TheManWhoCameToVisit
So my friend Greg, aka TheManWhoFellAsleep has a book out. Well, the book was actually published back in 2006. But typically of TheManWhoFellAsleep and his time-dilating lethargy, Greg is only just getting round to publicising it.
A Year In The Life of TheManWhoFellAsleep is a strange, paranoid, very funny and surreal illustrated journal-style novel about a Londoner who is being stalked by someone who may or may not be himself. The book starts with a drunken Jesus waking the protagonist at 3am and trying to get off with him. Overall, it's reminiscent of if Haruki Murakami and a pissed Woody Allen got into a brawl right next to the open door of a crazy genetic mash up machine. Unbeknown to them, the half mutated Jeff Goldblum from The Fly is lurking in the shadows and pushes them in, still struggling, where they trip over the prone form of lethargic New York comedian Steven Wright who had previously crawled in there and finally nodded off after a five night bout of insomnia. Goldblumfly slams the door, cackling, and pulls the genetic combination lever. The resulting Murakami-Allen-Wright melange is what this book is like.
At the time of the book's original publicaton back in Winter 2006, Greg promoted it with a virtual book tour. That is he borrowed friends' blogs for a day at a time to do personal appearances, interviews and the like. This was back when blogs were the social media darling du jour, before the Facebookistas and Twitterati took over and started crushing writing into tiny little bitty chunks. Today, Greg would probably do a 147-character Twitter Tag Tour or some sort of embedded Microwidget Mosey.
But I digress.
I was lucky enough back then to be able to welcome Greg to the draGnet, on my birthday (December 19th - hint hint) as it happened. It was like having a birthday booze up with a friend, except not really...
We decided to do something a little different for Greg's visit. As you may or may not know, he does a series of pieces on his site called Invisibilia ("replacing people with lines") and we decided to have an Invisibilia mash-up right here. The ones of me are by Greg, and vice versa.
I'm republishing the pieces now as (a) they're great and (b) because as part of the book's renewed publicity push, Greg's doing a reading tomorrow evening, Thursday 15th October at BouTea, in Covent Garden. You can see the details at the Facebook event. You should get yourself along and buy a copy which Greg will sign and dedicate. It's really good.
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