Interview with British writer and walker Will Self:
I write on a 1959 Groma Kolibri typewriter. I had to go to Berlin to get a ribbon for it.
Really?
By train.
You don’t fly?
I stopped flying, yeah.
Why?
Because it’s wrong.
Morally?
Aesthetically. It’s ugly, it’s not intrinsically ugly, but the way in which it’s incorporated into the man-machine matrix is ugly. The buildings are ugly, the environs of airports are ugly, the experience of flying is an ugly experience.
How do you define ugly?
Not beautiful.
Are your walks about beauty?
Yes, of course. I only want to be surrounded by beautiful things. I’m an aesthete.
I think that globalization is a chimera, it’s a false thing, it’s not going to happen.
I believe that the pursuit of globalization is very destructive.
From an interview with psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas:
Would you say that the collective unconscious is modified by time and culture?
Absolutely, I’m very interested in social dreaming, in cultural dreaming; every society dreams, and the dream is what we call culture, so every societies culture dreams something. Film is a form of dreaming and if you look at, let’s say, a run of films in the 1960s, there were these disaster films; ships flipping over and sinking in the sea, towering infernos; before 9/11 they were already going up in flames at a time when North America was going to its doom in Vietnam. It was the absolute end of American innocence.
More fundamentally, where is the point when a generation forms?
Well I’m a contextualist. Each decade, or even every two, or five years, there is a different culture context. So things are constantly being redefined; this has to do with memory.
Objects redefine the individual?
Society redefines itself; it reinvents itself.
