Soon as I get back from Devizes, we'll blow some smoke back into this anthill, yagitme??!

A greeting to our new, and indeed only, reader. May your tilling of the turf prove useful.

I've humped my ways and why and wherefores, folks, over to a place where a couple more people might actually read the pointless scrap I scribble out on low days.

The good people at Londonist.com have welcomed me into their pool of writerly types. The swell fellow, and all. So you can find more of my chopped and changed semi-sentences right there, where I'm posting under the creatively lubricated pseudonym of "DeanN".

Of course, I'll still kill time at this copperplated sinkhole when the mood sees fit.

The Zooseman's been neglectful of them, there's no denying it. Events have threatened to overwhelm his grobbled cranium, that much we do know. He's moving house yet again, these things have a tendency to overwhelm his petty system. More soon, soon.

Ah, life, that endless displacement, the curly welt balled up in a fist, the canker and chances that piss by while you're spending your life haggling over a bus ticket trying to wrap your jaw around a new acronym every few weeks. Wasn't it always thus?

We must take the thin weeds that grow up through the cracks, though, and cultivate them into a Babylonian garden fit for a Sultan. To take but two examples: I recently noted that an upmarket ladies lingerie shop has opened its doors across the street from my house. Things are moving up, literally.

thanks to my main man Squiggly Pete (a pseudonym) for reminding me of the absence of updates on this hear crab-pad. Seems Squiggs (as nobody calls him) was up late one night, drunk on bourbon and bad karma, and found himself fondly racking through the laundry list of unpaid parking tickets that is this blog, reminiscing about good times had with whores in Tucson motels and other blue times too lewd to mention, hoo boy. So here I am, back again to holler down into the mousehole once more with flared nostrils and throat dry as bone marrow.

I've scuttled to India for a few weeks, a sweaty country if ever I found one. When the locals are complaining about the incessant heat, you know you've got problems. Constantly bathed in a salty patina of my own secretion, the cities and villages and roadsides have flickered by in a swampy, seethy mass, as my sun-blistered eyes gaze through their cowering slits at a strange tapestry of organised chaos. They're saying one sixth of the world's population lives in India. Jump on a bus, or a passenger train, or wander the markets and streets, or hitch onto the back of a rickshaw and just ride. It's easily believed. The place is packed solid, so much that when things work, you're amazed that they do. But they do, regularly, intermittently, off-hand. There is a flow and function.

Had to postpone my project to document the glazing over of Crotch End's smugness with the grizzled veneer of estate agent carbuncles, mainly owing to a club foot that has landed me grazing up in a retirement home grimier than Attica for the past month. Seems like my snooping around the corridors of power has shut down all the options available to me. Firstly, I got news that I'm being made redundant from my job. No biggie, and the payout means I have a few months to sort out my stamp collection and stare at my reflection in cracked bathroom mirrors before the financial wheel of this proto-capitalist spins round again into the lockstep of necessary employment.

Secondly, I found out today that my application for an Iranian tourist visa has been ixnayed. No grounds given, am I a security threat? Do they imagine me to be a covert agent of some description? Have I accidentally strayed onto a 'persona non grata' list holed up in some clandestine Tehran ministry? If I am the kind of lousy agitator to warrant such a bracketing, then I'd damned like to be aware of it. I'm sure I could use it to my advantage.

With these two blows to the kidneys, I feel chastened. The dust and lint in my hovel-like room has risen to epic proportions but I have not the inclination to remove it.

So I did finish that novel. It is called Habitation. It scrapes in at over the 50,000 word mark, and was completed in the space of one month. I should feel proud of that achievement, perhaps, but the rank funky awful stench that the combination of pages and ink, ink and pages - in the particular confluence that is the words arranged on the page in the order necessary for the novel to have shape and form - is more than any mortal sinuses should have to bear.

I'll write more soon, more indeed, about the disturbing upturn in estate agents in Crouch End. By my reckoning there are just three non-property related premises on the Broadway and its tributary roads. This is not good, but is an inevitable byproduct of the obsession with Propp of all shapes and sizes that grips the middle classes and squeezes the precious pennies from their joint accounts.

Yes, more soon.

My National Novel Writing Month entry has consumed large chunks of my time over the past three and a half weeks. I'd love to say that it was all worthwhile; sadly that would be a magnificent lie, as the resulting output is about as intellectually stimulating as a spread of cat vomit that resembles a picture of Bernard Manning. If you so wish to torture yourself, an extract can be viewed online here.

... in which he's chewed through the characters and tropes and stylistic ticks of his entire back catalogue and defecated the digested remains into a slim book that resembles a dog trying unsuccessfully to bite off it's own tail.

I've long been a fan of Auster. Sure, his work can be repetitive, and willfully meaningless, and humorless, and (appropriately) austere. And there's something in the argument that, Joseph Heller-like, his best work will always be his first, the intricately layered triptych of New York Trilogy. But for me he's one of the most important American novelists of the past twenty years. Works such as the aforementioned NYT, The Music Of Chance, and The Book Of Illusions represent some of the best examples of experimental fiction to have achieved mainstream notoriety. His style of hauling Camus into agreeable Americana, of offering dense philosophy in eminently readable prose and page-turning plots, is rarely bettered.

But Auster's latest is a mess. And what a mess. I'm only halfway through Tales of the Scriptorium, a slight and sorry-looking tome in it's bleak dust jacket, but it's making me reconsider whether he was any good in the first place.

By reintroducing characters and leitmotifs from his previous novels, and offering them up as vague dream-like apparitions to the all too familiar character of the confused old man sitting in a windowless room with no idea why he got there, Auster is asking many of his usual questions - about the relationship between truth and fiction, between a writer and his characters, between fate and random occurrence - the only difference this time is that all these worthy themes have been denuded of interest. Auster himself seems bored; the prose is tacky and laden with heavy adjectives, and his trick of making pages fly by seemingly untethered is conspicuous by its absence.

Like I said, I'm only halfway through, but I don't think things are likely to improve. My only hope is that this is some kind of line in the sand for Auster; that he's drawing a close on all these characters and themes, and his next project will have a freshness reflective of the mental clearing-house that Scriptorium represents. It almost feels like a book tossed-off to fulfill a contract, with no real interest or input from the author, much like a band releasing a half-hearted album simply to get rid of the label. Hopefully Auster is something of a Lou Reed, and Scriptorium is his own personal Metal Machine Music.