Peak Book

Will Self:

The above leads me to suspect that we indeed may have passed that numinous — but for all that, real — point known as "peak book". Might this mean that the ever-expanding and ever-deranging gap between what is written and what is read may be beginning to narrow at last? Don't be ridiculous! The web has put paid to that — all those petabytes, all those pages! If the consciousness of unread books was bad enough, what about the consciousness of unread web pages?

It all puts me in mind of the Cha'an meditation illness: an incontinent recall of Buddhist texts that is the symptom of a Zen pupil's overstrained psyche, and which can only be rectified by his master hitting him on the head with a stick. Otherwise, the texts proliferate across his visual field, while the meaning of every word is instantly grasped by him. At first, there are just texts the pupil knows, but soon enough these are joined by others he has only heard of — yet these, too, are comprehended in their entirety.

There is worse to come, as flying from all angles wing still more texts that the pupil is compelled to include in his screaming wits — texts he has never heard of at all, texts he didn't know could exist, texts written by alien civilisations, texts doodled on the Etch a Sketch of God by archangels peaking on acid! No stick is big enough to beat this pupil — Humanity. So the maddening and delusory library expands, while the real and useful one is shut down.

Self, typing

Will Self on his writing practices:

Self, who prefers to write his fiction on a typewriter, adds that his daily word count is lower than it used to be, "partly because I shifted to the Imperial Good Companion, which is a slower machine, about four or five years ago. Writing on a manual makes you slower in a good way, I think. You don't revise as much, you just think more, because you know you're going to have to retype the entire fucking thing. Which is a big stop on just slapping anything down and playing with it." Joan Didion once told an interviewer that she used to retype her whole draft every morning to get back in the rhythm. "I'm not that good a typist," Self says incredulously. "I'd aim to write, on a first draft, not a great amount any more, only about 1,200 words a day. I write the book through. And then I start rewriting it, in successive waves."

I’ve been telling myself for years that I’m going to take out the old Smith-Corona that I used all through college and most of grad school and . . . nah. Not gonna happen.