In response to Peter Riley's request for comments from greybeards on CCCP9
following that feisty young buck Keston's observations, a couple of things
occurred to me after attending Friday and Saturday only (middle-age meaning
an early start Monday)...
The alienated position some readers adopted in respect of their writing.
This is where I agree with Keston that Andrea Brady gave the finest reading,
wholly given over to the writing she delivered. Otherwise there was the
gamut from disavowal (Andy Johnson) to histrionics - Robert Adamson,
although in this latter reading there was a certain antiquarian pleasure to
be derived from a mode of reading - and indeed of writing - which brought
the ghastly ghost of George Barker back to the stage. Embarrassment too.
The separation of audiences. Bob Walker's reading recreated a Cambridge
audience c.1975. The grand dismissiveness of a few stray PhDs in the making
about Bob's work encouraged me to join this audience when it repaired for
tea in Belinda's , but I was taken aback on leaving to hear Andrea and Lisa
Robertson to find no-one else in the reunion interested in taking a chance
on what presumably they didn't know. Stuff 'em.
And only Kevin Nolan's translation of Philippe Beck had me scrabbling
through my pockets for scraps of paper to record what I was hearing...
But as a social event it was the pleasantest and least exclusive that I
remember from any CCCP, and congratulations to the organisers for that, and
to Keston and Andrea for their late-night salon.
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