Excellent anthology of essays, interviews and other ephemera. In the introduction, Self explains that the book was originally intended to focus on drugs. (At one point the title was to be Junk Male.) Even though that focus changed, drugs are the subject of the first quarter of the collection and remain a major theme throughout. Articles include a review of William S. Burroughs’ collected letters, a visit to a crack den and a visit to the drug-rehabilitation centre at Downview prison in Surrey. He watches David Cronenberg’s film of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch with members of an Oxford drug clinic and offers assorted thoughts on English motorways, Nicholson Baker and the wit of Woody Allen. There are also thought-provoking essays on the IRA, Satanic abuse, cryogenics and Englishness and English culture.
There are insightful interviews with J.G. Ballard and Martin Amis. Refreshingly, Self’s intelligence is such that he understands those authors’ work well enough to instigate meaningful conversations that shed light on their writing and his own. There’s also an entertaining piece in which he meets Bret Easton Ellis and is disappointed to find him a thoroughly likeable, decent kind of guy.
All it lacks is an index.
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