#will self

[oacest]

article two - by will self. from feeding frenzy

[luxe-pauvre]

It’s surely this ability to “do something” that ensures surgeons, far from being traumatized by their work, actively enjoy it—in some cases to a point where they view it quite as much aesthetically as they do ethically. Bramhall speaks of “a line between surgery and art.” He explains: “Surgery is definitely an art form of some kind, although not in a conventional way. When it goes well and it looks beautiful at the end—especially something like a liver transplant or a major resection—it really is a thing of beauty.” The writer-surgeon Gabriel Weston even went so far as to paraphrase Oscar Wilde’s notorious remarks on literature: “There’s no such thing as a good or a bad operation.”

Will Self, Letterman

[quasi-normalcy]

A Posthumous Shock, by Will Self

How everything became trauma

We tend to think of the ability to be wounded in this way as a permanent feature of human experience, albeit one that was long undertheorized. In this way, it is analogous to a psychopathology such as schizophrenia, which we retrospectively recognize as having operated long before it was properly identified. In contrast, I shall be advancing the heretical notion that trauma as we now understand it is not a timeless phenomenon that has affected people in different cultures and at different times in much the same way, but is to a hitherto unacknowledged extent a function of modernity in all its shocking suddenness. Furthermore, I will argue that trauma is so widespread precisely because of the ubiquity of traumatogenic technologies in our societies: those of specularity and acceleration, which render us simultaneously unreflective and frenetic. On this analysis, the symptoms deemed evidence of PTSD are in fact only an extreme version of a distinctively modern consciousness.

[hungryfictions]

mary maclane, the story of mary maclane / pierre bonnard - jeune femme écrivant, 1908 / louise fitzhugh, harriet the spy / phil grey - two photos from will self’s writing room: a 360 degree view in 71 photos, 2007 / tom astor - susie boyt’s notebooks, 2018 / stephen king, on writing / jill krementz - stephen king at his home office with his corgi marlowe, 1995 / joan didion - “on keeping a notebook” / wayne miller - author and poet maya angelou, 1974 / photo of sylvia plath from the everett collection / anne carson in a 2016 interview with NPR / octavia butler’s motivational notes to self / jim carroll, the basketball diaries / benjamin garcia - writing painting, 2012 / wayne pascal - writer’s block, 2019 / louisa may alcott, little women / little women (2019) / mary shelley (2017) / dickinson (2019) / anne lamott, bird by bird

on writing

[juliansummerhayes]

“Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.” ― Will Self

[petercushingscheekbones]

Genuinely don’t know what to do now that I know this picture exists (so I’m just dumping it here)

[derangedrhythms]

[…] death is — quite simply — bigger than life. 

Will Self, from ‘Death: A Graveside Companion’, ed. Joanna Ebenstein