The festival got off to a curious start for me. I had decided that my own contribution to it would include reading books in public places, as a form of propaganda. (I have also been carrying them around without using bags, so that passers-by can see what my intentions are.) On the first day, I was sitting in the elliptical park on New Walk, reading a chess book under a pleasant afternoon sun. Some drunken young men entered the park, and sat down with their cans to enjoy a bit of loud cursing and complaining about the heat. Suddenly one of them declared loudly, "I feel sorry for that bloke over there, he's reading a book!" I didn't understand why this made me an object of pity. After a while I wandered off, as I found their noisy behaviour was disturbing my concentration. The incident demonstrated why we need the Everybody's Reading Festival, and that it needs to improve and develop to reach more people. By reading in public, I am not trying to persuade people like that young loudmouth to read books, but rather trying to dissuade his kind from intimidating other people out of doing so, by accustoming them to the sight.
On Sunday night, some of us went to hear Corey Mwamba's music group perform in the café at the Phoenix. At first it seemed as though very few people would come, and we were thinking in terms of taking away the buffet in doggy bags. Gradually the place filled up, and in the end virtually all the grub disappeared, and an insufficiency was threatened. Fortunately the two children present turned their noses up at the fare on offer, and fetched themselves food from a well-known fried chicken chain, thus alleviating a shortage caused mainly by the way I'd been stuffing myself.
In Leicester, it is traditional to be what elsewhere is known as 'fashionably late'; so we shouldn't have been surprised that people floated in when they felt like it. It's a wonder anyone manages to catch a train any more.
The music began after the buffet, and took the form of some kind of jazz improvisation. Corey performed on a kind of xylophone, looking a bit like Gollum at times, as he seemed to be almost crawling over the instrument; at other moments he stood back and hammered away. He was accompanied by sidemen with an acoustic bass and a small drum kit. It created a very pleasant sound, at a felicitous volume level for the size of venue. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, though the link between his composition and the reading festival which had inspired it was not obvious to the musically inexpert like myself. He had done some of the composition at the Central Library Story Café, and I had watched him doing it. He uses an unique notation of his own, in the form of a kind of mind map on a single sheet of paper, with all sorts of strange squiggles.
On Friday night I attended the highlight of the festival, the panel discussion featuring successful SF author Peter F. Hamilton and Professor George Fraser of Leicester University's Space Research Centre. It was on the theme of 'science vs sci-fi', or how SF has influenced or predicted the real progress of technology. It was well-attended, and the auditorium was full. Damien Walter of Everybody's Reading chaired the meeting, and asked questions of the participants, which had been composed by popular local SF writer Catherine Digman. It was an interesting session, in which I learned that twenty exoplanets have been discovered right here in Leicester! Not a lot of people know that. (An exoplanet is one that orbits a star other than our own Sun.) The panel went on to discuss the issue of the 'singularity'. This is a popular idea in SF, in which it is postulated that exponential technical change will continue to accelerate until we are no longer capable of keeping up with it. Neither panellist seemed to think this likely, and Prof. Fraser suggested that technological civilisation had plateaued, and maybe even entered a decline. A question-and-answer session with the audience followed, and Prof. Fraser was asked if he was worried about being abducted by aliens. He replied that even the University students didn't know where the Space Centre was, so he didn't think the aliens would be able to find him. I asked him about the feasibility of my favourite idea for a space drive capable of reaching Mars in a few days. He said that it would require a step change in technology, and no-one was working on it; so it's still there for me to invent, once I am rich enough to own my own development lab.
On Saturday, I went to the session on starting a blog, run by John Coster and a Canadian film activist called Kenton. I got my blog started OK, though I'm not sure what I want to put on it yet. Possibly bits of stuff I've written for the story café, initially. Many of the participants seemed a bit naïve about how competitive it is, and how dedicated a writer you have to be. Kenton put all this across quite forcefully. The most interesting thing I learned was that I could contribute pieces to Citizen's Eye, which might or might not get published by them. This is an amazing Leicestershire online newspaper, an all-volunteer effort. There is also a Creative Media Week coming up in November, which will give opportunities to meet all sorts of people involved with grass roots media and learn how it's done. I'm looking forward to it.
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