I discovered that curating a show like WORDSTOCK requires a kind of pragmatic theatricality. Communication is all about conveying information but the way you tell it must be dramatic. People will forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. 26 is packed with extraordinary people who have broad terms of reference. Once the word was out, offers to facilitate events poured in and the WORDSTOCK programme began to firm up: A writing workshop exploring the crossover between words and music; A discussion around linguistic analysis, metaphor and brands; Two best selling authors on the dynamics of agents, editors and publishing; A group therapy session for timorous Tweeters; The launch of a new 26 project inspired by litter; A case study of 26 Flavours – a Cornish festival of food and language; Advice on how to keep the inspiration bubbling faced with looming deadlines; A smorgasbord of activities investigating music festival nomenclature, song lyrics and memories provoked by golden oldies; A performance around verbal seduction and how to make yourself a more attractive proposition to potential partners – business and pleasure.

Come the big day, the halls were decked with weeping willows, mountain ash, ivy clad pergolas and autumn leaves. I have never experienced such drive from a group of people so determined to make something extraordinary happen. I’m increasingly convinced that authentic change is not achieved by grandiose schemes, but by incremental interventions that gather momentum through sticky enthusiasm: Conjure up a loose framework that bristles with opportunities, stand back and watch the sparks.

So here are my 12 Top Tips for designing and running a fruitful festival.

1. CONSTRUCT & DECONSTRUCT. Create an ambience of heightened awareness around a fixed timetable allowing plenty of room for idiosyncrasy.

2. FOCUS & CONTEXTUALISE. Create themed centres of attention with a few signature landmarks, and set the scene with inveigling temptations.

3. INVITE & ENGAGE. Begin with a chaotic icebreaker that inspires participants make their own marks and establish terr

4. FASCINATE & PROVOKE. Provide concurrent choices of speakers and events offering challenging content and thoughtful interaction.

5. STROKE & EVOKE. Provide counterintuitive encounters that inspire people to turn abstract meanderings into tangible experiences.

7. REFLECT & ABSORB. Give participants the time and space to explore themselves and bring back even richer gifts back to the table

8. OUT & ABOUT. Break the day with a blast of fresh air and an ambulatory workshop to trigger pollination and serendipity.

9. IMAGINE & INTUIT. Draw upon rich veins of subliminal memories and amplify them in Technicolor.

10. HARMONISE & BOND: Create magnetic attractions that dissolve inhibitions.

11. LIBERATE & ANIMATE. Peel away years of socialisation and encourage all that visceral stuff to emerge.

12. ASSERT & EXPRESS. Fuse the new empowerments into triumphant expressions of lusty joy.

Tom

While the advantages of getting your thoughts straight are clear, it’s also worth remembering that the benefits flow the other way. The act of writing can help us to explore new ideas, clarify what we know and don’t know, and test the mettle of our views. And so it can help us to develop richer, more useful, more valuable, more considered interpretations of the world. Making our ideas manifest on the page is like bringing an object out into the light. Once something is written down it becomes separated from our mind, and that provides critical space between what we thought then (when we wrote it) and what we think now (as we read it). Putting words on the page doesn’t necessarily mean publishing it to the world; sometimes it’s simply about publishing it to yourself. The natural extension of this is to read your words out loud – always a great test of whether you’re making sense.

Here are three excerpts that draw out the value of writing as part of the thinking process. The first takes us back to David McCullough, and a remark he made in a recent Time magazine interview:

We don’t write letters on paper anymore. How will this affect the study of history?

The loss of people writing – writing a composition, a letter or a report – is not just the loss for the record. It’s the loss of the process of working your thoughts out on paper, of having an idea that you would never have had if you weren’t [writing]. And that’s a handicap. People [I research] were writing letters every day. That was calisthenics for the brain.

The second passage is from the first chapter of EH Carr’s wonderful book What is History:

Laymen – that is to say, non-academic friends or friends from other academic disciplines – sometimes ask me how the historian goes to work when he writes history. The commonest assumption appears to be that the historian divides his work into two sharply distinguishable phases or periods. First, he spends a long preliminary period reading his sources and filling his notebooks with facts: then, when this is over, he puts away his sources, takes out his notebooks and writes his books from beginning to end. This is to me an unconvincing and unplausible picture. For myself, as soon as I have got going on a few of what I take to be the capital sources, the itch becomes too strong and I begin to write – not necessarily the beginning, but somewhere, anywhere. Thereafter, reading and writing go on simultaneously. The writing is added to, subtracted from, reshaped, cancelled, as I go on reading. The reading is guided and directed and made fruitful by the writing: the more I write, the more I know what I am looking for, the better I understand the significance and relevance of what I find. Some historians probably do all this preliminary writing in their heads without using pen, paper or typewriter, just as some people play chess in their heads without recourse to board and chessmen: this is a talent which I envy, but cannot emulate. But I am convinced that, for any historian worth the name, the two processes of what economists call ‘input’ and ‘output’ go on simultaneously and are, in practice, parts of a single process.

The third passage is from writer Jamie Jauncey’s excellent blog:

I’ve just received the first copies of Room 121, my new book, co-written with John Simmons. Those three months over last winter when we were writing it, exchanging on an almost daily basis the blog posts that form each chapter, were a period of deep thinking because the time was ring-fenced; it had to be or we wouldn’t have met our deadline… But as soon as we finished it, hyper-connected life crashed back into the almost sacred space we had created for ourselves and the deep thinking time was lost. Now I’m left with the frustration that while my life seems particularly rich in experience, my resulting view of the world feels only half-formed because I don’t have enough time to reflect on it.

Tim

The English language in America is fog-bound. This is hellish serious, more serious than who will be the next Republican nominee for the Presidency. If we cannot communicate clearly with one another, who can tell what our votes will mean? Two lousy forces are at work: (a) stencilism and (b) carbonic plague. They have in common only their hideous fear of straight talk. We cannot now say “in colleges”: we must say “at the college level”. Nor can we say “yearly”; things are now “on an annual basis”. Who done this? Webster’s Third? Here is one crime, I think that cannot be lain at their door. But at whom’s?

April no longer brings “showers”, it brings “shower activity”. There is also “flurry activity” here, on a winter basis. Do we have “fog”? Goodness knows we do, but it is “fog conditions” which create “chain reaction pile ups” on the New Jersey Turnpike. (The Turnpike is, of course, a “facility”, just as Columbia University is a facility, at the college level.)

Analysis, is giving way to “analyzation”, by the way, to keep things straight “at this time”—and you’d better not get caught making a summary of things any more because what you’re really after is a “summarisation”. If it’s a good summarisation it could lead to a significant “breakthrough” which could accelerate the toothpaste “explosion” and thus close the dental “gap”.

If a media of communication wants to be more than a passing phenomenon at a satisfactory profit level on an annual basis, it ought to contemplate a facility for more analysation on what in hell’s name is being done to the English language by some “doee” or “doees” unknown.

New York Herald Tribune, 1964

Strangely, an even more recent hour spent nosing through old newspapers unearthed another pedantic, weather-related missive from 1964. This one is from a newspaper that is alive and well today, despite some creaking in the knee department.

“There could be,” said the radio yesterday, “a little snow here and there.” “Snow showers,” it said on Saturday, “could be prolonged.”

Thus the B.B.C. catches up with current cant, which through substituting “could” for “may” or “might” weakens the language by blurring definition. It is now quite common to hear or see “could” used twice in one sentence with a different meaning each time.

Of all people, the B.B.C. should know better. But as yesterday it also said that “cycling past Woburn Abbey, a black squirrel ran across the road,” the situation could now be hopeless.

Daily Telegraph, 1964

Tim

‘We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others.’

Goethe

Shaun Usher is the mind behind a wonderful blog called Letters of Note, a sort of cultural Mount Pleasant Sorting Office for “fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.” The site has been going for a while, which means you now encounter a rich and varied selection of personal correspondence, from a memo about the casting of Star Trek (Wesley Snipes considered for the role of Geordi) to revealing missives and scandalous jottings from a range of writers, artists, politicians, executives and scientists.

There are some profoundly important pieces in this collection – asides, sideswipes and deeper ruminations that bring the often complex theories and personalities of individuals into the language of everyday life. I’m particularly enamoured with a letter from Albert Einstein to philosopher Erik Gutkind, who had recently written an acclaimed book, Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. Albert lays bare his views on the subject of religious faith:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish… For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong … have no different quality for me than all other people.

There’s a notable touch at the end, when Einstein offers (if you’ll forgive a reference from the Book of Genesis) an olive branch:

I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.”

I might use that.

Usher includes lots of entertaining pieces where celebrities and other high profile individuals lose it on paper. Madonna to Letterman is memorably mad. There are also some deliciously unreconstructed memos to employees from the CEO of Tiger Oil, Edward ‘Tiger Mike’ Davis. Take this:

Do not speak to me when you see me. If I want to speak to you, I will do so. I want to save my throat. I don’t want to ruin it by saying hello to all of you sons-of-bitches.

I was chortling from that when I clicked to IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER. I’ll let Usher, who writes elegant introductions to each piece, set up the story:

On July 18 of 1969, as the world waited anxiously for Apollo 11 to land safely on the surface of the Moon, speechwriter William Safire imagined the worst case scenario as he expertly wrote the following sombre memo to President Nixon’s Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman. Its contents: a contingency plan, in the form of a speech to be read out by Nixon should astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become stranded on the moon…’

You can see and read the original memo here. It’s a remarkable speech. It also reveals something of the strange life of the speechwriter at their desk; mustering emotion ahead of time. I felt moved by Safire’s attempts to find solace and spirit in the face of potentially shattering events; by the way he draws feelings into ideas, and ideas into the words needed to anoint a tragedy that might never happen.

Tim