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 First event (at the moment) is a short story evening (personal, unpublished, between ten and fifteen minutes) at Café Lento on North Lane on Tuesday 15 March.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: