Beast with Five Fingers

June Diamond writes:

Monday’s event at the Cottage Road Cinema appealed in so many ways. I’m a sucker for old horror films , and we also had local history and significance.

Janet Douglas began by telling us a vivid tale of the early life of the author of the original short story on which the film was based. In We Were Seven, William Fryer Harvey describes how he grew up at Spring Bank House in Headingley, in a Quaker household full of books and stories. His grandparents kept to the old ways and the family eschewed violence in every form, down to not burning a guy at Bonfire Night. It is no surprise that he read Edgar Allan Poe under the dining room table.

It also made sense to learn that he became a doctor, conducting a particularly gruelling amputation to free a trapped sailor during the First World War. This dreadful  episode wrecked his own health, but was retained in his imagination.

Janet’s lively and evocative introduction led brilliantly to the film. They really don’t make them like that any more, from the excellence of Peter Lorre, to the pace and atmosphere that contributed so well to the grisly story.  A terrific evening.

RW adds: We are approaching the hundredth birthday of the Cottage Road Cinema, the oldest operating cinema in Leeds, which opened as The Headingley Picture House on 29 July 1912. The first Leeds cinema was The Assembly Rooms in Briggate (opened 1907) which is now a refurbished space used by Opera North.

So how many would you get right?

Do you think it's too hard - or not? This is the quiz which was on the tables at the launch on Friday. Some people scored high marks without the benefit of Google. Thanks to Mary Francis for putting it together.

1.    Who wrote ʻThe Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christʼ?
 
2.    What is the name of Peter Robinsonʼs detective character?
 
3.    Don Quixote, Cervantesʼ famous hero, hailed from which part of Spain?
 
4.    Although much better known for her novels, she was also a friend of Charlotte Brontë and wrote the first biography of her. Who is she?
 
5.    Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichieʼs first novel was ʻPurple Hibiscusʼ. Can you name her second one, winner of the 2007 Orange Prize?

6. Who wrote ʻSouth Ridingʼ, recently produced (in shortened form) on TV? 

7. Who was the author of ʻTestament of Youthʼ? 

8. How are the two authors from questions 6 and 7 linked? 

9. Who wrote ʻOde to a Nightingaleʼ?
  
10. Who is the Scottish author of both contemporary and science fiction, whose name changes with genre by the use of the initial ʻMʼ?
 
11. Name the Egyptian author of ʻThe Map of Loveʼ who is also a political and social commentator and who reported directly from Tahrir Square, Cairo, recently? Or - name the most famous work by Naguib Mahfouz. [Bonus point if get both answers]
 
12. Name any novel by Jonathan Coe.
 
13. From which Kingʼs Cross platform does the Hogwarts Express leave?
 
14. The name of Kathryn Stockartʼs 2010 bestseller that features the lives of three women, two black and one white, in the Mississippi of 1962.
 
15. ʻOur Kind of Traitorʼ is the latest title by whom?
 
16. Can you name the famous Spanish poet who is author of the play ʻYermaʼ, currently on at the West Yorkshire Playhouse?
 
17. Famous detective series, based on books by R.D.Wingfield, filmed in West Yorkshire. 

18. Name Ben Okriʼs most famous book. [Bonus point for his latest novel, of 2007, also.] 

19. What is Jonathan Franzenʼs latest, highly acclaimed, title?
 
20. Which of these titles is not an Agatha Christie mystery? (a) 4.50 from Paddington (b) The Mystery of the Blue Train (c) Death on the Tracks (d) Murder on the Orient Express.

Shark

 

Richard Wilcocks writes:

Wes Brown lived in Burley, when he was even younger than he is now (early twenties) and his novel Shark is largely set in the area, which in case you don’t know is right next to Headingley. This evening event took place, appropriately enough, in a large front room in a house in Burley not far from the narrow bridge on St Michael’s Lane. He was interviewed by Mick McCann, author of the encyclopaedic How Leeds Changed the World. They are both in the photo. See Mick's Guardian article on Leeds writers and their rebel-rousing influence here.

Shark, described in its blurb as ‘a story about the dispossessed and how they get by’ has John Usher as its main character. He is an ex-soldier who returns to his boyhood home (in Burley) to find that things have changed drastically. Wes made it clear that he was an admirer of mid-twentieth century writers like Alan Sillitoe and that he hoped Shark would be seen as a genuine working-class novel which came out of real-life experiences, including his own. He talked about his early years, his father’s work as a professional wrestler and bouncer, and how he had spent ages with a guide to pool and snooker, because John Usher spends much of his time in pool halls. “It sounds very authentic to me,” observed Mick McCann, and after we had listened to Wes reading from the opening pages, I think most of those present agreed. Usher’s language is spiced with the right obscenities, and his tough talk could be taken at least partly as a consequence of the time he spent in Iraq.

There were comments from the audience about this and about the flashbacks which deal with Usher’s time in uniform. How can you write about the horror of war if you have never been in one? Well you can, it appears: Stephen Crane’s late nineteenth-century short novel The Red Badge of Courage, which is set in the American Civil War, was greatly admired by citizens who had been soldiers because it sounded credible and authentic. It’s often difficult to interview soldiers, Wes agreed, because traumas and painful memories can be internalised, leading to numbness.

Wes spoke about his interest in the actual shapes of word and sentences, and about how he connects various colours with pieces that he writes, which was picked up by a psychologist in the audience. It’s a benign condition.

There was plenty about influences, the names of Bellow, Updike and De Lillo cropping up frequently. The language has to sound just right, really streetwise. Wes has his own ideas about phonetics , and they work:

“So what abaht that?”

“I’ve got past that. Truss me on’t this, arr know what I yav to do and I’ll do it.”

“Iss too risky for me.”

“Av taken bigger.”

“Who does Fran think abaht all this?”

Wes explained that he is untrammelled by what is sometimes known as ‘political correctness’ and that opinions and statements that issue from the mouths of characters who have been in contact with organisations like the EDL (English Defence League) are just some of those that he has heard in real Burley and in real Leeds. “It’s not my racism. It’s for the readers to judge,” he said. “I didn’t write a manifesto.”

People lingered well past the end of the allotted hour, and a significant number of books were signed and sold by both authors.

 

Personally Speaking

In the photo, Maggie Mash as Miss Brodie is speaking to Lynn Thornton as the headmistress in an extract from Muriel Spark's novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

It was difficult to squeeze into the capacious front room where the second house event took place, in spite of the fact that the chairs were “smaller than last year”. Knee-in-the-lower-back situations seem to have been rare, however, and the huge audience was very appreciative throughout – a happy genie that did not mind being bottled up. It was wonderfully entertained by Wordsong and by a number of guest performers.

Wordsong consists of Maggie Mash and Lynn Thornton with pianist John Holt. Their programme was divided up into five sections. Early family influences had poems by John Siddique, Philip Larkin (yes, that one), Carol Rumens, Grace Nichols, Lis Bertolla and Peter Spafford; Education and friends had a tale from Gervaise Phinn’s recollections, Juan taught me by Lucy Newlyn, extracts from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark and Lynn Barber’s An Education, W H Auden’s O Tell Me the Truth about Love (music by Dankworth) and a poem by local lad Terry Simpson – Did Those Feet in Ancient Times Walk in Woodhouse?

Love and marriage featured the work of Wendy Cope, Vicki Feaver, Sophie Hannah, Dorothy Parker, Carol Ann Duffy, Bob Dorough and Imtiaz Dharker, Beliefs and attitudes began with an excerpt from Climbing the Bookshelves by Shirley Williams, continuing with Liz Lochhead’s Mo, Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mystic Fiddler by Terry Simpson, My Carbon Footprint by Lynn Thornton and Nigel Wears, arranged by John Holt, and a chunk of Trollope’s Barchester Towers.

Adrian Mitchell’s Human Beings was the only poem in the final section, and the show closed with Cole Porter’s Anything Goes

Efficiently organised and superbly performed!

Songs about love and shipwrecks

Richard Wilcocks writes:
There was far more love than shipwrecks in this event, the first of those held in people’s houses. Backed by a window framing a sunny garden scene, Peter Spafford read his poems and sang his songs with aplomb, displaying some of his many talents to excellent effect. He began with a poem inspired by a graveyard visit, and also by a recollection of Stanley Spencer’s 1926 masterpiece The Resurrection, Cookham. Tombs were flung open and the dead became quick as Peter asserted a passionate love of life which became increasingly apparent as his one-man performance progressed.

He sat at the keyboard to tell the story of a doomed ship in Cornwall, then moved on to the necessity of writing things down:

That idea you had yesterday

Write it up, write it down......

Because the ink of memory runs thin in the rain

He sang about love, then moved away from the keyboard to read about it: “These are love poems in a very broad sense,” he told us. He speculated on the origin of the name of the Hello Bridge which crosses the River Cover in the Yorkshire Dales. Did lovers once meet there? Yes they did, centuries ago.

My favourite was a song which seems to have come from a viewing of the film Waterloo on DVD, the version starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon. Two farms were destroyed in the battle – Hougoumont and La Haye Sante. Tacticians might focus on how one or the other was crucial to holding the line against the Bonapartist forces, but Peter Spafford focuses on two lovers who grew up around them. He sang partly in French to a French tune – Jean Petit qui danse – and ended with there’s rubies in the dew. Beautiful!

Towards the end of the session he was flipping through a ring binder containing the brief poems he has written for every year of his life, which I recognised from when he was in Café Lento a couple of years ago. He invited audience members to call out a year. 1968 brought forth a bearpit, 2005 a view from a high point in the Malvern Hills, 1973 his loss of virginity (in a dream, to an Indian goddess in a church), 1995 a delicious strawberry eaten in Portugal, and 1963 the death of his dog Bilko, when he (Peter) was seven years old. “Were you seven when you wrote that, daddy?” came a child’s voice.

“No no,” he replied. “I wrote most of them in 2005.”




>Peter performs with Edible Tent. See www.peterspafford.co.uk

Launch of Sky Burial by Genny Rahtz

 Sheila Chapman writes:

Flux Gallery is an enticing place: its walls are not parallel and they fly away from you at the front door into an expanded space laid out and lit by Julie with her artistic eye, and decorated with Dan’s excellent photographic art work. With wine, nibbles, sandwiches and great music from Des the Miner what more could you ask for, except the launch of a poetry collection, Sky Burial, by Genny Rahtz.

Genny was featured in the renowned A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull  which was published by Bloodaxe Books Ltd in 1982 and which featured a foreword by Phillip Larkin. She was supported last night by three of the other poets whose work appeared in the book and as T.F.Griffin explained in his introduction, they spent those years in Hull under the tutelage of Douglas Dunn and in the shade of Philip Larkin.

Ian Gregson’s poems included surprising juxtapositions of ideas and images as he invited us to consider a corpse and a parrot in the same room, and the The Paper Bag as the self which, as it falls from your grasp  'grazes its lips on the empty pavement,....mimes its unheard words’

Cartoonist influences were captured in poems such as Queen Victoria as an Owl ‘because she did actually look like one’ and The Elastic Band, where the English Empire is ‘snagged on peaks’ and ‘... snapped back in our faces’. Other poems considered the isolation of the individual (Traffic Island Desert) and Thomas the Tank Engine as a Cyborg at puberty. Ian continued the cyborg theme in The Breast  where Jordan’s breasts are cyborgs who are  trying for a new start away from her and ‘...have secretly acquired an agent’

Douglas Huston  treated us to a sometimes humorous and always interesting selection of poems, some in rhyme and some in free verse. In School Report an ageing school boy reflects on the past where a teacher was encased in his ‘black gown’s folded wings’ and indulged in ‘weapons grade rages’ and in Lines on Man’s dereliction ‘disintegration is where the big time starts’. Other poems included Report from up the Lane, The Quick One, Once Upon a Time (‘beyond mortgages’) and the Weather Regrets.  A poem, Poet Laureate Ritual Bath Murder, which is a skit on Ted Hughes poetic style and lifestyle, was received with great gusto by the audience especially when, after the murder, the poet ‘...went off to do things with your wife’.

Genny Rahtz told us that since childhood she has been greatly  influenced by American writers and by books about them. It also became apparent through her reading that she is influenced by cultural rituals such as sky burials. These burials take place where there is little or no wood to burn a body and the ground is undiggable so graves are not an option. The bodies are dismembered and offered up for buzzards to feed on and in the title poem of her collection she imagines her own sky burial where her brain

 ‘... is scooped out / and folded with ceremony / into my crushed skull’

... ‘as a feast for vultures, / kites, ravens.’

Genny also treated us to three animal poems: Rat Catcher, ‘I am my own rat catcher. / I let the beast go ... I allocate whole days to him’; Lambing, ‘You watch the sun rising as you walk home .. and fear that crows will come for the eyes of new born lambs.’; Desert Lion. ‘could you have known ... one day, Tate and Lyle / would embalm your story / on their syrup tin?’ She also read, in her simple and unassuming style, other poems from the collection including: Soft Fruit Harvest,  ‘the sound of canes rubbing / as I pull and let them go, ... I think of elephants / stripping leaves from acacia trees’; Self Portrait,  ‘I thought my true colours / required paint / and heavy paper’;

Before reading Geometry, Genny explained that there is scientific proof that  our ability to navigate and judge spaces is hard wired into our heads; the  poem starts with children  in US cities who ‘... learn asymmetry of 3D grids, / kaleidoscopic patterns / of concrete, metal/ glass’ and moves on to an isolated Amazonian tribe who know ‘... from childhood how timber falls / how shapes and angles / work in practice. They read / the time language of shadows’.

Genny spoke of her mother, who died thirty years before her father and who, because of that, was rather overshadowed in the present activity and memory family life. In  the poem My Mother Wendy – she says ‘I should light a candle / before it gets too dark’

Finally she paid  homage to her beloved  American painters and writers in Sky Windows celebrating  ‘the long grain / of Wyoming voices in Annie Proulx, / the laconic / slow transatlantic roll / of Black Mountain poets.’

Sky Burial by Genny Rahtz (Flux Gallery Press 2010)