Self lumbers onto the stage dressed in a quasi-uniform of Napoleonic blue and high-throated red, mutters to himself through a jawful of gum, then plays peek-a-boo with the armchair. The effect is of a large off-duty circus monkey.<\/p>\n
The audience leans in, unsure whether to rattle the cage or throw peanuts to make him do<\/em> something. These are Self veterans and there\u2019s a collective holding of breath, a waiting to see if we\u2019ve caught him on an off-day and are about to spend the next hour being pelted with faeces (a word of warning\u2014for Self, there is<\/em> such a thing as a stupid question). It\u2019s a masochists commune\u2014many around me look like they\u2019d enjoy nothing more than for one of his steaming nuggets to drop right on their greying crania. In a sense, you do have to be a little masochistic to put yourself through Self\u2019s trilogy of modernist streamofconsciousness doorstops. They\u2019re not easy reads but then they\u2019re not meant to be. The final tome, Phone<\/em>, is the reason we\u2019re all here.<\/p>\n If this Lugubrious George seems relatively sedate tonight, we soon find out that the guy\u2019s whacked out on nicotine\u2014his gum is the strongest on the market. \u2018At six milligrams, it\u2019s drugs\u2019, he says, comparing the experience to a shaman getting razzed on fermented jaguar blood.<\/p>\n We start out, as does the book, with Manchester. Our city is familiar to Self\u2014his habit of fleeing his beloved London to write in provincial metropolises having brought him here numerous times. Physical knowledge of an area, he feels, is the only way to achieve a realistic sense of place in fiction and, needing somewhere to situate his opening, he picked Manchester, realising he\u2019s well enough acquainted to give the thing some verisimilitude. Though he suspects we think he\u2019s a \u2018southern arse\u2019 anyway. Self begins the reading\u2014a nude psychiatrist, the ageing Zack Busner, surveys tables of continental breakfast in the Deansgate Hilton. When the manager tries to eject him, Busner wards him off with nothing but a ringtone. Self\u2019s prose is characteristically ample. As a bonus we get to hear his best Manc accent\u2014on guts alone, he\u2019s now one of us.<\/p>\n Journalist Alex Clark presides over the evening, and unobtrusively steers Self through familiar topics\u2014walking, his turn to modernism, the impact of the web and technology on fiction, and psychogeography, to name a few.<\/p>\n It\u2019s on the last of these points that we start to see his wackiest side. Asked about the lack of women practitioners of psychogeography, Self advocates a night-time curfew on men leaving their homes three times a month so that women can practise their transgressive urban drift in relative safety. Cue a roomful of gentle titters. \u2018No, I\u2019m being deadly serious.\u2019 Cue tumbleweeds. That\u2019s a bit unfair\u2014a couple of beret-wearers applaud.<\/p>\n Discussing the French situationist Guy Debord, Clark asks Self whether he thinks the internet is bringing about a kind of mass spectacle. \u2018We\u2019ve always lived in a spectacular society\u2019, he replies. Looking down at the rows of faces all fixed, open-mouthed at the stage, it\u2019s hard not to wonder whether, for us at least, the spectacle comes in giant sesquipedalian form.<\/p>\n Oh, and he told a woman that her views and dress sense would soon be consigned to a folk museum. Perhaps the gum was wearing off.<\/p>\n Will Self, hosted by Alex Clark, Central Library, 10 October 2017. Self lumbers onto the stage dressed in a quasi-uniform of Napoleonic blue and high-throated red, mutters to himself through a jawful of gum, then plays peek-a-boo with the armchair. The effect is of a large off-duty circus monkey. The audience leans in, unsure whether […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[16,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Manchester Literature Festival<\/a> continues until October 22 in venues across Manchester. This piece also appears at Chapter & Verse<\/em><\/a>, the Manchester Literature Festival blog.<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"