A grete entertaynment

Snakes On A Plane à la Geoffrey Chaucer:

... and Sir Neville was passinge wroth and seyde, ‘That ys ynogh. I haue hadde it wyth thes cursed by Seynt George snakes on this cursed by Seynt George shippe!’

Read the grete entertaynment of 'Serpentes on a Shippe' in full at Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog.

Genius.

(Thanks to my chum Dubaiyan for discovering this).

My new favourite bands

Ever since orbital disbanded in 2004, coupled with the demise of Red Snapper in 2002, my interest in music waned a little. I wasn't hearing anything new that interested or excited me ("new" in the sense of being new to me rather than recently released).

Thank goodness for Last.fm and its handy "similar artists" function (which, by the way, pisses all over Pandora's limited catalogue and its - erm - rather "creative" artist comparisons). Searching for similar stuff to Orbital brought up lots of bands that I was into already, but "Red Snapper" brought some really interesting stuff to my attention.

As a result, I have been going on a massive music bender of late and spending money on a whole bunch of CDs (I know, I know, it's all MP3s these days - I'm so old fashioned). This has left me scratching my head and wondering I hadn't delved into the Ninja Tunes catalogue years ago but, hey, I've always been a bit slow on the uptake.

Anyway, here is some of the cool stuff that I've discovered recently, stuff that has rekindled the ebbing flames of my love of music, or something:

• Xploding Plastix - A brilliant blend of jazzy instrumentation and electronic blips and burblings. Goes some considerable way to filling that dance/jazz/funk fusion type void left by Red Snapper
• Amon Tobin - I'd been hearing his name for years, had sort of heard a few bits and pieces but didn't really know what his stuff was like. And then I bought the album Supermodified. What have I been doing all these years? The man is a fucking genius! Lovely dark atmospheres, complex rhythms and melodies hinted at rather than heard... wonderful moody stuff.
• Rjd2 - Instrumental hip-hop with a curious hint of glam rock, especially on his Since We Last Spoke album. Imagine, if you will, a sound that falls somewhere between DJ Shadow and the rock-influenced bigbeat of The Chemical Brothers (less melancholy than the former, more balls than the latter). And Rjd2 deserves a medal for giving The Horror from his debut album Deadringer to the world.
• Four Tet - "Folktronica", apparently. Acoustic instruments and sweet, moody melodies blended with intricate drums and electronic effects. That description doesn't really do Four Tet justice - you really won't have heard anything quite like them.
• Laurent Garnier - Bit of a god of the dance scene, this French DJ and producer was instrumental in bringing deep house and Detroit techno to the Manchester scene in the late 80s and inspiring the likes of The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays to mix techno elements into their rock sound. Not that I was there or anything - I just read that somewhere. But he makes damn good electronic music. The Sound Of The Big Babou from his Unreasonable Behaviour album is a great slab of techno.

And that's not even mentioning Mouse On Mars, Bonobo, Blockhead, Funki Porcini, etcetera. Yup, there's lots of excellent and innovative stuff out there to discover - you just have to dig for it.

I'm in the sort of mood...

... where I absolutely definitely should not blog. So I won't.

Another book meme thingie

I has been tagged again for one of them meme thingies, this time by Kay Sexton. So, here we go:

One book that changed your life.

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. This novel was pivotal in the transition between my early teenaged reading habits (Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, lots of hard sci-fi) and the wider world of serious literature. Slaughterhouse 5 was so important because it showed me that literary fiction could be funny, sad, thoughtful, playful, experimental yet accessible all at the same time. Vonnegut's writing taught me the most valuable lesson that any aspiring writer can learn: anything, absolutely anything goes.

One book that you’ve read more than once.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - all five books in the inaccurately labelled "trilogy". Douglas Adams was just so damn funny and had a gift for using language to spin out increasingly absurd flights of fancy. He left us too soon, goddamnit.

One book you’d want on a desert island.

Hmm, tricky. I think if I was on a desert island then I'd want something really meaty and long, a novel that I'd have to return to again and again in order to work it out. In which case, I could do no worse than James Joyce's Ulysses. I haven't even read it yet but its reputation precedes it. It is sitting atop my bookshelf as we speak, drumming its fingernails, arching its eyebrows, silently questioning me as to when exactly I intend to finally gather myself and start reading it.

One book that made you laugh.

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. A beautifully absurd book. Whenever I am feeling blue, I flick to the part about how atoms are swapped between men and their bicycles. Just hilarious.

One book that made you cry.

Martin Amis has a reputation for being a bit of a literary brat, a writer whose outstanding prose style outweighs the intellectual or emotional content of his books. However, his 2001 memoir Experience managed to be both typically stylish and emotionally engaging. Amis Jr. writes candidly about the loss of his cousin Lucy Partington, who was a victim of serial killer Fred West, and also about emerging from the shadow of a famous literary patriarch. I do love Martin Amis' novels but Experience may be the best thing he has ever written.

One book that you wish had been written.

The sixth book in the Hitchhiker's trilogy.

One book that you wish had never been written.

As much as I despise Frankenstein, there is no denying its influence on the horror and science fiction genres and its place in literary history, so I will say Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch

One book you’re currently reading.

Deadfolk by Charlie Williams, ennit.

One book you’ve been meaning to read.

Apart from Ulysses, another big ol' brick of a novel sitting on my shelf waiting to be tackled is Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I did once start reading it but gave up after 75 pages. This will not do. I've read other books that have a reputation for being hard work or "difficult" so I simply cannot allow this novel to defeat me. Even if I never grasp what the hell the thing is about, I am determined to finish it one day.

Wasn't that fun? I suppose I'd better tag somebody with this now, as is the convention. Very well, I tag the Sleep Evangelist because I know she welcomes any aid to procrastination and Jai Clare (although she is an extremely busy woman and may never get around to doing it).

Random thought of the day

I am always slightly confused when DVDs are advertised as having an "interactive menu" as a special feature. Well, yes, but surely every DVD has an interactive menu system - that little onscreen button that says "play movie" constitutes a menu option and you can select it, ergo it is interactive. A non-interactive menu system wouldn't be of much use, would it; you wouldn't be able to play the bloody thing.

Likewise, I am confused by car advertisements that boast of an "interactive driving system". A car that doesn't have an interactive driving system would be one without a steering wheel, pedals, gear stick, ignition or any controls at all on the dashboard. Such a car would be a real bugger to drive.

This kind of gibberish is simply the manufacturers' way of saying, "There is nothing special about this product whatsoever so we are going to dress it up with some meaningless spiel in order to make it sound much more impressive than it really is and - this is the best part - you will fall for it because you are all a bunch of easily swayed retards."

Oh, that job interview

So, that job interview I had on Monday went really well. They thought I had a great CV with lots of useful experience, that I did a good job on the pre-interview test they sent me and that I performed strongly during the interview. All in all, they said I was an ideal candidate.

But they saw one other candidate after me who turned out to have done the exact same job for twelve years at another academic publisher so they gave him the job.

Bollocks.

Nail on the 'ead

An essay by Jonathan Rauch about the "trials of introversion in an extroverts' world" has inspired a huge response since it was published in The Atlantic Online in 2003. The general thrust of Rauch's article was that introverts are discriminated against by the extrovert hegemony of modern culture. Everyone is expected to be outgoing sociable party-loving extroverts at all times and the world's dominant extroverts simply don't understand that, for some people, making small-talk is a real effort for some and genuinely tiring.

Me, for example: I have no idea how to start a conversation with a complete stranger. I am lousy at chit-chat. Unless there is some common point of interest then maintaining a conversation is like trying to clean an oven with candyfloss for me. Sure, get me onto a subject that I am enthusiastic and knowledgeable about and I can bang on for hours but talk to me about the weather or work or... whatever it is that strangers talk to each other about when they first meet then you can forget it.

But at least I am not alone.

You can read Rauch's original article here.
You can read a follow-up interview with Rauch here.