February 2012
65 posts
And I see them in the streets. And I see them in... →
"DAVID ALTMEJD’S INSTALLATION FOR THE CANADA... →
Assaf Shaham - American Dream series
See more: http://assafshaham.com/
The Men - Think
“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense...”
– Oscar Wilde
"In the summer of 2011, New York's Museum of... →
Amelie Von Wulffen
Future foods, both real and imagined →
“If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people...”
– Scott Adams
We're all millionaires now (social stockbroking) →
ALLOTMENT - 10 plots (a nice, new curatorial... →
“What happens when nothing is happening?”
– Christopher Ross
"People who had been exposed to inaccurate... →
“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”
– Antonio Gramsci
“Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not,...”
– Judith Butler
“In its first full season, the show was moved up to 7:30. In 1963 it was moved to...”
– On the TV scheduling of Rawhide in American Rebel, a biography of Clint Eastwood by Marc Eliot
“For a man who is lost and dying in the wilderness to cry out is both futile and...”
– Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, from Memories of the Future
"After the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, all... →
Bird, plane, flying baby →
“If you have no enemies you’ve never stood for anything”
– Winston Churchill
“The opposite of humour isn’t seriousness. The opposite of humour is...”
– David Shrigley
1 tag
"A few years later I worked out that one of the... →
Adam Curtis talks to e-flux
"Clicking a virtual cow gets you one point.... →
"On 11 February 2009, an argument about Titian's... →
"KILLOLOGY, (n): The scholarly study of the... →
Save the arts
Self Vs Littlejohn
NICKY CAMPBELL: Your book is called How the Dead Live, Will, and basically it's a horror story - somebody dies and then stops being dead. Well you tell us. You wrote it anyway.
WILL SELF: I did write it and you manifestly haven't read it.
CAMPBELL: Well, you know, there's a lot to do on this programme.
SELF: I know, I appreciate that. It is not a snide dig. It is quite a difficult book, it takes about 13 or 14 hours to read. So it is a fair claim on people's attention spans. It is really about what happens to a pretty standard, kind of materialistic, atheistic person who, when they die discovers that really what the Tibetan Buddhists have to say about cosmology and about the afterlife turns out to be true. So to say that it is a kind of portrait of what everybody's death is like is not quite right. It is a portrait of one particular person's death and their experience about it. I suppose it has horrific elements and it is after all told from the point of view of somebody who is dead. So that that gives them a slightly kind of "Sunset Boulevard" feel, but it is not strictly speaking a horror story.
CAMPBELL: That's not to say I won't read it, you've made me feel quite guilty now.
SELF: No - that was just a low crack.
CAMPBELL: It's just that you have a lot to do in three hours and you get books at 6 o'clock on a Tuesday night - you have got to bath the kids - you know all about that.
SELF: I do. I have many children. Many, many children.
CAMPBELL: Neither did I get a chance to read yours Richard but that's not to say that I won't. But what do you make of what David Aaronovitch has said? It is front page in the Independent. He says Richard Littlejohn's novel is a 400-page recruiting pamphlet for the BNP.
LITTLEJOHN: What else do you expect from an overgrown student union leader who used to be a member of the Communist Party? I think it is a badge of honour to be attacked by people like David Aaronovitch to be perfectly honest. I might put it on the cover.
SELF: Well he is right.
LITTLEJOHN: Is he?
SELF: It is a 400 page... I've read 200 pages of it and that is a 200 page recruiting leaflet for the BNP.
LITTLEJOHN: Well, you can't comment until you have read the other 200.
SELF: Why? Does it suddenly turn into Tolstoy?
The Future (brought to you by NASA) →
“If you don’t know where you’re going. Any road will take you there”
– George Harrison
“Although progress has no necessary end, it does have a necessary beginning”
– David Deutsch
“The preeminence of commodity production has produced grotesque deformities in...”
– Ursula Huws, ‘The Making of a Cybertariat’
Alphabet City is a series of annual hardcover... →
"Many so-called solutions to the food crisis focus... →
Wordnik →
“The kitchen is his hell and he the very devil in it … he will domineer and...”
– Gervase Markham, The English Huswife (1615)
Monsters demonstrate, monsters alert us: whether... →
Fail Better is now experimental literature’s... →
The Composites - Literary characters imagined... →
Library cats in the United Kingdom →
“Lying, lying and cheating, but not trying to make a personal gain”
– Francis Picabia
Jim Hodges’ Buoyant Monoliths →
"1) This article will do little or no harm. 2)... →