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THIRD BLACK HUTS FESTIVAL • HASTINGS

etruscan bookspresents a Festival ofwriting/music/film29 October – 2 November 2014Patron: Andrew Kötting

Tickets for all Festival events:http://blackhutsfestival.eventbrite.com

Tickets for Electric Palace events:www.electricpalacecinema.com

Tickets for The Beacon events:info@beaconhastings.comTel: 01424 431 305

Tickets for ALASDAIR ROBERTS andMEG BATEMAN also available fromMusic’s Not Dead71 Devonshire Road, Bexhill-on-SeaTel: 01424 552 435

SEASON TICKET £50 / £40 concessions

www.e-truscan.co.ukTel: 07905 082 421 Find us on facebook

At the end of the 20th century Englandwas a country in turmoil. Privatisation,miners' strikes, inflation and poll tax hadleft its inhabitants disillusioned withsuccessive governments.

However, nestled in the south east cornerof the country was a little old town calledHastings, where the townsfolk seemedimmune to the political issues aroundthem. It was full of colourful characters –from artists to fishermen – who oftenmet in a tavern called the Lord Nelson.From here they organised strange eventssuch as pram races, pub crawls, bikeraces, tug-o’-war competitions and beachconcerts. All they wanted was fun.

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The Grass Arena by John Healy. It’s a long and brilliant postcard from hell. A brutal childhood, alcoholism, a Londonunderworld – this is what it’s like to touchbottom, then find your way up through the game of chess. Ian McEwan

THURSDAY 30 OCTOBER 7.00pm

ELECTRIC PALACE39a High Street, Hastings6.15 for 7.00pm – note early start

£8.00 / £6.00 concessions

An evening with Timothy Neatand friends

Two films The Summer Walkers (TimothyNeat & Hamish Henderson, Scot, 53 mins,1976) and Rathad Nan Ceard (The Road ofthe Tinkers) (Scot, 28 mins, 1995) in ScotsGaelic (with subtitles)

The Summer Walkers is a documentaryabout the Scots Travelling People – a

group long known as tinkers. Cheaplymade, it is a simple, old-fashioned film. It portrays a fascinating, vanishing groupof British nomads who have maintainedan essentially palaeolithic lifestyle acrossmillennia. We see tinsmiths and pearlfishers, hawkers and horse-dealers, andhear great songs sung by unique traditionbearers.

Timothy Neat will give an illustrated talkon his photographs, including those of1960s rural Spain, and of travelling people.He will then discuss his work with theaudience and introduce Rathad nan Caird(The Tinker Roads). This documents poetand folklorist Hamish Henderson andGaelic piper Norman Maclean renewingcontact with many of The SummerWalkers, 20 years later.

Henderson wrote The Freedom Come All Ye.Billy Connolly saluted him at the CulturalOlympics as Scotland’s great-uncle.Etruscan Books published Hamish

WEDNESDAY 29 OCTOBER 8.00pm

ELECTRIC PALACE39a High Street, Hastings7.15 for 8.00pm

£7.00 / £5.00 concessions

Barbaric Genius: Documentary on John Healyby Paul Duane (Eire, 72 mins, 2011)

A bottle of ‘Blue’ was a cheap way to tacklethe cravings for alcohol. It also took theedge off the morning’s hangover, helped the day slip by and lessened the terrors ofrough sleeping.

But you need to dilute the poison of surgicalspirits – and the easiest place to get freshwater would be scooping it from the font ofa church into a milk carton.

Dan Carrier Camden Journal

In 1988 Faber published The Grass Arena,an acclaimed autobiography of a formervagrant alcoholic John Healy who spent fifteen violent years in a wino junglewhen begging carried an automaticprison sentence. Healy had been a boxer,winning many amateur titles, absconded

from the army, gone to ground in manycountries.

In prison Harry the Fox taught Healy toplay chess. Out of prison he was a lookoutfor a mob that ran scams on post officebooks using a public toilet washroom astheir HQ.

He won 10 major British chess tourna -ments, forcing a draw from Soviet grand-master Rapheal Vaganian, then second-best player in the world. Frustrationsbetween Healy and his editors led to thebook being deemed out of print byFabers. Over 5000 copies of this bestseller were destroyed. The reputation ofHealy was destroyed. He would becomeinvisible, shoved out of the writing world.It would be harder to reappear.

What became of Healy, almost forgottenfor a dozen years is explored in the firstdocumentary about Healy’s life. The Grass Arena was described on Newsnightby Kirsty Wark as a literary sensation, and Matthew Sweet declared it one of the great works of the twentieth centuryon Radio 3.

Barbaric Genius The film unfolds like adetective novel, following the clues alongthe way, tracking down the real story. The Grass Arena is about to be rescued byan American editor at ‘Penguin ModernClassics’ who knew nothing of – andcared less about – the insidious way thesystem conspired to pretend the book had never existed. Here is the evidencethat shows Healy’s paranoia is based onsomething very real – a subtle conspiracyof class and education against a man who wrote a masterpiece.

What had become of Healy in all thoseyears, and who remains culpable?

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Iain Crichton Smith wrote that MegBateman “seems to display with deepfeeling and exact imagery the women’sexperience of love in a manner that recallsthe great songs of the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries.”

Rhyme in her early poems link her poemsto the tradition of popular Gaelic song. Inthese songs, Bateman finds a precedentfor a feminine voice in Scottish Gaelicpoetry. While entry into the professionalcaste of poets who dominated Gaelicculture until the seventeenthth centurywas entirely closed to women, theanonymous, vernacular song traditionthat survived the destruction of thebardic system often spoke with a femalevoice. Her four books are Òrain Ghaoil /Amhràin Ghrà – 1989, Aotromachd agusDàin Eile / Lightness and other Poems(1997), Soirbheas / Fair Wind (2007) andTransparencies ( 2013).

Alasdair RobertsA master of scordatura techniques on theguitar… an exceptional lyricist… the soundof new myths and new music being hewnfrom folk’s stone. The Wire

Singer, guitarist, songwriter based inGlasgow, born in Swabia, Germany. Since1997 he has released 11 albums, mostly onDrag City. Roberts’s extraordinary lyricismtakes its place in the lineage of a Scottishliterary tradition encompassing modern -ist poets such as Iain Crichton Smith,Sorley MacLean and Hugh MacDiarmid,back through Robert Burns and RobertTannahill to the mediaeval ‘makars’ andGaelic bards of Dark Age Dalriada.

Alasdair is driven by collaboration, indiverse mediums : with Shane Connolly,whom he worked on a puppet theatreinterpretation of the Scottish folk playGaloshins, film makers (including LukeFowler, contributing a soundtrack to hisfilm All Divided Selves) and, last year thepoet Robin Robertson, with whom hemade Hirta Songs, a song cycle about theremote Scottish archipelago of St Kilda.

His musical work mainly consists of two parallel strands: self-written songmaterial – on Farewell Sorrow (2003), The Amber Gatherers (2007), Spoils (2009),A Wonder Working Stone (2013), andAlasdair Roberts (2015) – together with

Henderson’s first collection of poems andsongs in 50 years in Pervigilium Scotia.

A photographer, migratory bee keeper,wild mushroom gatherer and writer,Timothy Neat was raised in Cornwall. He wrote the biography of HamishHenderson, and he filmed Hallaig withSorley MacLean. Play Me Something (madewith John Berger) won the Europa Prize at Barcelona 1989. His new book is TheseFaces – Photographs and Drawings. Neat isan HRSA and Fellow of the Association ofScottish Literary Studies.

Alasdair Roberts recorded his song ofNeat’s poem The Ugly Mountain.

PLUSHere We’m Be Together (Eng, 13 mins, 2014)

A field-recorded encounter with some ofthe more eccentric folk rituals of theNorfolk Broads – through the eyes of onehomegrown fabulist. Rob Curry and TimPlester’s long-awaited follow up to Way ofthe Morris features music by Sam Amidonas well as iconic Norfolk artists BillyBennington and Sam Larner.

They have recently started production onThe Ballad of Shirley Collins, a lyricalresponse to the life and work of Hastings-born folk legend Shirley Collins.www.shirleycollinsmovie.com

Nicholas Johnson presents 3 short films byRebecca E Marshall filmed in West Devonwhere much of his Collected Longer Poems,And Stood upon Red Earth All A Round, isset. These are films “responding to folk inrural Devon – the playing of skittles withits remarkable rhythms, hearing thenaming of fields only in spoken word noton maps, the red soaked earth in winterand a strange poet with his inside outoutside in house and family.”

Ticket includes a complimentary copy of Listening To The Stones, Poems of NewCaledonia, by Nicholas Johnson – a postcolonial work about French occupation in New Caledonia, and the events that ledto the Heingene and Ouvea massacres,subject of Mathieu Kassovitz’scontroversial film Rebellion.

The deep feeling for the West Countryterrain, the vernacular outcroppings thatrun like ripples through the text, makeNicholas Johnson’s poetry a haunting and wonderful reading experience.

Edward Dorn

FRIDAY 31 OCTOBER 7.30pm

THE BEACON67–68 St Mary’s Terrace (opposite steps of 12 St Mary’s Terrace), HastingsDoors open 6.00pm for supper menuPerformance 7.30pm

£10.oo / £8.00 concessions

Alasdair Roberts (solo concert)and Meg Bateman

Two sets by Alasdair Roberts, and two setsby Meg Bateman, one of her Gaelic poetry,in Gaelic and English and the second, ofher translations from Gaelic poetry,Songbook of the Pillagers.

It was your lightness that drew me, The lightness of your talk and your laughter,The lightness of your cheek in my hands,Your sweet gentle modest lightness;

And it is the lightness of your kissThat is starving my mouth,And the lightness of your embrace That will let me go adrift.

Meg Bateman

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“T.H. White is part of my story,” she writes.“I have to write about him here becausehe was there. When I trained my hawk Iwas having a quiet conversation of sorts,with the deeds and works of a long-deadman… whose life disturbed me.”

Helen Macdonald has assisted with themanagement of raptor research andconservation projects across Eurasia, and bred hunting falcons for Arab royalty.She’s also sold paintings, been anantiquarian bookseller, shepherded aflock of fifty ewes and once attended anarms fair by mistake. Her poetry workShaler’s Fish (2001) will be republished in a new Etruscan edition in 2015.

SATURDAY 1 NOVEMBER 7.30pm

THE BEACON67–68 St Mary’s Terrace (opposite steps of 12 St Mary’s Terrace), HastingsDoors open 6.00pm for supper menuPerformance 7.30pm

£8.00 / £6.00 concessions

John Healy, author of The GrassArena, (Penguin Modern Classics)plus a reading with StuartChristie, author of Granny MadeMe An Anarchist, and Pistoleros

We are utterly compelled both by the powerof Healy’s story and his great power in thetelling of it to stay by his side until the lastword is writ. Daniel Day Lewis

John Healy, a former wino and streetthief, spent 15 years as a vagrant alcoholicon the streets who rose to become achess master capable of playing severalgames simultaneously whilst wearing ablind fold. In 1986, living from hand tomouth on a rundown council estate

at Kings Cross, he wrote his savagemasterpiece The Grass Arena, which has been almost universally acclaimed.The book and the film of the book havebetween them over a dozen majornational and international awards.

An extraordinary man, a remarkable life.

John Healy’s other works include TheMetal Mountain, Streets Above Us and The Glass Cage. They all should be put into print.

In Rome, 2000 years ago, the sand theyused for the arena was specially importedfrom Egypt because it soaked up bloodquickly. I was thinking about that, and I thought we were in an arena ourselveswhen I was living on the street, only it wascovered in grass. I was trying to convey asubculture where there is no law; it’s life or death. All over Britain there were grassarenas. I was trying to bring the reader into my world, to experience it with me – a vicarious experience, at least.

Then out of the blue I remembered a book I read about ancient Rome and thegladiators. It was set in the time of Nero,the people were starving but the Gameswere still going on.

There was a passage about a HarbourMaster in Alexandria. He asked should heload the boats with food for the people orsand for the arena? He was told: “You fool,load the boats with sand for the arena.”Translated from Latin into English, ‘arena’means ‘sand’. The surface of our arenas was grass. John Healy

Spanish Civil War historian and anarchistwriter, editor of The Hastings Trawler andAnarchist Film Channel, Stuart Christiereturns to Hastings to read with Healy.

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interpret ations of traditional songs andballads from Scotland and beyond – onThe Crook of My Arm (2001), No EarthlyMan (2005) and Too Long In This Condition(2010). He collaborated with the ScottishGaelic singer Mairi Morrison on Urstan(2012).

Alasdair Roberts is a member of theEnglish/Scottish quartet The FurrowCollective. Their first album is At Our Next Meeting. They recently played atEtchingham, the closest Alasdair had got to performing in Hastings.

SATURDAY 1 NOVEMBER 2.00pm

THE BEACON67–68 St Mary’s Terrace (opposite steps of 12 St Mary’s Terrace), HastingsDoors open 12.00 noon for lunch menuPerformance 2.00pm

£8.00 / £6.00 concessions

Helen Macdonald and PatrickMcGuinness, poets and authors of prose works: H is for Hawkand Other People’s Countries(with Cape’s support)

Patrick McGuinness “has written thegreat book on Belgium and modernmemory, Other People’s Countries. Hetakes his place among those singers andpainters of the haunted, the melancholy,the diminished, the caricatural, the hum -drum: Ensor, Rodenbach, Sax, Huysmans,Simenon and Magritte.”

Michael Hoffman

Patrick McGuinness is that vanishingfigure: the multi-lingual, multi-cultural,pan-European literary polymath. He is thepoet of The Canal of Mars, translator ofMallarmé’s For Anatole’s Tomb.

Tunisian born, raised in Venezuala andBelgium, he’s lived in Iran and Romania.He has edited exemplary editions of poetsT.E. Hulme, Marcel Schwab and LynetteRoberts. His first novel The Last HundredDays was set during the fall of Ceau,sescu.

He is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

Helen Macdonald’s, H is for Hawk is thispoet and falconer’s life with Mabel, ahawk, “an exemplar of the mysteriousalchemy by which suffering can betransmuted into beauty”. Melissa Harrison Financial Times

She bought Mabel for£800 on a Scottishquayside and tookher home toCambridge. Then shefilled the freezer withhawk food, ready toembark on the long,strange business oftrying to train this

wildest of birds. H is for Hawk has beenhighly acclaimed since its summerpublication for the beauty of its prose, forits portrayal of the hawk, of T.H. White,and of grief.

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took the young surrealists to the brink of insanity as a revolutionary new era in Art History was born.

Tymon Dogg, a singer-songwriter andcomposer, has collaborated with artists as diverse as The Clash, Nico, EnriqueMorente, Hugh Hopper, Charles Haywardand Michael Horovitz. Until JoeStrummer’s sudden death in 2002, Tymonwas a member of the Mescaleros andcomposed the music for a number of JoeStrummer’s Mescaleros songs includingMondo Bongo – to the strains of whichAngelina Jolie fell in love while filming Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

The Irrepresible Tymon Dogg 1968–2009is out on Cherry Red records. TymonnDogg played Hastings Pier with JoeStrummer and The Mescaleros in 2002.

PLUS a performance by special guest Peter Manson, Glasgow-born translator of the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé.

He is author of Poems of Frank Rupture, (Sancho Panza) and Adjunct: an Undigest.

A seven-year creation, it manically foldstogether rueful diary entries, irreverentcomments on artists, writers andmusicians, gleeful misprints, and all sortsof found and heard material. Undigested in appearance, but regurgitated in combin -a tions either crafted or mathematicallydetermined, the consistent hilarity of itsrelentless, deadpan juxtapositions hasinescapably serious implications too.

Robert Potts The Guardian

His 2012 Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse(Miami University Press) were, in theaccount of Ian Thomson in the FinancialTimes: “a marvel of luminous precision.Sensitive at all times to Mallarmé’s idealof a literature stripped to the bone, thetranslation glows with a melancholysense of absence (‘The flesh is sad, andI’ve read all the books’).”

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www.christiebooks.com hosts over 800films and documentaries with anarchistand related libertarian themes.

Born in Partick, Glasgow the son of ahard-drinking trawlerman and ahairdresser, Christie was named after the country’s best-known Stuart, BonniePrince Charlie – “the only man in historyto be named after three separate sheep -dogs” as his fellow Partiquois, BillyConnolly, once said.

Like Andrew Kötting’s Gladys in Gallivant,Christie was also much influenced by hisgrandmother. She “provided a moralbarometer which married almost exactlywith that of libertarian socialism andanarchism, and she provided the starwhich I follow.”

Christie met Spanish anarchist exiles in Bristol and decided that “I had to do more than just demonstrate and leaflet. I offered my services.” The mission he was assigned was to deliver explosives to Madrid for the latest attempt – thethirtieth, as it happened – to blow upGeneral Franco.

Duncan Campbell The Guardian

But his mission was infiltrated. Christiewas arrested in Madrid, aged 18, inpossession of plastic explosives, andsentenced to 20 years imprisonment. The action was co-ordinated by theclandestine anarchist armed resistanceorganisation Defensa Interior for whichChristie was acting as courier. The family’sthree-year campaign – supported bymany writers, including Jean Paul Sartre –was mounted, and Christie was pardoned.

On his release from prison in 1967 Christiewas involved in the re-formation of theAnarchist Black Cross and the launch of

the anarchist monthly Black Flag, and waslater arrested and charged with sevenothers of being a member of the ‘AngryBrigade’ in what became – at the time –the longest trial in British judicial history.Acquitted on all charges at the Old Baileytrial Christie set up the anarchistpublishing house Cienfuegos Press.

Anarchists have a ‘bad name’ in the media,not because they can point to oneindiscriminate massacre by anarchists –there have been none – but because the one thing holders of power fear is that they personally should be held responsiblefor their own actions.

Stuart Christie

SUNDAY 2 NOVEMBER 1.00pm

ELECTRIC PALACE39a High Street, Hastings12.15 for 1.00pm

£8.00 / £6.00 concessions

A WAVE OF DREAMS, Louis Aragon

Two leftfield treats based on Susan DeMuth’s translation of Aragon’s surrealistclassic: a spoken word performance ofextracts by actor, Alex Walker, with livemusical accompaniment by Tymon Doggand Alex Thomas PLUS a screening of film-maker Nichola Bruce’s magicalinterpretation of an extract from thework, Dreams, Dreams, Dreams.

Louis Aragon’s 1924 prose-poem-essay(Une vague de rêves) is a compelling,lyrical, first-hand account of the earlydays of surrealist experimentation inParis. Aragon vividly describes, andphilosophically evaluates, the inneradventures, the hallucinations andencounters with ‘the Marvelous’ which

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collaborated locally with Liane Carroll,and John Harle.

Sometimes men make sounds as birds do –just to sing. That need is so clear a fact ofTom Pickard’s poetry men would do well to listen. They will not so soon again haveso lovely a man to inform them.Robert Creeley

Tom Leonard was born in Glasgow. Pivotalto the Glasgow renaissance, Leonard’spoetry is visual, sonic and vital. He is alsoa great reader. Tom Leonard’s 1984 poetrycollection Intimate Voices remained inprint for almost 20 years through fiveprint-runs and with three separatepublishers. In 2010 it was supplanted byoutside the narrative (Poems 1965–2009),then in 2013 his collected prose writingwas published as Definite Articles.

His Places of the Mind: The Life and Work of James Thomson (B.V.) remains the solemodern biography, with its epigraph fromSwedenborg, of the poet of The City ofDreadful Night.

His translation of Brecht’s Mother Courageand her Children was published this year.

Regarded by many as one of Scotland’smost influential writers – a revolutionarypoet who has shaken up the literary

establishment in as many ways as it’spossible for one man and a typewriter to do. Rosemary Goring The Herald

His poems written in Glaswegian arebrilliant moral beauties, as perfect in everyway as the lyrics of Hugh MacDiarmid orthe best of William Carlos Williams.Andrew O’Hagan The Observer

SUNDAY 2 NOVEMBER 8.00pm

ELECTRIC PALACE39a High Street, Hastings7.15 for 8.00pm

£8.00 / £6.00 concessions

An evening with film director John Krish

For viewers who have enjoyed TomPickard’s film with its evocation of thewaterways in dizzy sunlight, then itsabrupt cut to a different kind of peacewhen old newsreel of Dylan Thomas withcreaky music is broadcast, stay awhilelonger for the end of the festival.

Hastings is honoured to welcome JohnKrish, who worked on HumphreyJennings’ Listen to Britain in 1942.

John Krish selects and introduces anevening of film and television documen -tary, spanning the 1950s to the 1970s,including Captured, a Prisoner of Wardrama – a lost gem of British post-warfilmmaking – and a directed episode of The Avengers, for which he designed the intertitles.

In 2008, The British Film Institutepublished Land of Promise, a history ofDocumentary film making in Britain from 1930 to 1950. With it came DVDs of 40 films made by 25 directors.

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SUNDAY 2 NOVEMBER 4.00pm

ELECTRIC PALACE39a High Street, Hastings3.15 for 4.00pm

£8.00 / £6.00 concessions

Two readings: poets and prosewriters Tom Leonard and TomPickard, plus a film by TomPickard Roy Fisher: Birmingham’sWhat I Think With(England, 50 mins, 1991)

There’s a scene in the film in which RoyFisher happens upon the house inworking-class Birmingham where he wasborn in 1930 and lived until he was 23. The house has a fresh, new door, and thepoet, a large white-haired gent in a parka,gives it a knock. A young Sikh boyanswers. Fisher introduces himself andinquires whether he might have the olddoor, which he had noticed in the rubbish.His courteousness wins the boy over, andlater we see the two studying a sandstonecrag in a nearby wood; Fisher takes out apenknife and digs in, showing the boyhow easily sandstone crumbles. Uponthat foundation, the poet points out,Birmingham was built. Ange Mlinko

Alongside many short poems, Fisherwrote seminal long poems and prosepoems: The Ship’s Orchestra, City, The Cut Pages and A Furnace.

Featured jazz musicians in the filminclude Roy Williams, John Barnes, LenSkeat, Peter Cotteril, and Roy Fisher.

Failing the 11-plus Tom Pickard attended a secondary modern school in Blakelaw,often in the remedial class, until 14 whenhe joined the Tyneside dole queues wherehis real education began. At 17 he met hismentor, poet Basil Bunting, and began co-running readings at the Morden Towerin Newcastle upon Tyne.

As well as a librettist and director ofdocumentaries he has also worked and‘survived’ as a benefit claimant, a dyker,labourer, book dealer, oral historian,itinerant poet, driver and scullion. He livesin the North Pennines near the Scottishborder where he makes recordings ofwinds on Fiend’s Fell, while walking andwatching cloud shadows on distant hills.

He reads from Hoyoot, Collected Poemsand Songs (Carcanet). Tom Pickard has

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The BFI then decided to do the samething, for the years 1951–1977. Theypublished Shadows of Progress and chosefour films from one director, John Krish to represent that entire period. Thiscollection is called A Day In The Life and in 2010 it won the Evening Standard Awardfor Best Documentary.

The BFI describe John Krish as “one ofBritish cinema’s best-kept secrets: amaster of post-war documentary film -making who repeatedly turned his worksinto, not just effective non-fiction films,but truly stirring cinema to rank along -side the world’s greatest directors.”

John Krish entered the cinema as ateenager early in the second world war,working for the Crown Film Unit (on HarryWatt’s Target for Tonight) and the ArmyFilm Unit (as an editor on Carol Reed andGarson Kanin’s The True Glory), beforejoining British Transport Films. It was withthe latter group that he made his classicThe Elephant Will Never Forget (1953), abeautiful movie about London’s last

tram journey. It was shown in a muchacclaimed quartet of his pictures thattravelled the country in 2010, includinghis infinitely moving I Think They Call Him John (1964).

Philip French The Guardian

Captured (65 min, 15), made for MilitaryIntelligence, shows unflinchingly what it was like to be a British prisoner of theNorth Koreans in the 1950–1953 War. Itwas screened only to selected membersof the Services.

This remarkable 1959 docu-drama wasmade for the Army Kinematograph Corpsas an instructional film following therevelations about different forms ofinterrogation used by the enemy in theKorean war. Performed by such actors as Alan Dobie, Ray Brooks and WilfridBrambell, it’s a harrowing movie thatilluminates its time and has immediaterelevance for our own. It was, however,marked ‘restricted’, screened only toselected members of the Services, andwithheld from the public until 2004.

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Small Publishers Fair • Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL • 14–15 Nov 2014

John Healy reads – together with Nicholas Johnson and John Hall – on Sunday 5 October2014 at 6.00pm in the South Bank Centre, as part of the London Literature Festival