An absolute delight

Sally Bavage writes:

35 Years of Loitering by Ray Brown was an absolute delight – a tour of a creative life in interviewing and writing plays for mainstream theatre, articles for magazines, radio scripts… the list was extensive, the many snippets both amusing and thought-provoking.

Ray was born and brought up on the edge of Thorner and although he has lived locally for most of his life he still feels like the ‘boy on the edge of the village’ wearing the ‘cloak of alienation.’  He has the quirky perspective of someone who can observe the ordinary and discern the extraordinary. Who else would be radicalised by the accounts department of Butlins?  Or move from an apprenticeship at Heathrow to an early academic career in Psychology? 

Kurt Vonnegut “wrote fiction in order to tell the truth” and this philosophy has informed Ray throughout his long professional life.  From first writing about an early (and unsuccessful) attempt to seduce his eighteen year-old naïve but “pretty” self (his own choice of adjective) – possibly by Quentin Crisp on later reflection – he found his voice for both the serious and the comic. The miners’ strike of the 70s was a significant benchmark in his perspective, as was the later civil war in the place once known as Yugoslavia, which he observed at first hand from many trips to a region he continues to love and visit.

He made his first visit to the region in 1985 and soon fell in love with the country and its people. He has returned once or twice a year ever since. In his play ...is normal! which was at the West Yorkshire Playhouse 2003, he worked with two actors to present a funny, moving and compelling mixture of fact, fiction, performance and dramatic readings which also featured music and voices recorded live in former Yugoslavia. “The title is a quote,” he told us. “It’s what everybody said in response to questions about the war and its horrors.”

In an early part of his career, writing for the groves of academe – including ghost writing a textbook he was later asked to peer review - he also taught locally, wrote pub guides, articles for magazines and scripts for successful plays performed nationwide.  A spell of creative writing residencies in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, British Rail workshops included a poignant one in a local hospice.  He clearly painted for us a picture in words of the black humour of chemotherapy patients who raised hairless eyebrows at revelations in the writers’ circle or else raised their hair (wigs) to reveal, in another way, their life history.

Radio scripts have formed a significant part of his life for decades and he treated the audience to some excerpts from shows on topics as diverse as flight and … duffle coats. Music became a key medium in his delivery of the message, and a delightful conflation of the jazz trumpet of Humphey Lyttelton with the sound of the machine attaching toggles to the likes of the 555TM duffle as worn by Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea was masterful.  Who amongst us did not call up an abiding memory of duffledom?

He spoke movingly about writing Living Pretty, the life story of Alfred Williams, who was his neighbour when he lived in Kirkstall in 1981. It is based on the autobiography which he co-wrote, To Live It Is To Know It, which moves from a childhood in Jamaica to retirement in Leeds. It tells of an ordinary man made extraordinary by resilience, intelligence and good humour. Alfred spoke in a blend of Jamaican patois and other dialects, but Ray was able to represent his speech with great authenticity, because dialect and the way people speak is one of his obvious fortes. Alfred Williams once cultivated a plot on Burley Model Allotments, and there was once (and still is) a plan to put it on outside the allotments hut.

His politics have always informed his work, although an over- bold use of a clip of the voice coach of Margaret Thatcher when prime minister persistently being told to lower her voice led to a period in radio wilderness. Not that this changed his perspective: his commitment always to use the interview and music links to “tell the truth” remains undimmed.  Ray has, and continues, to shine a light on life from his position “on the edge of the village”.

Valediction for John Jones

Richard Wilcocks writes:

John Jones died in December aged eighty-four. He was a long-term resident of Headingley and a strong supporter of the LitFest from the moment it started. His interests and areas of expertise were many and various: he lectured for many years in the Fine Art department at Leeds University, where he was in overall charge of studio instruction and where he created and ran a course in the history of film, an artist who thought deeply about life drawing and a brilliant conversationalist.

He was very knowledgeable about literature in general, and was especially interested in the works of James Joyce. He had an impressive collection of Joyce’s work, and exhibited a series of his own illustrations to Ulysses.

He collected Victorian optical toys and magic lantern slides, and was the founder of the International Magic Lantern Society. Last autumn I was suggesting to him that one of his magic lantern shows, on the damage done by the demon drink, could be performed as part of this year’s LitFest. I am sure it would have been greatly appreciated.

In 2009 he took part in what has become an annual short story evening in Café Lento: his contribution was part of his autobiography, which he had recorded on a number of audiotape cassettes shortly before he suffered a stroke. He spoke about the year in the States in 1965 during which he interviewed artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Louise Bourgeois and Yoko Ono. His interesting account of Yoko Ono’s stay with him (with her then partner and her daughter) in Rochester Terrace, and of the happening which she organised at Leeds College of Art in which she was tied up in a large black bag, was written up in local newspapers in 2009, then picked up by media around the world.

A year ago, for the third Headingley LitFest, he contributed with Gaby Jones to one of the first house events, in his front room in Hollin Lane. Gaby and John are pictured below at this event, which was called Déja-Vu. Gaby spoke of her return to the villa by Lake Como which she had known as a small child, and John spoke (again, on tape) about when he was a young soldier in 1945, who had been conscripted into the Royal Engineers and sent to recently-liberated Ostend in Belgium.

His obituary, written by one of his devoted ex-students, the cartoonist Steve Bell, can be found in the Guardian online.

So, farewell to an old friend.

 

Launched

Sheila Chapman writes:

The LitFest launch happened in HEART last night in the Shire Oak Room, a ‘large spacious and bright space’ (Bill Fitzsimons) which had been thoughtfully set out by the HEART volunteers and staff. The room was filled with people who sat at round tables clutching their drinks, raffle tickets and a ‘golden ticket’ entry into the free book draw for one of the twenty-four copies of Alan Bennett’s A Life Like Other People's. As Richard Wilcocks explained, the LitFest had received these books courtesy of World Book Day. He also read out his valediction for John Jones, which will appear on this blog separately.

So, we were off to a good start and James Nash, our compère for the evening, explained to us that the literary quiz on the tables was to be completed as a team effort by each table and the results announced at the end of the break – more of this later.

We settled down then to hear the Word Birds, a group of female poets - Sue Vickerman, Jean Harrison and Sue Butler - who were accompanied by a male musician, Robin Fishwick.

Robin started us off with a Song for Headingley and after songs about Croatia, Croatian Wedding Song, and Hungary, he finished with Green Man, a song inspired by standing at the pedestrian crossing outside Mike’s Carpets in Armley. He played a timple (have I got the name right Robin?) and also a tenor recorder through which he hummed at the same time as playing. This produced a very different sound which, as Ruth Wynne said, ‘was adventurous, interesting and original’.

Sue Vickerman’s  first poems reflected her time in China: she mused on the fragility of the skyscrapers which have grown up during current economic boom – something which has particular resonance given the devastation of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. She then treated us to a series of poems drawn from her experience as a life model which she thinks allows her time to muse and compose poems and ‘hang out with artists’.  She spoke of the continuing rounding and softening of a woman’s body charted by an artist as he draws her through her developing pregnancy, and ‘the nicotine finger ‘of the drawing instructor as he gets intimately close to demonstrate the lines and angle of her body and her ‘pelt rises’ . This Bird weighs her words carefully and builds her evocative  images to entrance and enlighten her audience.

James Nash rounded off this first half with a humorous and well observed poem about his experience as a gooseberry in The Lounge cinema. He had gone there with two friends, who were a couple, obviously, and their casual intimacy, when one of them stroked the other’s leg, set him off on a desperate search for a leg of his own to stroke.

The audience worked hard during the break to complete the quiz. There was a great deal of muttering, sly glancing over shoulders and desperate argument and counter argument. Was A Touch of Frost filmed in Leeds , or was it Banks? I don’t know! The results were announced. Had anyone got the maximum twenty-two?. No. Twenty-one? No. Twenty? No. ... sixteen? Yes! A draw! Two tables were entitled to the prize - drinks for the whole table. But were there enough drinks to go round? Yes, phew, what a quiz.

There was more of the Word Birds for the second half. Jean Harrison described her place poems as ‘not romantic’ and yet there was romance in her description of a Zen garden where there were bushes with ‘meditative shoulders’ and in the ice-cream chimes which made a fragment of Greensleeves run through her head for days. Sue Butler who has lived all over the world, spoke of the hardships of Russia in 1937, of joyriding in someone else’s glasses and of using poetry as a weapon, particularly against her rich and handsome brother. Sue Vickerman spoke of her return to Bradford and the tree outside her new Bradford flat ‘which will never dapple anything’ and of her days as a student in Headingley when she was a ‘rock dove’ The evening was rounded off by more music from Robin and by a very welcome sonnet of love from James Nash.

The audience set off home clutching raffle prizes, books and drinks. As one of them said ’Thanks for a lovely evening! Nice blend of words and music!’ (Sue LS6)

The evening was filmed by two students from Leeds Metropolitan University (Joe and Matt) who also conducted interviews with performers and some members of the audience.

Below - two of the Word Birds - Sue Vickerman and Jean Harrison

How to get published

Sally Bavage writes:
How to get published was the theme for tonight’s session of the fourth Headingley Litfest, held in the Claremont room at the brand new Heart Community Centre on Bennett Road.  More than forty people crammed in to a packed and lively session to hear Isabel Losada give some wannabe authors very practical advice about getting their literary baby into the welcoming arms of an agent or publishing house. 

Realism not idealism is the key, she insists.  “You must believe passionately in your book and persevere to find the right agent or publisher who likes your work.” 

George Orwell claimed that the secret of being published was ‘brevity, clarity, precision’ – something Isabel emphasised through many pragmatic examples.  There are some tough questions to ask yourself first so that you can be very clear with any would-be agent:

Who is the book really for?
What section of the bookshop would you find it in?
Does it engage the attention of the reader from the first paragraph?
What is the unique selling point of this book?
What books are similar? (so you can describe it)
How would you sell it? (produce a marketing plan)

Isabel has published six books; her latest The Battersea Park Road to Paradise will be out in paperback in May 2011. You must be a self-critical editor who has the courage of their convictions and ignores the (wildly differing) opinions of friends who would each ask you to change something different.  You also need resilience to bounce back from the inevitable rejection letters and the confidence to just keep going. 

And you won’t make your fortune, unless your initials are J K.  Sadly, ninety percent of authors earn less than working on a checkout till, and the average advance of less than three thousand pounds is hardly the step to financial heaven – although J K Rowling was told in one rejection letter that “You’ll never make any money writing children’s books.” 

Isabel herself got quite a few rejection slips for books.  “We’re too mainline for you” and “Covers too many different subject areas” or “Put it on the shelf and put it down to experience” were some; the comments were conflicting and could have been demoralising unless you have the iron determination to just keep going.  She has and she did – her books have now sold one hundred thousand copies in sixteen languages.

Isabel has worked as an actress, singer, dancer, researcher, TV producer, broadcaster, public speaker, comedian as well as staying committed to her writing.   She brought a number of these skills to a lively session, trying to sell us a broom (“handcrafted bristles, lovingly grouped, woven together for months” – you get the idea) and singing a line from a Madonna number.  As one feedback quote said, “Informative, fun and inspiring! 

If you are interested in her books that focus on the pursuit of happiness through the development of human potential through the media of nuns, men and the Dalai Llama, to name but a few, then take a look here.

Close up at Café Lento

Sally Bavage writes:

The second event of the fourth Headingley Litfest – A Sense of Self - was held at Café Lento on North Lane.  A well-mixed crowd ranging in age from the teens to the seventies were treated to half a dozen tales.  True or false: you decide.  Autobiography or whimsy? Lost youth - in the tale from one ex-social worker - or lost youth from presenters remembering their glory days?

Café Lento was packed with close to 30 local residents happy to listen to the background jazz (a foretaste of the Music Festival in Headingley from 13 to 19 June this year) and drink in the stories as well as the coffee.  A warm atmosphere as old friends greeted each other and new ones struck up conversations with their neighbours who were, well, close up.

Was a Facebook search for a first, lost love the reminiscences of a man reflecting on the path his romantic life had taken, or the story woven by a talented raconteur and wordsmith?  (Proprietor Richard Lindley)

Did the Revolution (of about  three decades ago) come to a small Pennine town, welcomed in by flyposters who ‘drove their chevy to the levee’ (actually a Morris Minor with a faulty tail light) on the way to the local factory?  (Moira Garland)

Was Pete Townsend really second choice for The Who, supplanting the first choice from the Isle of Man whose drummer friend told the tale?  And what a tale – of stagefright, flying drumsticks and a brief stage appearance with the renowned bandleader Ivy Benson.  (Doug Sandle)

Not a daffodil but a bog asphodel made an appearance, giving us commentary on the booted walkers passing by.  (Mary Mayall)

No boots on the next walkers, just trainers needing repair and a cuppa in a twee teashop on Haworth Main Street as cold rain sheeted down and the lives of the Brontës in the Parsonage Museum prompted debate.  (Lis Bertolla)

Finally, a tale of evacuation – no, not from a war but from a horse called Oliver on a mission to contribute something less than mysterious - and steaming - to a Leeds city centre reading of the banns announcing a production of the Chester Mystery Plays. (Richard Wilcocks)

A mixed bag indeed, and gently enjoyable for the range and scope of the stories.  How much was invention, how much recollection – will we ever know?

Oscar Wilde adds:

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction. 

Below, Doug Sandle reads:

Gujerat met Sicily

Salvo’s Salumeria is intimate and full of atmosphere – more so yesterday evening, when Hansa came. It was, of course, the first event of the LitFest.....let’s hope they all go as well as this one.

Gip Dammone  introduced Hansa Dabhi, who is quite a storyteller as well as a great authority on cooking and the Hindu Philosophy of Food and Lifestyle: she spoke about her exit from Uganda, just before the dictator Idi Amin got into his stride, and about how she took the first steps towards setting up the now-renowned all-female vegetarian Gujerati restaurant down in the middle of the city, which many of her audience, I suspect, have visited.

We were looking at the starters which had been delivered to our tables as she described them in detail and gave their names and ingredients in both English and Gujerati – Bateta Vada, Pau Bhaji and Patudi. You’ll find the recipes in her second cookbook. She went on to talk about how expensive the medical services were back in Uganda – the Western sort that is. Her family always had the spice box at hand for cuts and colds: a sore throat, for example, could be cured by adding a teaspoon of Cumin seeds (Jeera) and small pieces of dry ginger to a glass of boiling water. After it has cooled down and been strained, it should be taken twice daily.

Sicilian-style pasta with aubergine and tomato was the main course from Gip Dammone. This was followed by a dessert which Hansa said was easy to make. She demonstrated the truth of this in front of us. It was Fruit Shrikhand – her version of a popular Gujarati yoghurt curd dessert with tropical fruit, garnished with cardamom.

There was more on the use of the spice box for the treatment of everyday ailments (from husband Kish) and plenty of copies of the second cookbook (Hansa’s, more than just a restaurant....It’s my life!) to be signed and sold.

Gip Dammone looks rather like Dizzy Gillespie, and he indulged us by playing recordings of sessions by the great jazz trumpeter, along with performances by Louis Jordan dating from the late forties. A man of taste!