Sunday, March 6, 2022

Ray Brown's relaunch of new novel Whoosh!

 

Plenty of pathos and drama

Sally Bavage writes: 
A literary soirée! At last, after a three-year absence, Headingley LitFest hosted an event in Headingley Library with real people in actual space. Not called Zoom, but Whoosh - still a word that indicates fast-moving and risk-taking. Words that certainly characterise Ray Brown's newest novel. He is an acclaimed author and old hand at Radio4, also a local denizen whose work encompasses playscripts, broadcasting, talks, articles and longer pieces. His latest book is also published by the eclectic Armley press, which has over the past decade or so published some original and exciting work by local writers. Check out their catalogue - https://www.armleypress.com/about2-c69n

Ray whooshed us through some of the many characters in his book. And when I say characters, they certainly were. Oddball, eccentric, ornery and horny as well as argumentative, committed and occasionally almost normal. You've met the people Ray has based his writing on, or passed them in the streets you walk between the thinly-veiled venues (not even thinly in some cases!). Or heard them talking over a drink in one of the local hostelries. His motley crew of characters is both strangely gripping - and they are us! As Ray said, "Any resemblance to persons living or dead is intentional".

The events of the book take place on one Saturday afternoon and evening in May 1979. Yes, shortly after that election and when the word gay was still applied to jolly parties. It hasn't stopped some people from continuing to live - not always well - or love - not always wisely - and laugh - not always kindly. There's plenty of pathos and drama amongst the dramatis personae of these pages. An illicit affair found out, a bank manager with a secret, a domestic bully, students of human behaviour as well as the university, media types and misfits, sex and lust, arguments and desire. All normal then! And you'll find you whoosh through it, caught up in the lives of those who were probably your colleagues, your neighbours or friends.

Richard Wilcocks writes:

This book is like a large landscape painting, a landscape heavily populated, somewhat in the style of Frith's realistic Victorian masterpiece 'The Derby Day'. Brown is a realist with a sense of humour, and any Victorian connotations which are in this modern panorama of an afternoon and evening in a city still in touch with its grimy industrial past would have to be found in accounts of the underworld of that time, or in some of the many officially banned publications which once circulated widely.  Readers, that is the viewers, can linger over individual characters (most of them 'amalgamations' of people the author knows or once knew) or relish groups of people linked by snatches of superb dialogue, often startling, or funny. Brown is so good at dialogue. Leeds is not the city to be found on maps, not quite. Districts are delineated approximately, sometimes misleadingly: Burley, for example, appears as Leeds 6, not Leeds 4.

If the book was translated into one long film it would be long and fragmentary, but many of the vividly evocative scenes could be tackled by storyboarders for shorter works, which could be pieced together according to taste, or to emphasise contrasts, from the brick-built toilets on the edge of Woodhouse Moor once frequented by cottaging gays and predatory, enticing policemen to the Fenton pub near the (then) Polytechnic and the University, which was in 1979 the preferred meeting place of a very diverse range of extraordinary people, not all of them artistic, who turned it into a Leeds equivalent of Paris's Left bank. Well, sort of...

A book by the American author John Rechy, The Sexual Outlaw, was a big influence. It is a non-fiction series of vignettes about the homosexual scene in California in the seventies, and was part of the movement against oppression at the time. Brown's book is not just about gay liberation, but the author is obviously very conscious of the fact that 1979, the year of Margaret Thatcher's election, preceded a decade of tragedy and prejudice for the gay community, from the infamous Clause 28 to the hysteria which came with the beginnings of the AIDS crisis.





Wednesday, February 23, 2022

New website for Headingley LitFest

 Richard Wilcocks writes:

We decided to replace our old website last year, and now we have done it! It is still more or less in draft form, but will soon have more pages. Take a look - 

https://headingleylitfest.com

Sunday, February 13, 2022

George Orwell in Headingley - lots of interest

A large photo of George Orwell was quickly recognised by local people visiting Headingley's Farmers' Market on Saturday (12 February), part of a display about the events on 5 March. Many of them are really surprised that the great author stayed with his sister for a while in 1936 in a street which is very well-known amongst the student population nowadays. Several said the walk sounded like fun. We'll be doing it whatever the weather incidentally, so bring a brolly just in case.




Thursday, February 10, 2022

Two Thursday evening events for Headingley LitFest

 TWO THURSDAY EVENINGS

Two Headingley LitFest events are coming up which are not part of Leeds Lit Fest: first at 7pm on Thursday 3 March in Headingley Library/Hub, RAY BROWN will be relaunching his new novel WHOOSH! which according to many readers is hilarious. He'd like you to bring your own memories of what you were doing in 1979 - or maybe what your parents were doing.




Second, DOUG SANDLE will be giving a talk and showing a powerpoint at 7pm on Thursday 10 March in Headingley Library. It is entitled The Poetry of Seeing: Visual Illusions and Ekphrasis. He'll explain that Ekphrasis is poetry about or inspired by works of art and read (and show) some of his own ekphrastic poems. One of them is inspired by this one - Patrick Hughes's Liquorice Allsorts.

Both events Pay As You Feel.

Registration tickets for George Orwell in Headingley on 5 March (click on the event on www.leedlitfest.co.uk) are going fast. Got yours yet?

Monday, January 31, 2022

Wigan Pier. The facts.

 

 

It is an Orwellian joke - Wigan's 'pier' was never a seaside attraction, just a couple of bent-up rails where coal-wagons once tipped their loads into barges. Orwell "liked Wigan very much - the people not the scenery" according to Labour MP Lisa Nandy, who features in this Daily Mirror article from 2017 "We follow George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier where poverty is now worse than the 1930s". I doubt things have improved much since 2017. Have you got Saturday 5 March in your diary yet? 
 

Wednesday, January 19, 2022

George Orwell in Headingley

 Richard Wilcocks writes:

It's all coming together for our Road to Wigan Pier event on Saturday 5 March! Yesterday, I knocked on the door of 21 Estcourt Avenue in Headingley, a tall, Victorian terrace house, to find who lives there. Happily, the door was opened by Theo, who turned out to be a student of English who knows about the work of George Orwell but who had no idea that he had stayed at number 21 in late 1936 when his sister lived there. It seems Orwell used his time walking to local landmarks like Kirkstall Abbey and collating his extensive notes on his journey round the north of England documenting the great poverty and deprivation he found there.

Theo and his flatmates have said that they will join the crowd outside the house at 1.30pm on 5 March, which is when local actor and musician Jem Dobbs will say a few things about when he lived in the same house for his first nineteen years after being born in it. With luck, he will play his trumpet and he will lead everybody on a short walk to the HEART Centre in Bennett Road.


Jem Dobbs

At 2pm our tribute begins, when Les Hurst from the Orwell Society will talk about The Road to Wigan Pier, which was found to be quite shocking in 1937, when it was published by the Left Book Club. A lot of people who lived in the south had no idea about the adult and child poverty and the awful working conditions in the north. There will be readings from the book - a few of the most memorable bits - and a Q & A will follow. Orwell devoted a substantial section of the book to his idiosyncratic musings on the nature of Socialism, and these will no doubt be addressed in any discussions. Several people have told me that they would like to make a connection with the poverty and general neglect by central government to be found today in the same areas that Orwell wrote about.

If you are unable to join us on the walk, try to make it to the HEART Centre for 2pm. PWYF

Wikipedia entry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier

RESERVE YOUR PLACE AT THE HEART CENTRE! 

GET A TICKET BY CLICKING ON OUR ENTRY ON THE LEEDS LIT FEST WEBSITE www.leedslitfest.co.uk