Unbuffering

Gonna dig up that new site from somewhere soontime. It'll be so menthol and moreish. It'll be Jenny Holzer meets Kool A.D. It'll take me another fifteen months and still be ahead of its bloat.
I can't thank-bomb you all enough, whoever you all are. While I've been away from here working on things I've also been working on other things. Here is one of the other things.

The Beast is Loose

Announcement:
I wrote a story for Inkymole, who made it into a tremendously-illustrated book-and-record package and it's out now, right now, all over your town like rent and right angles. The record features B. Dolan reading the story over Buddy Peace's music. B has an all-time classic voice and is good at words, Buddy makes proper wholesome sauce.

This feels huge, a bit like I went through a wormhole.

It's available for sale from Unearthed and Juno
And in Germany from deejay
And it's in the internet (yeah in) here.

Thanks for reading.

Only So Much

I combed my brain to get out the crumbs and see what they all added up to. I sent the unnecessary cake away to be assessed, hoping its irregular texture might mean it's tremendous.
I watched a spider disappear into the new Thee Oh Sees album.
I read R. Adler's account of her experience of reading a P. Kael book and began to think I should think more about what I'm doing with all these words.
My role at work changed and now instead of putting people in rooms I put numbers in boxes. The boxes change colour when they're satisfied.
Barbaric fluctuations in the thickness of the five-pence piece cause frowns above the coin tray.

A Burbling Old Sausage

A small delay while I had my chakras resurfaced. It took a while to find them, first, and then there were complications, as you'd expect, but I was eventually able to trouser a queen's pittance by flogging the full set to a wispy gentleman who insisted both he and I knew what we were on about. I didn't really believe him, but that doesn't mean he wasn't right. It took a few weeks to sharpen all the scissors and marinate the doctor's hands etc, and after the operation I woke up in a season of necessities where it rained capital letters and the wind tied knots in space and the internet completely froze over not entirely unwelcomely. So I was able to finish another book-length heap of sarcasm, and when I say finished I mean I stopped bothering with it and moved on to other nothings, and when I say book-length I mean short but double-spaced. I pressed the sequence of buttons that turned the file on my computer into a cardboard-coated rectangle on my doormat, next to and on top of all the adverts for potential politicians, all of us repeating ourselves, and I'm not sure what I'm doing but what they seem to be doing is using dead language to kill hope. Not really, no not really, no really. It's a lot more colourful this time, isn't it, with all the new squabblers blinking at each other and the hairy clown interrupting your morning flapjack to tell you voting's daft, and what would be much better is I don't know, I haven't read his book because the front cover highlights and reverses the word love within the word revolution, which indicates amongst other things a lack of terrific ideas, although I'm willing to believe he didn't scoop all his language from the mouths of boring corpses like all the people on my doormat did. And a Monty Python keeps e-cajoling me in bold yellow underlined writing to make a donation to the least credible mammal in existence, which will enter me into some sort of tombola that may result in a dinner date that neither of us or anyone else has ever, to my knowledge, expressed the slightest interest in.

I Can Explain

I got trapped in a well and Sarah's arms fell off and also there were some manufacturing/delivery undesirables so we've whacked the jackanory back to Christmas 2015 yes 2015, to ensure its readiness and frightening dominance, a lot like when Nasty Ways was on dubplate for eighteen months and when they finally let people buy it Dillinja became prime minister for a week which is why everything is fine now, and if you don't remember this it's because either you were too far away or you had the wrong ears. It's not too late.

Quite Some Rush

I am ferociously excited to announce a big new thing:

A 16-page book and 7" record package, being a three-voiced written, illustrated, soundtracked-and-jackanoried seasonal story, entitled Tinselsnakes and featuring the vocals of B. Dolan, the music of Buddy Peace, and the illustrations of Sarah Inkymole Coleman.

Right now the audio's a free download, and as soon as someone punches the big green button in the pressing plant, the whole package'll be available, for yourself and your friends and your children's children's children, etc.

The website is here. It has details.

The people if y'didn't know:

B.Dolan did this about houses and this about names.

Buddy Peace did this about Tom Waits and this about pudding.

Sarah did this about To Kill A Mockingbird and this about Copper Gone.

I've admired all these people for years and it's amazing to hear and see what they did with the words.

As soon as the whole thing's available I'll crash a foghorn into your life. Until then enjoy the audio and thanks and thanks again for your time.

Less To Go Wrong

I went to Liverpool to learn more about how to help people respond to failures in managerial procedure. Fleetwood Mac were playing as I wrote notes in a modern wood/pork boozer on the following. [Jesus, you write notes for these things -  yes - and then type them up, later - yes - that's a lot of effort - not really - for not very much - yes]. If I had to introduce a fictional musical accompaniment that embodied the concept of error, I thought, it would be them, but luckily, unhappily, there they already were. One of the two other customers loudly asked me and the bar staff if we thought he gave a shit. About anything. My no was lost beneath that song about going your own way's insufferably well-recorded slop. The other of the two other customers was saying vacate, vacate. Vacate, vacate. It was possible that both these people were finally taking a stand against the cultural atrocities regularly delivered by this band, who I feel've lately, and also my whole life, been lurking amongst almost every public playlist, like hairs in a sandwich, which people tell you you're overreacting to when you spit them out, either through a lack of good judgement, or the wish to appear different, and both of these are things you will outgrow eventually, until, like the rest of everybody, you will admit that before this group came along, the entirety of human musical endeavour was undeniably lacking a pinnacle, and you will then start ordering sandwiches that consist entirely of hair, for delivery, nightly, to your plateau of refinement, for you to enjoy with a straight face and the usual vague but persistent thoughts about getting something done someday, so it's no use insisting that the thought of this band induces panic, the sight of them induces nausea, and the sound of them induces terminal emphysema, because you'll be like all the rest of us soon enough, us for whom not a hint of insincerity could come anywhere near our professions of love for these gutsy and melodic leviathans, and [you should've stopped at emphysema, we think - alright - there's a distinct negative bias to this whimsical bile that seems quite unwarranted - that's all I've got - right, but, please, onward, to more pressing matters].
I did a radio show the other week you can listen to here. There's nothing wrong with it.

Low Resolution Events

In January I finished another book and set about foisting it into the future, with the help of some expert foisters. The idea was to have someone I've never met say this is good.
Someone I'd never met said this is good.
Then the idea was to have an agent read it and say this is good.
An agent read it and said this is good, but it lacks what would make me love it, so you should send it to someone who, etc, good luck.
Now the idea is to explain it, in summary and at length and in various formats, to help the people employed to find new good things to figure out what it is and whether if it's new it could be good. Tell me again what exactly it is you're trying to do here or get out of my office.
I can't get much further than These words in this order seem alright to me and I'm a big fan of gaps. A man spends a year achieving nothing. It's called Yet.

Orality Corner

-[question]
-There was concern, about the start of the last bit. Either it was an unforgivable lack of proofreading or it was a deliberately unfriendly, unnecessary, pretentious whim. In a moribund slew of fragmented tedium.
-[response]
-Slew is no exaggeration after five-ish years, we feel.
-[response]
-It doesn't appear to be leading anywhere. And the eyes crave things to be glad about, and they feel themselves beginning to require an explanation, they say, or they might stop letting through the light that bounces off these drab and baggy lumps, until a more reader-friendly tone is struck.
-[response]
-Slews can contain lumps.
-[response]
-Yes, but they have no say in where we choose to point them. They said it was only yesterday they felt that a quiet word must be had, if a general improvement in stimulus is ever to be gained.
-[response]
-Verbatim. And somewhat highfalutin' we admit. We can't imagine why.
-[response]
-While you were passed out.
-[response]

Big Super Normal Time

, but using the phonetic alphabet when stood two feet away, while neither one of us was in a blizzard or a war, was too much, and it was only my long-standing and well-known commitment to appearing professional when I can be arsed to, that stopped me asking him if he was taking the piss. Maybe he'd always found the sound of y hard to distinguish from the sound of q, and used the names yankee and quebec as a confusion-reducing courtesy to my thick-eared and disengaged face. I asked him to repeat himself.

Much Crudity

Hack a kebab off my shin, I've finished reading Gargantua and Pantagruel. It took nigh-on longer than it might've done if I hadn't been taking frequent breaks to wonder when I'd get round to finishing it. I enormously recommend it if you like all the stuff that goes into and comes out of human holes and heads. Or books by 1550's French doctor-monks. Or books, or heads, or holes, in general. While that was going on, I was working on stuff, and taking frequent breaks to wonder about the differences between "finished" and "done". I don't know anything more about those two things now than I did when I started thinking about them, but the thinking about them has definitely helped with the avoidance of doing what I keep saying I want to do.

Up Sticks

In the West Wing episode called Shibboleth, the word shibboleth is introduced by the president, explained by the president, and spoken at the president by a man who's been dragged from a river of screaming cheese into the big office, so they can check whether he's the type of man who'd know about and be able to pronounce the word shibboleth, and therefore be worthy of receiving help, by hearing him almost not say it, but then, after a kind of bollock-churningly inevitable hesitation, say it. Rumour has it this episode was written by a man being hassled into agony on deadline day by the chuckling ghost of his English teacher. And your trust in the until-then much-better-than-good-enough quality of the writing is replaced by a worry, with fifteen and a half more seasons to go, that the whole thing might end in a gutter of songs and hugs and star-spangled handshakes. But it improves.

Catatonics and the English Language

Foyles offer a free muffin for spending over a tenner, but mention nothing about a free book for buying ten muffins. This is one reason why my forthcoming book-and-alcohol-vending enterprise (possible names I haven't yet checked are available: Anais Nin's Home Entertainment Supercentre. The Fountain of Paragraphs. The Swede Creamery. Dostoyevsky's Death Palace. Loitering. The business plan, when I present it, will be just this list of names and an inventory of about a hundred books, none of which I'm really willing to part with, give me seventy thousand pounds or I'll bomb your allotment) will offer five hundred words for every litre of ale imbibed, and a free book for every seventy-five millilitres of spirits power-quaffed when you had work the next day. I haven't found a location, or an idea of where the stock is going to come from, how much the overheads are likely to be, start-up costs, customer base, and whatever other goblins might like to obscure the picture with their realistic hands, but I'm guessing a sharp half-hour on Yahoo Answers'll take care of all that, and I'll then be free to galvanise both flanks of the Avon with crass enticements, veiled threats and loyalty cards.

Realms of Annihilation

I wonder when's a good time to talk about the decomposing cat, in the rain, on the grass, its skin the colour of the pasta we overcooked, extremely visible from the covered picnic bench ten feet away, on which we ate all our dinners for two weeks, while on the empty campsite around it we worked, with shovels and sacks, and occasionally argued about who should pick it up, and nobody picked it up.

I wonder when's a good time to talk about the gruesome 1978 cover of Renata Adler's Speedboat, with its blurred brown humanoid staring at a frozen grey boatless sea, beneath a John Updike quote that's been trowelled on under the author's name in a nervous font that has something up with its A's, but I couldn't tell you what, and Updike always comes attached in my mind to the most unpleasant book title anywhere, ever, which is Rabbit, Run, which I tried to read once, but something about the sound of the title's syllables and the big pompous comma, like a fingernail in the eye, made me stop. And all the bits of this cover's text seem very slightly too close together, and very slightly off-centre, and this ocean of hogwash rested in my hand the whole time I was reading the book, which was very good, and I nearly removed it, the cover, but kept thinking then what?

If I put it in the bin, someone else might see it. If I bury it, a child could accidentally or on purpose dig some of it up. The proper thing to do is to feed it to a massive snake.
I just left it. But now it's over, I really think something should've been done.

Examples Quite Excessive

Johnny Cash sang about Christmas. A History of Bombing described innovations in missile stability. I sat everywhere in a succession of childish chairs, trying to concentrate on the bombing, but anywhere I went the CD started skipping, although I didn't think people used CDs anymore, and none of the other customers anywhere seemed irked, so I never asked the staff what was up with their music, or the customers when they planned to begin to be irked, Johnny isn't half going on about this pudding of his, do you not think? In case they said it's not a CD, it's not Johnny Cash, it's not even music, you're in the hospital, your head's come off.
A History of Bombing finished, and I burped and started on Martha Gellhorn's History of Aftermaths, which isn't what it's called. The music dissolved into something small and nervous, and Martha went round talking to people and looking at stuff.

Shortcrust Leverage Imbroglio

Blobs of doubtful vitality ought to keep their holes shut, I wanted to overhear someone saying, at the pie shop, two weeks ago, but didn't. The previous night I'd watched Savages bring down a church from the inside, then had some confused but lively sleep and taken my howling ears to work and finished early with an imaginary appointment. You ask to finish early and they say do you have an appointment, and you say if I did have an appointment would I also have to have proof of the appointment, and they say no, and you say well then of course I have an appointment, in fact this interrogation is making me late, and the appointment people take an extremely dim view of lateness, whoever they are.
So the pie shop was subdued but for the kitchen-clatter and my howling ears and the damp rustling pies inside heads make. I was having difficulty overhearing something I could steal and put amongst the fragments of the thing that is now finished but then wasn't. It was research and I was hungry. At the door as I was leaving I heard some lively pie-based dialogue I could use, and went home and put it in the thing, and half an hour later deleted it, and spent the next two weeks moving fifty thousand words around until an order that doesn't look like much of an order emerged.

w/r/t

These people have a David Foster Wallace special issue. I took his book about infinity and made it into a couple of babbling paragraphs. I was also asked if I wanted to write something about the man and his writing and how much of my clothing it's removed, throughout the years, as I kept going back for more. And I did but all I really should've written was: I enjoy his books because they seem like funny sacks of spikes.

Deeds

The building has four floors. The lift's buttons are set up so that the number on the button you press is also the number of the floor the button instructs the lift to stop at. A voice announces the number as you exit. And on the bit of wall next to the lift doors on each floor is a large plank of information to do with where everything is and why you might want to go there.
Some people mentioned that they found it difficult to discover, after they got there, what floor they were on, and I was asked by a manageman to solutionise the improvable. I think that's how he put it. Solvify the crevasse. Bradbury the topknot.
I tried to resist. If your problem is you can't find out what floor you're on, your problem is much bigger than not being able to find out what floor you're on. But no. Then what about a sign directing you to the plank? No, this would appear deliberately unhelpful and maybe sarcastic. So I was wafted into the reprographics alcove and ordered not to come out until I'd stated the obvious.
I printed an A4 sign that said you are on the first floor. In bold Helvetica, I think, although it could've just been something that looked a lot like Helvetica. Taking care not to repeat myself or make any signs for places that didn't exist, I printed similar but not exactly the same statements for the other three floors. By which time the laminator was purring like a distant helicopter, ready to attack anything, regardless of colour, typeface or grammar, and as I fed it the four signs I patted its lilac flank and whispered the words the work we're doing here is vital to facilitate the smooth running of this organisation, whatever this organisation is. I switched it off after it'd passed the fourth sign, and went to the lift in a more businesslike manner than usual, so as not to appear to be gloating.
The lift has its own internal plank which includes information on all the floors and rooms except it doesn't mention a thing about room number six.
I leapt out onto the fourth floor and began mashing the this is the fourth floor sign against the wall opposite the lift with my forehead and elbows and the aid of a substance that strongly resembles but is significantly less effective than blu-tack, while people who've never not known what floor they're on stared at the sign and then at me and shook their heads and started conversations like
Are you really...
Yes.
But there's already a...
Yes.
and moved off with faces like funeral rain. I returned to the public waiting area and sat behind the enquiries desk and imagined a future where every wall was a sign, the comic sans smeared up it like abbatoir splashes and the apostrophes scurrying like lice. And I was doing nothing to stop it. I opened a Twix and carried on with the paperwork.

Minor Crimes

The freezing jungle wants us dead but before that some news:

Mail Me Art is a thing where people do hand-art on envelopes and send them through the actual her majesty's royal post office mail to be collated and displayed in exhibitions and a book. The Factory Road Gallery are hosting one of this year's exhibitions and have parachuted in a few people they know, including Teratogens, who has universes seeping from his East Midlands fingers all the time and at night stores his eyes in a jar of unfathomable syrup.
It all starts in London the first week of August. Everything's very nice and you should go. The brief mentioned fun so I bought a scalpel and some exotic glue and put a lot of fun in there. But then I had to remove it all because it didn't look like fun, it looked and smelled like a baffling accident. I then put some words on the envelope using a biro.

National Poetry Month is all over the USA in April and as part of it The Found Poetry Review assigned the eighty five Pulitzer Prize for Fiction books to eighty five people. Each of the eighty five people then made thirty poems out of words they found in their book. One poem from each book will be posted on each day of April. I am one of these people. How the fucking hell this happened I don't know (I mean I asked to do it and they said yes and then I did it), but it's happened now and there's nothing we can do about it. I was assigned Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I changed my name to Chutzpah Limey and polished my butchering goggles. Now there's these thirty squirming blobs on my desk. They're a bit twitchy, I've given them all haircuts and I'm going to have to dress them properly. I'd be grateful if, if you look at them, you could tell me when their flies are undone.

It was after reading Brooke Valentine's blog just now that I thought I should stop wittering on for a minute and maybe deliver some information. She's good at drawing and cutting things.

Thanks for reading.

Must Be Off

I had this whole big thing in my head about the watchability of Taken 2, it was really going to highlight the something something paradigm something, but when I started to write it I realised it wasn't going to make any sense or be the kind of nonsense that's readable, and I tried to come at it from another angle and it ended up just being about boozing, and not really very whoa hey wow that's raw, so I put it in the pile of things that didn't work and went to a talk about self-publishing, where three people said keep going, champ, in three different ways, and you'll either find a publisher or realise you're not very good, and they asked for questions, and there should be a rule where if someone has asked for questions, and you've put your hand up, and they ask you what your question is, and you just go on about yourself so much that everyone else in the room begins hoping you either already have a terminal disease or contract an extremely meticulous one before dinnertime, and you have to actually be prompted to ask the question you were supposed to ask before you started saxophoning your brilliance, as if your question would be incomprehensible without the entire audience having a solid understanding of your cavernous potential, even though we can all tell your self-improvement will only begin with the removal of your ridiculous hat, and would you like us to remove it for you, with our feet, as part of a blinding assault, I've forgotten how this sentence was supposed to end. One of the questions was what am I doing wrong, and the answer was you haven't stopped doing what you always do.