There’s already much to like about a documentary named after a Richard Brautigan poem. But after stumbling across part two of Adam Curtis’s thought-provoking if infuriating three-part film All watched over by machines of loving grace on BBC Knowledge recently, I’d have sympathised with Zoe Williams writing in the Guardian, “I kept thinking the dog was sitting on the remote”, had I known she’d said it; even though I don’t have a dog and she was on about something else altogether. This may have been a bit of a mind-fuck for an introductory paragraph but it’s nothing compared with what Curtis almost pulls off in these films.

I love java sweet and hot. In fact, I love coffee so much that I only allow myself one cup of it a day. A big cup. A very big cup. One big cup sees me through the day and I rarely have cravings for more. One reason for this is that our Krups Bravo espresso machine is decidedly low-tech, and coffee-making tends to be far too time-consuming for an encore. It’s even more time-consuming because I use a Hario Skerton ceramic coffee mill to hand-grind the beans every morning. I like the hand-ground beans because, like an electric burr grinder, the Hario crushes the beans gently rather than pulverising them as a blade grinder does.

“It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey,” Steve Coogan tells us about halfway through this very 21st Century road-trip. One thing this series of six half-hour TV programmes (eventually edited into a feature film) certainly isn’t about is its supposed premise: a commission from the Observer magazine for Coogan to write an article about fancy restaurants in the more picturesque parts of the England’s north country.

I don’t remember being as affected by a film since I first saw David Lynch’s Eraserhead as a teenager. The odd thing is that I haven’t even been able to watch Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void (2009) all the way through yet. It has that disturbing, captivating quality of watching someone else’s nightmare that Eraserhead made its own but the quality that had me glued to the screen was the dreamlike insistence of the imagery – and it’s isn’t even about dreams; it’s about ghosts and death.

Georg Salter was born in 1897. His family emigrated to the US where he worked as a designer at a time when books mattered in a way they no longer do. About his design for Kay Boyle’s novel, Generation Without Farewell, Thomas S. Hansen writes in his book Classic Book Jackets: The Design Legacy of George Salter:

“Salter’s abstract design prevailed over the author’s own wish to present images of amputee soldiers against a background of mutilation … Salter instead chose a symbolic approach showing battered Venetian blinds to symbolize a state of despair about cultural dissolution in postwar Germany.”

Some of his designs prefigure the work of modern day design houses such as Tomato.

“Schultz punching now for his life. Connecting with a straight left ka plonk on Al’s nose which instantly cascaded bleeding blood. Schultz momentarily still and aghast at the horrifying crimson sight of Al’s face. Al undaunted cutting free with a looping right connecting with Schultz’s unblack eye. Schultz hanging on in a clinch.”

JP Donleavy is the ultimate stylist. My proof: few other writers are instantly recognisable from a paragraph taken at random from one of their books. Schultz is the story of theatrical impresario Sigmund Franz ‘Isadorable’ Schultz, a man so dogged by misfortune and his own clumsiness that its first 150 pages wear you down and punch you drunk so you feel you’ve gone 15 rounds with a prize-fighter. My trainer, a grizzled old pro called Sebastian Dangerfield, told me to persevere, to keep getting back up, so I did.

About five years ago I acquired a second-hand, yellowed Penguin paperback of Bill Bryson’s Troublesome Words and it’s since become the most often used book in my writer’s reference library. The edition I have has a more attractive cover than any of those I’ve been able to locate on the internet, and its hand-lettered illustration by Jeffrey Fisher (shown here) makes it seem even more special to me. The trouble with most reference works (as Bryson points out in an introduction for the benefit of those afraid that reading any book about words would be about as pleasant as eating it), is that “they so frequently assume from the reader a familiarity with the intricacies of grammar that is – in my case, at any rate – generous”. Troublesome Words can enjoyably and profitably be read from cover to cover as entertainment, rather than just dipped into when needed.

One of the aims I had for this website was for it to provide resources for other writers from a variety of tools and aids that have worked from me – everything from reference works to the kind of music that might inspire or map a route away from Blighter’s Rock. There are so many writers’ reference works that it isn’t just a problem knowing which ones to invest in but also which ones to reach for when you have a word problem that needs a solution. Most days, all you need is a good dictionary and a clear head. At other times, your brain needs a bit more help. That’s where Mark Broatch’s In A Word: The Essential Tool for Finding the Perfect Word comes in.

Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians is a 33-year-old piece of music I discovered relatively recently that’s had probably the most direct influence on my writing – so much so that I wrote it into one of my later short stories as a character. Steve Reich is now 75; not that you’d guess from listening to this record. I can’t think of a more modern-sounding piece of music – it’s positively futuristic, which in itself is extraordinary, since he uses only orchestral instruments (cello, violin, clarinet, bass clarinet, pianos, marimbas, xylophones, unamplified vibraphone and women’s voices), no electronics, and only the musicians’ breath to create the effect of what could be mistaken for a sequencer.

As Frank Zappa memorably said, music is the best. In the early to mid-2000s, I reviewed a variety of CDs for the IDG New Zealand magazine >>FFWD, including albums by Can, David Gray, Dave Brubeck, various world music artists, Herbie Hancock, The Who, The Blue Nile, Peter Gabriel and many others. Writers review other people’s work for all kinds of reasons; not least because, although the pay rates are often negligible (or non-existent), it provides you with a ‘free’ source of listening or reading. Many of the CDs I’m listening to today were acquired as review copies, so it’s a win-win. And there’s nothing like being required to articulate in a couple of hundred words what you think of something for arriving at clarity in your own mind.