Saturday Night's All Right for Dancing

Literary people! You know what you don't do enough of? Dancing. There are just too few opportunities to mix fiction and foot action. But this Saturday you can do exactly that! In two different places!

First of all, if you're anywhere near the bright lights of Wolfenbüttel, you can gatecrash on the German literary translators' annual meetup. Where myself and my colleague Steph Morris will be spinning the wheels of steel at the KuBa-Halle under our nom de stylus, DJs Lang 'n' Scheidt. He's Lang, I'm Scheidt. Ha ha - it's a hilarious pun! We play music to make translators beg for more until the early hours. Here's a bit of what we played last year. This year DJ Lang has even more eighties treasures and I've got more trashy soul than you'd ever want to hear.

If you're in Berlin and thinking - Oh no, I won't get to dance with literary translators, I'm really upset but I can't afford the fare all the way to Wolfenbüttel and where would I sleep and what if they don't let me in? - then you're in luck! Because this coming Saturday is "a day of Austrian literature by the Wannsee" with all sorts of top Austrian writers and their publishers and dancing afterwards! At the LCB! And I know the DJ, he's my mate 4-Phase-Stereo! He'll be making your feet tap and your legs jerk and your shoulders shake in a fairly un-Austrian way, and he has very cool glasses and the only moustache I like in the whole of Berlin.

What makes me very happy is that they haven't said, Hey, there's a writer/editor/book nerd who has an interesting record collection, let's ask (invariably) him! Because in my humble experience, writers/editors/book nerds don't generally make good DJs. You just can't dance to Leonard Cohen, can you? Now translators are a different matter of course, just think of Tim Mohr, translator and DJ extraordinaire. We have rhythm in our blood, you know, and we're used to hiding our light under a bushel - which is what a good DJ has to do, I'm afraid.

If you're not in Berlin or Wolfenbüttel you'll have to find your own party on Saturday nite. But rest assured that the entire literary and translatorly community will be shaking their booties on the floor along with you in spirit.