Jo Caulfield presents… The Speakeasy
Scottish Storytelling Centre
Edinburgh
Tuesday18th November
Comedian and actress Jo Caulfield hosts six short acts of varying styles, & makes up an evening that feels more like one of those lucky days at the Edinburgh festival when you randomly chose a class act of a show. For £6 the evening was an eclectic mix, with each act flowing well about Jo’s interludes of easy-humour and performer introductions. The whole effect was a mixture of a stand up comedy club, a poetry slam and an episode of QI. Jo Caulfield could host anything and I’d happily go – her style is so friendly & honest, we all feellike we’ve been personally invited to her home. Tonight, this was the Netherbow Theatre under The Scottish Story Telling Centre; a lovely, cozy, simple little Theatre in the heart of the Royal Mile.
First up was Sam Small, a member of the Black Lantern collective. A talented poet, he performed 3 of his pieces around the themes of ‘boxes, love and time travel’. All performed at a fast pace, – hyper, funny, angry, and intelligently executed. He had the audience intrigued and impressed from the first sentence and I was left wanting more. A talented guy.
Author Eleanor Updale spoke next, a friendly and warm presence, Eleanor told some wickedly funny & partly true, partly fiction (never 100% sure where the boundaries lay but who needs to know?) tales of what she and her media comrades are planning to do next after they have been robbed of the retirement pensions there were expecting. A story of pitching an idea to the BBC about an X-factor style show minus the music – just focusing on the sob stories called ‘Dead Nans’, followed into a weird and wonderful pretty believable plan to run a restaurant/brothel for pensioners with ‘live stream for TV’ in Edinburgh was surreal and lovely and sounded completely homely and respectable.
Phil O’Shea then shuffled onto stage and sucked the audience into his weird and wonderful surreal world. A intentionally nervous awkward style all of his own perhaps made the audience a little unsure for a few seconds before we realised that actually that’s how we were meant to feel and settled in for the ride. A squeaky northern accented turtle hand puppet accompanied some of the act and that’s all I can really write without rambling crazy nonsense as he does it so much wonderfully better!
The second half was kicked off with journalist and broadcaster from Radio 4’s Today Show James Naughtie. An engaging speaker, he told some great stories of ridiculous things that have happened when interviewing politicians, with some great tidbits and insights about his life as a journalist. A funny and interesting talk.
Next up we had Bram E Gieben Alias Texture, a poet also from the Black Lantern collective. Two poems were performed with thunderous hypnotic fury. The intelligent angry rhythmical ‘Burn’ was a wrenching strongly executed rant at the state of the economy, whilst ‘Keep going’ was as he said with a smile, ‘about divorce, suicide and cancer but -much more positive’. And it was – a powerful committed performance from this hugely talented poet. Highly impressive.
Last up was the bizarre ‘The Creative Martyrs’. Looking like an old fashioned mime cabaret act, the two chaps performed a slightly confusing piece with a cello and visual humour singing about war. I found it a little hard to follow exactly what they were singing about, but they were pretty funny to watch and ended the evening on a light note.
All in all a really lovely way to spend a wintery Tuesday evening and something completely different to see each time. I’d fully recommend spending £6 once a month to go to this lovely evening of well chosen performances and enjoy Jo Caulfield’s welcoming generous hosting and obvious love of the city’s talent.
Reviewer : Pip Burnett
Clarke Carlisle
Edinburgh International Book Festival
During his time as a professional footballer, Clark Carlisle was considered to be Britain’s brainiest footballer, even knocking a reigning champion off his perch on Countdown in 2010. Writing a full length book, however, was a different kettle of fish, as Clarke readily admitted during his amenable chit-chat with fellow former footballer, Pat Nevin, at the Edinburgh Book Fest His book,. ‘You Don’t Know Me, But,‘ is an auobiographical confessional piece, in which Carlisle takes us from his multi-racial beginnings in Preston, to his recent position as chairman of the Professional Footballers Association.
Clarke Carlisle is a lovely chap, a well-spoken & family man who finds himself these fays with the plumb job of commentating at premier league football matches. His talk touched a number of interesting places, such as his addiction problems & handling of the John Terry/Anton Ferdinand racial case. The best moment for me, however, came during the Q&A session, when an audience member asked Carlisle what was his favorite moment on the pitch. I was at Wembley myself in 2009, when Burnley triumphed over Sheffield United in the Championship play-offs. But this was only his second favorite moment. The first was scoring the last-minute winner for Blackpool against Carlisle, with his mum attending one of his football matches for the very first time. That moment, he said, is when he fell in love with football, & his animated demeanor as he told the story showed very much how that love is still there.
Damo Bullen
Irvine Welsh
Divine Inspirations
Michael Fry & Angus Konstamm: using the past to glimpse the future
Charlotte Square
August 20th
Confronting a nation’s history involves confronting its national myths. If the country is our own, that can move us right out of our comfort zone. As we in Scotland get closer to the referendum on independence, the issue of our history seems to take on more importance, and we are reminded of George Orwell’s words, from ‘1984’, “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” Looking at the past, for the purposes of this debate, were historian-authors Michael Fry and Angus Konstam. Their chairman Joseph Farrell described them as ‘heavyweights,’ and although Angus Konstam suggested that if the conversation flagged the two of them might entertain us with a bout of sumo, the chairman was clearly referring to their intellects.
To Michael Fry, control of the past, as in the publication of books on Scottish history, has been left too long in academic hands, and has been a one-sided account of social and economic history replete with statistics. His bias was towards culture, society, and politics, in the search for what has kept Scotland Scotland; he has found that when a historian undertakes research he finds things which relate, albeit perhaps as echoes, to today, and that what we recognise are not the products of sudden upheaval but have deep roots. In his book ‘A New Race of Men’ – the title being a phrase taken from observations made in 1845 by the Rev. George Cruden, one of the few kirk ministers to have taken part in the Statistical Accounts of Scotland in both 1794 and 1845 – Fry presents a picture of a nineteenth-century largely at peace, with a conservative constitution (if I can use such a word) that supported that of England, union with the rest of the United Kingdom long since a ‘done deal’. Scottish capitalism was in the hands of men who had served their time as apprentices and shared social roots with the men who worked for them, giving rise to a sense of egalitarianism. In movements such as public health, it was recognised that contagion did not stop at the edge of working-class areas, and that therefore health belonged to all, not simply to the bourgeoisie.
Ideas like this didn’t fail to draw dissent from the floor. A questioner from North East England challenged the assumption that the nineteenth-century Scottish working class was any less exploited than the working class in his own area – and indeed the supposed difference that Michael Fry had suggested between the Scottish and English concepts of class did seem to sit rather awkwardly with a previous statement to the effect that the North East of England, for example, shared much of Scotland’s perceived remoteness from London and Westminster. Another questioner challenged the idea of the ‘done deal’ with its roots going back to the eighteenth century, citing the verse in ‘God Save the King’ about ‘rebellious Scots’; unfortunately her point merely perpetuated the canard that the verse is insulting to the Scots as a whole, when it is actually specifically directed at the Jacobites. Fry made this point in reply, however – that in the ‘age of revolution’, between 1789 and 1848, while the death toll in political causes in other countries was high, there was a total of twenty-three in Scotland. “I counted them’” he said.
Angus Konstam, although principally a maritime historian, has been fascinated by Robert Bruce since reading a ‘Ladybird’ book about him. In his book ‘Bannockburn’, according to the event pre-publicity, Konstam ‘debunks some myths about the legend of Robert the Bruce’. He describes the modern popularity of Bruce as ‘a national talisman… wrapped up in romantic guff’. The definition of Bruce’s wars as ‘Wars of Scottish Independence’ was a later one, as are those of a nationalist or a class war, both of which would have been lost on Bruce himself. The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century conflicts were fought to ‘solve purely medieval problems’, and in them even Bruce himself changed sides more than once. Nevertheless, by the time of Bannockburn there was an unprecedented and unfamiliar wave of specifically Scottish patriotism that must have lent something to the subsequent sense of Scottish identity.
For all that, the presentation did leave me wondering what myths were going to be debunked. It is more than forty years since Nigel Tranter’s ‘Bruce Trilogy’ was published, moving into popular fiction what historical study had long made known – Bruce’s career as a serial turncoat, and his murder of a rival. I listened to the account of Clifford’s unsuccessful charge against the Scottish infantry, and muttered to myself that surely the knowledge that horses will pull up before a solid mass of footsoldiers was known as far back as the Greek phalanx. However, we were brought back to popular myth when Konstam reminded us of the legend of Bruce and the spider – “It’s in the Ladybird book, so it must be true,” he said with a smile – for which there is no evidence beyond its existence in popular folklore.
Of the two books foregrounded, it strikes me that Michael Fry’s is probably the more controversial. However both authors were kept busy signing copies of their books after the event. I have to say I was left wanting more time for public discussion with the two authors – to drill down into some apparent contradictions in what Michael Fry said, to challenge Angus Konstam further about whether the myths about Bruce were actually as powerful as he assumed. Joe Farrell did make the point that the pair seemed to have been drawn together simply because they were historians. This was the first time I had attended an event at the Book Festival when I wondered if either of the authors on stage was thinking to himself “If I were Germaine Greer or George R R Martin I would have this stage to myself. Obviously I’m considered second division!” I am happy to give the Edinburgh International Book festival the benefit of the doubt on this issue, because it does what it must to pack so much into its schedule, and by-and-large gets it just right.
Paul Thompson
@BookseekerAgent
Making Meaning Of The Voices.
Edinburgh International Book Festival.
People with severe mental health issues are often stigmatized by society. From drugs to psychiatry, solutions are complex and expensive. Eleanor Longden, a voice hearer and a qualified psychologist joins James Ley, a playwright who explores his bi-polar disorder in his writing, and Robin Murray, professor of psychiatric research at King’s College London, to discuss how hearing voices and other problems can be ‘creative and ingenious survival strategies.’
Chaired by Dr Angela Woods, a lecturer in Medical Humanities,I knew that this was going to be an interesting gig. The theme of the day was making art out of pain and suffering. Eleanor Longdon became a Divine hero this afternoon. As she talked about the hell of being able to hear voices in her head and her barbaric experiences at the hands of Psychiatry. Indeed, Ms Longden’s recounted experience was the very reason I adopted the label of Spiritual Medium, especially before I had healed the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that had prevented me from progressing in life. I chose not to become a statistic or test case for western psychiatric medicine. I chose to find my own way of understanding this debilitating condition an to heal myself successfully!
The frustrating thing about this discussion,was not being able to be part of the discussion.The question that I was longing to ask Robin Murray, Professor of psychiatric research. Was, How is it possible to understand something if it had never been experienced first hand? Ms Longdon’s, account of possible solutions and ways of coping were admirable. However, not once was the possibility of healing the cause of the traumatic incidence aired as a solution. In fact,the only possibility of a solution that was raised, was to obtain more funding for research. Research is not going heal the cause/ causes of trauma and a damaged mind. Conscious change and removing the long held ignorance of the healing arts. Will heal the cause so that the effects no longer effect day to day life.
The first rule Of Spiritual Healing,is to take responsibility. I did and it worked. It will for you too. Good Time!
Mark ‘Divine’ Calvert
Protest! The Rhetoric of Resistance
Edinburgh International Book Festival
Scottish Power Foundation Studio
August 16th
“Spoken Word performance can be a tool of dissent, it can give a voice to the dispossessed – and it’s not all ranting these days. Join Phill Jupitus as Porky the Poet, Elvis McGonagall, Hollie McNish and Hannah Silva as their deft rhetoric confronts, parodies and overturns issues of political, domestic and social injustice. Fun performance, clever words, serious intent.” (blurb on the Festival web site). Sometimes it’s a pity to have to review a one-off event and to publish that review in retrospect. How better it would be to be able to tell your friends “Go and see this!” I’m in that position as I write. I wish ‘Protest!’ was mid-run and you could all queue for returned tickets at the Box Office. As it was, the theatre was full for this one-off ‘shard’ (as Master of Ceremonies Luke Wright called it) of the Festival’s ‘Babble On’ series, and you couldn’t have got a return for love nor money.
We were launched into the stream of comic dissent by Phil Jupitus who, in the 1980s, quit a civil service job to become a poet, and who got gigs supporting bands “because I was cheaper than a support band”. Instantly there was a post-punk feel to the proceedings. To me this was a little odd, as though poetic dissent had started when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, as though John Cooper Clarke, Gil Scott-Heron, and Allen Ginsberg had been forgotten; or further back – the polemic verse of left-wing poets of the 1930s, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s political diatribes, Chaucer’s and Juvenal’s satire. Irony was never far away from Phil’s performance; praising the subversive nature of comics like The Beano and The Dandy, he led us in applause for D C Thomson, a newspaper publisher who (correct me if I am wrong) stubbornly maintained an anti-trades-union policy. Phil’s paean to The Beano had the kind of robust rhyme-and-metre scheme that lends a hobnail boot to humorous poetry. The audience couldn’t help laughing, in fact they couldn’t stop. Especially funny was his series of ten-line poems built up from the titles of Fringe shows (although I sincerely hope he decides to give ‘Sex with animals’ a miss this year!)
Phil provided what he and Luke referred to as the ‘glue’ between the other poets. Next up was Elvis McGonagall, and although this will irritate him no end, the comparison with John Cooper Clarke is inevitable. Substitute a Dundee accent for a Salford one, and you have the same facility for using rhyme, rhythm, and refrains. It’s tight, precise, and rapid-fire, with the likes of Margaret Thatcher (yes, she can provoke even from the other side of the veil) and Nigel Farage in his sights. There was a wonderful recitation of clichéd phrases in David Cameron’s voice, and, evoking Sir Harry Lauder, an address to Scottish voters who had not yet made up their mid about independence – ‘Stop your Swithering, Jock’!
There was an instantly obvious dichotomy between the male performers’ work and the females’. The latter’s humour was gentler, the seriousness ramped up. Hannah Silva instantly grabbed our attention by speaking a series of broken semi-syllables into her microphone. Operating a recording loop by foot-switch and varying the same vocal sounds in pitch and stress, she built up multi-tracked layers what can only be described as music, and suddenly over the top of that filled in all the missing semi-syllables to repeat and repeat Ed Milliband’s response to public sector strikes. Intricate, well thought-out, and damnably clever. I can say the same about her other pieces, one of which almost worked like a cumulative folk or children’s song where extra elements are added on at the end of each verse. Except there was nothing folksy, nothing juvenile in her gender politics, her direct expression about prostitution and the female underclass. What is difficult for me to describe is how this use of technology coupled with fragmentary speech built up atmosphere, evoked such a strong emotional response in me. Her repetition of the fact that forty percent of all soldiers fitted with a prosthesis return to war was particularly evocative in the hundredth year since the start of the Great War. Hollie McNish got her points across by words alone. She sustained her technical power right through each long poem without flagging. Again it was sexual politics that were foregrounded. She was able to address serious issues in a vernacular setting – the facility with which she and her elderly grandmother can converse about earthy subjects which are an embarrassment to the mother/daughter generation between them. Hollie presented us with a wonderful poem about what turns her on, starting with bricks, going through a whole lot of other things including the laughter when a fart interrupts foreplay, before returning to bricks. Probably her best poem of the session was the one she wrote when breast-feeding her baby in a toilet, whilst being confronted by a poster of a young woman in a bikini tacked to the back of the door.
I spoke to Hollie after the performance, and put it to her that although it was possible to be more outspoken, more vitriolic, more insulting in an overtly comic work of art – a poem or a cartoon, say – the very fact that it is comic tends to draw its venom, to make an audience take it less seriously. By contrast, someone who enthralls an audience the way that she and Hannah Silva do and puts across a serious point, albeit with distinct threads of humour, has a greater effect and is not so easily dismissed. Hollie was happy and relieved to hear my opinion, as she had feared that the laughter her male colleagues got was a sign of greater impact. Not so, I kid you not.
Paul Thompson
@BookseekerAgent
Major-Minor: Languages and Nations
Edinburgh International Book Festival
Scottish Power Foundation Studio
August 16th
“In this age of globalisation, the English language has become increasingly dominant online and on the page. As an author writing in a different national or minority language how does this dominance affect your ability to tell your story and find an audience? Gaelic writer Martin MacIntyre and Arno Camenisch, who writes in Rhaeto-Romanic and German, join acclaimed translator Daniel Hahn to discuss.” (blurb on the Festival web site) It’s difficult to know how to review a discussion. One angle from which to look at it might be the structure and the way it was chaired. Considering that it was to last forty-five minutes with fifteen minutes for questions and answers at the end, and to include readings by two authors, on that account it was spot on, tight, and well presented. Much credit goes to the chairman, David Codling. Of course a lot also depends on the qualities of the members of the panel, so let me introduce them.
Arno Camenisch looks like a diminutive version of Simon Baker, right down to the disarming smile. He has stage presence, whether reading in his native Rhaeto-Romanic – a ‘minority language’ from southern Switzerland – or talking about his work. Despite, or maybe because of, his occasionally having to appeal to fellow panel-members for help with a word or phrase in English, he displayed a dry wit and an unconventional way of looking at things. “My choice of language depends on the weather,” he says. “If it is raining I write in Rhaeto-Romanic. If it is windy or sunny, German… I grew up in a polyphonous village. There were many languages… But television was king. We believed more in TV than god.” To Arno ‘the sound is the soul of the text’. Martin MacIntyre agreed, speaking of ‘music’ as being the key, and praising the sound of Arno’s reading. Martin was born in Glasgow to parents originally from South Uist, and learned Gaelic from them. His spoken Gaelic is precise and clear, and when he read from a recent novel we could hear that he was not simply bilingual but effectively trilingual, and the Gaelic was interrupted by both English and Glaswegian. Frankly, that was the first time I had ever heard a passage of Gaelic with the word ‘woggle’ in the middle of it! “What excites me about Gaelic is that everyone who reads it can also read English,” he said. “There’s a tension between the two.”
Both writers translate from their ‘minority’ language into a neighbouring ‘majority’ language – from Rhaeto-Romanic to German, and from Gaelic to English. Daniel Hahn, national programme director of the British Center for Literary Translation, said “Translation is never about the language, it is about languages. The relationship between languages… We use the big languages as a bridge for translation of minority languages. This is not an unproblematic relationship.” He highlighted this problematic characteristic by the example of a translation from Welsh to English of the words of an old man who spoke only Welsh and knew no English at all. During the question-and-answer session I had the opportunity to ask him to clarify this. I made the point that if I was reading, say, I Claudius, I suspended disbelief and simply accepted that I was reading the words of a native speaker of Latin who was writing to me in Greek; so how was a translation from Welsh to English any more problematical?
Daniel agreed, up to a point. “There’s a kind of sleight of hand going on when you read a translation,” he said. “We collude in that. We pretend we are reading it in the original language.” But then he made the very valid point that the relationship between Welsh and English, particularly in the context of the novel in question, is highly political, involving the identity of people where ‘to speak one is not to speak the other’. He further reinforced this when he mentioned a New Zealand writer who said that the problem was not that speakers of a majority language couldn’t ‘see’ the speakers of the minority language, but rather that they ‘couldn’t see themselves’. There is so much creativity in translation, not simply in how best to render a text literally, but how to find equivalent, analogous, or even vaguely similar concepts in two different cultures. “With modern Gaelic vocabulary, you are restricted in usage. It forces you to hone your prose in a different way,” said Martin MacIntyre. Such expressions sent us away from the event with much to think about.
Paul Thompson
@BookseekerAgent
Julian Cope
EIBF
15th August
Back when I was a Young New Romantic, ‘The Teardrop Explodes’ were one of my favourite bands. ‘Reward’ is still on my play list when I Dj, its such a funky feel good classic. As you will already know our hero of the evening has had a very successful career as a solo artist too, that has lasted nearly forty years. However, aside from his illustrious career as a recording and touring artist.Julian Cope is a Wizard and celebrated Shaman..
His first publication,The Modern Antiquarian it is a Wizard Classic, that details every stone circle and sacred site in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Mr Cope visited them all and photographed them personally. For novice wizards just beginning on the path of consciousness. The Modern Antiquarian is an essential tool. Because there is nothing else like it. When I found that I had the opportunity to attend Julian’s ‘appearance at “The Edinburgh Book Festival,” where he was to be giving a reading from his new book 131, I jumped at the chance. Julian is a Visionary on a mission to change the consciousness of the Planet. To show people a different way and to help them to heal. This is the centre of his work as an author. Fiction that has meaning and that has the potential to change the consciousness of the people that read it.
Mr Cope was a very enigmatic figure as he took the stage tonight, with the presence and the stage-craft of a true Master. Enchanting the capacity audience with the ease of an old Pro, which he undoubtedly is. It was Julian’s presence that was as transformational as it was Rock N Roll. The Book 131, is a time-travelling odyssey with characters and plot derived from his own experience both as a mystic and a Rock Legend. Bringing to life and immortalizing his own experiences in the captivating way that only a true Bard and Visionary can. We discovered that it all began with a bedtime story that he would create for his daughter… so its foundations are built on humour and unconditional love. With only an hour to address his audience. Julian Cope introduced us to his world as a professional Wizard and caring Dad. With more than enough source material For 132 and 134. Amazing stuff, reminiscent of the four noble truths.Could Mr Cope’s new book be an Antiquarian guide book for life?
Although a fan of his recorded work myself. It was the Shaman and the Author that gripped me tonight. He explained his new book as a tool of transformation.I am salivating at the prospect of reading it. What a Lovely Rock N Roll Legend He Is and what a lovely way to spend an evening. “Ladies and.Gentlemen. Mr Julian Cope!”.
Mark ‘Divine’ Calvert
Monkey Poet: Shit Flinging
2-4, 6-11, 13-18 20-24 Aug
16:45
Free (Non-ticketed)
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