clack clack clackity clack bing! whirclunk clack clack clackityclackityclackity clack clack clack clack clack

As may have been indicated by the title of this little post, yours truly is now in possession of a typewriter to call his own. Specifically, a Brother Deluxe 220 with black and red ribbons and a 7/8 key but neither 1 or a 0, because that’s the way they made them. I am very happy, and have been clacking away typing a letter to a friend of my grandmother’s all evening. No more chickenscrawl for me!

I’ve finished I, Lucifer, which was immensely entertaining, if a little let down by the ending, which seemed to come completely out of nowhere and ignore a lot of the metaphysics which had been painstakingly established. Ah well. Clack clak bing.

Four months in an evening

I’ve been at it all night, and now I have a year: some muggins who ought to be nameless may have bought himself a 2010 diary insert for his Filofax today, and given that a) it would be a  disproportionate expenditure to buy a whole year’s calendar for four missing months and b) he had lots of spare empty telephone-book pages neatly and conveniently divvied up into sevens he decided to manually fill in the missing months – with two different-coloured pens, no less. He has now entirely depleted two of the three black pens he was able to find in his bedroom and severely sapped his sanity – which may explain why he is writing in the third person – but he now has a fully functioning Filofax with enough hardware to support his needs (and even a few dates in it).

One might ask why on earth he has a Filofax, in this digitised day and age, and he might answer in a number of ways. Some of these may very well be these: that he was given it donkey’s years ago and never quite threw it away because it might be useful some day; that he has no wish to be as chronologically illiterate as he was last year, and that a Filofax is a) conveniently bag-sized and b) able to also double as an all-purpose refillable notebook and is thus less irritating to port than a seperate diary; and that he is fundementally opposed to everything being done on computers today because a) he thinks it is unnecessary when there are more reliable technologies which are more user-friendly and b) he is a fusty old Luddite with frame-breaking sympathies who is unsuited to living in this hectic, whirring, humming, beeping age into which he found himself unnervingly thrust some  nineteen years ago.

Presently this Filofax is black and shiny. This is quite distressing, because it makes me feel like a wannabe executive from the mid-90s, and I am attempting to break up the shininess with stickers of the classy variety, to whit, thus far, an ‘Unemployed Philosophers’ Guild’ logo and a Horrible Histories Roman leigionaire. If any of you, my loyal readers, happen to have classy stickers which you wish to donate to grace the covers of my Filofax then a postal address can be supplied. Those of you who don’t will forever feel a tiny, nagging, unidentifiable twinge of guilt. Yeah. Builders of the pyramids, take that for a damned nasty curse.

My quest for retro stationary was somewhat broader, however, than mere Filofax inserts, as my primary objective in town today was to scare up a typewriter from a charity shop with which to write letters (and maybe to type readable drafts of poems). In this great task I failed (although  was told that the Grove House Hopsice shop may have one, if I’m lucky), but  did purchase the following books: I, Lucifer, by Glen Duncan (whom I had come across previously, as the author of Death of an Ordinary Man – I’ve started I, Lucifer, and it’s pretty entertaining); Instruments of Darkness, by James Sharpe (a scholarly-looking Penguin History about witchcraft in England between 1550 and 1750, which sadly doesn’t seem to cover Scotland); Metropole, by Ferenc Karinthy (an Hungarian author I’d never heard of before, but it sounded interesting – a sort of Kafka-does-a-modern-Babel); and the superbly titled Soon I Will Be INVINCIBLE, by Austin Grossman (which, yes, is a novel about superheroes and supervillains, but it looks really awesome shuttup).

I think I write along the same lines that I dream; with a little effort I can backtrack just enough to see where all the elements have come from. So the fact that I got two percent for an essay this morning (in my dream) because I hadn’t properly addressed Germaine Greer’s criticism of my thesis is undoubtably related to the conversation I had yesterday about the lyrics/poetry devision & how she tends to be wrong, probably deliberately, because it sells a lot of copies for the Guardian.

I woke up with my hands tapped mummy-fashion under my shoulders, unable to move my arms because they’d lost all circulation; I tend to have bad dreams when I sleep like this. (And now I must away to work.)

A drive and a two reveiws

I like driving. It’s one of my guilty pleasures. I bike most of my local journeys these days, and when I do drive I eye the miles-per-gallon-ometer in the same way that I do the speedo. And while I’d probably love the company, there’s nothing quite like a long trip up or down a motorway alone with my thoughts, Radio 4 and the CD player. I had a £20 HMV voucher kicking around in my wallet from a generous relation, & decided that just before a jaunt to Sheffield and home again seemed the perfect time to convert it to music; & so it came to pass that I found myself with Regina Spektor’s Far and Reverend and the Makers’ A French Kiss In The Chaos riding shotgun on the passenger seat. The former I’d had a hankering for since it came out, while the latter was an impulse buy (I saw them at the O2 Arena supporting Oasis, & I liked what I heard enough to give them a chance).

Strangely enough, both albums get their titles from lyrics rather than the names of songs: ‘far’ crops up in Blue Lips (blue lips, blue veins,/ blue, the colour of our planet from far far away), while ‘a French kiss in the chaos’ is a line from the album’s final song, Hard Time for Dreamers – both of which are very strong tracks. But here the similarity ends. Far is an apt title for an album with a preoccupation with distance, closeness, & the way that the one can telescope into the other; the theme is returned to again and again over the album, in different guises. It’s an incredibly acomplished album, exuding an assured sense of confidence from the first note & even going so far as to make an Oasis-like echo of previous work (the first whimsically poetic song, The Calculation, ends with a phrase lifted directly from Begin to Hope’s On the Radio). Where Begin to Hope oscillates ever-so-slightly rauccously between melancholy & a whimsical joy, Far strikes a slightly more contemplative tone and finds a middle ground. I think it’s fair to say that it’s the album I’ve been waiting for all summer, both literally & in that annoying journalistic metaphor.

By comparison A French Kiss in the Chaos comes off badly, & it’s probably a little unfair. It’s not that it’s a bad album; bits of it are even good. But it’s cautious where it ought to be bold, conventional when it should be breaking ground. The lyrics occaisionally astonish, but are usually mundane and even tedious, and the album could have done with a better producer. But that said, the mix of Kasabian, Arctic Monkeys, Oasis and Hard-Fi makes for pretty good listening, the tunes are surprisingly catchy & as mentioned before the final track, Hard Time For Dreamers, is fantastic.

The Gabble

I read most of The Gabble in the library this afternoon. It certainly isn’t Neal Asher’s best work. It wasn’t quite as well written as most of his novels; stylistically it was reminded me of Azimovian hard-science sci-fi short stories with the science & the settings rework, which isn’t at all a bad thing; Cory Doctorow does that very explicitly, even to the extent of titling two of the the stories in Overclocked ‘I, Robot’ & ‘I, Row-Boat’, but he matches form with content. Asher, by and large, plays hard-and-loose with the kind of technobabbling pseudoscience that requires a pretty decent working knowledge of the relevant fields, & does so in a highly stylised post-cyberpunk future. (As much fun as that term is, it’s a little unwieldy: I propose shinypunk as an alternative, because whereas cyberpunk is concerned with the rather grittier aspects of the impact of technology, writers like Neals Asher & Stephenson play far more with the really cool stuff can come out of it.) Asher tends to be most successful when playing with Very Cool Concept Characters (Mister Crane, Ian Cormac & Sable Keech spring instantly to mind, as does, to a certain extent, Jack Ketch) & Very Cool Complex Ecologies like Spatterjay, and the short story format doesn’t really give him the freedom to do either. Rho , Penny Royal and Snow are cool concept characters of increasing succesfulness; none of he stories really have thew space to use an ecology as a sandbox, but they do play with the Gabbleduck rather a lot, with variable succes. I won’t write too much about it, because I’d get it wrong and probably fail to explain quite how cool it is in any case – but, frankly, a giant, bizarre, many-limbed monster with a terrible beak, a rather unusual attitude to human prey & a habit of sprouting unrepeated  & linguistically infuriating gibberish at its victims gets my vote in any election. The Gabble isn’t Asher’s best work; but it is certainly good enough.

Other cool things of the moment include the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, seven phallic poems by Rilke, a really creepy animation of Emily Dickinson, &, of course, Pomegranate Issue 8: SAINT. I particularly enjoyed Noren Bonner’s Beowulf, Mark Burns Cassell’s Making Cider With Joan of Arc, Samantha Kinlin’s Greek to Me, Rachel Rowan Olive’s Duffy-pastiche The Innkeeper’s Wife, Kayo Chingonyi’s Gnosis, Alastair White’s Apollo In Exile & Cara Brennan’s Sparks (I often like things with sparks in them, it seems – the two obvious examples being Ben Wilkinson’s pamphlet the sparks and the following quotation fromLuke Kennard’s Bestiary For the Seven Days: ‘The scientists are flicking salt at your boyfriend. They do not believe in the efficacy of occult practisesm, but maybe that’s because they name every spark that flies from the lathe.’).

c25

Every so often I reset my iTunes play counts.I tend to listen to stuff on iTunes DJ, so it gets to be a pretty good indication of what I’ve been listening to; & rebooting every so often means that that song I listened to a hundred times in that one week when I was going slowly stir-crazy doesn’t stay at the top of the sheet like the proverbial cannonball on a rubber sheet. Before the next reboot, though, I thought I’d blog mycurrent Top 25, more for my own satisfaction than for yours, O Reader (though I hope you’ll find it interesting, enlightening, elucidating & intriguing, obviously).

Coming in at number 25 is The Gaslight Anthem’s Wherefore Art Thou Elvis. I have no idea where I came across this track, but I rather liked the band’s name & thought the title was pretty fun and though the sound was no way near as steampunky as I’d hoped I rather liked it anyway. With the same number of plays are Milk and Money (off The Fratellis’ brilliant Here We Stand); Leeds United & Have to Drive (off Who Killed Amanda Palmer); Modern Mafia (off Athlete’s Tourist, which I picked up last summer as driving music & contains the wonderful line ‘dancing like a samauri’);  Ares (Bloc Party, Intimacy); and a rather wonderful recording of Eels melding Stairway to Heaven and Lone Wolf.

The next block is even bigger. It contains two songs from a band that I can almost guarantee you won’t have heard of: Alibi Tom, who I only came across because a friend who knows them lent me their album Scrapbook. Fire is up on their Myspace; I couldn’t find Breathe My Way anywhere to link to. You might have heard of Jump, Little Children, but if you haven’t they are awesome and not just because their name includes a bit of punctuation; check out Dim and the Dark. There’s also Sticks & Stones by Babyshambles (yay for ampersands!), Mykonos by Fleet Foxes, The Kinks’ brilliant Till the End of the Day, The Last Shadow Puppets’ Calm Like You (& isn’t that an awesome name?); Untidy Towns by the criminally unknown Lucksmiths (which I was linked to by the fantastically knowledgeable Richard O’Brien while searching for songs to put in a playlist for an architect), Zoo Time off the Mystery Jets’ first album (Making Dens, which is superior to Twenty One by a decent margin), a live recording of Noel Gallagher singing Don’t Go Away to raise cash for some kids with cancer, and Oxford Comma of Vampire Weekend’s eponymous first album (hurrah for commas, right guys?).

Once more moving up in the word, we have Noel Gallagher singing Sad Song at the same charity concert coming in at #7; a fantastic mashup of A Day in the Life and Karma Police (look, bonus tracks!) by Mark Vidler titled Karma in the Life at #6; Babyshambles (again) with What Katy Did Next at #5; & the Kinks again with Dead End Street (which seems rather horribly apt for the current economic climate) as #4. Bronze goes, rather bizarrely, to Enterlude from The Killers’ album Sam’s Town; silver to Do You Realize?? from The Flaming Lips’ gloriously ridiculous Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots; & the gold medal for the most-played single track goes to Amanda Palmer’s Runs in the Family, which everybody should go and listen to right now. (She’s basically Regina Spektor’s evil twin, and she’s dating Neil Gaiman. What is not to like?)

Wasn’t that fun?

Chronoplastic

“He’s dead!” he announced, disconsolately & noticeably drunkenly. “He’s dead.” And we reassured him that no, he wasn’t dead, because that is what one does when very drunk people tell you that people are dead and you don’t want them to cry or knife you. He then continued to talk to us all the way to the station about politics mostly, and simply wouldn’t go away, as though he were a stray, inebriated chunk of space-junk caught up in the gravity-well of a comet or a planet or something.

And then the next day I discovered that he was dead, and not only that but his death actually broke the internet (or at least crashed Google and Twitter, which is practically the same thing these days). And also that his death is far bigger news than anything else going on in the world. I’m sure there should be a moral in that somewhere.

Oddly, this wasn’t the strangest encounter with inebriation of the evening. We – Richard O’Brien, Adham Smart, Amy Blakemore and Photolosopher (who I do not believe has a public profile, but should do, because she’s very talented – weirdly there is someone out there with a photoblog of that name, but I don’t think that it’s her – is it?) – were in Greenwich, overlooking the Thames, playing Scrabble Scramble, when two men approached us. One of them asked what ‘discombobulated’ meant; the other told us that a very long word which began with ‘chronoplastic’ meant ‘time warp’. O London. O London.

And speaking of London, one comes almost naturally to China Miéville – or at least his latest book, The City and the City, which I bought in York because I saw it at half price and caved in. It was disappointing. That isn’t to say that it wasn’t good; only that he could have done better. The premise was fascinating, and the development of Breach and Orciny through the novel well-done; but unlike the rest of his work, it didn’t teem with the fascinating and the grotesque, and the novel’s language mostly uninteresting (although I liked the slightly translated texture – I wish he’d played a little more with Borlu’s nascent talent for foreign tongues). Nonetheless, definitely worth a read, and probably a reread in due course. (I’d quite like to note here that I read large chunks of the book, appropriately, on a train going into London, and with Pink Floyd’s High Hopes stuck in my head. Also, he’s speaking at the South Bank Centre fairly soon. Exciting!)

On the book front, my Luke Kennard arrived a few days ago, which was dead exciting. I’ve also been reading The Quark and the Jaguar, a lot of which I’m finding quite redundant and taken up with lengthy explorations of largely unnecessary examples. Nonetheless, it is wonderfully intelligible without being either patronising or unreadable (though in a very different way to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which I am about half-way through, although it’s currently somewhere in the garage with the rest of my uni-books). Whilst typing this, I’ve been listening to a reading of a Stephen Greenblatt book on BBC7; and though Will in the World seems to be made up in equal parts of erudite scholarship and freewheeling and willful speculation it’s a pleasure to listen to, because Stephen Greenblatt is really pretty magnificent and it’s rather fantastic that it’s on the radio. And he just used the word sonneteer.

Placeholder before I go out because I promised -

Photolosopher is a Scrabble ninja. More to follow.

Round-up

There’s a lot to catch up on since my last blogpost. I attended my first politcal protest rally (protesting against the BNP representing me in Sheffield, because I felt that telling everyone how angry I was & then not doing anything about it was a little silly, although I’m not entirely convinced by the ‘the BNP are objectionable so let’s try to deny them a platform and throw eggs at them lobby); finished my exams (I wrote about  the first scene of Hamlet, mostly, and then came home and discovered that the mystery book that my mother had bought me off Amazon was called Kingdom of Infinite Space); read at an open mic poetry thing (where somebody in the audience had heard both of the Diagram Prize & of James Blish, which I swear honestly never happens); recieved a very exciting letter (twice); returned home; discovered that certain areas of my house were tidier than they had been at any point in the last fifteen years; cooked with exciting ingredients like pine-nuts; succesfully precipitated a minor domestic revolution (by succesfully pointing out tht the reason that the house tends towards high-level entropy is that there is too much stuff in it & too little storage space, & that there should be ample storage space but it is all full of often-redundant stuff that is never used because we have reduntant incarnations of it and it’s stashed out of sight and out of mind, and if my mother, for instance, threw out half of the vases that she’s been given over the years by well-meaning friends and relatives then we could put the stuff that causes messiness out of sight in the cupboards and use some of the pretty vases sometimes instead of sticking the odd bunch of flowers in a tall glass because we’ve forgotten where the vases are); visited the St Albans Organ Museum (which is possibly the strangest & arguably the most wondrous institution in St Albans); watched Angels & Demons (we went to the cinema on a whim to watch Star Trek and discovered that we’d have to wait another four hours, so compromised – review forthcoming); watched Pan’s Labirynth again (also on a whim, several hours after deciding to do so, as my neighbours from whom I borrowed it dragged me inside & gave me tea and banter for two hours before we ran away); spent an afternoon with my amazing grandmother (who gave me a copy of Withnail & I, as if she needed to make herself any cooler in my eyes); came down with a rather annoying 30-hour manswinebirdflu (amusing letter read in the Granuad today: apparently scientists are worried that bird and swine flu might combine. And pigs might fly); read a couple of books (Mona Lisa Overdrive, Kingdom of Infinite Space & The Terracotta Dog – clearly I need to up the tempo if I’m going to get all my reading done); and had another strange dream whilst listening to the radio (at least this time round I didn’t confuse Pirs Morgan with Stephen Fry). I realise that this is not the most scintilating blog-post ever written, but I am yawning and want to get some shut-eye now.

I am disgusted, I am appalled, & I am very, very angry. The BNP won a seat in Yorkshire & Humber. Nick Griffiths almost got another but was barely – barely – pipped to the post. UKIP have done very well. & I haven’t even mentioned David Cameron gtting into bed with racists, homophobes, anti-Semites and SS-enthusiasts.