Tim Clare's Cone O' Tragedy

New Website

2010-05-16T18:11:00.004+01:00

Want to see my new website? CLICK MY MASSIVE EYE! GO ON! CLICK IT!

I'll continue to update the blog there.

Games With Stupid Names - #12: Captain Bible in Dome of Darkness

2010-04-22T17:37:00.011+01:00

No amount of snarky commentary can do these screenshots justice. Suffice to say, I have been playing Captain Bible in Dome of Darkness, a PC point n' click adventure game where you must use Bible verses to defeat evil robots in a bizarre lycra-clad futurescape. Instead of an energy bar, you have a 'faith' bar, which is depleted if you fail to respond to the robots' (who look like a scuba fetish version of the Smash aliens) lies with the appropriate scripture. I played it for a bit, then started to feel my brain turning the consistency of aerosol cheese and had to stop. Just look for yourselves.

Just Don't Fling The China

2010-04-20T14:33:00.003+01:00

A few months ago, back in my flat in Cambridge, I started eavesdropping on our new downstairs neighbours. I'd crouch on the living room carpet with my ear to an upturned pint glass, like in the movies. It didn’t work very well. Fortunately their rows were loud enough to hear even if I’d got the telly on.

They were a young couple who’d just moved in together. I'd tell myself I was concerned about the state of their relationship, but that was a lie. I listened in because it was a good way to put off cleaning the oven. And because pretending I was in a spy novel helped me forget I’d nothing better to do on a Thursday evening than lie alone on the floor with a pint glass to my ear.

Given the frequency and intensity of their spats, the odd thing was, neither of them seemed to enjoy arguing. For example, one of their earliest barneys, from what I could tell (I’m only alerted to a row once it’s escalated to yelling, so it usually takes a bit of detective work to figure out how it began) started because he was talking on the phone when she called for him to help her unload the washing machine. When he didn’t answer, she did the only sensible thing and flung all his freshly washed laundry out of the window.

As usual, his response was to adopt the whiny, nasal tone of a petulant eight-year-old sulking at being made to visit a much-hated relative.

‘Why-eee?’ he mewled, stretching the word out to two shrill syllables. ‘Why-eee? It’s not fay-yer!’

Her sigh was loud enough to hear through the thick barrier of floorboards and underlay. ‘Because you were annoying me!’ With this sentiment, at least, I could sympathise.

As a fully qualified armchair psychologist, I decided their relationship was doomed. They seemed totally incompatible. With all the anger and bickering, I couldn’t imagine them lasting another two months. However, the current thinking on long-term relationships suggests I may have had it all backwards.

Dr John Gottman is a leading researcher into marital stability and divorce. He claims to have developed a methodology whereby he can predict with 90% accuracy whether a couple will still be together four to six years later. Partners get wired up to heart monitors, then asked to discuss a topic they disagree on.

The recordings make for gripping listening – some couples squabble with a gladiatorial intensity that makes my battling neighbours seem like the picture of domestic bliss. What’s even more startling, however, is Gottman’s finding that legendary bickerers often have the most stable and long-lasting marriages. Angry squabbling doesn’t necessarily mean a break-up is on the cards.

Indeed, according to The (possibly slightly right-wing and horrible) Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education: ‘The number one predictor of divorce is the habitual avoidance of conflict.’ For many couples, it seems a spirited ding-dong is a great way of letting off steam and expressing one’s feelings. All partnerships involve issues on which the two people involved fundamentally disagree. The difference between a healthy relationship and an unhealthy one is that, in a healthy one, opposing perspectives get listened to and acknowledged. For some couples, sometimes a row is the best way to achieve that.

Habitual conflict avoidance is something I know all about. After all, I spent the best part of a month with my ear to the floor like an under-resourced Stasi officer, when really, I should have just walked downstairs, knocked on their door and politely asked them to keep their voices down.

But a funny thing happened. After a while, the rows just sort of tailed off. Just before I left for Norwich (to move in with my own girlfriend), I saw them walking together, arm in arm, looking the very picture of sickening romantic contentment. So maybe a bit of verbal jousting is good in the long run. And if you disagree, don't keep it in. Let's argue about it.

Death Drive

2010-04-09T15:56:00.005+01:00

Hello! Goodness me, I've been busy as a bee, moving cities back to Norwich, weathering minor psychic catastrophes and beavering away on the script for my FIRST EVER solo show. Yes. Like a grotesque bee-beaver hybrid, lying on its flank, its useless wings quivering, a rasp issuing from its misshapen, bucked-toothed maw... kill me... I was not meant to be... That's me.

So yes, rather than come up with some way of wittily paraphrasing it, here's the press spiel:

There’s nothing like seeing your dad have a go at an activity to make it seem embarrassing. It turns out suicide is no exception.

Sacked, dumped, and stuck living back with his parents, failed writer Tim Clare struggled to see the point in carrying on. Eventually, during a 4am drive, his newly spiritual dad staged a dramatic last-ditch bid to shock him out of his misery.

Thus Tim began a quest to lose his cynicism and get happy. But when you’re faced with jeering teens, obnoxious neighbours, all six Rocky movies and a psychic horse, is there anything in this sordid world worth getting happy about?

So far, I'm booked to do four previews of Death Drive at the Brighton Fringe from Saturday 1st May - Tuesday 4th at the Royal Albion Hotel, 35 Old Steine (4-5pm Sat-Sun, 9-10pm Mon-Tues). Tickets are £5 a pop and you can get them here. Then on Sunday May 30th I'll be doing another preview at the Pulse Fringe Festival in Ipswich, at the Sir John Mills Theatre, at 8:30pm. Tickets are £6 and you'll be able to buy them in advance here in a few days, when the full programme goes online. It's an exciting festival with lots of new shows to see on the cheap, so if you're in the area, COME TO MY SHOW AND LOVE ME UNCONDITIONALLY

I've got more previews coming up in July in Colchester and Norwich, and maybe one or two others - I'll post more nearer the time. In the meantime, if you do know anyone who lives in Brighton and might fancy a fun night out for a fiver, do let them know about my show, eh? I'm a bit nervous and a bit excited, all the clichés, really - also nauseous and aroused. How's that? It'll be a challenge to hold an audience's attention for that long - part of what I love about performance poetry is it challenges you to compress thoughts, jokes and stories down to their shortest possible form, so you're not wasting anyone's time. Death Drive is quite a dramatic story with lots of twists and turns, and it all really happened, so fingers crossed, folks won't find themselves dry retching with tedium 40 minutes in.

Right. Off to play video games. Happy days.

Interview Podcast

2010-03-17T21:10:00.002Z

Hey folks, check it out - I did a really fun gig a week or so back with Byron Vincent and A F Harrold, based around Poetry and Stand-Up. Before the gig, us and the compere got interviewed - you can listen to the interviews online here. I think the interviewer, Julia, asks some really insightful questions, and Byron, A F and Dr Kevin McCarron (who has some awesome ideas) all give great, articulate answers. If you're interested in stand-up or poetry or both, I'm sure you'll find it a rewarding listen.

Pat Sharp

2010-03-10T20:57:00.002Z

Readers of this blog will know that a fair proportion of my life's work is devoted to promoting the creative output of the writer John Osborne. He has just done a new youtube video, for a poem I like called 'I Think Pat Sharp Is Lonely'. Here it is:

Today is MAR10 Day, apparently. I was going to have mushroom pasta for tea to celebrate, but I seem to have contracted a stomach bug and, well... I'll be uncharacteristically coy about the details but suffice to say I don't feel much like tucking in to a hearty, cheese-slathered meal. This is the first time since the beginning of my Lenten video games fast that I've seriously considered giving in and playing something, if only so my DS could accompany me on my frequent trips to the toilet.

Deep in my heart, however, I know that spending 6 hours sitting at my PC playing Civ 3 will leave me feeling sad and defeated, not because I'd failed to quit video games for Lent, but because at the end, I won't have achieved anything. I do love video games, and, in fact, I'd genuinely credit the Civilisation series for significantly improving my historical knowledge in areas such as military history, scientific discoveries and political history, but that addictive feeling of 'just one more go' can eat up hours and hours of your life. But unlike TV, most sophisticated video games make you feel as if you're actually progressing and achieving something, and afterwards there's this horrible downer as you remember that your trans-continental fascist empire, your 3598 bottle caps earned, your levelled-up paladin or your 'Silent Assassin' achievement unlocked don't mean shit in the real world.

Okay, right. That's my bowels calling. Off to the bathroom again. Ta ta.

Woohoo! Issa Me!

2010-03-08T15:54:00.004Z

"There's a sense of wonder and a spark of imagination at the heart of the Super Mario Bros. games, and as children we pick up on that right away. Then, over time, most people lose that spark. School, career, social engagements, relationship drama, mortgage payments, credit card debt, medical ailments, and other things that we pick up on our way to and through adulthood weigh us down and we forget the simple pleasures of saving the princess from a turtle despot with an eye for annexing kingdoms and galaxies. Those of us who continue to play Super Mario games and who make them a part of our adult lives found a way to keep that spark alive."

A few weeks into my video games fast, I enjoyed reading this article on a 33-year-old guy wondering why he still plays Mario games. I accept that nostalgia plays a role, but this kind of feels like hand-wringing to me. I play Mario games because they're fun and they make me happy. No need to overthink it!

Oh, and since you asked, I'm doing okay without video games so far. I'd say my happiness is 3 Fygars out of a possible 5. I'm sort of stockpiling a to-do list of stuff I need to sort out once back in those pixelated virtual worlds - sell scrap metal in Fallout 3, replay Loom in hard, replay flawed PC Sword n' Sorcery RPG Silver (assuming I can get it to work - I'll probably need a proper mouse, too) which I dug out the CDs for when back visiting my parents, replay Planescape: Torment (it's been 10 years, but man I loved that game), maybe buy Fallout and Fallout 2 to play on the PC (I have been assured they are awesome, especially if you like Planescape: Torment and Fallout 3 - oh WAIT)... also I want to complete Spirit Tracks on the DS.

All this squeezed in around moving house, sorting out taking my debut solo show to the Edinburgh Fringe this year (more on that in a few weeks! Shh...), writing new material, planning the new novel, actually earning a crust gigging etc, and maintaining a social life. Okay, so maybe earning money and the social life will have to take a back seat for a while - just till I max out my Heal spell and get the twin-swords on Silver, at least...

6Music and the Asian Network

2010-03-02T14:50:00.002Z

Like a sad bandwagon-jumping pranny, I have written a letter to the BBC Trust. God, it's almost as if I believe people can do something to affect the world they live in. Muppet. So I plugged my mate's book, just to keep myself feeling like it was self-serving, cynical and ironic, rather than a heartfelt plea about something I really, really care about.

Dear BBC Trust,

I have never been moved to write to the BBC before. As a long time supporter of the BBC, the world-rivalling quality of its programming and everything it stands for, I am baffled and saddened by the announcement of plans to shut down 6music and the Asian Network. For me, both stations represent the BBC doing what it does best, fulfilling the remit of its public service responsibilities by providing high quality broadcasting in areas which commercial competitors do not cover. If there is a lack of awareness that either station exists, this is a failure in branding and outreach - not an indication that the stations themselves are underperforming.

Radio1 is now almost indistinguishable from its commercial rivals. 6music is unique, having taken over the commitment to showcasing new, alternative or otherwise fringe music that Radio1 used to promote in the evenings during the early to mid nineties. Similarly, 6music has been supportive of British artists working in other media - I have had the pleasure of hearing authors, film makers, actors and poets interviewed and encouraged to perform on the channel.

The author John Osborne's recently published book Radio Head, a celebration of Great British radio, singles out the Asian Network and 6music as two jewels in our country's broadcasting crown. It would be a tragic day for British music, and a gross dereliction of the principles upon which the BBC were founded, if two of the finest, most unique radio stations on the globe were to be shut down completely. I urge you to listen to the license fee payers, and to re-evaluate the wisdom of your strategy, so that these two stations can continue to promote the best of our country's vibrant and diverse Arts culture.

Yours sincerely,

Tim Clare
http://timclare.blogspot.com

Reading Instead Of Video Gaming

2010-02-19T23:16:00.002Z

So with video games off the menu until the end of Lent, I just finished reading Northern Lights, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Yes, yes, I know I'm way behind the times, but better late than never, eh?

My verdict on the first book? Loved it. After years of editing other people's manuscripts I can't quite turn the internal critic off, but even with my scouring for loopholes and duff lines, I was gripped and I really enjoyed it. It's nice to feel like sometimes a book is really popular because it's very good. The book deals in lots of very standard Fantasy tropes, like the false, decadent king challenged by the valiant true heir, the airships and steampunky accoutrements of Science Romance, and the whole many-worlds portal-linked multiverse thing, which is so common as to often be almost assumed as existing in many SF worlds, but it executes all of these familiar elements really, really well. It confirms my growing feeling - influenced in part by my interviews with the author Steve Aylett and with Helen Corner of manuscript consultancy agency Cornerstones, in my book We Can't All Be Astronauts (have you read it yet? Probably - but if not, hey, you can buy it here) - that originality is an overrated quality that readers (and people in general) aren't that bothered by. Readers want a pacy, thumping good read that they can understand, with characters they care about and situations that excite them and make them think.

I'm currently doing some research and assembling with ideas for, gulp, another novel. I think it might be not rubbish this time. It definitely won't be a tale of dysfunctional middle-class relationships. It will be the same colourful, weird nonsense I always do. I don't know why people wouldn't want to write about that kind of thing. Sure, I enjoy books that don't have magic and fireballs and time travel and robots and airships and zombies and portals and spaceships and scrambler-riding dinosaurs, but not as much as books that do. SORRY, MAJORITY OF THE WESTERN LITERARY CANON

Speaking of books set squarely in our drab, everyday reality, there's an interview with me over here about We Can't All Be Astronauts and my being a writer. Oh, and, despite being a memoir Astronauts has a bit where I suplex a T-Rex through the Acropolis. I put it in after the final proofread, because, y'know - wouldn't you want something that rad in your memoir? EXCEPT YOU DON'T HAVE ONE OH SNAP

Lent

2010-02-16T18:31:00.003Z

So yeah, Pancake Day is upon us, like, well, a pancake, that has finally unpeeled itself from the ceiling and dropped, moist and lukewarm onto our upturned faces. I love pancakes. They are the best food. I always do my best to celebrate pancake day by gorging myself in a hurried and unselfconscious manner.

But I've never given anything up for Lent before. This is partly cos I en't religious, but mainly because quitting something for a month isn't quite so fun as cramming multiple frisbees of soft, sweet batter into my slavering dogma-hole. So, I thought to meself... what can I give up?

I thought of booze, chocolate, crisps, Diet Coke - DC was the biggie, actually. I know I drink too much of the fizzy black sugar water, and I don't much enjoy knowing I'm giving money to the ethically-dubious Coca Cola Company, but still I choose to guzzle quite a lot of it. Still, last time I quit for a week, I got a withdrawal hangover on the first day that lasted for 24 hours, complete with pounding head, runny nose, and chronic tiredness. My main reason for not choosing any of those things was that giving them up didn't seem to have much of an interesting narrative behind it.

So, I tried to think of something I do every day, something I've done for a long time, something I can scarcely imagine life without. And, I've decided...

For Lent, I'm going to give up video games.

It will be the longest I've been without them since Primary School. Yikes.

I love video games. They make me genuinely delighted and happy. I love them like I love books, like I love movies. For over two decades, they have sparked my imagination, and given me hours and hours of fun. But with the advent of game clocks and my progression into the higher echelons of adulthood, I've also had some tricky realisations. After 12 months of play on Pokémon Diamond, I checked the game clock and discovered I'd notched up 660 hours. That's the equivalent of 27 and a half days, without sleep. That's like playing non-stop for the whole of this month. Assuming an 8-hour working day, 5-days a week, that's like working a full time job for nearly 4 months. That's sick.

Obviously, I love Pokémon considerably more than the next man. If you're wondering whether I'm just lying, I'd point out that, since the battles are turn-based, Pokémon is ripe for being combined with other activities such as TV watching, and since it's on a handheld system, I played it pretty much every train journey I had - and I do a lot of train travel. Let's be clear - I'm not smack-talking Pokémon.

But that's not okay, is it? I mean, it's pretty awful. A little Pokémon, fair enough, but that's an actual bona fide binge. And it wasn't even the only game I played that year!

So look, here's what I'm going to do. You may have noticed I've done naff-all updates on this blog so far this year. Sorry about that. I've been busy. But we should reconnect more. So, I'm going to quit video games for Lent, try to rediscover some other pursuits, maybe procrastinate less, and I'm going to blog about it a bit. I reckon I will miss them, but I also think my life needs a little more balance, eh? I'd like to do one or two posts on games that really made a difference in my life, and also on non-video games. You know, like board games. My Dad has always been a pretty awesome advocate of board gaming, and I reckon it's his fault I'm hobbled with this dreadful craving for arbitrary simulated challenges. And I want to write about that.

Or maybe I'll just spend the time checking my Twitterfeed and reading obscure blogposts and I'll realise that video games are one of the most constructive uses of unstructured time available to us. Maybe I'll go mad. Maybe I'll renounce video games and never play them again. Who knows? All I know is that they're a really important part of my life, I kind of, not to be an idiot, but I kind of actually care about them, but for the next month me and them are going to have a trial separation.

And so, for now, I'm going to spend the rest of the evening binging on pancakes and games, in preparation for the long, stark fast before Spring.

Greatest Video Game Villains Of All Time: #2 Wolf O'Donnell

2010-02-03T20:29:00.005Z

So, uh, yeah. Doesn't time fly? It's been a year to the day since I started the Cone O' Tragedy. Frankly, I'm surprised (and pleased) it's staggered on this long, like a plucky lil' zombie. So happy birthday, my blog. Well done! Like a drunk lost in an disused railway tunnel, you yell your barely coherent blather-koans into the echoing darkness, indifferent to the fact that no one hears, and that you've soiled yourself.

To mark the occasion, I thought I'd continue with what's shaping up to be an exciting annual series, following on from this rather optimistic post back when things began.

If you've not played Starfox 64/Lylat Wars on the N64, go do so. It is available to download for the Wii and I would rate it in my top 5 games of all time. It's a third-person space shoot 'em up that sees you as Fox McCloud, leading your intrepid team of Arwing pilots through battles that span an entire system. It's got the best dogfight sections of any game ever made, really cool set pieces, a great scoring system that keeps you coming back for more, and very fun radio chatter between you, your cohorts, and the enemies you face.

Some of the most fun parts of the game involve facing off against a rival team of mercenaries: Star Wolf, headed by your nemesis, Wolf O'Donnell. Depending on which route you take through the Lylat System, your first encounter with them may be on the planet of Fortuna (Star Wolf's bit starts at around 1:30 in the video):

Later - again, depending on how well you do and what course you plot through the system - you get to fight Star Wolf a second time, this time with revamped ships. I remember playing Lylat Wars a hell of a lot when I was younger, and unequivocally loving it. The dialogue is cartoony and silly, but it's great fun, and the bad guys' gloating taunts and bellowed orders to their underlings add a brilliant layer of hokey pantomime to proceedings. Just for the record, in my day, I was pretty awesome at the game - you get points for every kill you make, and bonuses for wiping out multiple enemies with a single shot, so on replays it takes a combination of tactical acumen and hairtrigger reflexes to maximise your score. Friends, I have both these qualities in spades.

Wolf O'Donnell is the classic hotshot baddy pilot archetype, whose sneaky self-servingness ends up being secondary to his desire to beat Fox McCloud and prove his superiority. There's a bit of the old grudging respect in there too - he's kind of a Moriarty of the skies. His gleeful opening line: 'Can't let you do that, Star Fox!' has become something of an internet meme, as wags insert punnage for mild lols. To be honest, I enjoyed them, because I love Lylat Wars, and I am an awful nerd.

Last Week Of Luke & Ross's Shows - GO! GO!

2010-01-24T23:17:00.005Z

Apologies for the spotty updates so far this 2010 - I'm hella busy with lots of pseudo-exciting stuff that may or may not come to fruition, and some of that will involve my posting sporadically worthwhile things on this here blog for your perusal. I do enjoy having a meagre platform for my first drafts and half-formed opinions like terrible irradiated embryos hacked from their dead mothers' swollen bellies.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that last week I went to see the latest solo shows by my dear chums Luke Wright and Ross Sutherland, during their run at the Old Red Lion Theatre (nearest tube Angel), which continues until the end of this month. Luke's is called The Petty Concerns Of Luke Wright and Ross's is called The Three Stigmata Of Pac-Man.

Obviously I'm not a very credible advocate of their work, because, as I've made clear, they're good mates of mine. HOWEVER, if I'd thought the shows were crap I simply wouldn't have mentioned them. I actually reckon that they're brilliant. You should go and watch them and see two experienced young poets operating at the height of their powers. They've had several splendid reviews, and a bit in The Independent, and, you know, if you're in London you should do something different and interesting with one of your weeknights and take a friend along who's never seen performance poetry before. The shows are funny and witty and not so long you'll get bumache, and you'll have a new thing to have an opinion about and you'll feel all cultured and arty when you talk to friends for the next couple of weeks.

Anyway, look, you can make your own mind up by watching these clips from their shows. I hope you enjoy:

Thank You Mario But Our Princess Is In Another Castle

2010-01-14T15:40:00.002Z

So, I just realised I've never posted up this track by John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats and Kaki King. It's written from the perspective of one of the Mushroom Retainers (or 'Toads') that Mario saves at the end of each castle in Super Mario Bros. Toad was my favourite character in Super Mario Bros 2, and I'm glad to see the plucky guys triumphantly return in Super Mario Bros Wii.

Hello 2010!

2010-01-04T17:10:00.008Z

Hey you. Nice to see you again. You're looking well. Have you had a haircut? Sure? Well your hair looks great today, then. You're welcome.

I had a pretty Kinder Bueno 2009, all told. My first (maybe only!) book came out, I got to do gigs with Vic Reeves, Jon Ronson and Tim Key, I tried my hand at stand-up, and I made some new friends. So come on 2010, how are you going to beat that?

Well, it looks like I'm going to be taking my first ever solo show to the Edinburgh Fringe in August. I'm working on it at the moment, and my main goal is to make it not crap. Having written material for four live shows in the past two years, I know only too well that I'm capable of lurching between rather entertaining and drab sniper bait, so I'm kind of counting on lots of trial runs and useful feedback between now and then. If you were to ask me what kind of show I'd like to go see at the Fringe (well, clearly even if you weren't I'd still volunteer the information unsolicited) I'd say something funny and interesting that made me think. That's the kind of show I'm trying to write.

It's weird though - the moment you start putting stuff down on paper, all these possibilities start closing themselves off to you. I think, as a writer, my biggest enemy is lack of focus. My ideas fly about like shiny bits of paper in the Crystal Dome at the end of the Crystal Maze, and I get sort of dazzled and mesmerised by them and can't decide which to grab for. I think probably the piece of live writing I'm most pleased with so far is my 'How To Save Your Girlfriend' bit for Infinite Lives. Although, in the linked video, it was my first run-through and so my performance is not the greatest, once I had it down I really enjoyed delivering it. It allows me to talk about some obscure shit that I secretly care about, like the opening part of Wardner, or Dynamite Dux on the Master System, but by making relationships the nominal subject of the talk, it's accessible to people who are usually bored to within a merry inch of their lives by banter about video games. I love video games, and getting people to laugh at random stuff I'd privately laughed at before felt really good.

It's very unlikely my first show will use a screen. Though I'm a fan of the Aisle16 comedy microlecture format, and it's hugely useful to be able to illustrate a point or chuck in cool, colourful pictures, unless you need it for every section, it splits attention across a whole extra medium. Plus, I'm a bit concerned that I'll end up writing in that ironic faux-lecturer voice, whereas I'm trying to work towards the 'Hey, I'm just a regular folksy dude telling you the story of what happened to me' voice (though just as grounded in artifice) that typifies things like The Moth. Also, it's just much easier to find places to practise bits of a screenless show in front of a live audience, whereas if I use a screen I've pretty much got a coupla previews, then I'm doing it.

I don't know. Like I say, as soon as you start chowing down on one meadow, the grass o'er yonder starts to look increasingly verdant. Like ectoplasmically so. We're talking Slimer or some shit. That's why it's good I've left myself with plenty of time to pull a 180 if I decide I need to try a different route, like 'git with clicker'.

Anyway, onwards with scriptwriting. In the meantime, you should really go check out Cat And Girl. It's so witty it annoys and depresses me. The internet is renowned as a world-trumping cretin nexus, yet it's full of people much smarter than me.

Answer SOLVED

2009-12-19T04:19:00.004Z

So, I've really wanted to know this since ever, but I kept forgetting to ask someone in the legal profession who could appraise me of the facts. Now T-Rex of the robustly entertaining Dinosaur Comics has answered my query! I recognise no higher authority in the world of jurisprudence.

My question was: can you put a legally-enforceable 'haunted house clause' in your will? You know, like, you can have my money, but you have to all spend one night in a haunted house!

So awesome. I totally wish I could hire T-Rex as my lawyer. Case dismissed, bitches! Heh.

The Limits Of The Expert

2009-12-15T22:14:00.014Z

So it's nice to see my old chum and fellow Aisle16er Luke Wright has been back blogging after a long period of sporadic comms. In my continuing efforts to bore the tits off of all my readers equally (my video game posts have a consistent knack for making at least 50% of eyes glaze over) I'm going to write a tiny bit in response to a point he raised around managers involved in live literature administration. Grab the popcorn.

Basically, in his blog post, Luke talks about the distinction between recruiting managers from experts in that particular field, versus recruiting managers from managerial positions in other fields, and how that applies to live literature (a term I fucking hate - eugh bleugh ptooie! (and I'm not much fond of the moribund 'spoken word' either)). In his own words: 'Now there’s more money about (though not for long with the recession looming) the powers that be have had two main options on how to grow the industry: a) use the existing artists and producers who know the scene and have creative vision; b) bring in proven arts managers from other industries to apply their knowledge of fund raising and management to live literature.'

Although he's conspicuously evenhanded and tentative in his overall appraisal - probably a wise move given that his ability to make a living partially depends on the good will of people working in this area - Luke seems to come down slightly on the side of using 'existing artists and producers', whilst acknowledging the value of having an experienced, talented manager with strong fundraising skills.

It's a tricky one. On the one hand, if you take on an active performance poet, there's a potential conflict of interest. Lucrative opportunities are few and far between in live poetry, and there's a real danger that, instead of spreading the word throughout the region and empowering as many poets as possible, they'll just take the best opportunities for themselves and for their performance buddies. From the outside, a poet booking their 'contacts' for gigs and workshops, and signing them up for support schemes, looks a hell of a lot like cronyism. For a poet, taking on an arts admin role is a great way to plug the holes in your finances while securing yourself a prime seat at the trough.

On the other hand, if you're a poet, it can sometimes be hard not to feel bewildered and frustrated when people who watch approximately a tenth of the live poetry you do, and who rarely, if ever, attend any events except the ones they organise, are the ones taking big decisions on the direction of the medium in the UK for the next five years, with very little apparent consultation. Working with different organisations across the country, rather than seeing a unified strategy and a genuine sense of cohesion and progression, it can feel like you're watching a hundred little showponies getting brushed and groomed then sent trotting out to market, all with owners hoping to earn kudos for having raised the brightest and the best. It can feel more about promoting an organisation and showing off how much clout it has, than about getting better live poetry to more people, and providing value to the taxpayers who are often bankrolling most of it.

Of course, these two extremes are both strawmen that don't paint a very accurate picture. We're a nation of armchair football managers and music critics, and I, like so many others, like to lounge on the sofa, yelling at my telly about how I could do a better job, despite the fact I can't kick straight or hold a note. All I'm trying to get at is that both options come with their potential problems, and neither one trumps the other. I don't think oodles of grassroots experience nor a robust background in managerial roles are game-changers.

Nobody working in the Arts - as far as I know - has ever been given a no-strings-attached metric fuckload of money with the instruction 'go and make live poetry better, however you personally choose to interpret "better"'. An Arts organisation's first priority is to secure funding to allow itself to continue to exist, otherwise it has no way of achieving any of its subsidiary aims, just as the priority of any government operating in a democracy is to remain in power, otherwise it can't affect change. While it's usually all in the service of exciting, interesting projects, there's no way you can make replying to emails, checking spreadsheets and drafting press releases as fun as standing on stage, getting whoops and laughter and applause from a crowd. Doing the boring stuff well takes skill, maturity and dedication.

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, and without knowing the competing pressures and priorities facing people, it's easy for me to pick holes in people's decisions. I'm not sure that's very fair of me and it's not a habit I admire, but I suspect we're all a little guilty of different forms of this from time to time.

However, there was one phrase in Luke's post I'd like to pick up on - not in how it relates to any of his personal views, but in how it tends to get bandied around and vaunted across Arts organisations. Luke talks about this notion of getting people onboard who 'have creative vision'. Personally, I believe that sometimes the disproportionate value placed on so-called 'creative vision' and strong personalities rolling out big, bold projects and proposals, overrides other important qualities like, y'know, listening. You don't need to be a gigging performance poet yourself to work in an organisation that aims to improve and promote the medium, but you do need to be willing to engage in an honest, respectful and sustained dialogue with a wide spread of people who do, not just in this country but across the world. There is a wealth of knowledge out there, distributed amongst hundreds of enthusiastic pro-am experts, and it seems not just foolish, but willfully arrogant not to attempt to draw upon it. That doesn't just mean accepting criticism and sending out the standard survey asking 'How could we do this project better next time?' after you've pissed away 50 grand on some ill-conceived vanity-wank - it means asking a decent spread of relevant people before you've squandered the time and money, to see if what you're doing is actually what the people you're supposedly doing it for want.

I suppose what I'm saying is that, as a performance poet who has notched up over 100 gigs in the last twelve months, I'd like to think that those involved in organising events, initiatives and projects relating to live poetry would see people like me as an important free resource of information and opinions. And I'm not using 'people like me' as a euphemism for 'harrumph, why don't people beg me for the chance to listen to my divine wisdom?' (although I like feeling important as much as the next petty, insecure egotist) - you can only get a true picture by consulting a range of people from across lots of different nights. Indeed, probably even more useful than getting the poets' views would be directly engaging with audiences and listening to their feedback, and, even better, getting into dialogue with people who don't go to spoken events but maybe attend events in stand-up, music and theatre, to see if we can start to think about strategies for showcasing the best live poets to a wider appreciative audience. By the same token, a lot of people who perform live poetry, myself especially included, could do with asking advice from those with experience in larger organisations, then listening to and acting on the responses we get.

So basically, I reckon one of the most important qualities a high-level manager in Arts administration can have is an open mind and a willingness to listen. Whether they're an ex-poet, a promoter or someone with management experience in a related area, it doesn't really matter, as long they're not an arrogant asshole who thinks they know it all. (like me) Indeed, I suspect we could use some new blood from different disciplines, coming in to suggest ways to improve. At the moment, live poetry is an obscure cultural curiosity on a par with beekeeping. It deserves so much better.

I should also point out here that I have met plenty of people within Arts administration who clearly devote an awful lot of time to listening to others, and who are incredibly conscientious and hard working. (I'm sure there are people reading this now thinking what? I spend my whole life in fucking meetings! Listening is all I fucking do!) It must be really difficult trying to synthesise lots of different people's opinions on a subject, all of whom have competing agendas, and many of whom, I'm sure, must come across as shambling simpletons. Also, I realise that the whole 'big project launch, big creative vision' way of doing things is, in part, a result of how organisations have to go about securing funding. 'Listening' sounds a bit woolly, unless you launch it as a 'big listening project' or just pitch another dreadful networking event (which tend to be weirdly uninclusive, closed shops). And, of course, at some stage somebody's got to cut through all the bullshit and actually make the decisions. Only hippies throw everything out to a vote, and look where that got them - crusted in their own filth, huddling round shards of green calcite for warmth. (and before someone chimes in with 'well you're just betraying your ignorance there, Tim - green calcite is actually for reducing anxiety' THEY'RE USELESS CHUNKS OF ROCK YOU GORMLESS LUDDITES)

I'll close with a quote from Shunryu Suzuki, to lend a spurious air of Zennish wisdom to my latest incoherent, axe-grindy blather. Suzuki famously wrote about cultivating a quality he called 'beginner's mind', once stating (perhaps a little mischievously) that the essence of Zen was 'not always so'. As he put it: 'In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.'

Worst Band Names Of The Year

2009-12-14T11:10:00.005Z

So it's that time of year again. But while you might be hanging festive wreaths and guzzling Coca-cola, I'm celebrating the season of goodwill by reading the Onion AV Club's annual Worst Band Names list. Here are the lists from 2008 and 2007.

Most of these names are so crap it's impossible to imagine they weren't the unhappy result of a three-week meth-binge or aggressive mental illness. The 'Funk Bands With "Funk" Somewhere In Their Name' category (now called 'Funk Bands Will Never Get It') has become a reliable old favourite, with candidates like Clusterfunk, Dysfunkshun Junkshun, United We Funk and Hubble Funk-o-Scope, as has the 'We're So Heavy, Dude' category: Black Arrows Of Filth & Impurity, May This Day Perish, Disthroned Agony and Carnal Befoulment are just a few of the hardcore monickers to grace the lists. Rock.

Yet, this welter of dreadful notwithstanding, one or two back unwittingly into genius. My 'So Bad They're Kind Of Awesome' name picks from this year's list include Fuckface Unstoppable, Vagina Panther, and a Manchester MC who calls himself 'John The Raptist'. John The Raptist?! Don't look at me like that. Come on. Literal genius. Oh, and it was nice to see Dananananakroyd finally get a mention. I've seen them live twice this year, and not only do they put on a really belting show, but they seem like very sweet boys - you just want to take them home, give their grubby faces a spit-wipe and feed them some sausage and mash. Well, I do, anyway.

Purple Ronnie Stand-Up Poetry Club

2009-12-13T15:29:00.004Z

This Thursday 17th December, I'll be performing with all seven members of Aisle16 at The Monto Water Rats Theatre, on Grays Inn Road. It's exceptionally rare that all of us are in the same place to do a gig, aside from the late night 'Aisle16 and Friends' sessions at Latitude festival.

A good portion of the show will be given over to our two- and three-man poems, which are always roistering fun. I know you'd expect me to say that - I'm hardly credible as a neutral advocate of Aisle16's live oeuvre - so, if you disbelieve me, check out Spoonfed's review of our appearance at Wave If You're Really There #5 with Wave Machines: 'fast-paced, cuttingly clever and ferociously funny performance poetry... performed with such vigour, to a crowd so completely engaged, that it is a joy to behold (and, yes, very clever too).' That's nice!

So yeah, doors are at 7:30pm, the nearest tube is Kings X - come down, and we'll do our best to give you a show to remember!

Pokémon Is A Tool Of Satan

2009-12-09T13:08:00.003Z

I wonder how this chap would feel if he knew that, within the latest versions of Pokémon, they have their own church you can visit, laid out like a conventional Christian church, where people worship the Earth and Pokémon. No joke. Plus there are Ghost Pokémon who are literally the resurrected ghosts of dead Pokémon, now under your control. Anyway, I have 434 different Pokémon in my Pokédex now, so I'm probably beyond saving. Here's a little snippet from our scratch performance of Infinite Lives, with me ranting, despot-style, about Pokémon:

Games With Stupid Names - #11: The Lord Of King

2009-12-04T01:20:00.010Z

In The Lord Of King, you play some beardy dude who pulls a magic fire axe out of a stone, becoming, in the process, a king. But not just any king. Oh no...

You're the Lord of King! Gooowaaaaarggghhh!

The rest of the game sees you waddling about hacking at weird mantis-creatures, skeletons, cruel wingéd gargoyles and a few fire-belching end of level bosses in an awkward and tedious chop-a-thon, the even timbre of its dullness undisturbed by a single moment of enjoyment from beginning to end. The control system is a piece of shit, your fire-axe takes way too long to charge up to be of any use in a melee, the difficulty curve goes piss-take exponential somewhere around Level 3, and the music is so unatmospheric they might as well have pressed a Casio keyboard's demo button and let you cleave giant bats to an instrumental version of 'Wake Me Up Before You Go Go'.

When you lose your last life, a low-quality sampled voice sounding like Jo Brand with a mouthful of wet bread asks, almost maudlin: 'Don't you want to play this game?' then bellows with laughter, as if even he realises that the idea of squandering another second supping this abysmal tragedy juice is patently absurd.

Released in 1989, The Lord Of King is a blatant, albeit hamfisted, forgery of Taito's 1987 corker Rastan Saga, a game I particularly like on account of its being a univocalism in 'A'.

Rastan Saga is epic where The Lord Of King is anecdotal, visceral where the latter is coy, and fun where its rival is a flyblown mound of zebra shit.

Taking you over rocky mountain ranges, through fetid swamps and into trap-filled castles, it's a robust, well-realised Conanfest with just the right amount of hokey homoerotic thrills to keep your heart hammering in your chest - indeed, as your energy bar gets depleted, the discomfitingly realistic multi-chambered heart at the end begins to thud ever more rapidly, until you vaporise with an echoing moan.

Rastan Saga's soundtrack is particularly mighty, with lots of cool percussion and pounding multivoiced sections to get the blood pumping. Why not dribble a little of its barbariany love into your ear-gobs? 'Because I don't like video games, Tim.' What? Ah, fuck you! 'He who is bored of video game soundtracks from the late eighties is bored of life.' - Samuel Johnson

Games With Stupid Names - #10: The Irritating Maze

2009-12-03T20:29:00.007Z

Hello, yes, it's me, Tim Clare, inviting you to watch my strange, infrequent ritual of poking a shotgun muzzle into a barrel of writhing pilchards, then squeezing the trigger. What's that? Some old video games don't hold up to close aesthetic scrutiny? No shit!! What incisive, necessary reportage! You should, like, be given a job or something!

So in The Irritating Maze, you're supposed to guide a sort of cyberpunk dreidel-cum-gyroscope round an electrified pinball machine. You get to choose whether you'd prefer to be play as a 'Man' or 'Lady', although, in the interests of gender equality, this has no effect on the game mechanic whatsoever. You can't even see them onscreen during normal play.

I started off with the chick. She showed her approval by having some kind of mini-stroke.

So when you start the game, you see your selected avatars' gloved hands placing the 'zap rod' in the starting bay, then you're supposed to ease it around the course using the trackball, avoiding all edges and objects, which are crackling with voltage. It's basically a video game version of those 'steady hand' buzzer games, except a team of programmers worked on this for months, and it manages to be even less fun.

I was all set to make the obvious crack about truth in advertising, but if the creators really had wanted to give it a literal title, it would be called The Shit Game. Sure, it's irritating, but not in that whole Marble Madness aaargh! okay, okay, just one more go compulsive way - it's irritating like losing your i-pod, or getting buttonholed for three hours at a bad party by some dropout with vomit on his breath who won't stop going on about how awesome The Shawshank Redemption is, no, seriously, fucking listen a minute... that film is proper shit-hot, right? Proper... like, that ending, is the best fucking ending of any film ever. What? No, go on then, name a better film! No go on, name a better film! What? That's cos you can't.

100 Poems In A Day - I DID IT!

2009-11-27T11:24:00.007Z

So yesterday I attempted to write 100 poems in a day - and succeeded! Boom.

It was a weird experience. The night before, I'd done my classic thing of feeling nervous and excited ahead of a big day, so I stayed up until 4am playing a Japanese RPG and reading Ted Hughes' Crow (which I reasoned might give me some inspiration by osmosis). A few hours later, my alarm went off at 8:25. I put it on snooze, and ended up getting out of bed at 8:35, just enough time for me to pop across to Tesco.

Outside it was one of those cold, bright days that make Winter great, except I was knackered from lack of sleep; I hallucinated someone calling my name, and it felt like all the pedestrians were part of some intricately choreographed performance for which I'd missed the dress rehearsal. At the supermarket, I dismissed food that required cooking time as too complicated - my schedule didn't allow for extended culinary activities - and instead bought a packet of crisps, three half-litre cans of energy drink, a bag of peanuts and a Kinder Bueno. When I got back, I made myself a bowl of All-Bran, (the most complicated food preparation I had time for all day) printed out the list of suggested titles so far, then sat down at my laptop with all of three minutes to spare, just enough time to log in to my blog and Twitter, before typing my first title into Twitter and getting started.

Originally, I'd planned to be clocking off by 11pm, but I thought it'd be sensible leaving the extra hour until midnight as a contingency period. 15 hours is 900 minutes, meaning I'd have an average of 9 minutes to write each poem. That is, 9 minutes, assuming no eating, toilet breaks, or doing anything a normal human being would do. I hadn't really thought about the practical limitations of what I was getting into. No, don't worry, I didn't just sit there and wet myself. Catheter.

No, obviously I got up for loo breaks, and to stretch my legs, which ate into my overall time. Thanks to a sneaky tip off, BBC Radio Cambridge got wind of what I was doing and phoned in the morning to ask if they could give me a title suggestion then speak to me in late afternoon. By the time I went on air, I was delirious from caffeine and still less than half the way through the hundred poems, which made me feel a little fraudulent, but the fear of failure was a good boost.

If you look across the day, despite any mounting feelings of failure, in terms of delivery schedule I was boringly consistent. The first poem appears at 9:00am, and, at 16:43, poem number 50 comes almost exactly at the midpoint of my attempt, with the final poem landing at 23:30. While I was writing, however, my brain was too frazzled to do even simple maths, so I remained convinced throughout that I was considerably behind and destined for an ignominious crash and burn scenario.

And so, to the poems themselves. I realise it would usually be rather crass and self-regarding to do critiques on one's own work, but a) I've already proven myself to be rather crass and self-regarding by attempting this cheap stunt and b) kind of the point of this whole thing was to get myself and others thinking about some of the mechanisms behind writing a poem.

I had more than 100 suggestions for poem titles, and I received a whole bunch more via Facebook, Twitter and by text over the day, so I had a certain amount of latitude to pick and choose what I was going to do next, balanced out by the need to get on to the next poem and not waste time deciding. Looking at the poems as a whole, even when there are a few good lines, what tends to suffer the most from the speed poetry process are the endings. The poems either finish abruptly, having made no discernable point, or they go for some try-hard punchline in an attempt to justify their existence. I think Fuck Denmark is a good example of this - a couple of nice images around the middle, in my humble opinion, then right at the end I obviously thought 'shit! I have to tie the two concepts together!' and finished with two rubbish lines which have all the subtlety of Jeremy Clarkson.

Thinking about it, endings are usually quite hard in performance poetry too. How many performance poems can you think of with great endings? (off the top of my head, the two I've come up with are both by John Cooper Clarke) Now how many can you think of with weak or indifferent endings? For me, it's a lot, lot more. If you know any great endings in page or stage poems, please forward me your suggestions. I'd like to do a whole blog entry on the thorny problem of concluding a poem, and different ways poets have approached it (successfully or otherwise).

One little accident I quite enjoyed was the spontaneous appearance of a couple of poetry sequences. Death and otters seem to be the two key themes in the work of Tim Clare. I'm pretty pleased with that. But overall, it was interesting how I found myself returning to characters as the day went on, and building up a little story.

Here's the 'My Affair With Death' sequence, in order:

Sleeping Myself To Death
About Bones
Okay, So I Didn't Invent The Superbowl Jetpack, But
Deception Sex Triangle
Burgers
Okay, But There's A Tram Coming
Gulliver, Nifty, Patience & Otter
The Bible Distilled
Train Travel
City Road Bus Stop

Honourary members of this sequence are It Feels As Tight As A Drum and Granny In A Bag (And Heading For The River) which introduce the poet's boss, Kit, and Otter Chaos, which introduced otters into the whole mess.

Of course, if it's real literary merit you're after, then this duet is where it's at:

Nathan And The Willy Tree
Ripe

Exquisite.

So, did I produce anything I actually like? Well, yes, but I think the ones I'm fond of are the rather silly, fatuous ones. I guess I have a soft spot when it comes to stupid for stupid's sake. Oh well. I quite like:

The Hump (mainly for the middle stanza)
Galactic Combat Battle Pony Ride
Christopher Christopher Christopher Christopher (for the ending)
Why So Many Blank DVDs?
Why I Can't Accept Your Friend Request
I Would Like To Take The Opportunity To Introduce Myself

And that's me. If anybody who had a go at one of the titles fancies emailing me the poem they wrote, I'll stick it up on the blog as a bonus track.

All in all, I enjoyed the experience, although I reckon it's the kind of thing I couldn't do more than once a year. I'd recommend it to any other poets who fancy stretching themselves or trying something a bit fun and different - failure's built into the mechanics of it, it's expected, so the only pressure comes from wanting to get through the full ton.

It'd be nice to extend the life of the project, though, maybe by handing it on to a new poet, and so on, getting a series of people to attempt the same thing, and seeing the different ways they try to put poems together. If it sounds like something you'd like to have a go at, drop me a line at my email (in the sidebar of this blog) - not because I get to personally sanction all attempts at writing 100 poems in a day, but just because it'd be nifty to stick all versions up on the same blog. Just a thought, anyway.

Um, thanks to everyone who made suggestions for poetry titles. Sorry I couldn't get through them all. The only genuinely brilliant thing about yesterday, creatively-speaking, was the titles, which I'm sure you'll agree are awesome and inventive and make fun reading in themselves. I'm sorry if I used one of your suggested titles and made an absolute hash of it - I hope, if you've not been inspired, then sheer irritation will push you into working on some pieces of your own. You cultureless bastards.

100 Poems In A Day - Starts Tomorrow!

2009-11-25T21:42:00.004Z

The day of judgement is upon us - tomorrow I attempt to write 100 poems in a day You'll be able to check my progress on the blog and on my Twitterfeed, and join in if you want to. Err... cheers to all the people who've sent me poem titles or generally said 'Jesus... good luck!'

There's a good chance my internet connection may go a bit spotty on a couple of occasions over the course of tomorrow - I've got mobile broadband and although it's pretty reliable if I stay in the same place, occasionally it drops out for a few minutes. If that's the case, I'll switch to writing in a Word file rather than direct into the blog, then copypaste them back into the blog as soon as the signal kicks back in. If you want to join in, just look at my Twitter page or the Twitter gadget on the side of either blog to see what the latest poem title is, then give yourself a strict 10 mins to bash out a poem with that title. Don't worry if it turns out okay or not - if you don't mind other people seeing it, please email it to me at joshureplied[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk and I'll put it up on the blog afterwards. Obviously if the idea of having your rough first draft workings exposed makes every part of you cringe like a prodded anemone then I'd rather you had a go in secret than didn't try at all!

Speed poetry is weird for a number of reasons, not least because, for most poets, the title's the thing that comes last. Often it's a bit of an afterthought - something unobtrusive, like a single word, or the first line repeated. A lot of the time now, when I'm onstage I don't give my performance poems titles at all.

This week I've been reading Logan Murray's Teach Yourself Stand Up Comedy and really enjoying it. He manages to be positive and practical at the same time, and there's lots of specific, robust technical advice on stagecraft and developing a set. Surprisingly though, I found that a lot of his advice could be equally well applied to writing and performing poetry - humorous or otherwise. I very much recommend you read it.

I think, in particular, some of his ideas about deciding on an 'attitude', then channelling material through that attitude may prove really useful to anyone attempting speed poems tomorrow. For the most part, if, once you've read the title, you can answer the question 'who is (in my imagination) writing this poem, and what do they think about the subject matter?' then a lot of the words end up writing themselves. If you can quickly choose a specific voice (note - specificity is key: 'mortally wounded pizza delivery boy gasping onto someone's answering machine through his mobile' is much better than 'dying guy') then have that implicit character respond to the title, you filter out a lot of distracting possibilities and get to work within fairly manageable parameters. Not all poems are monologues, obviously, but by faking up an attitude towards the subject matter, even if it's just 'deep, abiding loathing' or 'sexual arousal' is more likely to produce something interesting than just attempting to fit the words from the title into a series of unrelated sentences.

The other main guideline is just switch the censor off and go for it. When I've done speed poems previously I've often later discovered - to my considerable dismay - that in my rush to get words on the page I've ended up unconsciously plagiarising other poets, and plagiarising them cack-handedly at that. You don't have much time to look up the meanings of words, so I often find my poems are littered with awkward malapropisms. I often paint myself into corners and have no idea how to finish the poem.

It doesn't matter. Better to plunge into the poem with no real idea of how it's going to end than to sit there for 8 minutes growing ever more nervous and ashamed at the blank page. Every so often, something surprising, pleasing, and exciting comes out of it - something I'd never have known about if I'd spent those 8 minutes making a sandwich or watching a youtube video. If you have a go, I hope you get that experience at least once. But I hope I get it lots more than you. Heh.

So anyway, I'll do the last of my prep stuff now, collating the list of suggested titles, then I'll try to get a little sleep. Fingers crossed. See you tomorrow...

P-Day: November 26th, 9:00 GMT

2009-11-25T04:11:00.003Z

So, the 100 Poems In A Day Project has an official blog! Also, an official kickoff time. 9am, this Thursday. Aww crap. I'm actually going to have to do it now.

Will you join me? You know, if anyone has ideas for poem titles on the day itself, do suggest them, and I guess I'll work a few into this big, silly quest. If you fancy writing along with me, please do. Between us, I hope we'll write a whole bunch of not-terribly-good poems, and thoroughly grease up our creative cogworks in the process. Hopefully before I start I'll find time to blog a few tips on how to approach writing a poem in ten minutes or less. I've got to give a little time over to planning out my strategy, elseways the ton may get the better of me.

You'll be able to follow me on Twitter, and read the poems as I write them up on the 100 Poems In A Day Project blog. In the meantime, I'm going to devote myself to a bit of prep work - reading other people's stuff, and absorbing as much inspiration as I can. Heh heh. It's going to be fun, I reckon!

The Wall

2009-11-20T00:09:00.004Z

This wasn't a speed poem. I took a while over it and have no excuses other than a dearth of craft.

The Wall

The men are building a wall.

On top of the wall is a large cobalt blue radio
With armoured sides and black rubber
Shock absorbers,
Singing
Like a hornet trapped
In an ear trumpet.
It is built for being Humpty Dumptied
By a raconteur labourer’s careless fish-boast gesture.
When it hits the pavement, it will bounce.

These men do not care.
They are blasé to the point of nihilism.
One keeps a live timebomb as a mantleclock.
One watches Sorry on DVD.
They are clock-faced from gravity
And the Soviet bread-queue of beer cans
Upending into their water clock throats.

The one sat at the top of the stepladder
(he is working on the wall)
Throws a wet chunk of apple
To an Irish wolfhound with a dry nose.
The wolfhound rises from its spot on a cement path
And hungrily devours the morsel out of midair,
Like a peacock gulping down lead shot.
The wolfhound’s name is Gary.

‘I would love to visit Rio,’
Says the one on the stepladder,
‘And see that big Jesus statue, you know.’
He spreads his arms,
Knocking the radio off the wall.
‘I will go there
When we finish the wall.’

‘When we finish the wall,’
Says the one eating a ham bun,
‘I will march through my front door
And announce to my big fat wife
That I love her.’
He throws a strip of ham to Gary.
‘And I will mean it
This time.’

‘I come back every night
With a hammer,’
Says the quiet one,
‘And knock out bricks like
Important words in a telegram,’
But nobody hears.

3 Speed Poems

2009-11-18T01:36:00.007Z

I've already received a whole bunch of awesome suggested poem titles for the 100 Poems In A Day Project. There's a great variety of facetious, serious, abstract and specific lines there for me - and everyone else who decides to join in - to work from. Thanks peeps! Please keep them coming!

So, since I haven't written any speed poems for a while, I've realised I probably need to do a bit of warming up. Over the next few days or so, I plan to do a post or two on poem technique and strategy, specifically when it comes to speed poems. I don't claim to be an expert - my main reason for doing posts on the subject is to organise my own thoughts in preparation. I wonder if speed poetry is the closest written verse gets to improv, and so I expect I'll be looking at whether any moves from improv or comedy work when transferred to writing poems quickly. Hopefully, I'll be able to come up with a few tips that may prove useful if you decide you'd like to join me on my lengthy, many would say pointless, task. I'll also confirm that all-important date.

Writing speed poems also resembles doing a series of micro-commissions. I'm not very fond of commissioned poetry - it's hard enough writing about something when you're really interested in it and feel you have some original, considered take on it, let alone when it's something random chosen by someone else - but it may be a form you get better at with practice.

Anyway, tonight I decided to start feeling out the territory, and wrote three speed poems with my flatmate - one of us picked a line out of a book, then we had 10 minutes to write the corresponding poem. I'd forgotten how grim it feels when, six or seven lines in, you realise the poem isn't going to work. I reckon one of the key skills to develop in writing speed poetry, is spending thirty seconds to a minute at the start, working out your tactics, and the broad shape of your take on the subject. Figure out a serviceable conceit, and writing the content is relatively straightforward. Plunge straight into your first few lines without knowing where you're going, and you'll find yourself rapidly buggered.

So, in any case, here are my first three practice laps. Feel free to take one of the titles and have a try yourself. I have a looong way to go:

Italians Are Still Into That

All the pigeon shit
that gives Garibaldi a Tippex toupee
while a maths teacher leaves
the gelateria licking a passion fruit
cornet and some semi-pro rower
with triceps like stirrups and deltoids
like a smooth new saddle single-skulls
east down the fishbelly green Arno;
in this funereal heat
the bins stink to high
horizons wobble with heat warp,
even the lizards can't be bothered,
and Garibaldi's black statue
thrums like an old stove
like a low note
or a pizza stone
and, apparently,
the Italians are still into that.

A Short Time Ago, A Tramp Came To Our Door

Now he is telling us
an elaborate story involving
inventing a new type of washing-up
liquid. I know he's lying
but I can't bear to send him
away because I want to hear
how it ends.

I think he may be winging it.
Beneath his grey felt hat
his good eye has begun to tick
as he fumbles for details.

Awkwardness blooms
like gunshot blood
as he founders around the part
where his research partner
double-crossed him.
'I thought you said his name
was Alan,' I interrupt,
'stop, stop.'
I rearrange his collar,
brush Monster Munch
crumbs off his tie.

One Might Expect These Scenes To Be Tedious

Dorothy doesn't feel like
going out to The Lamb tonight
because she's tired after
a bad day on front desk
and Oliver doesn't know how
he can be expected to have sex
with her when she won't watch
Shawshank Redemption and all
her clothes smell of rusks.

What if the TV jawed open
like a treasure chest,
exposing a golden airplane yoke,
or alien controls like
an insect's complicated mouthparts?
What if the lawn became a firelake
and we had to pilot the house
away from the apocalypse?
he says.

She says
that would be brilliant.

The 100 Poems In A Day Project

2009-11-17T00:49:00.008Z

I was chatting to poet, author and magma-arteried destroyer of worlds John Osborne this weekend, when he mentioned discovering that a poet we both knew had never heard of speed poems.

Well, here's a pathetically small potential controversy to rock my friends and the poetry world at large - up until a few minutes ago, I believed that I had invented speed poetry. When, back in uni, me and about a dozen other members of the UEA Creative Writing Society headed off to Herefordshire for a week long writing retreat, we wanted an exercise to do as a group. (I know, I know - my uni days were fookin mental) As a nerd I have had many incarnations - all of which, if I'm candid, I only feign shame over - one of which was a tabletop gaming nerd, and I remembered how, at the annual Games Workshop convention Golden Demon, the organisers tried to really get pulses racing by having a screamin' hot SPEED PAINTING COMPETITION, where contestants had to paint a lead model in an hour, and the best won. An hour seemed a bit long for a writing exercise, so I suggested we pick a word, all write a poem in ten minutes using that word, then read them out. That was my understanding of how speed poetry was born.

Two qualifiers: one, I may have misremembered. I'm pretty sure several of my friends would say that it just sort of bubbled up out of the memepool as a communal idea that we all sort of cottoned onto at the same time. Two, having Googled 'speed poetry', I've discovered - without, to be honest, much surprise - that many people have been writing various species of speed poetry for years. To be clear, I'm not claiming to have invented the concept - just that I was there when it appeared in my friendship group. It's not a particularly outlandish concept after all - bordering on obvious, in fact - so I'm more surprised when I encounter poets who've never heard of it.

In the years since then, me and a whole bunch of my writing friends have regularly got together for tea and speed poetry sessions. I reckon it works best with a group of four, although you can do it on your own if you like, or even with a dozen writers. Similarly, you can impose any arbitrary time limit, but we almost always go for ten minutes.

The way it works is: one person flicks through a book, a magazine, an instruction manual - anything with text - and picks out a few words or a phrase. Everyone writes it down as their title, the clock starts, and they have ten minutes to write a corresponding poem. At the end of the ten minutes, everybody reads out the poem they've written. Then you someone picks another phrase, and you start again. Ideally, you do a run of five poems, which comprises a good hour or so of reading and writing.

It's the reading out part that makes a lot of people squeamish. They imagine - for the most part, correctly - that the poems they produce will be crap. What's the point in doing a writing exercise that produces bad poetry almost by design? And why would you want to share that with others?

For me, writing speed poetry does a bunch of things. When I started out, I found the first few poems I wrote tended heavily towards parody. They were these mock highbrow pieces, usually closing with a line about someone farting, to break the mood. I quickly realised I was using (not terribly funny) humour as a defence - a way of letting my fellow writers know that I hadn't taken the exercise seriously or really tried my fullest, so they couldn't judge me on the quality of the poem. At the same time, I got to hear several of my peers faced with the same title, mostly producing poor poetry, but occasionally coming up with a great turn of phrase, or a strange, arresting opening, or a sudden vivid image amongst a load of turgid waffle. Hearing a range of interpretations of the same spur material, but also realising that they were writing bad poetry and the world hadn't ended, encouraged me to move away from piss-take poems, and to actually try to be good.

My first few poems after this shift were much worse. I had no idea what I was doing. With the sense of urgency created by the timer, I tried to bluff my way through, picking words I thought sounded like they belonged in a poem, constructing these vague, obfuscatory word parades that I hoped might seem artsy in that whole impressively recondite, emperor's new clothesish way. I'd always struggled to enjoy poetry, and had assumed that this pointed to a failure of intellect on my part, rather than any defect in the pieces I'd read.

But it never mattered that my poems were shit. Nobody cared. We'd read our attempts out, then move on to the next round. Each speed poetry session, I might hear between three and twenty new poems read out to me by their authors. Each one gave me hints on different ways of approaching the same subject matter or interpreting the same phrase - oh yes, I'd think, a poem can sound like found dialogue, or it can be like a little third-person short story with line breaks, or it can have a chorus like a song, or repeated lines, or take all its similes from a particular lexical field, or be presented as instructions, or just be a list of stuff, or be an open letter to somebody, or be in praise of something, or adopt the style of another type of text like a newspaper report. Slowly, I was building up a repetoire of options for when I got the next title. Often, I'd find myself semi-consciously plagiarising poems from the previous rounds, bastardising metaphors or techniques in an attempt to expand my range.

Doing speed poetry regularly helps abolish a fear of blank pages. You learn to just roll your fucking sleeves up and have a bash. You experiment, you try out lines, you muck about, you learn by doing. Weeks later, it's sometimes worthwhile to go through old sessions and see if there are any lines worth saving. If so, you can underline them, or even transfer them to a fresh page, ready to be used in worthy (i.e. non-crap) poems later on. Old speed poems certainly work great as sources of inspiration when you're stuck with writers' block - a sort of scrapheap of battered ends and odds you can traipse through, looking for promising salvage.

Another useful side-effect of speed poetry is that it gives you hints about poems you want to write, but don't realise yet. Sometimes, looking back over a session, you see a theme over several poems, despite their different titles, or you notice a stanza that doesn't fit with the rest of the poem. Often, this is a result of your butting your head against the arbitrary constraints imposed by the task, and these little bids for creative freedom can give you great pointers on what sort of pieces you might want to attempt 'properly' - that is, with more than ten minutes to spare.

One final positive thing about writing speed poetry is that it's fun. I know it's a gut-clasping cliché, but writing can be a lonely business, and having friends by your side as you claw ineffectually at the literary coalface makes the whole process slightly more bearable.

In any case, all of that is just a preface to what I wanted to say, which is that I've become a bit prissy about my writing of late, working on these big, unwieldy performance poems that sit around as ideas for months and months, then take me days to write, and weeks to learn, before I finally take them to an audience. I haven't kept a notebook for ages, and I never do writing exercises anymore. I find myself thinking that if I can't do a project perfectly, I'm better off abandoning it.

So I want to put that right. I accept I can't necessarily change my habits forever, but I'd like to go back to doing a bit of the old donkey work, you know, punching in, churning out crap, putting the creative machinery through its paces and limbering up so when an idea next strikes, I'll be firing on all cylinders and will be able to exploit it to its fullest advantage.

Anyway, I was thinking about speed poems, and I was wondering about doing a really long session, then I wondered about how long you could keep it going for, then I thought: a hundred? Could you really do a hundred in a day?

Well, the maths supports me. You don't have to spend 10 minutes on a speed poem. We've done 5 minute sessions, even a series of 1 minute speed poem sessions (which are kind of thrilling and terrifying, as far as writing poems goes - you've got no choice but to just stream text unedited from your brain to the pen). If someone started at 9am and kept going until 11pm, some 14 hours later, that gives a good 840 minutes for writing speed poems. Now, granted, if you took 10 minutes for each, that'd only be 84 (assuming no wee or food breaks, or technical malfunctions), but notch the time frame down to 8 minutes and you get 100 poems, plus a whole 5 minutes for pissing! By my reckoning, if you were to chuck in a few 1 minute poems and a few 5 minute ones, writing 100 poems in a day would be doable.

So, I'm going to.

I'm sure it's been done before. I'm not doing it out of any claim of it being an amazing technical feat or anything, just for the reasons above. It'll only take a day, it'll be an interesting writing experiment, and it'll force me to try to write 100 discrete creative pieces on the trot.

But I need titles.

So what I thought is this: readers of the Cone O' Tragedy, could you help a poet out and suggest some titles for poems I could write over my 100 Poem Day? As many as you like. Go nuts. They can be facetious or deadly serious, found text or quotations or even titles from your own work. I just need lots. You can post them as a comment on this blog, or email me at the address in the sidebar, or message me on Facebook. Whatever, I don't mind.

What I'm thinking is that, on the day (which might even be next week, depending on workload), I'll have all the titles in a Word file, and I'll work through them one at a time, writing a speed poem, then posting it online once I'm done, either up on this blog, or at a special 100 Poems In A Day Project blog that I'll link to from here.

And since one of my favourite things about speed poetry is the group aspect of it, I thought that I'd post each of the titles up on Twitter (yes, I've cracked... I'm officially an uncool late-adopter) as I'm about to write it, so anyone who wants to join in with a couple themselves can write along with me. You never know, it might get the old creative juices sluicing from your nostrils once more, and I daresay I'll post any alternate versions of poems written by other participants up on the blog afterwards.

Uh, one rule I've set myself though. Despite the involvement of Twitter, these won't be Twitter poems. Although some may be very short, all of them must be longer than 140 characters to qualify! Otherwise I'm basically setting myself the challenge of writing 100 text messages in a day, which seems rather less worthwhile.

Probably every poem I write will be total crap. I am sure the majority will be. But there may be some nice flourishes in there. Who knows? Maybe the range of titles will trigger an unexpected gem. Unlikely. However, I think it may be an interesting adventure into the grimy nuts and bolts of how a person goes about writing a poem. It may also play out like a slow exploded breakdown conducted over the internet. If everyone suggests titles relating to dog penises, maybe it will be the rather sad spectacle of someone writing 100 dreadful poems about canine genitalia. We can only speculate and pray to our respective gods for guidance.

So what do you think? Good idea? Bollocks idea? And if you'd like to see me take a run at it, please start suggesting titles! A whole bunch of titles each would be good! Hopefully some of you will even have a go at writing a few poems with me on the fateful day. Hmm. Is this wise? Oh psshaw! I toss it to the winds of fate. Start the fans please!

Found In Translation on Radio 4!

2009-11-16T19:50:00.005Z

Hey, hey, hey, if you tune into to Radio 4 this Thursday, 19th November, at 11:30am, you'll be able to hear a show about the Oulipo, where they chat to me and my fellow Aisle16ers Ross Sutherland and Joe Dunthorne about our Oulipo-inspired poems and our show about our attempt to infiltrate the Oulipo, Found In Translation.

For those of you who don't know, the Oulipo are a French experimental literature movement who played with imposing arbitrary constraints on language (like writing an entire novel without using the letter 'e', for example) as a way of breaking out of old habits and encouraging creativity. On discovering their work and techniques, we felt as if we were learning a whole new language. And, like anyone learning a new language, the first thing we wanted to do was be as rude as possible. 'Slap a gran's damp and tangy flaps!' we hollered, straining with mirth at our uncommon verve and ingenuity.

The show is apparently Radio 4's 'Podcast of the Week', so you should be able to download it afterwards, and it'll be on Listen Again for a week as well.

You, The Master Of Unlocking

2009-11-12T20:05:00.004Z

(via the ever-giving Metafilter)

I love video games, and, as some of you may know, I've written dialogue for games too, as well as helping cast and direct voice actors. So, you know, I get a little piqued when game companies release titles with crappy dialogue. What's the point of pouring all that time and energy into making a game fun and visually arresting, then doing a really shitty, scrappy job on the script?

Not all of these are examples of bad acting - some are abysmally scripted, and some are the result of poor directing. I think even Laurence Olivier would struggle to deliver 'you, the master of unlocking' convincingly. Also, video game actors tend to record all their dialogue separately, reading off big Excel spreadsheets with every instance of speech in a big list, without context. They need a director on hand to give them their feed lines and explain what's going on in the game when they're saying it, to take account of the multiple possible ways they might choose to inflect a line, and the different meanings each choice might convey. I'm not calling for weeks of pseudy, brow-scrunching dramaturgy or video game character method actors, just basic competence please.

I played Fable 2 last week, putting aside some insane choices with regard to game mechanics that make it considerably worse than the original (you can't die, making every battle virtually without consequence, plus they've taken away the Will gauge from Fable, meaning it becomes just another form of projectile attack, and you just spaz on the cast button instead of using strategy) the voice acting is as crappy as ever. Well, that is to say, Zoe Wanamaker and Stephen Fry's characters are actually done really well - but they're noticably better than every other bit of speech in the game, which veers between hammy at best, and, at worst, completely incompetent. In the original, I was absolutely gobsmacked at how bad the voice acting was for Maze, the Guild wizard - totally flat, like a voiceover for an aeroplane safety video, or someone selling biscuits. Most of the rest of the incidental voice acting for villagers and guards was merely irritating and hammy. Grr. Why build a game around narrative and trying to engross people in a story, then do such a shitty job of writing and recording dialogue? YOU SILLY SAUSAGES!! I've pretty much lost faith in the Fable franchise now, which is a shame, because - despite its feeble length and duff script - I found lots to enjoy in the first one, including a really satisfying battle mechanic that made switching between long-range sniping, magical zapping and melee combat easy and fun, and plenty of choice in how to approach battles. The 'Boast' system was great too. Fable 2 somehow manages to take the increased capabilities of the Xbox 360 and the lessons of the original, and come up with something much worse. Boo.

Anyway, I'm ranting now. I'll go and play Portal or something to calm myself down.

Christmas Is Coming

2009-11-11T23:38:00.005Z

Hey look, Christmas is just around the corner. If you're stuck for a present for that frustrated writer in your family, or that artsy depressive, or that smug schadenfreude-loving accountant, then you could do a lot worse than snapping up a copy of We Can't All Be Astronauts, my award-winning book about desperately wanting to become a bestselling author, and being jealous of all my mates. It's dead cheap, you'd be helping to boost my sales, and if you want me to sign it to make it seem all fancy-like just drop me an email. So yeah, don't hold back - solve all your gift dilemmas and give me a merry Christmas simultaneously!

Pieces Of Me

2009-11-08T19:52:00.006Z

So 'Cone O' Tragedy' ticks just about every 'Don't' in the list of bad blog design. Whenever I put up another piece about some obscure arcade game and what I think about it, I alienate most of my artsy, poetic audience. Whenever I write about my opinions on the UK performance poetry scene, everyone who reads the video game stuff yawns and switches off. Even amongst my miniscule audience, I ensure there's something to bore everyone.

But it's inefficient, alienating one demographic at a time. So here's a little something that will alienate everyone simultaneously. I think I'm probably oversharing (on multiple levels) but I've written it now, so it seems a shame not to post it. Uh, so anyway. I just wanted to warn you.

It's called a speculum, and it's a little tapered metal thing. The article on the website said it was about 4cm in diameter, but I reckon it was closer to 3cm. It's attached to this long transparent plastic hose, and the far end of the hose connects to a white box a bit like a shower control panel, with a dial and buttons, and the other end of the hose - the speculum end - gets daubed in lube, then pushed up your anus. Well, not your anus, obviously. My anus.

A couple of weekends ago, I went for colonic irrigation - or colonic hydrotherapy, as most practitioners now call it. For those of you who don't know, it involves having a hose shoved up your bum, then water pumped into your bowels. Our appointment was at nine o'clock on Saturday morning. I say 'our', because me and my girlfriend went to have a session together. You know, like normal couples do.

On the drive there we tossed a coin to decide what order we'd go in. She won the toss and elected to go first. We drove down a road plastered with wet autumn leaves that had collected in big drifts in the gutters and got mashed to mulch under car tyres, and I thought about mashed up food and the insides of my colon. My girlfriend started slowing down as we came to a line of detached suburban houses, set back from the road. She wasn't sure she could remember the exact number, so we peered through the rain-streaked windscreen between squeaks of the wipers, trying to figure out which house looked like it might belong to a professional bum-cleaner.

'What will you do if it's just a fat bloke in a stained vest, smoking a fag and holding a bit of pipe?' said my girlfriend.

I laughed, a little hysterically, and gripped the door handle. 'Are you sure this place is okay?'

'I don't know.'

'Don't you? Why did you choose it?'

'It was the only one I could find in Norwich.' My girlfriend saw my fraught expression and added, 'She seemed really nice in the email. She gave us a list of things we had to do in preparation. I printed it out but I think I must have left it at work. God knows what my colleagues are going to think if they find it.'

'That you're going for colonic irrigation?'

'Oh, I've told them already. I think this one is the place.' She swung the car into an unremarkable driveway and the tyres crunched on pea shingle as we pulled up.

I took a deep breath. 'Well, here goes.'

We walked round to a door at the side and rang the doorbell. From inside, we could hear frenzied barking. I could feel my chest tightening. I wasn't sure what I was going to say if someone answered the door and gave us both a blank look.

The door was opened by a healthy-looking, normal-looking lady with short hair and a wide smile. 'Hi,' she said. 'You're here for the hydrotherapy?'

Her soft tones and gentle manner suggested she knew how nervous we were. We were led into a converted kitchen area and invited to take a seat. On the side of the room by the door were shelves laden with homeopathic tinctures in big brown glass bottles, and on the opposite side was a large treatment table and the aforementioned hose and control unit, which was made by Mira, the company that made my parents' shower. I really like a good power shower, and I reckon Mira are a great manufacturer, so I tried to cling to that mundane detail as the lady started asking us a short questionnaire about our dietary habits and bowel movements.

'Now you two are friends, but you're not together?' she said.

Me and my girlfriend looked at each other. 'No,' she said, 'we're together.'

'Oh, okay,' said the woman. 'So you're comfortable with answering some personal questions?'

We both nodded. I could feel myself beginning to blush.

My girlfriend went first. While she got up onto the table and rolled onto her side, I picked up a copy of Reader's Digest and pointedly engrossed myself in an article about a woman and her boyfriend who got stranded on an island populated by komodo dragons. The woman walked over to a portable CD player.

'Okay,' she said. 'I'm just going to put on some chill out music.'

As the kitchen filled with the strains of Morcheeba, I read about how the bacteria coating komodo dragons' fangs mean a single bite is usually fatal, so they follow wounded prey, waiting for them to die, and the lady gave my girlfriend a rectal examination and asked if there had been any blood in her stools. The whole treatment took about 40 minutes, during which time I kept my head buried in reading material.

After my girlfriend had been unplugged and had popped to the adjacent loo, it was my turn.

The woman handed me a powder blue towel. 'If you just go through into the loo and pop off your bottoms, then we can get started.'

I went into the bathroom, where there was a loo and a set of electronic scales and a sink and lots of toilet rolls. As I undid my belt and dropped my trousers, I reflected on the fact that I was paying a stranger to poke a lubed finger up my bum then pump me full of water. I hoped she didn't think I was doing it as a weird sex thing.

I left my trousers and boxer shorts puddled on the floor and emerged wrapped in the towel. I climbed up onto the padded treatment table.

'If you just want to move the towel round so it's open at the back,' said the lady, 'then roll over onto your side.' I shuffled the towel round a little awkwardly, then rolled over, away from her, and found myself staring into a large glass fishbowl. I concentrated on distorted goldfish as the woman told me to relax, 'this may feel a little uncomfortable at first.'

It felt a lot uncomfortable. She later told me that 'blokes seem to find it harder than girls, because...' she turned to my girlfriend for confirmation, 'I guess girls are more used to, y'know... medical procedures.' I think what she really wanted to say was 'having large cylindrical objects inserted into them', and, I must concede, the speculum is, to date, the largest thing I've ever knowingly had inserted into my anus. About 3cm in diameter and smeared in lube, it held my sphincter open as I rolled over onto my back. It was very cold, and hurt, as if someone were using thumb and forefinger to forcibly peel open my ringpiece.

'Okay, now I'm going to turn the water on,' said the lady in a clear, even tone. 'If you want to stop at any time, just let me know, but you'll have to give me a minute or two while I pump it all out.' She reached up to the control unit, pressed a button and turned the dial. She looked down at me, smiling. 'Can you feel it?'

At first I wasn't sure, then I felt a cold, trickly sensation. 'It's quite a weird feeling at first,' she said. 'Like you really need to go, then you don't again.'

This was true. I felt suddenly bloated and uncomfortable, like when I wake up the morning after a phaal and realise I've got about thirty seconds to get to the bathroom before the bumbay doors swing open and decorate my bed in fragrant ochres and chestnuts.

The lady asked me to move my towel down a little, and began massaging to the left of my stomach. 'This is the last part of your intestines, before it comes out, so if there's any food waiting it'll be here,' she said, tapping with her fingers the way the chest specialist did once to get phlegm off my lungs.

'Tim Clare?' my girlfriend called from her chair on the other side of the kitchen. 'Is it okay?' I could hear the glee in her voice.

'Yeah,' I grunted, as the tide reversed and water began sluicing back out of me into the transparent hose. There was a little round mirror on an articulated arm positioned to allow me to watch shit floating out of my bum, and I made a point of not looking at.

'It feels weird, doesn't it?'

'Yeah.'

'Just try to relax as much as possible,' said the lady.

As someone who occasionally gets performance anxiety pissing at public urinals, and has to wait until the bloke next to him has left before he can start to pee, I found it especially hard to relax while every physical cue was telling me that I was copiously shitting myself flat on my back in a stranger's kitchen. For all our supposed animal instincts, socialisation seems just as deeply hardwired into us, and as much as I told my body it was okay, my sphincter's clench reflex gripped that speculum like a bulldog with a chew toy, tenaciously trying to hold in the torrent of liquid pouring from my gaping backside.

Now, if you're still reading at this stage, you may - quite reasonably - be wondering, why was I doing this? Why did I not only consent to have a large object pushed up my arse, but pay for it, and take my girlfriend along? And perhaps the only answer you can come up with is that it was probably a weird sex thing.

Okay. I know how it looks, but it was not a weird sex thing. I think, maybe, to explain, I have to talk about the punts.

Once, I was sitting outside The Anchor pub in Cambridge, having a drink with my girlfriend. It was a sunny day, and the river was crammed with people punting. There were so many punts that there was barely enough room for them to get past each other. It was hot, and people were getting impatient, and the boats were so gridlocked I thought someone could probably use them as a bridge to run from one bank to the other, hopping from punt to punt like a middle-class pirate.

I traced three possible routes from where I was sitting to the opposite bank. I turned to my girlfriend with a big grin.

'I reckon I could run from here to the other bank,' I said. I'd had a pint and a half of Guinness, and the sun had left me a little lightheaded, and my girlfriend had a beautiful smile. 'I'm going to do it.'

I expected her to look worried and tell me not to, and then I'd engage in some brinkmanship for a bit, pretending I was really planning on doing it, and she'd giggle and tell me to stop it, and at last I'd back down, then we'd both laugh about it and I'd seem sexy and impulsive without actually having to do anything.

Instead, she said: 'Yeah! Do it!'

'I will!'

'Go on.'

I stuck my head through under the rope between our table and the water's edge. I looked at all the punts bunched together. The seats were covered with tartan blankets, black brollies tucked down the side. In one of the punts, a panting bulldog sat at the stern. In another, a little Japanese boy with a blue patch over one of his spectacle lenses pointed at the dog and squealed with delight.

I glanced back at my girlfriend. She was watching with excited anticipation. She really believed I was going to do it.

I'm going to do it, I thought.

'I'm going to do it,' I said.

'Do it,' she said.

I looked back at the river. One of the boats in the middle, piloted by a swarthy guy in a black vest with curlicued bramble tattoos across his biceps, was starting to break through the pack. There were lots of parents with young children.

If I run across their boats, they will think I'm stupid and rude, I thought.

'Right,' I said, moving as if to get up from my seat with what I hoped looked like sexily impulsive intent. I hoped my girlfriend would believe that I was serious, and finally tell me not to, so I could back down without looking like a fraud. I paused. She didn't say anything. I imagined myself clattering across the punt with the smiling German tourists in it, souring their day out. I pictured the old lady in the cotton blouse and the powder blue sunhat looking upset as I thumped through her boat with my big drunk feet. I imagined her returning home feeling a little less safe, a little less optimistic, because of the reckless young bell-end with a poor capacity for judging the mood.

The big-armed guy pushed hard with his pole, and his punt, containing an attractive blond girl, prowed loose into open water. The other boats began to drift apart. I sat back in my chair.

'I don't think it's possible now,' I said.

'Yes it is,' said my girlfriend.

I looked at the remaining punts. It obviously was.

'Nah,' I said, shrugging. 'I left it too late. I should've gone when I first said.'

My girlfriend looked disappointed. I took a sip of warm Guinness, and the world felt smaller.

So a month or so later when, after a reading an online article about a journalist who went to an intensive detox resort in Thailand where people shat out marbles and purple slime and chunks of raw steak into colanders, we started trading jokes about how we should go to have colonic irrigation as a couple, and wouldn't that be funny, and about how people would probably think it was a weird sex thing, and about what we thought might come out, I suppose I didn't want to back down. I didn't want to feel that tickle of nerves and excitement about getting into something unwise, only to put on my dull, grown-up face and say 'No, no, that's something I'd never do really.' I didn't want the joke to be over. Not even when she emailed me saying she'd found a place that actually did colonic irrigation. Not even when she suggested booking in as a couple. I thought, this is stupid. I thought, this will end in pain. I was, frankly, terrified. But it made me feel excited. It felt like something new and strange was going to come into my life. It made me feel I had the power to choose new things, to create my own future. And I didn't want that feeling to stop.

Also, I thought it might make me feel good. I was worried about my crap diet, and I'd read about people doing it and feeling pounds lighter and more energetic than they had in years. I'd started going to saunas a couple of months earlier, and they made me feel absolutely euphoric.

We met at a sauna evening. I'd just done a stand-up gig in Norwich. It had gone much better than I'd expected, and my friends Yanny and Molly said they were off to have a sauna. They suggested I come along. I said I couldn't. I had to get the train back to Cambridge, I had work to do, I hadn't brought a change of clothes with me, if I stayed I'd have to sleep on a sleeping bag on John and Molly's floor and I wouldn't get a decent night's sleep so I'd be knackered the next day, I hadn't been invited so it might be weird my turning up... I had lots of good reasons not go. But I was high from the gig, and I thought fuck it, and I went anyway. And I met someone, and I fell in love.

Not so long afterwards, I mentioned to my new girlfriend how I hadn't been on holiday in years, and how great it would be to just pick somewhere without thinking about it and go there.

'Let's do it!' she said.

I'd never been on holiday with someone I was going out with before. I'd never spent that long with just one person ever. We hadn't been going out very long. I thought, this is stupid. I thought, this will end in pain. I was, frankly, terrified. But it made me feel excited. It felt like something new and strange was going to come into my life. It made me feel I had the power to choose new things, to create my own future. And I didn't want that feeling to stop.

Love, for me, is like this beautiful dream-house. Every time I've moved in, it's seemed wonderful for a while, then suddenly one of the rooms has turned into one of those slow deathtraps from Saw, where to get free I've got to smash my own bollocks with a hammer otherwise a harpoon will jaw my ribcage apart and wrench my heart out, and then it turns out the trap's rigged and I get my balls smashed and my heart ripped out anyway. But then, after a few months, maybe longer, I find myself standing outside the house again, admiring the paintwork, remembering the time I spent there, and it looks so inviting, and I think, maybe this time it'll be different. Maybe this time, there'll be no buzzsaw deathmaze. And I go back in.

Maybe there can be empowerment in masochism. I guess I do things that conventional wisdom says are stupid, things I know will probably hurt, because at some level, it's my way of saying fuck you to a godless universe and those self-indulgent feelings of sucking nihilism that come a-creeping into my bedroom when the lights go out and I find myself staring up at the cracks in the ceiling, wishing I could transform into some wishy-washy religious fruitjob rather than confront the sledgehammer reality of pragmatic atheism.

After the lady unplugged me, I waddled to the bathroom. 'You may find you have a bit still to come out,' she said. 'Men tend to be a bit more tense than women, so you might have been holding it in.'

She wasn't kidding. The instant I'd locked the door and sat down on the toilet, I passed what felt like several basinsful of frothy brown fluid, and instantly felt two stone lighter. I emerged feeling bouncy and relieved.

I doubt I would ever do it again. I found it unpleasant throughout, my bum hurt for days afterwards (the only time I glanced at the mirror I swore I saw a dark trail of blood, and immediately looked away, my heart racing), and I paid sixty quid for the privilege. I'm talking about the colonic irrigation of course, not the last-minute holiday with my girlfriend, which turned out to be one of the most romantic, happiest times I've ever experienced.

Afterwards, as we drove home, my girlfriend expressed disappointment that both our sessions had produced nothing in the 'foreign objects' box on our report forms. Then she turned to me and said, 'You don't think she thought it was some kind of weird sex thing, do you?'

Those of you who know me (and, after this blog post, I suspect now you all feel you know me a little too well) know I find this world, and life, pretty scary. So why, on top of that, do I do things that scare the shit out of me?

I don't know. To be free of shit?

Fresh Earfood - Available Now!

2009-10-22T10:47:00.003+01:00

I've put two new songs up on my Myspace page, which you can listen to if you want - 'Think Of England' and 'The Other Shoe'. Just click here. I'm afraid the recording quality is a bit scrappy (although better than my previous efforts), and it's clear at several key points that my reach exceeds my grasp vocals-wise, but if you can grimace and bear it through the caterwauling then why not check them out and let me know what you think.

I'm pretty pleased with the lyrics I came up with for 'Think Of England' - it's one of the few pieces I've written where it ended up coming out exactly how I'd conceived it, without sort of morphing or collapsing on the journey - but I always feel slightly fraudulent writing songs. I suppose I've come to terms with calling myself a 'poet', an 'author' and a 'writer', but 'musician' still sounds like a ridiculous leap, despite the fact I play songs to live audiences pretty much every week. Hopefully the live aspect keeps my feet on the ground a bit. I like to think that if every crowd I played to gradually lost the will to live each time I performed a uke song, I'd notice and phase them out of my set (the songs, not the crowd)... unless, of course, I'm so dazzling and charismatic that all concerns over quality of material get overridden, and what looks like positive feedback is just them all gazing, enraptured, at my massive visage.

So yeah, basically what I'm saying is I've done some stuff even I'm ambivalent about, yet I've chosen to display it to the world anyway. Oversharing, eh? It's the modern disease, I suppose.

Local Boys Done Vid

2009-10-21T21:36:00.005+01:00

So yeah, those of you who came to the Local Boys Done Good edition of HOMEWORK will remember we did a show all about our hometowns. Well, guess what? If you missed it or just forgot it or loved it so much that you want to be locked in a cell with it projected onto your clammy delighted face 24-7 then fortune has shined upon you, friend, because it's up on Youtube. BOOM:

The more eagle-eyed, beagle-nosed and smeagle-fingered amongst you may have noticed a distinct absence of Tim-ness in this video collection. Well, that's cos when it came to doing my bit I heinously overran, plinking and a-plonking on my uke and waffling, and ended up going to about 23 mins or something insano. I think we all agreed it didn't really work as a conclusion, well-intentioned though it was, so rather than cram it in there, I'm rewriting my section for when we continue to develop the show next year. It'll be all polished up with a brand spanking new ending, extra bits, slicker delivery, and a slightly more aged, paunchier cast. On the plus side, this means we haven't given everything away online, so if you come to see us, you'll find out how it all ends, what it all meant, and hear me playing the ukulele. We're performing it at Norwich Arts Centre on Monday 8th February, so pen that monster in your diaries, yo. Hope you enjoy these flicks. If you do, commenting on them and posting them somewheres else like your blog or your Facebook wall would be a super-helpful indulgence. Gotta spread the word. Peace out.

Homework Is Due

2009-10-21T00:22:00.003+01:00

So yeah, had a faboo weekend over in Liverpool at the Bluecoat, doing some challenging and fun gigs and getting to soak up some culture. I really enjoyed doing the Revolutions In Form gig on the Sunday, which featured live doodles, a poem passed Chinese Whispers style through the whole audience, performance art, music and film. I realise I'm not a very credible advocate for a gig I was part of, and I don't usually like bigging up gigs I liked anyway, because it makes me sound like an awful fawning luvvie, but I thought it was a really interesting show. 'Performance art' especially gets a bad rap as a blanket term, but at its best it just means someone doing something cool and fascinating live.

Um, so next Wednesday, the 28th of October, you should come to the final Homework of the season. Aisle16 will be performing The 9½ Commandments Of Aisle16. Okay, here's the pitch:

'When the British Council approached stand-up poetry collective Aisle16 wanting to commission a brand new live literature show for a "live, appreciative audience", they jumped at the chance. After doing a poetry tour of Britain’s motorway service stations and becoming the world’s first poetry boyband, as well as their regular appearances at festivals such as Glastonbury and Latitude, they were used to taking verse to new audiences. But there was a catch.

The show would be at the 2nd Annual Children’s Book Festival in Athens – and the "live, appreciative audience" would be composed entirely of Greek 7-year-olds, who hardly spoke any English at all. Never ones to shy away from a challenge – or money – Aisle16 set about trying to write a new poetry show that could be understood by people who barely speak the language.

The result is The 9½ Commandments Of Aisle16 – a stand-up poetry show featuring fat bullies, God’s rejected fish prototypes, and a portrait of the yeti as a young man."

So that'll be Chris Hicks, Luke Wright (interviewed here), Ross Sutherland (interviewed here), and Joel Stickley (interviewed here). There'll also be supporting performances of new material from me, Joe Dunthorne and John Osborne. Which means it's going to be that hella rare equinox where all seven members of Aisle16 are in the same place, at the same time, performing at the same gig. I know. You're correct to water your underpants in entrancement and terror. It will doubtless be a dead good finale to a super-successful season of Homework. Come, imbibe heartily with us as we say adios to our darling literary cabaret night for another year. And gawd bless the Arts Council for supporting our efforts. We've done our best to make it memorable, and give our audiences something more interesting than just blokes chuntering on in a vaguely artsy way.

Oh, and hey - you ought to check out the new online ventures from two of our members. Joel Stickley has started a blog called How To Write Badly Well. Partly based on his experience as a creative writing tutor, each short lesson builds up into a step-by-step guide on how to excel in composing dreadful prose. He claims he's going to update every Friday. Even though this seems a modest schedule, from experience I expect it will prove to be a SORDID LIE. Still, you should read it because it is well-wrought and funny. As someone who does a bit of the old creative writing tutoring from time to time, I enjoyed a few recognition laughs, along with a few twinges at stylistic gaffes I'd committed myself.

Also, Ross Sutherland has a new website up, here. Lots of poems, vids, links, gig dates, etc. I reckon 'The End Of Our Marriage' is particularly good.

In other news, after a weekend of appalling eating habits in Liverpool, including two takeaway pizzas and two meals at McDonalds culminating in a McGangbang (a double cheeseburger with a chicken mayo shoved in-between them... I KNOW) I am in the midst of a week of detox. No alcohol, no nicotine, no caffeine, no meat, no dairy, no sweets, no crisps. Steering away from unrefined carbs and stuff that's high on the glycemic index as much as possible. Losing Diet Coke feels like the cruellest blow thus far, which I suppose only goes to prove how much of an addle-pated addict I am. Yesterday I spent the whole day feeling like absolute crap, with a pounding headache. Today, I feel a bit better, albeit enfeebled. It's only until Saturday morning, anyhow, then I get to go right back to stuffing hot hogsflesh into my slavering unclean craw.

Mercy Me

2009-10-17T01:22:00.004+01:00

So, I'm in the midst of a rather pleasant weekend in Liverpool, doing a bunch of gigs at the Bluecoat. On Friday evening, I got to host an evening with Vic Reeves, where we introduced a sold-out crowd to his new book, Vic Reeves' Vast Book Of World Knowledge. As you can probably imagine, I was absolutely essential to keeping the otherwise meek and audience-shy Senor Reeves buoyed up and confident over the course of the show. A well-deserved pat on the back and an egg sarnie for me.

If you're around Liverpool and its environs, Saturday 17th sees me and Ross Sutherland (who I interviewed here) doing our show Infinite Lives, about retreating from the shitty, complicated miasma of real life into the clearly defined score tables and unlimited retries of video games. Also we do poems and some music. It's free, in the Bluecoat bar, so come, get soused, and appreciate us with your massive praise-beaming faces. On Sunday the 18th, me, Ross and Nathan Jones (who I interviewed here) plus a whole host of other musicians and artists are doing a gig at the Bluecoat called Revolutions In Form. There'll be a slew of non-wanky experiments in being interesting and entertaining with spoken word and its many mutant cousins - I can't speak for the other artists, but for my part, I'll be doing a brand new performance poem and a brand new uke piece. Hopefully I won't rot the ears off my audience through sheer incompetence. It starts at 8pm. If you're in Liverpool, come, or I'll silently resent you.

Finally, Issue 9 of Mercy's online magazine Flatline has just come out. Click here to read it. On page 6 you can read a new poem from me - I hate to be a gushy pranny but I love the illustration, done by a chap called Kenn Goodall. I'm proper chuffed with it. I think it's wonderful, and I'm usually a fussy twat. Go have a look, and let me know what you think.

Manic Pixie Dream Girl

2009-10-15T23:32:00.008+01:00

Back at the beginning of 2007, the Onion AV Club's Nathan Rabin coined the term 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl', to describe the archetype represented by Kirsten Dunst's character in the movie Elizabethtown: 'Dunst embodies a character type I like to call The Manic Pixie Dream Girl (see Natalie Portman in Garden State for another prime example). The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.'

In the AV Club's follow-up article listing 16 films featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, they write: 'the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She's on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness.'

So the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a chauvinistic confection invented by sad sack late-twenties/early-thirties screenwriters pining for some chipper, twinkle-eyed fitty to come airlift them out of their self-brewed mires of despondency, thus sparing them the uncomfortable effort of personal responsibility - a sexy, naughty Mary Poppins to their bawling menchildren (is that the correct plural of 'manchild'? I'm never sure).

A sexist fantasy whose only purpose is to please a 'brooding arty loser' with mild depressive tendencies? Hmm... Sounds like my type of girl! But I'm inclined to agree with the Onion AV Club that the ladies who most embody the classic conception of this archetype are crappy, and not hot at all. As Jessica at Jezebel put it: 'Honestly? Anyone who telegraphs their so-called weirdness so outlandishly is not actually weird, they're merely quirky enough to be vaguely interesting without having their own thing going on. They're completely mainstream but have one really big tattoo, or occasionally sing really loud in the shower!' Amen, sister.

I'd like to reclaim the term. After years of wondering whether I have a 'type' and drawing a blank, I think I've cracked it. I like weird girls. Not 'weird' in the 'look-at-me-aren't-I-alternative' sense flagged by Jezebel above - to me, a shit dress sense and a clutch of ill-judged facial piercings, or a shrieking, ear-splintering laugh on a hair-trigger just suggest an unfortunate yearning for attention. I mean 'weird' as in 'a bit poorly in the head'. I don't mean 'mental' as in 'one time I spat off a bridge'. I mean 'mental' as in 'one time I jumped off a bridge'.

I'm not after some superficial ditz who can affect a kind of glorious infatuation with the state of being alive just because she's pretty and middle class and living in the decadent West while all over the world children die of disease, war and starvation. I want a girl who'll punch me, and mean it.

Basically I want the Ghost Of Christmas Present out of Scrooged (about 1:35):

That's my kind of Manic Pixie Dream Girl - a kind of unpredictable screaming id-dervish. Also, that bit where she chins him with the toaster (just after 2:00) is hot.

That might seem a bit fucked-up and gross but isn't that how all lovey-dovey couples look to outsiders? Isn't there a reason why we describe people as being 'madly' in love? And so many of us, we get stung and we get stung and we get stung - worse than stung, we get fucking eviscerated on the serrated horns of this huge, snorting love beast and yet, as soon as we've patched up the hole in our chest, we take up our spears and we head out hunting again. In spite of all our experience, in spite of everything we've learned, in spite of our certain knowledge that anyone we come to care about will be taken from us, if not by acrimonious divorce or apathetic abandonment then by death, to which we are all subject, in spite of all of that, we still choose to make ourselves vulnerable, and love. If that's not mental illness of the fiercest stripe, I don't know what is.

Manic Pixie Dream Girl
When you’re in love
Everything is a message
From the sun beaming brilliant and bronze in the sky
To the wind through a cornfield
A woodpigeon’s cry
The world seems exotic, so complex and new
All the bands on the radio sing just for you

When you’re insane
Everything is a message
From the fluorescent runes that dissolve at your touch
To the backwards Latin whispers
Rising out of your crotch
Amor et melle et felle est fecundissmismus
The world seems exotic, so complex and new
All the bands on the radio sing orders to assassinate Delia Smith just for you

Manic Pixie Dream Girl
For so long I’ve felt you approaching
Like the low thrum of a zeppelin fleet
Shadows rolling over the city of my heart
To a stark snare drumbeat

Magical Schizoid Munchkin Chick
You are the ripples in my water glass
The blips on my motion sensor
My seismograph’s spazzing needle
And as the printout settles in slow, pleated cascades on the floor
I know you’re coming
You’re coming
You’re coming

Floridly Psychotic Faery Queen
So horridly erotic! Where the hell have you been?
Paranoid Delusional Frenetic Elf Strumpet
O Ludicrous Hyperkinetic Gelfling Crumpet!

After we’ve kissed, I’ll just ask you to hold me
And I know you exist... cos the microwave told me
See troubles we had then were just teething pains
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains

Let’s have slow hugs and highwire fucks
Chase butterflies off viaducts
Then plug our bums with jelly tots
And ride on roofs of fire trucks
To burning buildings where
We’ll make out while the flames lick higher, sucks
For all those people trapped inside
Life’s tough
So let’s just try our luck

Till my fingers stink like sprats in brine
And your breath pongs of Cheetos
Let’s tie the knot in Vegas
Amongst brothels, bars and freakshows
With a bridal veil of tinfoil
And a skinful of Mojitos
We got peckers made of marzipan...
But you don’t have to eat those

O I know your looks have faded
And my gut’s a little flabby
And your knives are rubber-bladed
Just in case you’re feeling stabby
So you keep the windows shaded
And a close eye on the tabby
When the aliens invaded
He was singing in Punjabi

Go wild baby!
Hump that marrow!
You can be the devil’s child
And I’ll be Mia Farrow
Cos giving birth to you my dear
Would be such sweet sweet sorrow
Look! I can see her head!
Oooh! That’s gonna hurt tomorrow!

I’ll freestyle like a gabba star
While we smile in the abattoir
Snog to blood-drenched bleats and yelps
You don’t have to be mad to wank here –
But it helps!

And we won’t agree on everything
I mean
We can’t both be Jesus, now can we?
But I forgive you

Cos I love your blokish gobbing
Though I watch you through my fingers
And your choked, staccato sobbing
While receiving cunnilingus
I need ice to rest my knob in
But the fire inside still lingers
These sweet feelings aren’t like bees,
Please see, they won’t die if they sting us

What’s crazier than love
In all this shit and piss and pain?
Where magic’s just another
Drab disorder of the brain

I know we shouldn’t even start
I know one day you’ll break my hand
Accidentally
Sort of
And what do I need both eyes for anyway?
You can’t judge depth just by looking

They say truth’s beauty. Absurd! So screw sanity!
We’ll go down like the Hindenburg – o the humanity!
Waking life was always crappy
So I s’pose I must be dreaming
My friends ask me: Are you happy?
But I can’t hear for all the screaming

Want me to blend in? Hand me the blender!
Let’s all go on a normality bender!
Okay, okay, me first.
Here’s my impression of a normal person:
Yeah, it’s been chaos round ours, as per.
Washing machine broke down again.
Ford Galaxy broke down again.
Gloria broke down again.
Third time in a month.
Third time in a fortnight.
Third time since Pilates.
Flooded the utility room.
Leaked oil all over the pea shingle.
Pissed the ethnic rug.
Called out the plumber,
The mechanic,
The brain mender,
You know what was wrong?
Little washer,
Valve
Wedding ring
Only that big.
Costs about 50p.
Costs about 50p.
Cost about three grand and a week in Kefalonia.
Hate to think how much we’ve spent on repairs
A hundred?
Thousand?
15 years of grim-faced stoicism?
Gets to the stage where you think, is it worth it?
Is it worth it?
Is it worth it?

If adventure’s changing channels,
Lazy nights on the settee,
And they say I’m fucking crazy –
I say crazy’s fucking me
If a brand new set of flannels’
Your idea of being free
Then I may be fucking crazy
Maybe crazy’s fucking me
O sweet crazy, you amaze me
I’d forgotten how to see
And of course I’m fucking crazy
Because crazy’s fucking me
Grind the mountains down to gravel,
Burn the woods and boil the sea
Cos it’s true, I’m fucking crazy,
Yeah, but crazy’s fucking me

Games With Stupid Names - #9: Mustache Boy

2009-10-13T12:58:00.006+01:00

Pity the swollen ranks of crap comedy superheroes - every Goitreman and Ochre Bagpiper, each Super Wafter and Captain Brasso, even The Amazing Mr Narcolepsy - and their attempts to amuse by being mediocre. They are all but wisps of bumfluff against the majesty that is Mustache Boy. Mustache Boy is a vaguely Einsteinish hirsute child. That's it. Some unpleasant hormonal disorder meant he grew a tache before puberty. That's the sum of his powers.

His moustache plays no part in the game mechanics (which involve trundling round a maze, painting blocks with your feet, Q-Bert style, while jumping over baddies) whatsoever. Best of all, he wears a space helmet the whole time, so his facial hair isn't even visible. It's like having a hero called Technicolour Revolving Cornea Chap then always portraying him in a massive pair of reflective cop shades.

The only nod to his hidden tache is the fact that, if you collect the letters to spell 'MUSTACHE', you get an extra life and skip to the next stage. Notice the disturbing subliminal commands positioned around the maze. After a few minutes play, they make you kind of, uh, woozy. Wait... maybe the protagonist isn't in the game at all! Maybe I'm Mustache Boy. KILL... KILL... KILL...

Masquerade

2009-10-12T23:19:00.002+01:00

Masquerade
‘He goes by many names –
Loki, God of mischief,
Mara, the deceiver.
In the dark arts of misdirection and illusion
He is peerless,’
Says Cecil.
I am looking at a green electricity junction box
Concreted into the ground.
Cecil senses my confusion.

His beam widens
Like an interdimensional rift.

Little Gods

2009-10-11T20:04:00.008+01:00

Little Gods
Strange, omniscient Maxine watches
A couple conceive on the backseat of a Yatsuki Gremlin
Listens to the creak of leather upholstery and ancient suspension
And the hushed whoosh of a snowstorm raging outside the car
While, seventy years later,
Their great grandson thumbs cartridges like little lipsticks
Into a magazine
Puts the muzzle to his throbbing temple
And waits for the 12:15
To crescendo past his pokey tenement
Muffling the shot

She could save him
Make the trigger stick
Delay the train till he loses his nerve
Clanking the handgun down on the folding table
Then slinking back to his foldout bed
She could miracle the cartridges to Pez bricks
Even Lazarus his dead boyfriend
Back out of the grave mouth,
Dewormed and panting bashful apologies
But the fact is, She likes symmetry

When the bullet ruptures
His brain’s pleasure centre
She sees his ancestor hit orgasm
And a nodding dog on the car’s parcel shelf
Bops its head in mute approval

It’s not my place to judge
I’m just a facilitator

Pablo likes to be capricious
I write this in His notes
He appears to one of His most ardent followers
As a kind of gubbling blancmange
O loyal subject, the blancmange intones,
Ask of Me a boon, that I may grant it.
The follower prostrates, and requests wisdom.
No, says Pablo, and vanishes in a blast of flatulence.
‘That was an interesting exchange,’ I say,
Inhaling through my teeth.
‘Let’s talk about what happened there.
Why did You refuse?’
But Pablo is busy appearing in the splatter pattern
Of a high-strung spinster’s dropped porridge;
She drags a neighbour round to see
By which time
The image has changed to buttocks.
'I don't know,' He says.
'Because it was funny?'

I facepalm at Anton’s lack of originality
But can’t say
Christ alive, human beings I can understand
– in Your own image and all that –
But could You not imagine
A world without Rice Krispies?
Instead, I try: ‘I notice You’ve filled
Your realm with lots of familiar things.
Is that a comfort to You?’
He shrugs. He is watching
A repeat of Leave It To Beaver on three million sets.

Rupert removes the top of a chap’s head
Like a boiled egg
During a wedding reception.
Nanase’s world is all dogs being sick.
Dogs being sick, I jot.

Heinrich has created an impossible ice planet
With a flaming core
And no people.
He spends aeons
Melting elaborate catacombs
Into the huge spherical glacier.
When, at last, He blows into it,
The orb shivers with one terrible note.

We Can't All Be Astronauts Wins Best Biography / Memoir!

2009-10-09T09:22:00.006+01:00

So, yeah, guess what? Last night, my first book, We Can't All Be Astronauts, scooped Best Biography/Memoir at the East Anglian Book Awards! That's good, isn't it? The judges called it: 'A funny, poignant, beautifully written account of a budding writer's quest for literary success.' Yep. No argument there, judges.

As you can imagine, I am - ah ha, ah ha, wait for it, wait for it... over the moon. Eh? Eh? Because 'astronauts', you see? Not just a funny pun though folks - also true. I was really surprised and I accepted my award in a sort of dazzled fug. Wow. Happy times. Thanks so much to everybody who's read it and those of you who've taken the time to write to me to confirm it didn't make you sick in your mouths.

Games With Stupid Names - #8: The Amazing Adventures Of Mr F. Lea

2009-10-06T13:59:00.010+01:00

The Amazing Adventures Of Mr F. Lea can't blame its title on some over-enthusiastic foreign programmer's bad English - unlike most of the other games I've covered in this hall of shame, it's just a really crap pun. Appropriate really, since the entire game is basically a succession of weak jokes, as gentle and poorly-executed as the vicar's 'funny' cartoons in the fortnightly church newsletter.

As the eponymous Mr F. Lea, you must face four dog-themed levels in whatever order you choose. Unlikely though his name may sound, when I worked selling car insurance over the phone, my manager was a Mr D. Olphin, so shit names do exist in the real world. D. Olphin wasn't a dolphin though, at least as far as I'm aware - I never saw him in person, and to be fair everyone who worked at Norwich Union had tiny, expressionless eyes and talked in a string of chirrups and clicks.

Each of the quartet of levels is essentially nicked from a more successful game, given a doggie makeover then made shit. It's like watching a version of The Matrix where all the cast are alsatians filmed on someone's Nokia. Whilst having one of your toes amputated.

'Dog Hollow' is a joyless rip-off of the first level of Donkey Kong.

Instead of fireballs, giant gorillas and daredevil leaps across girders, the rear end of a dog kicks bones and what look like beach balls down a florid morass of blocky gibberish. Collect balloons on the way, if you can be arsed.

'Lawnmower' latches onto Frogger's glistening calf and humps the living Christmas out of it.

Instead of a road and a river, you must first guide Mr F. Lea across a lawn, avoiding the mowers, then help him leap over a series of dogs' backs (the sausage dogs are the easiest to hitch a lift on, for the obvious reason) to reach some tiny, nondescript hangars (for a less obvious reason). Collision detection is crappy, and Mr F. Lea moves in a succession of decrepit jerks, yet it's still insultingly easy - an achievement almost impressive in its dreadfulness.

The other two stages, 'Dog's Back' and the irritatingly-apostrophed 'Dog's Tail's', plagiarise levels from Taito's 1982 platformer Jungle King, a game which had its own dubious history of theft, after Taito got sued by Edgar Rice Burroughs' estate for its unauthorised use of the Tarzan character (including a sample of his trademark yell), and, sadly, a game which was total shite.

'Borrowing' liberally from the vine swing and uphill boulder-dodging levels, the final two stages see Mr F. Lea swinging across a succession of apparently delighted pooches' tails, (a level which is so easy I've literally never managed to die on it - I don't even know if you can) and running up a dog's back, dodging the spots, which for some reason seem to have become lethal to fleas.

In fairness, Jungle King was bollocks to begin with, so TAAOMFL can't really be said to have hugely besmirched the lineage by producing similarly tedious, workmanlike plod-a-thons, but when they're such obvious toss, why steal them in the first place? It's like building a sex-robot then giving it the face of Gaby Roslin.

Also, why did they filch two crappy levels from Jungle King, yet not touch the section that sees you swimming through a river, repeatedly stabbing crocodiles in the face?

Regular readers of this blog know only too well what a fan I am of games where you get to stab crocodiles in the face. It's an unsung genre, and one that TAAOMFL would have done well to mimic. Instead of all that knifey-carving-supple-flesh-gnnnh-I-love-spoiling-you-bitch harmless fun, we get a stupid flea jumping up and down on a dog's big smiling head. Fuck you, Mr Lea. I bet D. Olphin would have stabbed a croc. He would have stabbed a croc right in the visage and liked it.

We Can't All Be Astronauts - at HOMEWORK, tomorrow!

2009-09-29T13:11:00.004+01:00

So yes, hooray, tomorrow, Wednesday 30th September, I'll be reading from my first book, We Can't All Be Astronauts, at the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club. But wait! Not only will my esteemed Aisle16 brothers in arms Luke Wright, Joe Dunthorne and John Osborne be providing support with new work, but we have a very special guest in the form of journalist and broadcaster Jon Ronson!

Basically, we think he's brilliant. You might suspect me of being sycophantic just to big him up for the gig, but one, you're much too clever to fall for obsequious propaganda, so I simply wouldn't bother, and two, I've posted very prominently before now - on this very blog - what a massive fan I am of This American Life, a show which he has contributed some of the best stories to. Check out Them, Habeas Schmabeas, Pro Se, and It's Never Over. In fact, while we're talking about superb radio, why not check out an episode of Jon Ronson On? May I humbly suggest The Wrong Kind Of Madness and The Worst Internet Date as two good places to start?

So yes. Come. The Timeout listing is here. Doors at 7:30pm, and we usually get started some time after 8:00pm. We'll all have books to sell and sign too, if you fancy one. I suspect it's going to be funtimes.

Games With Stupid Names - #7 The First Funky Fighter

2009-09-18T13:53:00.010+01:00

Of all the video game titles we've encountered so far, The First Funky Fighter is the most semantically problematic, colliding various contradictory images into a single, on the face of it ludicrous, claim of primacy. One definition of the word 'funk' is 'the smell of sexual intercourse', thus making the protagonist 'The First Fighter Who Smelt Of Sexual Intercourse'.

This is a movie I would pay to see my friends. But surely lots of fighters have boasted a musky fuck-aroma? That heady pong of spunk, B.O., mackerel and bum juices is universally recognised as the pheremone-drenched calling card of any self-respecting warrior.

On the other hand, dictionary.com defines 'funky' as: 'overcome with great fear; terrified'. 'The First Fighter Who Was Terrified'? Less awesome, dudes. But this radical transformation from log-cocked beefcake to simpering bedwetter doesn't do anything to resolve the central preposterousness of the claim - I doubt very much this chap was the first brawler to experience nerves before a scrap.

'The First Fighter Characterised By A De-Emphasising Of Melody And Harmony And A Strong Rhythmic Groove Of Electric Bass And Drums'? Ah, fuck it.

TFFF sees blond ripped-shirted pugilist Randy setting out on a quest to rescue his bosomy blond girlfriend Chris from an unholy alliance of sharks and bipedal humanoid gators. Randy is a man of few words and direct action. When Randy has a problem, he punches it. Right in the face.

That's not to say he's not flexible. Occasionally, he stabs it in the face.

And, under very special circumstances, Randy will rip the problem's face in half.

Randy is so fucking masculine, his dick has a dick. After studying TFFF, I can't tell you if he is indeed the first fighter to smell of sexual intercourse, but to him, I expect other people's sexual exploits smell like damp cabbage, whereas his testosterone-marinated fucking stinks of roast dinners and burning tar.

SPOILER ALERT. At the end of the game, once every enemy has been punched in the face, Randy takes Chris to the beach, and fucks her completely in half. She loves it.

Poor Old Dead Jeremy Beadle

2009-09-13T23:50:00.010+01:00

When I heard Jezza Beadle had snuffed it I were rate sad.

Not in that whole, 'Hay let's get stoned then watch Volume 3 of Steven Segal's Body & Spirit Motivational Workout on VHS' internet-age hyper-irony way - I genuinely remembered him as seeming like a nice guy who was made the target of a lot of (only half-serious, but still) public bile and horrible remarks about his physical appearance. As with Heather Mills' losing part of her left leg, it seemed that the country had convened a meeting and decided that Jeremy Beadle's Poland's Syndrome was not a bona fide disability, but a comic misfortune ripe for mockery and scorn. I feel pretty strongly on this - if you think Heather Mills is a gold-digging batshitinsane scarecrow lady worthy of a wet slap round the chops then by all means say so, but stop fucking bringing her injury into it as if it represents some character defect, you ignorant, prejudiced cunts. It's just cheap sniggers at the divvy kid in class in another guise, and all sections of the media are guilty of it.

I'm a bit shy of admitting it, but I think Jeremy Beadle was a big inspiration to me. In lots of ways, he was ahead of his time. You've Been Framed and his primetime show featuring viewer-created sketches, Beadle's Hotshots, prefigured the monster success that user-generated content would have with the advent of Youtube. I videotaped every single episode of Beadle's Hotshots, and I would watch them and rewatch them. Granted, it was essentially a less esoteric, naughty and cool version of Adam Buxton's Takeover TV, but it was amateurs, with cameras, making really stupid short sketches, and when I watched, I thought, I could do that.

I couldn't, as it happened. Even the appalling 'punchlines', palsied camerawork and leaden performances drastically outshone anything I'd ever produced on the family camcorder, mainly because they kept things simple. But - in my favourite clips at least - the people involved were clearly having a great time pissing around and being silly, and I loved that. A lot of coolness, for me, has always been about not appearing too bothered about what other people think - not in a drink medicine, shit your pants and bellow racist epithets at pigeons way, just in a 'I don't mind if you think I'm silly' way. Anyway, that show meant a lot to me growing up, and it was fronted by the Beadmeister.

Watching a recent 'the greatest TV pranks of all time' clip show, where the pranks in question were chosen and presented by Jeremy Beadle, I was impressed to see that, as number one, he'd chosen Brass Eye, noting that, although it'd caused a lot of controversy, he thought it was peerlessly hilarious. I was surprised at his choice, but it made me respect him, and believe that, despite the fact that the closest he got to gags during his You've Been Framed links was alliteration (Harry Hill is effortlessly superior), he'd got a good sense of humour.

Add to this the fact that, over his lifetime, Beadle raised a reported £100 million plus for charity, and you can't help but wonder just what it was that inspired such hatred, to the extent that the British public voted him their second most loathed person, after Saddam Hussein.

Then you watch a couple of clips from Beadle's About, and oooooh. The penny drops.

The most common modus operandi of Beadle's About was basically: pretend to rob working class person of their livelihood. Laugh at their despair. Reveal the con, and GIVE THEM NOTHING.

Watch Beadle's face after about 0:50: 'Dave Hughes is a market trader. He parked his van, full of his entire business stock, on the quayside at the Docklands Sailing Centre.' Listen to him trying to disguise his mirthful contempt as he says the words 'entire business stock'. Then remember that, at the time of recording, he was a millionaire.

What are we laughing at, exactly? Dave Hughes' howls of genuine anguish as he sees his ability to make a living destroyed in a single stroke? The ridiculous good grace and calmness with which he tries to deal with it? What kills me is how pathetically grateful he is after the 'reveal'. Brilliant. Everything I've worked so hard for hasn't been snatched away by blasé arseholes with more money than me. Maybe Thatcher's Britain does work.

Jeremy Beadle, you brought me a lot of happiness. But you really were a tactless wanker.

Metafilter

2009-09-08T13:49:00.006+01:00

I've been threatening for a while now to do a post about my favourite website, Metafilter. But the pressure of actually putting something together that would adequately sum up why I love it, while encouraging others to go and check it out - the amount of time it'd take me to put that kind of post together - always stayed my hand.

Until today.

In a nutshell, Metafilter is a community blog where people post links on the front page to examples of what they consider to be 'The Best Of The Web'. This might consist of various takes on a current news story, or various websites shedding light on some interesting historical event, or just some kooky or fascinating youtube video. Site members (or Mefites, to give them their proper title) can then discuss the posts in a thread underneath. It's not that the format is totally unique (Fark, Digg and Boingboing all do similar things) but that the quality of posts and comments is especially high. There are a lot of literate, well-informed contributors who make the front page posts and ensuing debates well worth a browse.

I check Metafilter every day, and through it I have discovered pretty much all of my favourite things on the Internet, from shows like This American Life and Jake and Amir to brilliant webcomics like Nedroid, Dinosaur Comics, Hark! A Vagrant, A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible and MS Paint Adventures. Ooh! And Minus! Have you ever read Minus? It's a webcomic about an omnipotent little girl. It's over now. Iit was quite sad and unsettling in places. It's well worth a squiz!

But the reason I decided to post about Metafilter today was this post I read yesterday, in the 'Ask Metafilter' section of the site. 'Ask Metafilter' is like a non-imbecilic version of Yahoo Answers, allowing posters to draw on the wisdom on the MeFi Hivemind for help with everything from 'I think my boyfriend is cheating on me' to 'Is it safe to eat this?'

Yesterday, I read this:

Facing death: I have received a medical estimate of dying within a year, but this is known only to me (within my circle of family and friends, including my wife). I am so lost as to how to break the news in a caring, non-stressful way.

A chap finds himself at this incredible juncture in his existence, and he turns to a bunch of strangers for the internet for help. I don't think of myself as an especially glurgey person, but this got me right in the gut. I'm sorry he's in this situation. It puts all my ludicrous neuroses into extreme perspective. I hope he and his loved ones are able to spend some precious time together now, and I hope he is able to work through this incredibly difficult, surreal and (I use this term in its non-religious sense) sacred period in his life.

What would you do if you knew you had a year to live? Where would you go? Who would you want to spend time with? What things would you want to talk about? What problems would seem less like problems?

Because we've all got a year, really. It's just that some people's year will last a little longer than others'.

The classic AskMeFi thread is this one: Life-altering experiences. Can you point to a single experience in your life, as a child, which you can define as having contributed to the person you are today? The stories, big and small, that come pouring out are riveting.

And for slightly more unconventional entertainment, may I suggest the quasi-legendary (at least amongst members) Metafilter mushroom thread. In it, poster MiHail botches a front page post about a cashier's ignorance regarding portobello mushrooms, acts really shittily when people call her out on making a crap post, then the pile-on of snark and sarcasm begins. Eventually it transpires MiHail is having chemo and isn't very well... The thread is from 2005 and by February 2006 she had died while waiting for her third liver transplant. Mefites respond with the customary mark of mourning in a thread - a single full stop.

Anyway, that's all I'll say for now. I'm off to tell some special people how much I love them.

.

We Can't All Be Astronauts Shortlisted For East Anglian Book Awards

2009-09-07T15:37:00.004+01:00

So We Can't All Be Astronauts has been shortlisted for East Anglian Book of the Year 2009. You can see who else is on the shortlist here.

That's exciting, isn't it? I feel very chuffed that the judges liked it. Hopefully a few more readers will stumble across it as a result. I'll be spinning some yarns from Astronauts at this month's Homework, on Wednesday 30th September at Bethnal Green Working Men's Club. Homework is Aisle16's regular literary cabaret night, with a mix of poetry, stand-up, music, literature, and pretty much anything else we can think of. We've had Kate Nash and Tim Key as previous special guests, and this month's special guest is someone we're all very much looking forward to, since all of Aisle16 are big fans. I'll let you know who in a couple of days...

Wait, No - This Is What I Did On My Actual Holidays

2009-09-02T22:07:00.018+01:00

I haven't been on holiday, on an actual, bona fide, you're-here-to-relax-not-to-do-work vacation, since I was in sixth form. This is partly because I'm very lucky to do a job that I enjoy, nay love, that sees me heading off to all sorts of interesting places, and a whole slew of festivals, and getting paid to do so. I often feel like I'm a bit on holiday. Even when I have to fill in applications or calculate tax returns, I rarely feel under the cosh because I largely get to dictate the terms under which I do them, I'm at home with a cup of tea and my own music, and it's in the service of stuff I care about (creative stuff and me), rather than marginally advancing the interests of a multinational insurance conglomerate.

But by the same token, I rarely feel like I'm totally off-duty. There's always work that can be done - right now I have a chapter of the next book that should have already been finished, I've got a new performance poem I should have learned, another I want to rewrite, and there are three uke tunes sans lyrics that I want to finish and try out in music sets. That's all stuff outside of the tasks that are taking up my day-to-day workload at the moment, and I feel a bit twitchy if I can't check my email multiple times a day, even on weekends. Let me make my position clear as an unmuddied lake sir - I'm not complaining. I feel very grateful that I get to lead the lifestyle I do and I wouldn't want to go back to office drudgery for the world. All I'm saying is, it gets a bit muddled, without a clear dividing line between work and play.

So anyways, on a whim, in fact, a super-whim, I ended up booking a four-day trip to Tuscany in August. Then I bought a book on Tuscany to find out where we were actually going, and if there was anything worthwhile there. Of course there was. (click on pics for big versions)

This is a detail from the plinth of a statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi in Pisa. Garibaldi was a military commander who believed in universal sufferage, an end to the dominance of the Church, and the unification of an independent Italy. The Garibaldi biscuit was named after him, after he turned up in Tyneside in 1854 and acted all matey with the working classes, who saw him as something of a hero and gave him a sword. Garibaldis are pretty fucking blah biscuits if you ask me - only elderly misanthropes and the mentally subnormal would count them amongst their top five.

Yep. The Leaning Tower. And me doing a goofy clichéd posed like the soulless whore-ist I truly am. We flew into Pisa Airport, and it was a case of either deliberately ignoring the Leaning Tower for the whole time, or sucking it up and embrace our inner ersatz sightseers. The tower leans because the local soil it's built on is soft and silty - awesome for putting a tent up on, not so great for supporting a massive heavy cylinder. They actually corrected some of its lean a few years back, after fears it was going to topple over. Apparently it's now close to the angle it stood at in the nineteenth century. I'm not sure I care that much, but I was glad I went to see it. It looked pretty cool up close. Also there were tat stalls everywhere, and after some frankly disappointing encounters with souvenir vendors it was gratifying to see a decent range of proper genuine tat, often only tangentally related to the Tower, occasionally completely irrelevant, like big ass knives. 'Oh hey peach, I went to the Leaning Tower of Pisa and I brought you back this massive blade. Enjoy!'

Some of my favourite time was spent drinking and not attempting to achieve anything worthy at all. We camped in Marina di Pisa, which is a coastal resort area just outside Pisa, developed under Mussolini in the 30s and largely populated by retirees who bring their chairs out onto the street at night and sit and chat, staring out across the Mediterranean. And who can blame them?

There are some rocky beaches, then a whole series of cramped, sandy private beaches which you're supposed to pay to use. One belonged to the campsite, so we got to use that free. I want to tell you it was tacky and grim, but I had a lovely time. Sure, it made me appreciate how lucky we are in Britain to have some beautiful, expansive public beaches, but at the same time the blue, cloudless sky, the blazing sun and the warm, lapping ocean made me appreciate how lucky I was not to be stuck in Skegness. In the morning, the camping site staff would lug a big speaker down onto the beach, which promptly started blaring out pounding Eurodisco. Just what you need while you're dozing quietly - something to wake that nascent hangover fizzing in your cranium! I soon got over my dismay, however, when I realised that the music signalled the start of aqua aerobics. A girl from the site stood on the shore doing various punchy-clappy moves, while people in the sea faced her and tried to keep up. I joined in, even though I was pretty much the only male involved for most of it. Even though most of her moves looked suitable for the over-65s, I was struggling to keep pace after a while, perhaps because I was standing in chest-deep water, because I wanted to be behind most of the participants so they couldn't see me.

After seven each evening, staff rolled out matting and the beach became a boozy night spot. There was a cocktail bar up the top and lots of big candles. I really enjoyed getting pissed there, even if it was incredibly cheesy, the mood underscored by endless smooth ambient dance tracks with bizzarely literal lyrics pacing the ongoing reality like 'We're on a beach / the sun is setting / so warm and beautiful / it's the evening and we're here with each other'. I know. Fucking shut up and help me pour this Southern Comfort down my throat.

There were a whole messload of lizards in the campsite. This pic is of a baby one. They're very cute and amazing up close, but they move like shit off a greased shovel and I wouldn't have appreciated waking up with one skittering round the tent or gnashing at my exposed corneas. Not one bit!

So we did a day trip to Florence, and when we crossed over the bridge to south of the River Arno, we found this cluster of padlocks chained to the railings, as if they'd accrued there like weird barnacles. As far as I could tell, each padlock seems to have the name of a couple written on it. Perhaps they're sort of like carving your names into a tree - only shitloads of couples have done it now, so it's like a vast ungainly schmaltz orgy, with the original lovers buried corroding and forgotten beneath the ever-growing heap of new ones. Sort of like a metaphor for how we eventually forget about and in our turn are forgotten by everyone we've ever known or cared about, smothered by a procession of newer, shinier people and memories. That might not sound very romantic, but frankly, if your idea of love is a padlock with no key then you've already set the tone, you shambling co-dependent twatmunch.

Yeah so Florence had some architecture and art and all that jazz and some of the buildings were quite impressive. I was more about the ice cream, though - we hit up gelateri every day, if only to fight back against the intense heat. I had some awesome mango flavoured ice cream, and the Nutella cone I had was a super-strong choice that I feel proud of even as I relate it now. Also, one night in Marina di Pisa I got a delicious seafood pizza that was covered in fresh mussels. By the time I'd finished I had a big stack of shells next to my plate and I was beaming with replete contentment.

So yes, that is my first - and probably only - genuine 'What I Did On My Holidays' post of the entire year. I sweated lots, relaxed, drank too much Diet Coke, often felt deliriously happy, rode buses without tickets, bailed on a half-paid bar tab, and did a whole bunch of other stuff that's none of your goddamn business.

Nedroid Is Good

2009-08-24T19:49:00.004+01:00

Hey, have you ever been to Nedroid.com? I like several webcomics, and Nedroid definitely counts as one of them. Praise indeed. The two main characters are Reggie, a bird, and Beartato, a potato-shaped bear. You should go there and read the comics. Do it. Go check it out. Here's one I like:

Did you also know I went on holiday last week? For the first time since sixth form? It was GREAT. Not that it's any of your goddamn business. When I'm less snowed under I'll post a couple of pics and tell you some about it. Okay? *mwah!* I love you. Sometimes I want to cut you. Just on the hand.

Games With Stupid Names - #6 Violence Fight

2009-08-13T16:04:00.007+01:00

'Story:
In the early part of 1950's in USA, a game called "Violence Fight" was in vogue among Mafia, reckless drivers and general businessmen.
The "Violence Fight" was the game to struggle for "No.1 Quarreler" with fighters who were gathered from all parts of the USA speaking boastingly of their strength.
And of course a lot of winning money as well as the honor were given to the "winner".
Here in a downtown in L.A., a young fighter "Bat" and his manager "Blinks" seek for the winning money eagerly.
As a matter of fact, can Bad take the No.1 place of the USA?'

Taito's 1989 alley brawler beat 'em up Violence Fight remains a classic of the genre - if the genre in question is 'shit arcade games that sank without trace'. Stagger slowly around dull, samey levels! Mash at the unresponsive controls to perform as many as four or five moves! Struggle to comprehend the poorly localised text!

My favourite part of Violence Fight, ('favourite' here operating in a purely technical capacity, as it might in sentences such as 'my favourite STD' or 'my favourite suppurating head wound') are the big comic sound effects that appear whenever you land a blow that knocks your opponent over. GOGON! BOGON!

Beat three foes and you get to battle in a bonus round against the mysterious 'Tiger'.

But wait, those inverted commas are a trick! You're not facing some tiger-like brawler at all, but an actual tiger! Naturally he kicked my peasy ass. GOON!

Looking at these screenshots I'm sure you'll agree that it's a miracle Capcom's paltry effort Streetfighter II ever managed to find a niche in the market. But seriously, Violence Fight achieves the near-impossible task of making me recall Pitfighter fondly. WTF? I'll leave you with my spit n' sawdust scrapper of choice, Ben Smith, warning off his next opponent with a chilling battlecry:

Japanese Techno-Pop Makes Me Wee Rainbows

2009-08-12T16:32:00.005+01:00

(via the ever-giving wellspring of EPIC WIN that is Metafilter)

So yeah today I watched these performances from an 80s Japanese kids' TV show, three Techno-Pop bands, P-Model, Hikashu and Plastics. The sound quality is mildly anus, but you get the idea:

Everything I know about J-Pop and all its bizarro corollaries could be written on the back of a postage stamp in fat-nibbed magic marker, but regular readers of my blog (I'm looking at you, Mum) will know I reckon proggy girl trio eX-Girl are rather spesh. (you should check out Waving Scientist @ Frog King - it's probbo my fave track) Wikipedia reveals that the first band on in the vid, P-Model, are fronted by Susumu Hirasawa, who did the soundtrack for spooky millenial angstathon Paranoia Agent. I got sent a review copy of part of the series when I was writing for NEO, and I can confidently say it's one of the best, most unnerving anime series I've ever seen. It follows a succession of people who get attacked by a rollerblading, bent baseball bat wielding kid known to the media as Lil' Slugger, and explores estrangement, insanity, and people's pasts coming back to haunt them. It's endlessly inventive and manages to have a great sense of humour while being genuinely disturbing.

I remember even finding the opening credit sequence upsetting for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on, but it provides a great opportunity to show how Susumu Hirasawa's music helps create an atmosphere of weird uneasiness:

Games With Stupid Names - #5 Diet Go Go

2009-08-07T22:47:00.011+01:00

Diet Go Go belongs to that rare class of video game, the 'issue' title. The Oddworld series - Abe's Oddysee, Abe's Exoddus, Munch's Oddysee, etc - all foreground an ecological/animal welfare message, Cannon Fodder claimed to be anti-war, although how many players actually picked that up, and to what extent pleading 'satire' provided a convenient defence for the prodigious, unremitting violence is up for debate, uhh... Mick & Mack in McDonaldland advocated eating at McDonald's?

At first glance, Diet Go Go appears to be a game with the laudable premise of encouraging exercise and healthy eating. From the somewhat sparse cut scenes, it appears that a cyborg mad professor is intent on turning our planet into a world of fatties by pelting everyone with food. Clad in leotards, sweatbands and legwarmers, our two heroes set out to battle the professor's mischievous scran-dispensing minions and restore Earth's people to their former shapely glory.

Except - this shit is really fucked up. Touching any food whatsoever turns you into a slow-moving, miserable bloater, and touching a second item whilst fat instantly kills you. You don't even pop in a cartoonish way - your character moans and keels over, apparently from cardiac arrest. It's super-unpleasant, and particularly twisted given that most of the foodstuffs are somewhere between harmless and very healthy - bits of sushi and even tossed green-leaf salads flicker with a skull and crossbones showing that to eat them is to condemn yourself to life as a worthless sweaty chuffer.

Worse still, you can't work the weight off by running around or eating healthily - the 'diet' the game purports to promote in fact consists solely of bottles of diet pills, which, if collected, return you to your original shape. I mean, I can see why the Japanese felt the need to create this game, what with their country's long history of chronic obesity problems, but for fuck's sake, it's horrendous. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some humourless knee-jerk offence-finder - I thought the furore over Fat Princess many months back was ludicrous hand-wringing that trivialised a very serious issue and showed a worrying lack of judgement by advocacy groups apparently more interested in shrill, petty controversialism and column inches than credibility.

Fat Princess featured weight gain and loss incidentally as part of its game mechanics - Diet Go Go is actually attempting to promote an ideology, yet its take on the subject is a confused, cackhanded mess.

For the most part, the game's a remix of Tumble Pop, a cutesy platformer where two bandana-clad heroes suck enemies up into vacuum cleaners then fire them out at other foes, working to clean up the globe then eventually confronting the alien menace in space. Diet Go Go borrows several power-ups and baddie sprites, then adds its own rubbish twist on the game mechanics, essentially taking a reasonably yummy chocolate cake then glazing it with some Korsakoff's-addled boozehound's pungent arse Bovril.

Instead of sucking foes into a vacuum cleaner, you fling what look like little balls at them, causing them to get fat and float towards the ceiling. Bumping into fat enemies makes them go pinging around the screen, crashing into their cohorts, who get destroyed in the process. Their trajectories are pretty much random, largely removing the element of skill from the whole game. Brilliant.

At the end of each level, you face a big boss character. Initially they look quite exciting, until you realise each one follows an identical pattern, spazzing about dropping little bad guys which you need to fatten up then knock back into the big boss. That's it. Every time. Man it fucking sucks.

Eventually you confront the professor, hit him with a ball, and he duly explodes. Game over. I actually played all the way through this game just to write this review. Agghh.

Diet Go Go is abysmal. If you want kids to improve their health, it seems somewhat shortsighted to do so through a medium that encourages long periods of inactivity. However, Diet Go Go is so aggressively unentertaining that I can only imagine it drove thousands of Japanese youths staggering from the video arcades, blinking into the sunlight, emphasising as it does just what an intellectually bankrupt, wretched waste of our temporary sentience video games are. I feel miserable and dirty, and I'm not sure if I'll fully enjoy gaming again.

Complete a world, and you're 'rewarded' with a titilating/hilarious pic of the two central characters struggling with their weight or flaunting their unrealistic bodies. Actually I do fancy the girl a bit. Gnnngh. Do you see? This is what this steaming aggregation of colon slurry has done to me. It took my innocence. IT TOOK MY EYES!

Kings Of Power 4 Billion %

2009-08-05T01:03:00.004+01:00

Look, my question to you is simply this: have you watched Paul Robertson's Kings Of Power 4 Billion %? No? THEN DON'T COMPLAIN YOUR LIFE ISN'T EVERYTHING IT COULD BE!

It is special. You could watch it on Youtube:

But actually the quality of the compressed vids is pretty shitty. My advice? Be patient, go here, and download the full-quality avi file. You might need to download a little codec to make it run on your video player, but fuck it, you're a capable kind of person, you'll manage it. Don't worry, you're not pirating it or some zany shit like that - the creator, Paul Robertson, has been distributing it from his blog. If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll know I think he's a golden god, also being the dude behind Pirate Baby Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006.

I mean come on. Just the soundtrack to KoP4B% is a work of insano J-prog majesty. Obviously I love the video game aesthetic and all the little nods, both to games, and to nuggets of pop culture. This is clearly a guy who loves his Metal Slug, an ideological stance I can get behind with considerable gusto. I gaze upon this video and for a few, fleeting minutes the technicolour vomitworks that I laughingly call my mind seems somehow normal. Anyway, enough gushing. I think it's good. You may not. But then, you may be a gormless pranny.

EVEN MORE What I Did On My Holidays

2009-08-03T19:35:00.002+01:00

So this weekend I toddled north up to the Lake District for a little festival called Kendal Calling. I say toddled - I dozed in a van while Ventriloquist and the Tongue Fu band drove us the 6+ hours all the way up there on Saturday. I'd had to get up bright and early to get the train from Cambridge, so I was a tiny bit pooped. During my brief periods of consciousness, I read TV rent-a-skeptic Richard Wiseman's pop-psych book :59 Seconds, full of lots of little 'quick fix your life' tips and descriptions of interesting research. It's pretty good, except when he attempts humour. I try not to read too much pop-psych these days - as I wrote about in Astronauts, when I was younger I got quite addicted to pop-psych books. I used them as a form of escapism, imagining that I could supercharge my heart and mind and become immune to all the painful knocks and burns of life. I think consuming a diet of aspirational literature quickly makes you feel knackered. It's funny how many books on relationships talk about engagement styles and negotiation but seem to leave something as simple as love by the wayside. Self-improvement is all very well but I don't think it's defeatist to practise a little self-acceptance too. It's difficult, when you see a friend stung by disappointment or hurt by self-destructive behaviour, not to start dismantling their actions and identifying the things they did 'wrong', because you want to protect them and see them happy, but this kind of habitual micro-criticism can backfire when it's your turn in the barrel. You'll be lazy some days, you'll forget things, sometimes you'll feel insecure in a relationship, you'll lose your temper, and you'll act in whole host of other suboptimal ways. This will never end. It doesn't make you a bad person and no amount of beating yourself up about it will prevent you from doing it. Instead of feeling blue about your own perceived shortcomings, it's best to acknowledge them and draw on them as a source of compassion and understanding when dealing with others' shortcomings. We'll all live our entire lives doing less than the best possible. That can be a source of warmth and community and love.

And because I'm human I only sometimes put the above into practice. And I feel a bit sanctimonious for coming out with all that. Ah well. I forgive myself. A bit. Heh.

Talking of imperfection, at Kendal Calling I performed my most spectacular stage exit yet, hallucinating an extra section of stage after my set, catching my foot on the hazard tape and falling, faceplanting into the dirt. Fortunately the damp weather had turned the ground the consistency of Playdoh, so I merely left a big reverse imprint without hurting myself. I lifted myself onto all-fours, put my specs back on and looked up to see Howard Marks stood in front of me, looking down, asking if I was all right. 'Mr Nice' - not just clever branding, apparently!

I had a really lovely time travelling with the Tongue Fu crew, who seem like a thoroughly friendly bunch of people, and it was good to see Berkavitch and Kate Tempest with Sound of Rum at the festival. Kendal Calling seemed to be doing a lot to support local bands, which I can only doff my invisible hat to. You get to imagine what type it might be. I'm imagining a black felt tricorn with a single quail feather tucked into the brim. Your model may vary.

More What I Did On My Holidays

2009-07-29T22:29:00.004+01:00

My word, I am pooped. This weekend just gone, I set off for four gigs over two days. My voice still hadn't (and still hasn't) recovered from Latitude, so I left little Tim Jr back in Cambridge and resolved to stick to spoken word.

I was in fairly high spirits after my gig on Thursday, supporting Byron Vincent on his Poetry Link tour, at Wax Lyrical in Colchester. It was my first time at the Wax Lyrical night, and Molly Naylor and Ross Sutherland were both on the bill as well, meaning essentially I got to perform with a bunch of much-valued chums. The audience were really lovely and I think I did one of the best twenty minute sets I've ever done. I felt very at ease and enjoyed just sort of blathering, telling anecdotes and making up my set on the fly. It also provided yet another reminder of the value of decent lead-ins - not only do they set up the poem nicely for the crowd, but I find now that the right sort of preamble actually helps to put me in the best mental state to perform the poem well. Anyway, basically it was great fun, and I really enjoyed getting to watch Ross, Molly and Byron perform their sets all on one night, to appreciative spectators. Oh, and the sound tech guy was a total champ - he stuck a lovely tickle of reverb on Tim Jr and made him sound all Hawaiian, full, and dreamy. Kudos to that guy.

On Friday it was off to Camp Bestival, down on the south coast, at Lulsworth Castle. There's something particularly cruel about Camp Bestival's location - from on site, you can see the ocean shimmering just a mile away. It felt like it was constantly teasing me - I mean, festivals are okay, but with the insanely hot weather Camp Bestival had, you can't help but wish you were down on a beach instead, cavorting on the sand or diving into cool blue waves.

Camp Bestival started out as a bit of a culture shock - we arrived to find ourselves kicking through drifts of jammy-visaged sprogs three or four deep. Squealing tykes battled with plastic swords, scampered about with balloons and crammed ice cream wafer sandwiches into their red, mewling gobs. The music on the main stages at Camp Bestival was pretty shite. I condescended to watch Florence and the Machine, against my better judgement, and wished I hadn't. I don't know what all the fuss is about - all I saw was some crapulent, equine-mawed toff caterwauling and dropping barrages of slurred f-bombs between her nondescript dirges, much to the consternation of the watching parents and children. Beatboxer Beardyman on Saturday was a similar waste of time - a smug, irritating cunt trying to spin a meagre party trick out into a career. I'm easily impressed by beatboxing, but you have to have some kind of interesting content or be exceptionally good at what you do - Beardyman has neither, and he compounds the problem with his constant toe-curling attempts at humour. It's like being stuck in a lift with Timmy Mallett.

But when the sun goes down, all the children suddenly seem to get removed by some sort of snow plough, and then Camp Bestival turns into a really excellent dance festival. Better yet, because it's such a family festival, the atmosphere in the late evening stays convivial - there aren't so many of the boss-eyed spannered townies you associate with banging choons. On Friday night we had a good ol' dance for many hours, ending up in the Silent Disco. Clare's Law: as the length of a Silent Disco increases, the probability of both DJs playing Cheese approaches 1. I bowed out gracefully as soused revellers bellowed Hey Jude up at the tent ceiling.

My readings on Saturday went okay. It's a bit tricky judging content and holding an audience when there are packs of roving kids swarming here there and everywhere, but I think I did okay. The hard thing is that a lot of parents tend to use book tents as creches, plonking themselves down on a cushion and leaving their kids to shriek and run about. There wasn't too much of that when I was on, though, and I'm usually shouty-shouty enough to make little children run away crying. I did a reading from We Can't All Be Astronauts in the early afternoon, then a poetry set with Scroobius Pip in the evening. I felt as if my rendition of Dear Man I Saw On The Platform At Colchester was a bit lacklustre - I think I might retire it for a while, just until I get the feeling back. I'm not an actor, so if I'm not feeling it then it just turns hammy, and I don't want to force that awful am-dram bollocks on some poor crowd.

By the time we were due to leave Camp Bestival, I'd become acclimatised to the huge numbers of kids, and found myself - embarrassingly - putting a hand to my chest and sighing with increasing frequency, as I saw and heard lots of very cute, very endearing things. Camp Bestival isn't my cup of tea - despite curator Rob Da Bank's claims of championing new bands, the music in the day is exclusively toothless crap - but the children there were obviously having an absolute whale of a time, and I was really happy for them.

Saturday evening we headed west, down to the Port Eliot Lit Fest. Aisle16 and Port Eliot have an association that goes back longer than I've been involved - at the last Port Eliot in 2007, we ended up doing about 20 plus hours of performance over two days; they might as well have renamed it Aisle16stock. I always enjoy Port Eliot because of its limited size - if you do a gig there, you instantly acquire a pseudo-celebrity that lasts for the whole weekend, and you can just wonder around chatting to people.

On the Sunday, me, Ross Sutherland and Joe Dunthorne did a performance of our show Found In Translation, about our attempts to infiltrate enigmatic French experimental literature group, the Oulipo. It went really well, as we suspected it might, because audiences at Port Eliot are always lovely. None of the mothers complained when I did my groin-thrusts and fecal splattering, which was gratifying. The weather on Sunday was crappy in the extreme - it was raining when we got up and it continued, unabated, all day and all evening, not letting up once. Port Eliot isn't really designed to cope with that sort of weather, and the tent we were performing in was leaking badly, the DI boxes for Ross's laptop sitting in an ominous marsh and bits of paper plastered to the stage with water.

Later on, I did a reading in the Round Room of the house. As the name suggests, it's a huge circular room with an elaborate and quite disturbing frieze painted across the wall and a large domed ceiling with a big chandelier hanging from the centre. I was directed to stand right beneath the chandelier, and as soon as I did, I could hear my voice being amplified and projected across the room. I believe it's called a Whispering Gallery - the acoustics are such that, if you stand in the centre of the room, your voice is projected by the architecture and you can hear everyone in the room perfectly. Lots of people turned up and I really enjoyed reading from Astronauts with my newfound big, booming voice. I did my first ever Q & A at the end, which was fun, and allowed me to babble enthusiastically about a bunch of things I like. Thanks Port Eliot!

Aside from some issues with our car breaking down, we had a great weekend. I think all this living outdoors has worn me down a bit though - I'm feeling ever so slightly under the weather, and I can feel my glands swollen up in my throat like big ol' gooseberries, so I'm committing to lots of water and quietness for the rest of the week, in the hopes that I can recover my performing mojo in time for Saturday, when I'm off to the Kendal Calling festival for yet more spoken word shennanigans and living under canvas. Hooray!

What I Did On My Holidays

2009-07-21T13:50:00.003+01:00

So, after a day of sleeping and staggering groggily about the flat with Supernoodles dangling from my slack gob, I've officially recovered from Latitude festival 2009. My voice is still pretty buggered, so no arias for a week or so, but aside from that I'm compos mentis so woot.

Despite intermittently shitty weather, this year turned out to be a bit of a corker. I was performing every day, doing sets in the Poetry Arena and also reading from We Can't All Be Astronauts in the Literary Tent. The reading from my book was a particularly nice surprise - they told me to tell the audience that I'd be signing copies afterwards, and I cringed at a vision of me sitting glum and alone behind a pile of my books. Instead, we sold out of copies! I felt incredibly flattered and a tiny bit fraudulent, but, you know, I think in these instances it's best to drop the self-effacement and just enjoy it, which I did. Thanks if you bought a copy. You made me feel really chuffed.

In the Poetry Arena the audiences seemed bigger than we've had in previous years, and on Thursday and Sunday they were particularly enthusiastic. I didn't catch everyone who performed, but I felt Nathan Filer, John Osborne, Kate Tempest, Dockers MC and MC Angel had particularly good innings. Kate Tempest with her band Sound of Rum managed to get a crowd who had started out listless and subdued up on their feet and dancing by the end of their set, which was incredible to watch. John Osborne did the best performances I've ever seen him do - I particularly enjoyed the point where audience members started spontaneously yelling out names of bands that only use the vowel e. One guy shouted out ELO, to which John responded: 'That's a rubbish attempt. There are three letters in that name. One of them's e, and one of them's l. Do you see where you fell down?'

The tent on Sunday just got warmer and warmer as the evening went on, until it was rammed and the crowd were really up for it, whooping and cheering and belly laughing. My highlight of Aisle16 and Friends was watching MC Angel start a rap battle with Keith Allen. Keith Allen was better at freestyling than you might have guessed, and it was great, drunken, knockabout fun that had the audience laughing and questioning their sanity in equal measures. Aisle16's late night sessions in the Poetry Arena always teeter on anarchy, and the upside of that is that amazing bits of performance can arise spontaneously and give everyone present one of those festival 'moments' that we're all fiending after. Watching Ross Sutherland carry the mic into the middle of the audience to lead the tent in a rousing chorus of Total Eclipse Of The Heart was another bumper, albeit silly, moment.

Thank you to everyone who came to watch us, or gave poetry a try over the weekend. It's really salutory to do it and basically not be crap. It reminds me of why we do it in the first place - we just want to give people something fresh and new that can be funny and exciting and emotional all at once. That sounds gushy and pretentious until you're in the middle of a show that's going really well, then you realise, oh, it's true.

In another news, yesterday I stumbled across the Decemberists for the first time. Someone mentioned them in the same sentence as Jonathan Coulton, and I was like, aha. I love what I've heard so far. After my nap yesterday I got up and had a little dance around the living room with my wireless headphones on. Here are just two, Valerie Plame and The Legionnaire's Lament. Funtimes.

Ghostbusters... Yes, We're Back

2009-07-13T11:29:00.007+01:00

Apologies for the lack of updates recently. I know you must have been tearing at your hair and gnashing your teeth with sheer boredom, and for your fortnight of torment, I beg your forgiveness. A combination of tech problems, writerly busy-ness and lovely weather have left me with mere slivers of free time, and every time I've looked at the blog and thought 'Shall I?' I've backed down like a wheelchaired grandmother wimping out of a river jump. I think part of the problem has been that I've got lots of ideas for involved, substantial posts, which will take ages and which I haven't been able to face starting - then compared to their rich majesty, a little Youtube vid or 'so, this is how my week has been' update feels as a crude Crayola scrawl against the artistic fruits of history's grandmasters.

In terms of writing, I've been mucking with stuff from my next book, getting it ready for some part of it to be looked at by another human being. Sitting down and writing prose is something of an odious experience for me, occasionally punctuated by satisfying - albeit brief - flurries of productivity. I like a lot of the parts of being a writer, except, for the most part, the actual writing. Hmm.

I've also been working on getting my poetry sets ready for Latitude festival at the end of this week. I reckon one in every five performance poems that I sit down and write ends up making it into my final set. And I don't often write performance poems. This means if I want some new pieces, I have to commit to a pretty intense work schedule so I've got more chance of turning up one that works. It's a little frustrating when you finish a poem, think 'wowee this'll be a banker', then deliver it at your next gig to crickets. But, you know, I'd rather work hard than be rubbish. I've got a poem in the works at the moment which I hope, hope, hope will wind up becoming a solid part of my set, and I'm trying to get it finished for Latitude so it can have its debut there.

Um, I completed Mario Vs Donkey Kong and Mario Vs Donkey Kong 2: The March Of The Minis, the former on the GBA, the latter on the DS. A mon avis, Mario Vs Donkey Kong is brilliant - a fun-packed dose of classic platforming action that sees you, as Mario, pursuing Donkey Kong after he steals a sackful of clockwork Mario toys from the factory. The level design is superb, the gameplay tough but fair, and the difficulty level ranges from easy to fiendish - a rare and welcome concession to hardcore platformer fans who want a challenge they can really sink their teeth into.

Mario Vs Donkey Kong 2 is pants. The fun, intuitive platforming action of its predecessor has gone - in its place is a joyless Gyromite clone (you remember Gyromite, right? No? Exactly) mixed with the most tedious elements of Krusty's Super Funhouse. Instead of getting to dash, backflip and 'yahooo!' as Mario, you must use the DS stylus to shunt little chittering Mini-Marios round small, dull levels. They move slowly, the stylus system is iffy, and the boss battles with DK are samey and bland. It's like a rubbish version of Lemmings, and the failure is all the more painful when you remember how classy the previous title in the series was. It's a rare swing-and-miss for the Mario franchise, and a sobering reminder that Nintendo's much-lauded innovation has risen from a history of pig-in-a-poke goofs, from Gyromite's ROB to the it's-so-bad Powerglove to the unwieldy Superscope to the nausea-inducing Virtualboy.

So, coming up I'm performing at Latitude festival in Suffolk on Thursday (9:10pm in the Literary Tent), Friday (6:00pm in the Poetry Arena), Saturday (11:30pm in the Poetry Arena) and Sunday (6:00pm in the Poetry Arena). I'll also be part of Aisle16 and Friends every night in the Poetry Arena, 11:00pm Thursday and Sunday, 1:00am Friday and Saturday. I'm helping to compere the Poetry Arena too, so basically, busy weekend pour moi. The weekend after I'm at Camp Bestival on the Saturday, reading from We Can't All Be Astronauts in the day, then doing a poetry set in the evening. On the Sunday, we'll be at Port Eliot Literary Festival, where I'll be performing with Joe Dunthorne and Ross Sutherland, doing our show about our attempts to infiltrate the enigmatic French experimental literature group the Oulipo - Found In Translation. Later that day I'll be giving a reading from We Can't All Be Astronauts. Then, weather-permitting, we are going to get plastered. The following weekend I'll be at the Kendall Calling festival, doing some performance poetry, then after that... oh, you can just check out my schedule. Be really nice to see you if you're about at any of those festivals. Come and say hi. Teach me a really elaborate handshake or something.

There. I think that's all for now. I've managed to write about poetry and video games in the same post, thus alienating both halves of my audience at once. If you don't feel excluded by one, you probably hate both. Well, that's what this blog exists for. Taking the rival camps of people who like poetry and people who like video games, and bringing them close enough that they can glare at one another, stoking their mutual emnity and mistrust. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've just remembered that there's a new episode of This American Life ready for me to listen to. See you at the festival!

Knock Knock

2009-07-01T01:59:00.014+01:00

You know how, a few days after a celebrity death, you always get this surge in not terribly sophisticated jokes about their passing? My friend Tom once announced, several years after her death, that he had made up a Princess Diana joke.

Tom: Knock knock.
Me: Who's there?
Tom: Princess Diana.
Me: Princess Diana who?
Tom [beaming]: Dead!

This developed as a meme, to the extent that, for the past 5 years, the first I have heard of almost every celebrity death has been my phone buzzing, and a text from either Tom or my friend Joe, that simply reads: 'Knock knock'. The phrase has taken on a terrifying odium that makes my chest tighten whenever I read it. Thus I awoke at 7:09am inside my tent on Friday at Glastonbury, to two texts reading: 'Knock knock'. Actually, Joe's read 'Knock knock', Tom's was: 'Don't blame it on the sunshine / Don't blame it on the moonlight / Don't blame it on the good times / Blame it on the knock knock'. I could barely bring myself to reply: 'Who's there?' because Tom's text suggested the unthinkable answer. It's horrible knowing that somebody has died, but not who. When I was told 'Michael Jackson', I was really spun out, but I knew it was true, because for all their levity, Tom and Joe have never ever lied in any of the dozens of 'Knock knock' texts they've sent me. There's a certain unspoken code to them, something almost, y'know... sacred.

The thing that really got to me was realising that, some day, who knows how soon, I'm going to receive one of those texts from Tom or Joe, and I'm going to reply, 'Who's there?', and the answer will come buzzing back through the ether... 'Dan Ackroyd'.

One Day, It Will Be Ackroyd

I find out in a flurry
Of poorly thought-out movie allusions
They carry the news like pall-bearers
‘Busted, mate’
‘Bustin’ makes him feel bad’
‘He really is a ghost now’
Tom, a veteran at text obituaries, says:
‘Apparently they found him with a phone in his hand.
Who was he gonna call?’
But Joe weighs in late with:
‘My mother-in-law is a little... high strung’
Which, though irrelevant,
Is the only Driving Miss Daisy reference,
Meaning he wins.

It’s one choc chip in an otherwise raisiny day –
Clocks grind like winches
I find it hard to load the dishwasher

We always said fame is a hen’s egg filled with fog
Those nights we ran amok
Snapping the noses off plaster saints
When it was
Knock knock Monkhouse
Knock knock Beadle
Knock knock Hussein
How our scorn prowed through the gloom
Like a distress flare
So by the doomy dawn
We were damp with cooled hubris
And huddling to get warm

Now, in the aftermath,
I regret my smug distance
My insistence their deaths are none of my business
I know the jumper will some day snag
That if it can be Ackroyd
Then one day, it will be Murray
One day, it will be Culkin
One day, it will be T

Stand-Up at the Big Fish

2009-06-24T06:29:00.005+01:00

So, This American Life have devoted one of their TV shows to stand-up. Here's a clip, where they cover an open mic night at a bar. I hope this gives you an idea of why I'm so excited about my open mic project, and all the stories and people that are out there:

I don't agree with Ira Glass's commentary by the way. Like most of his TAL introductions, it brings a single interesting or provocative thesis to the table rather than trying to summarise a complex situation, like in the Telephone episode, where he says that (I paraphrase) 'when you talk to some on the phone, it's one of the most intimate forms of communication there is - it's like you're whispering in their ear'. I don't think that's wholly true, but it's a surprising and interesting and fresh way of looking at the subject, and that's the whole point of these lead-ins. In their own way, each of Ira Glass's intros is like a 'didja ever notice?' stand-up bit. It's why TAL is so consistently damn good.

But anyway, the idea he advances that all stand-up open mics are huge, lethal peaks that we send these junior skiers out to practise on just isn't true. Some are bearpits, some are like quirky, touching little support groups where all sorts of misfits and strugglers can come along and be accepted. Most are somewhere in between. Some can be one or the other, depending on the night. Some lurch between the two states during a single night. It's an incredibly diverse world where a lot of human emotion is just out there, presented in its raw form. It's like what reality TV once aspired to be.

If you liked that (if? psssh!) then you should listen to the first story in this radio episode of TAL: Lost In Translation, where Starlee Kine and Jonathan Goldstein go and do karaoke stand-up, on a karaoke machine which contains stand-up routines as well. It is good.

Ukulele Record Breakers, Glastonbury and Horrific Torture

2009-06-24T03:15:00.009+01:00

So here's a video of our attempt to break the world record for most ukuleles playing together at the London Ukulele Festival. I'd been there to open the Grass Ukes Stage, and also because they had an open mic, but I think the world record attempt was pretty much the biggest open mic I've ever been too! You can see me right in the middle of the shot with Tim Junior; I'm wearing a khaki shirt:

It was hella fun.

So today is Homework, the Aisle16 scratch night in Bethnal Green. Doors are at 7:30pm and it only costs three spondools, so you should come. Me, Chris Hicks and John Osborne are providing suppport with new material, then Luke's doing a full preview of his new Edinburgh show, The Petty Concerns Of Luke Wright, where he asks 'How does the desire to be loved by millions turn into an ego trip?'. It will be dead spesh.

I'm feeling pretty down at the moment. I suspect the reasons are threefold. One, publicity for We Can't All Be Astronauts is just about over now, so that's kind of it. Now, we just wait and see whether people buy it, and whether the people who read it like it and tell other people. I guess I'm feeling the post-party crash, and hoping I've done enough to not make it a pricey disappointment for my publishers. Having now been through the process of getting published, it's terrifying to see how much of a book's success or failure hinges on a handful of decisions by just a few people. Having someone pick it to review or decide to use it in a feature can mean the difference between a book reaching its target audience or sinking into obscurity. I'm not sure which of those categories Astronauts will fall into, yet.

Secondly, my grandma phoned and casually gave me the weather report for Glastonbury - torrential thunderstorms. People laugh about these things but constant rain ruins Glastonbury. Despite its history, as an outdoor event it doesn't deal well with bad weather and as a punter, five days of clammy, shivery vagrancy without anywhere to properly sit down is a dismal trial that saps your will to live. Last year was only good because, on Saturday afternoon, the rain relented, and, on Sunday, it was sunny. Sunday was glorious, and I had a great time. The rest of the festival was miserable. Not only that, but last year, we had the awning of Luke's caravan to shelter in, with camping chairs and a cooker and a kettle for tea. This year, we've got none of that - just little canvas cocoons to wriggle into, all sodden and wretched.

So yeah, I'm not looking forward to that. I feel very lucky that, as part of Aisle16, I've been able to perform at Glastonbury three years on the trot, to generally large and appreciative audiences in the big Cabaret Tent. Weather be damned, I love performing there and that's why I'm prepared to stick it out through all the grimness. I've got a grudging admiration for the kinds of people who seem able to shrug off the bad weather and enjoy themselves anyway - that takes a level of resilience I haven't developed yet - but, for me, the sight of a night time downpour blasting thousands of tiny tents just fills me with dread.

Finally, I think I feel bad because I woke up from a nightmare where I was being horribly tortured by a man who had discovered that I was a spy. I was pinned down, and he had a long, thin needle and he was moving it about fast, threatening to jab it into different parts of my body like the soft inside part of my elbow or the corner of my eye, and I was hysterically telling him that I'd confess everything, that I'd tell him what he wanted to know, he just had to stop because I couldn't concentrate if he kept punishing me, but he wouldn't, there was nothing I could do to stop him torturing me, but I knew that it'd be worse if I didn't talk and he wouldn't stop until I'd told him everything he wanted to know. I was hysterical and frantic and the worst thing was feeling like I had no control, like all the usual socialised mechanisms of getting a response out of someone weren't working, and there was nothing I could do to prevent my suffering - my options were 'bad' or 'worse'. I woke up gasping for air, my heart crashing in my chest.

I expect it was my fault for watching the videos from this post on Metafilter about the terrible human rights abuses that still go on today in the North Korean gulags. They're extremely disturbing, but I'm glad I watched them - it's obscene and outrageous that such atrocities continue to happen, although what the international community might be able to do about them is another, far thornier question. Certainly anyone thinking of going on a kooky North Korean government mandated 'sightseeing tour' of NK should think twice about pouring their tourist dollars into a grotesque totalitarian regime.

It's rare that something I've watched translates so quickly and so obviously into a dream. My sleep patterns have been all out of whack for the past week or so. I've had a couple of late night writing sessions that have turned into all-nighters, but also my hayfever was making being up in the day a pretty rubbish, wheezy experience, so I preferred to do my work at night, when the pollen count is lower. One of the effects of messing up your sleep patterns is your dreams become a lot more vivid and memorable. Irritating that they've become memorable-horrific rather than memorable-porny, but I'd rather have horror in my dreams and technicolour carnal theatre in my waking hours than the other way round.

Anyway, if you see me at Glastonbury, give me a hug, eh?

Aisle16 at Glastonbury Festival

2009-06-19T23:47:00.009+01:00

It's appropriate that Glastonbury is organised by a farmer, because the ancient and fundamental principle of the yearly harvest also applies to the festival - if the weather's shit, it'll be shit. I hope that the weather isn't shit at Glastonbury 2009, because firstly, have you seen the line up? WHAT. It's actually mental. Blur, Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Art Brut, Nick Cave, Roots Manuva, our chums Wave Machines, our chum John Smith opening the Acoustic Stage on Friday, ROLF HARRIS. I repeat - WHAT. You should read through the line-up, because I guarantee there will be someone who I haven't mentioned who will make you exclaim: 'Tim - how could you leave out x? x are amazing!' where x is the name of an artist or band you admire.

I know your AwesomeScanner currently reads: critical density reached, HOWEVER get ready for it to overheat then short out in a blast of sparks, because I'm going to be performing too, as part of performance poetry collective Aisle16. We're doing half an hour on Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the Cabaret Tent (that massive yellow and blue one in the Circus Field) from 11:40am to 12.10pm. We're also doing a slightly longer set in the Poetry & Words Tent on Saturday afternoon, 5:15pm-5:55pm. That's over two hours of Aisle16 - longer than most of the headliners get. I know, I know. We're incredibly chill.

Come and see us one of those times! It's poetry but the twist is it's not shit. If you're not familiar with Aisle16 allow me to break down the Glastonbury roster into a quintet of crude archetypes: Joe is the sardonic scholar. John Osborne is the kindly uncle. Chris is Michael Douglas in Falling Down. Ross is Charles Bukowski, if instead of being drunk he was just a bit tired. And I'm the sex-pest who takes onlookers' embarrassed laughter as encouragement.

So yes. Aisle16 at Glastonbury - 11:40am every day in the Cabaret Tent, and 5:15pm on Saturday in the Poetry & Words Tent. Set a reminder on your mobile. You'll only forget otherwise - you know what you're like. I'll also be making a number of solo appearances - catch me wandering dead-eyed across the festival site at 7:30 every morning, clutching a bundle of soiled rags to my chest and howling something about needing medicine for my baby.

In other news, while browsing the Ebury Twitter feed I found a link to this review of We Can't All Be Astronauts on a blog called The Slammer. It's a really positive review and I feel chuffed: 'A less safe pair of hands would make certain passages sound whiny and irritating, but Clare’s passion for the subject matter lifts these moments into a real-life triumph of the underdog tale. His self-deprecating humour is also a major virtue - particularly when it comes to briefly being "Jeffrey Archer’s bitch" on national TV.' Ha - that first sentence becomes unintentionally damning when you remember that the 'subject matter' is me.

Lots of people who've read Astronauts have got in touch to let me know what they thought of it. I try to make a point of replying to everyone, but thanks anyway to all the folks who've taken the time to write to me. I'm surprised at how many people have said that certain sections resonated with them - it's obviously struck a chord with a few frustrated artists out there, and it's been nice to hear that it helped some readers feel slightly less alone in their futile struggle for recognition. Other people just wrote to let me know that they'd laughed at what a twat I am. That's nice too! I can be a bit of a twat - I'm glad that at least I'm a twat who uses his twattery for the forces of good. Too many twats squander their talent. Stupid twats.

Interview With Me, Plus We Can't All Be Astronauts 'Hilarious' Reveals Grazia

2009-06-17T09:34:00.004+01:00

There's an interview with me up on essentialwriters.com, which you can go read if you're somehow not satisfied with the current volume of unsolicited self-disclosure on this here weblog. In other news, I am SO in Grazia today. Well, We Can't All Be Astronauts is anyhoo. Lauren Laverne dubs it 'hilarious'. Thank you, Lauren. Do people still chortle? What's a chortle sound like? It's not very onomatopoeic, is it? I imagine it's the kind of noise that'd be made by a toddler choking on a gooseberry.

But I digress.

We Can't All Be Astronauts Launch Pics

2009-06-15T21:46:00.006+01:00

These are some pics from the launch of We Can't All Be Astronauts. Joe Dunthorne, Ross Sutherland, Steve Aylett and Salena Godden all did some terrific readings, and a good time was had by all. Pics courtesy of Dan 'Scoopmeister' Derrett.

We Can't All Be Astronauts - Review 2

2009-06-13T04:07:00.013+01:00

So I got another review of We Can't All Be Astronauts, this time at writers' website essentialwriters.com. You can read the full thing here, if you like.

The reviewer, Judy Darley, is mostly nice about it. She says some bits are 'truly fascinating', that 'you can’t help but be awed by his audacity' and that 'you’ll be alternating between feeling depressed and inspired by Tim’s revelations, and may even find yourself making decisions about your own future as a writer'. But she also thinks I'm whinging and self-indulgent and sections of the book read like me chucking my toys out the pram.

I think that's probably a fair comment. When I was working on Astronauts I had lots of decisions to make about how to portray myself, my moods, and my aspirations. On the one hand, I wanted to be honest. On the other hand, I didn't want to come across as such an unlikeable arsehole that I alienated the reader. Severe depression can have a weirdly narcissistic component to it - sometimes you end up projecting all your feelings of doom and self-loathing outwards, deciding that there's no possible way you can be happy in this shitty, fallen world populated by hollow bastards. Like I say in the book, I puffed up myself and my idea of my future because as a teenager I was lonely and unhappy, and an aggrandised narrative gave me something I could cling to. Up close, depressed people are often hugely unsympathetic, but their suffering is still real, as are its consequences.

In the end, after several discussions with my agent and my editor, I went for being as honest as possible, because that seemed like the most interesting option. In her review, Judy says that in places I come across 'like a kid with a strop on because they didn’t get the part they wanted in the school play'. I think that's very perceptive and I absolutely agree. And it's easy, if you get the part you want or you're not invested in the play at all, to dub that kid a grasping obnoxious pranny and move on. Jealousy isn't a very noble pursuit, and it rarely evokes our sympathy.

Personally, I wanted to investigate. Most of us experience jealousy to a greater or lesser extent, although we're not all prepared to admit it. I expect most people deal with it better than I did, but then, the useful thing about a grotesque is it's easy to see the mechanics of the trait it embodies. I don't want to start vaunting the cheesy, life-improving benefits of Astronauts, but I do hope that some readers recognise smaller, less destructive instances of the same sort of thinking in their own lives, and can let go of it a little as a result (or at least feel like slightly less of a twat for not being perfect).

I realise that the moments in the book where I say 'I know I was being really self-indulgent and actually I was a very fortunate young man' don't negate the fact that much of the story focuses on a character who has his priorities badly out of whack, so I think it comes down to whether the conflict and psychology of that interests you. It's just who I was, and who, to a certain extent, I still am. I get the impression that Judy would have preferred a straighter account of the writer's path, with all the various hurdles between page and publication. Which is fair enough. I'd prefer The Bill to have more ED-209 cameos but until we get out of this damned recession and ITV starts filming bespoke episodes I'll have to make do with my crappy retro fan fiction. In one episode, ED-209 and Tosh uncover a cache of stolen video recorders in a Sun Hill lockup - but who's the culprit?

Homestuck

2009-06-12T15:07:00.005+01:00

So if you've been doggedly following my blog for some time now, you'll know I'm a capering ninny of a fanboy for Andrew Hussie's MS Paint Adventures. I've posted several times before about the marble cake of win that is his text adventure meets webcomic meets 'what if you could play the most awesome video game ever' simulator.

Well, the latest adventure, Homestuck, has just reached Act 2. The first Act was kind of like a prologue, setting up the premise, so now is a really good time to join! Unlike a TV show or comic book series, all the backstory is right there, so you can breeze through, discover the story for yourself, and catch up! More importantly, unlike both of those things, you get to suggest stuff for the characters to do! John: Captchalogue TC's rapt attention. Go on. Go have a peek. I'll wait.

And if you like pretend video games so much, why, pray tell, have you never watched Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006? HUH?

How To Get A Book Deal - Director's Cut

2009-06-10T17:07:00.005+01:00

So, I thought I might as well post up the original text of my article on how to get published that The Independent commissioned then wankerishly mangled. I know I'm being a teensy bit precious but it is a bit galling when you get an article printed in a national newspaper but they edit out some of the most important bits. In a way, it was doomed from the start - 'how do I get published?' isn't a particularly helpful question. We don't live in a country that needs more published authors - what we need are better authors. In all the freelance editorial work I've done, and in all the writers I've known socially, I've only ever seen two cases of people who were struggling to find an agent, and yet were exceptional writers - in both instances, their manuscripts started weakly then got rapidly and dramatically better a few pages in. Also, both authors were writing in somewhat obscure subgenres, where the number of lists dealing in that sort of thing are limited.

For almost all the unpublished authors I've read over the years, the answer to 'how do I get published?' is, very simply, 'write better'. The vast majority of rejected writers don't get published because they're not good enough. For some reason this simple truth seems to make a certain subset of aspiring writers apoplectic with rage. 'No!' they bellow. 'It's because dipshits like YOU refuse to give me the secret password that will get me past the gatekeeper! What do you mean, "write better"? What sort of trite bullshit is that? Agents send my work back with a standard rejection letter! That means they can't possibly have read my masterpiece! How dare you insist I "write better", you smug gobshite! I'll fuck you in half!'

These are the people who nod with credulous glee when told that the publishing industry is a clique-ridden clusterfuck that genuine talent will never penetrate. These are the people who end up forking out thousands of pounds to self-publishing companies, companies who perpetuate these myths because they stand to profit. These are the people who will always be a bit rubbish.

The novel I spent years working on and then trying to sell? It didn't fail because of a global conspiracy. Nobody published it because it was a bit mediocre. Dude. Write better. That's it. That's the secret, you irredeemable bellend.

So anyway, here's the full original piece in all its discursive, flabby glory:

How To Get A Book Deal

When I went undercover at the London Book Fair, posing as CEO of Fabulous Books Inc, an aspiring author gave me the lowdown on how to get published:

‘I sent my manuscript to agents and editors but I just got it returned. It’s very difficult to get anything read. The way the modern industry works, it’s all about self-promotion. The thing is, you’re asking people to put their money into your work. So to convince them you’ve got to show that you know how to sell a novel, so they know they’ll get their money back.’

Dressed in a pinstripe suit, with a red silk handkerchief stuffed into his breast pocket and cherry-red braces, he was walking from stall to stall, handing editors copies of his children’s book. While in India, he had paid to have over 2000 copies printed. The cover was drawn in pencil crayon.

‘This is Phase Two of promotion,’ he explained. ‘I’ve been posting copies through the letterboxes of people in the neighbourhood.’

‘What, friends?’

‘No, just, you know... local letterboxes.’

Imagination is supposed to be one of a writer’s strong suits, but ever since I was a child and a teacher first asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said: ‘Someone who writes stories,’ I never managed to think of a better reply. Back in school, a group of kids could answer ‘nurse’, ‘train driver’, ‘builder’, ‘inventor’, and you’d never hear: ‘Very good – except you Johnny. Inventor? Are you mental? That’s not even a real job. I mean Jesus Christ. Go and stand by the coat rack.’ We were encouraged to dream. Learning what was and wasn’t feasible would come later in a series of informal realisations, by which time we would be so off our faces on burgeoning hormones that our only aspiration for the future was that, one day, we would get to squeeze a breast.

If you want to be a footballer, or a heart surgeon, or an astronaut, there are clear prerequisites and cut-off points – before you proceed you must acquire such-and-such a qualification, if you haven’t achieved such-and-such by the age of 20 your chances of a career are zero. By stark contrast, becoming a professional author calls for a highly subjective skillset, recognises no age limit, and can even co-exist alongside other jobs. Obviously I’m not advocating some Logan’s Run style cull of older writers – my point is that, with most other vocations (including mother), there comes a stage where you can say: ‘well, it was a pretty dream, but it’s impossible now,’ and finally let go, safe in the knowledge that no amount of hairshirty exertions will ever be enough.

Most people who put pen to paper and attempt a book are perfectly aware of the horrendous odds they face, but becoming a novelist has little to no start up costs, and offers theoretically limitless profits. Anybody – including you – could be plucked from the doldrums of their shabby, average job and hoisted into a life of status, meaning, and comfort. Knowingly being on the wrong side of probability doesn’t stop thousands of people buying scratchcards every week. A lottery ticket’s value doesn’t come from an expected return on one’s investment – what you’re buying is a tiny, white hot nugget of hope, that you get to carry around with you, drawing warmth from it until your numbers come in dud.

For all the supposed allure of the distant finish line, in my experience, writing a novel is a long, lonely path, lined with signposts pointing in contradictory directions. It’s like trying to unclog your drains by yourself. You spend countless miserable hours alone, elbow deep in your own excrement, and at the end of it all, you don’t get published.

Magical thinking thrives in unpredictable environments. Even for industry stalwarts, the dense mesh of variables that governs whether a book sells in barrowloads or slumps into ignominious obscurity makes publishing a baffling business – which, of course, is part of its attraction. There are no control groups to test successes or failures against, meaning that editors tend to rely on trend-chasing and hunches, garlanding the process with statistics to lend it a spurious air of scientific rigour. As Mark Le Fanu, General Secretary of the Society of Authors, told me somewhat ruefully: ‘The fact is, for almost everyone involved, it’s a very unpredictable, tricky industry.’

It shouldn’t be surprising then, that to the uninitiated would-be writer, the book industry can seem variously like a glamorous dream factory, an unfeeling monolith honeycombed with toff cabals, and a kind of clapped-out zeppelin piloted by monkeys that randomly distributes food parcels. You find yourself fiending for guidance, and there is no shortage of pundits, hucksters and gurus all willing to sell you a map that shows the one true route through the labyrinth.

The fact is, there is no one-size-fits-all prescription for getting published. What we refer to as ‘the publishing industry’ is a whole stir-fry of different companies with different agendas and different end-products, many competing with each other over a shrinking consumer base. Books end up on publishers’ lists through a variety of processes, and the only general advice possible is to embed yourself as deep as you can in the belly of the beast, then use every means at your disposal to get your work read by the people with their hands on the purse strings. Of course, this policy presumes that you have spent years honing your craft, know your market, and have produced a manuscript that showcases your skills firing on all cylinders. Yes, the occasional purblind idiot may blunder across the minefield unscathed, but most will get blown to smithereens. Think of talent as your insurance policy.

My friends took a variety of routes to publication. One entered a children’s writing competition with a novel he’d written in a week, came runner-up, and was offered an advance five times that of the winner. Another came up with the proposal for his first book on a single side of A4 the night before he was due to have a meeting with a publisher, who promptly accepted. Two got to know their editor socially, bandied around some ideas, wrote a sample and pitch, then wrote the rest on acceptance. One spent four years studying creative writing at university, won a writing award, attracted an agent, finished his first novel, then had his agent sell it off in an auction between publishers.

As for me, I spent years working on an elaborate Fantasy novel that didn’t quite hang together, then lost my job, split up with my girlfriend, moved back in with my parents, and had a nervous breakdown. For the next 18 months, I watched as my best mates started achieving things that, just a couple of years before, were nothing but whimsical fantasies. I played video games, ate breakfast at two in the afternoon, and listened to my recently retired dad shuffling round the house like Marley’s Ghost. Eventually, partly at the behest of my therapist, I began to write about what I was going through – the tight knot of jealousy in my stomach, my heart-to-heart chats with my father. Writing about my feelings spurred me into action – stupid, ill-conceived action, mostly – which in turn gave me more to write about, until soon I’d wrestled some of my darkest demons and decided that I could live without the glory of being ‘someone who writes stories’. At which point I showed what I’d written to an agent, who showed it to a publisher, who said: ‘no this is self-indulgent flatus I will not give you money for it’, and then my agent kept on showing it to publishers until one said: ‘this is very good I will give you money for it’.

Simple.

And apparently useless as a practical model for getting your magnum opus out of your desk drawer and onto the bookshelves of homes all round the country. Except, maybe it isn’t.

Tenacity and flexibility make a formidable team. Take pleasure in creative failure – it’s a sign you’re pushing yourself – but learn from it too. I had to bash my head against a brick wall several times before I thought: ‘Hey. Maybe I should change direction!’ Getting published isn’t a matter of pushing books through strangers’ letterboxes – it’s about practising until you’re really good, then persevering until you’re really lucky.

//BOXOUT
HOW NOT TO GET PUBLISHED
1. Don’t dilute your vision by reading others’ work. Especially avoid new genres and forms.
2. Never lose faith in your original draft. To edit is to scorn your infallible muse.
3. Submit your work with as much supporting material as possible. Self-portraits in green crayon scream ‘I am creative’.
4. Approach editors somewhere they could not reasonably be expecting to field submissions. This will catch them off-guard and you will be more likely to negotiate a favourable deal.
5. Bear in mind that the Writers’ Handbook and Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook are both produced by publishers, and are therefore biased. Ignore them.

How To Get A Book Deal

2009-06-09T13:38:00.006+01:00

So, I've got a little article in The Independent today. Annoyingly, some doltish sub-editor went in, cut out several important sections and changed the box-out at the end. Originally, they emailed and said 'oh, and I thought it would be rather amusing if Tim wrote a tongue-in-cheek 5 steps on "How Not To Get Published"', which I duly did. I wrote them in a deliberately pretentious, arty-farty voice because, you know, that was kind of the joke. For example, Number 5 was 'The Writers' Handbook and Writers' and Artists' Yearbook are produced by publishers, and are therefore biased. Ignore them.' This got changed to: '5. The Writers' Handbook and Writers' and Artists' Yearbook are both produced by publishers. Ignore them at your peril.'

They're saying that's my suggestion for what not to do? Oh pillockish Indy and your cash-strapped knee-jerk hackery! Did it not occur to you that I might mind your chopping my article to bits then printing it under my name without asking? Grr.

In better news, we did the London launch of We Can't All Be Astronauts last night in Soho, at Salena Godden's Book Club Boutique. Joe Dunthorne, Ross Sutherland and Steve Aylett all did brilliant readings and I met up with people I haven't seen in ages. Copious, grovelling sackfuls of thanks to everybody who took the time to come down. I felt very flattered and special and basically great about myself and all my friends. If you were there, thanks very much and I hope you enjoyed it. Also, you have very good taste and you're cool.

Poetry's First Pop Group

2009-06-07T23:31:00.002+01:00

Someone suggested I watch this video from back in 1998, of 'poetry's first pop group', Atomic Lip. In the aftermath, I find myself uncharacteristically lost for words. Wow. Just wow. Actually spectacular. Anyone starting out in performance poetry could learn a huge amount from this video. Just study the choreography, their various delivery techniques, and the content, then do the exact inverse.

Games With Stupid Names - #4: Hatris

2009-06-06T23:08:00.009+01:00

Since today marks the 25th birthday of Tetris, I thought meh, why not, I'll chuck in a 'bonus' post. There have been many variants of Tetris over the quarter century since it first appeared, but none quite achieve the status of 'Hatris'.

Yes. It's Tetris but with hats. WACKY.

Playing Hatris is like waking to discover that, during the night, a tramp who subsists entirely on Buckfast and vindaloo has emptied his rotten bowels all over your chest and face, like some aggressively generous poo Santa. Stack five hats and they disappear! Look! The heads vaguely resemble Elvis! That's it! That's the entire game! Just be thankful you can't hear the sour, brain-rotting six-second loop that constitutes the only in-game music.

Fill up the word 'SALE' by stacking enough hats and you get to remove one type of hat from the board. And look! The Elvises have turned into vague Regan simulacra! Aha! Aha ha ha! Brilliant! I must play on to see the next row of crudely rendered celebrity faces! Or open my wrists lengthways! One of the two, definitely!

So yeah, before you get too dewy-eyed about Tetris' glorious legacy, take a moment to remember Hatris, and consider if we wouldn't all be better off if Alexey Pajitnov had been relocated to Siberia for some hard labour.

Games With Stupid Names - #3: Cotton Boomerang

2009-06-06T09:35:00.016+01:00

Cotton Boomerang (full title Cotton Boomerang: Magical Night Realms) is a side-scrolling shooter that takes the hypercolour cutesy aesthetics of games like Pop n' Twinbee and Parodius, dials back on the self-consciously wacky elements, adds a touch of R-Type, then finishes with smatterings of that deliciously cultish shoot-em-up sub-genre, 'bullet hell', to create a game that's big, brazen, and really rather good.

I realise that most readers of my blog will be going WHAT THE CRAP TIM at this point, because I'm talking entirely in video game references and most of you are artsy types whose shoot-em-up knowledge starts and ends with the ironic Space Invaders t-shirt you sometimes wear at festivals, so look, even though you feel horribly alienated and you've probably already stopped reading by this stage, just for you here's a (very) brief bluffer's guide to shoot 'em ups. Who knows, one day (in a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances) it might just save your life.

So it starts with Space Invaders in 1978, your little ship tucked behind destroyable bunkers, shooting up at gradually descending aliens.

1979 saw vector-graphics based Asteroids, where your little triangular ship can rotate through 360 degrees and fly around the screen with the thrust button. Your job is shoot at the asteroids, breaking them into ever smaller chunks until they disappear, without colliding with them. Pew pew pew! Later shoot 'em ups in the 'fly in any direction' sub-genre include Sinistar, Time Pilot, Blasteroids and Geometry Wars.

Vertically-scrolling shooters like Twinbee built on the single-screen format of Space Invaders and saw you taking the battle to your enemies.

1942 is another classic vertical-scroller, replete with power-ups and ridiculously huge planes which you must nail with a hail of gunfire.

The granddaddy of the side-scrolling shoot 'em up is Williams' Defender, a peach of a title where you nim about in your little spaceship trying to stop aliens snatching humans off the planet and using them to transform into super-fast mutants. The game is impressively elaborate, with a range of enemies, a 'scanner' display up the top of the screen that shows you where your enemies are, smart bombs, and a 'warp' button that gives you a last-resort escape hatch when under fire. Games like Scramble foreshadowed the more straightfoward left-to-right shooter, the main difference being that Scramble is absolute unremitting shite.

Sega's Choplifter is one of the more successful attempts to create an earthbound variant, pitting you against a plethora of anti-aircraft turrets and fighter jets as you attempt to bust hostages out of their holding cells and fly them back across enemy lines to safety.

The R-Type series is one of the most fondly-remembered instances of the side-scrolling shooter, boasting many features that have now become staples of the genre. By holding down the fire button, you can charge your laser, allowing the player to choose between rapid fire or big, surging blue blasts of energy. Multi-directional lasers that can ricochet off walls and air-to-ground missiles add to the havoc, as do the gigantic fearsome bosses that wait at the end of each stage.

In lots of ways, the shoot 'em up in most of its classic formats is something of a forgotten relic, but one of the most modern iterations is the 'bullet hell' sub-genre. It took a while for hardware to reach the stage where it could cope with calculating and updating the exact position and velocity of pillions of different-sized projectiles, but once it could, a hardcore of shoot 'em up junkies found themselves drawn to games where colossal, multi-part bosses spew volley upon volley of burning death, leaving you tiny wedges of screen to hide in while you fire back with everything you've got. The game above is Raiden Fighters Jet, a late iteration of the popular Raiden series. Bullet hell isn't for everyone. It's kind of like grindcore - it's evolved to scratch a very particular itch, to the extent that the genre and its select audience exist in an almost symbiotic relationship. You have to be committed to take on bullet hell. This is the real shit, yeah?

So yeah, Cotton Boomerang. Remember that? When you start out, you get to select a team of three characters from a choice of eight possible shot-patterns. Once you're in-game, you can switch a limited number of times (you can replenish your 'switches' with power-ups) and, if you get hit, that character drops out and the next in line takes over.

Cotton Boomerang synthesises the cutesy monkey business of Twinbee with the robust power-up spread of R-Type and Raiden's merciless spray of deadly ordnance. As either a witch on a broomstick, a fairy, and some kind of sentient witch's hat presumably employed as comic relief, you battle legions of magical fiends and nasty beasts. As with R-Type, you can charge your shots - a full-power blast unleashes some kind of etheric dragon which blasts through foes and traps them in spheres, Bubble Bobble style. You can then catch these spheres, and fling them across the screen into other bad guys, who will in turn be captured, and so on and so forth. Like the 'option' unit in R-Type, these spheres absorb most bullets, cutting a useful swathe through enemy fire and offering you some much-needed breathing space.

Like most bullet hell shooters, Cotton Boomerang is all about the boss battles, which are everything you'd expect them to be - creative, spectacular, and brutally unforgiving. At first, you'll just get nailed repeatedly as the boss ejects seemingly unavoidable walls of projectiles. If you persist, however, you soon discover ways to take cover or blast through, and resulting in some near-knuckle evasive maneuvers and a lovely jolt of adrenaline.

Cotton Boomerang's biggest failing is the intermittent doses of cheesy anime fanservice. I don't need to see some bikini-clad sprite wapping out an implausible rack and vast acreage of thigh at the end of every level, thank you very much. I'm no prude, I just think porn should be porn, you know? This sort of embarrassing halfway house stuff just feels awkward and chauvanistic.

So yeah, in summary, Cotton Boomerang is a game with a silly, effete name that carries a technicoloured sledgehammer. Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.

Games With Stupid Names - #2: Appoooh

2009-06-05T02:51:00.009+01:00

Appoooh is an early attempt by Sega to capture the excitment and sweaty, balletic majesty of pro-wrestling, without actually forking out for the rights to the WWF franchise. This 1984 button mashathon sees you limp and jerk around the ring, punching, kicking and grappling your opponent into a stupor before going for that all-important pin.

The 'action', such as it is, can even go outside the ring:

When you start out, you're offered a selection of wrestlers including the rather cheekily named 'H. Hogen' and the similarly copyright-skirting 'A. Giants'. With moves such as the 'Body Slum' and 'Neck Hanging' at his disposal, this Mr Giants fellow sounded like my kind of beefcake, so he was the lucky brawler I chose to take me into my first bout.

Now I know here that A. Giants [left] looks, if anything, like Rowlf the Dog from the Muppets, which might lead you to question his chances of success, until you notice that his first opponent is David Crosby.

Sure, side by side two of America's best-loved musicians look pretty evenly matched. But once you step into the ring...

A. Giants reveals his secret weapon. GROTESQUELY ELONGATED ARMS. Seriously. He makes an orangutan look like a thalidomide baby. We're talking serious Mr Tickle shit here.

The combined power of freakish monkey arms and the devastating body slum made short work of Crosby, who sloped off to seek solace with the other members of his increasingly uncool supergroup. Like a lot of beat em up games of this era, you can only attack people to your immediate left or right, meaning skilled fighters stand slightly above their opponent, before moving down at the last moment to attack. You've got two attack buttons at your disposal, punch and kick. Pressing forward and kick together makes your wrestler do a dropkick. By pressing forward and punch, you lock your foe in a grapple. Then it's just a case of bashing the buttons fast enough to win, so you can hurl them into the ropes or pile driver them.

Having won my first bout at a canter, I was getting a bit cocky. I have huge bemuscled arms and the face of a dog, I thought, who on this planet can challenge me?

WHAT THE FUCK.

Sigh. A wrestler with not just long arms, but super-long legs. Yes, this spaghetti-limbed gangle-molester made short work of poor stubby-legged A. Giants. I staged a brief, promising comeback, keeping him at bay with well-timed dropkicks, but once he had me in a grapple it was curtains. Headlocks, elbow drops, all sorts of monkey business. I left, humiliated, my head swirling with the image of a tortoise on its back, helplessly pedalling its useless limbs while an ostrich pecks at its exposed belly.

Oh. The game's rubbish, by the way. I have no idea why it's called 'Appoooh', except that, possibly, it is one. Aha. Ahahahahaha!

Games With Stupid Names - #1: Tinkle Pit

2009-06-04T02:25:00.008+01:00

Tinkle Pit is the kind of hyper-cutesy epic bananas-ness that peaked in video gaming around the late 80s and early 90s. For the most part Taito had this market all sewn up, with the Bubble Bobble franchise, New Zealand Story, Don Doko Don, Rodland and Liquid Kids amongst others. Namco clearly decided they could go one better.

Tinkle Pit is laden with aggressively pointless, incomprehensible shit swirling round reefs of heavy-handed Namco cameos. Cribbing heavily from Universal's Mr Do series (especially Do! Run Run), the game sees you lugging a giant sentient jingly bell around a maze full of enemies. Holding down a button pays out the rope the bell is attached to. As you walk around, this trail of rope grows longer and longer, until you release the button and - ping! - the bell goes shooting along the trail you've left until it returns to your side. Any enemies it hits along the way get killed.

The sub-genre of 'games with elaborate and idiotic ways to kill enemies' is replete with this kind of asinine Heath Robinson muppetry. Dig Dug started it all off, making you inflate foes with a bike pump (the Fygars and Pookas from Dig Dug appear in Tinkle Pit too, as if Namco are desperate to batter us over the head with reminders that they make good games too), then there was Snow Bros, where you had to bury enemies in snow until they became a huge snowball, before kicking it into the other baddies. Tumble Pop made you suck multiple bad guys into a vacuum cleaner before firing them back out as a big, tumbling ball of limbs.

Tinkle Pit is crappy. It starts off ludicrously, insultingly easy, so that on a first go it's possible to get past the first two worlds without losing a life. Somewhere around the middle, the difficulty jumps from 'simple' to 'frustrating'. Levels suddenly become packed with baddies, and robots are introduced that fire deadly lasers that can pass through walls and travel the length of the screen. Even less forgivable, there are only two boss battles in the entire game - the majority of it is taken up schlepping round saccharine giga-nippon labyrinths, waiting for foes to blunder into the path of your massive, jangling bell. Ha.

Booktrust Interview

2009-06-02T12:25:00.005+01:00

Oh sheesh y'all, if you have a sixty second window in your schedule lolling open and unsightly like some ageing schnauzer's slobber-rimmed gob then why not cram a tasty shin bone in there - metaphorically, bien sûr - by reading my short interview on the Booktrust website. I drop so much knowledge it's like I'm some kind of klutzy bookseller trying to rearrange the encyclopedia window display - WHICH IS TO SAY I DROP A CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT OF KNOWLEDGE.

Penzance, May 28th

2009-06-01T15:37:00.005+01:00

So I caught the train down to Penzance, my nose all runny from hayfever and my shirt sticking to my back in the heat. As you get close, the track is bordered by lots of verdant spiky bushes and trees that look like they belong in Malta or, y'know, somewhere rather hot and exotic.

When I arrived I realised I needed somewhere to stay, so I rang around some guesthouses. All of them said they were booked up for the week, until eventually one chap said that yes, he had one room left. I asked him where the B&B was. It turned out it was behind me, about 30 seconds away. When I met him, I found myself being extra smiley and polite, and I realised that it was because I felt a bit weird about being a young man booking himself into a B&B all on his own, down here on the edge of the country, apparently without having planned it in advance. I think I was worried he might think I'd come down to Cornwall to commit suicide, and they'd find my shoes neatly side-by-side at the end of the quay. (did you know that people who commit suicide by jumping off things tend to take their shoes off? It's one of the early warning signs bridge attendants are supposed to look out for)

The man running the B&B was very helpful, and recommended a couple of good seafood restaurants, before giving me directions to the road I thought the Arts Club was on. On my way to the night, I heard shouting echoes from amongst the thick stone pillars of the church. A guy with splayed, bird's nest hair around a sunburnt bald pate was propped on one elbow, talking loudly to a teenage boy slugging on a can of Stella. The man had a bedroll and rucksack next to him. He made an expansive gesture to illustrate some garbled, recondite assertion and an almost empty litre bottle of Teacher's whiskey went clattering down the steps, each bounce ringing and echoing across the street.

I'd sent an email to check that the night was definitely on before I left Cambridge, and had received a simple 'Yes! Still on!' from someone who, as it transpired, never showed up to the venue. I asked a short man wearing little wire frame spectacles if he knew where the Arts Centre was.

'I think you mean the Arts Club,' he said. 'Follow the street down and it's the yellow door on the left.'

I waited for an hour inside the Arts Club. There was no mic, and no performance space. The two rooms were decorated with the motley abandon of some fruity widow revelling in her newfound freedom after her stuffy husband's long overdue death - albeit with a fully-functioning bar installed at one end. Actually, no - that's exactly the sort of very cool extravagance a fruity widow would splash out on.

When it reached the time for the evening to start, there were three people aside from me; two of whom were down in Penzance by chance and had decided to pop down to the Arts Club to see what it was like. The person supposed to be running the night had not turned up. There was a sort of nervous murmur as to whether anything would happen at all.

In the end, it turned out to be one of my favourite open mics I've been to so far. I'm not going to explain everything that happened here, but I met some fascinating people and really felt quite privileged to have stumbled across such an odd little coming together of people of all sorts of ages, to talk and listen and share.

I'm starting to collect all my photos and recordings and notes and memories together now, and I'm battling Dr Procrasto for the opportunity to sit down and start synthesising them into the beginnings of a story. My journey is far from over, but I really do feel like the nights I've visited and the people I've met are beginning to change me. The only question is whether I can convey that on a page, and make someone else feel 'wow!', or whether they feel so precious precisely because, as the saying goes: 'I guess you had to be there.'

Homework - NEW SEASON!

2009-05-27T01:46:00.004+01:00

Ahh. Finally, the new season of Homework is about to kick off. Homework is Aisle16's London scratch night, a kind of loosely themed literary cabaret on the last Wednesday of every month. Each night has a main show, with support slots from the residents, and often a guest slot.

Last year, despite drifting across three venues, we managed to have a fantastic run, premiering new material and shows every single frickin' night. For a gig that consists largely of poetry, it manages to be pretty raucous fun. Back in October we debuted the full version of Infinite Lives, our show about video games and the grinding vapidity of real life, which is developing into something I'm really proud of. I think it contains the best material I've ever written, and it's on a subject I really care about. Me, Joe and Ross also debuted the full version of what would eventually become Found In Translation, our show about how we tried to infiltrate infamous French experimental literature group, the Oulipo. We're due to perform Found In Translation at the Port Eliot Literary Festival, on Sunday 26th July. Again, the show's final version is something I'm really chuffed with and proud to be a part of. My other highlights from last season include: taking part in the four person performance of Ross's Obituary poem, which cuts up four obituaries from around the same time then splices them together as if they refered to one person; hearing Kate Nash do a set at the end of Joe's Submarine reading; watching Ross, Chris, Joel and Luke perform Services To Poetry on a tiny stage in a room packed to bursting point, and remembering that they're my favourite poets; and getting to play Where Jenny Goes on my uke with glockenspiel accompaniment.

So anyway, the new season goes on until the end of October, on the last Wednesday of every month. It's upstairs at the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club, although knowing our history with venues, I wouldn't be flabbergasted if at some stage we have to make new arrangements and up sticks to somewhere else. But that's all part of the crazy make-do-and-mend ethos that makes Homework so special, so slapdash. The night's certainly one of my favourite to do, because the audience are always great. We experiment, we write lots of new material, and because of that, there's that exciting feeling that what you're watching will never happen again. It's just a really cool mix of new stuff and super-bankable classics that is loads of fun to perform and seems, from the crowd's responses, to be, err, nearly as fun to watch. Heh.

So, the new season kicks off with John Osborne's Radio Head - current Radio 4 Book of the Week. As well as John's reading there'll be a full set from Tim Key of BBC4's Cowards and Charlie Brooker's Newswipe.

I reckon Tim Key is awesomecakes.

As if that wasn't enough (well, actually it obviously isn't - you can't have a cabaret night with only two acts) me, Ross Sutherland and Chris Hicks will all be doing support slots, performing new material and generally being convivial little imps. I've actually written brand new poems, which I'll be trying out for the first time at Homework. Squeeeeeeeee!

So look, if you're reading this, you should come. Here are the details. The mental thing is, it's only £3 on the door. If you can't get there, we film each night and it sounds like an actual film crew should be turning up to the opening night too, so there'll be eager lenses a-go-go. Fingers crossed it will be giddy joy and everyone will have a great time. We've been super-jammy with our regular audience at Homework. They're lovely and the main reason we keep doing it.

Oh, and last but definitely not least, we're extremely grateful to the Arts Council, who are helping to fund this second season. They've been really, really supportive, seem to get what we're doing, and have trusted us to work hard and develop it. Hats off to them, really. Thanks to them, we're now able to put on a whole half-year of exciting, innovative, affordable live literature in East London. Hooray! It's not just good for us - it's good for all the somewhat nutty heroes who put in so much work to create a vibrant performance poetry scene. There's some fantastic stuff out there if you know where to look. Ahem. But may I suggest starting at Homework?