Will Self Thinking
I wouldn’t call myself a fan of Will Self — I’ve only read and enjoyed his short story collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), and his 2006 novel The Book of Dave — but I like him. His ideas are interesting, I find him very funny, he’s brilliant in Shooting Stars (including/especially the Geordie Jumpers video), and I don’t care much if he occasionally creates a minor furore with a comment he throws out or if others find him pretentious because of the vocabulary he uses or because he describes himself as a “modern flâneur”. Being a keen walker, cyclist and observer doesn’t seem that pretentious to me, but I understand why others might think his curmudgeonly image is too contrived.
I also like the Arvon Foundation, so when they started holding “Arvon at Home” readings and masterclasses, I was all in. Will Self happened to be doing one in August. It was called ‘Holding and Letting Go’, a title which intrigued me, and Self was going to explore psychogeography in writing. I signed up.
In writing, psychogeography involves conjuring a place so that the reader doesn’t just imagine the scene as if they were looking at a photograph, but as if they were within the action of the scene. Things are moving all around the vantage point that the author has given us, so that the place is alive.
To help us learn this, Self gave the attendees readings and then small exercises. What was amazing about these exercises was that, unlike other masterclasses I’ve “attended”, Will Self didn’t disappear behind a black screen with his name in white sans-serif. He stayed at his laptop, presumably seeing nothing but his notes on his own screen, giving us a small slice of his life in his London home.
I’ve not properly thought through why this entranced me so much. Perhaps it’s that it seemed to make him very vulnerable, giving us access into a very private place: the thought processes of a writer. And yet this seems a silly thought to me, too: people write and think and do both intensely in public places all the time. But they aren’t famous writers, I suppose, and happily sitting in silence rather than retreating from his audience at the first chance he got was very charming to me.
Or perhaps his being there, in the moment, doing nothing but thinking and scribbling, just captured some of the psychogeography of the moment.
1. Here’s Will Self rubbing his neck and thinking. My hand, writing, is reflected in the screen of my laptop: I’m doing the work whilst being a creepy voyeur and accidently capturing my own movements as I seek to capture Self’s.
2. Here’s Will Self thinking and rubbing his neck, after which he says, “Okay, welcome back,” as if we or he had physically gone somewhere, though hopefully we had in our minds.
3. Here’s Will Self doing some face-stroking and more thinking, while I’m not writing: I haven’t realised that I’m also in the video as I film it, blinking and un-made-up, trying to capture the weirdness of being in a silent moment with an author.
