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!

Rommi Smith at Heart - evening of 26 March

Richard Wilcocks writes:
Poetry and Jazz is something which brings back memories of the sixties, which immediately dates me, of course. How well I remember my late teenage haunt, the old Peanuts Club, upstairs at the Kings Arms behind Liverpool Street station, where the likes of Mike Westbrook and Mike Osborne played and the likes of Bill Butler, Jeff Nuttall, Mike Horovitz and even myself blasted forth. Blending poetry and music (Coltrane-related Jazz a lot of the time) was a big scene in the sixties - I remember watching Danny Abse doing it with aplomb, and everyone knew that over in the States it happened in every smoky café. But enough of the nostalgia....

It's still going strong, and one of its most stunning practitioners in these parts is Rommi Smith, but to be accurate, we can't just say poetry and jazz in her case. She is a brilliant poet, musician and playwright whose work fuses spoken word and music. She has been performing since the age of fourteen and has achieved a reputation for sharp, socially conscious poetic imagery coupled with astute harmonies and jazz, funk and soul rhythms.

She has done so much that it is difficult to do her justice in a few paragraphs. My most recent view of her (through a camera lens) was in Leeds Civic Hall at the awards ceremony last October for the 2010 Leeds Peace Poetry Competition. For the second year running, she was the chief judge. After insightful and sympathetic comments, she called each winner in the primary and secondary school categories individually from the audience, and each one stepped forward bravely to read. Applause swelled, cameras flashed, smiles spread. If only all teachers (and judges) were like that...

Rommi performs her work regularly, both nationally and internationally at arts, music and literature festivals.  Rommi’s work has been broadcast on various media, including the BBC - print and audio versions of Rommi’s work are featured on the BBC website. Google her now!

During the bicentenary celebrations for the abolition of the slave trade, she was Poet in Residence at the Houses of Parliament, and she is currently in residence at John Keats's house in London. Use the link on the right to read more about her - there's plenty.

And if you haven't done so already,  get your ticket for the evening of  Saturday, 26 March, when she performs with the excellent Fruit Tree Project in the Shire Oak Room at Heart in Bennett Road. It is going to be something which will be remembered for a long time, so make sure you are there!

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.

Feeling competitive?

Richard Wilcocks writes:

One day, Headingley LitFest will run a poetry or short story competition, mark my words. Until then the talented readers of this blog, both the bridled and the unbridled, will have to submit their work to others. How about the Brontë Society? We've got the Brontës in our memories and in our sights (Professor Bob Barnard, author of A Brontë Encyclopaedia and a biography of Emily Brontë spoke to us during the first LitFest) so why not find out about the Society's recently-launched essay, short story and poetry competition?

Naturally, the work must have some kind of Brontë connection. You can get hold of the rules and an entry form by clicking here.

It's not all winebibbing

Those of us who attended Martin Wainwright's talk at the Yorkshire College of Music and Drama in March during the LitFest - and others - might be interested in his brief but sensitive background piece on the Cumbria shootings which was published in the Guardian. This puts the horrific story of random killings into some kind of context: Whitehaven and other places on the edge of the Lake District have had more than their fair share of tragedies in the fairly recent past, for example a pit disaster in 1947 which killed 104 miners. Martin is drawing on his encyclopaedic knowledge of the True North, without doubt. The article can be found by clicking HERE.

Another reminder that festivals of literature are not all about an equivalent of winebibbing, examining novels as if they were rare vintages, or clapping the local scribblers, though we do plenty of all that. Real life and real death come into the narrative. I am now thinking of Wallander's creator Henning Mankell, a master of crime fiction who is able to concentrate all human frailty and most of the world's evils into the town of Ystad, and who has now been taken into Israeli custody (as far as we know at the time of writing) for the crime of being on a Swedish boat (the Sofia) which was part of the flotilla attempting to bring humanitarian aid to the people of the Gaza strip. He was intending to broadcast directly by satellite connections to the Hay Festival, but apparently the signal was blocked. I bet he's there next year. Hay that is.

Finally...

Herbert Read is well-known to teachers, at least to art teachers, or should be. His Art and Society, first published before the War and on all good educational reading lists ever since (I hope and trust) is strong on the need for art in education, and on the virtues of simplicity, which conveys a feeling of truthfulness.

Moon’s Farm is simple, or appears to be at first, like a freshly-raked Zen garden. It was written for the Third Programme in 1955, and is described as A Dialogue for Three Voices, which on 27 March at the Yorkshire College of Music and Drama were those of Maggie Mash, David Robertson and Murray Edscer, who moved about with scripts in hand, looking… chilled, in the old sense, with hoods up, wearing sensible clothing, the sort that would keep the Yorkshire breezes out, the sort that reminds us that Read came from a line of Yeoman farmers. Theatre of the Dales (in association with Trio Literati) made sure that the atmosphere was coolly meditative, hypnotically beautiful.

David Robertson said he was delighted to work with T Lit again, because he has helped on the production side of many of their shows. He’s a pretty versatile performer, with plenty more than Voice 2 in Moon’s Farm on his programme list. TV credits include Emmerdale, Heartbeat, Cold Feet, Coronation Street and Waterloo Road, and in 2008 as King Duncan in Tim Albery’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth with Opera North.

Earlier in the evening, we heard him with Maggie Mash in 84 Charing Cross Road, the twenty year correspondence between Helene Hanff and Frank Doel. He had deftly pruned it and he sensitively read it. Maggie Mash once again reminded us that she does accents superbly, on this occasion an accent from the northern part of the United States. Difficult! They so often get us wrong (think Dick Van Dyke) and vice versa, but she sounded like the genuine article, and I should know, with a daughter-in-law from transatlantic parts. Maggie, appropriately, sounded a little prissy, and the Fifties attitudes were well conveyed by both actors.

The selection of recently discovered letters which preceded the two main courses of the evening was an excellent starter, well prepared by the chef, again David Robertson.

After the show, Herbert Read’s son Ben, a denizen of Headingley and Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University,  addressed the audience, replying to a few of my questions and providing the last voice of this year's LitFest. Issues were clarified, but mysteries remained: how, for example, could a man describing himself as an anarchist receive a knighthood from Sir Winston Churchill? The coffee beans stopped arriving, said Ben, when this happened. They had previously been regularly dispatched to Yorkshire from Soho, sent by a group of Sicilians. They were anarchists, and upset.

Below, Ben Read:

David Peace - the interview

Richard Wilcocks writes: 

During the whole of my interview with our main guest, the large audience in the New Headingley Club on Saturday afternoon was overwhelmingly sympathetic and pleasantly inquisitive. It really impressed the amiable David Peace, the LitFest's headliner, and I know that because he said so. At the end of the questioning sections, he made the point that his audience at the last Ilkley Literature Festival last autumn had been relatively dull.

This one was not, and it was also very different in its make-up from the audience in the library on Friday for Frances McNeil. We have had a good 'spread' in all our audiences this year in terms of age and gender.

The double focus was Occupied City, the second in the (as yet incomplete) Tokyo Trilogy, and GB84, on the Miner's Strike, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the finale of which is about now. After a brief introduction, the author read from the first part of Occupied City before engaging in a public conversation sat at a table with me. He read the final words of GB84, from the chapter entitled Terminal, or the Triumph of the Will. The questions from the floor came thick and fast.

It would be daft to attempt to cover all of the questions and answers on the blog, but here is a very brief taste of what was said:

On music and song titles: he talked about his time in a band when he was an Ossett teenager, and its influence on his thought processes, perhaps paraphrasing Noel Coward's famous quote that it is extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

On the often-recurring Wasteland theme: yes, he had studied T S Eliot's poem in the sixth form as part of the English Literature syllabus, and it is one background influence.

Many stretches of Peace's novels sound poetic, especially when read out loud. Is there a poetry volume in the pipeline? Sometime perhaps... 

On main literary influences: West Riding realists like Stan Barstow (also from Ossett) and David This Sporting Life Storey and more recently the American master of the staccato sentence, crime writer James Ellroy, but also Roald Dahl. He remembers being turned on to writing through the stimulus provided by Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox, which must have brought a flush to the cheeks of any primary teachers present. "I enjoy reading a great variety of prose and poetry." he said. "Even Ezra Pound."

On the often-recurring theme of police pouncing on innocent people: he spoke about the example in Occupied City of Sadamichi Hirasawa, a watercolour artist who had died in prison forty years after being convicted of the mass murder by cyanide poisoning of almost the entire staff of the Teikoku Bank in Tokyo (The Teigin Incident). A campaign to clear his name is still going on. The real poisoner could well have had something to do with the infamous chemical and biological warfare research unit which the Japanese operated in occupied China during World War Two - Unit 731.

On researching, writing and teaching: researching for GB84 took place in Japan, where it is easy to get hold of archived copies of The Times and The Telegraph, but not other relevant newspapers, and teaching adults English (TEFL) is not like teaching in, say, a local comprehensive.

On the title of the last chapter of GB84: yes, of course, Terminal does echo the famous Germinal by Emile Zola, also about a long-lasting pit strike, and carried everywhere by The President in GB84. Germinal, however, is a name with many resonances, sending out messages of rebirth and the spring. At the end of GB84, there is no rebirth, just defeat by a triumphalist authoritarian state.

On the theme of child murders in 1974... how deeply has becoming a family man with children affected your writing? Substantially, was the answer. "I did not have children when I wrote it... I regret the swan's wings now."

There were people present who remembered the ferocious Battle of Orgreave, and who had been involved with food-runs for the families of strikers. One woman's statement of her memories was particularly moving. Others had had something to do with the Red Riding television series, and no, David Peace is not just about to write a screenplay...

I think he was charmed by the Headingley crowd. He liked the idea of a constant supply of tea and home-made cakes, the New Headingley Club and the general atmosphere.

Richard Wilcocks with David Peace

Have a go!

Mary Francis writes:
On Saturday, Chris Mould, author and illustrator, entertained both children and adults with his lively talk, his slideshow of illustrations and characters  and then his drawing, in front of us, while he talked and while the audience put questions to him.

His career began with illustrating other people’s picture books, before he began to produce  - writing and illustrating - his own works, including the wonderful Something Wickedly Weird series. He has also worked on pop-up books and we learned how the illustrator works first and then the paper engineer comes on board and it becomes a collaboration. This was fascinating - and we saw a version of a pop-up book currently in production - one that was originally going to be much longer in size, before the recession struck!

The finale had him drawing as we watched - amazing was the speed with which the piratical character appeared before our eyes! In answer to the many questions on the subject, Chris emphasized that you can draw with all sorts of unlikely materials - he uses Bic biros, Tipp-ex pens and cans of spray paint amongst other things - and the importance of ‘having a go’ and not being ‘precious’ about drawing.

Sleuth

Two veterans (I must be careful with that word, but here it carries not a smidgeon of denigration) entertained a large audience (another extra chairs job) in Headingley Library on Friday evening - for Headingley's Female Sleuth.

Frances McNeil, whose pseudonym is Frances Brody, is the author of four novels and the winner of the Elizabeth Elgin Award for best new saga of the millennium for Somewhere Behind the Morning. She has written many stories and plays for BBC Radio, and scripts for television. She concentrated mainly on Dying in the Wool (ISBN 0 780749 94 1871), her first crime novel, for this event, because the female sleuth is in it - Kate Shackleton. Her research for this period piece included interviews with textile chemists, retired police officers and experts at Armley Mills Museum. Does this not sound authentic?

He took over the entire house with his inventions and experiments. She wondered they weren't poisoned after he used her pots and pans for God knows what type of dyeing mix. He'd stir the dye stuff in with water, using her wooden spoon, boiling it up to dissolve it, more than once causing an explosion.He claimed the fastest green dye in England. He dyed her grey cape forest green and insisted she wash it. It was her fault when the tub turned emerald. Then it was a new type of gas-fired machine for close-cropping the cloth...

"I came to Headingley specially to find a house for her," Frances, a denizen of Crossgates, told those present. "I found a beautiful one as well, just right for someone who has to make frequent journeys to the city centre.

Murder, mystery and family secrets have always fascinated me and featured strongly in my writing. Kate Shackleton sprang to life from our family album, circa 1920. She came carrying her camera, looking at me, looking at her."

Maggie Mash is the audio reader for Frances, and a trained actress who knows about this side of things, in depth. In addition to dramatic readings, she explained that audio books are not just for people with sight problems, but that they are increasingly popular for people to use while working at home or driving a car. She talked about the accents she can do and not do, giving the example of Geordie, which she can maintain for only a limited period. Norfolk is not problematic for Maggie: on one occasion she was pulled into an adjacent studio to add the real thing after an American reader had made embarrassingly bad attempts at it. American actors rarely get accents from England right (Ain't that a fact, Gor Blimey Mary Poppins?) and, of course, vice versa.

Here, the reliable Fairtrade and green indie bookshop Radish must be mentioned - they supplied a selection of titles afterwards. Dying in the Wool sold out.

Below, pictured with two bottles of Domaine Romanée-Conti 1976

The Seventh Sense

This was on Thursday after the Poetry Slam at Lawnswood. A contrast! What has impressed me during the LitFest is the diversity of our audiences, which have encompassed many groups living in Headingley and outside it. The Seventh Sense - A Sense of Place was performed by Lucht Focail and Friends, and was organised in association with Irish History Month. The theme was perfect for the occasion. It wasn't all Ireland, though there was a reading of a poem in the ancient Erse language (Sean Dún na nGall) by Annie O'Donnell, and I listened to Yeats's The Lake Isle of Innisfree (eternally good for a recitation, that one) for the second time this LitFest, from the same eloquent mouth. Bel Connolly read Moiza Alvi's very relevant The Laughing Moon with sensitivity, Linda Marshall read her Headingley Rocks and Síle Moriarty referred to one of the places she comes from in The Mermaid in Birmingham.


Dancers from the Joyce O'Donnell School of Irish Dancing took the floor a couple of times, accompanied by Des and Kevin Hurley and the evening closed with a welcome reading of Seamus Heaney's Bogland by Síle. Here's her apt poem for the occasion, which was printed on the back of the programme -


Place names carry history:


the trail from Kirkstall to Monkbridge;
the slow wind of pack horse to wagon
tracked earth to tarmac;
the greedy dissolution of Kirkstall
on Cromwell’s report
and the later distaff despoliation of Ireland;
the estates of Cardigan and Beckett
summed by semis and terraces
and the oaken wapentake
quenched in the Skyrack;
the Norse mermaid of legend
sanitised by Starbucks now
drinks latte and mourns her breasts;
the lane at the Three Horseshoes
opens the Wetewood
which killed a prince of Abyssinia
with cold miasma;
the Lounge, eclipsed by the Arc
lingers in local politics
while the Cottage Road,
a refugee, has screened since 1912.


These place names carry history -
they start with capital letters.


Síle Moriarty 2010

Lawnswood's excellent rhetoricians

They just grew on that school stage - into new, self-assured beings! Talented as well, at least as talented as the adults in other LitFest events, and in some cases more so. The Lawnswood Poetry Slam was much more than an extracurricular frivolity (and there's too many out-of-touch people who think that arts events are frivolities generally, look out for creativity-numbing cuts after the election), it was essentially educational. These kids do not stunt their creative growth on PS3s, obviously. All the poems, songs and dances were original, many of the words were learned by heart, and the emotion all around us last Thursday evening was absolutely authentic. Nothing contrived - it came from the heart. I saw a teacher crying, and not from stress this time!

Judging the event was a great pleasure for myself, Richard Raftery and Donna Cartwright, and as I said at the time, you couldn't put a whisker between some of those kids. I nearly described them as contestants, but they weren't really. This is not the Slam Factor, and none of them were really doing it for any kind of prize.Michelle Scally-Clarke was as charismatic and inspiring as ever - a great teacher of rhetoric, you might say.

Rhetoric is the ancient art of communicating effectively with language. It was the basis of education for young people for many centuries, so it is old, old as well as new, new. Lawnswood has been slammed (in the crass tabloid sense) recently. These lovely slammers went some way to putting the record straight, because it was obvious on Thursday evening that Lawnswood students are terrific!

Below, Michelle Scally-Clarke with some of the slammers: 

Phyllis Bentley on Tuesday

Richard Wilcocks writes:
Dave Russell from Leeds Met made plenty of assumptions about his substantial audience on Tuesday in Headingley Library - that most of us had read the 'textile district' novels of Phyllis Bentley, for example. Winifred Holtby (she of South Riding) as well. Vera Brittain? Hah, Vera Brittain! Heads nodded: everyone knew Testament of Youth.


There was tension between Bentley and Brittain, Dave Russell explained. Brittain had nice vowels, nice standard sounds, blending in well with the London lot, whereas Bentley was distinctly Halifax, and thought of herself as rather tweedy down there. Strangely enough, Brittain originated from Buxton, which is hardly southern. We saw a fascinating photo of the two of them with a toddling daughter - Shirley Williams, who is now Baroness Williams of Crosby.


Bentley was not just a 'regional novelist' (a fading category) but a novelist who dealt with class issues, and who came with a J B Priestley seal of approval. Her Inheritance (and yes, some of us have read it) was the big thing more than half a century ago, and was made into an impressive Granada TV drama series which was most ambitious for its time, which was 1967. The story of the Oldroyds covered 153 years, from the Luddite machine-breakers of 1812 to Churchill's death in 1965. Very young versions of John Thaw and James Bolam were in it. Many authentic workers' houses were still standing when filming took place, and the muddy killing fields of the Battle of the Somme were recreated just outside Wigan, which was not too difficult.


Bentley was also a significant writer of non-fiction: The Brontës and Their World still reads well today. 


Bentley is due for a revival, it was hinted - a major, if not really great, novelist should not be lost to us. There seemed to be general agreement. Thanks to Dave for his fascinating talk and useful (if sporadic) Powerpoint.




Below, Dave Russell with his LitFest bottle of Aurvin Winery Firebird Legend Cabernet Sauvignon 2007, Phyllis Bentley on a cigarette card and Vera Brittain in nurse's gear:

Wonderful sofa

The Saturday Sofa broadcast from ELFM is wonderful, especially the excellent contributions from the children of Shire Oak and Spring Bank primary schools. Thanks to everybody in the caravan parked outside St Michael's!

It was Dmitri Hvorstovsky

The music for Gaby's reminiscence in Déja-vu last Sunday caused a bit of a stir. This is what it was - Non ti scordar di me sung by the Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky. It is on a CD entitled Passione di Napoli.

North Noir

Re-watching the discomforting Red Riding television series, I couldn't help thinking of Martin Wainwright's talk at the LitFest last week, on people's perceptions of the North, and his passing mention of David Peace, "who might be a brilliant novelist, but....."  No doubt there will be audience members tomorrow (New Headingley Club at 3pm) who will ask suitable questions and make appropriately pithy comments on bloodstained depictions of Yorkshire, although the focus will be 1948 Tokyo and the 1984/5 Miners' Strike. A different kind of bloodstained.

Anyway, the TV backroomers really got it right when it comes to seventies clothes, interior design and tobacco, I am thinking. The wallpapers are authentically nightmarish. And I used to drive one of those Zephyrs. And all those smoke-filled rooms and characters with cigs drooping from their mouths... was it that bad?