easter message
Note to Self. Will Self, that is
First off, if Donald Trump dies today, five days after making a bizarro apocalyptic speech on three extinct TV networks on April Fool’s day … today on an Easter Sunday during which this agnostic reprobate already decided to stay home, do nothing and eat Thai leftovers, after having gone to a barn-burning Seder at an anti-Zionist Jewish friend’s house on Friday and putting on a yarmulke for the first time in 30 years … I’ll change my mind and possibly even agree that we’re “living” in a simulation. Welcome to the matrix.
In light of the disturbing synchronicity noted above, I’m almost simultaneously reading some very good writing … particularly a compelling interview by George Monaghan (recommended in my fast-moving feed by Sam Kriss) concerning someone my addled brain barely retained a sense of: Will Self.
The following is what I read. Please read it. Now would be best, if you have the time:
If you were too lazy to do what I asked, don’t sweat it. Will Self, a blazingly intelligent iconoclast, is dying, soon, of cancer. He claims in the interview that he still has sex once a day, which I’m going to call bullshit on, but regardless, the piece introduced me to yet another sad, doomed fellow traveler (or so I imagined). After having read it, I was moved to respond to its interviewer/author, as follows:
This was a great thing to stumble on, especially for a 73-year-old asshole obsessed with death. As an American philistine who’s read the wrong 4,000 books, I’ve only ever encountered Self as a name in an article I don’t understand or care about. Thanks for giving me something new to obsess over. Fuck.
Then, like Neo surgically trapped in his tyrannical pod, having a creeping feeling that I was disastrously wrong about something, I went to Wikipedia to check on the name Will Self. This stanza started to jar something loose:
“Self is currently an honorary Professor at Brunel University London, where his interests include psychogeography.[6][7]”
Wait a second. I clicked on psychogeography and was presented with a wiki page that, despite being allegedly plagued with “multiple issues,” solved my nagging suspicion.
I had read Will Self only one fucking year ago, and for a brief moment had bathed in his genius and fantasized that we’d been separated at birth (even though he and all these other people I’m reading this morning happen to be British … there goes that Matrix again). I immediately fired off this chestnut to Monaghan and Kriss, neither of whom I know from Adam, but what the fuck :
Again, it is Easter, after all. If you’re too preoccupied with familial or, God forbid, spiritual matters to click on the above, I won’t be offended. Here’s what it says …
I guess I lied. About a year ago I read an utterly magnificent article by Will in County Highway, an actual physical magazine printed on old-school broadsheet newspaper format. I can’t look up the article … which was about one of his psychogeographic treks around London … as the luddites who published the thing don’t do an online version. Self probably should have been more careful where he walked. I’m also obsessed with figuring out where all the toxic waste is being dumped … which apparently is everywhere.
… appended with a self-serving link to a nice review of a novel I wrote about evil motherfuckers polluting everything… a subject apparently close to Self’s equally jaundiced and close to crapping-out heart:
https://dactylreview.com/2019/05/26/wasted-by-biff-thuringer/
County Highway is a severely iconoclastic thing, which I happen to love and subscribe to, despite being a closet anarchist with an annoying, counter-productively socialist vestigial tail. At any rate, that’s how my easter is going so far, and it’s only 11:11. Happy easter!
Addendum:
Song of the day:
I grabbed a copy of My Idea of Fun when it came out. I enjoyed American Psycho to a certain extent, the film as well - and films like Man Bites Dog and later on, The Magician did a decent job exploring the serial killer/hit man mythos. Professionally, I'm still an investigator and have met many killers. Had some in my family due to circumstance of Prohibition and of course, war. I don't have any interest in writing about it myself. It's not that interesting when you've seen it all your life. I could write a book solving a 100 year old Irish mob homicide as I'm the only one who was told about it who is still alive, and that would be a hell of a book...but would cause unnecessary pain for people. I don't want to use my talents that way, even though I could use some money. Guess I'll keep working.
Great review of Wasted by Brent Robison. That's how I met you, I think, or first heard of your work.