The Blackbird by Claire Allen

At the end of May my twice-weekly online gathering, A Leap in the Dark, featured a pre-launch of The Blackbird, a fine new novel by Claire Allen, published this week by Henningham Family Press. We enjoyed an excellent reading by the author and some context-setting by the publishers, and we all braced ourselves expectantly for the publication, because any new book from HFP is cause for a celebration.

At the time I'd read The Blackbird in pdf form, which is never the best way to read anything. I need to handle a text, to annotate and riffle, not to scroll, and this is a novel that invites conscientious riffling. I now have a copy of the trade paperback edition, and plan to read it again, but really for the first time, if you see what I mean. I look forward to that, because it's a wonderful novel (and I suppose one has to mention in passing Golding's The Spire as a noble predecessor) and because as an object it's a book of quite outstanding beauty, like all HFP publications (more on this in a moment).

Claire Allen deftly organises two narrative strands around the main character of Hope, strands set respectively in the Liverpool Blitz during the Second World War and in the present day,  in London. Here, on the Blackbird Housing Estate (based loosely on the now-demolished Heygate Estate in the Elephant and Castle) Hope cares for her husband, a retired civic sculptor who suffers from Alzheimer’s. Hope's father, we learn, worked on the construction of Liverpool Cathedral (above), the colossal pile designed by George Gilbert Scott on which construction began in 1904 and continued until 1978.

Other bloggers and commentators have already shared their thoughts on the text, so I shall add only that Clare Allen''s prose is both plain and simple (in the very best senses), and very frequently piercing. This is a beautiful novel, generous and humane in range and depth.

You can read an extract here: https://unbound.com/books/the-blackbird/

David and Ping Henningham set dizzyingly high production standards for all of their publications, whether the trade paperback or the covetable limited edition deluxe version (of which I understand a handful remain unsnapped-up). How they do this while keeping the cover price so affordably low is a mystery.

I learn from their website that they have sourced materials from G.F Smith, paper merchant to Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and that all editions of The Blackbird 'will be covered with Gmund Urban, which uses “genuine pulverized cement” to recreate concrete’s subtle texture and sparkle. The
Römerturm paper mill has created “tradition and dynamic modernism in one material."

So - paper made from cement to reflect the book's partial setting on a post-war housing estate. There's a thing.

And has anyone else yet mentioned the beautiful illustrations scattered throughout the text, by David Henningham? They add weight and texture, and I'm surprised it isn't a more common practice, although I suppose it helps if the publisher happens to be an accomplished fine artist. Apart from the inclusion of smudgy black and white photographs (a lamentable development pioneered by W G Sebald and copied too often since), illustrations seem to have largely disappeared from contemporary fiction, apart from those expensive Folio editions. Sort-of relatedly, I recall that the standard paperback edition of Joyce's Dubliners featured some charming, rather Quality Streetish pictures by Robin Jacques. Here's my copy, complete with rogue apostrophe in Finnegans Wake.

More on The Blackbird here.

A Leap in the Dark 35

I'm publishing this blog about Friday's Leap in the Dark a day earlier than usual to make way for a special piece tomorrow. 

A Leap in the Dark 35   8pm  Friday 31st July 2020

   Auden’s ‘Runner’

We reach Canto XX of Spring Journal by Jonathan Gibbs, read by Michael Hughes. The cryptic mystic Yoga Dave is on furlough this week but will be back next Friday. Amy McCauley performs a second extract from 24/7 Brexitland, her epic diagnosis of contemporary Britain, and Aea Varfis-van Warmelo and William Watt will perform Aea's extraordinary 'Marginalia'. Then a rare chance to see Runner, Don Owen’s short film about the Canadian athlete Bruce Kidd, which boasts a commentary written by W. H. Auden. The Pale Usher will add some afterthoughts. And the novelist and Republic of Consciousness Prose founder Neil Griffiths will join us to mark the launch of Weatherglass Books, a welcome arrival on the indie publishing scene.

There's no charge for taking part in A Leap in the Dark, but please make a donation, no matter how large, to The Trussell Trust.

The Programme

1 The Pale Usher welcomes you

2 Spring Journal canto XX by Jonathan Gibbs, read by Michael Hughes

3 Amy McCauley performs a second extract from 24/7 Brexitland

4 'Marginalia' written and performed by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo, 
   with William Watt

Interval 

5 Runner, a film by Don Owen

7 On W. H. Auden’s Runner commentary

8 Neil Griffiths introduces Weatherglass Books

8 The Pale Usher signs off

The Company

Jonathan Gibbs is a writer and critic. His first novel, Randall, was published in 2014 by Galley Beggar, and his second, The Large Door, by Boiler House Press last year. He has written on books for various places including the TLS, Brixton Review of Books and The Guardian. He curates the online short story project A Personal Anthology, in which writers, critics and others are invited to 'dream-edit' an anthology of their favourite short fiction. Spring Journal is a response to the current coronavirus pandemic taking its cue very directly from Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal.

Neil Griffiths is an author, publisher and founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.

Michael Hughes is the author of two novels: Countenance Divine (2016) and Country (2018) both published by John Murray, the latter winning the 2018 Hellenic Prize. Under his stage name Michael Colgan he recently appeared in the acclaimed HBO television drama Chernobyl.

Amy McCauley is a poet and freelance writer. She is the author of OEDIPA (Guillemot Press, 2018) and 24/7 Brexitland (No Matter Press, 2020). Amy’s first full-length collection of poetry will be published by Henningham Family Press in 2021.

Aea Varfis-van Warmelo is a trilingual actor and writer.

The Pale Usher is David Collard, who organises these gatherings.

The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

                                           Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

The next Leap in the Dark tomorrow (Saturday 1st August) is dedicated to the practice of close reading and features:

- Brian Dillon, author of Suppose a Sentence (Fitzcarraldo Editions) in 

  conversation

- Wendy Erskine delivers a close reading of Linda Mannheim’s short story

- Linda Mannheim on Wendy Erskine’s close reading of her short story

- The Pale Usher on Ford Madox Ford on D H Lawrence

Stay well!

The Pale Usher

Taking potshots at shit hot hotshot novelists

"Who are the new male hotshot novelists?" screams the annoying headline. 

 "I asked everyone I interviewed for this piece to name as many important male novelists under 40 as they could. All of them struggled" amplifies literary hack James Marriot of The Times, in a pointless exercise in ageism and middlebrow whatiffery. 

There's a point worth making perhaps, but it's already made by the mugshots at the head of the article - Barnes, Rushdie, Martin Amis and Ishiguro - four big hitters, presumably all over forty. Well over.

Marriot's humdrum observation is that there seems no longer to be a regular new clutch of Oxbridge-educated blokey 'hotshots' boosted by their agents and publishers and (every few years) by GRANTA and other publications as "Best of British whatevers' to take over from the previous batch of Oxbridge-educated blokey hotshots, boosted by their agents etc. in a cultural dance as old as time. 

But that scenario hasn't really been the case since the mid-1970s, the last decade in which it was possible for a bookish young man on the make (always a young man) to fetch up at the offices of The New Statesman or The Spectator or The Listener or The Observer or Ian Hamilton's New Review or some other publication, and get a gig reviewing and eventually parlay that into a literary career of sorts. Those routes no longer exist and most of the publications have long since downsized their literary coverage, or simply disappeared along with the readership that made them viable. Of course and to be sure there's been a far greater focus on women writers in the decades since, and that I suppose took off with (Oxbridge-educated) Zadie Smith and White Teeth twenty years ago. Keen interest and a receptive readership surrounds each rising generation of exceptionally talented women writers. That's a Good Thing.

Rising reluctantly to Marriot's challenge, and off the top of my head, and just Brits, alphabetically, I can come up with  Will Eaves, Jonathan Gibbs, Michael Hughes, Anthony Joseph, Toby Litt, Paul Mendez, Wyl Menmuir, Courttia Newland, Simon Okotie, Alex Pheby, Lee Rourke, Paul Stanbridge, Tony White. (I don't know if they're under 40, and don't care. Age is as relevant to a writer as height, weight and starsign.) And there's plenty of non-Brits: Jack Cox, Jean-Baptiste del Amo, Mathias Énard, Hugh Fulham-Mcquillan,  Rónán Hession, Édouard Louis, Mike McCormack, George Saunders and so on and on and on and I'm not even breathing hard because anyone with a serious interest in literature could do the same. Marriot's article is behind a paywall so I don't know whose views he solicited, but perhaps he should expand his circle of acquaintances and broaden his reading horizons. Or just shut the fuck up.

Bingo!

From 2013, an old blog that harks back to a week I spent as a Bingo caller, a job which taught me more about life than anything I've done since.

Bingo-Master's Break-Out!

Here's Mark E. Smith and his Mancunian combo The Fall performing the scrupulously punctuated Bingo-Master's Break-Out, their debut single dating from August 1978. Play the song as loud as you can and sing along while reading the blog to enjoy the full multi-media experience.

As it happens I worked for a week as a Bingo caller (as the regular caller was off work) and the experience left its mark - wasting time in numbers and rhymes has become a lifestyle choice. I've long pondered over the extraordinary cultural richness of the bingo caller's repertoire. It is (as you'll see below) an elaborate accumulation of the time-honoured, the superstitious, the ribald and the surreal.

1 Kelly's Eye: a reference to 19th century Australian brigand Ned Kelly's monocular iron helmet.

2 One little duck: from the resemblance of the number 2 to a duck; see also '22'.

3 Cup of tea or You and me.

4 Shut that door! Catch phrase of Larry Grayson, camp presenter of the 1970s telly game show The Generation Game. Reportedly came from his attempt to say the French phrase "je t'adore".

5 Man alive!

6 Tom Mix: after the star of silent era Westerns. Less evocatively "half a dozen".

7 Lucky for some.

8 Garden gate. Sometimes Heaven's Gate.

9 Doctor's Orders: Number 9 was a laxative pill dispensed by army doctors in the Great War.

10 (Boris's) Den: The name refers to whoever currently resides at Number 10 Downing Street. In my bingo caller days it was 'Ted's Den', can you believe?

11 Legs Eleven: A reference to the shape of the number resembling a pair of legs. Players traditionally give a wolf whistle in response.

12 One dozen.

13 Unlucky for some.

14 The Lawnmower (The original lawnmower had a 14 inch blade.)

15 Here (as elsewhere below) the number is simply spelt out thus: "One and five - fifteen' or rather "fifteen-ah", that appended 'schwa' adopted by Mark E Smith for the rest-ah of his career-ah.

16 Sweet 16, never been kissed. From a1930s hit song by The Blue Mountaineers.

17 - 20  See 15 (above) but twenty may be called as "Two-oh - blind twenty", the zero resembling a milky cataract, if you see what I mean. Likewise 30, 40, 50 et seq.

21 Key of the Door: the traditional age of majority, on reaching which a house key would be entrusted.

22 Two little ducks The numeral resembles the profile of two ducks.  The traditional player esponse is often, "quack, quack, quack".

23 The Lord is My Shepherd: The first words of Psalm 23 in the Old Testament.

24 Knock at the door. (Players would rap the table) More prosaically 'two dozen'

25  Two and five - twenty-five (see 15).

26 Two and six, half a crown (two shilling and six pence) in the pre-decimalised currency, equivalent today to 12.5p.

27 Duck and a crutch. The number 2 looks like a duck (see '2') and the number 7 looks like a crutch.

28 Two and eight, or "in a state".

29  See 15

30 Burlington Bertie. Reference to a music hall song of the same name composed in 1900. Burlington Bertie is also bookmakers' slang for odds of 100 to 30.

Or (and this is terrific)

Dirty Gertie. Common rhyme derived from the given name Gertrude, used as a nickname for the statue La Délivrance, a 16-foot statue in bronze of a naked woman holding a sword aloft, the work of French sculptor Émile Oscar Guillaume (1867-1942).  It is located at the southern edge of Finchley at Henly's Corner, at the bottom of Regents Park Road. The statue has a number of local names including "Dirty Gertie", "The Wicked Woman", and (most popular - to the exclusion of its real name) "The Naked Lady". The statue was created as a celebration of the First Battle of the Marne when the German army was stopped from capturing Paris in August 1914. The usage was reinforced by Dirty Gertie from Bizerte, a bawdy song sung by Allied soldiers in North Africa during the Second World War.

31 See 15.

32 Buckle My Shoe.

33 All the threes.

34 See 15.

35 Jump and Jive (from the 1940s dance step).

36 Three dozen, or three-and-six.

37 - 43  See 15. Why none of these numbers merits any more distinctive call is a cultural mystery. Forty sometimes 'Life begins' or 'blind forty', but that's it.

44 Droopy drawers, a near-rhyme that refers to sagging trousers.

45 - 51  See 15. Fifty may be called as "Five-oh - blind fifty".

52 Danny La Rue. A reference to drag entertainer Danny La Rue (1927-2009). Also used for all other numbers apart from 12 ending in '2' (see '72' below). Alternatively 'Chicken vindaloo' reportedly introduced by a Butlins Holiday Camp caller in 2003.)

53 Here comes Herbie - 53 is the racing number of Herbie the sentient Volkswagen Beetle in the 1969 Disney film. Players usually reply "beep beep!".

54 House with a bamboo door.

55 All the fives.

56 Shotts Bus, refers to the former number of the bus from Glasgow to Shotts. There's a whole world in that 'former'.

57 Heinz Beanz. Refers to "Heinz 57", the "57 Varieties" slogan of the H. J. Heinz Company.

58  See 15.

59 The Brighton Line - refers to the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway (which became part of the Southern Railway during the Grouping of 1923, which created four large companies from many smaller ones, such as the LBSCR).

60-61  See 15, although 60 may be called as "Six-oh - blind sixty".

62 Tickety-boo.

63-64  See 15

65 Stop work - a reference to the age of mandatory retirement for men, in the days when such a thing was possible.

66 Clickety click.

67-68 See 15

69 Anyway up. The number appears the same upside-down. "Meal for Two" is the lubricious alternative is a reference to the sexual position soixante neuf.

70 Sometimes "Seven-oh, blind seventy", or see 15

71 Bang on the drum.

72 Danny La Rue (again).

73 - 75  See 15.

76 Trombones "Seventy-six Trombones" a song from the 1962 Hollywood musical The Music Man.

Or (and this is my favourite of the lot) "Was she worth it?" This refers to the pre-decimal price of a marriage licence in Britain, 7/6d. The players traditionally shout back "Every Penny"

77 Two little crutches.

78 - 79 nada

80 Gandhi's Breakfast (i.e. "ate nothing").

81 - 83  See 15.

84 Seven dozen.

85 Staying alive (pre-dating the Bee Gees' popular hit record from 1977).

86 Between the sticks (orig. obsc., as they say in the OED).

87 Torquay in Devon - a baffling reference to this resort on the English Riviera.

88 Two Fat Ladies, obviously.

89 Nearly there (or Almost there).

90 Top of the shop,

So there you have it - one of those permeable linguistic systems that is both conventionally stable but subject to continuous revision. Now listen to Bingo-Master's Break-Out again. Catchy.

Ray Bradbury's Mr. Electrico

A Leap in the Dark: Mr Electrico 

On 4th July I read this short piece on A Leap in the Dark (which had an American theme, with a reading of the film commentary “U S” by W H Auden, conversations with film-maker Beth Harrington, an extract from Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann read by Stephanie Ellyne, Roland Bates on Ezra Pound and David Greenberger on Duplex Planet and his subsequent career.

As Ray Bradbury fans know, Mr Electrico is a minor character in his novel  Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury always insisted he was real but scholars never could confirm that. Then, in an interview from 2010 by Sam Weller for The Paris Review, Bradbury told the story of how he met the real Mr. Electrico:

He was a real man. That was his real name. Circuses and carnivals were always passing through Illinois during my childhood and I was in love with their mystery. One autumn weekend in 1932, when I was twelve years old, the Dill Brothers Combined Shows came to town. One of the performers was Mr. Electrico. He sat in an electric chair. A stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end.

The next day, I had to go the funeral of one of my favorite uncles. Driving back from the graveyard with my family, I looked down the hill toward the shoreline of Lake Michigan and I saw the tents and the flags of the carnival and I said to my father, Stop the car. He said, What do you mean? And I said, I have to get out. My father was furious with me. He expected me to stay with the family to mourn, but I got out of the car anyway and I ran down the hill toward the carnival.

It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I was running away from death, wasn’t I? I was running toward life. And there was Mr. Electrico sitting on the platform out in front of the carnival and I didn’t know what to say. I was scared of making a fool of myself. I had a magic trick in my pocket, one of those little ball-and-vase tricks—a little container that had a ball in it that you make disappear and reappear—and I got that out and asked, Can you show me how to do this? It was the right thing to do. It made a contact. He knew he was talking to a young magician. He took it, showed me how to do it, gave it back to me, then he looked at my face and said, Would you like to meet those people in that tent over there? Those strange people? And I said, Yes sir, I would. So he led me over there and he hit the tent with his cane and said, Clean up your language! Clean up your language! He took me in, and the first person I met was the illustrated man. Isn’t that wonderful? The Illustrated Man! He called himself the tattooed man, but I changed his name later for my book. I also met the strong man, the fat lady, the trapeze people, the dwarf, and the skeleton. They all became characters.

Mr. Electrico was a beautiful man, see, because he knew that he had a little weird kid there who was twelve years old and wanted lots of things. We walked along the shore of Lake Michigan and he treated me like a grown-up. I talked my big philosophies and he talked his little ones. Then we went out and sat on the dunes near the lake and all of a sudden he leaned over and said, I’m glad you’re back in my life. I said, What do you mean? I don’t know you. He said, You were my best friend outside of Paris in 1918. You were wounded in the Ardennes and you died in my arms there. I’m glad you’re back in the world. You have a different face, a different name, but the soul shining out of your face is the same as my friend. Welcome back.

Now why did he say that? Explain that to me, why? Maybe he had a dead son, maybe he had no sons, maybe he was lonely, maybe he was an ironical jokester. Who knows? It could be that he saw the intensity with which I live. Every once in a while at a book signing I see young boys and girls who are so full of fire that it shines out of their face and you pay more attention to that. Maybe that’s what attracted him.

When I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of “Beautiful Ohio,” and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. He gave me importance, immortality, a mystical gift. My life was turned around completely. It makes me cold all over to think about it, but I went home and within days I started to write. I’ve never stopped.

Seventy-seven years ago, and I’ve remembered it perfectly. I went back and saw him that night. He sat in the chair with his sword, they pulled the switch, and his hair stood up. He reached out with his sword and touched everyone in the front row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the sword. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, “Live forever.” And I decided to.

Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203 (The Paris Review) 

Letter from Deià

Friday's Leap in the Dark featured the following from my old friend David Holzer, known to Leapers as 'Yoga Dave'. 

With a serendipity that took my breath away he revealed at the end as you will see that the day - 24th June - had a particular significance. He has kindly allowed me to share the text he read. My thanks to him.

Letter from Deià

On my first ever morning in Deià, in late April 1997, I swam out into the middle of Cala Deià, the rocky bay below the village. When I paused for breath and looked down at the ghost fish nosing through the waving fields of bright green Posidonia grass, it was as if I was suspended in liquid air.

I remember letting my gaze drift up from the boulders on the beach to the olive terraces to the tip of the village church tower to the mountain bowl in which Deià sits to the empty sky and feeling weightless and eased out of the flow of time.

Later that day, Lali and I made love beside the ruined pirate tower on the clifftop as a storm moved in. Seven years later, her sister, one of her twin sons and I scattered her ashes from the headland on the other side of the beach. A month or so later, we burned her diaries so another sister, a writer, couldn’t get her hands on them.

Before we left the fire we’d made, Lali’s sister picked a fragment of paper out of the ashes. On one side it read ‘burned’, on the other ‘honoured’.

We never got round to placing a marker to Lali in the village churchyard so Cala Deià is where I go to gather my memories of her.

My plan was to walk down to Cala Deià but, by the time I stepped off the airconditioned bus from Palma and lowered my mask so I could breathe easily for a moment, it was already too hot to spend any time walking in the sun.

‘David!’

The person calling my name was my Columbian friend Maria. She was back on the island to allow her 10-year-old daughter to spend more time with her father.

Maria is studying family constellations. She leads people in ayahuasca sessions, calls ayahuasca ‘grandmother’.

As she explained how family constellation work is all about seeing patterns, which is what ayahuasca allows you to do, her patterned mask kept slipping down over her snub nose.

We were interrupted by Emma, who had been my five rhythms dancing teacher, and I drifted off into the village.

It was late morning now and I thought I’d have breakfast at Sa Font Fresca which has a large terrace overlooking the lower part of the village, the Clot, where Lali lived in the 1970s among painters, writers and musicians that included Kevin Ayers and Daevid Allen.

The Clot is in shade for much of the morning. Over different summers, living in the Clot, Lali’s twins went out of their minds. The path that would have taken me down to Cala Deià begins at the bottom of the Clot.

Jackie, an anthropologist and writer who has lived in the village since the late 50s, was taking coffee on the terrace of Sa Font Fresca.

We talked about what it had been like in the village under lockdown. ‘I saw no-one for a couple of months,’ she said. ‘And suddenly there are all these people. It’s a bit of a shock.’

As one of these people, I felt a little guilty.

‘I always relax when I come here,’ I said. ‘It’s like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.’

‘Be careful you don’t relax too much.’

Jackie told me that the latest famous person to buy a house in the village was Donovan, the Hurdy Gurdy Man. Donovan has had a house in the south of Mallorca for many years. I interviewed him before he performed at La Casa de Robert Graves, now a shrine to Graves.

As he burbled away, his accent shifted from mid-Atlantic to Irish to Scottish and in and out of the third person: ‘So there was ol’ Donovan a wandrin’ down the road with Gypsy Dave.’

After my lunch of tumbet, a kind of Mallorquin ratatouille or moussaka, I strolled up the village main street. The actor Llewellyn Parr, dressed down in expensive shades, a red neckerchief and denim shirt sat on his own in front of a bar, mask dangling from one ear. He looked lost.

Llewellyn is a pal of my painter friend Hugo who has lived in the village since 1978. Hugo, who reminds me of Freddie Starr, has his own reasons for having fond memories of Lali.

I spent the afternoon nattering with Hugo in his living room. Next to me a painting of James Dean was propped up in a chair. A huge painting of Robert Graves at a Romanesque lecturn against a blue sky dominated the room. Graves looked like a cross between a ring-battered boxer and an emperor who has survived many intrigues.

Hugo told me it was Jason Donovan who’d bought the house.

A little unsteady on his pale pins after drinking four glasses of Soberano brandy with chocolate milk, Hugo walked me down to the bus stop.

The bus follows the coast for a while before the road turns inland to Valldemossa. Beneath the cliffs, turning blue as a light mist descended, the sea shifted as if something huge stretched below its surface.

I met Gabi, my Hungarian partner Erika’s sister, on our local beach. Near where she was lying, a group of Latin Americans danced drunkenly to reggaeton booming out of a speaker that belonged in a nightclub. The last of the sun bronzed their wobbling, badly tattooed bodies.

We walked back to my apartment over stained, crumbling paving stones, past rotten tooth bars and shuttered shops. 

And, wrapped around my neighbour’s front door handle is a white plastic crucifix.

Today is Robert Graves’s birthday. He would have been 125. 

A Leap in the Dark 34

A Leap in the Dark 34   8pm  Saturday 25th July 2020

 Pottery, Irish lit and glossolalia

A second improv pottery session, with the artist Laura Hopkins producing a unique ceramic piece in response to audience suggestions. Regular Leaper Amy McCauley will perform an extract from her epic poem 24/7 Brexitland and we'll also revisit the subject of formative reading, in which members of the audience nominate books that made a big impression on them as young readers.

Then the rest of the evening will be devoted to the fascinating linguistic backwater known as glossolalia, or 'speaking in tongues'. The Pale Usher will navigate secular examples (some of which are staggeringly bizarre) and  Marie-Elsa Bragg will consider the origins of glossolalia in the early church and its role today in the Anglican communion. We'll have some startling clips of gossolaliacs in action and there will be some audience participation . . .

There's no charge for taking part in A Leap in the Dark, but please make a donation, no matter how large, to The Trussell Trust.

The Programme

1 The Pale Usher welcomes you

2 Pottery improv with Laura Hopkins - another spin of the wheel

3 Amy McCauley 24/7 Brexitland (Part 1) https://vimeo.com/440117405      

4 Formative reading: Leapers nominate the books that made a big impression 

  on them as young readers

Interval 

5 The Pale Usher on secular glossolalia: scat, walla, rhubarb and Venusian

6 The Settee Salon: Marie-Elsa Bragg and guests discuss Speaking in Tongues

7 Improv pottery - the reveal

8 The Pale Usher signs off

The Company

Marie-Elsa Bragg is an author, priest, therapist and Duty Chaplain of Westminster Abbey. Her first novel, Towards Mellbreak, was about four generations of a quiet hill farming family on the North Western fells of Cumbria. Her second book, Sleeping Letters (2019) is the description of the the ritual of the Eucharist alongside a compilation of poetry, memoir and fragments of un-sent letters. Marie-Elsa has contributed articles and interviews for papers such as the Telegraph and the Church Times; Radio pieces for BBC Radio 4 and interviews for literary festivals and Story Vault Films. 

https://marie-elsabragg.com 

Laura Hopkins is an award-winning stage designer and ceramicist-in-training. 

Her website: www.laurahopkins.co.uk

The Pale Usher is David Collard, who organises these gatherings.

The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

  

The next Leap in the Dark on Friday 31st July will feature:

- Spring Journal canto XX by Jonathan Gibbs, read by Michael Hughes

- Yoga with David ‘Yoga Dave’ Holzer, our Daily Llama

- Amy McCauley performs another section of ’24/7 Brexitland’

- The Pale Usher on RUNNER, a film by Don Owen with commentary 

  by W H Auden

The Leap on Saturday 1st August will feature Brian Dillon, Wendy Erskine and Linda Mannheim, an evening dedicated to the practice of close reading.

Stay well!

The Pale Usher

Stay well!

The Pale Usher

A Leap in the Dark 33

A Leap in the Dark 33   8pm  Friday 24th July 2020

 Wasting time in numbers and rhyme

We welcome back our composer-in-residence Helen Ottaway and will hear the latest canto of Spring Journal by Jonathan Gibbs, read as ever by Michael Hughes. There's a double dose of Guru Dave who returns with a yoga lesson and delivers a Letter from Deià, the Mallorcan village that was once home to Robert Graves. We’ll have some thoughts on the late Mark E Smith and the Pale Usher is your caller for a round of live Bingo (cards provided in advance). To get you in the mood you might like to listen to Bingo-Master's Break-Out! Play it loud.

There's no charge for taking part in A Leap in the Dark, but please make a donation, no matter how large, to The Trussell Trust.

The Programme

1 The Pale Usher welcomes you

2 New music by Helen Ottaway

3 Spring Journal canto XIX by Jonathan Gibbs, read by Michael Hughes

4 Yoga with David ‘Guru Dave’ Holzer, the Flash Harry Krishna  

Interval 

5 Bingo-Master’s Break-Out! - the Fall (and fall) of Mark E Smith

Two swans in front of his eyes

Colored balls in front of his eyes

It's number one for his Kelly's eye

Treble-six right over his eye

A big shot's voice in his ears

Worlds of silence in his ears

All the numbers account for years

Checks the cards through eyes of tears

Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!

All he sees is the back of chairs

In the mirror, a lack of hairs

A lighted room, checks fill out

Here the players all shout

Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!

A glass of lager in his hand

Silver microphone in his hand

Wasting time in numbers and rhymes

(One hand drug and faces bright)

Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!

Came the time he flipped his lid

Came the time he flipped his lid

Holiday in Spain fell through

Players put it down to

Bingo-Master's Breakout!

A hall full of cards left unfilled

He ended his life with wine and pills

There's a grave somewhere only partly filled

A sign in graveyard on a hill reads

Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!

Lyrics by Mark E Smith & Una Baines (1978)

6 Letter from Deià by David Holzer 

     Our yoga guru is on the island of Mallorca and sends a letter from 

     the village of Deià, former home of the poet Robert Graves 

7 Eyes down for a full house: Bingo with The Pale Usher 

8 The Pale Usher signs off

The Company

Jonathan Gibbs is a writer and critic. His first novel, Randall, was published in 2014 by Galley Beggar, and his second, The Large Door, by Boiler House Press last year. He has written on books for various places including the TLS, Brixton Review of Books and The Guardian. He curates the online short story project A Personal Anthology, in which writers, critics and others are invited to 'dream-edit' an anthology of their favourite short fiction. Spring Journal is a response to the current coronavirus pandemic taking its cue very directly from Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal.

David Holzer is a dedicated yogi, author, blogger and journalist. He founded YogaWriters and has taught workshops in yoga for writers in Mallorca, where he lives. Hundreds of people have taken his Yoga for Writers course on the DailyOm platform (www.yogawriters.org). His writing appears regularly in Om yoga and lifestyle magazine. David will be explaining why yoga is so beneficial for writers and taking us through a simple yoga sequence that can be done by anyone of any age in the comfort of a favourite chair.

Disclaimer

Please take care when practicing yoga. Should a pose feel that it could be harmful to you, do not 

 attempt it or come gently out of the pose.

Breathing is a key part of yoga. Please breathe comfortably and naturally through your nose at all 

 times. If your breath becomes forced, slow down the speed of your practice.

If you feel any kind of sharp, sudden pain anywhere in your body stop practicing right away. Be 

 especially aware of your joints, particularly your knees.

Michael Hughes is the author of two acclaimed novels: Countenance Divine (2016) and Country (2018) both published by John Murray, the latter winning the 2018 Hellenic Prize. Under his stage name Michael Colgan he recently appeared in the acclaimed HBO television drama Chernobyl.

Helen Ottaway is a composer and sound artist. She is lead artist with Artmusic, creating and producing collaborative, site-specific art work. She has written for many forces from string quartet to choir and orchestra and recently has started to include found sound in her work. Her writing for hand-punched and hand-wound musical box began during an artist’s residency in Sri Lanka in 2017. Back in the UK she continues to compose for and perform on the instrument.  

www.artmusic.org.uk   https://helenottaway.bandcamp.com/

The Pale Usher is David Collard, who organises these gatherings.

The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

This week’s second Leap in the Dark is tomorrow night (Saturday 25th July) and will feature:

- Improv ceramics by artist Laura Hopkins, who’ll invite audience suggestions for a piece 

  to be completed in the course of the show

- Formative reading (2) - books that made a huge impression on you as a young reader. Open 

  call for short contributions

- The Pale Usher on secular glossolalia (including scat, walls, rhubarb and Venusian)

- The Settee Salon tackles Speaking in Tongues, with Marie-Elsa Bragg and guests

- no end of other glories

Stay well!

The Pale Usher