Wednesday, 9 December 2009
Beryl Bainbridge on the radio
In response to some recent enquiries relating to Beryl Bainbridge, who was our guest last March, please click HERE to reach a BBC website where you will be able to listen to her, and where you may well find answers to your questions.
Wallowing
We were hippos rediscovering a muddy pool: Doug Sandle and myself visited the Brotherton Library's special collections department yesterday afternoon to look at magazines (mainly poetry) from the Sixties and Seventies. Neatly filed in cardboard boxes were fountain-penned letters, Underwood-typed poems on yellowing paper, carefully Gestetnered publications and distant but still fresh memories.Archivist Kathryn Jenner (Geoffrey Hill Archive) showed us some of what she is documenting, and as we talked, we splashed about in comfortable nostalgia. Doug remarked on the quality of MOMA and IKON, I remembered that Dave Birtwhistle used to drink and sing in the back room of the Packhorse with Jake Thackray.
Click HERE for link to Brotherton.
All of this led to the fixing of a date - Thursday 18 March 2010 - for a reading of some of the notable poets of those prolific times.
More programme details to follow soon - jigsaw nearly complete.
Wednesday, 9 September 2009
Darkly brilliant David Peace
The darkly brilliant and remarkably prolific David Peace (pictured here by Naoya Sanuki) has been booked for the final Saturday – 27 March 2010 - after more than a week of events.
The novel which led to the film The Damned United was a big word-of-mouth success before the celluloid version, and the Red Riding television plays based on his novels and set in the time of the Yorkshire Ripper clocked up high ratings. David Peace has more recently detonated his explosive mixture of politics, local history, violent crime, humour and horror in the setting of Tokyo, and many commentaries on this and all his writing can be found on the web. Try clicking on one or two of the links on this blog.
The 2010 LitFest programme is being firmed up at the moment. There will be another Poetry Slam at Lawnswood after the great success of this year’s, another sports writing competition for schools, an Irish connection, theatre, and plenty of local talent.
The general theme will be A Sense of Place.
If you want to help, or offer suggestions, or make criticisms, come to our open consultation meeting on Tuesday 22 September at 7.30pm in the New Headingley Club, St Michael’s Road, Headingley.
Feel free to click on the comment link below, or send an email (see above right) remembering to put LITFEST in the subject line.
Tuesday, 25 August 2009
Wandering Abroad - Corinne Silva
This notice follows on from the first of the events of the Headingley LitFest 2009 - on The Hounding of David Oluwale, when Kester Aspden and Ian Duhig spoke (and read) at the Yorkshire College. Scroll down to see the blog entry for it. Some of those who came are likely to want to visit Leeds Art Gallery.
9 October 2009 – end January 2010
Leeds Art Gallery: previews 7 October
David Oluwale came to England from Nigeria as a stowaway in 1949 with dreams of studying to be an engineer in Leeds; twenty years later he was found drowned in the River Aire. Subsequently two police officers were found guilty of assault.
This new film installation by Corinne Silva, which receives its premier at the Gallery, relates to Oluwale’s journey down the river, his final journey, but also narrates a journey through the city, a journey through times of change and transition, resonant with the contemporary development of the city and the experience of migration in our own times.
The story - of migration; prejudice; isolation; and the forming of communities, runs parallel to a story of urban regeneration in a post-industrial city with its concept of ‘readymade’ communities, ‘new developments’ and those left behind in their wake - is told through a collage of sound and image. Interwoven and sometimes contradictory accounts recount the tragic tale of David Oluwale: fragments of memory and experience from other migrants who also chose to settle in Leeds in the 1950s, interspersed amongst a soundtrack of music from the time, recorded in England by musicians from Africa and the Caribbean and played at the dance sessions attended by young West African immigrants striving to create a foothold and a community in what was often a hostile city.
Corinne Silva, born in Leeds, is a photographic artist with degrees from the Universities of Brighton and Nottingham Trent. Past commissions include From War to Windrush, from the Imperial War Museum (2008) and Róisín Bán from Leeds Irish Health and Home (2006), about the Irish Diaspora.
Wandering Abroad, her first moving-image commission, is commissioned by Leeds Art Gallery with support from Arts Council England.
9 October 2009 – end January 2010
Leeds Art Gallery: previews 7 October
David Oluwale came to England from Nigeria as a stowaway in 1949 with dreams of studying to be an engineer in Leeds; twenty years later he was found drowned in the River Aire. Subsequently two police officers were found guilty of assault.
This new film installation by Corinne Silva, which receives its premier at the Gallery, relates to Oluwale’s journey down the river, his final journey, but also narrates a journey through the city, a journey through times of change and transition, resonant with the contemporary development of the city and the experience of migration in our own times.
The story - of migration; prejudice; isolation; and the forming of communities, runs parallel to a story of urban regeneration in a post-industrial city with its concept of ‘readymade’ communities, ‘new developments’ and those left behind in their wake - is told through a collage of sound and image. Interwoven and sometimes contradictory accounts recount the tragic tale of David Oluwale: fragments of memory and experience from other migrants who also chose to settle in Leeds in the 1950s, interspersed amongst a soundtrack of music from the time, recorded in England by musicians from Africa and the Caribbean and played at the dance sessions attended by young West African immigrants striving to create a foothold and a community in what was often a hostile city.
Corinne Silva, born in Leeds, is a photographic artist with degrees from the Universities of Brighton and Nottingham Trent. Past commissions include From War to Windrush, from the Imperial War Museum (2008) and Róisín Bán from Leeds Irish Health and Home (2006), about the Irish Diaspora.
Wandering Abroad, her first moving-image commission, is commissioned by Leeds Art Gallery with support from Arts Council England.
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
Tea with Beryl Bainbridge
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| Photo by Richard Wilcocks |
The tea and the talk took place on Saturday 28 March. Framed photographs of battleships and Royal Navy reunions were behind her on the wall of the long meeting room at the back of the New Headingley Club, which was until a few years ago owned by the British Legion. In front of her was a large audience expecting to be charmed and entertained. It was. We loved her! At one end of the room, a selection of her novels had been spread along the top of a table All were later sold.
Introduced by Richard Wilcocks, who had invited her to Headingley after a conversation during a visit to the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, she spoke about her early career as an actress at Liverpool Rep, about her influences, about recent illness, about recurring themes, and about death, which was the subject of an essay to be broadcast on Radio 3 a few days later. This can be heard by clicking here.
She made special mention of According to Queenie and her view of Dr Samuel Johnson, of The Dressmaker and the repressive atmosphere during the War, and of The Bottle Factory Outing, but the main part of the talk was taken up by a reading from the manuscript of The Girl in the Polka Dot dress, which has yet to be completed. After a short explanation about the background (who was the widely reported, untraced young woman seen in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in which Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in 1968?) we heard the story of Harold and Rose, who are travelling through the States in search of a sinister Dr Wheeler. They end up in Los Angeles on the night of the assassination. Rose is wearing her favourite dress – the polka dot one.
Questions afterwards were well fielded, and a queue of admirers formed for the book signing. A major event!
In conversations later on, after the main audience had departed, she expressed great interest in the Victorian aspects of Leeds, of which there are many, of course, especially the streets of red-brick houses and two of the buildings in the city centre designed by Cuthbert Brodrick - Leeds Town Hall and the Corn Exchange.
EXTRA
Here is an extract from her July 2010 Guardian obituary: She did not read modern fiction, only "anything from Graham Greene backwards". Her discipline as a writer was intense. Each novel emerged from a few months in which she wrote through the nights, smoked a lot, slept and ate little. She constantly read aloud what she had produced, to get "the music of the prose" right, and in an alchemical process of cutting and perfecting, she would distil every dozen or so draft pages into one sheet without a single wasted word.
Read the whole thing here
Introduced by Richard Wilcocks, who had invited her to Headingley after a conversation during a visit to the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, she spoke about her early career as an actress at Liverpool Rep, about her influences, about recent illness, about recurring themes, and about death, which was the subject of an essay to be broadcast on Radio 3 a few days later. This can be heard by clicking here.
She made special mention of According to Queenie and her view of Dr Samuel Johnson, of The Dressmaker and the repressive atmosphere during the War, and of The Bottle Factory Outing, but the main part of the talk was taken up by a reading from the manuscript of The Girl in the Polka Dot dress, which has yet to be completed. After a short explanation about the background (who was the widely reported, untraced young woman seen in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in which Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in 1968?) we heard the story of Harold and Rose, who are travelling through the States in search of a sinister Dr Wheeler. They end up in Los Angeles on the night of the assassination. Rose is wearing her favourite dress – the polka dot one.
Questions afterwards were well fielded, and a queue of admirers formed for the book signing. A major event!
In conversations later on, after the main audience had departed, she expressed great interest in the Victorian aspects of Leeds, of which there are many, of course, especially the streets of red-brick houses and two of the buildings in the city centre designed by Cuthbert Brodrick - Leeds Town Hall and the Corn Exchange.
EXTRA
Here is an extract from her July 2010 Guardian obituary: She did not read modern fiction, only "anything from Graham Greene backwards". Her discipline as a writer was intense. Each novel emerged from a few months in which she wrote through the nights, smoked a lot, slept and ate little. She constantly read aloud what she had produced, to get "the music of the prose" right, and in an alchemical process of cutting and perfecting, she would distil every dozen or so draft pages into one sheet without a single wasted word.
Read the whole thing here
Friday, 3 April 2009
Cellar debuts
James Nash is the perfect compere for poetry sessions. He gave the audience in the Dare Café cellar (in this case, largely made up of people wanting to read their work) just enough of his own excellent fare and then turned things over to the other producers, handling them with cordiality and diplomacy, making sure that nobody went on for too long. He always had a positive word or two up his sleeve, especially for first-timers. There's nothing as frightening as spouting your treasured verse for the first time in front of your fellows!
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