I Want To Take This Opportunity To Introduce My Next Novel, Tentatively Titled “Self’s Blistered Heel”

Old genital face Will Self eschews the $45 flat rate and the AirTrain and decides to hoof it from JFK to Manhattan:

When Mr. Self recently traveled to New York . . . he did not take a taxi from his house in South London to Heathrow. He walked the whole 26 miles. Upon arriving in New York, he walked from Kennedy Airport to the nearby Crowne Plaza Hotel — a journey more perilous than he expected, because it involved a nighttime traverse of expressways with no curbs.

The next morning Mr. Self, who is unusually tall and very thin and has a long, melancholy face that he once described as looking “like a bag full of genitals,” packed his knapsack, rolled a cigarette and, puffing from a Hunter Thompson-style cigarette holder, set off on foot for Manhattan.

. . .

Proceeding along Eastern Parkway, Mr. Self studied the streetscape carefully, eager to discern the exact point when it turned from a black and Hispanic neighborhood to an Orthodox Jewish one, and was delighted when he spotted a guy in a yarmulke talking to two coffee-colored men.

“There!” he said. “There’s the interface!” A little later, after pausing briefly near the Utica Avenue intersection to inspect, in vain, a curbside book table for Will Self titles, he caught a whiff of subway. “Ah,” he said. “The afflatus of the city’s bowels — now we’re getting into the real body of the city.”

. . .

He added, “Actually, instead of looking at individual buildings, it makes more metaphorical sense to think of New York as one enormous chunk of masonry that has been cut up and carved away. It says, ‘This is the ultimate polis, through which humans move like nematodes.'”

On that note, still striding briskly, he walked down into Manhattan and across Little Italy to his hotel, where he freshened up a bit before walking to the National Arts Club that evening for a reception announcing the inauguration of a writers’ retreat on the Scottish island of Jura. Mr. Self is to be the first writer in residence there, and having written in his novel “Cock and Bull” about a man who develops a vagina and a woman who sprouts a penis, plans to work on a new project about unruly growth: a short story called “Haydn’s Nasal Polyp.”