And cake for all

As anyone who's just shapeshifted their way through a bundle of Marvel characters - including Rogue and Ben Grimm - while running through a Macbethish landcape full of moors and castles from an unknown but terrifying assailant, before waking up slightly confused at midday, can confirm, overindulgence is a danger at Christmas. So while we all hole up and pray for Harry Hill, here's a few virtual food-based Rennies to ease the pain of those seven extra tatties from yesterday:

W. N. Herbert, a favourite at the Fuselit den, has written this awesome festive poem about the forgotten martyr of the season - the noble chicken.

The Nativity Chicken

Below the trembling udder-thuribles
of carolling kine, beneath
the suddenly-loquacious ass

lo, the nativity chicken, roaming
between the shifting pillars
of their leggy temple

to be plucked out on the morn
and executed, though innocent of envy
to provide a nourishing broth
for both mother and boy
(Joseph's speciality for the journey)

let her severed head be set among the stars
to guide all poultry home
to the great after-egg of release
from pucking and pecking
from straining and laying

let her startled beak announce peace
for all those who labour but do not know it
who serve with no sense of duty
and sacrifice without grasp of regret

let her blessings descend upon us like feathers

For more Herbertage, why not explore these realms?

On a poultry theme, check out artist Matthew Meyer's awesome Chickens of the World sequence.

and to drink?

Dark Roasted Blend, who find the weirdest and most intriguing artwork and objects in their "on-going quest for wisdom and beauty, for all things cool and wonderful in our world, and beyond - in the spiritual realm. " have featured a gorgeous array of robot art here. Check out their steampunk page too.

Right-o. I'm off downstairs to ignore all warnings against a surfeit of food and sample some of my future sister-in-law's stunning cakes. Please don't let me Hulk out tonight, body.

I forgot to say ...

We'll be giving the blog a makeover too. Frankly, I think it looks bum and I want to be doing the best impression possible of a professional organisation, even if we aren't one. It would also be helpful, I'm sure, if readers knew who was writing a post at the beginning of it, rather than right at the end!

All Systems Go at Sidekick Books

The second micro-anthology, Obakarama, is out, which means Dr Fulminare and Sidekick Books are steaming into the new decade with both produce and plans for the future. Just to recap, here is what the micro-anthologies look like:


That's Obakarama, and here's Coin Opera:


Both are £5 (plus p&p) and can be ordered from the Sidekick Books site. They're pocket-sized and between 40 and 50 pages each, packed with poetry and (in the case of Obakarama) full-colour illustrations. The contributors are a combination of poets we admire and have approached, poets who we have discovered purely through Fuselit and ones we have encountered through the thriving London poetry scene. Although there's a bias towards the capital, there are also contributors from India, Scotland, the US and Finland. We've got a nice gender balance too, with 12 female poets and illustrators to 13 male.

We're very pleased with these books - they may not be handmade in the same way Fuselit is but every bit as much love and attention has gone into making them. The print quality is excellent (thanks to the chaps at Good News Press) and everybody involved has been both enthusiastic and hard-working. I feel like this sort of approach to publishing poetry is genuinely different, taking the emphasis off the individual as demi-popstar and removing the need to slap over-the-top praise and commendation on every interesting new poet in order to get people to read their work. Instead, the focus is on poetry as a way of engaging in an entertaining way with our past and our future, with other cultures and our own. The common theme gives readers an entry point to an individual's work and also operates as a way of getting people outside the usual circles interested in what poets are doing.

At least, that's the theory! And on that basis, we're planning more collections in the new year, aiming for an even broader range of poets and still more fresh and exciting subject matter, as well as continuing the sort of collaborative formal experiments we started with Chimerium and Telemorphics. It will also, I hope, give us a little breathing space with Fuselit - that is, to continue in the tradition we've established of publishing a unique, lovingly put together literary magazine based on the connotations of a single word, but without the pressure to use it as a vehicle for all our new ideas. With any luck, that means we'll be able to settle into a more regular cycle, and our aim is to get three issues out in 2010, starting with Tilt in January, followed by Jack in May and then ... well, the next word will be announced soon - I've already got the CD design done for it, and a plan for the cover.

Anyway, what's left to say is Merry Christmas to everyone out there, and have a fantastic New Year, from all of us at Fuselit!

Showing your workings

I've just been to see The Paper Cinema's The Night Flyer at the Battersea Arts Centre tonight, a story of a young man's heroic endeavour to save his beloved from fiendish top-hatted rail travel enthusiasts.

The set up was as follows: a video camera is set up in the centre of the room, which is linked up to a projector. The animation is then created in real time, using a series of beautiful paper cut outs which are moved in front of the camera by the two animators/puppeteers.

It struck me that there was an enjoyable tension created by having the mechanisms of the animation laid bare in this way - you could see a pictorial cut out being readied, wonder how it was going to be used and then see it realised on the screen. It didn't distance you from what was taking place within the story, but the two inalienably connected spectacles of creating and creation resonated with one another strangely. You could never actually see the act of creating an effect or movement and the effect or movement itself, but you could infer perfectly between the two (a kind of aesthetic 'knowingness' perhaps?) Against this was a semi-improvised musical accompaniment which in part acted as a glue for the visual experience, allowing you to become immersed in its tensions - or despite them, if you should so choose. But the music must have been more than this, because what was happening visually was of course a parallel of the music, but made clear in a way that we wouldn't normally hear or see in music. Or perhaps it was there all the time, and I'm just not sensitive enough to it.

Phew. I hope that made some kind of sense - I may have been reading too much aesthetics. After the performance, we were showed sketches and talked through what The Paper Cinema presently had in the works - a retelling of the Odyssey. Interspersed with this was further music - some of it the planned score for the new work. It was a pleasure to see a project in its early stages, and it was good to be given an opportunity to input into it - though I question the use of standard BAC forms as a means of accomplishing this. It seemed slightly undiscursive, and the questions didn't quite fit with what we'd seen and been shown. In fairness though, we were all perfectly free to ask questions, and food was offered in an attempt to create a more congenial atmosphere. As with so much, it was what you made of it. For my part, it has got me to consider carefully how you can expose artistic processes to generate more than just critical distance, and what kind of strategies you can employ to encourage people to engage in what you're doing.

Wordplay: Devilry at the Good Ship

Something to kick off the new year - both Kirsty and I will be reading at wordPLAY on Tuesday 5th January in the new year. It's at The Good Ship, 289 Kilburn High Road, £4.50 (£3.50 for concessions) from 7pm. Really neat venue - the readings take place in a sort of sunken pit area with rows of leather sits within it and extra chairs around the edge, so that lots of people can get a clear view of the stage - good job as Facebook claims that 80+ people are planning on turning up.

Other readers include Chris Horton - who has a splendid poem in Fuselit: Mars and whose work turns up more and more regularly in the big national poetry competitions - and Joshua Idehen. I saw Idehen perform at the Fling festival this year and he actually - I'm not even joking or exaggerating - seemed to magnetically draw people towards the poetry tent. He got up on stage and people started to flood in from all directions, beyond the range of the speaker system. He is undoubtedly responsible for most of those 80 who've already put the date in their diaries. Is it just that he's astonishingly tall? Is it the easy-going charisma he exudes? I dunno. But if it means more people are coming to see poetry events, that must be a good thing.

There's also going to be some stories and music, keeping things nice n' eclectic. And I'm going to bring a CD with some music from Sonic 2 in it, which I am going to incorporate into my set. Also some Caligula poems. In fact, I'm going to be mostly doing Caligula poems.

Need an Emergency Christmas Present?

Pentone mugs. I've been meaning to mention these for a while now. Nick and Sue Asbury, a writer/designer team, have come up with Pentone (geddit?), a system for organising voice into different tones.

The Pentone website has tones ranging from 'Hallmark' to 'Palin', 'Boring' to 'Daily Mail'. The mugs, which can be ordered individually or in a set, are 'Yorkshire', 'Sympathetic', 'Stirring' and 'Mug'. You get a swatch sheet featuring the full range with every order though.

Asbury & Asbury are also responsible for the book Corpoetics, which myself and others reviewed for Happenstance here. It's a rather clever little book made up entirely of poems collaged from corporate mission statements.

Back to Pentone, and my current favourite is probably 'Dithering':

Christmas with Audrey II

(Being a quick recap of our day out at all-day poetry bash The Christmas We Get We Deserve)

Sunday was fun. It really didn't feel like eight or so hours in the same joint, although there's no doubting that a hell of a lot of entertainment was packed in, and the Fuselit gang were very happy to join in. The event was co-hosted by Broadcast, Rising magazine and Donut Press, aka Roddy Lumsden, Tim Wells and Andy Ching.

The festivities kicked off in the afternoon, with a series of short readings by Ashna Sarkar, Sabrina Mahfouz, Suzanne Andrade and Sophia Blackwell, compered fantastically by the latter. I hadn't seen Suzanne before, but particularly loved her set of mimed-to-backing-track tales - eerie and as darkly deadpan as a Blue Jam sketch.

Then it was Team Fuselit with the readers from Coin Opera and Obakarama. Roddy Lumsden, Simon Barraclough, Chrissy Williams, Ross Sutherland, Rowyda Amin, David Floyd, Cliff Hammett, Amy Key, Adham Smart and me and Jon compering, reading from Coin Opera and Obakarama, all introduced to a soundtrack of classic game themes. We were over the moon with the readings, and it made us all the more excited about the books, which sold well!



15 to 1 saw a veritable conga line of poets, including Jon, answer questions from Roddy's magazine of quizzery, the winner being the mighty Rowyda Amin.

Then we saw sets by the authors of some of the year's best poetry collections, including Penned in the Margins head honcho Tom Chivers, Luke Kennard and the wounded-but-game Kate Kilalea.

Penultimately, we had the fantastic Donut poet Tim Turnbull. If you haven't seen him and you have the chance, you probably should. Especially when he rounds off his set with a chorus by acapella group the La Di Dahs to accompany him.


The immaculately-coiffed La Di Dahs rounded the reveleries off with Andrews sisters-esque renditions of Creep, Lose Yourself and Earth Song, before the wartime classic Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.

And that was that - the day slid so easily by. The Betsey, as usual, proved a grand venue (with top mulled wine), the spirit was decidedly festive and there were even presents. Here's hoping it's repeated next year.

PS: oh yeah - the Audrey II mention is in reference to the huge pot plant that you can see in the Tim Turnbull picture above, which thwarted most of my other photos. Ah, I'm fooling nobody. I blighted the shots by being supremely rubbish at photography. But enthusiasm? I got that.

Clothes Airer Flash-mob exhibitor

A few weeks back, I was set a task to create a Free Media tool. Free Media, if you're not familiar with the term, is about creating accessible and open methods for people to get their messages across - and for a lot of people, accessible means cheap! But not necessarily for free - the 'Free' is 'Free Media' is as in freedom, not free cake.

And in line with this, once you've had an idea, it's good to share it will all and sundry, so they can give it a go if they fancy it. So here it is - the Clothes Airer Flash-mob Exhibitor (or, ermm, CAFE for short). It's a device to provide an easy, portable stand for presenting work in a variety of mediums.

What I had in mind was producing a simple presentation system suitable for flash mob exhibitions. Flash mobs, if you're not familiar, are large groups of people who suddenly come together for a small amount of time, usually to do something unusual. And so a flash mob exhibition is a sudden group exhibition which comes out of nowhere, and then after a short amount of time is disbanded.

The normal convention used in these affairs appears to be the clothesline (or whatever the line is that you use to put up your photos when developing), see for instance:

Here

and here

This has a pretty nice DIY aesthetic and is eminently suitable for photography - but I think there's definitely room for alternatives - the 'clothesline' has low visibility and arguably isn't suitable for media and artworks in larger formats. So here's what I came up with:

Making the Clothes Airer Flash-mob Exhibitor

What you'll need:

A clothes airer like the following:

It's far better to get one where the plastic joiners are separate rather than doubling up as caps for the tops and bottoms

Other helpful bits include curtain pegs, drawing pins, and bedsheets:

Oh and things to display!

How to make it:

1. Adjust the connectors and 'panels' into a creative configuration. Leaving the panels all at one levels is boring - you can make a far more interesting display by raising the central panel.

If you have two or more of the clothes airers you can connect them up into a multiplicitous wonder.

2. Put up your creation. If the ground is soft, push it down into the mud to make it more stable.

3. Fold the bed sheets and place them neatly over the panels of the clothes airer, making a nice clean surface for you to attach your work to. If you want to look smart you could go so far as to iron the sheets - but this is a bit dull and time consuming, so I probably wouldn't bother.

4. If you don't mind putting pins through what you're showing (or alternatively mount it on paper), this is perhaps the easiest way to attach things. You can use curtain pegs under the sheets to hook things - it's difficult but doable!

You can hang all kinds of things:

Here's a link to a video of me putting it up and taking it down in a park in Camberwell. Don't watch it through, skip through on the bar at the bottom:

Setting up the CAFE (Clothes Airer Flashmob Exhibitor)

It took me 10 minutes to set up on my own without a clue what I was doing - with preparation and friends you can have it up in no time. Coincidentally, it ended up an exhibition of

And in case you were wondering how I hung the laptop - I unscrewed the back panel, placed two hairbands round the screwholes...

.. and then screwed them up again. Try at your own risk!

Clothes Airer Flashmob Exhibitor - howto (inc all images, video and text) by Cliff Hammett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Obakarama: preview

So Jon's provided you with a sneak peek at Coin Opera, has he? Very well, then I want to scuttle in and whisper some words about the legend of Obakarama!

The second micro-anthology from Sidekick Books, Obakarama contains poems and artwork inspired by Japanese folk monsters. With thanks to the brilliant Obakemono Project, we've rallied a band of wandering ronin to study some of these weird and wonderful beasts and come up with poetry based on their bizarre and sometimes beguiling traits.

Long-necked and long-tongued demons, winged dogs, mysterious children hiding in umbrellas, amphibious tricksters, killer scarves and cloud apparitions are just some of the characters you'll encounter inside.

Features poetry by Adham Smart, Wayne Holloway-Smith, Roddy Lumsden, Ian McLachlan, Aiko Harman, Chrissy Williams, Richard Watt, Kirsten Irving and Amy Blakemore, and artwork by Mike Stone, Hanne Härkönen, Seb Manley, Mary Graham, Darnae “Crimsonwolf” Sobolewski, Jd and Jon Stone.

I'll round off with the following poem from the anthology, by Chrissy Williams:

Hainu in Chikugo Fields

Hideyoshi whistles through the tall grass,
katana held low.
Hainu's ears prick up in the azalea bed.
He yawns a wide grin
and stretches his white wings
from shoulder blades to feather tips.

Hideyoshi comes closer.
Hainu springs up in delight
and gives a hearty shake.
The sharpness of his teeth
and glinting of his eyes
form a soft smile on his pantomime-fierce face.

Hideyoshi raises his sword arm.
Hainu starts, then howls a battle cry.
Fierce dog of the skies, defier of gravity, remember:
you must not pay for loyalty
with your life.

Scuba Dogs!

This weekend me and Jon went to Donna Nook near my parent's place in Lincolnshire. The beach there is host to a huge colony of grey seals who return to have their pups around this time every year. I've been back the last three years, as it's such a unique opportunity to see wildlife up close in its natural habitat. That and the pups are very, very cute.

The first thing that strikes you as you walk towards the beach is the sound. It's not hard to understand how so many myths have sprung up around seals - it's truly haunting to hear this howling echoing across the sand.

As soon as you get near the colony, it's a pretty impressive sight. Hundreds of seals lying across the sand (1,200-odd babies born this year!). Jon described it as looking like a cross between the Normandy landings and the aftermath of an insanely over-indulgent dinner party.



The Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust provide a voluntary protection and information service, and a small wooden fence has been erected, which you can stand behind, so as not to interfere with the seals and their pups, and to stop the children biting the animals. This little guy wanted to explore the strange bipeds behind the fence for himself!



It's usually fiercely windy and/or drizzly at Donna Nook, owing to the season and the coastal exposure, which is good for two reasons: firstly, it stops me staying there all day gawking at tubby pups waving their flippers and secondly, it puts a slight cap on the rapidly increasing numbers of visitors. Don't get me wrong, lots of people coming, enjoying seeing the seals and donating to the Trust is a great thing, but if it gets too crowded, it's harder for anyone to enjoy themselves, not to mentions the stacks of burger vans that'll move in (without, I suspect, paying a penny to the Trust for their increased custom), and eventually you can't help worrying that the Trust will get overstretched and the animals disturbed. So I welcome foul weather - it's a natural moderator.

You get a full cross-section of the harsh realities of life in wild even in just a short period of time on that beach. Dead pups who had failed to gain enough weight, fights between huge bulls, rapes, the struggle by new mothers to defend their pups, not just from us, but from aggressive suitors wanting the offspring out of the way to get to the females. According to Trust information, the mortality rate for pups is 10% at Donna Nook, way lower than the average, though it rises to approximately 40% once the pups are out on their own in the sea. It's not an easy existence. You do, however, alongside the more grim aspects, get to see moments like this mother suckling her pup:




So that was our trip to see the seals, or scuba dogs, as a geordie colleague calls them. Oh, and I had to include this guy. He's got a good attitude.



More seal photos can be seen here if you fancy a further (albeit badly shot) peek at colony life.

Wii Sports Resort: Table Tennis

Part 3 of my extended, rambling Wii Sports Resort Review that has absolutely nothing to do with poetry except that it helps to compose the mind during creative droughts - apart from, of course, when I'm shouting blue murder at it and convincing my housemates I'm somewhere between psychotic and five years old.

This has started happening a lot with the Table Tennis. It's OK until I start caring about winning, and then I get gradually more and more irritated with it. More on that in a moment.

Wii Sports Resort Table Tennis is possibly the best demonstration of the Wii controller (with Motion Sensor Plus accessory!) yet. You wield it exactly like a real table tennis bat, even down to your backhands and topspin. There are two major respects in which you don't have the sort of control you might like: 1) the way your Mii moves round the table is completely down to the AI, and 2) the actual left-right direction of your shots, as in Wii Sports Tennis, is decided by how quickly you hit the ball after the bounce. Hit it quickly, and you strike across your body. Wait a moment and you'll hit it in more of a straight line.

Apart from that, it's more or less like playing real table tennis, except without (a) those annoying moments when your hand-eye coordination completely fails you, and (b) having to go get the ball from a gutter, or a roof cavity, or a fast-flowing river, or from underneath another table in the middle of someone else's game.

Playing against another human, as far as I've had the opportunity to do that, is hunky dory. I suppose that's the whole point of it, which might explain why the single player experience is such a drag. It follows the general Wii Sports Resort rule: the more you win, the more your experience goes up, the harder your opponent. Lose, and your points go down, and you'll face someone more within your ability range. The result is that I casually thrashed everyone silly for my first umpteen games, and now I find myself ping-ponging (ha!) between opponents I can beat blindfolded and others that seem to have some kind of telekinetic control of both the ball and my Mii's body. I might have them stuck on the far side of the court, then smash it with ample topspin onto the extreme other side - it don't matter. They'll not only get a bat to it, but remove all my spin and replace it with some sort of foul incantation that makes the ball bend into a near-orbit. With the limited depth perception the television screen offers, I frequently run foul of returning the ball before it's bounced on my side, losing me another point.

There's one particular character who keeps coming up. His name's Akira, and I'm sure he's some kind of programmer surrogate. If I have the audacity to get a 2-0 lead at the start of the game, Akira uses his mind-powers to force my Mii to stick to one side of the court while he bats to the other, or replaces my ability to smash with a sort of 'keepy-uppy' movement. I can almost tell that behind his stoic 'concentration' expression, he's laughing at me. That's not relaxing! That's not what I go to a sports resort for! I want opponents who are tricksy, sure to get a point if I let my guard up, but will ultimately fall if I put in a killer performance. Instead, Akira stares at me with his Dragonball Z eyes and says, "You just don't get it, do you? Your table tennis chi is so pathetically weak that I have to hold back 90% of my power just to keep from crushing you like a bug." He's worse than the Champion, who at least has a weakness you can exploit.

The only other way you can play table-tennis is in a sort of rallying game, where you simply have to bat back as many balls as possible without messing up. Occasionally, a tin can is put on the table and you have to hit that for extra points. After returning 100+ balls though, I tend to get sloppy out of boredom.

Palindromic MARS response poetry!

Had to excitedly burble that Mike West, oftentime host of Celebrity Euthenasia and other Vintage Poison related events (and performer of a quite magnificent rendition of The Shamen's Ebeneezer Goode at the last Bingo Master's Breakout), recently purchased a copy of Fuselit Mars and sent us this fantastic response poem:

Professor Palindrome Plots His Trajectory

0G draws Ram
on deep space. Sir, I rise! Cap
speed? No: Marsward go!

It's hard not to love palindromes anyway, but it's so cool to receive such a creative response to the magazine. Mike, we salute you!

Wii Sports Resort: Cycling

Part 2 of my rambling review of Wii Sports Resort.

Cycling has been unfairly maligned in every other review I've encountered. Why others prefer the likes of Wakeboarding and Basketball is beyond me. Maybe it's something to do with what you look like when you're playing it, since cycling has you pumping your arms up and down frantically to move the pedals while tilting left and right to steer. It's certainly not the most elegant of control systems, but all that movement does help you feel like you're actually competing in something, as opposed to simply waving a magic wand around to make figures on the screen perform all your feats for you. There are moments when I've crossed the finish line unconsciously leaning forward like a sprinter going all out for the last few feet, then realised, as the results come in, that I'm actually pretty breathless.

Unfortunately, a system of 'energy' hearts makes it more complicated than it needs to be. Rather than simply being able to armpump all the way to the end of a race, you have to watch out for how the wind, gradient and surface is taking its toll on your Mii's energy. Push him too hard and he goes blue (presumably from lack of oxygen in his blood) then has to stop to chug a Lucozade. For a while, I found this infuriating, as he seemed to spend half the race on his last legs, puddling the track with massive sweat drops while other cyclists sailed past him on basket bikes. After some time, I worked out that moving your arms at a leisurely pace is pointless - instead, you have to alternate frantic pedalling with complete rest. That way, he lasts a lot longer. I wonder if it has something to do with the limits of the motion sensor technology, since the movement of your Mii's feet on the pedals seems to be only tangentially related to where you're holding your arms and he rarely matches pace with you.

The best thing about cycling is the feel of breezing around the expanse of the island to some jolly, continental-style music. Nearly every other sport takes place in a small arena, but cycling takes you in and out of the volcano's core, all the way around the beach, through the town centre, over various types of bridge and even off the edge of a cliff with the wind behind you. One course even goes full circle round the island. The only thing missing - and this is the case even more than in the swordplay - is the ability to roam entirely free. I was hoping that this would be the last option to unlock on the menu screen and instead all I got was a six-course race. Ugh.

Which brings me to the other major defect. Every race starts you off in last place out of 30, 50 or 100 bikers. That's a bizarre way to run a competition. You have to spend the whole time trying to overtake people, which sometimes isn't much fun, as the other cyclists tend to have the compulsion to try to barge you off course, particularly if 'off course' means into the water or off the edge of a mountain track. Which in turn brings me back to the first problem - I can't help imagining how much fun it would have been if, having taken the plunge down the sheer rock slope, I could half-cycle, half-pinball my way to the bottom instead of disappearing into thin air and being put back on the course.

Why did Nintendo go to all the trouble of making this gorgeous fantasy island, only to restrict you to an aerial view? Touring it by bike (while possibly still in your swordplay gear) would have been, I think, a legendary moment in gaming history. It would be like the Grand Theft Auto

games, except without the dull gangsta characters and the downpour of inane policemen waiting to gun you down the moment you do anything fun. Imagine: you're on your bike with your plastic fencing sword, coasting through a sunny town, knocking down Hitler and other look-a-like Miis like a computer-age Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Then you ride straight into the table tennis table and fly into the swimming pool.

Two player cycling is good fun though, especially as you have the option to either race against each other (and five other randoms) or take on the pack with a tandem.

Coin Opera: Preview

Here's the story of the last five months in brief: we love doing the extra booklets with issues of Fuselit. On that basis, we planned out the next two. However, we've found that they add to the weight (and the postage) and take a whole load of extra time to produce, so we decided: rather than package them with Fuselit, let's ramp up the production values and release them separately. You know, as sturdy, perfect-bound, miniature books.

To do that, we'll need ISBNs, so's people can order them from bookshops. And to get ISBNs, we need to be a publisher. Hence, Sidekick Books was born, and will be releasing two debut micro-anthologies just in time for Christmas (we hope). Taking a cue from weekly British comic 2000AD, the chief editor of Sidekick Books will be someone so unlike traditional publisher-types you'd almost suspect him to be imaginary - in this case, Dr Fulminare, self-confessed genius alchemist of the arts. That's him on the cover to Coin Opera there, in the form of a sprite from the Final Fantasy series.

Coin Opera is going to be a 48 page book of poems about or inspired by computer games. Whether or not you think that's a suitably inspiring subject matter depends, I suppose, on your prejudices. I think it's a rich seam, begging to be mined for characters, conceits, formal invention, atmosphere, symbolism, statement and personal reflection, so much so that unless our attempts to get this on the road are a complete disaster, I'll be trying to put together a sequel book next year.

Here are the poets who have contributed to Coin Opera, presented in the form of a Street Fighter II selection screen:


Recognise any? I can't guarantee these are the most arresting likenesses - they're more in the games industry tradition of working within certain constraints. The poets themselves faced a similar task - keeping their pieces suitably nugget-sized, like programmers trying to make sure their fifty hour point and click adventure fits onto a single floppy disk. Economy of language is, after all, a mainstay of both arts. I think the longest pieces in the collection may be Ross Sutherland's sonnets, at a traditional 14 lines each.

I'm going to wrap up the preview now with a piece by David Floyd, based on Championship Manager:

Second half substitution

Jesus is ready to come on
John the Baptist will make way
Jesus comes forward
Jesus plays the ball to Peter’s feet
Peter loses out
Matthew gathers up the loose ball

Matthew hits a 30 yard ball ahead of Jesus
Jesus is free of the last defender
Jesus bears down on goal
Judas brings him down
A free kick is awarded
Jesus will have to go off
The Referee wants a word with Judas

Matthew puts the ball into the six yard box
Peter has the goal at his mercy
Satan puts it behind for a corner
He somehow got his fingertips to it

Wii Sports Resort: Swordplay.

Kirsty made the mistake of buying a second-hand Wii from someone at work two weeks ago. Since then I've been spending every break in my busy work schedule (and some of the time I should be working) playing Wii Sports Resort. It's 12 games in one, all requiring you to use the Wii's motion sensor remote in ways vaguely approximating the wielding of certain sports utensils, such as oars, bats and kendo sticks. The clever conceit is that all these activites are available at a resort called Wuhu Island - which would be so much ho-hum if the game developers hadn't designed the whole island in detail and given you the option of exploring it with a seaplane. So it's sort of like going on a brief holiday to a place too fantastic to really exist, and I like that in a computer game, particularly if it's raining outside.

Anyway, I'll do a quick run through the activities and say what I think of them. In one player, the general mechanic in each sport is that the more you play it, the more experience you get, the tougher your opponents become. If you start losing, you drop points and your opponents get weaker. This works well up to a point, forcing you to discover new techniques that will give you the edge without ever overwhelming you too badly. However, not having any control over the level of difficulty means that every game requires concentration, somewhat depriving you of the option to just relax and go on autopilot. It also robs you of any sense of 'beating the game', since the contests are never-ending.

Case in point - Swordplay. This is my favourite of the games on offer, since it reminds me of playfighting as a youngster. You swing, thrust, parry, knock opponents into the water or off the hillside and generally make-believe you're a samurai/fencing genius. It's loads of fun in two-player, where you can taunt each other as well as inflicting humiliating blows. In one player, I've played it to death, beaten the 'champion' and collected many of the 'stamps' that supposedly signal the depth of your achievement. All this means is that I have to spend every battle now constantly blocking while I wait for the tiny opening in my opponent's defence. If I'm lucky, I might get three or four good bitchslaps in per match, but most of the time, it ends in a stalemate.

The Showdown mode, where you face off against waves of weaker opponents while making your way across the island towards the ancient ruins and the volcano, also suffers. At first I was slicing through opponents left, right and centre, bowling them into each other, taking their feet out from under them, generally being the ruthless, invulnerable ronin I always knew I was on the inside. However, as the stages become tougher, it soon becomes apparent that no matter how many enemies gather around you, only one of them will face off with you at a time. Continuing to treat them like a hoarde of attackers just means you get your arse kicked for being too hasty - you have to concentrate on one at a time, patiently watching for the best time to strike while the others dither, awaiting their turn.

The Speed Slice mode is fun for a while - a referee throws various objects towards you, from clock radios to watermelons to bamboo poles, and you have to cut them in the direction instructed faster than your opponent. The best thing about it is that you get a few moments before the next round, during which, if you're frenzied enough, you can actually slice the object in question to ribbons.

What's missing from Swordplay - and this is a theme throughout Wii Sports - are two things: firstly, a more free-roaming mode which lets you explore the island in your samurai gear, challenging strangers to fights. It would be particularly satisfying if you could march right up to the table tennis court and take revenge on whoever beat you in the last match.

Secondly, and more importantly, the level of violence is too low. I know this is meant to be a family game, and so we can't really kill people. Fair enough. But the worst you can ever do to an opponent, it seems, is disappoint them. When they roll off a cliff, they're immediately saved by a balloon. When you knock them to the floor, they sit around wriggling their legs for a bit as if mildly inconvenienced. Even after plunging into the sea from an elevated platform, they turn up moments later, dripping and looking just ever so slightly downcast. Not to mention you're fighting with coloured sticks instead of swords.

I dunno - maybe I'm perverse. The only enjoyment I ever got out of The Sims was sealing two people in a room adjoining their house, with a window so that they could watch their girlfriends carry on their lives untroubled while they slowly went insane and starved to death. I never got far on Rollercoaster Tycoon because I couldn't resist building a ride that ended half way through, in mid-air, calling it 'Certain Death', and then watching as hundreds of tiny sprite-based punters queued up, screamed with delight and then with terror, as they expired in a corkscrew of flame. Part of what I like about games is doing things that you can't do in real life because you're considerate of other people's rights and feelings. Games characters don't have rights or feelings - they just exist as part of an extended formulae for getting the player's brain to release endorphins. So I would have really appreciated being given the option to march into the town square in my swordplay gear and start knocking holiday-makers down like skittles. And I'd have appreciated seeing opponents you have bested clutching their knees or chest in discomfort, losing their grip on their swords, crawling feebly away or flat out not moving, so as to imply they've actually had enough, rather than simply being 'tagged out'.

I said I'll do a 'quick run through' - actually, I'm doing my usual thing of going into far too much detail. So I'll save the other sports for another day!