Oh yeah, that time of the year again

Tomorrow is 1 November and we all know what that means, right? Right? Exactly.

Oh, and that novel writing month thingie starts as well. I think I know what I'm doing. Pretty much. I think.

Let's see if I can beat last year's total word count which was precisely zero. At the very least I need to get my long-dormant writing muscle flexing again. It has been far, far too long since I actually wrote anything other than the gibberish I sporadically cough up onto this blog. Really need to get back in the game or, more accurately, on the game*.

* This is a not-so-cryptic clue as to what my NaNoWriMo novel is going to be about. I'm hoping Jake Gyllenhaal will portray me in the film version.

Whoops, I did it again...

Curse Blackwell's bookshop and their "3 for 2" deal on Oxford University Press World Classics. I've resisted for so long, so long, but today my will foundered and I bought the following:

• The Life & Opinions Of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
• La Bête Humaine by Émile Zola
• Major Works by Jonathan Swift

Oh well, I'll just add them to the pile of unread books waiting patiently for my attention. I shall post a list of all the books in my library I have yet to read. I shall do this for two reasons: firstly because it will make for a nice long blog post and make it look like I've made the effort; secondly because seeing all the bloody books I haven't read yet in a written list might prevent from me buying any more:

• The Magus by John Fowles
• The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time by Hunter S. Thompson
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
• Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
• The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
• So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away by Richard Brautigan
• Two Tall Tales and One Short Novel: Anthology of Shorter Fiction by Lucy Fry, Kay Sexton & Heidi James
• London Orbital by Iain Sinclair
• Slow Chocolate Autopsy by Iain Sinclair
• Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
• Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami
• River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
• In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbin
• Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality by John Gribbin
• How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now by William H. Calvin
• Nature's Numbers by Ian Stewart
• Writing to the Moment: Selected Critical Essays 1980-95 by Tom Paulin
• Luis Bunuel: New Readings by Peter William Evans
• The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers by Henry James
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

Yes, yes, I know, I know...

Mots de jour

Two of my current favourite words:

• Obstreperous - noisily and stubbornly defiant.
• Defenestrate - to throw someone or something out of a window.

I think we can all agree that these words are not used often enough in everyday conversation. Go forth and obstreperously defenestrate with giddy abandon!

Saddo fanboy moment...

I try not to broadcast the geekier aspects of my personality with regard to my love of Doctor Who but - I'm so sorry - I can't help but be terribly excited (for once) about watching the BBC's Children In Need Telethon this year on 19 November for one simple reason...

I cannot, however, bring myself to type "squee!" or "w00t!": I do have limits, thank you very much.

Random ramblings of a Sunday afternoon

Boy, this blog is dying on its arse, isn't it? I can barely manage one post a week and even then I seldom have anything interesting to say. Ugh. For what it's worth, here are some headlines to tide you over:

---

Attended an Underworld gig on Thursday night at the Roundhouse in London. All kinds of awesomeness. Despite their latest album, Oblivion With Bells, being a more relaxed and ambient affair than previous records, they still know how to get people's butts movin' on the dance floor. And singer/guitarist Karl Hyde, bless him, is one of the best frontmen in the business. He bounces around the stage with such joyful abandon that you can't help but grin like a fool and cheer like a lunatic. His enthusiasm is not only infectious but also possibly lethal.

Highlights must include Two Months Off into Kittens into Moaner into Born Slippy [NUXX] into Shudder/King Of Snake - I was flippin' knackered once that little mix came to an end; and Rez/Cowgirl/Rez/Cowgirl was bloody brilliant too.

---

For reasons that are far too convoluted to go into, I seem to be engaged in cyber-sex with a pair of sock puppets

---

Current cultural artefacts entering my head via various orifices and organs:

• Aram Khachaturian's Gayane ballet suites (Suite No. 3, Gayane's Adagio - used by Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey to introduce the Discovery One on its way to Jupiter - is a sublime piece of music).
• Talking Heads, the early Eno produced stuff: funky, arty, post-punk goodness, yeah!
• Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec. No, not a self-help book but a wonderful French novel that describes a Parisian block of flats, its occupants, their lives and tales relating to their possessions. Funny, inventive and sad. Highly recommended.
• The TV show Heroes - enjoyable, well-written sci-fi/fantasy although it does sometimes take an awful long time for anything to happen. Addictive stuff nevertheless.

---

I am also preparing for National Novel Writing Month by trawling the internet for information about bizarre sex fetishes and reading a critical study of the films of Luis Buñuel.

Don't ask.

Hmm. And, hmm again

Simon Pegg as Star Trek's Scotty? Simon Pegg... as Montgomery Scott. Pegg... Simon... Scotty...

Hmm.

Don't get me wrong: I love Simon Pegg. He is a very funny man and a strong enough actor to pull off serious roles as well as comedic ones. But Scotty? "You cannae' change the laws o' physics" Scotty? I can't quite see it somehow.

On the other hand, the presence of Pegg has finally made me slightly interested to see JJ Abrams' "rebooting" of the tired old Trek franchise. Possibly.

But never mind Star Trek: the real question on everybody's lips is "Who will be the next Doctor Who?" (not that David Tennant appears to be going anywhere in the foreseeable future even if he is taking a "gap year" to do some Shakespeare; but you know what the world of fandom is like).

[Hmm, this turned into a bit of a geek thread, didn't it?]

I've completely forgotten what I was going to blog about

Um...

I went to Glasgow at the weekend. Nice place, had a great time, thanks. I'm even contemplating moving there. But, no, that wasn't it.

I went to a Bonobo gig last month (Bonobo being a downbeat jazzy trippy-hipperty-hoppity type beat combo - I didn't go and watch a performing chimpanzee although that too would have been cool) That was last month and it is too long after the event to blog about it now. It was a bloody good gig though.

I have somehow ended up in another shitty temp job taking phone calls from people who want their toilets fixed except that this time I am doing it at the university rather than the city council. Dog, no, I don't even want to think about that, never mind write about it.

Just finished reading José Saramago's Blindness, a harrowing tale of how society collapses when everyone inexplicably goes blind. Great book that I heartily recommend (except to readers of a nervous disposition as some passages are genuinely disturbing). That, however, was not what I was going to blog about either.

Nope, it's gone completely. No idea what I was going to write about. Actually, I'm not even sure that I was going to write about anything in particular which may be why I can't remember what it is. Or isn't.

Why live in Emgland?

Seriously, give me one good reason why England is a good place to live, just one, because I am struggling to think of any.