Namu

If you get a chance, go and see Crank.

A man wakes to find he has been poisoned and the only thing that is keeping him alive is adrenalin.

Sounds daft, but boy does it work for a fast paced, original, funny, violent, sexy, non-stop thrill ride with driving musical score, great script and Jason Stratham in a film made for his talents.

Go see.

Monday nothing
Tuesday 4 pints @4.4% 10
Wednesday nothing
Thursday nothing
Friday 6 330ml Stella 10
Sat 4 pints @4.2% 9.8
Sun nothing

Total 29.8

Normally I drink twice a week. Friday was poker night so added an extra 10 I guess.
Otherwise, in the week I normally have 3 pints (had 4 cos it was a jug)
Saturday 4-5 pints

Art theft

Follow-up to pub discussion. This is what it's made of:

Water, malt vinegar, sugar, sunflower oil, modified maize starch, mustard flour, salt, stabalisers (E412, E405, E415), Emulsifier (E435), concentrated lemon juice. Colour: riboflavin, spice extracts.

No added sweeteners. 13 calories per desertspoonful. less than 7% fat.
Not only vegetarian, pretty sure it's vegan.

One of the reasons I had to come to Vegas was to play poker. Besides loving the game, the novel I'm writing is set in Vegas and has a poker as the backdrop. I needed to sit at a table and get a feel for live games that I'd previously only played in EntropyJim's home game.

tmp3rtantrum and I sat and played an insanely aggressive $25 tournament (250 chips, $3 50 chip add on, 15-30 limit roound one, 15 min rounds, no limit after an hour). Less than 45 minutes later we were done without any sense of having experienced poker properly.

entropyjim and t3mprtantrum decided to sit at the 1-2 table offered to people wanting to learn. It seemed silly to have three of us sat at the same table so I sat at a $2-4 limit table with $150. What followed was the best 5 hours of poker I've ever had, not just because I walked away $97 up, but because I learnt so much. I've had reasonable success playing online no-limit tournaments, and I beat the micro-limit tables with ease, but these only tell half the story. Add people to poker and the entire experience is hugely different and more fun.

The cliche view of live poker is the two players eyeballing each other before one wilts and the other reveals a bare faced bluff. This does not happen very often, if at all, playing $2-4 at the Luxor. It's about firemen on a convention who are there to get drunk on complimentary drinks and have a good time. It's about the young gun with his Poker Tour sunglasses who thinks he's playing a serious game and that he can bluff 7 5 off suite. It's about the retired old men gently taking the tourists for a few dollars. Poker is certainly about money but it is also about people. In that way, poker is an extraordinary game.

It wouldn't be LA if you weren't caught in jam on the freeway. Whatever the problem, it was so bad that after an hour of sitting still the traffic cops had 4 lanes of traffic turned around and going *back* up the freeway to the previous exit. Must have been severe. The plus side was we took a well navigated alternate route (props entropyjim) through Pasedena. This was the well healed end of LA burbs; great looking houses and beautiful palm lined avenues.

Two hours later than planned and we were headed north on I15 towards Bairstow and ultimately Las Vegas. The drive is long (4 hours or so) and made bearable by the novelty and the mountains. Soon after the Sierras comes the Mojave desert. The desert is like a bald man's failed hair tranpslant with widely spaced hardy looking bushes. Mixed in are raw rocky outcrops and flat salt lakes like birth marks.

The California/Nevada border is marked by a taste of the tat to come, a frightening blemish of billboards, a resort hotel and fashion outlets.

We've climbed again and so are coming down when we see Las Vegas against a hazy sky. When the marker tells us we're still 14 miles away we realise the scale of the place. Surrounded by mountains, Las Vegas sits on a plain daring you to take offence, but you can't. It defies all logic. Buildings tower next to each other and compete for your slack jawed attention. We spot The Luxor where we are to stay and it is dwarfed by the casinos around it. The Luxor is fashioned as an immense black reflecting pyramid. There's an obelisk outside that looks straight out of an Indiana Jones movie. entropyjim snaps a great shot of the dying sun reflecting the pyramid's side.

We park up (props t3mp3rtantrum for getting in one piece through the Vegas traffic) and head in. For some reason, crazy as it is, my subconcious assumed the pyramid would be solid, but instead there is a vast space and Egyptian figures towering above you. A sphynx sits and contemplates the row of checkin desks. Stargate fans are immediately at home and looking for the transport rings to the higher floors. Instead there is an inclinator, kinda like a lift but it goes *sideways* as well as up. Very strange feeling. I open my room door and I'm greeted by the immacualte Hollywood Egyptian styling. I grin stupidly.

We resist the urge to immediately sit at what looks like the loosest game of 2/4 limit Hold'em we'll ever see, and make do with eating, drinking and take in what is surely one of the most significant reflections of what man is capable of: hedonism on a scale that only the ancients may have rivalled.

Who: Minus10 t3mp3rtantrum and entropyjim

Where: US

For: A Vegas Road Trip

Let's skip the boring long haul flight details and get straight to driving the ten miles from LAX to Sunset Boulevard. First impressions of LA are a characterless mix of advertising and pull-in fast food, video stores, tire stops, and the list goes on. Only as we got close to Sunset and into Beverly was there any sense we were somewhere individual. By the time we were on Sunset Boulevard, and the exclusive houses were arrayed up the hillside, I got a sense that this was a place people lived.

The Hotel is the West hollywood Hyatt. Okay for one night. The plan is to stay awake as long as possible to get our body clocks synced so we head out to a place Ted on the reception recommends, Cabo Cantina. Happy Hour from 4-8 pm is two for one on drinks. The place turns out to be a Mexican styled faux beach hut type place with inflatable toys of the sports kind and a ridiculous number of screens showing a clinch match between the Detroit Pistons and Miami Heat. The atmosphere is good; the young and beautiful are taking cocktails and the waitresses are bouncy and fresh faced. We're looked after like only the US can seem to manage by a sweet young thing who we tip heavily when we decamp back to the hotel four hours later, drunk, fed and ready to sleep for ten hours.

Wide awake at 2 am I take two pills for the screaming synus pain from air con and sleep til 4 am. Then 6.30 am when I concede and get up. I don't expect the others are up so I head to the nearby Starbucks and sit outside listening to two guys doing the morning papers. I file away the nuances of their conversation for use when I'm writing. (It's one of the reasons I'm here after all.)

Breakfast and then off to Vegas and the real adventure begins ...

Dan Brown's, The Da Vinci Code, is the only book I have read that I balked on the first word of the first sentence in the prologue. I also read Holy Blood, Holy Grail back in the eighties when it came out, so the book has absolutely zero new things to say or revelations to make. The only good thing about this book is the structure which keeps chapters mercifully short and is a lesson to every writer to keep the reader engaged (if you give a shit that is, which I didn't, so it was a chore).

There is no point in deconstructing the appalling prose. No good can come of it. I suspect, Dan Brown is actually an extremely able writer along the lines of Stock, Aitken & Waterman being good pop producers. The sad thing is we are now doomed to endure a succession of Dan Brown wannabees who imitate his lack of writerly skill to deliver sub standard thrillers.

I guess the thing I find most frustrating is the idea that popular culture has to be bad. Dan Brown could have achieved everything he did and write it so much better. Let's not forget, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, T-Rex, and a host of others, were mainstream popular and excellent to boot. There's nothing wrong with popular; there's everything wrong with not doing your best to make it good.

... for these online test thingies. Blame 561

Robot You are 71% Rational, 0% Extroverted, 0% Brutal, and 42% Arrogant.

You are the Robot! You are characterized by your rationality. In fact, this is really ALL you are characterized by. Like a cold, heartless machine, you are so logical and unemotional that you scarcely seem human. For instance, you are very humble and don't bother thinking of your own interests, you are very gentle and lack emotion, and you are also very introverted and introspective. You may have noticed that these traits are just as applicable to your laptop as they are to a human being. In short, your personality defect is that you don't really HAVE a personality. You are one of those annoying, super-logical people that never gets upset or flustered. Unless, of course, you short circuit. To put it less negatively: 1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive. 2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted. 3. You are more GENTLE than brutal. 4. You are more HUMBLE than arrogant. Compatibility: Your exact opposite is the Class Clown. Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Hand-Raiser, the Emo Kid, and the Haughty Intellectual. * * If you scored near fifty percent for a certain trait (42%-58%), you could very well go either way. For example, someone with 42% Extroversion is slightly leaning towards being an introvert, but is close enough to being an extrovert to be classified that way as well. Below is a list of the other personality types so that you can determine which other possible categories you may fill if you scored near fifty percent for certain traits. The other personality types: The Emo Kid: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Humble. The Starving Artist: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Bitch-Slap: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Humble. The Brute: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant. The Hippie: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble. The Televangelist: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Schoolyard Bully: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble. The Class Clown: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant. The Robot: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Humble. The Haughty Intellectual: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Spiteful Loner: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Humble. The Sociopath: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant. The Hand-Raiser: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble. The Braggart: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Capitalist Pig: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble. The Smartass: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 47% on Rationality You scored higher than 0% on Extroversion You scored higher than 0% on Brutality You scored higher than 48% on Arrogance

Link: The Personality Defect Test written by saint_gasoline on OkCupid Free Online Dating

April already. The novel is coming along well at 21k words (about 70 pages). I'm happy it's a mix of poker and character. The novel group is going okay. Bimbling along.

The Contemporary American lit course has been a lot more tempestuous with a reading list that has not gone down well. We started with Carrie (Stephen King) which most ppl know is about a teenage girl brought up by a psycho religious mum. Carrie has telekinetic powers and kills loads of ppl at the prom. Good, wholesome, American fun.

Then we had Anita Shreve, The Pilot's Wife. This was picked up by Oprah, made her book list and since then everything Shreve has written has gone gold. This is coffee table literature; not low brow, not high brow, just readable. Not a great story but well enough executed.

From here, things went downhill with a string of increasingly literary books. The tutor is unfortunate in that he has three of the most commercially focussed writers on the course in his group, the most vociferous of which is a Scot who thinks Dan Brown is a genius (The Da Vinci Code).

Anne Tyler's, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, is a study of a disfunctional family told from each members point of view, set in Baltimore from the fifties to near present. Grim, lacking any real story and little to no change in character throughout. Shrug.

Dan De Lilo's, The Body Artist, is a novella of 124 pages whose first 24 pages are devoted to a confused and rambling portrayal of a man and his wife having breakfast, after which he drives off to his ex-wife's house and commits suicide. The woman is the Body Artist in question and the rest of the book is about her dealing with this death and the nature of time. The novella is best described (politely) as performance art (Don goes as far as to tell us pretty much this) or (less politely) crap.

You can imagine this went down poorly with our Psychic presenter from Sky (Psychic interactive daily) and our Scots thriller writer.

And next we are faced with Joyce Carol Oates, I'll Take You There, a stream of conciousness novel told from the point of view of an unreliale and unlikeable woman dealing with her neurosis of identity, love and family. I wonder if it will come to blows.

And if we survive that, then there is Beloved to follow up (Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate 1993) and her book about the slave woman who kills her own children rather than let them fall into the hands of slavers. Beloved is the single word on her daughter's gravestone and the name of the woman/ghost that returns to her mother. Good stuff if you are Stephen King, but in the hands of Toni Morrison we get a book where it is difficult to tell when anything is happening, who is doing it, and with a point of view that on occasions changes by paragraph, let alone by chapter. Soulful, certainly. Rich in character, doubtless. Delivered in a confusing as hell melange designed to confuse and frustrate, absolutely.

I'm currently reading the book after that, Blood Meridian, Cormac MacCarthy. Best described as Hemmingway on peyote. Literary and yet direct and brutal, it is a portrayal of early 19th Century US west/Mexico that is unfogiving in its meanness and cracks along like a buffalo herd. Dispassionate, gruesome, compelling; this is bound to stir more debate.

IslandBoy intrigued me. He thinks he has it rough. LMAO.

Jung Explorer Test
Actualized type: INTJ
(who you are)

INTJ - "Mastermind". Introverted intellectual with a preference for finding certainty. A builder of systems and the applier of theoretical models. 2.1% of total population.

Preferred type: INTJ
(who you prefer to be)

INTJ - "Mastermind". Introverted intellectual with a preference for finding certainty. A builder of systems and the applier of theoretical models. 2.1% of total population.

Attraction type: INFJ

(who you are attracted to)

INFJ - "Author". Strong drive and enjoyment to help others. Complex personality. 1.5% of total population.

Take Jung Explorer Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

It's been a while and a few have asked me why I haven't been writing so here's an update on my reading and writing.

We read three more books on Love Story: Girl With a Pearl Earring, Brick Lane and The Bookseller of Kabul (Norwegian journalist who's name I cannot spell).

Girl With a Pearl Earring is set in 17th Century Holland and revolves around the life of a maid (the girl) in a Dutch painter's house (Vermeer).I found the book engaging and it built genuine tension. The book created a real sense of life in those times and highlighted the plight of the lower classes and in particular our heroine. She is 17 and has a crush on Vermeer, but her realistic future lies with the butchers son and (literally) meat for life. Reasonably short, well written and has a story: recommended.

Brick Lane made a splash and had rave reviews when it was published a few years ago. The book is written from the point of view of a Bangladeshi village girl sold in to marriage to a pompous older man (who I personally grew to like in a Homer-like way). The author gives a grim unrelenting view of life on an estate in London and waits over two hundred pages to introduce a love interest (a young idealistic Islamic lad, who's good looking of course). The love story is shallow and pointless. I'd rather chew my own arm off than read this book again. Badly written, badly plotted, bad everything. Sucks.

The Bookseller of Kabul is a compelling view of life in Afghanistan post Taliban. The book is narrative non fiction, in that the author lived with a family and relates events she witnessed or was related. This is not a love story, but is very well written. The book is full of interest and gives a vivid and depressing insight in to the plight of women in this Islamic country. Worth the effort, but no chuckles along the way; don't read to lift your spirits.

As for the workshop itself, by and large I concentrated on writing solid short stories. Nothing complicated; just telling stories, generally with some humour. My submission for the creative folder at the end of year was a monologue of a widow waiting for her daughter to come round for tea. The other piece was about a painting some of you may know (the blobby man in a bath) and was semi autobiographical humourous look at what happens when people make a home together.

In Experiment and Exploration I wrote a radio play. It was a first venture and was a fantasy comedy. I learned a huge amount, not the least of which is that people are funnier than authors. When I cut the jokes that I wanted to write and just let the characters be themselves then the story not only became tighter (I cut 20% of the material, about 6 pages) but the humour was less forced, and so I think better.

Finally we have a manuscript tutor. Many have tutors who they've never met, I got my tutor from Love Story, so that'll be interesting. I think she will be good for me, though I suspect we have different views on aspects of writing. I'm curious to see what she thinks of being given someone who wants to write a poker book given that she is a slam poet.

Next is 5000 words of the poker novel for Jan 21st, then a new term starting Feb 14th. I'l be doing contemporary US fiction with what looks like a great reading list, and The Novel (workshopping each others novels in progress). So I guess at last the book will become a real thing. Should be fun.

The last two books for The Love Story context module have been Ian McEwan's Atonement and Carol Shield's Unless. I can't say either did much for me at all. Both are literary, which seems code for: nothing happens.

In addressing Atonement we started off discussing literary fiction in general. I find it overwritten, slow paced, referential and as dull as dull can be. It has nothing to do with the quality of writing, on the contrary, a great deal of attention goes in to its crafting. I shall labour the point and compare it to prog rock: clever, classical, tedious and up its own arse. I prefer skate punk.

This week I left a few things in my short story for Love Story to see of people in the group would pick it up. If they did they I can trust their criticism, if they miss it then the jury must still be out. In particular I left one blatant tell, which I cut and then put back in. Few pulled me up on it :(

Exploration and Experiment has gone from strength to strength. It's a great group with a wide variety of style, and none of it too literary. Last week's assignment was to do the opposite of the week before and just start to write a novel with no planning at all. I started on my poker book idea (fiction) and I was happy with how it flowed. It's a Ninja Story plot so easy to write (trial, failure, training and triumph).

I've bought a couple of books on writing for radio as I've been recommended to think about that medium for my Buddhist play from earlier in the course. It strikes me as a very challenging medium.

Book of the week - Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
A notorious book (and films). I didn't enjoy this book much. The subject matter is a little close to the bone as I know the victims of child abuse. The writing is very literary, witty, and mannered. The POV is very well written and completely convincing. Though Humbert tries hard to dazzle me with wit, charm and satire of banal america, I do not like him in the least. Was a struggle to finish the book as many long passages in the middle of the book seem not to advance the story much.

Love Story
I learned that I need to polish my work more before coming to class. The critical faculty of the group seems not to be as relaxed or in tune as in the afternoon Exploration and Experiment, nor is there the collaborative air that the latter group has. This week's story was written for a friend and is a first person POV piece that deals with separation of a father from his son when his marriage breaks down. It turned out to be very easy to write and it will be interesting to see how a group of women (one other man) take to a piece with a very emotional father.

Exploration and experiment
The poetry went a lot better than many of us thought and was very instructive in free verse.

This weeks homework is to plot a novel and write a synopsis in two pages (600 words in double space). This has been pretty hard, even though I had a story idea and some characters. I spent several days just working on character maps, plot lines, timelines, story ideas and I'm not convinced I have a great story. The important thing is that I think there is something, so the synopsis got written. We will have to see how confused I am between story and plot and whether what I've written is at all at the level or pitch of what was required.

I'm getting used to having a lot to do every day, and consequently forgetting things like this journal.

My two 3 hour sessions at college are on a Monday which gives me the week to do all the work. This week we talked about Pride and Prejudice (a good read if you haven't already) and then brainstormed ideas for a short stories based around family conflict (and a love interest would be good). 1500 words isn' tmuch so I've written a single scene that starts and ends with the daughter telling her parents she has accepted a proposal to marriage but is in fact about the father who undergoes quite a dramatic transformation at the prospect of losing his daughter. It came down to an opportunity to write a soliloquy on love.

This week's book has been Jane Eyre, and let's just say that it is a fair bit grimmer than P&P. I would have aggressively edited the first two hundred pages or so but the story does start to rip along when Jane gets involved with Mr Rochester (dark smouldering type, though a lot older - which obviously is no barrier at all to marrying a 19 year old ;)

We also acted out the plays we had written. It is quite remarkable how just listening to your words being performed helps show you what works and what doesn't. It was an excellent exercise and I learnt a huge amount about dialogue in a very short period.

This week's exploration and experiment assignment is to write four blank verse poems (no rhyme or meter). One about your father, one about a pet, one the place you love most and one about Kenneth Bigley. Having never written poetry this has proven to be a tough assignment and took a lot longer than the 1500 word short story.

Next week's book, Lolita and taboo love (or what not to do at Seven/Discord :)

I almost forgot to say how successful Entropy was; record numbers and outstanding Brian Blesseds. Johnny had a superb home made costume and Ivana the dodgiest beard.

I've just started a Masters in Creative Writing. One of the requirements is to maintain a Writer's Journal to track my self awareness as a writer, work in progress, strengths, weaknesses and influences, and Live Journal seems like a good place to do it.

Week One
Context Module Love Story 10 a.m. - 1 p.m.
They changed the reading list so I didn't have to read Bridget Jones's Diary after all. A real shame I didn't know earlier as I didn't think it was a good book in many ways, but never mind.

We do still have to read Pride and Prejudice though, and surprisingly relevant and observant in the nature of romance and marriage. So far I've managed to hide how attrociously read I am when it comes to the classics.

I toook this module as romance and love form part of many fictions. I don't necessarily want to write love stories but I do want to be able to represent and understand love as part of character and motivation.

The in class writing piece was a personal view on 'The One'. As I have actually been asked this in real life by a woman before it was a cinch and I wrote about Lisa Simpson. In hindsight, perhaps the most insightful reason she is 'The One' for me is that she is fictional; perhaps 'The One' can only ever be fictional.

Workshop Experiment and Exploration
This is a module that will cover all forms of creative writing from short stories to plays, scripts and even Haiku.

We kicked off on plays and discussed the necessary elements of a play before each being put on the spot and having to come up with an idea for a play to be developed by next week. The important elements were ensuring contradiction (or conflict if you prefer) and building to a climax. I went for a heroine addict being reformed within a Tibetan Buddhist commune under the guidance of Buddhist nun, with the climax being whether the addict takes on the robes herself.

We have to write a few scenes to be acted out by the other workshop members next week and review/critique eachothers work. This really has lit the touch flame for me; I was wide awake at 4.30 a.m. and unable to get back to sleep. At 5.30 I got up and started writing. At 7 I had my first scene and was back in bed. At 10.30 I woke ready to go again. I've never written a play but I can see this one set out perfectly. There is so much potential conflict and agony with many possible dramatic moments. As they have to be acted out I guess I'll have to pass on some of the more anguished scenes I have in mind and just outline them, but that will leave plenty for class. I still don't know myself whether our addict will reform or not. Good job Bodhi can help me on the background on this one as heroin addicts are not uncommon in real life Buddhist communities.

Overall, the course seems perfect for what I need. I'll be writing every day, I'll have a large and professional critical element looking at my work, and I'll get to meet some of the right people to get my work seen and hopefully published. I'm very optimistic and look forward to the inevitable slump :)

This weekend is a residential weekend away in Dorset. It should be interesting.