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.

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.

“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.

Released on 24 February 2009, Wellington-based composer Rhian Sheehan’s Standing In Silence is a relatively recent addition to my armoury of music to write by, but I could tell on the first listen that it fulfilled each of my criteria. Sheehan has been an active recording artist since 2001 and his work has featured in a number of films, commercials and an Emmy Award-winning TV series. This album is what I’d normally describe, if forced to put it into words, as “ambient” music, by which I mean it enhances the mood in the room, augments or improves an existing atmosphere without dominating it or dictating a mood – aural wallpaper, if you like; although that sounds dismissive of the music and it isn’t meant to be because a functioning soundtrack is an intrinsic part of a lot of my writing.

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.

I’d decided not to re-publish an old post about Martin Amis, until I discovered a David Barrett article on Standpoint. I was defending Amis’s writing long before it became fashionable to deride him for being, as some would have it, “a really lousy writer”, “talentless” and, heaven forbid, “really annoying”. But if Barrett’s examples from Amis’s body-of-work are unconvincing, it’s incumbent on the haters to dazzle us: specimens from his superiors should be so incandescent that quotes by a talentless and lousy writer would shrivel and turn to ashes in our hands. I challenge anyone to do that by posting examples of inarguably better writing than the ones Barrett quotes. In the long silence inevitably to follow, here’s what I said about London Fields.

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 I said in my previous post, music often plays a role in creating conditions conducive to writing. Just to recap, my criteria for great music to write by are: 1. It has to be more than wallpaper, should enhance your mood while not distracting you from the task at hand. 2. It should engender a mood of anticipation; filled with possibilities, not the intimidation that makes a blank page seem bigger and scarier than the potential it holds. 3. There should be an underlying, bristling electricity that hints at anything-could-happen. You’re seeking an inner tranquillity and an outward tingling; a 3 o’clock in the morning feeling that shifts your mind up a gear.

I’m reviewing another oldie this time, Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s 1984 recording The Pearl. An interval of 27 years between its release and my review seems about right, although it sounds fresh enough to have been recorded yesterday.