Leap, y'all

2008 is a Leap Year and today is our extra day. Tradition has it that 29 February is the day when women are "allowed" to propose marriage to their men. (Interesting how, even in this enlightened age of equality*, it is still often the man who is expected to propose - not always, for sure, but often. That has certainly been the case amongst my friends. Then again, maybe I just know a lot of unusually old fashioned people.) I have long been aware of this tradition as I expect many of you have too.

An additional proviso to the tradition I was not aware of is that if the man declines the marriage proposal then he is obliged to furnish the woman with a new gown.

Thanks to my chum Wendy Vaizey for that interesting nugget of trivia.

If any of my female readers wish to ask for my hand in marriage then please form an orderly queue and leave your proposals in the 'comments' of this post. I await your requests with great anticipation.

I thank you.

* Yeah, right - not if much of the "hilarious" commentary on Hilary Clinton's Presidential campaign is anything to go by, or salary comparisons between the sexes, or the persistent "glass ceiling" in many industries, and so on.

Twin casualties

Last night I dreamt that I was in an episode of Casualty (a British TV hospital drama, for the benefit of my foreign readers). All the doctors and nurses were running around as usual looking after the sick but the weird thing was that each patient was the spitting image of their attending nurse or doctor, as were any friends or relatives accompanying them. It was strangely creepy like that scene in Being John Malkovich when the eponymous actor enters his own head and ends up in a restaurant where everyone sports his face.

I can understand why I might have dreamt about a TV show that I watch only occasionally: My chum Paul Campbell is going to be writing an episode for the show (well done Paul!); but what the whole twin thing is about, I know not.

Sunday babble

About 100 pages into The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. Hard work but I think I've settled into it verbosity and mad digressions. Keep telling myself that I've read Ulysses so, hey, I can fucking read anything.

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I went to the The British Fantasy Open Night last night on the flimsiest of pretexts - my chum Jai Clare invited me. Got drunk, talked to some interesting fantasy writers, chatted up a nice auburn-haired film producer, joked that I could be the next Hugh Grant or Jude Law, gave her a phone number, possibly mine. Feeling a bit sluggish today.

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Had a dream that the house I lodge in was some sort of boarding school except the internal layout was completely different - but it was the house I lodge in. Anyway, the cleaner managed to utterly humiliate me in front of my fellow pupils by pointing out that my bed linen stank of cum.

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My resolution to stop buying books until I substantially reduced my "to read" pile has failed abysmally. Awaiting my attention once I have concluded my business with Mr. Shandy are:

• Other Voices by Andrew Humphrey
• The Complete Enderby by Anthony Burgess
• The Famished Road by Ben Okri
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
• L'Assommoir by Émile Zola
• La Bete Humaine by Émile Zola
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
• On Truth by Harry G. Frankfurt
• The Turn of the Screw / The Aspern Papers (Omnibus) by Henry James
• The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson
• London Orbital by Iain Sinclair
• Nature's Numbers by Ian Stewart
• Continent by Jim Crace
• Pesthouse by Jim Crace
• In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbin
• Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality by John Gribbin
• The Major Works by Jonathan Swift
• Palm Sunday / Welcome To The Monkey House (Omnibus) by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
• Two Tall Tales and One Short Novel by Lucy Fry, Heidi James and Kay Sexton
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
• Plays And Petersburg Tales by Nikolai Gogol
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
• The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
• Luis Bunuel: New Readings by Peter William Evans
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
• River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
• Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• Writing to the Moment: Selected Critical Essays 1980-95 by Tom Paulin
• How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now by William H. Calvin

Utterly ridiculous, isn't it. Still, it makes for an artificially long blog post.

Interpretations

The literal minded among you may interpret the dream related in my last post as an anxiety dream about my hiring a car to drive 100 miles to a wedding in Dorset having not driven for three years.

Maybe, but it all came back to me in seconds. I'd forgotten how cool driving is. I had my homemade Amon Tobin compilation CD blasting out the speakers and there wasn't too much traffic around so, apart from getting lost briefly due to confusingly labelled signposts and the odd obligatory muppet driver getting in my way, I really enjoyed myself.

Oh, and the wedding was quite good too: some blonde Welsh tart of my acquiantance was marrying some American fella. And if Suw Charman (for it was she) wasn't already queen of the blogosophosphere, she damn well will be when the photographs of her gravity-defying burgundy corset hit the interwebs. We are talking Cleaveage Of The Decade™. The geeks of the world will gawp in amazement when those puppies hit their Macbook screens. Oh, and a good time was had by all, yadda yadda yadda.

But I'm pretty certain that my driving dream was not about driving at all.

No parking

OK, seeing as I have been inundated with... um... two requests for disclosure, here is the dream I dreamed the other night:

I was driving a big family estate car through a typical residential suburb. I turned into a cul-de-sac of five or six generic detached houses that all sat upon raised ground with sloping driveways running down to the road. I turned into the driveway of the house in which I apparently lived. I took the car up the driveway, allowing gravity to slow the car down, put the clutch in and pressed the brake pedal. The car came to a halt in front of the garage door but instead of staying put the car began to roll back down the drive and into the road even though my foot remained on the brake pedal.

The car came to a gentle halt by the opposite curb. Frowning, I gently moved the car forwards, mounted the driveway, took my foot off the accelerator when I reached the garage door and firmly applied the brake pedal, but yet again, once the car had stopped it began to roll back into the road.

I tried again but this time, once the car rolled to a halt in front of the garage, I applied the foot brake and the hand brake. No good: the car rolled back again. This time, though, a neighbour was pulling into the cul-de-sac and had to come to an abrupt stop to avoid a collision. I looked out of the side window, shrugged and mouthed an apology. My neighbour waved and manoeuvred around me to reach his own driveway.

Annoyed now, I attempted to park again, this time slamming down my foot on the brake pedal and yanking up the hand break, but still the car rolled back into the road even faster than before. More neighbours were driving into the street and I had to swerve to avoid them mouthing sorry at them.

Again and again I ascended my driveway, slamming harder on the brake pedal, yanking up the hand brake with all my strength and every time rolling back faster and further into the road, dodging my neighbours' cars, rolling up the pavement, onto their front lawns, across their driveways as they themselves were parking on them, skidding and dodging. It was Cars On Ice.

The car eventually slid to a halt. I clung to the steering wheel, breathing heavily. I didn't know what to do. The car would not stay on the sloped driveway. I couldn't leave the car where it came to rest across the middle of the road. I could not park at the roadside where the car could not roll away - that was somehow not an option - but I could not leave the car until it was parked. I was stranded, helpless.

My dad emerged from the house and strolled over. I wound down the window and said, the brakes have failed. Dad nodded and said nothing. He looked away, stared into space. It's not my fault, I wanted to say. Dad sighed. His eyes tried to communicate sympathy but they could not disguise his disappointment, his resignation, as if to say, he can't even park the fucking car.

Enigmatic blog post title that gives no indication as to what the post may be about and is quite possibly longer than the post itself

Last night I did something that I haven't done for a very long time: I awoke from a dream and... wrote it down.

Leave a comment if you wish to know what the dream was about.

Mentally challenged headgear

Oh, I forgot to mention that the latest issue of Mad Hatter's Review is online. It's got some tunes in it. By me. Check the about page for direct links. Etcetera.

Job done.

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I think I'll buy one of those little tabletop ironing boards. And an iron

The Coens on fire, Camden burns

I was very shocked to wake up this morning to the news of a major fire at Camden Market. I'm not intimately familiar with the place but I have strolled around the market and drunk in many of the pubs around there. There are several great gig venues in the area too like Koko, the Electric Ballroom and the Roundhouse that I visited several times last year.

Damn, a real shame, that.

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In an attempt to rekindle my interest in films, I made the effort to go and see The Coen Brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country For Old Men. And what a relief it was. After two disappointing films, Intolerable Cruelty and the utterly pointless (if beautifully shot) remake of The Ladykillers, No Country For Old Men sees the Coen boys on cracking form. I read the novel last year when I heard that The Coens were making a film of it and I immediately realised that McCarthy's sparse, violent and melancholy neo-Western was perfect material for them. And how. It is reminiscent in tone and pace of the brothers' first film Blood Simple but in an older and wiser way. Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones are all wonderfully understated in their roles, Kelly MacDonald is strong too.

I can understand why the ending has pissed people off but, having read the novel, I was prepared for it. I don't think I would have minded anyway: I wouldn't have expected a nice, tidy and typical thriller-style ending from the Coens anyway - that is not what the film (or the novel) is about.

To find out what it is about, I suggest you go and see it, think about it for a while, see it again and then read the book. Or read the book first; I always prefer to read the book first for some reason.

Anyway, the film is good enough to make you think that it should be law that all McCarthy adaptations are made by the Coen Brothers. Having said that, The Road is currently in production under the directorship of John Hillcoat, the fella who made the Nick Cave scripted The Proposition, a powerful film that stayed with me long after I left the cinema even though I didn't really know whether I liked it or not as I was watching it. I think Hillcoat and McCarthy will be a good match. Also, Blood Meridian (which is on my ever-growing "to read" shelf) is on the slate for Ridley Scott. McCarthy... Ridley Scott... hmm, it could work; Ridley is nothing if not eclectic in his choices.

As yet untitled blog post

I don't know where to begin so I will skip the beginning and begin in the middle.

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Finally went to see a shrink - sorry - counsellor today and it turned out to not be as an horrific waste of time as I might have feared. She discerned very quickly that I am not interested in discovering why I am a miserable failure with no self-esteem but how I can stop being a miserable failure with no self-esteem. Yes yes yes, it's all because of my mother probably, great, but what do I do about it? I'm not interested in examining the past, I want to fix the now. She said the three magic words before I had a chance to bring them up: cognitive behavioural therapy. I decided I liked her very much at that point. "Oh thank fog* for that, she gets it." She is going to refer me to a CBT group which is nice. Unfortunately, the next round of classes doesn't begin until the beginning of April but, I don't know, having somebody who knows what they are talking about acknowledge that I have a real problem and could offer a practical way forward was comforting. April, though... bit of a long way off. I may buy myself a copy of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies (seriously) to tide me over.

I feel oddly... validated

She was also quite attractive. She wore nice boots.

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I am glad to hear that despite the death of Heath Ledger production of Terry Gilliam's new film The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus will continue.

When I first heard of Ledger's death I could not help but recall the collapse of Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote and think, "Oh no, not again." I don't wish to sound as if my desire to see a cool movie overshadows the sad loss of such a young human being but I am glad the film can be completed. Dr. Parnassus (along with the upcoming Dark Knight) will give us a final glimpse of how this intriguing young actor might have developed, and what better tribute to an actor is there?

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I am fucking loving Bartók at the moment

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Don't know how to finish either so I will stop here at the end of the middle.

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* As an ignostic, I am loath to use the phrase "oh my God." However, from a purely aesthetic point of view and in certain circumstances "oh my god" is exactly the right phrase to use. Therefore, in order to circumvent my distaste for the word "god" whilst not depriving myself of the satisfaction of using the phrase "oh my god" I am experimenting rhyming substitutes such as "dog", "fog", "bog". I must confess, though, that it just isn't the same**.

** However, I have found a most favourable substitute for the exclamation "for the love of god", namely, "oh for the love of fucksy". Go on, try it. The next time you feel the need to express your incredulity at the sheer stupidity of a person or persons in your immediate vicinity, try screaming from the very depths of your diaphragm, "Oh for the love of fucksy!" It really works.

A little Light Reading?

Hello chums. What's that? You're at a bit of a loose end? Hmm, maybe you could read a book. What's that? You don't have anything to read? Ah, well, I can help you out there. It just so happens that my great close personal friend* Aliya Whiteley has a new novel out called Light Reading. What's it about? I'll tell you (or, more accurately, I'll cut 'n' paste the blurb here for you):

Welcome to Britain’s most sinister seaside resort...

Prudence Green is a troubled woman. Stifled by her existence as an RAF wife, she’s dying for a bit of excitement. When one of the other women on the base commits suicide (having discovered that her husband is having an affair with a male comrade in Iraq), Pru and her best friend Lena are prompted to set off on a memorably surreal journey – a criminal investigation, a search for love and an exploration of Pru’s own dark past. The discontented pair escape the base and arrive in a blighted seaside town, Allcombe, determined to find out the truth behind the supposed suicide of one-time TV star Crystal Tynee. But as they explore the lawless town, Pru and Lena find that Allcombe hides more than one hideous secret. Light Reading is a wickedly clever detective story and a pitch-black mystery, seething with grotesque and unforgettable characters, and concluding with a twist that will leave you breathless.

If that floats your toast then you can order Light Reading from Amazon UK (and if enough people use this link to buy from Amazon then I might get a 23p referral fee or something - yes, I am a whore).

On the other hand you could go one better and get your copy signed by the lovely Aliya in person. But how? Simply pop along the Light Reading launch party at Goldsboro Books, 7 Cecil Court, London on Thursday 28 February between 6.30pm - 8.30pm. (And here be a map for your convenience.) Sadly, I cannot attend as I am going to the UK premiere performance of Penderecki's Symphony No. 8 at the Barbican. I never thought I would ever say anything like that.

And while you are in a book-buying frame of mind, why not grab yourself a copy of Jai Clare's** The Cusp Of Something? You know you want to, you goat-baiting flan spanners.

* Well, OK, I've never actually met the woman but she did once send me a bookmark and I've played Scrabulous with her on Facebook. She's quite good at it. Sometimes.
** Jai genuinely is a great close personal friend of mine. We've been drunk together and I have crashed on her sofa and everything. And she's a damn good writer too so buy her book or, you know, puppies... woof woof...bang bang.