ear, seems to so perfectly complement his prose?

Will Self explores these questions and more. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self, Kafka's Wound: A Digital Literary Essay
• Franz Kafka, The Hunger Artist: Illustrated
• Franz Kafka Centenary: 100 Years of The Judgement

Teju Cole talks to 3:AM Magazine

An interview by Max Liu

Teju Cole

Max Liu interviews the author of Open City, Teju Cole, for 3:AM Magazine:

Increasingly, novels are praised for how much of the culture they manage to include. Open City is entirely contemporary and worldly and it includes a great deal. What are the possibilities and pitfalls of literary inclusiveness?

In a sense, Open City is a kind of Wunderkammer, one of those little rooms assembled with bric-a-brac by Renaissance scholars. I don’t mean it as a term of praise: these cabinets of curiousities contained specific sorts of objects – maps, skulls (as memento mori), works of art, stuffed animals, natural history samples, and books – and Open City actually contains many of the same sort of objects. So, I don’t think it’s as simple as literary inclusiveness. That phrase, in fact, brings to mind David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Dave Eggers. They are keen to include and, in fact, itemize the present in all its gaudy multiplicity. My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of exclusions and sleights of hand. There’s an admittedly antiquarian flavor to it, even though there’s enough of the present included to lull the reader. So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn’t use a smartphone, and he doesn’t discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail. [Read More]

Will Self on Digital Distractions

From a recent article exploring the relationship between writing and the internet

Will Self writing in Liverpool's (now demolished) Linosa Close tower block during the Further Up In The Air project

Will Self, quoted by Carl Wilkinson in The Telegraph (via Susan Tomaselli):

'“I think I felt oppressed by the distractions of digital media and longed for a certain level of clarity and simplicity that the typewriter afforded,” he says. “The internet is of no relevance at all to the business of writing fiction directly, which is about expressing certain kinds of verities that are only found through observation and introspection. It’s an incredibly powerful tool and you’d be stupid not to use it, but it’s a distraction in the actual business of writing.”

[...]

As a former addict, Will Self is acutely aware of the internet’s potential power to lure users into cul-de-sacs of distraction. “It fulfils the criteria of addiction, which is obsessive mental content connected to compulsive action,” he says. “The machine itself seems like a paradigm of the addictive state. I can see it as something that needs to be put down the way an alcoholic puts down drink.”' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Ten Rules for Writing Fiction
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Will Self interviewed in The Paris Review

Will Self on Nick Papadimitriou

British writer and critic on Papadimitriou and his work

Photograph: Nick Papadimitriou. Source.

Writing in Granta, Will Self describes his friendship with Nick Papadimitriou, and his opinion of his work (the article includes an extract from Papadimitriou's recent novel, Scarp): 'I first met Nicholas Papadimitriou in the mid-1980s. We were both lost young men at that time - now we’re lost middle aged men. Nick lived in Child's Hill, North London, where he still does to this day - I was based in Barnsbury, near Islington, and latterly Shepherd’s Bush. We crossed and recrossed London frequently on purposeless walks that we would’ve called derives in the manner of the French Situationists - if we’d ever heard of such things. I also had a Hillman Hunter car, complete with veneered dashboard, and in this we drove to the city’s outer limits - we were both obsessed by these liminal zones, where the city declined into a series of disjointed entrepots of urbanity. We dubbed them ‘interzones’ after the William Burroughs fiction of the same name. I remember visits to the marshes where Belmarsh Prison now lowers, to Thamesmead and to the Ultima Thule of the Isle of Grain – the haunt of Magwitch and Marlow’s shades, of Dickens and Conrad, those great proto-psychogeographers. Nick was a man of passions, of poetry and of certainties: the ground beneath his feet. Already he disdained the Moloch of the man-machine matrix and went his own way, weaving along, a figure emerging from the interwar period, clothed in Symbolist verse, wreathed in tobacco smoke.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• BBC Newsnight meets Nick Papadimitriou
• Nick Papadimitriou, Scarp
• Documentary: London Perambulator (2009)
• Will Self: Walking out of London
• Richard Long: Walking Artist

BBC Newsnight meets Nick Papadimitriou

Television interview first broadcast in February 2011

Nick Papadimitriou. Image: BBC Newsnight

From BBC Newsnight: 'The writer Nick Papadimitriou has spent decades taking walks to explore the urban environment, and documenting these journeys and the items he finds on them in minute detail. / The BBC's Arts editor Will Gompertz has been to meet him.' [Watch the interview]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Nick Papadimitriou, Scarp
• Documentary: London Perambulator (2009)
• Will Self: Walking out of London
• Richard Long: Walking Artist
• Robert Walser, The Walk

Nick Papadimitriou, Scarp

The Guardian reviews debut work of a London walker

Nick Papadimitriou

Tim Dee (The Guardian) reviews 'deep topographer' Nick Papadimitriou's new book, Scarp:

A mostly crap scrap of the neither-here-nor-there London exurbia is the subject of Nick Papadimitriou's wonder Scarp. Through decades of walks from his council flat just inside the hellish ring of the north circular, he has fallen deeply for the low bumps of the 17-mile north Middlesex/south Hertfordshire escarpment. Here he is almost on common ground and up against the capital's modern saints of dystopic psychogeography: the master of the meaningful roundabout JG Ballard (Concrete Island), and the leggy pair of Will Self (Walking to Hollywood) and Iain Sinclair (whose M25 – in London Orbital – is the unspoken tarmac hedge to Papadimitriou's ambition and stride to the north of his scarp). There are a host of others too – a proper ministry of silly walks – but Papadimitriou is his own man.

His methodology might be bonkers but it is very engaging. Years of study and dreaming in the spare bedroom of his flat have given birth to a series of fantastic journeys – trips, more like – through the ages of the scarp and into and out of its living and its dead, its creatures and plants, its buildings and routeways, its residents and its passers-by. The whole shebang is channelled into what Papadimitriou calls "deep topography". But the loopy incredibility of all this is redeemed by his indomitable playfulness. That he is relaxed about taking his own character along with him on his walks also helps a lot. He is good fun. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Documentary: London Perambulator (2009)
• Will Self: Walking out of London
• Richard Long: Walking Artist
• Robert Walser, The Walk

Will Self: Modernism and Me

An autobiographical essay for The Guardian

Will Self. Photograph: David A. Selby

Will Self reflects on his connection to literary modernism: 'As a bookish adolescent I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid. My unstructured absorption of the European canon was only intensified by my refusal to submit to the strictures of a conventional English literature degree course: I never took in the historicist perspective that leads ineluctably from Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer, through Spenser and Shakespeare to the robust, door-stopping certainties of Victorian triple-decker novels. Instead, already by the time I lay in that Jericho aquarium, I was a devotee of those works marked by an inability to suspend disbelief in their own formal properties. Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes's Don Quixote, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Melville's Moby-Dick and Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time – these works spoke paradoxically directly to me in their very sense of indirection. I understood intuitively rather than systematically that all these works were examples of a form we might call "pre-modernism", insofar as they anticipated the same existential problems that afflicted Joyce, Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Eliot and other literary modernists to come. That the novel in its inchoate state was more capable of self-questioning experimentation is unsurprising for all sorts of social, cultural and historical reasons, but we can equally ascribe to the writers themselves a sensitivity to what Gabriel Josipovici, in his book What Ever Happened to Modernism?, characterises as an essentially timeless awareness: the simple impossibility of going on, if to go on is to continue with well-established ways of depicting the world in art.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self and the Art of Contemporary (Conference)
• Will Self, Kafka's Wound: A Digital Literary Essay
• Is Modernism Boring?
• Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism?

Will Self and the Art of Contemporary (Conference)

Museum of London · 23 March 2013

Design: Rhys Tranter

About the Conference

Will Self is one of the most notorious and exciting contemporary writers as well as one of Britain’s most visible public intellectuals. Self is astoundingly prolific, has written across many different genres and is our foremost literary satirist, whose linguistic pyrotechnics and surreal conceits give an idiosyncratic and highly illuminating perspective on the world today. As psychogeographer and provocateur Self has staked out as the world his territory, drawing our attention to the surreal and grotesque within everyday life. As Self’s status as master of Zeitgeist is now confirmed by his Professorship of Contemporary Thought, this conference presents a unique opportunity to reflect on the significance of Self’s achievements, bringing together the foremost critics working on contemporary fiction. Will Self will be reading from work in progress and talk about his extensive body of work.

Invited Speakers Include:

• Jeannette Baxter (Anglia Ruskin)
• Peter Childs (Gloucestershire)
• Caroline Edwards (Lincoln)
• Sebastian Groes (Roehampton)
• M. Hunter Hayes (Texas A&M University-Commerce, USA)
• Hugo Spiers (UCL)
• Philip Tew (Brunel)

Call for Papers

Short papers and panels are invited on aspects of Self’s writing focusing on topics including the work’s relation to genre, intertextuality and form; (post)modernism and new realism; political and cultural geography and the contemporary; satire and surrealism; place, psychogeography and the urban environment; (semi-)documentary fiction/gonzo and life-writing; mental illness, psyche and consciousness; gender, sexuality and alterity; morality and ethics; class, Englishness and Otherness.

Send abstracts for papers of 250 words, together with a brief biographical note, to Nick Lavery at the email address below, before 28 February 2013. Requests for early notification of acceptance for international delegates are welcome. For further information and registration details, see below.

Contact

Conference organiser:
Nick Lavery (University of Roehampton)

English and Creative Writing, Digby Stuart College, Fincham 301, University of Roehampton, London, SW15 5PU. 

Email: laveryn@roehampton.ac.uk. 

Tel: +44(0)20 83923291.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self

Will Self, Kafka's Wound: A Digital Literary Essay

An interactive online essay with digital footnotes

Will Self, 'Kafka's Wound: A Digital Essay'

Wow. What a fascinating idea. Interactive cultural hub "The Space" has just posted Will Self's interactive online essay, 'Kafka's Wound: A Digital Essay'.  Written on commission from the London Review of Books (LRB), the project outlines Self's interest in Kafka's short story, 'A Country Doctor'. His preparation for the essay has been the source of some reflection, recounted in a blog he kept before the piece was published [Read More].

What is remarkable about the essay is the extent to which it utilises multimedia to tell its story. Self's digital footnotes can be accessed as one reads, and to some degree they recall the fiction of W. G. Sebald (to say nothing of Self's recent work). Among the extras is a complete English translation of the Kafka story itself, along with academic commentaries on the work; there are a number of musical works, complete with analysis; there is documentary footage (including a one-hour film of Self's recent trip to Prague); a fascinating panel discussion with two leading translators; not to mention archival photographs, clips of recent Kafka debates, and even an online game! [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Will Self: Kafka's Wound
• Judith Butler: How to Read Kafka
• Francis Bacon: Free e-book
• Free Penguin Classics iPad App
• Jack Kerouac's On the Road as iPad app
• T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as iPad app

Will Self on Umbrella

'I don't write for readers'

Will Self

Elizabeth Day (The Observer) interviews Will Self at his home in south London. Topics include his most recent novel, Umbrella, illness, influences (J. G. Ballard), coffee and contemporary literature: '"I don't really write for readers," Self says when he appears, bearing a packet of coffee. He lights a compact gas camping stove on the corner of his desk and puts a stainless steel espresso maker on to boil. "I think that's the defining characteristic of being serious as a writer. I mean, I've said in the past I write for myself. That's probably some kind of insane egotism but I actually think that's the only way to proceed – to write what you think you have to write. I write desperately trying to keep myself amused or engaged in what I'm doing and in the world. And if people like it, great, and if they don't like it, well, that's that – what can you do? You can't go round and hold a gun to their head."' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self