Home from work, and we were off to University Bookstore for Will Self's appearance and to get an autographed copy of "PsychoGeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche & Space" - for Will is a "long distance walker," and had walked form SeaTac Airport to University Bookstore.
A collaboration with Ralph Steadman, famous for the drawings in Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas," the book had to be purchased in hard copy but that didn't stop avid readers from bringing in armloads of books for autographs.
"The Old Communist" sat in the front row. I sat behind him, making a little YouTube movie of Ken asking Will about David Ickes. I asked about my favorite writer, Lawrence Osborne and was gratified that he knew the reference.
We were used to Will's fiction but this book isn't fiction. It's a collection of fifty illustrated pieces involving place, ie. whether we are oriented moreso to the freeway or the free way.
Writing about going through immigration:
"I wouldn't try to get into Legoland dressed like that, let alone post 9/11 America," he says of a Frenchman. It turns out Will has dual citizenship, since his mother was American, and Immigration resented his use of a British passport. "Mr Self, are there little things you are not telling us about yourself?" To Will, his size 12 shoes distinguish him more than his passport.
Sao Paolo:
"an unholy miscegenation between London & Los Angeles" "the minibar was called the Self Bar so I took it personally and downed alot"
R&R in Rio:
He had nothing to read .. finally found a bookstore with three shelves of those books they sell at airport and one copy of "The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich" .. "I snapped it up." He broached the language barrier to find that local women had nicknamed him "Hitler"
Nepal:
"sitting opposite an Australian hippie wearing a Victorian nightgown" (who read Shakespeare endlessly)
"met an excitable Ukrainian" who "believed every conspiracy theory going" & "the wandering AntiSemitic" had inscribed in ballpoint pen on his rucksack all of the countries he'd visited.
India:
He bought a ticket accidentally for eight days later than expected, was forced to stay in the Holy City & "linked up with a Canadian Buddhist .. the worst kind" - "grit in my retinal afterimages" (from burning bodies), and in the Ganges, "collided with the corpse of a cow" - "ingurgitating spriochetes to last me a lifetime"
Finally:
"Now I'm an older, less adventurous & less stoned man."
He referred to us as "erudite" and seemed sincere. People asked him about travel writers and his highest recommendation was for Norman Lewis' Naples '44, though he also spoke highly of Guy Debord, the French intellectual who was the driving force behind "psychogeography," and anticipated the effects of the internet, mass communication and mass travel on our sense of place.
To Will, we live in a human geography defined by commerce and the antidote is to move about more or less randomly, as "flaneurs," and he is obsessed by the idea that we don't really know where we are any more. We live in "zones of ignorance" whereby we may know intimately the few blocks we live in and the few blocks we experience when we vacation, but nothing in between. He suggests taking the journeys we are not intended to take.
In fact, Will lives less than a mile from where he was born, and where at least five generations of his family have lived. On this book tour, he is travelling without baggage and walking from each airport to where he does book readings. The Old Communist tells us "Rick Steves said to pack light." The Old Communist asks if there is any place Will has not been that he would like to go and he answers, "The Arctic, because it's disappearing." "Is it?" asks the Old Communist, skeptically.
A woman with an accent I can't place asks is in the process of the long walks, Will will just go away (from writing). He says that Rimbaud was a long walker and did just that, before he was 27, but he won't. Someone asks him about Buddhism, and he tells us that two days ago he went to a Buddhist meeting in San Francisco. He imitated the Master guy, acting all egoless, then said he felt like telling him, "You're a fucking fraud, man."
Will is modest but really charismatic and was named one of the best dressed men in England, even though he has no baggage. Tonight he was wearing a black silk shirt, very nice.
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