Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Cybermen On Heat
It turns out that discovering that Will Self regularly walks around the area you grew up in and know like the back of your hand is much more disturbing than his encounter with a dildo in a public place. Indeed, the fact that Will Self encountering a dildo in a public place is more or less exactly what you expect probably explains why the idea of him on buying paint the Northcote Road is quite so disturbing. It's a whole new level of uncanny for me: being disconcerted not by normality being not quite able to cover up the deep levels of weird that sustain it, but the reverse - the insertion of the normal into the typically weird. I'm sure some unfortunately-named French person has been talking about it for years; probably they'll be the subject of In Our Time next week.
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3 comments:
It's also that he's mocking Northcote Road at the same time as going to the shop representing its worst excesses. You can buy Farrow and Ball in Homebase...
Thank you for having created a now unforgettable association between In Our Time, which I love, and (presumably used) dildos. I don't know if I can ever listen to it in the same way again. I am not pleased.
He's not anything like nasty enough about the Northcote. He's much nastier, for example, about the common, which is at least less full of useless shops.
Bragg kind of annoys me. That he's dilletantish in exactly the way that Self identifies really winds me up. What academics think matters about what they think about matters. Also, whenever I know anything about what they're talking about, they invite pricks. But it is good.
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