lazer-guided commentaries

I've not been reading an awful lot recently; perhaps keeping some kind of record will help get me started again. Pauline's short-story reading at Decongested was great fun — perhaps I'll get into going to more of that kind of thing.

Over the last few months, though, I've managed:

• Lattimore's translation of the Odyssey. The copy I received from a second-hand seller on Amazon was a kind of parallel text, so heavy were the marginal annotations. Still, they were helpful in a way, pointing out internal connections and cultural background I wouldn't have picked up otherwise. I also picked up Lattimore's translation of the Iliad, but having read that a few years back, I'm not ready to read it again yet, even though it's in a different translation.
• Matter, Iain M. Banks. I enjoyed this — I've not enjoyed all of his recent SF work, but this one felt to me like a return to form.
• The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks. I'd read this before, many many years ago, and it was good to read it again. I read it this time in preparation for the Guardian Book Club evening where he was interviewed about it. He's a charismatic speaker, very entertaining. The Guardian published a report of the evening, and you can listen to a podcast of the discussion.
• I've started re-reading The Silmarillion. I read this when I was about thirteen, I think, and I'm enjoying refreshing my memory. So far, no surprises; it's like everyone says, a fairly dry piece of work. One for the nerds.

Next in the queue: The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche; This Is Your Brain On Music, Daniel Levitin; The Universe Next Door, Marcus Chown; Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon. Most probably interleaved with some lighter fare, too.

Yesterday I attended Field Day in Victoria Park in the rain. Chris and I spent most of the day at the Homefires Stage. Particularly good were:

• Tunng — massively enthusiastic and talented modern folk group. Great performers, moving songs (esp. Jenny Again — lyrics on this page).
• Jeffrey Lewis — perhaps the highlight of the day. Wonderful lyrics and delivery (the Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror! The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane!), and complete with a silly illustrated song about the Creeping Brain. Highly recommended.
• Alasdair Roberts — Melancholy Scottish folk occasionally segueing into drone/shoegazer-noise (whee!).
• Efterklang — Somewhere between Sigur Ros and Sufjan Stevens. Quite a big group — nine or so people? — and they wore capes!
• King Creosote (with Pictish Trail) — Guitar and harmonies. Plus a dirty sing-a-long song to finish.

For some reason, the stage was more than an hour behind schedule all day, but we didn't much mind, having nowhere in particular else to be. In the intervals when we sampled others of the many delights on offer we managed to catch part of Lightspeed Champion's performance (I wasn't paying much attention), part of Richie Hawtin's set (lumpy, crowded, good visuals, average sound) and the end of Foals' set (undistinguished pop a la mode, carefully coiffed, styled, packaged and presented; maybe check back if they ever do anything original^[1]). Apparently there was a whole village-fete style thing happening elsewhere in the park which I managed to completely miss — I shall have to check that out next year.

In terms of new music, and things slightly out of the ordinary, Field Day has been a great success. Great fun.

I watched Moulin Rouge yesterday evening. I'd sum it up as visually spectacular, and slightly deficient in plot. It was interesting hearing Mr McGregor and Ms Kidman sing, and there were some clever cultural references. I also enjoyed the use of the Shakespearean idea of the play-within-the-play reflecting the play itself (and for a moment I felt that they'd managed to carry it further, to push the film out into the real world somehow... it was only a fleeting sensation though, and I can't remember why it struck me).

It's been an uneventful weekend otherwise. I put a new cover on my motorbike, replacing the one that was stolen; I visited the warehouse-sized ASDA supermarket at the end of the D6 bus route; and I read a little further through Bleak House. It's finally become cold enough that I've unlimbered the heavy artillery of winter clothing: the possum/merino gloves. The Met Office has taken back their earlier misprediction of snow; now they're mispredicting mere overcast days. Summer's just a fading memory.

I was sitting on the sofa chatting to Sally earlier this week, describing to her my heroic ride through the cold on the way back from Brighton. She wondered why I hadn't been wearing the windproof, waterproof one-piece suit I own. The one that, after a moment's thought, I realised I had been carrying with me. Both there and back. The one I'd completely forgotten about and that would have spared me a good three hours of arctic-level windchill.

What's the word for the opposite of "astute?" (thesaurus.reference.com suggests dense, dull, dumb, idiotic, imperceptive, naive, obtuse, retarded, slow, stupid, and unintelligent.)

I've picked up Bleak House from Project Gutenberg, inspired by the current BBC production thereof, and am about half-way through. It's great, so far! It's enormously satirical, and very, very funny in places. I've only read one other Dickens novel — Great Expectations — and if I recall correctly it wasn't particularly humorous. (On the other hand, I was fifteen at the time and probably wasn't paying attention properly.)

Becky returned my copy of the Bone People, which I'm really looking forward to re-reading — that's next in the queue. After that, Steve's promised to lend me the latest (and last, thankfully) in Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Shadow" series — much lighter fare. By comparison, just reading the table of contents of the Bone People was enough to remind me of enough of the story to provoke an emotional response.

I recently re-read Sophie's World, which was interesting. My philosophical positions have changed quite a bit since I last read it (chiefly because of Greg Egan's books); it's pointed out a few areas I feel like looking more deeply into. One thing I like about the book is the way a few Scandinavianisms have crept through the translation into English: the descriptions of the last day of school before the summer holidays; the description of the Major's cabin by the lake; a few idiomatic puns that only make sense if you know how it would have read in the original Danish.

Finally, I spent a weekend recently ploughing through Ken MacLeod's trilogy about (among other things) space travel, various takes on a bunch of -isms (including but not limited to the usual suspects of anarchism, libertarianism, capitalism, socialism, communism, and their pairwise hyphenated hybrids), and a fairly conservative vision of a post-singularity future (complete with vile offspring).

Sunday was my flatmate Claire's birthday, and some months ago she arranged a large house in Saltdean, near Brighton, and invited her friends down for the weekend.

I rode my motorbike there and back. It has just in the last week or so turned cold, and the trip proved something of an education in techniques for staying warm at 70mph (that's 112km/h for you S.I.-using modernist hipsters in New Zealand) with nothing between you and the ambient degree or so below zero except a couple of layers of cotton and a pair of summer riding gloves. The main, somewhat naive technique — liberal application of polypropylene underwear and general doubling-up of items of clothing — proved insufficient to the challenge, and passers-by^[1] were treated to the spectacle of a shivering, stamping, arm-flailing, hand-rubbing, moaning, groaning, Michelin-man of a motorcyclist at regular intervals along the M23.

The weekend was great fun — once I'd arrived and regained feeling in my extremities through the magical restorative action of neat whiskey — starting off with an evening trip to a local pub in Rottingdean just over the hill, followed the next morning by a traditional English breakfast involving all manner of fat-laden meat products. On Saturday afternoon we visited the Lanes, shopping for bits and pieces (very cool earrings for some; very cool hats for others; and drinks for all, come 4pm). Brighton's brilliant: lots of interesting shops, and lots of cool people, thanks I suppose to the university. It reminds me of Wellington in a way.

After returning home for our meal of supermarket pizza and red wine, we caught the bus back into Brighton where we stayed for the next eight hours or so in a succession of increasingly loud and confusing clubs. I particularly enjoyed this part of the weekend: it's not often I go out dancing, and the clubs we visited were just great fun. I think pretty much everybody had a great time. I had so much fun that Sunday was a day of enforced quiet contemplation while waiting for the monstrous hangover — severe enough to make even a full English breakfast unappetizing — to pass. So it goes. What a waste of good scrambled eggs.

Eventually I recovered enough to attempt the trip home, this time wearing almost every piece of clothing I thought to take with me, as well as two pairs of gloves, a balaclava, and a scarf. Lessons learned: 1) Heated grips are not as ridiculous as they might seem on the counter in the shop at the height of summer, although a heated saddle still seems a little over the top. 2) The headlight on my bike is almost unusably dim, except on full-beam, when it is blinding. 3) It's at about this time of year that frost starts to form on the roads in the evenings.

I arrived home safely, despite a couple of frost-related hair-raising moments, and caught up on sleep with an early night. Overall, it was a great weekend: good company, lovely location, perfect weather, dancing like a mad eedjit, and plenty of bacon. Many thanks to Claire for organizing the whole thing.

According to Google, mikeb is the only person in the world who has written the exact phrase "meats, cheese, and inappropriate bread" into a webpage!

Update: As expected, mikeb once was the only person in the world who etc.

On Saturday I went out and bought myself a spare helmet, so that I could carry passengers. I took Claire for a ride that afternoon. Everything went well up to the moment I pulled out from the kerb. I got half a metre out and the bike fell over. Can you guess why? (Hint: small, heavy, yellow, iron, attached to brake disc)

Boy, I felt stupid. Still, I guess that's yet another thing I'll never do again. The only consequences, besides the hard-earned lesson and a slightly jittery Claire, were a smashed-up right front indicator (now lovingly swathed in duct-tape) and a brake disc that now needs checking out at the mechanic's, just in case.

We didn't let it stop us: I made sure the brake was OK and we went for a ride anyway. It went fine - great fun! We went up the A12 to Green Man interchange, turned around and came home again.

I went to Japan on the 3rd, for my friend Matthew's wedding. He's been in Japan for a long time now, I'm not sure how long except that it's more than five years.

I'd almost run out of holiday, so I could only spend 4 days there, returning by Monday evening, but managed to pack in a lot. Many of the old crowd from high school made it over [1], so we got to explore Tokyo and Yokohama together, which was brilliant. We also were finally able to meet Tim's girlfriend Elizabeth.

We had a day (Sunday) in Tokyo (Akihabara, Asakusa, Ginza), a day (Friday) in Yokohama (lunch at the restaurant where Matthew met his wife Yumi, a visit to Sankeien Gardens, a trip on the sea-ferry to see the city from the water, a walk through Yamashita Park and Chinatown, Tom Katsu for dinner), a day for Matthew and Yumi's wedding (the Saturday), and the remaining time basically for being drunken crazy gai-jin. We also had an afternoon in the less dodgy side of Shinjuku in Tokyo, the day we arrived.

Matt's wedding was amazing — at the Pan Pacific hotel in Yokohama, with a seven-course formal meal at the reception prepared by one of Japan's most famous chefs, and lots of formal speeches. After the reception we went up to the hotel bar for a few bottles of champagne and then on to an English-themed pub (!) in Yokohama to watch the South African team demolish the All Blacks; quite a strange context for a rugby match.

Toward the end of the day we had in Yokohama, we visited a crazy little darts bar where we got so freaked out at being the only foreigners there (and clearly we didn't know what the hell we were doing) that we left for a more traditional Japanese drinking establishment. After they kicked us out at closing time we went back to the hotel and drank Scotch and played Texas Hold'em poker until 3am, for small bits of paper we ripped out of a notebook and lemon sweets (each worth 10 scraps of paper).

The night of the wedding celebration we didn't get to bed until 6.30am, which would have been fine but for the fact hotel checkout was at 10am. Finally, on the Sunday evening, after exploring Tokyo all day, we had dinner with Matt and went on to a kind of exhibition space that was temporarily acting as a bar, where we met up with Yumi and a few of their friends and went on to a Karaoke Box place! They closed at 3am, we got to sleep around 4.30, and the next morning we had to get up at 7.45 to catch the train to the airport.

Three nights sleep deprivation combined with a massive drunk didn't help at all with feeling bright and chirpy on the train... I was still drunk when I woke up, and sobered up at about 10am while sitting on the Narita Express. Most unpleasant. The flight back was spent nursing my hangover and catching up on sleep, so my sleeping pattern has gone all out of whack what with that and the jetlag.

It was a fantastic holiday; with luck, I'll have copies of all the photos people took soon, so I'll be able to post a few here. Japan seems to be a really friendly country, and the atmosphere is like nowhere else I've been. I'm really looking forward to returning sometime soon.

[1] — namely Tim, Hadyn, Josh, Clayton and me

On Monday and Tuesday mikeb and I took a tour of the south-west of England. Here are some photos mikeb took. iPhoto mangled the anti-aliasing on some of the images; let me or mikeb know if you want better-quality copies.

The plan was to meet in Richmond at 10.30am on Monday. London traffic being what it is, lunch in Richmond at about noon was followed by an early afternoon departure along the A4 (not the M4) south to Southampton, where we took a break for orange-juice tops on the Town Quay.

Given what we'd learnt about how far we travel per half-day, we revised our destination at this point. Originally, we had planned to visit Beer in Devon, but it seemed like a bit of a stretch, and since I'd visited Bridport in early 2004 and liked it, we decided to go there instead. Upon arrival in Bridport, we rode directly to West Bay, found a B&B to stay at on West Bay Road, and walked down to the beach, where mikeb took a fair few photos of the dramatic and beautiful cliffs.

I phoned Hadyn to skite about the fact I'd made it to Bridport before he had (it's a long story). This backfired: Hadyn was there that weekend also! We met up for a pint at The George in West Bay, and then called it a night.

We were up next morning for a full English breakfast, over which we chatted with a couple who were taking their summer holiday driving a classic MG around the southwest. We rode on to Beaminster and then took some minor roads (which were outstanding!) to the road ("Sandy Lane") leading back south to Cerne Abbas, where we saw the giant! Amazing! Then we turned North again to Yeovil and Bath, where we stopped for lunch. Continuing on in the early afternoon, we took the wrong road out of Bath (toward Trowbridge and Salisbury instead of toward Chippenham) and stopped to look at the map. mikeb came off his bike and broke the gear-change lever, rendering the bike unridable. We called in the RAC, who carried his bike back to Bath. I followed the truck. There, an engineer repaired the lever by drilling out the snapped peg bolt and putting in a fresh makeshift peg. We managed to limp home via Marlborough, a White Horse at Cherhill, Newbury, Thatcham (for dinner at a roadside pub), and the M4, with me arriving home exhausted finally around 11.30pm.