Book Review: Psycho-Yawnography

Will Self
PsychoGeorgraphy
Illustarted By Ralph Steadman
Published by Bloomsbury
255 Pages







This... is unintentionally a coffee table book.

My admiration for Will Self is:

1. Long Standing
2. Well Deserved
3. Well Documented

He is one of the great writers of our time and has written some of the darkest, funniest and most brilliant things which have been scribed in the last ten years. Find him, read him, enjoy him. Start with something like “The Quantity Theory Of Insanity” and then “My Idea of Fun” or even his recent book “Dorian”.

So I was excited to find and buy this book. Steadman has been one of my favorite illustrators since the master wrote Fear and Loathing. There is something stark and upsetting about even his simplest and most pastoral images. I figure you marry him to Self and instead of darkness squared you get darkness cubed. Win/Win.
Wrong/Wrong it turns out.

Instead, I didn’t get much at all, dark or otherwise. It is a cute book and a clever book. Self is like a less self impressed David Foster Wallace. He does not have to write three page paragraph describing the type of “dust” he is trying to define. He is succinct. it helps that he is British and American and Jewish and Gentile and smart. But this muttness of his seems to have screwed him up and he is constantly coming up with theories about why he and the world are so fucked up. The key thing about his theories and his observations are that they tend be salient and wickedly funny, and sometimes very cruel. I mean this is a guy who was kicked of British Prime Minister John Major’s plane for snorting heroin in the bathroom.

In “The Quantity Theory Of Insanity” for example, he opined on the theory that there was only so much sanity to go around and thus you could put insanity and sanity where it was needed by moving groups of crazy people (or sane people) to certain locations and thus you would effect the balance of sanity as needed.

PsychoGeography also has to do with location as his theory is generally that the place makes the person. the place where you are from... the place you are going... the place you once took a dump. They all form and shape you and make you who you are now and more importantly make you how you are now. He got off drugs and started to walk on long sujourns following this theory that we all have become deconnected with “place”. It makes sense but he does not do much to flesh out why we should care.

The most (and perhaps only) worthwhile part of the book is the first chapter which is him walking from London to New York. He does it by leaving his home, walking to Heathrow, getting on a plane, Flying to JFK and them walking the 26 miles into downtown Manhattan. It is an introspective story with typical problems you would not consider such as modern airports are not meant for people to walk in and out of. It simply does not work. This story like amny of the others turns on his observations and the people he meets and it reads like a travelogue.

But... it never gets any better then the first story and his twenty mile romps around London, Iowa etc... do not reveal a lot and you kind of get a sense that he is mailing it in. Steadman’s illustrations are great but ultimately the book tells us very little, reveals very little out us to ourselves and... god forbid, gets kind of boring.

So. Though I love Self and love Steadman. Miss this one, unless you just like to have cool looking books for people to look at laying around like a pretentious prick... like me. then buy it.
6 Slingers on the 10 scale.