Cover by Mark Hearld and Emily Sutton

Any day now, the first edition of Random Spectacular will be flying through the postal system to homes around the country. Designed and published by St Jude’s, this occasional journal promises an exploration of the visual arts, literature, nature, travel and much more. A sneak preview here suggests there’s a visual treat on every spread. Typophiles should find much to savour. I’m also looking forward to immersing myself in the words when my copies arrive. All profits from sales will be donated to Maggie’s Centres.

At a time when many design and culture magazines are struggling – Grafik magazine closed last week, for example – it’s heartening to see a new title, especially one that has high production values and a confident approach to the sheer enjoyment of creativity. This magazine is all about reading for pleasure.

Its randomness is a sensible strategy; there’s no requirement for the publishers of such an epic collaboration to be defeated by their own promises of regularity. Besides, there’s something rather tantalising about not knowing when a magazine you enjoy will appear next. As an aside, I’m hugely impressed by the people behind Eye magazine, who have somehow managed to publish a stunning issue regularly since 1990, come hell, high water, recessions and the proliferation of design blogs.

Talking of blogs, my contribution to Random Spectacular is an interview with The Gentle Author of Spitalfields Life. In fact, it’s the first interview the Gentle Author has given. I think my subject is one of the most interesting writers in Britain today. The interview discusses aspects of east London life, and of a writer’s life. I start by drawing out the surprising background to the extraordinary promise made on the blog, which says:

Let me disclose to you the hare-brained ambition I am pursuing, which is to write at least ten thousand stories about Spitalfields life. At the rate of one a day, this will take approximately twenty-seven years and four months. Who knows what kind of life we shall be living in 2037 when I write my ten thousandth post?

A Typoretum typographic print accompanies Tim’s interview with the Gentle Author.

Buy the magazine to read why the Gentle Author felt compelled to make this commitment. To promise a story every day is the opposite strategy to that of Random Spectacular, but it also makes sense. The web has enabled this writer to form a consistent connection with the reader. And by imposing a daily deadline the writer is forced to produce; forced to create the momentum that will transform thoughts into words that can be shared. Even slow writers can become prolific when there’s a meaningful deadline hanging over their head. The Gentle Author has written more than 700,000 words in 2 years.

Prolific publication is made possible by the web. Indeed, Spitalfields Life is an important counter-argument to the ridiculous but common notion that people don’t like to read online. Many of the daily posts are more than 1,000 words. Some much longer. Even friends who rarely touch a printed broadsheet tell me they consume the Gentle Author’s post each morning. People will read online if writers write well for them. The greatest obstacle to better writing online is the miserabilist mantra that attention spans are shortening and ‘web readers’ can’t understand anything unless. It’s written. In very. Short. Sentences.

It’s partly the variety and unpredictability of the subject matter in Spitalfields Life that keeps people hooked. Each story is a surprise, like a gift. One day we are taken up a church tower normally off-bounds to visitors, the next we’re with bunny girls in Wapping or inside a small factory on the Hackney Road. Spitalfields Life is always somewhat random, quietly spectacular.

Tim

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

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

Encounter was launched in 1953, the brainchild of poet Stephen Spender and author Irving Kristol, with journalist Melvin J. Lasky succeeding Kristol in 1958. The magazine drew together articles from many of the period’s most influential and provocative thinkers, and it gained a reputation for well-considered and sometimes controversial commentary on world politics, the arts and society. It also featured an eclectic mix of poetry and some terrific editorial design, not least a series of striking front covers.

For many liberals, Encounter was the magazine they had been waiting for. So it was a shock when Spender resigned and announced his discovery that Central Intelligence Agency money had helped finance the magazine for more than 10 years. It was alleged that funds had been supplied via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-communist advocacy group, but it wasn’t clear which members of the editorial team were complicit, if any, and there are varying accounts of how far editorial decisions were influenced by Langley. This book review on the CIA site provides some background, while this article suggests the effect of the Congress for Cultural Freedom may have been rather subtle. The following excerpt from the lib.com article proposes that the Congress was promoting a leftist agenda – as a means to a conservative end, of course:

The Congress for Cultural Freedom was… characterised by two main approaches: channelling state money through private sponsorship in order to prevent any artists involved noticing the CIA’s involvement, and funding “progressive” art, loosely aligned with the Non-Communist Left. Both to show how culturally progressive the West was, and to try to increase the status of artists aligned with the NCL over those who supported the Soviets.

Encounter closed in 1991. Reading today, I find it refreshingly unapologetic about its more demanding content, open to experiment in the creative writing it features and unafraid of writers making grand statements on matters of state. Despite the Cold War editorial shadow play, much of what it published seems thoughtful, considered and independent. With the benefit of hindsight, you can enjoy trying to spot the fault lines in the nuanced relationship between the magazine and US foreign policy. Reading between the lines, you start to develop a sense of the rhetoric and counter-rhetoric of the Cold War, both between West and East and within the West; of subtle ideological battles being fought in cultural space; of the push and pull of big ideas. I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled for more.

Tim

Tim

Issue 1 of Fire & Knives magazine

F&K manages to find a niche in a subject area already provided with oodles of coverage in the Sunday glossies and lifestyle mags, not to mention all those foody blogs. In issue two it carries an evocative and entertaining remembrance of the Gasworks restaurant in Fulham, a place offering such a bizarre mixture of service and sleaze that two visits there in the eighties remain seared in my memory. There are also carefully prepared pieces on figurative food (whither the mould?), food photography, Nordic cookbooks and the enigma that is Fernet Branca (it’s a drink, not a daytime TV presenter). The piece that really drew me in was Xanthe Clay’s appreciation of restaurateur George Perry-Smith and his most notable place, The Hole in the Wall. Despite a rather haphazard approach, George brought saporous international cooking to cabbagey 50s England. Clay brings to life the man, while the excellent reproductions of his menus will have you salivating. £9.50 per issue, or £28 for a year’s subscription.

Tim