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May 8th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
• Chang, the author of Wild Swans, and a fierce
critic of Chairman Mao, had earlier given a forthright and gripping talk at
the Central European University to open the festival. She said she believed
the sheer size of her readership gave her protection from the Chinese
government and talked about her deep disappointment that censorship in China
is worse now than it was in the 1990s. Talking about dissident Chen
Guancheng, she said: “This regime is not relaxed because a relaxed
regime does not have 100 thugs surround the house of a blind man.”
• It wasn’t all highbrow talk, either. György (author of The
White King) was relating his experiences of trying to catch up with
American television on grainy bootleg videos in the late 1980s and his love
of present-day series such as David Simon’s The Wire. Fisher
suggested that if he really wanted a cop show with no “mealy-mouthed
compromising” then he ought to watch The Shield with the
ruthless Vic Mackay (Michael Chiklis). Okri, meanwhile, talked about one of
his favourite films – Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. He said: “It’s
such a simple film – the story of man trapped in his attitude to the world
until he opens up his mind. It’s brilliant.”
• Hanif Kureishi gave a QA session at the Central European
University after the screening of his film My Beautiful Laundrette.
Kureishi talked about the differences between now and 1985, when the film,
starring Daniel Day Lewis, was released. He said: “In those days, I got
all the ethnic work – I had the only name they could pronounce.”
Kureishi said that at the time the television company who had funded the
film, Channel 4, considered it “shocking” for an ex-skinhead
character (Day-Lewis) to kiss a Pakistani boy, adding: “I was very keen
at the time to show people in the suburbs what was going on, so it was
partly a letter to the world about racism in Britain. Some skinheads would
hear that there were skinheads in the film and go and see it without knowing
much else about the film. So for that reason, I used to quite enjoy seeing
the audiences at the film. I can especially remember one lot in Milton
Keynes and their reaction when the two boys kissed. If you went to see the
film where there were skinheads or fundamentalists, you were guaranteed a
good time.”
• The Hay Festival team and Hungarofest joined forces for an
excursion to János Hill, just outside central Budapest. On the walk, Okri
was recalling some of the great opening lines of his favourite novels and
stories. One of his most cherished is Ernest Hemingway’s beginning to a
short story called Indian Camp, which starts with simple grace: “At
the lake shore there was another rowboat drawn up. The two Indians stood
waiting.”
• Because the Festival will be celebrating its 25th year in 2012,
one of the new celebratory features includes the Hay team putting 25
questions to everyone taking part in the 15 festivals they hold around the
globe. In Budapest, there was a panel discussion involving Okri, Chang,
Gyorgy, Fischer, Foldenyi F. Laszlo and Tiffany Murray, which was chaired by
Jon Gower. Among the questions put to the panel was: which one book, film
and album would you contribute to a library of literature, music and drama
that Hay are building. When it came to selecting the books, György got a
laugh from the audience when he said that he had told his wife she better be
prepared to read his favourite book, The Good Soldier Švejk by
Jaroslav Hašek, on their honeymoon while Chang said that Ivan Turgenev’s
novella First Love “is a book that should be in any library of
humanity”. László F. Földényi chose Moby Dick by
Herman Melville saying “it was the book that changed my life . . . it
had stood on my shelf for 40 years and when I finally read it, I realised it
helped me sense things in the world around me that I hadn’t before.”
• The Petőfi Literary Museum was packed with young
Hungarians as Japanese architect Shigeru Ban talked to Dave Venables about
his innovative work in low-cost disaster relief housing.
• Finally, one of the highlights was Budapest itself. It’s a
great city to explore on foot or by public transport – the underground, the
second oldest in the world having been built in 1896, is cleaner and more
enjoyable than the London version – and the bookshops, cafes, bars, statues,
architecture, bridges and market were a hit with festival-goers and
performers alike.
Click
here for details about the Hay Festival.
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