Overview
Building on their first successful collaboration, more Self and Steadman on the oddities of place in the contemporary world.
Will Self’s satiric eye and hyperactive prose meet once again with Ralph Steadman’s manic hand and effulgent color, creating the coveted sequel to their collaboration Psychogeography: here is Psycho Too. In this energetic romp through an all-new landscape, Self and Steadman further explore the effects of our geographical environment—natural, man-made, or man-manipulated—on our emotions and behavior, and the interplay of surroundings and self.
In the introductory essay, Self sets out to walk the entire length of Britain—or, more precisely, a Britainshaped island off the coast of Dubai, part of the artificial archipelago of private isles replicating, in miniature, all the world’s landmasses. Fifty additional short essays cover terrain from Istanbul to Los Angeles, East Yorkshire to Easter Island, all accompanied by Steadman’s inimitable illustrations. Psycho Too is a dazzling guide to the wheres and wherefores of the way we live now.
Synopsis
Building on their first successful collaboration, more Self and Steadman on the oddities of place in the contemporary world.
Will Self’s satiric eye and hyperactive prose meet once again with Ralph Steadman’s manic hand and effulgent color, creating the coveted sequel to their collaboration Psychogeography: here is Psycho Too. In this energetic romp through an all-new landscape, Self and Steadman further explore the effects of our geographical environment—natural, man-made, or man-manipulated—on our emotions and behavior, and the interplay of surroundings and self.
In the introductory essay, Self sets out to walk the entire length of Britain—or, more precisely, a Britainshaped island off the coast of Dubai, part of the artificial archipelago of private isles replicating, in miniature, all the world’s landmasses. Fifty additional short essays cover terrain from Istanbul to Los Angeles, East Yorkshire to Easter Island, all accompanied by Steadman’s inimitable illustrations. Psycho Too is a dazzling guide to the wheres and wherefores of the way we live now.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Will Self is a keen student of la dérive, a mode of enquiry practiced by French Situationists in the 1950s: drifting on foot through an unfamiliar place and taking in the ambience-the lay of the land, the light and weather, immediate attractions and spontaneous encounters-to glean how it affects our emotions and behavior: a psychogeography. Self might add food, art, music, and architecture to the above in fashioning this collection of peppery, unsettling vignettes. He is not an amused, debonair boulevardier, but rather a bodacious flaneur -- gothic, pugnacious -- outraged and tormented everywhere he goes by the whole consumerist/industrial calamity that sends him into a surreally existential lather. Keep him trimmed -- say, 800 words per dérive -- and he draws razory, jet-propelled, often scathing place portraits; give him too much rope, however, and the caffeinated verbosity burns too much oxygen. As in his earlier volume, Psychogeography, he starts with a longish piece, here a rant featuring Dubai City: "a buy-to-let scheme for oil bunce and capital flight; drug, gun and whoring money; a great dung heap of pelf." It's a trenchant mug shot, and Dubai deserves the thrashing, but Self whips the horse dead and whips some more. Better are the 50+ quick, fierce sketches, each as arresting as the burp of an automatic weapon: he takes a walk, he engages in astutely freewheeling association, he creates an intense little world on the page. Ralph Steadman's artwork catches the mood of Self's progress -- spidery ink-pocked phantasmagoria, waxy with menace, twisted, hallucinatory -- stepping out and into the likes of Margate andBaghdad, Easter Island and the Isle of Thanet, haunted forests, a hermit's hut, and the close precincts of a bath house, where the inmates' "brawny pink limbs floated in a vaporous haze . . . you could easily imagine yourself deep in the heart of the Amazon, with a bunch of Bororo crazed on yoppo" -- an affecting ambiance if there ever was one.
--Peter LewisEditorials
From the Publisher
“A match made in some crazed, satirical heaven: Will Self and Ralph Steadman. A continuation and expansion of themes from an earlier collaboration, “Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place,” itself a wild and crazy sociological look into the character of different spots around the globe. In “Two,” Self and Steadman cover more turf in some 50 short, illustrated studies.”—San Diego Union Tribune“50+ quick, fierce sketches, each as arresting as the burp of an automatic weapon: he takes a walk, he engages in astutely freewheeling association, he creates an intense little world on the page. Ralph Steadman’s artwork catches the mood of Self’s progress—spidery ink-pocked phantasmagoria, waxy with menace, twisted, hallucinatory.” —Barnes and Noble Review
"The pairing of Steadman with Self inevitably draws comparisons with [Steadman and Hunter S. Thompson] and in this way "Psycho Too" may be seen as a post-rehab take on the "new journalism" — one that begins with 12 steps and just keeps going.”—Associated Press
“Electrifying… hyper-reactive, peeling hot off the page in real time. Like “Psychogeography,” this new collection takes us on a fresh tour of the planet. To add to the otherworldly brilliance of this densely written, vividly explored collection, each essay is accompanied by a witty, occasionally shocking and always visceral Ralph Steadman illustration. It’s hard to imagine that Self’s picturesque words need any illustration, but in a world so flattened by recession and dreary retrenchment, it is refreshing to be rewarded with such extravagant fare.”—New York Times Book Review
“The quirky follow-up to the author/illustrator duo’s Psychogeography. [Steadman’s] pictures do far more than illustrate—they amuse, illuminate, amplify and, at times, almost editorialize on Self’s text. Self crafts countless striking, buoyant phrases and/or sentences (“Wasps swarm on the lumps of chicken and beef we’ve left for them, then, too obese to sting, they blade-hop back to their subterranean nest in the rockery by the pool”). A journalistic feast best savored in small bites over several days.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Self's scabrous, amphetamine prose revels in odd details and twisted associations. Steadman’s evocative illustrations, which look as if Jackson Pollock had dripped on cartoons by Picasso, provide an appropriately demented visual commentary. [Self’s] eye for seldom-trod byways and offbeat insights make him a diverting travel companion.” —Publishers Weekly
Alexandra Fuller
…so personal it is not always easy to know where the man ends and the words begin. Place always bores itself into [Self's] flesh and soul. There is no separation, he is telling us, between what we do to our surroundings and what our surroundings (in turn) do to us. And in order to best understand the relationship between mind and place, Self seems almost pathologically determined to walk almost everywhere. Hundreds of miles of trekking clock up in the course of these essays. Without the distancing, hermetically sealed comfort of a vehicle, Self experiences the world with shocking physicality: sweat, heat, cold, insects…To add to the otherworldly brilliance of this densely written, vividly explored collection, each essay is accompanied by a witty, occasionally shocking and always visceral Ralph Steadman illustration.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
The travel essays and fantasias in this raucous sequel to Psychogeography register the psychic impact of place while mapping out the author's idiosyncratic mental terrain. Novelist Self views his surroundings through the lens of his gripes, alternately dire and whimsical, with modernity, embodied by the “vertical desert” of Dubai's soulless skyscrapers. He's not overly fond of antiquity, either: during a visit to Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall and the Via Dolorosa strike him, respectively, as “a large pile of breeze blocks and a rather smelly alley.” (Sometimes his surroundings fight back, as when he's attacked by seagulls in Scotland.) His ramblings sometimes wander into fictional riffs, like an imaginary trip to Bill Gates's house to discuss space-time and an account of “The Great Vomit Wave of '08,” during which the world's insupportable debt is physically regurgitated. Self's scabrous, amphetamine prose revels in odd details and twisted associations; for him, every map is a Rorschach blot that brings national sexual perversions leaping to mind. (Steadman's evocative illustrations, which look as if Jackson Pollock had dripped on cartoons by Picasso, provide an appropriately demented visual commentary.) Self is far from a reliable tour guide, but his eye for seldom-trod byways and offbeat insights make him a diverting travel companion. (Jan.)\Kirkus Reviews
The quirky follow-up to the author/illustrator duo's PscyhoGeography (2007). Journalist and novelist Self (The Butt, 2008, etc.), who wrote a weekly column called "PsychoGeography" for the Independent, presents his second collection of those pieces with his friend and illustrator Steadman (Garibaldi's Biscuits, 2009, etc.), whose pictures do far more than illustrate-they amuse, illuminate, amplify and, at times, almost editorialize on Self's text. His rendering of an unhappy Self scrunched in a tiny airplane seat alongside two toothy snarling companions is typically boisterous. Self loves to walk, knowing, like some sort of 19th-century Transcendentalist, that truths lie along roads rarely taken-and he often finds them. The collection commences with the longest and strongest piece. "Walking to the World" is a tribute to the author's longtime idol, the late sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard, whose life Self decided to honor by walking from Ballard's home in Shepperton to Heathrow Airport, flying to Dubai City, walking from its airport to "The World," Dubai's collection of 300-artificial islands designed to look like the countries of the world, where the author planned to walk the length of its Britain. Nothing quite worked out as anticipated, but his keen eye misses little. The other literary snapshots vary in quality and humor and offer some evidence why a collection of so many pieces has its risks-for example, the author uses the word "Brobdingnagian" in at least four different essays and repeats himself in other ways as well. But Self crafts countless striking, buoyant phrases and/or sentences ("Wasps swarm on the lumps of chicken and beef we've left for them, then, too obese to sting, theyblade-hop back to their subterranean nest in the rockery by the pool"). The author also includes pieces about the homeless of Los Angeles, American crayfish conquering the Thames, Baghdad's Green Zone and "cardinism," a kind of sexual relief provided by converting an old castle into a modern home. A journalistic feast best savored in small bites over several days.The Barnes & Noble Review
Will Self is a keen student of la dérive, a mode of enquiry practiced by French Situationists in the 1950s: drifting on foot through an unfamiliar place and taking in the ambience-the lay of the land, the light and weather, immediate attractions and spontaneous encounters-to glean how it affects our emotions and behavior: a psychogeography. Self might add food, art, music, and architecture to the above in fashioning this collection of peppery, unsettling vignettes. He is not an amused, debonair boulevardier, but rather a bodacious flaneur -- gothic, pugnacious -- outraged and tormented everywhere he goes by the whole consumerist/industrial calamity that sends him into a surreally existential lather. Keep him trimmed -- say, 800 words per dérive -- and he draws razory, jet-propelled, often scathing place portraits; give him too much rope, however, and the caffeinated verbosity burns too much oxygen. As in his earlier volume, Psychogeography, he starts with a longish piece, here a rant featuring Dubai City: "a buy-to-let scheme for oil bunce and capital flight; drug, gun and whoring money; a great dung heap of pelf." It's a trenchant mug shot, and Dubai deserves the thrashing, but Self whips the horse dead and whips some more. Better are the 50+ quick, fierce sketches, each as arresting as the burp of an automatic weapon: he takes a walk, he engages in astutely freewheeling association, he creates an intense little world on the page. Ralph Steadman's artwork catches the mood of Self's progress -- spidery ink-pocked phantasmagoria, waxy with menace, twisted, hallucinatory -- stepping out and into the likes of Margate andBaghdad, Easter Island and the Isle of Thanet, haunted forests, a hermit's hut, and the close precincts of a bath house, where the inmates' "brawny pink limbs floated in a vaporous haze . . . you could easily imagine yourself deep in the heart of the Amazon, with a bunch of Bororo crazed on yoppo" -- an affecting ambiance if there ever was one.
--Peter Lewis