From memories of Bowie at the Brixton Book Jam to tales of Cuba in ice-cold Clapham…a good week for literary luvvies in this part of town

Two literary events in the space of five days: what's going on? Next stop Hay-on-Wye?

Well, probably not. But what, on these dead, cold March evenings could be better than a dash to a local shop or a pub, and get a free evening's entertainment from a bunch of talented and fascinating writers?

Well, for a cheapskate old blagger like me, the answer is: not very much. Which is why on Monday evening people queuing for buses around Clapham Common and Acre Lane glimpsed a mad old scarecrow, woolly-hatted, two scarves, two pairs of everything - cycling madly towards Tulse Hill.

Going as fast as possible, against the biting wind, just trying to keep warm. And thus arriving unfashionably early at the Hootananny, Brixton, for the 13th quarterly Brixton Book Jam.

I remember writing these events up during a very short stint on doing listings for the Brixton Blog, and yet I never actually went to one - until this week. And realised immediately what a very fine thing it was that I'd been missing.

The Hootananny is one of those huge old roadhouse pubs that London used to have loads of. Now, they've fallen out of favour, and who knows how long it will be before we're signing petitions to save this one, à la Half Moon in Herne Hill?

No, perish that thought. This place is crazy but it's usually busy, there's music or comedy or something on every night,  there are pool tables, food outdoors in the summer, and it has a little hotel too. The spaces are gloriously old school. For Monday's event, which had tipped its hat to late local boy David Bowie, there were rows of school-hall style chairs arranged across the dance floor.

Some of the anecdotes were memorable, notably those from the legendary photographer of  the Manchester music scene (and Man City), Kevin Cummins.

Instead of plugging any of his books in particular, Kevin ad-libbed a bit about his times shooting David Bowie. The first time when he was still a student and devoted Bowie fan and thus too much in awe of the man to get the shot he wanted (He did get the shot a day or two later on the next stage of the tour, in Leeds).

He told the best story about Bowie I've heard since the man died. It involved Bjork. He also showed a pic taken at an early Smiths gig in Manchester, with two punkish girl fans, and then announced that both these girls were in tonight's audience. "See if you can spot them!" Cringe. But everyone could spot them (especially as he waved the mike at their table).

The second memorable Bowie anecdote came from local artist Nathalie Dubruel, who had been an extra in a shoot for one of Bowie's videos. It was in the early 1980s and the location was the famous Wag Club in Soho (a place I already knew I was too old and dull to get into in 1984 even though I was desperate to be there, having read all about it in The Face).

She told the story with all the enthusiasm of her teenage self, down to the bit where she sees the video for the first time, and see herself dancing directly in from of the (frankly, overdressed) star-man "wearing my Woolworths t-shirt".

It was again instant transportation back to those strange days, when they started making videos for MTV even though we couldn't get it here at the time.

 There were also some good poetic imaginings about, or inspired by, Bowie. Bowie on a cold night in desert in Sudan, watching the tracer shells from some rebel encampment. It was mind-blowing stuff. I think that was Richard Skinner - but there was so much good stuff. That's the thing about a jam. It's a confiture…an embarrassment, almost, of riches, richness.

Another great memory from the Jam will be seeing Marcia Robinson talking about her dad:  Sledge - The Soul of Notting Hill.

She'd written this beautifully-illustrated memoir of her father, Gladstone "Sledge" Robinson, partly to keep his name alive, and because she'd promised him she would. Sledge died back in 2008, tragically, in a house fire which also destroyed most of belongings. By then he was know well beyond his London W11 manor as London's first Rasta Man, one who put up with no end of aggravation from police and others through the 60s and 70s and 80s for the dreadlocks he grew a full decade before anyone here had heard of Bob Marley.

Sledge was one the elders of London's West Indian community, famed for his dreadlocks, and  his bongo drumming on Aswad and Bob Marley tracks.  What was less well known outside the Notting Hill black community was his generosity, his strength as a community leader, and his role as a human rights activist.

He inspired people to stand up for their rights,  Marcia said, and she conveyed very clearly that he was a great man who left an important legacy. And which other pioneer fighter for the UK's law centres and legal aid movement has also been - in his later years - a fashion model and cover star  for GQ magazine?

You could tell, he had taught his daughter well, Marcia was a kind but powerful presence in the room, with a great voice and a great laugh.

One of the writers who attracted me to this event was Martin Millar, who I always thought of as Brixton's own punk novelist, with an early novel, Lux the Poet, set at the time of the 1981 Brixton riots and squatting punks.

But of course Martin Millar is Scottish, and it may not be fanciful nonsense to imagine a bit of a link between his early writing and that of a slightly older Glaswegian surrealist writer Alasdair Gray.

These days he's a successful writer of fantasy fiction, but there's an echo of Lux in his latest  novel, Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies , which is his first historical novel. Alas, I was called away as he started to read, but the bit I picked up made me think he was in a way going back to the good old bad old surreal punk fiction of the 80s….so, he's another one to go check out again.

Debut novelist C D Ross completely changed the mood in the room with a reading from her book, Gangland, as a young mother encounters a gang fight on bonfire night in Clapton, and ends up comforting a stabbed teenager who is probably dying. Powerful, chilling stuff.

So, how do you top all that at a literary event?

Well, you don't need to, there's no topping anyone in this world. Well actually there is, as the final author made very clear. This was the poet Stefan Clark who has just written his first novel, which is "a prequel to Shakespeare's Hamlet set in modern times" called  Love and Blood and the State of Grace.

It was another firework display, a pyrotechnic reading; he put so much energy and malice into the character of the murderous Claud as he sets about humiliating and killing his brother (Harry) that at times you felt like taking cover. Great stuff in the mode of a Brendan Behan, but on who'd  swallowed plenty of Bukowski , a spot of Henry Miller even, with just a hint of an Alexi Sayle style sense of black humour.

So, that was what a book jam is like. If I'd been sceptical, I am now a complete convert. It was jam of the choicest variety, a veritable confiture, Tesco's finest. On bread. With butter.

Oh, and by the way, this being the Brixton Book Jam, in Lambeth,  meant that it also gave time and space to a librarian called Stevie ("luckily for me I work in Southwark") who explained what is happening to the 10 libraries in the borough, and encouraged everyone to sign the Don't Steal Our Libraries petition and  come along to Thursday evening's meeting at Brixton Library. She received such a warm round of applause and cheering that you imagine most of the audience had already signed - but those who hadn't, will have now.

Thank god!

(PS: next Brixton Book Jam is on June 6)

And so, wind back the clock to last Thursday…

… and a five minute walk to the bijou Clapham Books to listen to author Leila Segal reading from Breathe, her collection of nine short stories about Cuba.

She had lived there for several years, first  in Havana, then out west in what sounds like the idyllic province of Pinar del Rio.

Leila read fragments from the stories in a quiet but powerfully expressive way. You immediately got the flavour: it was careful, a tentative approach through which you got these glimpses of a vividly different world.  She really brought the words to life. The small audience - ten people at most, sipping at their free glasses of red wine in the children's books room, were rapt. We nearly all had questions for her. She answered every one, fully. She clearly loves Cuba and loves talking about it, her enthusiasm was infectious and her knowledge deep.

There's a story of a British girl experiencing the sheer sensual pleasure of being at night-club, dancing with Cubans to West Coast rap music.

Another is seen from the pod of an Italian business man.

She's got a good, tough writing style, she doesn't waste words, but she does conjure up places and people with  the flick of literary wrist…a perfect phrase here, a couple of words of dialogue there.

She made me want to go back to Cuba, though from all as he said things are actually a bit harder there now than when we went. All that expectation of the coming "thaw" in US-Cuban relations, it seems, is bringing out a different side, and maybe some of the old insects are going to be scuttling out from underneath the cupboard they've been hiding under for so long.

I bought the book, and scuttled home for more red wine.

Buy these books!

Ana Mendieta and Dayanita Singh: Hayward delivers double dose of inspiration

It's a bit like a homecoming, entering the Hayward Gallery, once you've got past all the 21st century detritus plastered everywhere outside. Inside the cool concrete caverns of London's first post-WWII purpose-built gallery for modern art, you're immediately given a sense that art is to be taken seriously - in fact that it is the only important thing inside these walls.

This was  where, in 1968 or so I was taken by my sister to see the Henri Cartier Bresson exhibition, which to me was like  mainlining a highly addictive drug - 35mm black-and-white photography.

I became and instant addict and started saving for my first 35mm camera - it was a poor-man's Leica, the Soviet Zorki 4, bought from the USSR state import agency Technical and Optical Equipment on New Oxford Street, as I remember.

This must have been one of the Hayward's first big exhibitions, though I can find no record of it. I can still remember going through room after room of beautifully mounted prints, running back sometimes to check something I'd seen, then staring out of the long windows of the upper gallery across the river towards Charing Cross. Soon after I went to another exhibition of Soviet  art, and fell in love with the replica of Tatlin's Tower built on the Hayward's roof, a bright red steel lattice spiral of a   tower of Babel soaring upwards. You really got a feeling of how inspirational such a tower might have been to the Russians had it ever been built.

For much of my life this was the number one location for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art in London - right up until the opening of Tate Modern in 1999. Then the Hayward - already way out of fashion in the age of tacky post-modernism - fell into some sort of doldrum. There were still some great exhibitions, but sometimes you had the feeling the organisers were having to apologise for the spaces they were showing in.

I don't know why but I have always loved the place, and entering it again last week was  happy to that great concret ramp still cuts across the huge ground-floor gallery, and chart there's still that strange arrangement of different levels.

In fact, the bare concrete floors and walls now have a patina, they have aged beautifully.

It was certainly the perfect gallery for the main expo, the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. She's described as a feminist conceptualist, an artist who was aligned with all those movements of  the 1970s/80s/90s

avant grade, landscape art,  performance art, video art,  etc.

But what's so clear here (as surely with any other artist truly worth the subsidised entrance fee) is that Mendieta was a one-off, a complete original, who just happened to use and exploit all the means that were surrounding her as a young and beautiful art student from the "alien" culture of communist Cuba in the 1970s USA.

She is certainly one of the great users of the materials closest to hand - i.e. her own body, usually naked, or covered with grass or rocks or earth or her own blood or feathers.  The "feminist" tag is strongest in her earliest stuff - the series on  rape victims, where basically she recreates the crime scene, turning herself into the victim, and then invites male audiences to experience these horrific tableaux.

But after these, it seems it's more to do with her own Cuban roots - so much of this work is about ancient ritual, she goes back to Cuba, she re-interprets and re-enacts rituals from Mexican and even Maltese societies, she lies in her own grace, sets fire to her own image, she floats like a drowned bird on th edge of the ocean - maybe a bird that was trying to get back to its homeland, across the water.

She died so young, we have no clear idea where all this was leading - but what is now very clear is that she could be regarded as the spiritual godmother for the "selfie" generation of internet-obsessed art students.  Go on any of the arty blog sites such as tumblr and flickr and you'll find there are hundreds of people trying to turn their bodies into art, using paint, blood, felt-tip pens, ash, flour, razor blades….you name it.

Part of it is the adolescent thing - "look at me, I am hideous, fat, I am killing myself, I am slicing my arms, I am starving myself to death, I am a ninja, I am a whore, I am a monster, I am hermaphrodite.." etc. But what's so different between these often disturbing, often repulsive, sometimes worryingly attractive pieces of online imagery and what Ana Mendieta did back then?

Well, thing is, in almost every case, she did it first, and did it better. And if she didn't, then you can be sure Cindy Sherman did. Or maybe, Albrecht Durer, who must stand as the god-dad of the narcissistic selfie.

They hayward imperfect for this show. Its wall and floors and numerous alcoves and hidden spaces under steps and  ramps make for a totally unobtrusive background for work ranging form small framed photos and notebooks through to huge wall pieces, floor-mounted art, sculptures, slide-shows, film and video pieces.

Even better, you reach a certain point and are then directed to the upper gallery, where a very different artist has her own exhibition which is a strangely perfect complement to Mendieta's.

Dayanita Singh is a young and prolific photographer who seems to have set herself the task of documenting - almost archiving - the people and cities and professions and religion and industries and artists, and the dispossessed of her own country, the massive country, the sub-continet.

Many of the photos are displayed as small "museums" or archives,  using old wood, glass and brass hinged shelving and filing systems from some Raj-era library of imperial bureaucracy. She likes to create albums and books, and again her exhibition follows this path. There are very few, if any photos of the artist herself here - and if there are she's not telling.

But in a way it's another slanted take on the online world of near-infinite archiving you can enjoy with flickr and Google and dropbox and so on. But the virtual clouds just will not do when we can have what she shows here - great installations of images, treasure troves of beautiful photographic prints, folding leaves, books!