Postscript to yesterday’s thoughts on Julian Barnes and ebooks: I also wrote an email to the Evening Standard making roughly the same points, and they printed it.<\/p>\n
Actually, I only wrote it because the Standard asked me to, on Twitter, after I Tweeted about the subject.\u00c2\u00a0I obliged, partly because I thought what I had to say re ebooks helping dyslexics needed to be spread to counteract a lot of knee-jerk negativity, but also because I just like to be helpful.\u00c2\u00a0I don’t know if this is how letters pages now work, with staff actively soliciting contributions, but\u00c2\u00a0at least it was my own words. There’s a sense that\u00c2\u00a0people are satisfied Having Their Say all over the internet – Twitter, Facebook, comments boxes, forums – and the idea of writing such comments in an\u00c2\u00a0email<\/em> to a newspaper now seems\u00c2\u00a0curiously redundant.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Today: to the NFT, or the BFI Southbank as it’s now rebranded, even though the actual screens are still called NFT1, NFT2 and so on. I pay my first visit to its Mediatheque, a wonderful drop-in area where one can book a session at a booth with headphones and watch a rare film or programme from the BFI’s archive. I choose a superb Angela Carter ‘Omnibus’ documentary from the early 90s, and a bit of \u00c2\u00a0Inappropriate Behaviour<\/em>, an intriguing 80s TV film by Andrew Davies, with Charlotte Coleman as a\u00c2\u00a0troubled lesbian horserider (of course). The BFI’s Mediatheque is absolutely free – no membership or deposit required.<\/p>\n Then: to the afternoon screening of Lawrence Of Belgravia<\/em>, the full length documentary about the eccentric, surname-less frontman of the bands Felt, Denim and Go-Kart Mozart. Beautifully made, if rather sad. The central theme is his lack of commercial success and life on benefits in a council flat (when he’s not being evicted), despite decades of critical acclaim and endorsement by The Smiths, St Etienne, Belle & Sebastian, Pulp and so on. The film itself, however, has already done well: its three screenings at the London Film Festival have sold out, with a fourth added due to demand. The festival’s programmer introduces the film, and it turns out he’s a serious fan of Lawrence’s music. A woman in front of me confesses that she had no idea who Lawrence was, but saw the film in the festival brochure and was interested enough to buy a ticket.<\/p>\n It certainly has the Captain Scott factor – the British love a tale of failure (or of success tinged with sadness, eg Kenneth Williams), added, perhaps, to the Syd Barrett factor – the image of a crazy old cult rock icon moping around the shops.<\/p>\n As one of the interviewers in the film says, maybe the film will finally make Lawrence a proper star. Or at least get him off the dole.<\/p>\n I say hello to Bob Stanley (and tell him that my degree course is studying the St Etienne film\u00c2\u00a0Finisterre)<\/em>, Tim from Baxendale and Harvey Williams, who says he saw my brother playing in Roddy Frame’s band.<\/p>\n Lawrence still refuses to do the most obvious thing of these reunion-saturated times – reform the now much-revered Felt and perform all the old songs – even though it would make a lot of people happy and – surely – would finally enable him to make a living from his talent. \u00c2\u00a0Still, I admire his defiance, and make a note to buy the new Go Kart Mozart album when it comes out. Jan 2012 apparently.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Evening – lecture on Oliver Twist<\/em> at Birkbeck, followed by workshop on literary research – at UCL’s medical lecture hall, for some reason. Large painting of what looks like a Victorian vivisection class on the wall. Also: at one side of the blackboard is a working dentist’s chair.<\/p>\n Memo to self: always eat before a lecture. Rumbling stomachs take on an embarrassing level of\u00c2\u00a0amplification\u00c2\u00a0in a big room with only one person speaking. Particularly ironic during a talk on the little boy who asked for more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Postscript to yesterday’s thoughts on Julian Barnes and ebooks: I also wrote an email to the Evening Standard making roughly the same points, and they printed it. Actually, I only wrote it because the Standard asked me to, on Twitter, after I Tweeted about the subject.\u00c2\u00a0I obliged, partly because I thought what I had to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[411,265,410,412],"class_list":["post-2447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dickens","tag-felt","tag-lawrence","tag-nft-dammit-its-still-the-nft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2447"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2479,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447\/revisions\/2479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}