Walk the lines

Hands up who else has noticed the shoots springing up in the barren ground? Or who’s felt a thaw. Is it my imagination, or, all of a sudden, has leaving the house become a much more attractive option? Spring has definitely arrived in Belfast and the city is getting all active and frisky.

As you read this the last kernels of popcorn will have been chewed at the Belfast Film Festival (yes, you did scan that line correctly – that is the Belfast Film Festival), and while in previous years the concept has survived mainly on a collective suspension of disbelief – the 2006 programme had an upbeat, unapologetic verve that suggested it was finally finding its feet. The Sayles Brothers, subjects of a great retrospective at 05’s event, were so taken by the ambition of the organisers that they agreed to back an award this year for documentary filmmaking. There was also a noticeable step-up in quality in the normally ropey selection of local short films. But perhaps the most significant factor in the feel-good vibe of the fortnight came with the premiers of a number of locally-shot features; one of which, the Tim Robbins and Sarah Polley vehicle The Secret Life Of Words, even looks set to make a genuine international impact.
I do hope you managed to make it along to share the love. You’d have gone away feeling good about yourself.
If not: tut tut. You’ve been a bad and culturally neglectful boy/girl.
However, lucky old you - in nary a month, the opportunity will present itself to redeem your sorry asses. The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival – our favourite annual distraction - is back once more, and will run like a demented, smart-arse child, around the Dickensian side-streets of St Anne’s Cathedral from April 27th to May 7. I will reveal more in a future column. And how could you possibly turn that kind of offer down?
So, you’ve maybe missed something cool, and you’ve to wait a while until something equally groovy comes along. What about now, I hear you cry, what about tonight?
Allow me to point you in the direction of the Crescent Arts Centre, a pretty and, in its weird spatial dimensions, Tardis-like building that squats at 2- 4 University Road in Belfast. Because up until Sunday 9th, it will be hosting the annual ‘Between the Lines Literary Festival’ and you really should make an effort to go along. Among the array of pen(wom)men and provocateurs on display are John Banville, Carlo Gebler, George Szirties, Kitty Fitzgerald and Terry Eagleton, while there will be nights devoted to Ginsberg’s HoWL and in celebration of the life of Ted Hickey, a much-missed figure in the Belfast arts scene.
John Brown, the festival’s director, promises a stimulating and enjoyable week.
“There’ll be a bit of music, poetry, honky-tonk,” he says. “All good stuff. We just
want to create a space where people can imagine different possibilities.”
Impressive as the line-up is, the undoubted highlight is a rare home-turf appearance by the world’s greatest poetic plate-spinner, Paul Muldoon. He’s in town on the 9th to offer a preview of Horse Latitudes, his first collection of work since 2002’s Pulitzer Prize winning Moy Sand And Gravel.
“Muldoon is a genius,” says John. “ Simple as that. He’s always been in advance of his contemporaries – pulling the strings of language – revealing its codes and webs of significance. It’s a great honour and pleasure to have him over.”
Brown has chosen to title the event ‘The Call of Mongolian Violins’, a lift from Muldoon’s stately recent poem, ‘Medley For Morin Khur’ – and has revealed that, just as that piece questions the ability of art to transcend the brutalities of a violent
past, the (jarringly grand) linking theme of the festival will be the fraught relationship that exists between literature and history.
“Writers have always been tight-rope walkers,” he explains, “opening up history to the kind of imaginative possibilities, complexities and imagined spaces that politics has never been able to access. Hopefully, with the calibre of writer we have appearing and entering into a dialogue with one-another, we should see lots of worthwhile ideas being generated.”
April, it seems, sometimes gets a bad press – it can also be the coolest month too.