The view from my room in
Finca el Cerrillo says it all really: luxurient gardens, blue pool, olives and vines on the ochre hills, and the mountain tops of the Sierra Almijara beyond.
That's my room, beyond the white jasmine (believe me I'm not gloating, just... smiling.)
My writing group is small but perfectly formed; we have all morning together in the cool studio as a 'master-class', then meet again before supper for what's become known as the 'aperitif session'.
Although this course has a fiction focus, the gorgeous gardens, rural architecture, and distant mountains all inspire lyricism, and our evening readbacks are filled with poetry as well as stories, so thanks Elaine, Collette, & Helen for a wonderful week of word-exploration.
In the afternoons... well, there's the pool to laze beside & within, there's cushions beneath the big carob tree.... and there's the meals for which this place is famed, along with the wonderfully relaxed hospitality of our hosts Sue and Gordon Kind.
And now I'm leaving all this & heading back to the Real World, where it's not 32 degrees every blue-skied, blue-pooled day, - and where there's a plinth in Trafalgar Square I'll be standing on next Saturday, and where like Christopher Robin and his bear, the
web-link is forever playing.
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Labels: Finca el Cerrillo, the Fourth Plinth
And as the heatwave continues, Winchester Writers Conference events are hotting up too. Here's my delightful and very talented group, taking a break from a long and intense day with a focus on dialogue in fiction - thanks guys for wonderfully entertaining readings and fascinating discussions. Lovely too to stay overnight with
conference inspiration-cum-fairy-godmother, the gracious and generous Barbara Large, who coordinates delegates' every need, even including lifts to the station and gypsy creams at tea-break.
Plinth update: a photo-call for the frock. Closest we can find to a plinth is this stone by the Merlin Theatre. (Thanks Somerset Standard for the pic.) I'm hoping to take to Trafalgar Square, as well as my stuff, a fistful of words from others - not just poems but quotes, quips, messages, greetings... anything. So I'm sending out a call - any fave limericks, haiku, maxims... anyone's birthday coming up around 18th July? Here's your chance to hear your words on Sky.... actually it's all too scary to contemplate, so I'm going to forget about it for a week...
...because I'm heading off to Spain tonight, to run a workshop in the foothills of the Sierra Almijara in Andalucia, a place I've never been before which is all the more exciting. So there won't be any Frome Festival bulletins from me this year: for those, click
here.
And have a great time.
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Labels: the Fourth Plinth, winchester writers conference
“Could we get any more British?” asks Duke Theseus, emerging as the umbrellas go up in Ashton Court Manor Gardens just before the start of
A Midsummer Night's Dream on Sunday.
Open-air theatre is not like theatre and I don’t just mean the drizzle; it brings out the territorial imperative in the cultural classes as they impose their own auditoriums on the lawn rather like Libyan forces invading Chad. Nearly all the grass was covered with predatory blankets laid out by a stentorian-voiced man urging his party to “maintain the line”. Children trail soft toys, parents eat paella from plastic plates, pies from wrappers, salads from Tuppaware, crisps, cakes, scotch eggs… waiting for curtain up is one long munch-fest. Corks pop, babies cry, mobile link-ups are arranged: “you’ll see us at the front, it’s not Glastonbury!”
Shakespeare's Globe on Tour has responded to the challenge by doing the whole play as a flapper-era end-of-pier show, with something for all the family: teddy-bears & percussion for the kiddies, Puck dressed as a pole-dancer for the Dads, and for us girls there was Chris McGill as Lysander/Quince/Moth, somehow managing to be equally irresistible whether a bold lover, rude mechanic, or gigolo elf.
The 8 actors in Raz Shaw's production play every part, morphing deftly from aristocrats to clowns to fairies, so there’s plenty of opportunity for inventive displays of versatility though less for costume change: adding aprons worked well for status downsizing but tailcoats and cigarette-holders for Peaseblossom’s posse didn’t do it for me. The production worked best when it stuck to the stage, creating a magic box that had everyone, even passersby peering over the railings, wide-eyed; the de-rigueur racing around the grass seemed like a slightly desperate, and unnecessary, crowd-pleasing tactic.
It’s a long play, made all the longer by William Mannering’s extemporising Bottom - I can see why the bard fell out with Will Kempe who first took the role – but at the end, despite the weather, numb bums, and no interval refreshments, the enthusiastic applause was rightly raucous. The
Tour continues till 31st August: Fiona Moorhead's photo courtesy of the Globe.
Plinth preparations continue: declaiming practice on Cley Hill, and lovely Mandie Stone from
Love Arts is kitting me out in retro prom frock with custom-made headdress (purple red & green) for my hour at Trafalgar Square on July 18th. I'm almost starting to look forward to it...
Labels: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love Arts, the Fourth Plinth
Two nights after
Moonshadow, I'm back in Bristol at the Tobacco factory for another play on social repression based on a true life incident, showing that just because you're not sectioned doesn't mean you're not trapped.
In 1928 Ruth Snyder was executed in New York for the murder of her wealthy husband. Journalist Sophie Treadwell followed the trial & wrote a play based on the case.
Machinal was on stage within a year and still has impact today as a feminist statement. Helen, intelligently interpreted by Polly Barsby as naïve and mentally frail, is caught relentlessly in a loveless machine, unable to relate to her mother, husband, or even daughter. Her emotional dysfunction is triggered by - and powerfully expresses - the materialistic society and social expectations that combine to entrap her. Mechanist patterns are vividly created in both soundtrack and visuals, with a series of memorably brilliant Hopper-inspired tableaux at the speakeasy bar where Helen meets Dirk and her first taste of freedom. Director Sue Wilson wanted to show the skills of the graduating students from Old Vic Theatre School- 'not just actors but designers too ' and this provocative play showcased an impressively talented ensemble. I can't find any images from the show so here's a Hopper which evokes something of the sense of loneliness & oppression created by the set, lighting, and tonal range - oppressive monochrome, with seductive slashes of scarlet and elusive glimpses of purple night air. Credit to all the cast too, especially Piers Wehner as Helen's lover and John McGrellis as her victim husband.
Plinth update: by post, a large, card-reinforced, envelope containing an A5 booklet with 24 pages of information for us plinthers including a map of Trafalgar Square and helpful tips like "Before you leave home do take a look out of the window or consult the weather forecast. This is Britain after all!" and "London is well connected to the rest of the UK - you can get there by plane, train, bus or car." There's a whole section on how to avoid sinking into debt over travel costs too: "Hold a car boot sale - you'll be amazed what people will buy!... do odd jobs in return for small sums. You could wash cars, walk dogs, baby-sit, mow lawns, or deliver leaflets... or bake some cakes, and ask for donations when it's time for tea-break!"
So, be thrifty, dress warm, and bring an umbrella if it looks like rain. Who ever said Arts Funding pays people to sit around devising patronising twaddle?
Labels: Machinal, the Fourth Plinth
Despite the delights of Frome, I do sometimes find myself yearning for the busy, fizzy, Bristol buzz. Totterdown was busy, fizzy, & frankly sozzledy, on Sunday with a mini-festival at the Shakespeare, where I was one of the performing poets. The Plastic Rocket also featured popular Bristolian Rosemary Dunn, who often makes passes at men who wears glasses...
Ten years ago the big topic of the summer was how to get down to Cornwall for August 11th. Rumours were rife: roads would be jammed, trains crammed… my solution was to cycle from Frome with my son Sam as companion, tent-bearer, and map-reader. I watched the milky silence of that strange defining moment of solar eclipse from a games field temporarily converted into a campsite by its enterprising fooball club.
A decade on, Steve Hennessy’s play
Moonshadow is being revived at The White Bear in Kennington, and is still – disturbingly – relevant in its potent critique of psychiatric practices.
John wants to see the eclipse and feel the touch of the moon’s shadow but in the Catch-22 craziness of his sectioned existence, the more he wants to go, the more he’s seen as proving he can’t be allowed. Dr Brown diagnoses paranoid psychotic delusions and refuses leave, so the only way John will see the eclipse is by astral projection.
A minimalist set enhanced the impact of celestial lighting effects as John sails over Taunton, defying his dead, but still monstrous, stepfather to swallow the sun. “If you’re ever going to come out into the light you need to go into the darkness.”
As with most of Steve Hennessy’s plays, the central theme is that psychiatry dehumanises, and creates a system in which the only differences between carers and cared-for are the labels and the salaries. Four lonely people wrestle with the pain of living and the damage of their pasts, but only John has the astral motorbike. He may be prone and drooling, but when the ECT has worn off, he’ll be riding high…
Brilliant performances by Michael Dylan and Annabel Bates as the endearing patients and Oliver Hume and Beverley Longhurst as their equally ‘sexually disinhibited’ but better paid (and without files & labels) authority figures. Insightful direction by Chris Loveless brings out the bleak realism as well as highlighting moments of wry humour in this powerful play.
Theme for this solstice week was sunshine, and about time too. While up in London I took the opportunity to check out the Fourth Plinth, since I'll be up there next month. My co-plinthers in the other corners are King George IV, a Major, and a General... there's the Admiral too, but he's about a mile high. Here's my plinth, under the scaffolding, and here's me wondering what to do if I don't get a portable PA. Hurrah for Patrick Dunn and Nick Waterhouse, who stepped in to supply the goods!
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Labels: Moonshadow, the Fourth Plinth, The Plastic Rocket
"There's something about theatre in a confined space that's quite special" Niamh says "- anyone jaundiced with lavish traditional productions should try this - five quid for a seat on the sofa and great entertainment." were at the double bill of one-act plays UPSTAIRS at the LANSDOWN, a tiny pub theatre in Clifton, more like voyeurs than audience. Both pieces were energetically acted and directed by students from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School - yuppy humour in
About a girl who... by Stephen Vagg and anarchic hilarity in
1% Inspiration.
Written and directed by Lars Harald Gathe, this is a brilliant & absurd 'deconstruction and reinvention' of Ibsen's
Ghosts, the famously "dirty deed done in public" that shocked the 19th century theatre-going world. Especial praise to Jack Holden as Osvald and Nick Blakeley as assistant Harry, chronically confused, who had hoped "this was going to be something real." But Al the manic Director is changing the concept. A talking badger, a buffet, a song and dance routine with no actors – they’re out to lunch, literally until it chokes them. Al sees his role, apart from sitting on the red sofa staring at the wall, as a calming influence: he counters Mrs Alving's script complaints ( "When you look at life, everything is a bad translation") and consoles baffled Harry: “My grandmother told me this on her deathbed: It’s all useless. It’s all a waste of time.” Not this though- a thoroughly enjoyable night of new writing and emerging talent.
Eclecticism means never having to say you're copying... Last year Alison and I went down to Brighton to check out their (hugely funded) Small Wonder lit-fest event and came back fired with enthusiasm to recreate the event, better, unfunded, ourselves. Hence was born Frome FLASH FICTION Friday, story-telling crossed with slam, agreed by all who crowded into the Merlin foyer last night as fabulous fun. The lucky-dip format kept tension high but no-one overran their allotted 4 minutes so we had time for everyone who wanted to read.
Our judges – publisher Barry Cunningham, novelist Debby Holt, and lyricist Brian Madigan – had the tough task of on-the-spot marking so many excellent pieces to a nail-biting finale with two writers recalled to the mic: Jeremy Gibson and Gordon Graft, both best-known for their poetry. A swift secret ballot resulted in FFFF logo teeshirts for both and the £40 prize to Jeremy for his wicked black comedy
Happy Endings.
Congratulations to all 21 writers brave enough to stand up and be voted, and to create such a fantastic evening of entertainment.
Labels: Flash Fiction, Upstairs at the Lansdown
!!!!NEWS FLASH!!!A couple of months back I posted a pic of me messing about in Stourhead posing as a statue in one of the follies. Kevin's comment - seconded by haiku poet Alan Summers - suggested I apply the Anthony Gormley
One&Other project in London, so I did. One hour on top of a column in Trafalgar Square, doing anything you like. Some of me pomes, I offered brashly. And oops, I got a place. So that's
me on a plinth along with the admirals & pigeons on July 18th, 4-5pm, strutting my irreverent stuff.
Anthony Gormley created the Angel of the North, and now his vision is to reclaim Trafalgar Square from the old order and make a living sculpture of “people expressing our hopes and fears, for what is possible.”
Boris Johnson is somehow involved and there’ll be a 24 hour streaming website, Sky TV, and 2400 of us during the 100 days of the project, but “it really doesn’t matter in the end who gets up there, it’s more this process of asking ourselves, what do we care about? how would we express that? What would we do, if we had this hour in the most public place in the whole of the land? to make a project that is a portrait of the UK now?”
Well I know for a fact there'll be bagpipe-players & balloon-twisters, and I'll probably do my lipstick one...
O brave new world, that has such people in't!..
Labels: OneAndOther
As the bunting comes out for another Frome Festival, I sometimes wonder if I edge into sycophantic hyperbole when enthusing about my adopted home-town, with its 2 theatres, independent cinema, bookshop, music store, radio station, acoustic nights, band nights, and café & party culture – a place so small you could hoover the entire town centre from one powerpoint given a reasonable length extension flex, yet there’s more creative clubs, circles, & happenings here than flying eggs at a BNP protest rally. And then I read
The Furball, and I know I’m not exaggerating. In what other free town mag can you find, as well as local listings, music & arts reviews, parkour promotion and poetry, a reasoned argument against school prayers: “You wouldn’t want teachers telling your children Thor exists..." Artsy, energetic, and a little bit anarchic: like the editors say,
It’s a Frome thing. 
Not that I'm averse the charms of bourgeois Bath & bustling Bristol too. On Thursday, when the sun realised abruptly that it should be flattering the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, kissing with golden face the meadows green and gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy since it's damn-near midsummer, I spent a lovely day in Bath, having lunch and talking poetry with
Esme Ellis amid her garden lupins, then meeting
Diana Cambridge for a delicious sunset session at the Spa discussing her new project: a Travel Writing Taster week in Crete.
Over in Bristol, Writers' Room Coordinator Sharon Clark is busy making the Old Vic the hub of southwest theatreland with an awesome programme of projects including on Friday a scratch night for performers.
10x3, introduced bouncily by Howard Coggins as 'a bold new experiment, a cauldron, a smorgasbord...' Sharon's concept is that 3 minutes is long enough to create a character, and actors can use this as a chance to take a risk.
Niamh and I went with our own drama project in mind so what interested me most was the self-written pieces: David Bailey's menacing
Security Man, poems by Gillie Harris and Shagufta K Iqbal. Possibly the actors would have liked more specific audience feedback, but the general response was positive: these disparate pieces combined successfully and "The Old Vic is now a place to try things out."
Back in Bath again on Saturday, for Acumen in the Georgian elegance of the Bath Poetry Cafe's new home in Queen Square, with editor Patricia Oxley talking about how she whittles down the 5000 poems submitted each month to the 50 published, and poet William Oxley reading some of his work. In his pre-poetic life, William confides, he was an accountant, which is why he likes the line "no accounting for Paradise."
There are other readers too, among them Frome poet Rose Flint, and the shortlisted entrants from the Acumen Poetry Competition. I entered this, and was extremely chuffed to be among the 7 shortlisted poets & thus find myself reading at short notice my poem
Charity Shop Shuffle, so here I am looking chuffed with Rose. Winner was sonneteer Judith Young, with Yu Yan Chen runner-up.
We all met up again for brunch organised by Poetry Cafe choreographer Sue Boyle on Sunday, lingering in her sunny garden and then strolling nearby Alexandra Park to watch the city sunning itself under a Simpsons sky.
Labels: Acumen, Bath Poetry Cafe, Bristol Old Vic, Frome Festival
"I don't think the writers work as hard as they used to, because the writing isn't as good" John Cleese reportedly told an interviewer recently. He was talking about television, not the state of stage in the southwest.
It's not often a play makes you laugh till your ribs ache then cry till your face hurts so that after the final curtain you stumble out silenced, feeling like you've been through an emotional tumble-dryer. 'You' of course means me, and the play is
Ray Collins Dies on Stage at the Alma Tavern. Written by Mark Breckon and featuring the stunning talents of Oliver Millingham, Kirsty Cox, and Neil Jennings, directed with devastating insight and astounding pace by Chris Loveless - superlatives are essential to convey how moving and extraordinary this piece of theatre is. Picture a writer who's painfully and chronically allergic to every scrap of the fabric of his own life - the clothes he wears, room he lives in, computer he tries to work on. On the literal brink of suicide he's saved by love but dies anyway, killed not by despair but by clumsy experimentation from the medical profession... doesn't sound like a laugh a minute, does it? Believe me, it was. Mark knows the scenario well, he lived it - and unlike Ray Collins survived it. His account of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and its treatment is hilarious and tragic and very, very, moving. Huge credit to Stepping Out Theatre Company for bringing this brave & brilliant play to Bristol: you can read audience responses
here, and go if you can, it's on till 13th June.
At the Ustinov in Bath, there's
The Adventures of Wound Man & Shirley - 'the best show I've seen, it's awesome' one barman is telling the other as I arrive.
Like Ray Collins, Shirley Gadanken is a social misfit on a macabre journey of pain and loneliness. And what do you need most, when you're a nerdy boy with knobbly knees, a sick brother, and a hopeless crush on a cross-country runner?
Why, a superhero of course, to make you his sidekick. Enter, clanking, Wound Man, looking "like Bill Murray crossed with a swiss army knife... weapons sticking out like cocktail sticks through cheese&pineapple at a party", whose special power is to calm those in extreme grief and pain by simply looking like they feel. Wound Man shows Shirley how to touch those he loves and can't because they're either dying (his brother) or despise him as a bender (his beloved). Lyrical and tender, gently humorous rather than hilarious, Chris Goode's highly original rites-of-passage story is performed by the writer as an intimate third person monologue, and deserves the barman's accolade.
John Cleese says the people who run TV these days are fearful of new, imaginative, ideas. John, you should get out more.
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Labels: Ray Collins Dies on Stage, The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley
This week we're talking shoes... their stories, the characters they create and convey. It's the first "7 AGES OF SHOES" drama workshop, held at the Merlin foyer. Writer-friend Niamh Ferguson has teamed up with me for this project, conceived while watching the
Show of Strength 5-minute pieces in shops in Bedminster earlier this year & thinking: we could do stuff like that in Frome. The shoes stimulus was Niamh's idea, and proved a wonderful starting point for great writing. Several of these pieces were polished up with help from the Writers' Circle at Rosie's on Wednesday so we're on the way to an evening of monologues.. a season of short plays... .
We're expecting a full house for the Flash Fiction event Alison and I are running on June 19th - another stolen idea, freely adapted from Brighton's
Small Wonder contest. We've got some excellent judges: publisher
Barry Cunningham - he first picked Harry Potter from the slush pile - with effervescent novelist
Debby Holt and
Brian Madigan, lyric-writer extraordinaire. Fun and frolics for all, and forty quid for the winner - come along. There's a teeshirt with our logo on too, how Fromeishly cool is that.
Labels: Flash Fiction
May is the month for confetti whites – hawthorn blossom, horse-chestnut candles, wild garlic, and cow-parsley, my favourite, drenching the river banks and fluttering along the lanes like a ragged peasant army returning glorious. This seems a specially good year for these wonderful wayside umbellifers everywhere.
I’ve been travelling up north staying with friends: Hazel my bard-buddy now living near Worcester (which counts as north to a Watford-orientated south-Londoner like me) then way up into the wilds of the M6 – to Ribchester, a tiny Lancashire village on the banks of the Ribble, which traces its provenance back to Roman days and celebrates its farming status with two pubs called after bulls.
I’ve come to visit Anya, who I first met in Tobago over a decade ago; we now have one of those friendships that picks up effortlessly with each connection. With her new partner John we explored the noble history of Hutton-in-the-Forest, the industrial history of Salts Mill, and the natural history of High Head Sculpture Valley, where the cow parsley was as impressive as the art trail.
Writer and social psychologist
Stephen Whitehead is staying too, and we spent Bank Holiday Monday walking the fabulous unpeopled landscape around Anya’s home on the hottest day of the year so far.
Stephen’s specialism is gender and unusually for an academic his published work includes popular & accessible books like
The Many Faces of Men – featured on Richard & Judy among other media worldwide – as well as course readings on feminist post-structuralist theory.
And after a stop-off with my brother on the borders of Derbyshire, I'm back home in Frome, where the lilac really is in bloom, and the white roses out too, and there's a literary look at nature next week at the library. Organised by John Payne for the
Lost World series of events,
Nature Friend or Foe on June 5th is based on John's upcoming book
The West Country: a cultural history. I'm specially pleased I get to quote bits of Kubla Khan, written by Coleridge "in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium taken to check a dysentery."
And finally... definitions for Tories: Louise Marnel, the Bromsgrove housewife who organised a petition against Julie Kirkbride for fiddling her parliamentary expenses, denies that the 4000 signatories she amassed mean she used "mob rule".
Quite right Louise. It's called - or was once - democracy.
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Labels: Lost World, Ribchester
Purchasing hairspray, choosing a belt,
waiting for cheese on toast to melt
and daytime TV doesn’t watch itself.
A poet’s work is never done. Luke Wright has a vocation: “It’s what I was born to do, say filthy things that rhyme”. With
Sex Butler, outrageously
Cool Mum, and the
Ballad of Fat Josh - he robbed pizza delivery boys and ate the evidence - you could nearly believe he means it. But Luke’s brilliant new show
A Poet's Work Is Never Done is a fast-moving journey from the bantery mockery of the show-title poem to powerful and dark scrutiny of modern life. “In a society where we do everything ironically, where does that leave meaning?” Luke’s theme, beneath the wicked wit & relentless rhyme, seems something like atonement. For cruelties of youth, insensitivities of adulthood, dread of spleen-filled old age … even the delirious stand-up that splices his poems is tinged with self-deprecating failure.
Most performance poetry has an edge of fury for social ills – callousness, classism, prejudice, stupidity. Luke is extraordinary in that his target is himself.
Luke’s Got A Joke is the most searing character assassination – even in a week of politicians’ expenses revelations – I’ve heard for a long while. He feels it’s the best thing he’s done.
“Here is wit, beauty and unashamed intelligence, in a show which should reap nothing but recommendations.” said
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine in a 5 star review. The audience at the Merlin last Friday agreed, and gave extra applause to Luke & charming support act Molly Naylor - who worried unnecessarily we might judge her for writing about boys - for their 6 hours on the M25 to bring the show to Frome.
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Labels: Luke Wright
It's official: May Madness at Frome Poetry Cafe was "the nipples" - and thankyou Alison for sharing this term of high approbation in a hilarious tale of teen times.
Dianne Penny and Jo Butts delighted the appreciative audience with musings on both May and madness as well as love and life generally, with sixteen other poets & writers contributing to the open mic. Impressively, several pieces had been written especially for this event. Many, like Bristol slammer David Johnson and local bard Phyllis Higgins, made us laugh; others were touching, intriguing, entertaining, lyrical... yeah, it was a great night. The nipples.
Jill (Happy as a Dead Cat) Miller and I went to the inaugural 'Writers' Lounge' at Bristol Old Vic on Thursday. Writers' Room Co-ordinator Sharon Clark had the great idea that as writers tend to feel isolated we should get together for "drinking, talking, and listening to music". Great fun, and good to meet up with writerly friends: screenwriter
David Lassman, Bath bard
Kevan Manwaring, and poet/novelist Rosemary Dun.
Poet James Nash has a new interactive site on Facebook, a kind of poetry party-bag, with songs, snippets and pictures - he's inviting Spring poems which he'll discuss onsite, and you can download his monthly podcast from here too. If you're not a Facebook fan, you can listen to it
here. I have a special interest in the May edition as I'm James's interviewee. We did it via Skype while I was in California, and just listening to it takes me back...
And finally... It's out! The
2009 Frome Festival brochure. Months of meetings interspersed with emails, enquiries, corrections, confusion, celebration, and the usual stuff involved in putting on 25 events in one week, ensuring there's something loosely under the banner of 'Literary' for every taste and age-group, including contests, talks, walks, agent-interviews, poetry performances, and workshops, with every genre covered from picturebook to screenwriting... you get the idea. So get the brochure, and start booking! You won't find Hat Box poets declaiming in the streets or internationally-acclaimed Arabic writers reading over supper in any other Lit. Fest. this year!
Labels: Bristol Old Vic, Frome Festival, Frome Poetry Cafe
"The first thing you must do as a writer is read" is Sarah Duncan's top tip at the inaugural meeting of
Writing Events Bath in New Oriel Hall in Larkhill last Sunday.
Organised by Alex Wilson and Jude Higgins, the event covered fiction both long and short, adult and children's, as well as drama, poetry, and self-publishing, in a fast-paced day with lots of breaks to mingle - and a really good lunch. What else could a writer want? Well, plenty of positive advice, answers to specific questions, and internet resource addresses. Happily all these were provided by the contributing practitioners: novelist
Sarah, YA author
Julia Green, poet
Carrie Etter, short story specialist Alison Clink, publisher
Miles Bailey - and (this blog is not noted for modesty) I did my best too.
"Poetry & a Pint" at the Wine Vaults takes me to Bath again on Monday. Robert Palmer is one of the featured poets, bringing his own quirky performance style to existential words both droll and sombre:
all his battling life he's wanted to trust someone - to give up - to believe...
Bristol's Mayfest has been bursting out all over, giving the new(ish)ly reopened Old Vic a great showcase for its makeover face of accessibility and vibrant modern writing, like
Kellerman, a touring production from
Imitating the Dog. All drama is a journey; this one is five journeys in different time spheres, two of them in a mental institution. It boasts - appropriate use of verb here - "a magnificent two-storey set which incorporates a revolving stage, flying harnesses, moving masks and stunning back and front projections". It was all, as claimed, extraordinary and exciting, but what I enjoyed most was the dark conundrum-laden script.
'Where does it all go, everything that’s ever happened to us?’
‘We’re left with what we remember.’But Harry remembers pasts he never inhabited, and people he never knew. "Perverse, erotic, poetic and grotesque,
Kellerman is a meditation on desire, loss and the structures that bind us to the lives we believe to be real."
Finally - a couple of plugs: May madness at the Poetry Cafe TONIGHT - the posters have become collector's items, thankyou Suzy! - and Luke Wright is at the Merlin on Friday with his new show
A POET'S WORK IS NEVER DONE... rarely begun, in my case. "Gifted social observer and wordsmith" Luke is sandwiching Frome into his national tour betwixt York and Maidenhead, which gives some idea of the truth of the title. If you missed Luke's on C4's "Seven Ages of Love", here's a bite of the real thing.
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Labels: Bristol Old Vic, Frome Poetry Cafe, Luke Wright, Mayfest, Poetry and a Pint, Writing Events Bath
Invasion of the blog-snatchers...
Writer John Baker's new book
Winged with Death is about time and tango and revolution, and is currently enjoying an ingenious extended launch, cyberspace-hopping through blogsites worldwide and collecting appreciative
reviews along the way. Today is my turn to welcome this novel and its enterprising author.
The first thing that impressed me is the fluency of the writer’s voice. The story is narrated by Frederick Boyle, aka Ramon Bolio, who establishes a dual time-zone from the outset. As an older man now living in England, he looks back to the journey of the boy he once was, jumping ship in Uruguay and finding a new name and a new life. His mentor Julio is introduced in a striking pen portrait as
a man of aphorisms, sometimes making sense but more often devoid of context. ‘Middle-class is the definition of criminality’ he would tell me, or ‘I don’t use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.’ And then we’re back in now, and a new character sidles into the room and onto the page:
an interruption that upsets the flow… It’s this intriguing combination of adventure story and real-time immediacy that for me makes this novel so compelling, with its suggestion of continuing dualism as shadows from the past emerge and reconnect.
I asked John about this notion of threads linking the past to the present, and the unpredictable pattern of the dance; these themes, he feels, emerged as he wrote rather than being catalysts. “In the beginning there was the dream of Montevideo, an obsession with time and the wish to utilize dance as a metaphor. I don't believe I had more than that. The novel was the product of my immersing myself in these three and experimenting with the various ways they might combine.”
John Baker has published 8 novels already but this is the first time he’s gone galactic, as it were, with promotion. Feedback, he says, has been mostly positive, but “the tour has been hard work in a way I never quite imagined - touring, even
virtual touring means actually engaging in a way that my day-to-day working life as a writer shields me from. So there is a sense in which I'm 'whacked' as though I've been on a real road for the past few weeks. On the other hand it has, of course, been exhilarating to feel that kind of support that only can come from people who are engaged in the same struggle as oneself, either as writers or as readers.”
John picked his hosts from the
links of literary blogs on his own blog. “Some of them run popular sites with relatively large followings, others are little more than personal blogs. I wanted the book to find itself in as many various environments as possible. This seems to me to be the destiny of a book.”
You can read the first chapter
here. Tell John what you think, and let me know what you think of this creative new notion of host- blogging.
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Labels: John Baker, virtual tour, Winged with Death
Lord Hamlet is mad.
But what does that mean?The provocative production at Frome’s Merlin theatre tonight explored this question like peeling skins from a schizoid onion. The players become characters, characters players, with even the observing audience implicated in the eyes of the paranoid prince. Directed with exuberant bravado by Ben Macfadyen, this innovative production enhances menace through masks, hi-impact physicality, dance, and even disturbing humour- as when Hamlet turns ventriloquist with the limp body of Polonius. In a script that impressively holds the emotional story while playing hideandseek with the best-known speeches, the famous soliloquy is saved for the finale.
Is he even mad at all? Or are all these occurrences merely figments of his imagination? Who is in control? ask the programme notes, which explain the brief was to produce 'an anagram of Hamlet'.
At the helm is an A-level examination piece for the seven young people who took part; the examiner was seated among the awestruck audience crowded onstage around the action and the prince’s line ‘Madam, how like you this play?’ was addressed with ingenuous charm towards her. I hope the lady's marking did not protest too much.
Labels: Hamlet
So I arrive home to a blossomy English Mayday and the excellent
news that Carol Ann Duffy is our new Poet Laureate. She says she doesn't want the pay but will take the butt of sack upfront, please. That's 600 bottles, should be a good celebration party up there in 'leafy Manchester suburb of West Didsbury' where, surprisingly, this Scots working class poet now lives.
A month's worth of post takes a while to dispose of, mostly in the recycling bin, but it's nice to hear my first novel
Frozen Summer is being reprinted again in the Netherlands. Googling the Dutch edition, I found this intriguing plot summary:
Forgotten Summer of Crys Morrison
A fall Kirsty is 10 years from her memory lost.
Although it does its best to its past back to get
Kirsty feels in her heart still twenty student she once was.
If the first is lost gradually reminders are rising to the surface,
Kirsty is also very relieved. But the image that looms up
as more loose puzzle pieces fall into place,
does it realize that amnesia may be preferable to the truth...
The new comedy drama
Boy Meets Girl - which coincidentally is also based on trauma-created character confusion - was reviewed enthusiastically by Times online. "...really good. ITV1 has, almost unprecedentedly, given a total newcomer — the writer David Allison — three hour-long episodes." In fact the writer David Allison had a 10-year scriptwriting apprenticeship, according to his interview with
Screenwriting Goldmine. This site is a great resource for any writer interested in the meeja, by the way, as you can sign up for a free newsletter which is genuinely useful and topical. Asked how he sold this rather cheesey concept, David is frank: Knowing people - like Head of Productions - helps. "I was going to have lunch with him and I was panicking, and I saw a friend who'd seen this awful film about a man trapped inside a woman's body and it was really naff. I thought, is there a gender story here that's not a cliché? And I pitched up. If Id been just someone off the street I don't think he'd have listened, but I knew him."
(Martin Freeman plays Danny/Veronica, which helps too.) The bit that's 'not a cliché' is the notion that personality, not gender, is what shapes people. "If you try and sit down and write about things that matter to you, like the class divide, its really dull and boring. You need a vehicle, and then it takes off, so if there's something that you're interested in, go for it. You should never pitch what you think people want - it never works because you're not as passionate about those things."
And finally: the Writer's Blog, initially seen as the shell-suit of the publishing fashion world, has apparently found its Pride. The May issue of
Writing Magazine features blogging as one of five key trends for success - a chance to interact in a more private-conversational way as well as a tool for self-promotion. I use mine as a kind of exercise in right-brain/left-brain dovetailing - what songwriter Bob Peterson calls negotiating between the engineer and the muse. Recently I've veered to the musey, so I'm balancing out with a few more oily rags this week.
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Labels: Boy meets Girl, Carol Ann Duffy
And so it's farewell Half Moon Bay. I've had my last long walks beside the windswept sands & roaring rolling waves, with carpets of bright iceplant and cedars silhouetted against that impossible cobalt sky, my final rock scramble with only pelicans and egrets sharing Moss Beach with me. No more visits to the exciting city-ness of San Francisco and Santa Cruz.
No more maple porridge & Peruvian coffee then back to my laptop for my morning stint of writing, with the chickens peering in through my window. California I'm missing you already. Thanks Mo, Anja, Kaitlyn, Erin, for taking me into your home, and thanks to everyone who made this trip such a privilege and a pleasure.
So, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much did I enjoy my month in California?
I'd give it a straight 12.
After dreamy days of mostly meandering and writing, the end of my stay suddenly starts to bustle with spoken word.
Bazaar Cafe on the north side of San Francisco has an Open Mic Night and Mo and I were lucky to both get spots and an appreciative audience. Then I have Skype interview with the very lovely
James Nash for podcast out next Friday, then a spot at Cafe Lucca and then on Sunday an interview for KZSC Santa Cruz radio with Kevin Spitzer on his early morning
Conciliation Sunday programme. The trip to Santa Cruz, with its sealions, superb surfing beach and buzzy Boardwalk, turns out to be the icing on the sumptuous cake of my California trip - especially the ride up the coast on the back of Kevin's big deep-throaty black BMW.
As well as being a radio presenter with an easy laid-back charm, Kevin is a poet and philosophical entrepreneur, using his experience of native American culture within the bigger picture of his experience of world travels and life generally to create a theory of 'Transformative Re-frames'.
We finish our conversations over breakfast at Aldos down by Santa Cruz harbour, and then take Kevin's dog Wing for a walk down to the lighthouse, watching pelicans preening and cormorants diving in the bay.
Labels: Cafe Lucca, California, Half Moon Bay, KZSC, Santa Cruz
Bulletin 4 from Half Moon Bay...
We've had a couple of mornings of sea fog. It's like a pot of paint-water has been spilled across the vivid coastline colours, thick white tendrils unfurling dramatically into the cornflower blue sky. Undeterred surfers loom faintly like a ghost army of silkies. Now we're back to the familiar cloudlessness, with temperatures in the high 30s. Sitting with a café freddo in a Mezzaluna afternoon under this improbably blue sky, I'm thinking about making a poem about El Granada in April & start to make a list:
Long surfing waves surging endlessly for miles,
Wind sweeping peachy sands impeccably smooth,
Ice plants, creamy & plum pink, smothering the dunes,
Cedars twisting into sculptures, eucalyptus rustling.
Sandpipers paddling, cormorants grooming,
Garboesque seals lounging on outcrop rocks,
Crabs scuttling, lizards... being small and lizardy.
Ginger barking me into playing ball on the lawn,
Kaitlyn puzzling over the objective correlative,
Sowing onions with Anja, Mo's songs, Mahi-mahi taco at the Flying Fish Grill...
The poetry is the list,
The being here is bliss.
California seems very far away from home (5253 miles, to a crow with stamina) but Dee Allen's poem - see link in last post - is grimly close to the G20 violence. Time difference means I'm just about to set off on another sunny walk while it's midnight in the UK and I have Rob da Bank on as I finish my laptop work stint for the day. He plays a
Dop track I can't find on Youtube but it's this Bukowski poem:
The Genius of the Crowd.
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Labels: California, Half Moon Bay
To encourage my aim of walking every coastal path in striking distance, Mo took me to his building project above the cliffs at Moss Beach and loosed me there like a homing pigeon, except without wings and -more significantly- a sense of direction. He pointed me south and said 'Remember the tide's coming in' and I set off, scuttling like a Purple Shore-crab across the boulders along the rim of the ocean.
I know the type of crab because my route took me through the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve,
'one of the most diverse regions in California' according to the pictureboard. Volcanic action has shaped the rocks into huge hoops which are a haven for all kinds of wild life: while I was focusing on some comatose seals about thirty pelicans came flapping slowly past.
"Seals don't hate us, honey, they just want to be left alone" a woman was consoling her child.
Keeping the Pacific on my right and the skyline hills on my left for about 3 hours brings me back to the harbour where I can watch the windsurfers riding the long waves with a gigantic fig icecream. Me, not the surfers. They need their hands free.
The Haight is the hippy area of San Francisco, a bit like Glastonbury but harder-edgy and with more sunshine. Mo and I had a mooch around the coffee bars and a browse in Amoeba music shop and then headed for Diamond Dave's open mic night.
Diamond Dave boasts the longest running poetry cafe in San Francisco. "On that street some call Haight and some call Love, I turned 30 in that golden summer of '67" he tells us, and introduces us to the eclectic audience: "We have a representative of the British and Irish working class, coming together to prove that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, isn't that beautiful?" Guest of the night was a self-styled beat in Ugg boots nostalgic for the murk of his drug days, but better stuff came from the floor readers, a few similarly self-indulgent but some sharp and topical.
Highlight was Dee Allen whose poem
Face Down moved the agenda from rainbow-tinted nostalgia to powerful political protest at the recent killing of Oscar Grant by two Bay Area Rapid Transit police officers.
And I'm now again lost for words. Here's a few more images:
Labels: California, Half Moon Bay, San Francisco
Vegetable connoisseurs may be fascinated to know this region boasts the title 'artichoke capital of the world'. Duartes restaurant, at nearby Pescadero, has made a sturdy reputation by supplying an enterprising range of artichoke-based dishes to hungry or curious visitors.
I was both, as we'd been walking the cliffs to watch basking seals and soaring cormorants, and the artichoke ratatouille was delicious. Deep twilight as we drove home, a rim of mystical pink separating silvering sea from darkening sky.
After ten days' nomadic exploration, I've become a connoisseur of cafe coffee. Discounting Starbucks, obviously, I've sampled Peet's (the gold standard, according to "zealous customers known as Peetniks"), Sam's (plentiful & free with breakfast), Raman's, New Leaf, and I can tell you with confidence that Mezzaluna down by the harbour wins by a Half Moon Mile. For one thing, it's served in a real cup, and actually served too, so you don't feel like a mere middleman on the disposable beaker's journey to the bin. And they make the best Americano in the Bay. I reported my findings to Mo and he said "Well they would, they're Italian."
Other discoveries:
- Blackbirds here sport scarlet epaulettes.
- PAM means jack of clubs. 'Tis in the Scrabble dictionary, so 'tmust be so.
- Huge full moon, Rain Moon, blazing like a magic lantern above the chicken shack outside my window.
Two open-mic events - my favourite was Cameron's English Pub - and a visit to the theatre.
The Coastal Repertory Theatre is a pleasant purpose-built venue - it’s where I saw Godot last year (in fact Mo was recognised and hailed for his ‘phenominal’ Pozzo) - with a very long stage. For their production of Sam Shepard’s
True West the director’s decision to use the length worked against the sense of intrusion and family claustrophobia in this story of a screenwriter challenged by the arrival of his drifter brother.
This play has been hailed as a masterpiece, simultaneously "clear, funny, naturalistic, opaque, terrifying, surrealistic", as a metaphor for "the two sides of the American present: one sophisticated, cultured, ambitious, and successful; the other alienated and outcast, raw, wild, violent... each is the double of the other, emphasizing that despite the American belief in starting anew, the past is never over but continues to intrude into the present." (Or as the review in the local paper put it: "Bottom line: As tough as things are, we can still laugh. And, after all, there’s always someone worse off.")
It's a strong theme, however you interpret it, and whether or not it's significant that the dramatist's intelligent screenplay is trounced by the more commercial pitch of his degenerate sibling, but for me the real drama is in the interaction of the brothers and the play didn’t need appearances from either the producer or the mother. Sam Shepard himself says it's not intended as "symbolic or metaphorical or any of that stuff. I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided. It's a real thing, double nature. I think we're split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal."
Still on the subject of theatre: "I want to be genuinely shocked. I want plays that shine a light into the darkest recesses of the human soul, that lead the audience on a journey that leaves us breathless and invigorated even if we've been terrified and deeply shaken by what we've seen. And while I'm not asking our current playwrights to be as great as Shakespeare or Euripides, I am asking them to remember that those are the heroes of the tradition in which they work."
Louise Kennedy reviews for Boston, but I found her rant at the current state of theatre in
THE WEEK over my breakfast coffee, picked out as a
Best Column. Playwrights, she says, shouldn't attempt to compete with the 'heightened version of reality' of films and television. "In moving away from the essence of drama - that is, the subtle and expert use of language and carefully developed action to illuminate human life - toward thrill-seeking and adrenaline jolts, playwrights give up their own most precious gifts.
And the audience? Jaded by the unnatural shocks of electronic entertainment, we remain unmoved by its awkward imitators, and hungry for the real, visceral, cathartic thrills that true theater can provide."
On Saturday I varied my coastal path route by walking along the beach, which for most of its two-and-a-half miles was disconcertingly deserted for a holiday weekend apart from clusters of birds, possibly having a Hitchcock conference. I started thinking about all the warning signs: HAZARDOUS WAVE CONDITIONS EXIST EVEN ON CALM DAYS - WAVES CAN SWEEP PEOPLE INTO THE OCEAN before eventually reaching civilisation in the form of windsurfers, a scramble-up-able cliff, and a cafe.
And now it's Easter Sunday, the chocolate bunnies are risen, and I am unbelievably nearly halfway through my stay in paradise... must find a wicked apple before I go.
Labels: California, Half Moon Bay, Sam Shepard, True West
April in California... I loved it here in Autumn so I'm back for a month to write and to walk. The writing's up to me; for walk routes, my friend & host Mo has drawn me a sketch map of El Granada and its environs. We're about 400 yards from the Pacific here, with a coastal path all around Half Moon Bay. The snag is Highway 1, which also hugs the coastline, lies between me and the sea.
Mo's map shows two options: I can take the back roads to the harbour, where traffic lights allow the (nippy) pedestrian a chance to dash across the 6 lanes of ceaseless traffic, or I can creep through the (nearly dry) drain under the road at El Granada.
And then I have the freedom to walk for miles with barely a sound but birdsong and the rolling breakers. And the wind - this wind would skin a goat, Mo warned me before I came, but the sun is strong and the sky so immensely high, so densely blue. I see only a few other people on these paths, but they greet me like they've been recruited by some Californian 'Let's make visitors feel cherished!' campaign, offering smiles, handshakes, even names.
After a week of retreatful days & early nights I went along with Mo to a music evening - a gentle event but pleasant. I can't play guitar or sing so I offered a couple of me pomes.
Labels: California
An idyllic weekend staying with college-days friends, chewing the fat and the Mothers Day chox and doing a lot of walking. We went to Grantchester, famously the haunt of Rupert Brooke, where the orchard is now a hugely popular cafe so there is indeed honey still for tea. You can also pick up a free booklets about the 'Grantchester Group' which apparently comprised Forster, Russell, Keynes, Virginia Woolf and Wittgenstein as well as the soldier poet. Alongside photos & poems there are intriguing quotes, like Keynes on camping
: don't make one nearly so ill as one would suppose, Woolf on Forster:
I always feel him shrinking sensitively from me, and Russell on Wittgenstein:
he would never have noticed such small matters as bursting shells when he was thinking about logic. There's a little museum too, with pictures of Brooke's grave and statue on Skyros which made me nostalgic for the those Greek skies. Here's the
yet unacademic stream, along the river walk to Cambridge.
"We don't care if it's by a man or a woman or a dog, all we care about is the story" is what women's magazine editors say, according to Alison Clink's encouraging talk at the
Bath Writers Workshop where she and I were both guests on Wednesday. We were warmly welcomed by hosts Kevan Manwaring and David Lassman, and found the writers of Bath a friendly and participative audience. No canine members, I'm glad to say.
A retrospective footnote this week: positive feedback on
Chimes of Freedom in the local paper (read the review
here soon) and from our illustrious lead reader, who enjoyed the ‘radical’ edge in Frome - and thanks, Sharon, for the positive vibe on your
blog!
It's appropriate maybe I discover 70s cult classic
Harold and Maude this week. Elderly Maude has a sound philosophy of life - "Everyone has a right to make an arse out of themselves" - and a catchy theme song
if you want to sing out, sing out and when young Harold gives her 'the nicest gift anyone has given me in a long time' she throws it into the San Francisco Bay saying blithely "That way, I'll always know where it is."
Which brings me nicely to my own departure, in 2 days time, for a month in California. Not that I plan to sling anything in the bay - in fact I'm not really sure what I plan to do. Watch, as they say, this space.
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Labels: Bath Writers Workshop, Grantchester
A varied week.
On Wednesday Caleb & I recreated our collaborative sonnet
Je M'aime at the film studio for the Frome Festival Cabaret, once Howard has edited in the cello sequence and added his own animational flair.
(Loo, lippy, and narcissistic poses are integral to the poem; paper bag was Caleb's idea.)
And on Thursday a complete contrast in mood:
Because the poet is the only person
who never forgets
the meaning of freedom(Yandamiro Restano, from a Cuban prison, 1993)
Chimes of Freedom at the Merlin, based on readings from persecuted writers around the world, in support of
Pen.
Ten local writers and artists reading poems, letters, and speeches from Euripedes to Pinter, all passionately insisting on the right to free speech.
Booker judge Victoria Glendinning, who is among her other literary roles the vice-president of English Pen, introduced the evening and read a moving anti-war speech from dissident Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Stories of imprisonment, torture, exile -
Come and see the blood in the streets, Pablo Neruda challenged the world after the murder of Lorca. Powerful stuff and inevitably dark - but with a dazzling lift after the break from musical performances by six of the Amnesty Youth Group, as stunningly talented as they were self-assured.
And finally: Andrew Motion
speaks out at the end of his 10-year tenure as Poet Laureate to berate journalists who 'turn poetry into a kind of Aunt Sally by making it look ridiculous and out of touch'. Poetry is, he says, 'a fundamental requirement of the human spirit, as natural and necessary as breathing.'
Words worth writing, and perhaps even worth waiting ten years for.
And who's next for the poison chalice? Wendy Cope says the post is ridiculous and should be axed, but Roger McGough demurs: "It's a rather nice tradition to have, and anything that gets poetry mentioned is fine by me - it can put a lot of pressure on a poet, but if you can't handle it, don't take it on." So, Luke Wright, Poet Laureate... Why not?
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Labels: Chimes of Freedom, je m'aime, PEN
There’s an out-of-season indolence along the sea front at Shanklin, souvenir shops still shut, entry to the lovely Chine area locked and the cliff-top lift closed till official holiday time begins. None of this detracts from the Isle of Wight's timewarp charm, which starts with the London tube-train waiting at the ferry point to transport the visitor on a rattling journey of nostalgia.
As Yannis our host at The Grange says: 'Here you are a time-traveller. You walk down the street and you walk into the 1950s.'
My last
Find Your Voice weekend here was a year ago - the 2008
Grangewriters had their reunion while I was back on the island - and though the group was great the weather was not. This time both were fab. Best bits: golden gorse and daffodils, red squirrels playing tag in the pines, spring notes of birdsong, and above all supportive friendly company and wonderful writing, brave, quirky, inventive & funny. For a sample - and a lush seascape image - see
Jay's blog where the 'recipe for Shanklin' says it all.
Regular readers - don't laugh, there are some - of this blog may recall my comments on the revival of William Saroyan's play
The Time of Your Life last December. I talked about an 'unsatisfying ending' but I wasn't nearly so disparaging as one reviewer of the original London production, 63 years ago this month. "The high spot of the evening was the incursion of an anonymous drunk. For this no marks can be allowed to the author" his summary concluded, adding dryly: "Certainly a play to be seen; one could hardly read it."
It's a voice I remember well. Regular readers of this blog will have to delve the archives a bit to realise why this review struck such a chord with me, as it was back in August last year I wrote "My father was a drama critic and he had a typewriter that must have been twinned with a lemon grater..." Yes, my regular and irregular friends, the H.G.M. at the end of this and several other pieces in
Theatre World magazine in March 1946 was himself. My father, younger than I ever knew him but clearly no less acidic.
I owe this emotional reunion to the lost world of my London childhood to a pile of just-post-war issues of this once-premier theatrical magazine, dug out of my dramaturgic friend's attic. "I thought you might like to see these" he said, and indeed I did.
Theatre World was heavy on black-and-white photos featuring kohl eyepencil and intense expression, and featured photo-stories of the major productions rather as
The Sun uses graphic illustrations on their problem page.
HG continued to review in his own distinctive, often lugubrious, style until the late 70s, and was particularly proud of his appraisal of
The Mousetrap: "I give it a week." His review of the 1946 Stratford-upon-Avon Festival concludes: "There were many children in the audience and from them the loudest applause followed the murder of Macduff's son and his mother's screams as she is strangled. Such are these times."
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Labels: The Grange, Theatre World
Black comedy hour again...
Blavatsky's Tower (at the Alma Tavern Theatre till March 21st) shows Sartre got it wrong: Hell is not other people, Hell is an agoraphobic family incarcerated in the top flat of a tower block with a crazy father who is the architect of this cultural monument to dysfunctionality. Gaudi built his cathedral high so the angels could reach it easily but angels aren't so easily lured here. Even the doctor who staggers up fifteen flights with an armchair can't save a trio who have normalised incest and incineration of their father's corpse in the roof garden. "We used his copy of Paradise Lost to start the blaze." And the comedy comes in... where exactly? Oddly enough, quite a lot, in Moira Buffini's script and in the actors' interpretations of this Chekhovian family dynamic, where the 'crushed' world below the high-rise is their own unattainable Moscow. Oliver Millingham as the patricidal son is especially moving.
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Labels: Alma Tavern
Mardi Gras night at Frome Poetry Cafe: a dash of razz-ma-tazz, a score of performers, and a Garden Cafe-ful of enthusiastic audience. The theme of celebration enjoyed wide interpretations, from Stephen Ledbury's ode to Shepton Mallet carnival to John Payne's charming Quantocks bestiary, from Bev's Salvadorian story to Lucy Howlett's fish-eye view of fairground life.
James Stokoe brought us Euridice and Rose Flint evoked Venus: "If love isn't around a Mardi Gras, I don't know where she'll be." A fantastic range of delightful reads and performances.
Actor Cameron Stewart found his grandfather a hard act to follow, so instead he's chosen to take that act around the country as a one-man show called
'My Grandfather's Great War'. The grandfather is Captain Alexander Stewart who fought in the three major assaults of the first world war with extraordinary heroism and survived to tell the tale in a handwritten diary forming the basis for this performance, which reached the Ustinov in Bath last week. The diaries have much of the grim humour of
Blackadder Goes Forth, including their own genuine General Melchett who agrees one particular mission is deathly lunacy but adds that it's the Brigadier's order, so "do your best, eh?". An amazing record of a man of exemplary moral qualities, but for me the most powerfully affecting words were the grandson's own as he ends his proud and passionate tribute: "I'm confused. All war is abomination. What the devil did you think you were doing, running around in the mud slaughtering each other?"
Change of pace again on Saturday, with the launch of the
Concertina Books weekend event at Widcombe Studios in Bath. Ruralist writer Peter Please is making a stand against the mass production of books, creating instead something 'quirky and individual' which combines old and new technologies. He has the support of John Moat, co-founder of the Arvon foundation, and several luminously talented writers and artists who contributed words and images to the project. There were readings too, some gentle, some charismatic; the whole evening a reminder that prim Bath can do bohemian, delightfully, too.
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Labels: Concertina Books, Mardi Gras, My Grandfather's Great War
I'm disconcerted to find myself in agreement with Salman Rushdie on the Slumdog subject - although he is considerably more irascible about this 'banal fluff.. slum tourism', commenting in the Guardian: 'To watch your home town's story being told in this comically absurd, tawdry fashion is, finally, to grow annoyed.'
Back in Bristol, Polly Teale from
Shared Experience, was at Bristol Old Vic to reveal 'how to weave a more physical approach into the building of character' to sixteen keen would-be playwrights. Hurtling around with chairs and intensive text analysis combined to confirm: objectives and obstacles are the essence of drama. "A good scene can be quite spare, a lot of it will come from the playing of it."
Bath Literature Festival boasts 'debate discovery passion and inspiration' and like all good festivals there's far too much to do. I went to hear Debby Holt, Sarah Duncan, and Robyn Sisman discuss the place - & status - of romance, an entertaining debate which proved a point made by Robyn: the novels may be light but that doesn't mean they're easy to write, despite the literary prejudice against romantic comedy. As Sarah said: women's issues are no less valuable than man-genres like Goth the Impaler. But can the complexities of a relationship be conveyed in a novel designed to entertain? asks chair Caroline Kington. Debby says an emphatic 'Yes - you can make a point more effectively in a funny way." I agree, and I wish I could remember who said
Humour tells the truth, but faster. 
Writer and publisher Diana Cambridge has a neat take on relationships too: they're our way of warding off death, she suggests, by making life dangerous and dynamic. We met for long nibbly lunch at Cafe Rouge, and later I was back in the Guildhall ready to be dazzled by the heavyweight talents of literary award-winners Helen Dunmore, Jane Gardam, and Rose Tremain. The brochure blurb predicted converse on
writing about love and yearning, youth and old age, loneliness, sex and exile. Irresistible. In the event they discussed form, research, and something defined, somewhat pompously, as 'the writerly frame of mind'. Perhaps it's a problem of format. Mathematically, a trio of writers talking should be three times as interesting a solo subject in the chair, but actually this triple division of topic feels superficial even in a heavy-going event like this. Paradoxically the chick-lit authors in the morning event achieved interactive discussion more successfully to create a sense of reciprocal interest. Or maybe it was the chandeliers in the great hall upstaging all below.
And finally... a word & image miscellany from here, there, and beyond:
"It's fun and it's difficult but that's the combination that, sometimes, gets you through" - Larry from U2 on making music. True of writing & life too.
"It's the best rush I've ever had and I'm utterly, hopelessly, addicted to it" - T.C.Boyle on writing. He's allegedly done 'vandalism, alcohol, drugs, maniacal driving, and the writings of Kerouac' so he should know.
LET DE MAN SPEAK, LET DE MAN BE HERD - Islamic hiphop site.
(Heartfelt echo is from a shopfront in Frome.)
"Can written language ever capture and recreate spoken language, or is it a place where the book is a lesser place than the tongue and the ear?"
Ian McMillan's piece in
The Reader is about writing in dialect, but i think it's a good question for every writer.
'In all Fairhurst's work there is a powerful human presence through actions, intervention, emotion and humour.'
Arnolfini guide to the Angus Fairhurst exhibition, on till the end of the month.
One of the first things you learn as a writer is that you write what you can, not what you want. - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, quoted by Debby.
Crysse finds her niche in the temple of Diana at Stourhead.
Labels: Bath Literary Festival, Shared Experience
Emerging blinking into the sunlight from the nightlights of Bristol's theatreland, I find Bedminster shops are full of.... theatre.
Trading Local is a Show of Strength initiative, using 19 shops to stage 5-minute monologues based on their own location and trade - each one repeated 3 times, so by scampering up & down North Street an ardent audient could catch them all. I didn't manage that, but the ones I saw were great: among them
Bernard the table lamenting his lot at the antique shop (Oliver Millingham gave great voice to Matthew Oven's tale from beneath candlewick drapings)
Tracy Wall's recreation of the
Poet Butcher, a real-life character who sold doggerel along with faggots in the 19th Century, and Caleb Parkin's
Units of Memory at Compuwave which took a poignant look at "life broken down into its componant parts." And I loved the reluctant tattoee musing on her graphic options, noting the sign on the door:
"No Children, No Drunks - I should think that just about rules out anyone who wants to come in." Satiric comedy may seem easy; evoking warmth rather than a patronised stereotype isn't, but writer Joe Hobbs & performer Kim Hick succeeded.
And as
Slumdog Millionnaire scoops the ultimate award on Oscar night, my question is this: how can brutality & sentimentalism emerge as 'the feel-good movie of the decade'? Fabulous soundtrack I agree, with brilliant camera work, and great montage ending, but the storyline was thin as the characterisation and the fairytale is embedded in realism as bloody as the rags on the eyesockets of the blinded beggar boy.
It's complex, I know. I wouldn't begrudge director Danny Boyle his Tigger-bouncing moment of glory or Simon Beaufoy his credit for the screenplay, but you have to search to find the name of the original writer: Vikas Swarup. And over in India there are riots over the 'humiliating' term in the title.
But is it the
dog or the
slum that's the problem? A perspective from an Indian journalist in
NYTimes insists that
Its depiction as a slum does little justice to the reality of Dharavi... (which is) safer than most American cities. The crowd is efficiently absorbed by the thousands of tiny streets branching off bustling commercial arteries. Also, you won’t be chased by beggars or see hopeless people loitering — Dharavi is probably the most active and lively part of an incredibly industrious city. People have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state — including having set up a highly functional recycling industry that serves the whole city. Promoting prejudice, creating misinformation - even
fear of reigniting the violence against Muslims of 1992 so graphically depicted in the film.... so although the title itself is merely a slur from the bad-cop who turned good-cop, objections are not as simple as one online comment seems to think: "Tough Shit. They don’t have any money to see it anyway."
Censorship is also the theme of
Chimes of Freedom, a Spoken Word event at the Merlin on March 19th featuring poems and prose by writers across the world who lacked - and lack - the luxury we see as our right: 'Freedom of Speech.' It's on behalf of
PEN, and former president Victoria Glendinning is joining the lineup of local writers who'll be reading. If you're in the area, come along.
Labels: PEN, Show of Strength, Slum Dog, Trading Local
A five-star revue from Venue for
On the Edge: "What characterises all four plays is efficient writing, crisp direction, and therapeutic humour... Remedy for winter blues available now at the Alma Tavern." And the audience feedback is great too. (It's all on the
Stepping Out website, click on the left-hand boxes.) Makes me come over all Kate Winslet. Other purr-making comments from Bristol
online listings ".. each story involving wonderfully unique storylines, all delivered with unwavering energy, this is an intriguing and satisfying way to contemplate serious issues, provoking laughter throughout a week of almost nightly sell-out performances."
And a huge thanks to my friends - more than 30 of you - who swelled the audience, and the even-more who sent good wishes when there were no tickets left.
Moving south, and back in time...
Road Hill House was the scene of the most sensational murder case of the 19th Century, and arguably responsible for the development of crime fiction as the genre we know today, with a wily sleuth uncovering secrets & lies from tiny clues and psychological tells. The building was renamed Langham House, and local spelling has changed to Rode, but it's the village I used as setting for my first novel
Frozen Summer, so I found Kate Summerscale's account of
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher particularly fascinating. "The dizzying expansion of the press in the1850s prompted worries that readers might be corrupted by the sex and violence in newspaper articles" she explains: "The new journalists shared much with the detectives; they were seen alternately as crusaders for the truth and sleazy voyeurs.” Freud recognised that therapy was psychic detection: "No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”
Still a few months before the 2009 Frome Festival brochure is out, but 2008's Short Story winners and details of this year's competition are now on the
Festival website. Watch, as they say, this space.
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Labels: On the Edge
Bristol Evening Post has done us proud with their
Crackerjack review of
On The Edge. "...barrowloads of deft writing, some absolutely lovely comic acting and a hit of thought-provoking conundrums. Chock-full of bright ideas, a tight group of actors and a slick series of sets manage to punch far above their weight... The voracious appetite among Bristolians for good new playwrights continues to be well fed."
My favourite bit is being nominated for a medal for describing baklava as “a hamster drowned in honey”. Thanks, Sophie Lomax - and your notion of a 15-minute play as "theatrical espresso" deserves a mention in despatches too.
Reading Matters on BBC4 set out to prove that words can literally electrify us, and reading about an act creates the same brain response as doing it. Science writer Rita Carter led us through this mental maze in a blue pashmino and Tory hairdo looking like she was off for a bridge night rather than an MEG scan. Our brain, she explains, was never designed for reading or writing. It remoulds itself, like a lego truck remade into a tractor, combining the oral linguistic function with the ability to distinguish between prey & predator in order to create a new ability: distinguishing between symbols & interpreting them as language. Hence empathy. It was all very convincing. Use it or lose it, said Rita, because your brain is still on the move.
And speaking of empathy, I've been meaning to say something about
Being Human (TV, BBC3) because it has more interesting stories about half-lives than smiting, rending, and shooting them to bits. Humanity, not demonising, is what the world needs now... and it's better scripted and funnier than Demons too. I'm getting very fond of the characters: Annie the ghost with self-esteem issues, George the rueful werewolf and gorgeous Mitchell the vegetarian vampire. ( Mitchell's
prequel is a neat story in its own right.)
Annie's a spectre after my own heart: last week, determining to find out why she's remained trapped in a shared house in Bristol since her demise, she announced "I don't know how, but I'm pretty sure it will involve some highlighter pens and a large pad of paper." George's new thing is dating: "We need some ground rules about guests," he tells Mitchell: "- like, don't kill them."
And there's lots of love and sex and death too, what else do you need for a Sunday night sit-com?
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Labels: Being Human, On the Edge, Reading Matters
The snow brought Frome not so much to a standstill as a slide. The main road was briefly closed, with cars abandoned at odd angles or, more ominously, slipping backwards down the hill with horn on full alert. Police advice not to travel seemed a good call, so reluctantly I missed the final rehearsals of the
On the Edge plays - but the thaw came just in time for Sunday night's
Love Cafe in Bath.
Enterprising organisers Sue Boyle and Caleb Parkin had created a scripted evening which survived the weather warnings with compliant readers standing in for absentee poets. "I think we've got the aggressive butterfly" said Sue, doing the roll call, "do we have the melancholy waitress?" We did, and all the humour and pathos you'd expect from the night's theme.
'Je m'aime' was an email sonnet collaboration between Caleb and me, performed by Arabella Butler and Paul Hurley with Caleb on cello - all I contributed on the night was some Jane Birkinesque passionate gasping. Great fun - check it out on Youtube
here.
Still on things lyrical, the next
Frome Poetry Cafe is on March 4th, with a theme of celebration. Just because it's been a long winter.
From stage to page: Diana Athill’s memoir
Somewhere Towards The End, recipient of the Costa award for biography. The Daily Mail published an
extract focusing on her sex life, apparently with much the same view as Samuel Johnson had of women expressing opinions: "like a dog's walking on his hind legs: It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all."
“The woman who worked her way through the Kama Sutra in her sixties – and at 91 refuses to worry about death - reveals how to grow old disgracefully” marvelled the Mail header, adding as further headline tasters
The delights of late-flowering lust and
Wear what you damn well like. 
The DM has never been bothered by tedious constraints like consistency and was soon back on ageist form with an acid comment on 75-year old Joan Collins posing in
Hello: "Hardly conventional for a pensioner."
Guardian columnist Michele Hanson responded tersely: "And what is a
conventional pensioner meant to wear? Maroon, or navy, or beige... tracksuit bottoms with elasticated waists, a sure sign that your sex life is no more.. but then none of that matters, when one is a "pensioner". As Michele's rant points out, a pensioner can be anyone from around 60 to over 100. "That's people with up to 40 years between them, all lumped together... No one would expect a five-year-old and a 45-year-old to wear the same frock."
All true. But I wish I was enjoying the old lady's memoir more. It seems sad that a woman who was once a courageously unconventional thinker now muses on misapplied lipstick and Max Factor facecream. It's unpretentious and honest, and the affectionate side of her bohemianism is a delight, but was it really the most interesting memoir the Costa board received? Or is this an example of what Marlene Dietrich called the Deathbed award: doled out indulgently and with a fine sprinkling of cynicism.
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Labels: Bath Poetry Cafe, Diana Athill
The annual Salon for affiliated artists of the Merlin theatre coincided with the heaviest snow seen in the southwest for 18 years, a fact of special significance as our venue was the Bath Arms, a charmingly eccentric hostelry on the Longleat estate... delightful for rambling in the forest but disconcerting when the track to the main road glazed into a skating rink.
We talked, among other associated artistic things, of the influence of social networking filters on modes of learning. By coincidence or zeitgeist, I'd been listening last week to Rupert Sheldrake on the radio propounding something similar with reference to the whole of nature. Not that crystals or creatures have social networking sites, but that they evolve, as we do, through collective memory. 'The laws of nature didn't spring into being fully formed at the moment of the Big Bang, like a kind of cosmic Napoleonic code,' he says: 'Through morphic resonance, the patterns of activity in self-organizing systems are influenced by similar patterns in the past, giving each species a collective memory.' So they're not actually laws, just habits. Sheldrake's classic
A New Science of life was tagged by one reviewer "the best candidate for burning there has been for many years" when first published, which brings me neatly on to censorship and Jaqueline Wilson.
Yes, amazingly, the Children's Laureate and Queen-Mum of young fiction faced removal from the shelves of Asda until her publishers agreed to change the word 'twat' to 'twit' in her new book
My Sister Jodie. Over 150,000 copies were already sold, apparently, before 3 complaints came to light. Who are these prits, winkers, and siddoes, one wonders.
Back
On the Edge, rehearsals are increasingly fascinating. On Wednesday we were in the tiny Upstairs Theatre at the Lansdown, snow whirling outside, and I quizzed Ollie about how to become a character - or in his case two characters in the same scene, which needs different-coloured highlighters for a start. He learns his lines as a monologue because, he says sensibly, he wouldn't know what other people are going to say. His process is to decide what the character wants, what's stopping him, and what would happen if he can't get it. When he's got these intentions, he works line by line to decide emotional action. Thrilling to watch the drama emerging from its script chrysalis -
Venue magazine has previewed our production and tagged it as their Choice in the listing, but there's more snow forecast for the first night...
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Labels: Jaqueline Wilson, Merlin Theatre, Oliver Millingham, Rupert Sheldrake, Upstairs at the Lansdown
Chris Loveless, founder/director of
Fallen Angel Theatre Company, says black comedy is his favourite kind of drama. Which is great, because he's directing my play
Thursday Coma and I've so enjoyed watching him and the actors work on "making the invisible visible" - including the humour lurking, I hope, in the darkness.
"What's the intention in that line?" he asks, as we sit round the table deconstructing my script over tea and Oliver Millingham's chocolate brownies, until I'm really not sure any more and my words start to look like soldier ants.
Challenging, and immensely exciting.
Oh What A Performance! was the typically quirky title Dave Angus chose for his monthly poetry event in St James Vaults in Bath. Dave, who so sadly died last month, was a droll performer as well as - in his own words - a militant atheist, so it was appropriate that the poetic community celebrated him with song, sonnet, and story in a memorial OWAP night last Friday. Organised by Richard Selby and attended by about a hundred people, the atmosphere was more upbeat than mournful, with many like Bard of Bath Master Duncan paying tribute to Dave's encouragement. Mary Palmer summed up: "Dave was really good at wrapping up a serious message in a lot of humour." Personally, I'll always remember him explaining the psychedelic connection between
The Owl and the Pussycat and
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds at last year's Frome festival. Sailing, flying... all our stories are journeys.
Humour is truth, and as Peter Ustinov said, "Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious."
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Labels: Alma Tavern Theatre, Chris Loveless, Dave Angus, Thursday Coma
Cotswolds Conference Centre almost seems too comfortable for a Creative Writing course: warm rooms, free newspapers and constant coffee - don't real writers need an icy garret? or at least a draft and no choice of puddings. Apparently not; despite the indulgent surroundings of Farncombe Estate, my weekend group was brilliant, gelling easily and producing an inspiring range of styles and stories.
I drove home on a high, at least until the road disappeared in a sleet-storm that drowned out the radio and obliterated the landscape. It was as if all the local rivers, partially frozen, had reared up like pythons before shaking themselves back down to earth.
Poor naked wretches that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and raggedness, defend you? a mentalist monarch with realm-rage might well have wondered.
Rehearsals for my plays in the
On the Edge programme at the Alma Tavern Theatre begin this week and director Pameli Benham invited me to come along for the thrill & privilege of witnessing my words brought alive by professionals.
The actors, Meg Whelan and Kirsty Cox, are both fabulous, morphing into their roles before my eyes and turning Pameli's diningroom into a Greek island terrace even with no sunshine spot or potted geraniums. My response to this empathetic interpretation was an intense desire to rewrite the entire play - or rather, to edit ruthlessly. I started extracting lines like they were prickly pear splinters. Exposition -
Out! Repetition -
Out! Gratuitous - obvious - cliché -
out, out, out !!! Best fun I've had with my boots on all winter.
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Labels: Alma Tavern Theatre, Farncombe Estate
Idiot Colony, at the Ustinov last week, was devised by
Redcape Theatre from the shockingly true stories of women institutionalised during the 1940s for having children by American GIs. The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act was in operation till the 1950s had a 'moral deficiency' clause and could be activated without a psychiatrist - it only needed the prejudice and hostility of two GPs and a relative. The three women performers evoked their characters stories succinctly and the 'business' was impressive but what touched me most was the words. Clever and self-confident performances but less stage skill and more speech would have made it even more emotionally memorable.
Nikki Bennett's party at the Bath Royal Sci & Lit Institute sounded a little bit daunting, with twenty-five performers lined up. It was actually a delightful evening, smoothly run with a generous bar and fabulous buffet and everyone keeping to their prescribed 3 minutes. A really lovely night.
And on this
inauguration day when America was told "the world has changed and we must change with it", if you've ever wondered who writes Obama's speeches, the name (according to the Independent) is Jon Favreau and he's 27. Obama disgorges his thoughts and Favreau crafts them into prose, and the pair then work in tandem. With disgorged thoughts like "Our patchwork heritage is a strength and not a weakness" and "We have chosen hope over fear", I guess the the soundbites write themselves.
And finally... Bath Poetry Cafe is putting on a Love Fest for February, with feisty Caleb Parkin and foxy Sue Boyle in charge. If you say it's a love poem, then it IS a love poem, says Sue, and wants "as many cafe poets and audience as possible to get a chance to read" in this UNUSUALLY CONVIVIAL, ENGAGING AND ORIGINAL EVENT. Tickets, from bathpoetrycafe@googlemail.com, are going fast.
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Labels: Bath Poetry Cafe, Nikki Bennett at the BRSLI, Redcape Theatre
"As you get older you realise that everyone is odd, in different ways" says Debby Holt at the lively launch of her new book
Love Affairs for Grownups. This is a story about two odd people who - like the rest of us, according to the author - do not get wiser as they get older. "They're constantly stymied by things that happened in the past which they don't talk about." Debby ended with a short reading, just enough to show the novel is funny and fascinating, and invited questions. "Do you think your heroines are getting tougher?" asked one gentleman. "They're drinking less" Debby agreed.
The January meeting of Words@ Frome Festival always has a sense of vague urgency. The festival - voted by
Time Out the best in the UK last year - isn't till July but brochure copy has to be ready next month... New events, regular favourites, and the return of the popular 'Authors and Publishers' day at the library.
Recording Miss Daisy:
Quantock Close, our team effort local radio soap, is progressing and Mike is working on other writerly programmes. Here's me reading my adaptation of Daisy Ashford's classic
The Young Visiters as a 5-part 'Book at Bedtime'. All recordings should start with salmon and wine, in my opinion.
And only a week now before rehearsals for my plays at the Alma Tavern Theatre begin, only three-and-a-bit weeks before the opening night!
Bookings 0117 9467899 or online
here.
Silly story of the week: American author JF Lewis is in trouble with his local church because his humorous debut novel
Staked features a vampire. If it had featured a tortured man with blood dripping from his head and side as he died in agony, maybe that would have been ok.
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Labels: Debby Holt, Frome FM, On the Edge
Exciting news: my plays, showing at the
Alma Tavern Theatre next month, have been cast: Oliver Millingham, whose work I've seen at the Tobacco Factory, Jo Lancastle, and Meg Whelan. It all seems so much closer now.
They're part of the 'Writing in the Margins' programme of short plays: my two are
Thursday Coma (when it's your mother's funeral and your estranged brother is arriving so you can't see your therapist, a quick coma seems a good solution) and
Your Time Starts Now (co-listening? just like conversation, isn't it? what could be simpler...)
Richard (Clockers) Price says every character you create is yourself: "How do I create a young black urban drug dealer? He’s me. Everybody’s the author, it’s all fiction." That was on
Front Row this week. Anne Enright said something similar in
The Guardian: "Writing fiction is a habit of flipping the world or tilting it... the way children make things up all the time. We are just picking up a fish finger and flying it across the dinner table: "Vrrrrrrrrrrrr vrrrrrrrrr vrrrrrrrrrroooooooom".
And on the subject of flying fish fingers, I'm loving
Demons, a brilliant new vampire series with a wicked script. Gene Hunt turns Ghostbuster to aid novice warrior Luke in battling unbeings and entities. "We don’t care to name them" he growls in a softly unidentifiable transatlantic accent, " We just smite 'em."
Luke is shocked at the interruption to his revision and unfamiliar with the opposition.
"Is that an entity?"
"No Luke, that is a rat."
They meet Gareth from the Office wearing a beak, and set about smiting him. "Very well smit, if I may say so" concedes the unbeing before combusting. Absolutely excellent.
Still on a vampiric theme,
Van Helsing, a few years old now but shown this week on ITV2, is overlong but highly entertaining. Anna Valerious, aka Kate Beckingsale in a costume blending grechen with catwoman, must kill Dracula to save her family from purgatory and Transylvanians from being swooped on by a plague of winged vampires. Igor and Frankenstein are involved too, and Van Helsing has a sidekick friar called Carl, like the Lone Ranger and Tonto. There’s an awful lot of whooshing about and things flung dizzily around before exploding but the best scenes are frankly spoofy: the undead giving a whole new meaning to hissy fits, and Carl like Bond’s Q showing Van Helsing his state-of-the-art equipment (a cross bow).
David Wenham as the friar had most of the offbeat lines: "Why does it smell like wet dog in here?" he mused after a particularly gruesome werewolf battle. As Richard Price says, “If you put the way people really talk on the page, it would be interminable... you take all that stuff and compress it into a shapeliness, and it’s fake but it does have the appearance of, wow, this is how people really speak."
Frome library writers' group met this week for an excellent workshop led by Val Fellows on the timely topic of New Beginnings, reminding us that every next moment fits that category. New beginnings means starting from now. It doesn’t have to be box-fresh, this start. It only has to be illuminated by mindfulness of mortality, knowing that in this moment we are alive.
Footling footnote of the week: According to stats, the average Briton spends two-and-a-quarter hours every day feeling anxious. I wish I knew how they cope with the other 21 and three quarters. I grade my anxieties from 1 to 12, which happens also to be the scale used by Philip Glenister's smiting character for the nastiness of entities and unbeings.
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Labels: demons, On the Edge, Val Helsing
It’s the first day of January and my FB friends....
- Are eating chocolate cake
In a house full of dogs and hangovers
Wishing everyone glucklich dingdong
- Are wearing a woolly hat tis cold today
Reading Plato in bed
Saying happy new year, ya mofos!
- Are baking bread
Having watched a massive firework display
Wishing everyone a brilliant sparkly starry creative and loving new year
- Are yoga-ing by the red sea
Saying thanks for a fun night
And hoping all your dreams come true
- Are wondering why it doesn’t snow in Hong Kong
Yelling Happy New Year from Glastonbury Tor
And wishing everyone all we wish ourselves
(adding confusingly
May you all break eggs with sticks.)
So we made it to the end of the year. And now, slipping between melting ice-caps and teetering past abandoned outlets of retail giants, another precious little New Year tiptoes in. Time for a detox, a reprogramme at the gym, and a new To-Do writing list... my focus is on scripts, with Frome writers' soap Quantock Court scheduled to go out on local radio soon, and my 2 short plays on in Bristol next month.
And if you ever doubted the power of drama to change the world, muse on this titbit from the Blackadder documentary: more than half the regimental goats in the British army are now called Baldrick.
Twilight is a teen flick so obviously I went to see it for research purposes only, not for the charismatic allure of Robert Pattinson as a vegetarian vampire with super-hero skills and a passion for running up the tall pines of misty Washington forests with his girlfriend clinging on like a besotted backpack. Bella is the ultimate bored teen, so being sucked into a state of immortal sleeplessness is an irresistible lure, though that could be because the vampire gang are kindof the in-crowd at school, and Edward is especially good at biology although his mood swings kindof give her whiplash.
The blending of filmic conventions is actually quite well done, or maybe I have an adolescent longing for supernatural schizophrenia too. Edward initially attempts to explain his sudden superhuman strength as “an adrenalin rush – you can Google it.” Instead she googles vampires, and he comes clean.
“I’m the world’s most dangerous predator. Everything about me invites you in. And I’m designed to kill.”
“I trust you.”
“Don’t.”
But this is a love story, so of course she can... though not the other vampires, who turn a stormy baseball game into a showdown from
The Warriors and then there's a car chase and a massive fight in a hall of mirrors... I hope I'm not spoiling the story for you. Go see it, there's too much rushing through misty forests and very little sex but an unexpectedly good end.
And after the best seasonal celebrations I've enjoyed for years, the news that Harold Pinter died on Christmas day. "The most original, stylish and enigmatic writer in the post-war revival of British theatre" mourns The Telegraph. "The most influential, provocative and poetic dramatist of his generation" says The Guardian.
The Dumb Waiter , which I first saw in a student production in Northern Ireland, was my rite of passage into the power of contemporary drama. I admired his uncompromising opposition, undeterred by critical disdain, to the Iraq war - I had the chance to read his poem
Where was the dead body found? at a PEN event organised by Victoria Glendinning last year, and was dead proud when Antonia Fraser told me Harold would have liked it and she would tell him about it.
Adrian Mitchell, too, chose the deep mid-winter to depart - as I discovered from Facebook status tributes.
Only love can unlock locked-up love he wrote, unfashionably, when the trend to demonise inept parenting was just beginning in the 80s. I so agree.
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Labels: Adrian Mitchell, Harold Pinter, Twilight
The Finborough Theatre has a reputation for staging great drama so I made the trip to Earls Court this week to see a revival of William Saroyan's Politzer-winning play
The Time of Your Life. Somewhere between Altman's
Short Cuts and an early episode of
Cheers, it's billed as a comedy but the shadow of Second World War looms across Nick's downtown San Francisco joint where drunks, gamblers, whores, delusionists all wander in to show us their hopes and their loneliness. Twenty-seven of them, on a stage that spills across the auditorium so audience and actors share tables and pretzels. Nick runs his bar like a sleazy soup-kitchen, benign to all except the Vice Squad snoop: "How do you know the difference between a lady and a street walker? You're out to change the world from something bad to something worse."
With an ensemble piece like this, a fine cast is more important than a single star (though intriguingingly the wannabe entertainer who can't dance was played in 1939 by Gene Kelly) and
Icarus Theatre had that. For me the only unsatisfying aspect was the ending, a flurried death off-stage, leaving it unclear whether or not there would be repercussions for this "profusion of wistful dreamers, lonely hearts, and beer-hall-philosophers".
But a dramatic ending is hard to write, as I'm finding. It's got to come from the characters, and they can be perversely secretive. I nicked this Harold Pinter quote from John Baker's blog. "I don't know what kind of characters my plays will have until they indicate to me what they are. Once I've got the clues I follow them. That's my job, really, to follow the clues."
And now it's nearly the longest night so in the words of poet Inua Ellams, I wish you all a Happy....
Solstice - Samhain - Yule - Saturnalia - Winterval - Hogmanay - St. Nicholas - Kwanzaa- Bodhi - Yalda - Hanukkah - Christmas.
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Labels: Finborough Theatre
In Frome, ChristmasTreegate is hotting up. Letters in the local paper are fulminating about our traffic-distraction-free replacement as a "monstrous illuminated rotary washing line". "It looks like a broken umbrella," said one lady, who had brought visitors to view - "how embarrassing".
"A bit sparse but very nice" another correspondent called Carol comments, more kindly.
Excitement at Emily's writers' circle too, as Debby Holt's new novel
Love Affairs for Grownups is poised for launch next month. Debbie's previous novel in Italian translation was hailed as
Strepitoso!.
The Merlin theatre pantomime has been a sell-out again this year.
The Wizard of Oz is probably their most polished so far, with strong central performances from Dorothy and her wandering companions, though predictably Kylie the dog stole every scene she was in.
Star of the show for me though was Howard Vause, the most unforestwise lion ever, nearly as vain as Red Dwarf's cat and much more cuddly.
(Thanks, Mike, for the picture)
Another theatre show, a long way from the Land of Oz,
Carthage Must be Destroyed, at the
Ustinov in Bath: a brilliant play provocatively well performed.
"It's not a play about Iraq" says writer Alan Wilkins, "It's about the Third Punic War. But then... all wars are different - all wars are the same." It's about the culpability of passivity and the absurdity of violence, and the damage of love too. From the spa waters of Rome to the fires of Carthage, the first casualty of warmongering is integrity.
Performances till 20th December - go see if you can.
And finally....Angus Deaton who hosted the British Comedy Awards earlier this week is usually one of my TV heroes - most of whom can be prefixed by the word 'disgraced'. He introduced the Writers Guild Award with the comment that he was 'delighted at the number of good writers coming forward, which is hardly any at all.'
Gavin & Stacey won Best TV Comedy, so James Cordon may find that funny even if the rest of us don't.
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Labels: Alan Wilkins, Carthage must be Destroyed, Merlin Theatre
A new month and a new moon - the Moon of the Long Night. My adoptive home of Frome traditionally greets the solstice season with street festivities and a mass countdown to the ceremonial illumination-switching-on moment. The Extravaganza, as this was magnificently titled, centred around the big tree beside the market cross, with shops staying open late and plying mincepies mulled wine and chocolates as well as their trades.
We had carols, bellringers, bands... ah, the good times rolled. Last year, presumably responding to a directive from Brussells, the tree was surrounded by an iron fence Michael Eavis might envied, and local youths naturally rallied to the challenge. So this year there is no tree in the market place. Instead we had a Sunday market in the Cheese & Grain and sporadic santa-related activity in the precinct with sound effects from a radio van and a merry-go-round. Not quite what
Strictly judge Len would call a smorgsbord of gorgeousness, but with quaint charm, especially the Christmas fairies dispensing snow from Siberia.
"Christmas decorations are a kind of defiance" Rose Flint suggested in her poetry workshop at the library, "Awareness of the night sky is deep in the human psyche. We're bringing the stars inside, and helping the light to return." We wrote about snow, and glitter, and stars, shaping constellations like gods. Winter glitz for wintry glums.
The Poetry Cafe was crowded for "Difficult Journeys" and we had to clear the window sills when we ran out of room for chairs. The theme's tenuous connection with
The Wizard of Oz, the pantomime at the Merlin, was largely ignored by guest poets Rose Flint and Malinda Kennedy and 19 open-mic contributors who opted for more personal interpretations.
It always inspires a sense of privilege when writers share intimate feelings, and there were some glittering gems.
Dianne Penny's beautifully-performed poem was a favourite for me:
I never knew I had the right to speak... listen, listen, listen... Paula as theatre director picked out many for special praise and donated prizes, with Linda Perry and
Rosie Jackson agreed as worthy winners of the theatre tickets.
In horse talk, I have not been On Form this month. Consequently most of my time has been spent in comfort pursuits involving mooching about, close friends & family, and online scrabble, so there's not much in the literary line to report.
However, I made it to the Mission Theatre in Bath twice: once to see Tennessee Williams'
Orpheus Descending. It's set in the playwright's usual world of small-town America: full of repressed passion needing only the trigger of a wild outsider to set the place alight, with an ending as horrifying as any Greek tragedy. In the hot dry dust of unspoken grievance and unspeakable grief, wanderer Val celebrates lyricism and hope for "
a future called perhaps, which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you. "
It's a re-working of a much earlier, failed, play called
Battle of Angels which Williams never abandoned. He said "You will find the trail of my sleeve-worn heart in this completed play... it's about the acceptance of prescribed answers that are not answers at all"
That notion of freedom from 'prescribed answers' is most lyrically expressed in Val's fantasy of tiny birds with transparent wings, eluding predator. "
They live their whole life on the wing, and they sleep on the wing, they just spread their wings and go to sleep and never light on this earth but one time when they die! " A powerful image to anyone, perhaps especially to writers.
Russell Brand ended his documentary on Jack Kerouac with this thought: "
The main thing I got from this journey is that if you aren't governed by fear then you can live truthfully and you can find a kind of beauty. But if you're inhibited and fearful, you will live a prescriptive existance. Once you get beyond the hedonistic first impulse of that philosophy, you find that you need to focus on something wider, more permanent and beautiful and valuable. That's what I've learnt." Could be Tennessee Williams' Val talking. Except he'd probably have strummed it.
Then on Sunday the Bath Poetry Cafe had a Rialto night, celebrating local connections with this prestigious literary magazine. Editor Michael Mackmin talked about what he seeks from submissions - a self-seal envelope is paramount, apparently. Readings from poets who had avoided this and other fatal errors followed: I especially enjoyed Sue Boyle, Emily Wills, and of course Rose Flint, who writes so sensuously and with such tragedic yearning:
And what I hope for every winter is to find a way through
to the other side where the jubilant light begins again
in a hesitation of birdsong.Footnote this week: my online
interview with writer Judy Darley .
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Labels: Bath Poetry Cafe, Tennessee Williams
Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night set in a 1960s Soho nightclub sounds a jaunty idea and I had high hopes of this production by Frome Drama Club, usually never less than competent. Sadly, purple tie-dye does not a Viola make, and the bullying aspect of this drama became, rather than Sopranos-style tension, an epidemic of pinching, punching, happy-slapping that even included Orsino flooring Olivia so violently her subsequent request that he call her 'sister' must have sounded alarm calls in Social Services. Even good acting - Malvolio as a lanky Gollum, the pragmatic fool Feste - couldn't create characters to satisfactorily survive this directorial savagery.
I didn't know what to expect from Dracula staged as a musical at the White Bear theatre in Kennington by Loveless brothers writer/director Chris and composer Alex... a comedy, maybe? (
Wiv a littul bit of blood, a littul bit of blood, you can let temptation drip right in...) Not so. It was stunning. From the wilds of Transylvania to prim Victorian London, the drama was darkly bloodstained and biting. Piano and cello enhanced a mesmeric mood, with every element for a gothic fantasy glowing through: madness, lust, the fear that immortality is worse than death itself and that love can seem the deepest abyss of all. Songlines simmered:
Love is a knife that carves your life. Faithful to Bram Stoker, the production still managed to find twists in the story, and played grim torchlight on undercurrents of brutality posing as medicine and morality.
There's an amazing scene as the men, outraged by the transformation of their women into vampiric seducers, form an armed posse and thunder through the forest, the vampire as their quarry, like any group of self-righteous fanatics witch-hunting the outsider who threatens their supremacy. Brilliant. I'd go to see anything by
Fallen Angel Theatre Company now.
Pix by Michael Brydon, more about the production
hereI'm writing a play at the moment - I don't usually admit to writing anything until it's finished & safely published, so acknowledging this is a strange part of the process - and therefore collecting comments on drama from every source I come across, as well as my dramaturgy (wonderful word, too) mentor, playwright Steve Hennessy. Like this from Tony (Mark of Cain) Marchant in an RT interview: "I don't think there should be any taboos. The object of drama is to illuminate and to explore - it's a writer's job to make people think harder." Finding this week's BIG ISSUE is a playwrighting special, I turned the pages avidly with highlighter poised. Here's a collection of write-bites from the mag:
"What makes good drama? Pushing the creative boundaries" - this is agent Mel Kenyon- "the stage should be about metaphor rather than literal recreation." Zia Trench of Zeitgeist Theatre Company believes: "If theatre wants to grow more of an audience, it's got to rethink just about everything", and there's frustration about the moribund state of theatre among most interviewees. "Shakespeare is all well and good but we get 2000 scripts a year from unknown writers" says theatre director Lisa Goldman, lamenting that there is no funding to produce them.
Patron Joachim Fleury doesn't want theatre "a formaldehyde form of art - museum pieces resuscitated ad infinitum." James Phillips urges other directors like himself to relish the risk offered by new writing: "I mean we know Twelfth Night works, don't we?" (see above, James...)
An overall theme emerges: face the fear and do it anyway. "The most important virtue for a writer is determination" concludes the editorial.
True for any writing, any media - and especially with difficult stuff. I was talking this week with Malinda Kennedy, therapist and poet, whose experience has convinced her that long-term anxiety = suffering that's not been expressed creatively. But, she cautions, personal outpourings are not art. “Most people feel so good about the outpourings they think it’s a novel - it’s a poem - it’s a play! Is it heck. Now starts the crafting.”
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Labels: Dracula, Twelfth Night
Ninety years ago to the month, Siegfried Sassoon wrote
Memorial Tablet, a poem as full of anger about class divisions as about war itself. His grave, in the sombre yew-shadowed churchyard of Mells near where I live, is often honoured with red poppies, and always on Remembrance Sunday.
Merlin Theatre foyer turned tardis on Monday night, as an auditoriumful of audience crammed through to see the magnificent Eddie Izzard in a one-night-only try-out of stuff for his new London show.
It's a sell-out there too - here tickets were going on eBay for £160, and I'm sure the buyers were delighted - my eyes were sore next day from weeping with laughter. Eddie's new stuff circles "like a cow with a gun" from Obama through the fallacies of world history through Wikipedia, Galileo, Genesis, stromatolites, stone-age scrabble, squirrels, Spartans, creationism, arriving back at Obama and the possibility of hope for the future. "Terrorism exists where there is no hope" he says simply, at the end of two hours of surreal humour, unflinching satire and brilliant mime. I wish we could elect our own God, my vote would go to Eddie Izzard - even though he doesn't believe we have or need one. "I believe in humans" he says, "Good and evil are in your tummy. That's our fight, how to live our lives."
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Labels: Eddie Izzard, Remembrance Day
Hot on the heels of November 5th - and how celebratory those fireworks felt this year - came the verbal sparklers of Madabout Words night. Over 60 people came along to hear thirteen local writer/performers in a cabaret of poetry, prose, drama, and lyrics.
I'd love to give a full and impartial review but as I organised it I can't so I'll just say to fiction writers Debby Holt, Magnus Nelson, Rosie Jackson & Niamh Ferguson; to poets David Sollors, Gordon Graft, Rose Flint, & Caleb Parkin; to dramatists Alison Clink and Rosie Finnegan, and to musicians Howard Vause & PJ Leonard:
Darlings you were wonderful and I mean that most sincerely. And many thanks to all who supported us.
As one performer said, for us it's an opportunity to play to a perfectly listening audience, and "it is something that actually seems to matter to people - very lovely - this sort of thing is important isn't it?"
I certainly believe so.
Same yet different, another evening of spoken word at the launch of a new book from Peter Please:
CLATTINGER An Alphabet of Signs from Nature, a quirky look at a Wiltshire
wildflower meadow and site of special scientific interest. The Georgian premises of the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Society contrast and blend graciously with imagery of snakeshead fritillaries and damselflies. Unusually for an author launch, this gentle and charming event was designed as a team effort, with musical accompaniments and contributions from several other writers including a striking poem from cover artist Sean Borodale. Clattinger is an unusual book too, a hi-tech production finished by hand; Peter Please sewed them all himself, pinching the spines in the traditional manner of 19th Century craftsmen. "We are the farmers' markets in a supermarket world," I like to tell writer friends; Peter Please wants to be slow-simmered broth in a fast food planet. You can find out more
here.
Footnote to last week's epic event in America:
Jeremy Paxman to Dizzee Rascal "Mr Rascal, could you see this happening in Britain?" "If you believe you can achieve, innit?" "Do you believe in political parties in Britain?" "Yeah, they exist." Perfect.
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Labels: Clattinger, Madabout Words
Searching
Halloween for smatterings of significance beyond pumpkinheads and Dracula for this once hallowed evening, I found that in some cultures the entire month of November is a Festival of the Dead. Something to look forward to.
Emily and I celebrated this tricky night by treating ourselves to Comedy Scratch Night at the Arc in Trowbridge. A fun evening, though with a curiously non-contemporary ambience. 'Rather a lot of genitalia' one audience member commented, which was true, yet Master Bates apologised for both his swear words and no-one mentioned Voluptuagate.
You've probably already over-familiar with what the Head of the BBC calls "the tumultuous events of the past weeks" and the tabloids term "sickening obscenities that made the whole nation shudder", (the infamous phone call to Andrew Sachs has been viewed over a million times on
Youtube) so the only thing that can make it better is... another cheap jibe.
"This sort of obscenity against a member of the Satanic Sluts cannot be countenanced." thunders
News of the News,
"Suspension is hardly sufficient. The British sense of justice and fair play will not be satisfied until they are castrated by a baying crowd, pursued through the street on horseback with dogs, hanged by the neck outside White City until dead and their foul corpses left there to fester for at least a month. We pay our licence fees!"
What a good thing we in the literary world aren't tainted by such salacious voyeurism, I thought smugly, going into WH Smiths where exciting promotions encourage everyone to turn off the telly and read a good book. Promotions like TRAGIC LIFE STORIES - BUY 1 GET 1 HALF PRICE...
Quantum of Solace.... well I won't go on about the dizzy-making yumminess of Daniel Craig but I will just mention that Ben Elton's first novel Stark had a similar storyline (villain poses as environmentalist) though without the breathtaking car-chases, land-sea-&-air shoot-outs, the inferno and the Tosca opera. Other than that, pretty close.
I'm posting this as the world is poised to know whether Obama managed that final lap to the White House, so in electioneering mode I commend this more local
party political broadcast from 'shouty scot' & poetic genius Elvis Mcgonagall.
And finally... how about writing a novel this November?
NaNoWriMo will help you. Lots of tips and pep talks, and an international scoreboard for ongoing word-counts. England is at currently number 18, with the Germans already spreading their writing towels across the keyboard at number 1. So if you want to change that, pick up your pens! (Not now, at the end of the blog when lines are open....)
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Labels: Daniel Craig, Elvis McGonagall, Halloween, Jonathan Ross, NaNoWriMo, Russell Brand
"A marvel" is how
crackerjack's reviewer describes
Cave by Steve Hennessy, one of Theatre West's new season of 'Writing in the Margins'. The isolate cave is a setting and a metaphor too, representing the dark and difficult place where Greek dramatist Euripides - and by inference all passionate artists - must go to find their creativity. And it can be a place of refuge, which is why runnaway slave Helen is here, heavily pregnant, feral and defiant. Their strange shared sanctuary is invaded by Theodoros: young, citified, glamourous and shallow, he embodies everything the playwright loves and loathes. Will Euripides choose his muse or his career? neither of them are glittering any more. There is a third way, one which is reckless and loving and wholly credible. A play which resonates long after the cave is empty. See it if you can - it's on until 8th November at the
Alma Tavern Theatre.
Labels: The Cave
Foxton is a great name isn't it? Sounds like a place in a Rupert Bear annual, with plucky young animals called Algy having lots of adventures in rhyming verse. In fact it's near Cambridge, and the location of
Villiers Park education centre, where last week my writer friend
Rosie Jackson and I led a creative writing course for twentytwo 'gifted and talented' 17-year-olds from across the British Isles.
An amazing week, and I felt overawed by their energy and charm, a bit like watching seals at play off the Californian coast but with the addition of dazzling writing.
The gee&tees gave us comedy, political satire, and personal emotions, all explored with individual style and lucent integrity. They'd clearly never grasped the concept of Kevin-the-teenager - nasty, brutish, and short of vocabulary; they were delightful company too.
Friday's "presentations" were one highlight of the week, and another was a performance and talk by
Luke Wright, whose own blend of talent and candour the group found inspiring.
We had a theatre trip too: Alan Bennett's 'Talking Heads' at Mumford Theatre. I'm not a huge fan of Bennett's whimsical assaults on social Aunt Sallys, and the two monologues memorised by Moonstruck Theatre Company seemed to me dated in their snobby lampooning of low-brow culture. The students were polite and some were appreciative, but I felt more moved by their own work.
Throw in mountain bikes, music, footie, and a Murder Mystery night, no wonder course evaluations were so upbeat. Virtual group hug, anyone?
American update: I see from G2 that the phenomena of Tina Fey upstaging Sarah Palin has now registered this side of the pond. While giggling over the goofy spoofs, you may be interested to note Tina doesn't stray far from the original - in fact sometimes, as in this multiviewed CNN
clip, not at all...
And also from that slightly scary big place over there, news of a teacher suspended without pay for allowing her students to read
The Freedom Writers Diary. This motivational collection of true stories by young people is a best-selling book and now also a movie. It contains swearing, apparently. Did I say 'slightly' scary?
I don't know what the Indiana censors would make of Ricky Gervais on Jonathan Ross (my Razorlight-alert gave me the
link - they're at the end) – but he made some good points about comedy writing. He doesn't do gags, he says; just characters. "If it’s just constantly one-liners, the audience is looking at their watches after 20 minutes. There has to be some character." He underlines the point with a hysterically funny story about his mother’s funeral. No, really, it was. And it gave a glimpse of a loving family, and the way outsiders simply can’t touch their grief.
Finally: What were you doing at 22.04 yesterday? Four minutes past ten at night is apparently the time we are all most creative, according to a new survey. (What time of day do they dream up these research projects, I wonder.) Sebastian Faulks spoke up for writers: "I was thinking what I think at 10.04 most nights: whether to open another bottle of wine."
Which reminds me of something I haven't done since I came back from America...
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Labels: American elections, Villiers Park
Bill Bryson writes in
I'm a Stranger Here Myself of "those sumptuous days when autumn is full of muskiness and tangy, crisp, perfection with vivid blue sky..."
That's how it is here. Guitarist Bill Peterson summed it all up at Mo and Anja's party: "That view out front, sun shining, good food, nice company, great music playing - it doesn't get any better than this." I'd walked that afternoon along the coastal path, entranced by the views of shore and sea and wild birds, and spent the evening listening to 9 talented musicians' varied styles - most of the songs original.
(Especially popular was Mo's tribute to George Bush:
Daddy What's A Brain?)
Once again beside the rocks of Pescadero on my penultimate day: seals basking, spray crashing beyond the deep purple of the near-shore lagoons. It's a transitory landscape, as the coastline of California is crumbling: about a foot a year on average, apparently. We reflect on this sombre statistic for a while and then go to
Duartes Tavern for artichoke soup and sourdough.
And now I'm packing for my journey back to the UK, to dull grey days and the tension of trying to get hold of a car in time for next week's course in Cambridge... I'll have to stop giggling over Bill Bryson's account of the safety demonstrations on transatlantic flights and prepare myself to watch closely while the value of the whistle to attract attention is explained by United Airlines stewards self-taped into yellow lifejackets. Hoping, of course, that this is a hypothesis I won't have to test.
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Labels: California
Mark Twain said the coldest winter he ever experienced was summer in San Francisco. Fooled by blue sky and palm trees when we drove in, I failed to realise this city has its own micro-climate direct from the Arctic Circle. The first thing I had to buy was another sweater and hot coffee. Thus fortified, we rode the platform on the cable car down to Fisherman's Wharf where the waterfront is full of buskers and the water is full of seals.
Back in time for another open-mic spot, at Cafe Lucca. The last three nights I've been regaling the locals with me pomes. There was open-mic at Camerons English Pub, which has a red phone box & a London bus outside it, but otherwise is big & bombastic American-style so my set had a certain novelty cachet, especially as all the other performers were musicians. Most of them turned up at Cafe Lucca the next night, and Saturday was even better, the whole cafe filled with appreciative audience for both Mo's singing and my extended poetry session. So thanks to all you generous Californians for coming along to hear a writer from England, and for being so exceedingly nice about what you heard.
There's a significant ripple of interest in the election along the California coast, with a healthy rash of Obama car stickers and street merchandise, and a spoof
debate doing the rounds. But the big news over here currently is Halloween. They take macabre seriously here. We went shopping for costumes at a hangar-sized building dedicated to vampires, ghouls, and other life-sized grotesques. Those evil-faced pumpkins are just a start, you can buy anything revolting from a bloodshot eye that walks to a torso that crawls, any costume from the tooth fairy to a plateful of poo, a vampire outfit for your dog or for $300 a family of gothic zombies.
Am I going to pass scornful comment on this national obsession? Of course not, I wouldn't be so rude. I'll simply say what San Mateo Coffee Company says to promote its Pumpkin Spiced Latte: " We hold this to be self-evident."
Labels: California, poetry performance
Morro Bay is more a nature reserve than a seaside resort, although ironically local promotion seems almost abashed there’s so little dollar-demanding distraction on offer. Only the seals at play, pelicans teasing the fishermen, sea-otters picnicking on clams in the blue water bay, and mighty Morro rock changing colour from early light to sunset.
Our stop-over base is close by the jetty, opposite the long sandspit which has been reclaimed as a sanctuary for estuary wild life, so we spend hours simply being there, watching, but the serious grape-growing area of California is close by so we take a drive to look at some wineries too.
Being here is like living in a road movie: the nonchalant acceptance of vastness, the affability of strangers, monster trucks and Harleys - and in towns pedestrians have right of way over traffic, how civilised. But they can’t make good Americano here– why is that? Coffee bars everywhere and it’s either too sweet, too weak, or filter.
What else have I learned… That the 250 mile coastal drive from Half Moon Bay to Morro rock is one of the wonders of the world, especially playing seventies folk –rock all the way.
Back to Half Moon Bay in time to walk the eucalyptus forest, admire the pumpkin harvest, and do a poetry set at Cafe Classique's performance night. As Basil Fawlty said, I think I got away with it...
Labels: California, Half Moon Bay, Morro Bay, poetry performance
So here I am in California, after 10 hours and 4 movies, none with a shot as good as the icecaps of Greenland. Mo collects me from San Francisco airport and we take the coast road past long pale sands where surfing waves are dramatically eroding the cliffs away, down to Half Moon Bay.
Mo and Anja live here in a blueygrey painted timber house, the Pacific on one side and hills & creeks on the other, canyons in the distance and hummingbirds in the back garden. In short, Wow...
Within an hour of arriving we’re all in Café Gibraltar where I’m mesmerised by the way the waiter chants the specials with particular attention to dressings. I pick the tomato salad with pumpernickel, Peruvian pine nuts and open-sesame seeds, drizzled with light squalls. (I may have misrecalled some of those ingredients, but the waiter applauded my choice & didn’t call the whole thing off even though I pronounced tomato the UK way.) Ah, and there was Californian wine too, I seem to recall...
Next day is mostly orientation & walking by the rocks of Pescadero, with an evening performance of
Waiting For Godot at the theatre in Half Moon Bay.
Mo plays Pozzo. “One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?” It’s an amazing play for many reasons, one of them being that every part seems to have the best lines. The director has decided that this timeless allegory of alienation exactly defines the plight of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, and his set reflects this. It’s interesting, and of course all interpretations have validity, but for me there’s extraordinary power in Beckett’s evocation of the road to anywhere, and that existentialist question
what are we waiting for? is compromised rather than enhanced by a realistic answer: for rescue from specific urban tragedy. That aside, a great production, with some powerful performances, notably Estragon and Pozzo.
A quieter day seemed called for after the cast party: more coastal walking along the bluffs and a little downtown mooching -oo-er that’s me on the poster in the bookshop! I'm hoping my airbag burns will be less livid by the time I perform. We're off to Morro Bay for a couple of days first...
Labels: California, Half Moon Bay, Waiting for Godot
"The reasons we write fiction are both simple and complex. Simple in that we are story-telling creatures who must shape our experience and share it with others; complex in that we are all individuals with different motives and desires." Derek Johns is an agent and a novelist too, so he straddles both camps in his article 'Why Write Novels?' in the current issue of the Society of Authors' Journal.
Possibly from beneath the brim of that first hat, he concludes: "The European novel was a function of 19th-century middle-class leisure time, just as chamber music was a function of chambers. Will it be superseded? We will always tell ourselves stories, but will those stories necessarily take the form of novels? And is the novel necessarily the highest, most evolved form of story-telling, as we have tended to think?"
Answers on a blog, email, poetry podium, or postcard, please.
Writers-on-radio corner: If you thought Alan Partridge far-fetched, spare four minutes to squirm at
this interview with writer Hardeep Singh Kohli recently on local radio. Unbelievable but genuine.
"A misty Autumn day, smelling of empty benches... what will become of those memories of water and swans?" This was Saturday's Finale of 'Palace Intrusions' at Wells, as Artmusic threaded and wove together sunset and singing, candles and cellos - and awesome parkour free-running. A very different musical interlude from Acoustic Plus in Frome on Friday, featuring the 'Mendip Rock' of
Cary Grace who's also my multi-talented web-designer.
Monday was a dramatic night: "A Number" at Salisbury Playhouse only lasted an hour but crammed in everything anyone who’s ever been a parent, or a child, might have wondered or worried about. What is the value of a person, when we’ve got 30% the same genes as a lettuce… and does it even matter? Not being unique is hardly a death-penalty offence, is it? Carol Churchill’s play is rightly highly acclaimed, though the staccato faux-naturalistic interrupty dialogue is occasionally jarring, but the acting (Pip Donaghy & Fergus O'Donnell ) was stunning and the overall impact both moving and shocking.
And another dramatic impact that night was suffered by my car, deemed by the guy from the Crash Repair Centre about the worst damaged he's seen. Thank Daewoo for airbags - you only need them once but when you do, you do.
And now I'm off to Half Moon Bay in California to meet up with old friends in a new place - and to bring some southwest-UK stylee performance poetry to deepwest-USA. I'm billed to do a set in Caffe Lucca, Montara, which gets great reviews on
Yelp. "Espresso pulled to perfection and foam that is wickedly thick and fluffy" says Jonathan C, giving 5 stars: "The patio overlooks the Pacific, but has a window to keep the chill of the coastal breeze at bay and minimizes the noise pollution on Cabrillo Highway."
Fellow reviewer Elizabeth H - is that really her on the surfboard? xtreme! - says it's her new favourite place. Mine too and I haven't even been there yet... Can't wait.
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Labels: California, Hardeep Singh Kohli
"Civilisation as we know it is well and truly past its sell-by date, and this is where this book comes in" says Bath writer Esme Ellis at the launch her novel 'This Strange and Precious Thing'. It's love, of course, and more - an exploration, among other things, of the possibility that fantasy is only another name for potential.
Small Wonder (Sept 18th-21st) is billed as one of the UK's most successful independent literary festivals. It certainly must be one of the smallest, being entirely contained in a barn just off the A27 a few miles from Lewes. Alison and I drove down to investigate, arriving at sunset on Friday to be met with cathedral quietness and exceedingly good soup.
The barn belongs to Charleston, where the Bloomsbury set allegedly met, so although the house and garden weren't open we could imagine Virginia and Leonard musing beside the cows, and EM Forster picking his way through the byre in his carpet slippers.
Our inquisitiveness was specifically focused on the Short Story Slam, to see if the idea might be worth nicking for Frome festival next year and luckily for our 8-hour round trip, it is. We'll adapt it, of course. We won't open the event with a narrative poem about the Mau Mau Uprising - always tricky to lift the mood to high joviality after graphic details of bloody atrocities.
We won't have the scores writ large on screen, so that the least successful slam readers have to sit staring at their low ranking along with the entire audience like some dreadful dream of schooldays trauma. We won't - oh, we've got lots of ideas, you'll have to wait and see. But thanks & respect to the writers and readers who created a highly entertaining evening, even though I couldn't honestly tick the "totally agree" box on the evaluation form for "Small Wonder is designed with young people in mind."
Our evening ended on a more lively note in Hanover, where Alison's friend Jonathan hosted us & introduced us to his bit of Brighton with "aspirations to bohemianism". Now if he'd given us an evaluation form, we could have ticked Accessible, Stimulating, Exhilarating, and Fun....
And finally...
I'd never seen that "classic romantic drama” Brief Encounter so as it was on this Sunday afternoon I thought I Ought To. David Lean's iconic movie is more interesting as a study of a culture thankfully gone forever, where 'heppily merried' meant being hysterically emotionally repressed but with an invisible cook to make dinner. Romance I saw not: the love-struck couple sniggered and bitched like Karen and Jack from gay sitcom Will & Grace until guilt intervened to ruin their heppiness. Made in 1945 but clearly set pre-war (Noel Coward's script was written a decade earlier), there's appeal in the bravado of the voiceover technique, trusting us with the ending right from the start, but narrative viewpoint is sacrificed for an unnecessary scene in Stephen's flat. Brief? that was 86 minutes of rare British sunshine lost forever. But nothing lasts long, neither heppiness nor despair. And aren't we due an Indian summer?
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Labels: Brief Encounter, Small Wonder, This Rare and Precious Thing
The Coleridge Way is signposted at judicious intervals with a quill, as fitting reminder of the inspirational nature of these 40ish miles across the Quantock Hills and Exmoor. The cunning marketing is certainly inspirational. It did strike me as a bit odd the poet had regularly paced this looping route to Porlock Information Centre; in fact he probably only did the bit between his house and Wordsworth's, and the rest are just some rather nice places he might have popped by. It's still a great walk, though we were mostly too knackered at the end of each day to write even with Dorothyesque minimalism. ('Walked, I know not where' is one of my favourite entries.)
Well, anyway, we did it. Nine random writers followed the quill through varying weather and terrain, with some natural wastage, until on the fourth day the survivors arrived wreathed in proud smiles and gratuitous waterproofs to collect our certificate.
We'd travelled through Xanadu's sinuous rills in forests ancient as the hills, forded seething chasms; like the earth we'd breathed in short pants and if we didn't drink the milk of Paradise we certainly had some really good nosh at our B&Bs.
Back in time to catch some of the Bristol Poetry Festival at the Arnolfini, where the cafe isn't open due to building work.
I had low hopes, as Emily and I picked the last Saturday in August for a writerly jaunt to Weymouth, of a proper day at the seaside with sun, swimming, and fish'nchips to finish the day.. but we did. We had an absolutely brilliant time.
Frome Library Writing Group met again on Monday: Ten authors in search of a character. Alison, this month's randomly rotating guide, stimulated our efforts with names, trigger lines, and tips like 'Obsession is always good.'
This weekend Hazel & I are off with the Dreamweavers team on the
Coleridge trek, 39 miles across the Mendips and Exmoor. We're hoping to find inspiration for poetry of our own from treading in the footsteps of this perverse and talented radical, and find out more about the man too. It was Coleridge who defined literature with stunning simplicity:
"prose = words in their best order;
poetry = the best words in the best order".
His was the primary inspiration behind the Lyrical Ballads yet Wordsworth, perhaps out of jealousy, edited his contributions and undermined him constantly.
The relationship between Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother's poorer, more attractive, friend may never be known, but her journal carries a discreetly euphoric account of a long walk together late one night: 'Venus almost like another moon. Lost to us at Alfoxden long before she goes down the large white sea.'
(The picture is not Dorothy but literary writer Frances Wilson, whose
biography explores dark secrets of this wild bohemian obsessed by poetry and passion.)
It's actually quite difficult to write simply on nature - even DH Lawrence was capable of sentimentalising, as when he said: "A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself" (how did he know that? Was he fluent in twitter? That small bird might have been griping away like Darnell in the BB Diary Room). As a contrast to Wordsworth's notorious anthropomorphism (babbling cuckoos, pious robins, and a green linnet who sounds more like a Brownies camp leader), try
Wing Beats, a collection of of words and images launched soon, with small observations like:
shifting currents . . .
a coot scrambles
to keep mid-river.
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Some of the most scathing put-downs come from theatre, especially the auditorium. My father was a drama critic, and he had a typewriter that must have been twinned with a lemon-grater.
He savoured classic sneers, too: "Delusions of adequacy" was one of Walter Kerr's. Less succinct is Bernard Levin's verdict: "the depth of a cracker motto, the drama of a dial-a-recipe service and the eloquence of a conversation between a speak-your-weight machine and a whoopee cushion", but I don't know which playwright writhed under that withering endorsement. Ken Tynan opined- I think of him as someone who opined, rather than just saying - "A dramatist is a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom."
And RT's Allison Pearson recently added to the roll of disparagement: "Why would anyone choose to pay to be cramped and uncomfortable in the same room as hundreds of other people, watching performances that are always too big and too loud and worst of all you can't get out." Theatrical productions, she says, get away with being "yawningly talky and boring", as well as brittle, mannered, stilted, "and nothing actually happens. Can you imagine anyone getting away with that lot in The Bill?"
Well no, I can't, but I don't watch The Bill. It sounds like a fair summary of most of Radio 4 though, but that's probably unfair because I don't listen to that either. I do love theatre, though. That breathless moment when the curtains draw back at the start, and you know your world is about to be changed, perhaps forever. My earliest theatre memory is crying at the end of a London production of Alls Well that Ends Well because I didn't want to go home. Family folklore has me aged three, demanding 'More, more' and refusing to leave my seat. That's the benefit of a critic for a father, even a curmudgeonly one; I'd seen Ibsen and Synge before I was 11, and in the glory days of angry young men, I was wide-eyed in the stalls.
All of which ruminations occurred because my current writing seems to be increasingly dramatic (though without facial lesions or glam cops.) I've been doing some radio shorts for Frome FM, and am keeping fingers & toes crossed my two 15-minute stage plays around the theme of marginalisation will find their way to production next year. It's scary and exciting, writing with no commission and no guaranteed outcome - yet this risky edge is part of a writer's life. Real creativity seems to live in wild places. "You probably have to be unstable to be creative," Anthony Sher says, "All great artists in any field seem a bit mad." I got that from the RT, too.
What else is occurring, as this wet summer dissolves into a damp autumn? Misty walks & cycles, mellow fruitful meetings, disappearance of Scrabulous on facebook, discovery of e-Scrabulous... life goes on in its variously wordy ways.
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Have you ever dreamed of swapping urban life for a rural retreat in spectacular surroundings where mountains circle the valley and a river runs through... finding and renovating old stone buildings where donkeys and chickens can roam - maybe putting up a couple of yurts in the garden
...pictured yourself and your partner following your ideal work here as your children grow up healthy and happy (there'd be a small village locally, for schooling and community)
...imagined evenings sharing meals al fresco with friends as sun sets over the forested horizon and the sky fills with an unimaginable numerosity of stars ...And then thought, Oh it would never work.
Think again.
Sharon and Alex live the dream: they talk the talk (French) and walk the walk, along the wonderful woodland paths of the Cevennes to Gardoussel. There's only one thing to do when you find a place like this and friends like these, and that's go back, which I intend to do, next year and for longer.
This was the first Creative Writing group that Sharon, herself a talented writer, has organised here as most courses are Ayurvedic nutrition and yoga. Le Loft adapted itself perfectly as a venue for inventive self-expression, lyricism and laughter, poignancy and passion.
And who comes to write in a magical story-book place like this? Magical characters, of course: A fairy, a jester, a cat (blue), a witch, a lord and lady, a wandering minstrel, and a colourful company of shape-shifting companions.
Donald opened his comments at our book-review evening:"I suspect that the books we love above all other books are those whose heroes are ourselves: flawed as we are; ideal as we intend to be." Open for discussion in terms of reading choice perhaps, but certainly every personality here glowed through their writing.
This was a fantastic week of word-crafting and sharing, amazing meals, and forest walks - I swam under the waterfall and hiked every afternoon, except the day of the thunderstorm when every surface suddenly became a pit of writhing rain-snakes. Admittedly there was, overall, less sunshine than the terms of the contract (viz: South of France, August) implied, but wonderful writing, wild walks, and white wine were acceptable alternatives.
Labels: Gardoussel
Hazel & I spent Saturday on an 'Artist's Date'. We've been doing these irregularly ever since we started writing together, sometimes in flamboyant venues like Paris, Barcelona, and last christmas Manhatten, though more often in downtown Frome. This time it was in rural Worcestershire where Haz now lives.
A great day, divided between working on new 'Live & Lippy' material, and walking on the Malvern Hills, where we discovered a wayside shrine where passing poets were invited in Blake's words to
"see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour."
We wrote 7 pieces, walked 3 hours, & rewarded ourselves with fish&chips.
Bristol Harbour Festival expected 200,000 visitors and most of them seemed to be swarming round the docks on Sunday. Streets were in full fairground mode, the river chokka with tour boats, and Cascade Steps throbbing with poetry performances. Rosemary Dun defied an overcast sky with odes to summer passions and the rain held off, till later.
And once more on the theme of writers in their own words... did you know Willm Shakspere never penned his name the way history has selected? I'm engrossed in the Bill Bryson biography, which finds the man himself missing for most of his life but paints a fascinating picture of his theatrical world. This was a time when, despite plagues and casual violence, theatres were crowded nightly with plays seen as so relevant to current politics that performers risked erratic penalties like having their noses lopped off. Ah happy days...
I finished this book knowing a great deal less about our greatest playwright and poet than when I started, but it's a compelling read. And here's Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, one of many conspiracy-theorist candidates to the challenge
Will the real Will Shakespeare please stand up - despite being 'sexually dissolute and widely disliked' and prone to murdering his servants, he was the favourite of a researcher named Looney.
Off now to Languedoc for a couple of weeks. Have a good August, y'all!
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Labels: Bristol Docks Festival, Coleridge, Shakespeare
Detecting writers from their letters... 'Miss Austen Regrets', now on DVD, is based on Jane's. Cassandra destroyed most of them, whether to protect her sister's reputation or in the anger stage of grief is not known. But from the remaining correspondence, dramatist Gwyneth Hughes constructed a sparky script as far from those La-Mister-Darcy! bosomy bonneted sagas as a script could be, considering references to Jane's most famous romantic hero were as prominent as those costume attributes. Dialogue is fruity with Janite drolleries, as when the novelist visits the Prince Regent's palace: "I have read them all..." purrs the librarian, "Twice. Will you have cake?" The story's premise is thought-provoking: Would Jane Austen's novels have been penned if she had not gone back on her early acceptance of a proposal of marriage? And did she truly believe loneliness a small price to pay for personal freedom?
Only 10 lines survive from the letters of Emperor Caesar Hadrian Augustus to his eventual successor Antonius, I learned from the exhibition at the British Museum. I'm not a big fan of hi-hype cultural must-do stuff, which is why I've resisted Mama Mia, generally agreeing with Miss Jean Brodie that 'For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like'. For 12 quid you get to walk round a gallery crammed with monster-sized sculpted heads & architectural reconstructions, and wallpapered with locational photo-shots & maps, but that scrap of papyrus was the most moving exhibit. "I am impelled to write to you as follows, not, by Zeus, as one subtly devises a tedious account contrary to the truth but rather making a simple and most accurate record of the facts themselves." Nothing beside remains...
It was interesting to discover Hadrian came from a Spanish family, that his lover drowned in the Nile during the anniversary celebrations of the drowning of Osiris in the Nile, prompting a cult that at one time rivalled Christianity, and that those classic white marble statues were originally gaudily painted & embellished with metal eyelashes that must have made them look like gross barbie dolls... but my biggest shock & awe moments came watching people hand over their life savings for crap snacks at the museum cafe.
Then on to Stoke Newington, to spend the evening with my writer friend Jane d'Aulby discussing literature, life, happiness, and the pursuit of liberty at The Fox Reformed. Stoke Newington is evolving, Jane says, using as indicator that essential truffle oil became readily available but you couldn't find a white sliced for love nor money. The urban renewal scheme has turned pavements into community art projects and restored to creepy glory the amazing Abney Park Cemetry, popular for spookie movie making and other flesh-tingling activities as darkness creeps in. Sally-Army founder William Booth is buried here, probably rotating.
A trip to London is always a chance of a mini-holiday, so I booked a late train home to spend the day with another writer friend, Christine (Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society) Coleman, walking round Regents Park and down the canal to Camden Lock to browse the markets and enjoy the sun.
Labels: Hadrian, Miss Austen Regrets
It's been week of wall-to-wall parties, with several Leo birthdays - including mine - and other celebrations. Main activity with writerly connections was a walk with travel writer John Payne
who will be joining our Coleridge Way 'inspirational creative trek' later this year.
As a limbering-up for this project, John found us an utterly beautiful walk from Westwood Manor through woods and by field paths to the river by Farleigh Hungerford, a place I used as the setting for a key event in my first novel. We stopped for a swim - my first since the time that gave me the idea for Kirsty's story - then tea & cakes at the farm. Walking back with afternoon sun flushing the quaking grasses in swathes across butterfly-flitted meadows, seeing the sudden stacato elegance of a bounding deer, I think our 'creative trek' could indeed be inspirational.
And so we bop and stagger our way into August when the Frome Literary scene, unlike an Italian coastal campsite, goes all quiet. I commend you to your own scribings - try browsing these
helpful thoughts, especially good if you've got writers' angst and inspirational quotes would be as likely to make you clap your hands as that if-you're-happy-and-you-know-it song.
Here's A. L. Kennedy's advice to a young person trying to become a writer: 'Don't. It won't make any difference because they'll do it anyway, but they really shouldn't.' DH Lawrence wrote when he felt spiteful because it was like having a good sneeze; John Mortimer laments that the shelf-life of a modern writer is 'somewhere between the milk and the yoghurt.'
And there's Asimov: 'I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.' - now that's not a jest, surely? Sounds like a fact to me.
The debrief meeting for Words@FromeFestival team is traditionally a jolly rather than a postmortem. The sun shone on Alison's garden while we nibbled Mike's amazing tapas and congratulated each other.
We did eventually all sit down round the table but that was more of a praline karioke than a financial and aesthetic analysis.
All over now for another year... till October, anyway, when the the word bunting begins to come out again for next year.
Q: Is it ok to have a main character we don't like?
A: Yes, if they go the journey to self-resolution, like Austen's Emma or Hosseini's Amir in The Kite Runner - but we should be aware readers spend hours with these people and as Sarah Duncan has pointed out, that's like being stuck in a lift with someone you detest.
A point pondered during a lively Fromesbury meeting at Emily's, with updates from the group: Debby Holt's next novel "Love Affair for Grownups" out in January, and Debs Hughes "Ultimate Supply Teachers Handbook" already on the shelves in eyecatching splendour.
'What think you of falling in love?' is Rosalind's suggestion when her cousin Celia casts around for Friday night entertainment. They settle for Mafia-inspired wrestling, chatting with stray from 'Allo 'Allo, and running off into a forest full of banished dukes, but love of course intrudes, and triumphs in the end. It's 'As You Like It' , entertainingly performed by the Bradfordian Dramatic Society in the gardens of Winsley Dorothy House, where the woodland slowly illuminated as dusk fell. Magical.
And it's the last Bath Poetry Cafe at the Mission Theatre before the summer break. 'What a triumph this has been' says organiser Sue Boyle - ''Seven months, from a standing start, full every month!' It's a real privilege for Hazel & me, as 'Live & Lippy', to share in this amazing line-up: from Linda Saunder's lucent elegy 'on the vulnerability we all feel on an edge between past and unknown future' to laptop cellist Caleb Parkin's 'Hexadecimalice'... a brilliant evening of experimentation and classical quality. (Thanks
Alan for the picture)
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Labels: Bath Poetry Cafe, Bradfordian Dramatic Society, Frome Festival
Rose Flint writes about nature - all nature, the vastness of elemental powers and the small details: a spider, a hare's ears in the corn, jasmine pollen. Her poems are luminous and enamelled with jewel-like clarity; intensely personal evocations of the world we inhabit, or should inhabit. 'The Field', which won this year's Cardiff International Poetry Competition, is a wish-list the Earth Goddess Gaia herself might have conjured. Rose's new collection 'Mother of Pearl' had its launch on the final Friday of Frome Festival at La Strada. Rose, looking stunning in midnight indigo, illuminated the room with moonlit images and
John Slater serenaded the event on accordion.
From owlsong to Cabaret Sans Frontières... a quintessentially Frome event: local talent with a decidedly leftfield edge. I'm privileged to be the Philosopher Provocateur, pontificating with risqué relish from behind a frame provided by Folies Bergere heavenlies Clare and Nicky. And also knitting an independent man... who materialised a tad too independent and ran off. A bizarre and wonderful night.
Alison Clink's short story contest 'Winner's lunch' always holds special interest for writers, as the senior judges traditionally share tips for success in their speeches. Steve Voake, who picked Bath writer Magnus Nelson for 2 of the top prizes in the 'local writers' category, urged resilience in those dark-night-of-the-soul times: "Don’t think you’re finding it hard because you’re bad – it really is hard. Just have faith." Katie Fforde ended her 'top ten' with the reminder "You must give yourself permission to write, and to write badly! We learn our craft by doing it. Keep writing.”
I'm reminded of Samuel Beckett's famously laconic advice: "Try. Fail. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Overall winner was Colin Smith with his story '1963, the winter Dad left home.'
Scriptwriter Matthew Graham urges writers to keep the faith too; the BBC initially rejected ‘Life on Mars’ as "a bit too silly." His talk is full of practical information, like pre-planning stories on a board to get the structure right - a big board, so you can pace around it. Matthew paces around quite a bit himself, mixing in realistic encouragement with ideas for exercises and helpful contacts. Start with a premise that can be summed up in a few words, he says, and today's story is about wannerbe writers discovering "There’s so much stuff you don’t know, and you don’t know you don’t know it till someone tells you.”
Yes, writing's hard and marketing even harder, but turkeys still slip through. One of the 'happenings' of Festival Fringe was a Richard Cameron play at Rook Lane Chapel. 'Can't Stand Up For Falling Down' took on serious issues: domestic violence, suicide, bullying, mental disability, one-parent families, bereavement, broken homes, neglected children, alcoholism... perhaps rather too many issues for a one-hour play. What with all this and a stereotypical Northern time-warp as setting, the cast of this Troupers production did pretty well with this mawkish murder story.
And like a big fat tiramisu dessert, the last drops of Frome Festival have finally been licked, leaving us all elated but sated. You can listen to highlights of Frome FM on archive - Laurie's wonderful
'Eclectic' show includes contemporary poetry; there's
Mike's writers' roundups, and
Rosie Jackson reads her new story on Wednesday's
Afternoon Magazine.
And for no connective reason but just because I really like them, here's some words by Spanish poet Antonio Machado, translated for me by Emily:
"Traveller, there are your footprints,
The path, and nothing more.
Traveller, there is no path,
You make the path as you go."
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Labels: Frome Festival
"Something in our spirit dies if we accept the taming of wildness" Rose Flint tells the Women & Wildness poetry workshop at the library on Monday. "We should all connect with it, be aware of our sensual bodies and our inner wildness, and honour our right to live our lives the way we want to be."
Nathan Filer, guest at the Festival Poetry Cafe that evening, is reflective too.
He says he feels full of love for us, but crushingly sad, because we're all going to die. He also says my pictures of him are disconcerting. There may be some connection here. Nathan gives us 3 sets, all new material, all brilliant & bizarre, and much appreciated by the record-number audience crammed into the Garden Cafe.
Eleven open-mic contributers competed for the 'Festival Poet Laureate' title, sharing a range of thoughts and styles, and good-humouredly submitting to random judgement by coloured card. And the winner is.... David Sollors! I forgot to get a pic of David in his moment of triumph, but here's one of our new champ enjoying Nathan tell us how he overcome his own aversion to slam contests: "There's nothing that makes a person reassess the validity of competition like winning it."
'I feel like I've landed in the middle of the Mad Hatter's tea-party crossed with a Chinese laundry' says MC Elvis McGonagall at the start of the "Green is the New Black" fashion show on Tuesday night. The event's a sell-out, with about 500 people crowding around the catwalk for Elvis's 'retro and preloved' poems, the music, the amazing costumes, the whole crazy glitzy glam-rock street-theatreness of it all... The 2-Mandy organisers urge us to "worship guilt-free at the altar of fashion' and green-awareness has never been such fun. Fantastic.
Undeterred by the arrival of monsoon season, audiences continue to arrive in unexpectedly large consignments. 'Desert Island Reads' needed 3 extra rows of chairs and an extended interval to accommodate the queue for cake (thank you, Dining Divas, for that scrumptious array). Readings were yummy too: thought-provoking, sensuous, funny, and profoundly personal.
Sarah Duncan led us off with Ann Tyler's 'Accidental Tourist' and the theme of intimate journeys underlay several other choices: Rose Flint's pick of 'Prodigal Summer' by Barbara Kingsolver for its 'plea to be awake to diversity, and beauty, and pain'; John Birkett-Smith took us to Mani in Greece with travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Peter Macfadyen reminded us that 'when the earth shrugs its shoulders' and throws us into climatic disarray we all need to ask, as Tom Hodgkinson does, whether we should learn to be more idle.
Alison Clink's journey was back in time, to 1967, with Martin Philips's 'Listening to Coloured Dreams' and, linking to thoughts of herbal refreshment, poet Dave Angus gave a witty deconstruction of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ with special emphasis on that mysterious Bong-tree, while Gordon Graft shared 3 great contemporary poems. Performance poetry, he said, 'doesn't exclude anyone, so it's very dear to my heart.' Although nothing was pre-planned, Annie Lionnet's choice of 'The Middle Passage' by James Hollis united all this diversity, his message recalling the theme of Rose's workshop: "Follow your passion. Choice is what defines, and validates, a life. We must say 'yes' to the journey."
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Labels: Frome Festival
And the winner is...
the literary bit of Frome festival kicked off on Friday with Band Night at the Masonic.
Alex Whittington took the prize for the lyric writing composition, as judged by Jakarta, local band who wrote the music and will be inspiring more swarming & squealing at
Battle of the Bands on July 19th. Here's drummer Miles in post-judging mode.
Saturday, the big street party day, began benignly weather-wise: sun like the Soap Box poets shone (Rosie, you're such a star for this fesival innovation!) and Writers In Residence toiled with their tales in Cheap Street, but by evening the World Food Feast was a drizzle-fest. Frome, of course, being random & resilient, the street stalls and bands were well-supported but a bit of Greek shimmering dusk and mellow warm breeze would have enhanced the night...
Sunday... and the dreary dizzle of Saturday night became a distant memory, as temestuous rain, floods, and thunder, rocked the town.
What is going on?
Luckily all my events today are indoors, and I scurry from Frome FM Radio Station - you can hear
my Playlist choices here - to Frome Library for the Travel Writing talk.
Main theme from both (excellent) speakers is that travel writing can and should be "rewarding - but not necessarily financially." Editor David Kernek gave a helpful & humorous guide to being a favourite contributor, while Laurence Shelley inspired potential self-publishers with his advice on editing and marketing.
Informative, affirming and fun... but still the rain fell. I abandoned plans for a late-night evening in favour of drying out at home. And they wonder why English people talk about the weather! I wonder why we don't have 57 words for rain, as Eskimos allegedly do for snow.
Meanwhile for the dryer side of festival writing, there's Mike's radio programmes - his One-on-one session with me on Friday is archived
here. (And still indoors, my latest story "Quiet Women" found a home in
Penumbra lit. mag.)
Labels: Frome Festival
Lists... I love them. Perhaps in an alternative reality somewhere I am a list. To-do lists cluster on my desktop, my diary will hardly close for the inlay of lists. And as for list poems... How do I love them? Let me count the ways - oh goody, another list.
So when Laurie asked to make a list of tracks for The Sunday Playlist on
Frome FM, I was elated. An opportunity to trawl through all my CDs, to postpone work (this is a list already) and to make a list of the best music tracks in the world ever...
If you've ever tried this yourself, you will have spotted a flaw. The best music tracks in the world ever do not stay still in line. They run like ants, only more randomly; they rush from one end of the row to the other like naughty boys in those old-fashioned school photographs. I managed, in a kind of drenched sweat of ecstasy from hours of saturation in musical memories, to reduce the list to a fairly consistent baker's dozen. Only one more track left to face that Alan Sugar moment and creep from the list, hauling its long-handled cabin-baggage behind it.
And I had just about decided that Dylan must go. OK, he's god an' all that, but he's such an obvious choice... and the others had fought their case so irresistibly. And then I read an Arts Comment in the Guardian on the lyrics of Bob Dylan by Germaine Greer, the pundit who does for wit what Catherine Tate has done for grandmothers, headed "That creep couldn't even write doggerel."
"Great lyricist? Bah! Humbug!" the article began, but any coy pussyfooting-around ended there. My adjectival-list-ometer collected from the opening paragraph: agonised posturing, pretentious, illiterate, senseless, not even doggerel, and annoying. (It’s a good tip to end a list on a lighter note.)
So Mister Tambourine Man has retained its place, not on compassionate grounds but because in the great celestial list of women of our age, I don't want to stand anywhere near Ms Greer. This is the woman who said of aspiring writers: "Every week I am sent the effusions of people who, from springs bubbling up in the pits of their stomachs, have produced long strings of truncated syntactic elements, often rhymed but never intelligible or melodic, usually embarrassingly illiterate and often even more embarrassingly visceral.” (This went straight to the pit of my stomach, which promptly bubbled up the following visceral effusion:
There once was a writer named Greer
Whose views on her peers were severe,
Delusions of lyricism
had her snorting with cynicism
Support for the sisters? Stick it up your career.)
So if you want a Germaine quote to pin above your work area, I recommend going back to the days when she wrote:
"If a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got?"
More about writers on Frome radio at
Mike's blog. And of course more about Frome Festival just about everywhere. Where to begin? Try the free events on Saturday, for a start - Soapbox Poets on the hour in Cheap Street - and peer into shops and cafes at the pen-chewing scribes striving to win as one-day Writer In Residence. There's loads more writerly stuff & I'm tempted to push my own events (they looks so tasty!) so for more impartial coverage check the
website, and pick up a Festival Fringe leaflet too. (Gremlins R Us spot: If you're wondering when Helen Feltham's "Spirit of Place" writing workshop is, it's Thursday.)
And for something " irreverent ~ risky ~ witty ~ strange", there's the innovative "Cabaret Sans Frontieres" at the Masonic Hall on Friday 11th. "Faded splendour, where echoes of Moulin Rouge and burlesque tangle with edgy contemporary performance" is the promise from distinctly non-faded, totally splendid, organisers Annabelle & Howard. They urge you to dress up, but Mimi and Fifi will be at your service on the night...
And writers everywhere, spare a blush for Tom Bullough, hailed as winner of
Wales Book of the Year last night, for... erm, about 30 seconds. How that 15 minutes of fame is shrinking. Poor Tom has blogged it as 'A Glimpse of Hell' preceded by traumatic dreams of being hunted naked down a labyrinth. So if you get those dreams too, avoid Wales is my advice.
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Labels: Frome Festival, Germaine Greer, Wales Book of the Year
"Nothing is forever, but some things are very special" says Graham at Demos as we start our second week. Skyros Writers Lab this year was both special and ephemeral, and it's strange to be back in Frome with Glastonbury festival on the radio, downloading images of everyone I've left and not-quite understanding we won't meet up today in the white sundazzled walls of Skyros town. Like the hot sand and the warm sea and the high cerulean sky, they're all still on the slowly circling mind-carousel of memories.
So as a quick homage to my wonderful group who seized on every bizarre exercise I gave them and flew with it, here's an acrostic of magic moments:
S arah's ode, evoking varied voices and sharing and laughter, summed up our 'writer's lab'.
K ala! each day as Vasso's feasts appear on the fig-tree terrace.
Y oga early, beach-bunnying all afternoon, trailing up cobbled steps at dusk, strolling late downtown
R ooftop bar under the stars, where we linger to make each day three times longer than the night.
O nly this of me.... Rupert Brooke's memento mori, his monument a watchtower for full moon and solstice dawn,
S oiree on the last night: all that jazz of living: drama and poetry, soliloquies and songs... 'Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika'
C elebratiing creativity, and commitment, with passion and compassion,
E njoyment our essential way. not losing sight of shadows in the sun
N othing is forever, true, but 'now' is all we have,
T rusting is our difficult necessity; like Auden said, we love or die.
R eaching the edge is scary, and then when pushed we fly.
E nding as we began, alone. And if we are lucky, beloved.
And on the theme of returning home, I'll end with a plug for 'An Utterly Impartial History of Britain' by John O'Farrell, which had me helpless with giggles on the beach & I became one of those annoying people who makes you take your earphones out so they can read you bits even though you can't understand because they're laughing too much.
Laughter is what I will remember, like the sun and the cidadas and those ever-unnameable blues of the sea and the sky.
Labels: Skyros holistic holidays
Recipe for a fanatastic week: Take a dozen fresh writers, a feverishly blue sky and a fig-tree terrace above the Aegean sea. Bake at 30 degrees. Garnish with wonderful words & laughter and serve daily.
I've never not had a great time in Skyros (double negatives are such an English thing, Canadian Craig reminds me) but this course is seriously special. And I'm here with Hazel Carey, who is one of those people you get the "Some people touch your lives" fridge-magnets about. What could make the week more perfect? Well, solid sunshine, swimming in warm sea each afternoon, full moon at night, solstice dawn, mellow music in the bars and the occasional crazy night... that does it for me.
'Appreciations and suggestions for improvement?' is the traditional request as we start the second week, meeting with "If it aint broke don't fix it" and general agreement that friendship has been the key.
Hazel ends our brief breakfast meeting with the words of George Eliot: "Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away."
Labels: Skyros holistic holidays
A quiet week. Other than celebrating these sunny days with bicycle rides along lanes brimming with cowparsley, I've spent most of the time doing that thing all writers have to do eventually: write. Five projects to complete, five days to do it... even a dyscalculate like me can do the math. (Odd word, isn't it. Why has maths morphed into transatlantic singular these days?) (And another thing: why gist but jest - and then why gesture?)
And! you heard it first here: while everyone else was punditting Claire to win, this was the blog that held out for Lee, now Alan Sugar's chosen Apprentice of the year. Now if I could only be bothered to tune into BB I could see if my early pick of cross-dressing Mikey was similarly perspicacious...
'I once out-poeted the town cryer at the Hay on Wye festival' confessed, or maybe bragged, Rose Flint at the final gathering of the Words@Frome Festival meeting, a very relaxed affair in Rosie's garden. Rose has just scooped the top prize at the Cardiff International Poetry Competition so she is entitled to brag, tho she would never be so bold. We were on the topic of Soapbox Poets, Rosie's innovation for the first Saturday, in our countdown process to the big week in July. I'm off to Skyros tomorrow, returning just as our simmering
festival plans come to the boil.
So there will now be a short intermission. And I'm off to pack suitable clothes for writing on a Greek island....
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Labels: Frome Festival
"You can be seen as successful, but I can assure you as a career it's pants" says David Johnson at the Library Writers meeting on Monday.
He's talking about becoming an accidental poet. "I write poems but I think it's a waste of time" confides a newcomer. David is sympathetic. He tells us he is rather against poets who don't use everyday language, although his entertaining
new collection is called "Bombazine" so he must make some exceptions. David is rather against quite a lot, according to his Grumpy Old Poets manifesto, and speaks longingly of early nights with ovaltine although staying on to guest at the Poetry Cafe. "Love in a Warm Climate" is the theme. A full house enjoyed listening to David open with sustainable angst and close with sizzling anguish, and a dozen local poets sharing torrid and tender passions too.
Bath Fringe again, to see "Diary of a Madman" at the Rondo. Seb Steiger plays Poprishchin, whose diary entries arc through humorous to harrowing as this initially Pooteresque clerk spirals down through his own fantasies to the graphic solitude of the madhouse. Seb's solo performance is stunning, deserving the twelve-out-of-ten reviews he's been collecting, and the adaptation by Steve Hennessy finds a timelessness as well as troubling poignancy in Gogol's short story. The play goes to Bristol next: more information
here.
Admit to watching reality tv and you get one of two responses from other writers: a flicker of shocked distaste, or a frisson of relieved recognition. For me, reality programmes reveal the psychological preoccupations of our community - and that's our readers. Rejection is a significant theme. I tend to skip the shows but watch the commentaries & the interviews with the rejected. 'The Apprentice - Your Fired' has been great. "Stop moaning about working in a male-dominated environment," scoffs the studio commentator of candidate Helene, "Life is a male-dominated environment." Oscar Wilde couldn't have put it better. Dyslexic Lee, dubbed by the Telegraph "oafish", is my fave to win. And of course, as Alan Sugar's Prospero bows out, Queen Titania/Davina is shimmying in... anyone else fancy Mikey the big blind Scots transvestite?
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Labels: David Johnson, Stepping Out
You'd think, wouldn't you, that May would be the ideal time to plan a group walk on the Quantocks and Exmoor
in the footsteps of Coleridge from Nether Stowey to Porlock... except that incessant rain had flooded most of Somerset, with callouts to the emergency services coming at 3 per second. We forded several roads on our route-planning tour, and found the wooded footpaths marked on the OS map as alongside streams had readjusted the preposition and were now within them. Relief to return to the Castle of Comfort, ironically so named when the 1600s miners' cider house; a coffee-house by the time Coleridge and Wordsworth met there, and now a rather posh guest house.
Our room had sherry and a library, where we discovered the Diary of William Holland, vicar of Over Stowey, and gems like this:
"October 23rd 1799. Went with my wife to Stowey and bought a gown of Mr Frank Poole who smiled and bowed graciously. Saw that Democratic hoyden Mrs Coleridge who looked so like a frisky girl, or something worse, that I was not surprised a Democratic Libertine should choose her for a wife." Coleridge would have been 27, married to Sarah Flicker and recently moved from Devon to Bristol, where he lectured at Unitarian chapels and wrote anti-war poems. The Lyrical Ballads had just been published. Kubla Khan and opium addiction came later.
Bath Fringe has so much exciting looking stuff I wish I could get to see more of it. Like all festivals, there's a buzz from just walking around the town on a warm night with audiences spilling out from every kind of event from classic to chaotic. My Friday choice was "A Bath with Bladud" presented by Touch & Go. No script, no repeats, promised the flyer. "An alchemy of movement and sound and more" promised Michael at the start. "It may not be the story you know" he added, usefully. There were places where this tale of the leper King with a fascination for flight seemed not to be a story even the performers knew, as ancient Greece slewed into a place of flamenco and cornetto accents, and Bladud's descent to the Underworld appeared to take him into a bar in Aberdeen. Bizarre impro explorations only added to the audience's enjoyment, and sense of privilege at sharing something ephemeral and courageous, with the themes - aspirations, choices, flight, fatherhood - powerfully shown.
Labels: Coleridge, Touch And Go
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Back home, the Merlin is aglow from their panto
success in the Somerset Fellowship of Drama Awards, and the Frome Festival countdown has begun. Mike's already on the next round of recordings for Frome FM. Very civilised it is too, with supper and wine.
Then on Tuesday I was in Bruton to MC the Festival of Arts Poetry Slam. 'Venue T.B.A" is never a good look on a poster, so full marks to those who discovered us in the Blue Ball Hotel and shared a quirky but enjoyable event, swelled by unexpected interest from the public bar.
Poets are not always so appreciated. Philip Larkin is kicking up a kerfuffle in Frome. His most famous
verses, identified in the front-page 'Outrage!' story in our local paper as "containing the F word in 2 out of 3 stanzas", have been carved on a slab as part of an art installation near a graveyard. Perhaps the Wesley Church congregation fear that mourners may find little comfort in Larkin's morose philosophy of human relations. I'd have thought it would be quite consoling to reflect on the shared inevitability of reciprocal fuck-up. Artist Cornelia Parker says bravely: "Frome has a long history of non-conformism and I hope that continues." Amen.
Footnote to the Larkin story: Emily reminds me of a cosier alternative from Adrian Mitchell: 'They tuck you up, your mum and dad...'
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Labels: Frome Festival, Merlin Theatre, Philip Larkin
After the simmering blues and sizzling golds of Greece, I've returned to the duchess greens and Queen-of-the-May whites of quintessential English countryside.
I'm still functioning in greek time when I set off to Farncombe Estate, a venue in a jewel of a valley in the Cotswolds and seething with students singing motown, rag-rugging, chinese brush-stroking, examining Tudor history and - in my room - exploring their creativity in writing. Despite my residual ripples of hellenic withdrawal, it's a really great session with a dream group: enthusiastic, mutually supportive, and with wonderfully varied voices. They sop up suggestions and stimuli like thirsty navvies and the weekend whizzes by.
Town news footnote:
Frome Festival brochure is now out, with most of the literary events bookable. And my piece on Hunting Raven bookshop is in the current edition of
Penpusher magazine.
"You have to know where you're heading and that exciting things will happen, but you have to discover them along the way," is Sarah Duncan's reply when asked how far she plans in advance: "The only time I ever sat down to plot a novel, I couldn't be bothered to finish it - or even start it."
It's the paperback launch of 'Another Woman's Husband' at Waterstones in Bath, and Sarah's giving How To Write A Best-Seller tips with a combination of helpful practicality and disarming modesty. Sarah is passionate that storytelling is more important than style, and if that means academic affectation I agree. But to me style IS story-telling; for writers, as for standup comics, it's not the events that matter, it's the way you tell 'em.
The third week...
and we'd become such lotus eaters it might have been impossible to leave Paxos without the lure of the seaplane which whisked us off to Corfu at sunrise.
By sunset we're on Salamina island, after travelling by plane, car, and finally ferry across Thermopolae Straits, where the tiny Athenian fleet saved the City States from Persian invasion in 490BC. We're searching for the legendary cave of Euripedes, unknown even to the Rough Guide, for the setting of Steve's next play - which we heard last week has been shortlisted for production by Theatre West, so that adds zest to the quest.
Salamina isn't that big but the population's more than 10 times that of Paxos, and it's totally untouristified. So there's no concessions to non-greek linguists, not even the road signs, and our explorations need much ingenuity, many pidgin pleasantries, and Steve's knowledge of Russian (their alphabet is similar, apparently) before we reach Euripedes Kanteen, a friendly little bar on a hillside above the tiny bay of Peristeria.
A steep clamber led us to discover... excavations of an ancient marble tomb, and a giant wild tortoise.
Time to move on to Delphi, where this often under-appreciated Greek dramatist would have seen his plays in performance at the amphitheatre beside oracle.
As befits a Greek odyssey, we had varied adventures before reaching Athens airport again, so I'm just going to post a few extra images from a place I still feel I'm wandering...
- morning view from our rooms in Krisso, near Delphi
- Orchomenos ancient amphitheatre
- a figure from a family votive offering to Apollo, 2nd Century BC (yes folks, that is 2,200 years ago....!!)
- American visionary Eva Sikelianus, who revived the tradition of amphitheatre drama in Greece in 1927
- that tortoise
Labels: Delphi, Euripedes, Kristo, Orchomenos, Paxos, Salamis
The second week here... and we decided not to start thinking about our final week in Greece until our stay in Paxos was nearly over, until we suddenly realised this drizzled- honey time of late patio breakfasts, strolls above cerulean seas, and easy evenings with new friends, is actually scudding past with scary speed, and our flower-filled days and firefly nights will soon be over. So we're going to extend our stay on the island for five more days…
I’m confident now I know the island paths, and stride off with the map, up past olive grove hill and donkey Hote (we feed her apples) to Ozias with the little bar that’s never open – which is open - and after a while Steve says
“Look! The sea!”
And I say “Yes! Isn’t it beautifu!”
“But it’s on our right!”
“Oh! It should be on our left!”
“Well it isn’t!”
And we’re lost for 4 hours on the hilltops of Paxos, above rock falls and mysterious cerulean sea inlets, until we finally arrive back at the bar that’s never open and it’s closed, so we go home for a Mythos on the patio.
As I've been rhapsodising about these cerulean waters, I should be honest and admit there’s the usual Greek scribble of wires across every vista, with villas plonked like trout-pout lips on the coastal face at every turn. The beaches here despite the beauty of the bone-white stones, are the dirtiest I’ve ever seen - the Germans didn’t need to waste ammunition when they invaded, they could have dropped the skiploads of plastic bottles that litter the island today and despoiled it just as thoroughly.
One of my poems about the frustrating and beautiful enigma of Greece ends:
"Greek islands are like that.
Tainted enigmas, sainted sluts,
Smells of jasmine and lust."
But my guess is, as Paxiots are nothing if not sensible to tourism, those beaches will be cleaned up by the time the season begins officially next week.
As Dionysis told us tonight at Anesis (“laid back”) bar: they are no more than 60% ready yet. Why, there’s still one day to go before the season starts!
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Labels: Paxos
Kalo Paska! Greek Easter is as far behind our as their summer is ahead.
On Paxos island the paths through dappled olive groves are already swathed with golden carrot flowers and broom, wild gladioli and garlic, mint, oregano, and thyme. The asphodels are beginning to seed and the aphrodysiac blue hyacinths nearly over, but the pretty purple parasitic mock-orchid broomsrape is profuse, and real orchids are emerging.
Jana, our friend and my reason for being here, is path-Minerva of the island. She recognises each trail literally stone by stone, since she's cleared most of them herself, and knows the history of each ancient cistern, mill, basilica, and village. The cisterns - sterna, locals call them, are amazing: there's no running water on Paxos (the main reason it's escaped mass tourism) and since the first inhabitants rafted across from Corfu, finding water has needed ingenuity and hard work. Wells were chiselled from the non-porous rock, and settlements developed around this essential supply plus the need to hide from pirates. Hence the profusion of ancient connective routes.
I've come to see, and write about, the reclamation of these old paths zigzagging across this tiny island. Almost every turn gives another glimpse of the sea, indescribably blue. Our villa pack describes this crystal water as aquamarine silk but there's turquoise brilliance too. "It's like headlights under the sea" says Christos.
We've spent the last 6 days blissfully wandering these wild flower paths, stopping by white pebbled bays, and after dark watching the strobe dance of the fireflies in warm night air below our villa on the southernmost tip of the bay.
On 'Big Sunday' we went with Jana and Colin to share a greek family meal of pascal lamb and eggs dyed blood red.
Monday was even bigger: a procession from Ipapandi Church in the oldest hillside village, with bell ringing, fire crackers, and chanting - and flowers, blood-red and pure white, strewn on the path of the icon all the way to the sea front at Lakka. Kristo aneste - Christ is risen, the followers greet each other.
But they also say here Poseiden fell in love with the nymph Amphitriti, and with his trident sliced off the most beautiful end of Corfu to make a paradise hideaway...
"This division between past, present, and future doesn't mean anything, and has only the value of an illusion, tenacious as it may be." - Einstein, apparently.
Labels: Paxos
Sue Townsend said every time she sat down to do some serious writing she'd decide she really ought to defrost the fridge. I resisted that particular distraction for 8 years, but my kitchen's now getting a total makeover - by my friend Rog, hands-on designer extraordinaire - so what with essential scouring attacks on appliances & cupboards, and other local activities including a workshop at Longleat Centerparcs, there's very little writerly goss to report this week. Though I did find an entertaining site for surreal
similes, for anyone prefers procrastinations that don't involve melting ice. Among 33276 options: Love is like a bumble bee. How true.
There will now be a month's intermission.
I'm off to Paxos, where the temperature is already over 20°C, to write about walking the footpaths of this exquisite island. I've been dreaming for weeks about sunlight on Greek waters... This image is from my hosts,
Paxos Magic - other mouthwatering glimpses at their site too.
What will I miss most about the English spring I'm leaving, apart from friends and family? "Streetcar Named Desire at the Merlin" - my garden unfurling - and Gavin & Stacey, obviously. Oh to be one of Uncle Bryn's 17 Facebook friends...
Writers James Cordon & Ruth Jones seem unerringly to find the stairway from suburbia to surreal heaven, with awe-inspiring moments like Nessa reminiscing over her torrid affair with John Prescott: "many’s the time Dave Blunkett came over with his bitch". And if you're wondering, not even the writers know what happened on the fishing trip... James Cordon says his favourite comedies “have a touch of humanity, a touch of heart and soul”. Mine too.
Speak later.
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Labels: Paxos Magic
It's a long drive to Taunton Brewhouse Th
The view from my room in Finca el Cerrillo says it all really: luxurient gardens, blue pool, olives and vines on the ochre hills, and the mountain tops of the Sierra Almijara beyond. 
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