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.

Language Is Not A Game

As you may have picked up from my previous post, I just finished a mini-tour with Ross Sutherland and Joe Dunthorne called Found In Translation, about language games and our attempts to infiltrate experimental French literature group the Oulipo.

In the show, we pass it all off as frivolous japes, but in reality, experimenting with language is fraught with peril. Ross and Joe found me (thank God) the morning after my attempt to write a poem where the only vowel used was 'A'. Apparently I had suffered a massive acid reflux and regurgitated all the unused letters. I post the shocking photographs of the scene they discovered in the hope that, if you know someone who is showing signs of discovering the empowering joy of playing with language, you can show them some of the repugnant consequences and dissuade them before they fall into a life of poetry. If that fails, I am happy to forward scans of my bank statements for the last twelve months, which I'm sure will be enough to send even the most ardent of aspiring wordsmiths galloping off to start a degree in Accountancy.

[WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES FOLLOW]

'Found' Univocalisms

As some of you may or may not care, I just finished a mini-tour of our show Found In Translation, the story of my, Ross Sutherland, and Joe Dunthorne's attempts to infiltrate the infamous French experimental literature group, the Oulipo, a group so radical and misunderstood that many people still don't believe us when we say they exist.

The Oulipo believed in placing restrictions on language to unlock one's true creativity. The central form we employed in our quest to gain entry was the univocalism - a word, phrase or piece of text that only contains one kind of vowel, e.g.:

A: Adam has a fat arm.
E: She shredded the letters every weekend.
I: Nikki's kissing this minging nitwit.
O: My voodoo doll only works on God.
U: Buddy tugs unlucky chumps' ruddy spuds.

Surely, we thought, if we each write a poem using this form, they'd accept us as one of their own.

You've guessed the end - we failed to join their ranks. But sod it, we picked up low-level psychosis on the way. Writing in just one vowel sends your mind's noise-to-signal ratio screwy. You start seeing patterns everywhere. Messages spring from every street sign. It becomes clear how an intelligent, creative person under a lot of stress might all too easily begin to think the universe was talking to him through shop hoardings and coffee machines.

Here's a selection of my poorly-snapped favesies:


This is my second favourite found univocalism, seeing as it's both a univocalism and a palindrome (a word that's the same spelled backwards or forwards):


But for sheer linguistic brio, you knew we were going to have to outsource to India:


If you spot any yourself when you're out and/or about, send them to me and I'll put them up on the blog. Gw'on!