Category Archives: drinking

Broke, bit­ter, usu­ally half-cut by lunchtime

By Mat | Published: December 20, 2005

Two months ago, as I was in Las Vegas shoot­ing Osama bin Laden with a machine gun, a man con­nec­ted to the pub­lish­ing industry was read­ing the choicest extracts from my novel. Before him were two stacks of paper: one piled heavy and high and marked ‘NO’, the other much shorter, marked ‘YES’ and, I’d like to think, haloed with tinkly stars dan­cing to a heav­enly coloratura.

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Truth, Beauty and Above All Quantum Superposition

By Mat | Published: December 13, 2005

Sud­denly I’m at an ima­gin­ary party.

“Nice party,” I say to a passing poet, rather lamely. She nods politely. I look around, a bit lost.

“Listen,” I say, “do you know why I’m here?”

“I don’t even know why I’m here,” she says crank­ily. “Why am I a poet? You’re mak­ing me up, you tell me.”

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Eng­lischsch­lichacha (part two)

By Mat | Published: July 18, 2005

We looked at the foot­ball play­ers. They looked at us. One of them had a whisk. This is not a euphemism.

“What did you guys get kicked out of?” asked my new partner.

“Engleschlitchacha,” I twitched.

“Oh great,” he said. “Not just nerds. Retards, too.”

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Eng­lischsch­lichacha (part one)

By Mat | Published: July 14, 2005

I have a ter­rible, humi­li­at­ing and very spe­cific speech imped­i­ment. I find it pain­fully impossible to pro­nounce the term ‘Eng­lish Lit­er­at­ure’ in mixed com­pany. I can say ‘Rus­sian Lit­er­at­ure’. I can say ‘Eng­lish cricket team’. Hell, I can say ‘Feodor Mikhail­ovich Dosto­evskij’ without blink­ing, but I hon­estly can­not say ‘Eng­lish Lit­er­at­ure’ without dis­lo­cat­ing my mand­ible. It has haunted me since I was six­teen when, in a pro­foundly influ­en­tial life event, I was psy­cho­lo­gic­ally trau­mat­ised by a bowl of scone dough.

There is an explan­a­tion for this, but to make it requires that we briefly revisit a party I atten­ded a couple of weeks ago.

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The Ninety-Thousand Man

By Mat | Published: June 24, 2005

Mile­stones are a strange busi­ness. I’ve never had a prob­lem with motiv­a­tion writ­ing this novel, except when driven to soul­less des­pair by some of the insaner moments of a list­less career in uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tion, yet I do tend to go a bit wild when my word-odometer passes a num­ber with four zer­oes in it.

Also posted in The Last Monk, photos, writing | Comments closed