The Girl in the Polkadot Dress

Richard Wilcocks writes:

When Beryl Bainbridge (who sadly died last July) spoke in the New Headingley Club in 2009 (second Headingley LitFest, click on the link on your right), she read from her novel in progress The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress. She dwelled at length on the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June, 1968, a key part of the plot. He had just won the California primary election for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, and investigators later tried to identify a mysterious young woman seen in the hotel pantry, wearing a polka dot dress. In the book, her name is Rose.

This is now just about published, to be released at the beginning of June this year close to the anniversary of the shooting by Sirhan Sirhan. It can be ordered from Radish Books in advance if you want to be the first on your street to have read it. Reference is ISBN-13: 978-0316728485

Strangely, the official blurb does not mention the assassination. It reads as follows:

In the rainswept summer of 1968, Rose sets off for the United States from Kentish Town to meet a man she knows as Washington Harold, in her suitcase a polka-dot dress and a one-way ticket. In a country rocked by the assassination of Martin Luther King and a rising groundswell of violence, they are to join forces in search of the charismatic and elusive Dr Wheeler - oracle, guru and redeemer - whom Rose credits with rescuing her from a terrible childhood, and against whom Harold nurses a silent grudge. As they trail their quarry, zigzagging through America in a camper van, the odd couple - Rose, damaged child of grey postwar Britain, and nervous, obsessive, driven Harold - encounter a ragged counter-cultural army of Wheeler's acolytes, eddying among dangerous currents of obscure dissent and rage. But somewhere in the wide American darkness, Dr Wheeler is waiting.

 

Thanks, Radish

Headingley has still got a library, but no real bookshop since Bookz closed down a few years ago (no offence, Oxfam Books...) so it is wonderful to be attended upon by the excellent Radish bookshop, which is situated far from the delights of God's Own Suburb in the alternative universe of Chapel Allerton. The Alan Bennett freebies which we were given by the World Book people arrived there, along with several cardboard boxes containing other titles. Apparently, Nigel Slater's Toast is popular in those parts.

Prominently displayed near the checkout desk this afternoon was The Battersea Park Road To Enlightenment, by Isabel Losada, who will be speaking/performing at the Headingley Heart Centre on Wednesday 16 March on How to get published, and who intends to sign copies of her best-seller not only at the event but also the following morning at Radish.

Remember Bookz? It was piled high with cheapo and remaindered tomes, but there was also plenty of good stuff. Pity it foundered. All the more reason to have a LitFest in the area. Let's fly the flag!

Below, Sally Thums at Radish:

When the Wind Changed

The excellent Leeds-based Theatre Company BlahBlahBlah  took part in the second Headingley LitFest in 2009, premiering their show When the Wind Changed to delighted parents and children in the library. It's still going strong:

Throughout March the Blahs will be spending a day at a time in schools across Yorkshire, performing When the Wind Changed four times in the morning for Reception children, each performance lasting half an hour. In the afternoon they will do two performances of their show Max for Yr 1 / Yr 2 children, each show lasting forty-five minutes.

When the Wind Changed is a story about a girl whose face gets stuck by the wind when it changes. All manner of people's faces have been stuck by this mysterious wind. When Gran realises that wiping that look off her granddaughter's face isn't going to work, her only advice is to "wait for the wind to change again". They wait... and they wait... and they wait. And then the wind begins to blow...

Max is based on the Maurice Sendak picture book Where the Wild Things Are. Max has been up to mischief and is sent to his room without any supper. We sit with the children around a blank canvas which becomes Max's bedroom that turns into a forest. They travel with him in and out of weeks to Where the Wild Things Are. The children meet Wild Things seven times bigger than themselves and must help Max find ways to tame them without hurting them.

If you can make it, you are invited to dip into the day and see the participatory work in action. Visitor places are limited to three a day. You can book your place by contacting Cas Bulmer on 0113 274 0030 or at cas@blahs.co.uk. Please give plenty of notice so that the necessary arrangements with the schools can be made.

Publish your own?

For fun and profit? Depressed by rejection slips? Fed up with being a would-be? You could come in with the tide - read this - or you could cheer yourself up on Wednesday 16 March when Isabel Losada addresses us in the Claremont Room at Heart. See the programme. More on Isabel later.

Our part in World Book Night

Headingley LitFest has been chosen by World Book Night to receive forty-eight free copies of Alan Bennett's A Life Like Other People's. These will be delivered about a fortnight before the LitFest starts, and as we have just received the news, we have yet to decide the mechanics of distribution. The official World Book Night is on Saturday 5 March.

Alan Bennett is, just in case you don't know, one of our local literary heroes, who attended the school which is now known as Lawnswood, and who lived over his father's butcher's shop opposite the Three Horseshoes pub, now known as Royale Dry Cleaning.

Lesley McDowell wrote in the Independent in May:

Alan Bennett's memoir of his parents' marriage and his mother's battles with depression is clear-eyed, touching, occasionally waspish, not always charitable, and ever honest. The discovery in later life that his maternal grandfather committed suicide is, he tells us, the kind of thing a writer longs for, to spice up a dull, normal family story. But, of course, no family is ever really dull or normal, and no family is ever "like other people's", however much one might strive for it to be so.

You can read the rest by clicking here.

Reviews from anyone else are welcome.

Congratulations, Jo Shapcott

Congratulations to Jo Shapcott from Headingley admirers for winning the general Costa Book Award. Individual winners are selected from five categories: novel, first novel, biographical work, poetry volume and children’s book. These winners are then put back into the competition and an overall winner comes out – with a prize of £35,000. This year, Jo Shapcott’s Of Mutability took it, narrowly beating Edmund de Waal’s memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes.

Help us with publicity

The LitFest programme leaflets have now been printed. If you want some to give out, please email here. You could also ask for the pdf of the programme, then send it on to people in your address book.


Don't forget to add the LitFest if you use Facebook: click on the icon top right. 

Peter Lorre - one of the greats

Richard Wilcocks writes:

Peter Lorre appears in the LitFest’s showing of The Beast With Five Fingers at the Cottage Road Cinema on Monday 21 March at 7.30pm. He stands out, almost inevitably, from the other actors in a strong cast, and not simply because of his reputation: he is genuinely one of the greats. The screenplay, taken from a short story by W F  Harvey, one-time resident of Headingley, is a little daft, but there’s the horror genre for you. It’s still very enjoyable.

His voice . . . face . . . the way he moved . . . laughed  -   he was the most identifiable actor I have ever known. (Vincent Price)

His ‘real’ name was László Löwenstein, and the languages of his youth would have included Hungarian, German, and probably Yiddish, because he was born in 1904 in Rózsahegy (now Ružomberok in Slovakia, then in the Kingdom of Hungary) to a fairly well-off Jewish family. He was educated in Vienna and became a bank clerk to please his father, in spite of his fascination with theatre.

Membership of a theatre group which specialized in improvisation led him to stages in Breslau (now Wrocław), Zurich and Berlin, where he became famous for his interpretation of Danton in Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death. Bertholt Brecht took a great linking to him, and cast him in his Happy End and Man Equals Man. In 1931 the film director Fritz Lang cast him as a psychopathic child murderer in his first talkie, which had the short title of M. This caused something of a sensation, and Lorre began to be careful about typecasting. However, although he starred in a fair number of German films after M, people remembered it rather too well, and in 1933, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who was deeply interested in the power of film (just like his master Hitler, whose favourite film was Lives of a Bengal Lancer) sanctioned the use of Lorre’s image on a poster advertising the anti-semitic The Eternal Jew. Lorre was supposed to look like a typical Jew. Sinister, that is…

Lorre took the hint and got out. In England, he quickly teamed up with Alfred Hitchcock to become a villain in The Man Who Knew Too Much, then sailed to the United States to star in Mad Love and to become the Japanese sleuth Mr Moto. His international reputation, which was substantial, escalated to stellar heights when he appeared in Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. After the War, still sensitive (rather late in the day) about typecasting, he appeared in The Beast With Five Fingers and similar films. He finished his career with a series of character parts in the likes of Around the World in Eighty Days.

Ben Okri booked for the LitFest

Ben Okri, one of the most acclaimed African writers within the postcolonial tradition, will be speaking on the afternoon of the final Saturday of the Headingley LitFest (26 March) at the brilliantly refurbished Heart centre in Bennett Road.


Often described as a 'magic realist', Okri's novels and poems are written in English but draw heavily on Yoruba myths, stories and culture.  Praised for his experiments with new literary forms, he is probably best known for The Famished Road, which won him the Booker Prize in 1991. In this, African and European literary traditions meet, in a story narrated by a 'spirit-child' who moves between the worlds of spirits and human beings, observing the chaotic history of his country. There is plenty in it about corruption - economic and political - in modern Nigeria, and about the devastation brought by war.


I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.


The oral storytelling tradition of Africa is a powerful influence, and Okri has added Ancient Greek legends, Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dickens to the list. Those who want to do some background reading before 26 March in addition to our guest's work might like to read the classic Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Okri's poem The Awakening, written to mark the Millennium, appears on this Oxfam Cool Planet website, and you can find a full bibliography and biography on this British Council website.


Tickets are not yet available for this, or any other event, because the programme's final details are still being sewn up, but if you want to express on interest in the Ben Okri event, email your details.  


Other guests include Rommi Smith, who works to fuse spoken word and music, the writer, singer and former television producer Isabel Losada, who will give a presentation on how to get published, Nicola Beauman, the founder of Persephone Books, which specialises in rediscovered inter-war novels by neglected women writers and a flock of female poets called Wordbirds.

Three people with the surname Brown will take part – Dr Richard Brown, who will talk about novelist and critic Storm Jameson, Ray Brown, who will talk about his plays for radio and Wes Brown, who has had his first novel published in his early twenties. 

Veteran writer for teenagers Robert Swindells (Stone Cold, Brother in the Land) will speak to Year 9 students at Cardinal Heenan Catholic High School, other high schools will hold poetry slams and the Flux Gallery will show a film about Irish writers and also host the launch of poet Genny Rahtz’s collection Sky Burial.

There will also be 'house events', following last year's successes, on Sunday 20 March. Apart from the Heart Centre, things will take place at the New Headingley Club, the Lento Café on North Lane, the LS6 (Clock) café on Headingley Lane, the Flux Gallery on Midland Road, Headingley Library and local high schools.


*Now read about what happened:

http://headingleylitfest.blogspot.com/2011/03/ben-okri-in-headingley.html

2011 Programme

The details of the 2011 programme will be with you soon - just a few loose ends to tie up at the moment. Looks exciting!

It's the Monster not the Doctor

Just down the road from Headingley is Kirkstall, and in March, on an unspecified date, Frankenstein's Wedding Live in Leeds will take place in the abbey ruins, thanks to the BBC. Wonderful idea!

Let us hope that the publicity is clear about the difference between Doctor Frankenstein and the creature he created, the one who messed up his wedding.

Mary Shelley had Doctor Luigi Galvani in mind when she wrote the original. He spent his time sending electricity into frogs' legs, but does not look like a character in a 1930s film. See below. Neither Mary or Luigi ever lived in Headingley, but they might have been tempted to move here if they had received the appropriate relocation package.

The LitFest programme will be finalised soon, and it might include the film The Beast with Five Fingers, which would be shown at the Cottage Road Cinema on an evening which did not coincide with the extravaganza down at the abbey. This is all about playing on keyboards, or not, and has no connection with the Leeds International Piano Competition.

The theme of the next LitFest is A Sense of Self. First event (at the moment) is a short story evening (personal, unpublished, between ten and fifteen minutes) at Café Lento on North Lane on Tuesday 15 March.  Final events will be on Saturday 26 March.

Galvani, the inspiration for Frankenstein.

Chinua Achebe at Leeds University

Richard Wilcocks writes:
It was not part of our LitFest, but a few of the people - mainly students of course - packed into the Rupert Beckett Lecture Theatre yesterday evening could be counted as known LitFest supporters, and the university could be described as being on the edge of Headingley...

It was unforgettable.  There was the great man himself, Professor Chinua Achebe, "the father of modern African writing", reading some of his poems to a rapt and highly reverent audience in a quiet, slightly quavering voice. Many had brought with them copies of his books. Generations all over the world have studied Things Fall Apart. He was introduced by Professor Martin Banham, who remembered his last visit to Leeds 46 years ago as part of a celebration of Commonwealth literature and who stressed how lucky we all were because Leeds was one of only two places where Chinua Achebe would read as part of his visit to Britain.

Amongst the poems was Vultures, probably the best-known, not least because it is in the AQA Anthology for GCSE English Literature in the Poetry from Other Cultures section - see this BBC website and listen to a reading accompanied by a slideshow. It was deeply moving to hear this disturbing poem from the poet's own mouth, at last.

Nelson Mandela's name was mentioned afterwards by a colleague in the audience who had first read Things Fall Apart in Uganda, and there is a definite link. Mandela read Achebe's work while incarcerated on Robben Island, and commented later that he was a man "in whose company the prison walls fell down".

LitFest poetry

Local and more than local poet James Nash has contributed to the last three LitFests most significantly, and is going to do so again, we hope and trust. He has an excellent line in sonnets. Take a look at this one, which is reminiscent of Auden and Shakespeare at the same time. Could he have just read the accounts of how the Sarkozy government is getting at the Roma in France?

And on poetry - one of the LitFest's poem-notices (below) can be seen on a stake stuck in the soil of the flower garden opposite Sainsbury's in the Arndale Centre, visible to everyone who has just used the zebra crossing. People read it, too. I saw someone doing that. He smiled. 

this is the garden: colours come and go,

this is the garden:colours come and go,
frail azures fluttering from night's outer wing
strong silent greens silently lingering,
absolute lights like baths of golden snow.
This is the garden: pursed lips do blow
upon cool flutes within wide glooms, and sing
(of harps celestial to the quivering string)
invisible faces hauntingly and slow.
This is the garden.   Time shall surely reap
and on Death's blade lie many a flower curled,
in other lands where other songs be sung;
yet stand They here enraptured, as among
the slow deep trees perpetual of sleep
some silver-fingered fountain steals the world.

e.e. cummings
 

Fresh and new

Some of the new work urged into being by, or 'discovered' during, this year's Headingley LitFest is now online at Headingley LitFest Originals.

Get in touch (heveliusx1@yahoo.co.uk) if you want to add to it.

Good to see you

Good to see Cadaverine on Woodhouse Moor today, which is Unity Day. A large area was covered with marquees and stalls, music boomed through canvas, several thousand people milled around, many with children, and dogs were much in evidence, possibly because there was a dog show, at which most of the beasts seemed to win red first prize rosettes. Throwaway barbecues were not in evidence this year.

Arts Council funded Cadaverine, which is for under twenty-fives in theory, should be making some kind of showing next March in the fourth Headingley LitFest. Its efficiently organised 'Talk Tent' today was popular and strangely earnest and sober...

Check this Guardian article for a feature on Cadaverine which includes an interview with its founder, Wes Brown.

Below, Becky Cherriman reading her poetry:

Merchant in the cloister

Richard Wilcocks writes:

There was a tiny touch of Opera in the Park about this performance. It was July, it was outdoors, it was nearly the weekend and the couple in front of us were eating lobster washed down with Prosecco. The audience, on camping seats, was much smaller than the gigantic music-loving throng at Temple Newsam, of course, but pretty substantial for the square of lawn in the ruined cloister. Which brings me to resonance and the quality of the sound…

I think challenging is the word. I’ll stick the knife in here – a vicious thing to do with Theatre of the Dales, an undoubtedly superb bunch of performers - well-known to all at the LitFest - which deserves all the bucket loads of positive comments it normally receives – aaagh those planes! Every few minutes, they came over, on course for the airport, timing their interventions for speeches we were straining to hear anyway.

After the interval, most of the planes had arrived, but the sabotage continued: hysterical jackdaws in the tower screeched, and just as Antonio was baring his chest for Shylock to take the pound of flesh, a motorbike with some kind of sawn-off exhaust system could be heard cruising up the Kirkstall Road and back again.

You could see that it was difficult enough to project in the old cloister anyway – it might seem to be a friendly space but it isn’t a wooden O, many nuances were lost, and the actors were constantly trying hard to send the words across even without the threats from the sky. Wouldn’t it have been better to do it in the round, or simply closer to one of the walls? Or on higher staging?

Anyway, I genuinely enjoyed it as a package, along with most others: it generated plenty of momentum and was strangely satisfying because it was what people call traditional, with good-looking Renaissance gear made by students at Yorkshire Coast College. Because many in the audience, I am guessing, know this play, it was all right: we could always fall back on lip-reading. Shylock wore a yellow hat, which was authentic, and was a proper villain from four centuries ago, played most impressively by David Robertson, the heart and soul of Theatre of the Dales and a reminder that great actor-managers are still thriving.

It was delivered as a historical piece, so that we could see across the centuries and place it firmly in its context, when Renaissance Christians, following on from their Medieval counterparts, perceived the Jews, the murderers of Our Lord, as revengeful money grubbers. Violent revenge was all the rage on the stage in the late sixteenth century, and a Jewish villain must have seemed like a sure-fire device, even though Shakespeare is unlikely to have met any Jews in his life. Irish villains on the stage hadn’t really caught on in his day, in spite of nasty recurring wars in Ireland, their equivalent of our Afghanistan. I bet he met a few Irishmen.

Antonio (Stephen Anderson) should have been rather more unpleasant, although he was definitely grumpy – and melancholy of course, but it’s a hard one to crack. Is his habit of racist spitting simply conventional behaviour or a product of depression caused by the loss of his ships and merchandise? Freud might help here. Bassanio (Will Tristram) was a suitably shallow gallant with a seemingly effortless aristocratic presence. Portia (Jennifer Jordan) and Nerissa (Beth Kilburn) were most entertaining – the first like a fairly modern and hard-faced businesswoman and the second as her efficient PA in period dress.

The fairy tale section with the caskets was well split up (intelligent direction from the internationally-inclined Serge Alvarez), with an amusing Moroccan prince (Stuart Fortey) who lingered after his rejection to give Nerissa the eye. The period atmosphere was enhanced by the use of Comedia-style masks at one point. All that stuff happened in the past, didn’t it? Never again, eh? In 1938 in Berlin, the thespians of the Hitler Youth put the play on as straight anti-semitic, while in the same year their Young Communist counterparts in Moscow put it on as straight anti-capitalist. Today, if producers look for a message, it is an anti-racist one, centred on the “Hath not a Jew eyes…” speech. This was the implied message of this production, I think.

Serge Alvarez, who has been directing in France and England for the last couple of decades has another Shakespeare on his horizon - an adaptation of The Tempest to be performed in English, French and Spanish in Valparaíso, Chile.

 The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare performed by Theatre of the Dales at Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds on 23 July 2010

Into the woods again

Dagmar Wood was just perfect for Midsummer Night's Dream last year. Puck and various other characters could insert themselves into the interstices of a large tree, the lovers could run through real, untrimmed bushes and Titania could choose her mossy bank from the many on offer. The audience made do with plastic garden furniture. It's more of a clearing surrounded by trees and then by century-old houses than a real urban wood, and it can be found, if you are sharp-eyed, just off Grosvenor Road in Headingley.

It has become the stamping and vamping ground of the Headingley-based Theatre of the Dales (scroll down to read more about this lovely crew), which this year will be performing The Merchant of Venice. Performances will take place on the 14th, 15th, and 16th July, and at Kirkstall Abbey on the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd July.

Now read this Guardian piece.