Will Self Sore Sites (2000)
It probably won't surprise anyone to learn that Self wrote a regular column for Building Design, a weekly magazine for architects. Sore Sites assembles a whole shitload of those columns into a single volume which has garnered the sort of appraisal you would expect on Goodreads, which only makes me wonder why some of these people bother to read Will Self at all if they're going to get pissy, as they invariably do, over his use of words in making the sort of observations he tends to make.
For what it may be worth, even as a fan of the dude, this one initially struck me as quite a hard sell. Nevertheless, it works, and it informs, and is insightful and funny in all of the right places. The author freely admits that he understands architecture only in so much as that he has opinions, and often the same sort of opinions as the rest of us, which is why he - as a layman, albeit an erudite one - was hired to write for Building Design in the first place, because you're not going to get this sort of perspective from anyone who has won an award for a series of concrete blocks. Being Self, the digressions greatly outweigh the strictly architectural content somehow without actually straying from the topic, and so mixed in with the aggregate we get autobiographical observations concerning typography, literature, Eric Gill, J.G. Ballard, the London Underground, fatherhood, pretty much everything, of which my favourite was this takedown of some miserable performance art thing.
It probably won't surprise anyone to learn that Self wrote a regular column for Building Design, a weekly magazine for architects. Sore Sites assembles a whole shitload of those columns into a single volume which has garnered the sort of appraisal you would expect on Goodreads, which only makes me wonder why some of these people bother to read Will Self at all if they're going to get pissy, as they invariably do, over his use of words in making the sort of observations he tends to make.
For what it may be worth, even as a fan of the dude, this one initially struck me as quite a hard sell. Nevertheless, it works, and it informs, and is insightful and funny in all of the right places. The author freely admits that he understands architecture only in so much as that he has opinions, and often the same sort of opinions as the rest of us, which is why he - as a layman, albeit an erudite one - was hired to write for Building Design in the first place, because you're not going to get this sort of perspective from anyone who has won an award for a series of concrete blocks. Being Self, the digressions greatly outweigh the strictly architectural content somehow without actually straying from the topic, and so mixed in with the aggregate we get autobiographical observations concerning typography, literature, Eric Gill, J.G. Ballard, the London Underground, fatherhood, pretty much everything, of which my favourite was this takedown of some miserable performance art thing.
But the reality was a couple of upper-middle-class twerps who'd turned their sub-designer house in Camberwell over to a bunch of grown-up children performing inadequate party turns. I'm as pretentious as they come but this really stuck in my craw.
The thing that stuck presumably being the fifty quid admission, the sponsorship, and that these kinds of performers do what they do because they can't think, or write, or paint, or print; and... the audience pay to see them for the same reason.
Sore Sites is funny, surprisingly illuminating, and works far better as a psychogeographical monologue than the great majority of pointless wank presuming to hijack the term.
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