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Jay Spencer Green

~ Novelist and Ne'er-Do-Well

Jay Spencer Green

Tag Archives: Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love

Looking for Ivy Feckett (looking for love)

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by jayspencergreen in Birmingham, Books, Ivy Feckett, Psychogeography

≈ 2 Comments

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Books, Humor, Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love

 

As she passed through the main doors of the library, she was greeted by a splendid, blinding glare, a bright summer’s afternoon in June that had put both a frown and a smile on the faces of everyone in Centenary Square. The joy of surviving another working week had combined with an unanticipated warmth to overwhelm the usual melancholia that came with the territory, the territory being Birmingham city centre; while the frowns, caused by a perfectly understandable failure to pack sunglasses, did resemble the more traditional facial expression, they were mere simulacra, disguising a less traditional cheeriness.

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Centenary Square from the Library 

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Centenary Square in the sunshine: The Hyatt Regency and Symphony Hall

Breezing through the square, Ivy resisted the temptation to pop into the Repertory Theatre to see what was on, distracting herself with thoughts of getting home and wondering, with an element of annoyance with herself, exactly why she’d asked Sam to help out with her research. The obvious answer, that he was quite brilliant, didn’t satisfy her. Wasn’t she brilliant enough herself? And it wasn’t like she was helping him out, especially since he had his own research to do for his Ph.D.

Grudgingly, she owned up that she knew the answer. It was because she knew he wouldn’t say no. She and Sam had grown up together. Of course, it was also because he was cheap, although he was cheap because he was a friend. A good friend. A friend who went way back. A friend willing to help another friend in need, regardless of his own commitments. A friend who was already getting on her tits.

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Birmingham Repertory Theatre: Restricted Entry

She crossed over Paradise Circus towards Colmore Row and turned right, onto Temple Row West, changing to the other side of the road to avoid the Old Joint Stock pub and to cut the corner round the side of the cathedral.

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The Old Joint Stock Pub

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St. Philip’s Cathedral (Front)

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St. Philip’s Cathedral (Side)

She pressed on with her head lowered because she could still feel the heat of her flushed face, not realizing that had she looked up, she would have seen many other Brummies equally pink; the sun’s unusual heat rendered her embarrassment indistinguishable from their incipient sunburn.

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Temple Row: Bloody Hot

Just past Needless Alley, she reached the doors of the Hartfield Foundation, the HQ of those very astute and discerning folk who had spotted Ivy’s genius, who had hired her to produce a series of position papers on. On? On what, exactly? Even after a couple of months, Ivy still wasn’t entirely sure.

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Needless Alley: It’s all downhill from here

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Yes, it exists! Needless Alley!

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Needless Alley just ahead. Could that be the HQ of the Hartfield Foundation?

Text from Chapter 1 of Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love: A Birmingham Romance

But wait!!

A Special Bonus: Here, on Temple Row, yards from the headquarters of the Hartfield Foundation, I found Ivy!! What are the chances of that?!!

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Yes, THE Ivy!

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Serendipity or Synchronicity?!

A Fragile Pedestal

03 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by jayspencergreen in Memories

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1980s, Anarchism, Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love, News from Nowhere, Persons Unknown, Poetry, Willy the Anarchist, Yevgeny Yevtushenko

yevtushenko

As students in London in the early 80s, my friends and I did whatever we could to entertain ourselves on the cheap: labyrinthine, clueless but committed all-night arguments on political theory, parties gatecrashed in the hope of stealing a bottle or a kiss, hours of masturbation (intellectual, physical, mutual if we were lucky, solo if not), and even, occasionally, attendance at lectures or seminars just for the craic. One form of entertainment I was unable to persuade my friends to partake of was a Sunday morning trip to Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner—hangover or inclement weather were the usual excuses—where one could huddle for warmth in crowds of pre-internet trolls as they heckled, harried, harassed, and humiliated the unfortunate few who had had the temerity to appoint themselves the focus of attention and source of enlightenment. I’ve always thought this ridiculing of the hubristic to be a valuable evolutionary tool in humanity’s development, a way to ensure not that anyone gets ideas above their station but that no station above or outside that of the community ever appears. And, to be fair, most of those who took the stage at Speakers’ Corner deserved the hard time they received: Proselytisers, Holy Joes, Holier-than-thou Joes, Prolier-than-thou Joes, Self-taught Vulgar Marxists, Untutored Vulgar Racists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Eleventh-Day Dreamers, Men in Straw Boaters, Strawmen by the Boatload. There’s a wonderful website where you can read about the varieties of crypto-religious experience to be had at this cathedral to free speech here.

My favourite speaker of all was a German anarchist known to me only as Willy, whose fractured English made his meaning no more or less opaque than that of the other turns, and no more or less funny, but it lent a certain charm to his Gestetnered magazine, News from Nowhere, never likely to be confused with William Morris’s utopian socialist text of the same name. Whenever I visited Hyde Park, I always hoped that Willy would be there, even though I rarely agreed with him—he was simultaneously too hippyish and too Stirnerite for my tastes—for he was a gentle and amusing speaker. He was also the only speaker I ever saw escorted off the premises by the cops at Speakers’ Corner, following some scuffles in which he played no part, for the content of his oration. Annoyingly, I don’t recall the subject of his speech, only that when he was helped down from his milkcrate by the constabulary, he was immediately replaced by a Marxist of a most boring and didactic aspect, who lost no time in losing the crowd’s sympathy, telling Willy’s erstwhile listeners that their attitude to work—they were against it—qualified them only for membership of the lumpenproletariat.

Willie died some years ago, I believe, but I still have a photo of him, courtesy of Invisible Threads, a large-format book of photographs taken by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who died this weekend. A bereted Willy stands on a milkcrate wearing a homemade cardboard placard round his neck like a victim of Mao’s Red Guard. The text in felt marker relates to the Persons Unknown trial and reads “If it’s a crime to be an anarchist, then I’m a criminal.” Yevtushenko titled this photo “A Fragile Pedestal,” an apt comment on the willingness of hecklers to knock speakers off theirs, but less appropriate in light of the trial’s outcome: four defendants—Ronan Bennett, Iris Mills, Trevor Dawton, and Vince Stevenson—were acquitted. I subsequently met Vince on a number of occasions at the Autonomy Club, an anarchist community centre in Wapping that was financed by money from the support fund, and Ronan Bennett has had a successful career as a novelist, playwright, and, more recently, focus of media celebrity speculation.

FragilePedestal

I saw Yevtushenko give a poetry reading in Birmingham in 1979, an experience I drew upon for the date scene in Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love; actually, not so much “drew upon” as reproduced verbatim, though with Ivy as the protagonist. Yevtushenko was 45 years old at the time, this episode of The Book Programme tells me, ten years younger than I am today, yet he seemed to me already to be pensionable, perhaps because he wore a flat cap throughout the reading, and flat caps were indelibly associated for me with my own grandfather, already in his seventies back then. (In retrospect, the flat cap may have been a fashion trend among intellectuals of the late 70s; that same year, I attended a sociology conference at Lancaster University where I saw Tom Bottomore deliver an entire lecture without removing his cap once.) Yevtushenko’s dynamism belied his apparent years, however. He declaimed heroically, growling, prowling, staring, emoting, the archetypal poets’ poet. There were only two male students in my Russian language class at college—Brian Grogan and me—so we were used to being marginal, minority participants in lessons (the low profile, I feel, explains why we were never targeted by MI6, either for surveillance or recruitment). Brian was absent from the reading, meaning that Yevgeny replaced him as the only other male in the room (male, not man; I was 16 at the time). It was a virtuoso performance, albeit helped, I am sure by the unworldiness of his audience, bookish bespectacled ladies of a certain age, awestruck by his very presence. I remember very little of the night other than Yevtushenko basking in the worship of his audience and wondering what that flat cap was all about. Maybe he just had a bald patch he was concealing.

Had I any sense of the dramatic, my anecdote would end with “And that was the night I decided to become a poet,” but to be faithful to my recollections, I must instead report that I chanced my arm with one of my fellow classmates on the way home, asking her for a date in the naïve hope that exposure to Yevgeny’s lyricism had rendered her susceptible to the less graceful charms of a teenage Brummie. My hope was as baseless as it was base.

Perhaps I should buy a cap.

Shortlisted!

28 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by jayspencergreen in Books

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love, ReadFree.ly, Top 50 Indie Books of 2016

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Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love has made it onto the shortlist for the top 50 indie books of 2016 over at Read Freely. Here’s the link.

http://www.readfree.ly/vote-50-best-indie-books-2016-comedy/

If you’d be so kind, please give Ivy your votes. You can vote twice in each category, even for the same book, and there’s a $50 prize for one lucky voter.

Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s came in at No. 6 last year, so it would be great if Ivy beat that.

Please also vote for Harry Whitewolf’s book Rhyme and Rebellion in the Poetry section. Harry’s a powerful protest poet and deserves the publicity this award will provide.

Fill your boots!

Ivy is .mobiLE!

09 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by jayspencergreen in Books, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Amazon, Humor, Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love, Kindle

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Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love is now available for the Kindle! Here are the links for the UK, US, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia and India. No need to go on a hunt for it!

 

Looking for Love? Look No Further!

04 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by jayspencergreen in Books, Uncategorized

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Amazon, Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love, Launch

IvyPic
Ivy is here!

The paperback edition of Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love is now available at Amazon (.com, .co.uk, .ca, .es .it, .fr, .de, .jp, .br, .in). The Kindle edition will be out next week, to be followed by Kobo, Nook, and ePub editions. Online distribution to Barnes & Noble, Abebooks, Book Depository, and independent bookstores will begin thereafter.

 

Woo-hoo!

What is Geocaching?

30 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by jayspencergreen in Books, Uncategorized

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BBC, Geocaching, Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love

The publication of Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love coincides with the Geolympix, a major gathering of geocachers from around the world. Here is a short video from the BBC explaining geocaching for the uninitiated.

Ivy Feckett Winners

30 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by jayspencergreen in Books, Uncategorized

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Competition, Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love, Prize Draw

Yesterday, I used the Random Integer Set Generator over at Random.org to generate the five winners of free copies of my new novel, Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love. The lucky five are Mercè & Josep in Barcelona, Richard in Balbriggan, Jeff in Blacklion, Dawn in Abu Dhabi, and Bernard in Long Beach. Congratulations to you all. Copies will be sent out as soon as the book is published.

Huge thanks to everyone who entered and who bought the book. Entry is now open to win one of five free copies of my third book, Fowl Play, which will be out in 2017. Just send a photo of yourself with your copy of Ivy Feckett (paperback or eBook) to enter.

Book 2 Cover Reveal!!

27 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by jayspencergreen in Books

≈ Leave a comment

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Book Cover, Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love

AKA “Langford Does It Again”!

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Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love: A Birmingham Romance will be available next month. Just in time for the holidays!!

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49489457_High Resolution Back Cover.5131632

Coming Soon!

15 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by jayspencergreen in Books, Humor

≈ Leave a comment

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Books, Humor, Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love, Monty Python

Book Number 2 is on its way: Ivy Feckett is Looking for Love: A Birmingham Romance. Don’t Miss It!

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