Compost Corner!

After the gravitas of Jacques Barzun, I allowed myself a touch of levity in the form of Tony Allen's book A Summer in the Park: A Journal of Speakers' Corner. I remember Tony from the early 1980s when he did a benefit gig for the Autonomy Club, the old anarchist centre in Wapping that I used to frequent of a Friday afternoon (me and Vince, that was it). Tony was never a particularly brilliant comic, but I doubt very much that the possibility of selling out would have ever occurred to him, and at least he doesn't have Mark Steel's smugness and punchable face.

In a slight book lacking in profundities but abundant with acuities, he presents a diary of 5 months spent giving speeches at Speakers' Corner, as well as descriptions of other speakers and the "professional" hecklers who seem to see it as their duty to deflate any pomposity they encounter but who, by the sounds of things, are really just annoying feckless wankers who enjoy interrupting for the sake of it.

The characters Tony describes are mostly rather sad and almost all male, which says a lot about both the practice of public speaking and the male propensity for self-delusion, but he gets on rather well with the SPGBers, who are also regulars there, and he even manages to convert a couple of their more perceptive members to anarchism during the period covered.

I would have liked to have read more of Tony's material and the actual texts of his speeches; as an advocate of anarchism I find him persuasive and amusing. There's plenty of material at Speakers' Corner Net to check out, however, if the book whets your appetite sufficiently.