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.
Showing posts with label john osborne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label john osborne. Show all posts
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
The 100 Poems In A Day Project
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!
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!
Wednesday, 21 October 2009
Local Boys Done Vid
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
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.
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.
Tuesday, 29 September 2009
We Can't All Be Astronauts - at HOMEWORK, tomorrow!
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.
Tuesday, 21 July 2009
What I Did On My Holidays
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.
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.
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
John Osborne's Radio Head
I've just finished reading my friend John Osborne's first book, Radio Head. It's the story of how he decided to listen to a different radio station every day, in a last ditch attempt to inject some variety into his boring data entry temp job. He ends up guiding you through an entertaining, uplifting state of the nation piece that rates as the best book I've read so far this year.I realise I'm biased, so by all means discount my praise, but I really enjoyed it from start to finish. John has a real talent for zeroing in on funny, tender details. Over the course of the book, he builds up a really positive, patriotic picture of a diverse and modern Britain. Radio Head's subtitle could easily be: How To Love Your Country Without Being A Cunt. But then I think he might be embarrassed to show his mum.
I don't want to start listening all the brilliant anecdotes and suprising incidents, because part of the pleasure is discovering them with John as he embarks on his modest odyssey. But watching how the different stations influence his mood and change his day is really satisfying and creates a forward momentum that somehow makes it both gently entertaining and a real page-turner - Fever Pitch for radio buffs.
So yes. I strongly recommend, basically. Each time I read it, it made me feel happier and more optimistic. I should really interview John for the performance poets section. I'll get on to that. In the meantime - check out Radio Head! There's a reason why it's been picked for Radio 4's Book of the Week!
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