We Can't All Be Astronauts - Extract and Competition

Oooooh! Guess what space cadets?

Ugh. Okay, that made me a little bit sick in my mouth. Note to self: don't use chipper wankerisms like 'space cadets' ever, ever again.

So, in any case, hello undifferentiated morass. With just over a month to go, there's a short sneak preview from We Can't All Be Astronauts up online, using Ebury's pretty funky Flash reader gizmo. Have a peep here. You could even go ahead and preorder here.

It's up there to help promote a contest we're running in conjunction with the Bookseller. It's a writing competition with a twist - we're looking for entries from people who work in bookstores. I reckon there must be a whole host of diligent, well-read bookshop staff who are also keen writers in their spare time, and this is a great chance to recognise their talent. It's also a great chance for me to feel like some smug, philanthropic industrialist 'giving back to the community', even though my book's not even out yet. So seriously, if you work in a bookshop or you know a writer who does, get them to go here. You'll be flattering my fragile - but very real - ego, and putting them on to a nice opportunity to get some well-deserved recognition.

The Performance Poet Interviews - #10: Elvis McGonagall

Oh my goodness. What a busy bee I am this week. And yet apparently making as much impact on my workload as an actual bee. They're not even heavy enough to operate a keyboard. So, look. Why not read this week's performance poet interview, with the very witty, very tartan Elvis McGonagall?

How did you get into performance poetry?

I fell into it, in the deep end, by accident, whilst drunk - entered a slam at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2003. Thus Frankenstein's monster was born.

How would you describe your work?

Chop, chop, merry, merry, busy, busy, bang, bang.

The happy sound of the four-letter word that is work. Sadly, a sound that is all too sporadic round these parts. The "performance" part is essentially shouting at strangers in a dark room, usually in the evening, whilst wearing a loud and increasingly tight tartan jacket. As far as the "poetry" bit is concerned if the content had to be labelled I guess it would be "political satire and gratuitous celebrity bashing derived from a deep well of bile and anger. In verse".



Do you think there's a difference between 'page' and 'performance' poetry? If so, what?

Yes.

One is better written down.

Mine isn't.

Which is probably why I've always felt a wee bit ambivalent describing myself as a "poet". Also, I don't have the fedora, the fur-coat or the cuban heels. "Wordsmith" is perhaps a more accurate description. Or "versemonger". But for want of anything else "stand-up poet" will do.

And poetry existed way before William Caxton so that's alright.

Why should someone come to a performance poetry gig?

Good question.

So that the likes of you and I are not left abandoned on a stage in a tiny empty room above a pub as tumbleweed drifts past forcing us to confront the futility of existence. And, on a good day, you might see all manner of exciting, entertaining, thought-provoking performers delivering wonderful words in defiance of the brutalisation of our glorious language by stubby-fingered neanderthal "txt" messages.

On the other hand on a bad day it might be absolute shite. But in any event it'll probably cost less than a fiver. And it would still be better than sitting on the sofa watching Piers Morgan interview Ulrika-ka for an hour. An hour. What the flying fuck is going on?

What do you think your best poem is, and why?

All my stuff is really written for my missus so I asked her and she said "This Land's Not Your Land" because "it makes her cry and want to sleep with me". That's more than good enough for me (although I do hope it's not the only piece that might assist in conjugal bliss as it's been retired from performance since Obama's election).

If you could nick one other person's poem and claim it as your own, which poem would it be, and why?

Ah - there are many and various candidates. Enough to fill a small anthology. Something very short would be ideal to nick - the equivalent of shoplifting items that easily fit up your jumper - perhaps Byron Vincent's Elton John haiku. Although that would be pointless because I can only ever remember the last five syllables despite having heard it on numerous occasions - too busy laughing to remember the other twelve. Or perhaps something that is radically different from anything I might do, such as Henry Bowers' "All Out Of Dogfood". But that would be equally pointless as I'd never be able to pass off as my own work that of a Swedish hip-hop Tom Waits-influenced bearded rapper. There are many, many others. Too many to list here.

What typifies bad performance poetry to you?

Self-indulgent bollocks that sends an audience to sleep. As the late, great Adrian Mitchell said "most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people". The litmus test is my mate Matthew's spectacles - if he's in the audience and he takes his specs off then it's really, really bad.

What do you think of the state of the UK performance poetry scene at the moment? Is it okay to talk about a 'scene', or is that a bit unhelpful?

For some reason the word "scene" throws up an image of Peter Sellars in a beret and black polo neck reciting bad beat poetry in a dingy, smoke filled cavern somewhere in Swinging London. Not sure why.

Anyway, on occasion the scene seems to be in rude health with a whole raft of fantastic performers out there and a potentially huge audience. But then again it sometimes feels like Hercules' 13th labour trying to do this for a living - particularly when I'm staring at the cows at the bottom of the garden.

And the cows stare back.

The cows usually win the staring contest.

Tell us about a particularly memorable reaction you've had to your work.

Here's a random selection:

I supported John Cooper Clarke a wee while back which was a thrill and he said "fucking fabulous" after my set - but I think he was being a gentleman.

A self-confessed lifelong Tory with a political viewpoint quite possibly more extreme than Genghis Khan heaped praise upon a piece I do called "You Can Call Me Dave" (which is none too complimentary about David Cameron's rhetoric). Nice to know that Dave unites left and right.

After my first appearance on Radio 4's "Saturday Live" Rachel Cooke, writing in the New Statesman, described me as "...someone you've never heard of whose every stanza sounds like it was written by Les Dawson on the back of a fag packet". Beautiful.

Bangor, Wales

Coming in on the train to Bangor, you get this deliciously precarious sense of teetering on the edge of the world. With the Menai Straits on one side and the looming, mist-weathed Bangor Mountain and its foothills on the other, the UK's fourth smallest city feels particularly wee, a temporary resident in a bold and ancient landscape.

It took me five and a half hours to get there, but these days train journeys like that ain't no thang. Unless my carriage is packed with brattish teens listening to trebly R n' B without headphones, or some knuckle-dragging lunk with the sort of boss-eyed glare that suggests all human faces appear to him as floating red-ringed bullseyes, then the ride offers some very pleasant me-time, where nobody can make any legitimate demands on me, and yet I don't feel guilty, because I'm heading towards a destination.

I was heading there as a featured poet for Poetica, a poetry night that takes place in the Blue Sky Café, and attracts a mixture of arty, bohemian types and chilled out hippies. If I was going to learn to be a mellower, less fearful character, surely hippies were the go-to experts.

My favourite part of the night was when the compere started the night by stepping up to the mic, then knocking out some beatbox harmonica. In ten seconds the room went from low-level chatter to rapt attention. It was one of the best opening compering gambits I've ever seen, a way of rapidly, non-aggressively asserting authority - and a blessed respite from 'so what's your name pal? And where are you from?'

Although there were invited poets, the evening began with an open mic session, and closed with one. For the second open mic, the audience were told to 'put your hands in your pockets - and write a poem about whatever you find there,' so any of the poems that got read out had been written during the evening.

Most of the open mic performers were Poetica stalwarts, but there was one guy, also called Tim, who was reading for the first time. I'd noticed him when he came in - he looked in his early twenties, had close-cropped hair, and was wearing a navy blue hoodie, and stuck out amongst the tie-dyed, dreadlocked hippies and brown-trousered retirees.

When he leant forward to speak into the mic for the first time, you could hear his panting breaths. He was shitting bricks. He read a poem called 'Mr Wrong', apparently autobiographical, about going from Welsh schoolboy boxing champion with a bright future, to a listless stoner at 21, after a series of unspecified 'misfortunes'. It was all written in metreless couplets, had a few awkward malapropisms, but was startling in its nakedness. He read the last line, 'My real name is Mr Roberts, but it seems to be Mr Wrong today,' and his voice broke as he hit the last word. The audience gave him a big round of applause, and he tugged at his hair, grinning bashfully.

'My legs are shaking,' he said.

This is a guy who has willingly, repeatedly stepped into a ring where someone else is going to try to deliberately hit him very hard in the face, yet reading his poetry to a roomful of smiling hippies left him so terrified it affected his ability to speak and stand. The pattern-creating part of my brain wants me to note that he was the second open mic ex-boxer I'd encountered in a week, though I'm not totally comfortable with introducing the obvious pugilist/performer analogy. For me, the most interesting thing to observe is that bravery and confidence in one area does not necessarily have any bearing on confidence in another. One person's routine triviality is another's gibbering nightmare. A lot of supposedly confident, together people have simply sculpted their lives so they don't have to come into contact with the things that they're afraid of. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that, so long as they admit their limitations, and don't act haughty when confronted with people who knock up against their anxieties on a regular basis.

In the end, I don't think I could be a hippy. I'm too fond of order. Also, I think crystals are just pretty rocks. And I don't think global pharmaceutical conglomerates are conspiring to give the world tumours. And you don't see many hippies playing video games. I like machine-gunning waves of enemy grunts. I'm pretty sure that kind of talk gets your hippy card permanently revoked.

Death Of An Open Mic

As I've intimated before, open mic nights are rare, transient things. Not quite a century flower, more a colleague's fart that topples a polystyrene cup.

In Shepherd's Bush, I went to the Knock 2 New night at Bar FM, a weirdly clandestine cocktail bar full of leather sofas and disco lights that rolls up its blue security shutter and emerges like the head of a tortoise every night, just after 6pm. Before it opened, I watched an overweight, bearded Danish guy plod up and down outside, apparently baffled. He wore a wide brimmed hat, khaki shorts and brown leather sandals, and he was sweating like a doughnut in hot Tupperware, his t-shirt dark with perspiration. I leant against the wall and quietly judged him, feeling superior because I was hiding my confusion beneath a facade of indifference.

At about twenty past six the blue shutter rolled up to reveal a stairway leading downwards off the street, and a sign with the bar's name on. The street was busy and, perhaps because of the fair taking place on the common, seemed to be riddled with arseholes and sketchy nutters. Some teenager was standing in the middle of the road, mates either side of him, sounding off at the top of his voice.

'Did you see that? That guy just fucking gave me two fingers! That guy in the fucking car!' He was spazzing like a Revivalist. 'He fucking disrespected me! I'll fucking kill him! I should've slung a brick through his window!' He mimed hurling something, with a motion that suggested more of a weighted sock than a brick. 'Where's he gone? I'll fucking kill him!' He was marching up and down the pavement, shrugging off mates who touched his shoulder. His volatility made me feel nervous. I was lugging my huge backpack and my ukulele. I felt suddenly vulnerable. I imagined he might turn on someone he felt was looking at him the wrong way. Already, on the way to the venue, I'd encountered a big guy in a baseball cap, stripey vest and gold chains approaching me on the pavement. I moved to the right so as not to bump into him, and he moved the same way, and when I kept moving right he kept moving, as if to intercept me, looking right at me. Just as we were about to bump into each other, I felt a whack to my backpack, and some stringy skinhead thumped past both of us, through the narrow gap between my side and the railings, and went sprinting on up the street, weaving in and out of pedestrians.

In the end, I felt so uncomfortable I binned the last third of my chicken, bacon and avacado bagel so I could go into the club early.

Now I read that sentence back it sounds like the most middle-class sentence ever. Please don't judge me as a prejudiced snob. I'm not a snob. Just - in some situations - cowardly.

It turned out that this night was to be the last Knock 2 New ever. I was present at the death of an open mic.

'We just don't get the audience,' said Alex, the evening's compere, as we sat at a table in the corner, before things kicked off. I was drinking a 16oz highball glass of pineapple juice and lemonade that had cost me three quid. 'We do another night with established acts, you know, proper big names, and it's packed.' He swept his hand across the empty room, implying a bobbing vista of enthusiastic punters.

I can understand why paying to watch a dozen or so strangers learn public speaking live on stage might not sound like a promising use of one's time, but the more stand-up open mics I go to, the more I feel like they've got something genuine to offer the more adventurous punter. Whereas professional comedy club circuit gigs usually cost well over a tenner on the door, and there's a nagging inauthenticity to the apparently spontaneous 'antics' that take place (if I have to watch one more professional compere go through ten minutes of that 'what's your name, sir? And what do you do?' flatus, well... I won't be very entertained, that's for sure), at open mics all bets are off. And I just don't mean in the sense that sometimes someone does something eye-gougingly wacky - 'There was this geezer, right, and he gets up on stage... No wait, wait... Oh mate I'm cracking up just remembering it... So this geezer gets up on stage, right... and he's only wearing a chicken costume! A fucking chicken costume! How mad is that?' - but in the sense that some of the most interesting stuff that happpens isn't comedy.

In a comedy club, a significant amount of money has changed hands, and it creates an implicit contract between the audience and the performers, and quite a strong dynamic. Tactics for 'setting up a room' get shared between comperes until they're pretty much uniform anywhere you go. At a stand-up open mic, the contract is often far more hazily defined. Often there are audience members who've come to support a friend, and who maybe have never been to a comedy night before. A lot of the audience will be other acts, who are sometimes quite nervous and preoccupied with what they're about to go up and do, sometimes very keen to be supportive and make the night feel warm and friendly, and occasionally actively hostile towards the other acts.

A lot of open mic acts don't write gags so much as mine their life for anecdotes that usually go down well with mates. Most people have got a sort of 'greatest hits' of their most awesome, surefire 'well, there was this one time...' themed stories that go down well at parties, and so their set seems to sort of branch off from those. Unfortunately, because these events really happened, people tend to forget to edit, so you get rambling odysseys absurdly frontloaded with irrelevant contextual details, leading up to a denouement, 'and, no word of a lie, my actual response to him, was: "Don't be such a silly goose!"' and then the person grins proudly to the audience, as if they've just spunked their name onto a chocolate cake.

But sometimes, although these anecdotes aren't funny, (and, presented as stand-up, 'mildly entertaining' becomes 'aggressively, grief-inducingly unfunny') they're interesting and compelling in their own right. Under the mantle of stand-up, people go up and talk about their failed relationships, their awful jobs, their loneliness, in a way I suppose they imagine will come across as hilarious and self-deprecating, but, to me at least, often comes across as bizarre and unique and really human. Sometimes the least funny comedians are the ones I enjoy the most, because they're the ones who adhere least to the reductive constraints of stand-up, and end up talking about, you know, actual stuff, rather than seeding their entire monologue with artificial 'twists' to trip the audience's laughter reflex.

The Knock 2 New audience ended up being almost entirely acts, with a large contingent of people who I assumed were friends of the landlady, (this may just be me being an ignorant racist - I assumed they were her friends because they were the same ethnicity as her. They seemed chummy, but they may, of course, have been total strangers) sat off at a table near the back, drinking, chatting amongst themselves, and totally ignoring the gig.

Alex gamely got on stage and tried to soldier through 10 minutes of the generic comedy compere's 'talking to the audience' schtick, even though, with the crowd mostly composed of other performers, he had pretty much nobody to talk to. I got the impression that he had mentally committed to doing a 'proper' compere routine before arriving at the gig, as part of an ongoing effort to develop the craft.

I was genuinely riveted, watching his expressions and body language as repeated attempts to establish a rapport fell flat.

'So what's your name fella? And where are you from? Ooh, [town x]. And how's that?' He didn't really have any material to riff off what people were saying, but also, fatally, nobody wanted to talk to him. Not just in the supposedly funny shy-reluctant way that some comperes try to exploit, but in an actively hostile 'stop fucking talking to me' contempt-filled way. A guy called Darren, who I saw do a set in Manchester back at the beginning of the month, pretended not to be an act, and rather cruelly set about stringing Alex along.

'What's that fella?' said Alex. 'You're not an act?'

'No.' Darren was sitting just behind me.

'What's your name fella?'

'Darren.'

'And why've you come down here tonight?'

Darren clapped a hand on my shoulder. 'I'm here to give moral support to my good mate Tim.'

'Oh that's great. And where you from?'

'Manchester.'

'Manchester? So what do you make of London?'

At this point, Darren slapped his palms together and began rubbing them. 'Oh mate, it's too big. I can't get my head around it.'

Some other people in the audience, who knew Darren was a performer, started giggling. Alex started smiling too, apparently believing he'd struck gold with a gauche, talkative audience member - the platonic ideal of compere-fodder.

'You think London's very big,' Alex repeated, then shot a glance at the rest of the crowd as if to say get a load of this rube!

'Yeah, and what about the Tube, man? It's always so busy.' The other acts who were in on the joke were by now sniggering and guffawing uncontrollably.

'You don't enjoy that?'

'When I get in a tube train, I feel like I'm inside a giant metal coffin.'

'Like you're in a coffin? So... so what song would you want played at your funeral?'

'Um... probably Will Young, I Think I Better Leave Right Now.' This got the biggest laugh of the night so far. 'Actually, I'm an act, mate.'

'What?' Alex's face fell.

'I'm an act. I'm Darren, I'm on later.' The audience all laughed, at, rather than with, the compere.

Alex looked at the floor, and made a loud 'huhhhh' noise, somewhere between a sigh and an anguished groan. This would become his signature move over the next seven or so minutes. He trudged across the stage and tried to keep going, calling to someone towards the back: 'Are you an act too, mate? You're not? What song would you have played at your funeral?'

'Kill the DJ,' said a chap with little librarian specs and chin length hair in a greasy centre parting.

'Kill the DJ. Good choice,' said Alex. He nodded. 'Good choice.' There was a pause.

'Hang the DJ,' shouted someone from the other side of the room.

'What's that fella?' said Alex.

'It's "Hang the DJ".'

You could almost hear a dozen people flinch as they simultaneously thought: no it's not.

'Very well pointed out, fella. Hang the DJ, is of course the name of the song.' There were some brief, aggravated mutterings amongst the audience. 'What's that? Oh, right. Yes... also known as Panic.' A kind of stagnant indifference settled across the crowd. Alex looked down at his feet. 'Huhhhh.'

I feel I ought to point out that I didn't think Darren was very gracious, and when I went up in front of that odd, vaguely irritated audience I withered in a laughless desert too, but I found it absolutely fascinating to watch the psychology of someone struggling on stage. If that seems a bit dehumanising and sadistic, then I'd concede that there's an element of the latter, but given that I've been putting myself out there as well, and given that, ultimately, these are events of very little consequence - unpaid nights in front of vanishingly small audiences - I reckon watching people die is a fairly harmless form of entertainment and elucidation. It reveals far more facets of a stranger's character than a slick set in front of a packed, roistering comedy club audience.

I wonder, somewhat idly, if what I've been watching is a form of live reality television. It has the same advantages of thrift and spontaneity, and offers a peculiar antidote to the homogeneity of the supposed experts. Watching clips of the Gong Show from the seventies, you can practically see Variety's tattered corpse give its final twitch before disgorging the ravenous chestburster of Reality TV. Slick professionalism may work for inducing Shock and Awe, but it's the strange, uncomfortable, arresting intimacy of fear, of live failure, that wins over Hearts and Minds.

Ren's Bitter Half

There's an episode of Ren & Stimpy where Stimpy creates a formula that physically splits psychotic chihuahua Ren into the two sides of his personality - 'Evil Ren' and 'Indifferent Ren'.

As my open gigs aggregate like silt, I'm finding I'm not growing more confident, just more indifferent. At my last stand-up gig in Shepherd's Bush, I did no preparation, got on stage and was rubbish, bombed, and I didn't care. This doesn't feel like progress to me.

It's not like I'm feeling apathetic about the world in general - I'm still enjoying watching new acts, meeting people, getting to know them, etc. In fact, in some ways, I've learned to unironically enjoy acts who maybe aren't 'good' in the conventional sense. Being nosy and talking to folks has shown me just how interesting and likeable some folks can turn out to be.

But I'm not exactly feeling passionate about my own work. I seem to be getting worse, not better, and with each diminishing return my interest in mounting a fightback decreases. If heading out to such a concentrated succession of open mics was intended to accelerate me through a portion of my career I missed, I fear I've overshot, speeding past naive pluck, ambition, and mastery, straight into 'jaded hack' territory.

Was it always like this? Were my nerves the only thing distracting me from how rubbish the gigs were?

The Performance Poet Interviews - #9: Scroobius Pip

Coo. It's all go here, isn't it? We've already heard from eight very different performance poets, spraying their opinions everywhere, making jokes, being all arty. This week, pray doff your cap and stroke your beard for Scroobius Pip.

How did you get into performance poetry?
It was a strange one really. I had been in various bands and tried to work with various musicians but musicians (and my friends) by their very nature are incredibly unreliable! I realised that, with spoken word, the only person i had to rely on was myself. If it all went tits up, only I would be to blame. Then at the same time, if it all went great, I could bask in my own glory!

How would you describe your work?
I generally just describe it as spoken word. Due to the fact it is a collection of words that i speak. I like to tackle some quite dark subjects, often within a more lighthearted surrounding to give it more impact. I did a gig for onetaste once and, both in his introduction and after the set, Jamie Woon just kept saying 'Light and Dark, Light and Dark.' I think that's a pretty accurate description of one of my sets.

Do you think there's a difference between 'page' and 'performance' poetry? If so, what?
I really do. That difference is the performer. I remember reading some Niall Spooner Harvey on recmendation and, whilst I enjoyed it, I didn't really think it was my kind of thing. Then, about a month later, i saw him live and his performance and delivery just made it all make sense. I think, particularly as a performer, when you read someone else's poetry you impose your own performance style and technique upon. If it doesnt match how you write/perform then you may not fully appreciate it.

Why should someone come to a performance poetry gig?
Variation!! I think the 'scene' at the moment is just so varied in style. People often think it will be hours of people churning out long boring pieces but it really isn't! If you get down to a good poetry night then it can surprise you with every new poem.

What do you think your best poem is, and why?
This is a really hard question! There is a poem I do called 'Unspoken Word Poetry' and, whilst it may not be my best piece, it has certainly been my favourite to perform for sometime now. This is due to the fact that is has a section of beat boxing in it that is essential to the piece so it can never be a piece of written poetry and therefore only ever exists in the moment that I am onstage performing it.



If you could nick one other person's poem and claim it as your own, which poem would it be, and why?
It would be Cooper Chimbonda by Musa Okwonga (that rhymes...). The first time I saw this performed live I was stunned. I was up against Musa (and maybe yourself from memory) in a Shortfuse poetry slam and as soon as I heard that piece I knew there was only one winner. It's a 10 minute poem that keeps your interest throughout. Beautifully written, with wit intespersed within masses of emotion and conflict.

What typifies bad performance poetry to you?
Harsh question! But I will happily answer! When I started off on the scene I went to four or five open mics and slams a week so I got a good, quick, concentrated view of the scene so it was easy to flag up what I didn't like. I found that, at many poetry shows, there would be a lot of people feeling that if they mimic Ginsberg's slow.....draaaaaaaging.....wiiiiiiiiinding delivery style then it will make anything sound good. The fact is it actually makes most things sound bad. Unless you are actually Ginsberg. Which none of them were...

What do you think of the state of the UK performance poetry scene at the moment? Is it okay to talk about a 'scene', or is that a bit unhelpful?
Well look at that! We both, kind of awkwardly, put 'scene' in little quotation marks. I think there is a scene and it's fine to talk about it that way, largely because of all the different styles and approaches with in the scene. I do a weekly poetry slot on BBC Radio One and I get different poets in each week. It frequently amazes me to see the depth and quality that is out there. Obviously there will be some slot where I think that I am maybe making up the numbers. Only every now and then! But EVERYTIME I have thought that, the poet has come in and been one of my favourites on the show.

Tell us about a particularly memorable reaction you've had to your work.
Well, I have afew pieces about suicide and self harm so I regularly get some teary emotional reactions which is always a weird mixture of being a huge compliment and hugely uncomfortable at the same time!

Since you're quite the inter-disciplinarian, what you think the worlds of music and poetry have got to teach each other?
I think the two don't necessarily have anything to teach each other. They just present each other with further options and areas in which to explore. Poetry doesn't need music added. Music doesn't need poetry added. But if you can develop the two together then the directions are almost limitless!

We Can't All Be Astronauts - Launch Parties

Oh look. It's me with my ridiculous pudgy face, gazing down like a proud father on my very first book. It's all downhill from here. Thirty years from now, that book will keep a tattered copy of this photo in its shirt pocket, taking it out between slugs of bourbon to stare at my face with a mixture of longing and rage. Why weren't you there for me, Dad? Why didn't you care?

So. Look, there are two launch events to celebrate the fact that We Can't All Be Astronauts hasn't been smothered in its crib, one at Borders bookshop in Norwich on Friday June 5 starting 5:30pm, and one at the Book Club Boutique in London on Monday June 8 starting 7pm. You can find details for the Norwich launch here, and details for the London launch here.

I don't want to gush like a gauche wazzock, but I'm really looking forward to both, because I've managed to cobble together an awesome support line-up out of people who appear in the book. The Norwich launch has support from John Osborne, ('Osborne is this season's hot property' - Horncastle News) whose first book, Radio Head, about British radio, is due out next month (and which you can pre-order here - go on, it's one of those rare, genuinely good reads) and also from mythic poetry godfather Yanny Mac, who you may remember from his interview here - one of the most popular I've done! Afterwards, we'll all head out to the pub and lark around as if we've forgotten we're just temporarily sentient aggregations of meat that will rot back into the soil, every memory and trace of our identities completely, irrevocably obliterated. The London launch has support from my two cohorts from the recent Found In Translation tour, poet Ross Sutherland, whose first collection is called Things To Do Before You Leave Town, and author and poet Joe Dunthorne, whose acclaimed first novel, Submarine, is out in paperback from Hamish Hamilton. Completing the line-up is Steve Aylett, prolific, award-winning author of novels such as Slaughtermatic, Lint, Shamanspace, Dummyland, and many more. I know it sounds ludicrously hyperbolic, but now I think about it, you've basically got one of the UK's best poets and two of the UK's most talented novelists there... plus me. Then afterwards there's music and DJs and drinking til midnight!

The mental thing is, both nights are free. And everyone will have books available for signing. If you're a reader of this blog, you are cordially invited. We'd love to see you there. Let's meet up and talk about hundreds of things. I only get to have a debut book launch once. The rest of my life will be a dreary anticlimax. Please - catch me on the upswing, eh?