Thank you and Goodnight

WHATEVER YOU THOUGHT of it, the truth is that The Bumper Book of Lies would not be what it is without:

Frank Zappa’s conceptual continuity and freakish fatherly guidance; Russell Hoban’s rejection of the ‘limited reality consensus’ — in more than one sentence in this book I doff my cap to the Greatest Living Novelist; Donald Fagen’s groovessential tracks and Walter Becker’s dopest cuts (Steely Dan website); Dave Cousins’s formative lyrics (The Strawbs website); Freur’s God-sound and the Underworld (Underworld website); Neil and Tim Finn’s atmospheres; Sylvia; Daisy, the late shaman; my family — and if you feel part of it, welcome to it; the Toth family, for teaching me that everything is simpler than it seems — or was that more complicated?; everyone in the Rondor Music gang, especially Tommy and Jens; Salvador Dalì, for ‘Mittelgroßes französiches Weißbrot mit zwei Spiegeleiern auf dem Teller ohne den Teller, zu Pferd beim Versuch der Sodomie mit einem Stück portugesischen Brotes’; the world of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast; David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Twin Peaks; the stories to be found in Edward Hopper’s paintings; Antoni Gaudi’s fantastical architecture; Terry Gilliam’s Brazil; Terence McKenna — for glossolalia and the archaic techniques of ecstasy; Iain Banks’s and Del Amitri’s Scotland; Laphroaig, Lagavulin, Caol Ila and the whiskies of Islay; psilocybin and the ‘skateboarder in the mist’; Jaco Pastorius for ‘the real deal’ and Bill Milkowski for the biography; Huw Hughes, ‘the man who waved at trains’; Mr Ken Walsh, for encouraging me to scrape away at the surface of English literature to discover the soul of the language buried beneath; the Moosewood Collective’s Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookery book; Ben Watson’s Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play; Anton Lind’s Super Term, You Chaps!; Jackie Leven’s heartbreaking voice in forbidden songs of the dying west — the mystery of love is, indeed, greater than the mystery of death; Cindy Crawford; Steven Berkoff; Harold Pinter; John Belushi; U2’s Achtung, Baby! and Zooropa — especially Bono’s lyrics; Wim Wenders’s Berlin; Paris; Nashville and Lynchburg, Tennessee; San Francisco; Singapore’s Wet Market; Tobago and St Lucia; Lubbert Das’s Hamburg; Pukekohe, Karekare and One Tree Hill, New Zealand. Oh, and Holyhead — the Last Resort.

This was for you.

P.S.: I also really ought to thank Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt for their Oblique Strategies cards (over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas) as well as David Langford and Chris Priest at Ansible Information for their AIQ PC Text Randomizer, which were of considerable assistance in the telling of some of these lies.

Waiuku, 1998 and Parnell, Auckland, New Zealand, 2002