twentysix: June 2006

Monday, June 26, 2006

New members

A warm welcome to this month's new members, Iain Dunn, director at Dunn & Co;
Propaganda's Nicola David; Nicky Palamarczuk; and last but not least, Kit Marr from Blue Yonder.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

A writer's retreat

Chill out and get inspired at this carming stone house on Dordogne/Lot border with riverside swimming and canoeing. The writer's retreat has been sympathetically renovated to provide ample living space for six people. Fajoles is small with an historic Norman church and a Sunday morning market offering local farmers' fruit, vegetables, cheese, bread and a stall selling Sangria.

Read more and see photos on www.frenchconnections.co.uk. For bookings contact the owner directly. 26 members can get up to 20% discount on the prices listed.

Alas! An offer from Cyan Books

'Alas! Smith & Milton – How Not To Run A Design Company'
by Howard Milton and Nick Asbury
List price £19.99, discounted by 30% for 26 members to £13.99 (plus free p&p in the UK)

Co-written by 26's own Nick Asbury, this is the entertaining and surprisingly honest tale of one design company's 25-year struggle to make sense of a notoriously fickle industry. Since launching in 1980, Smith & Milton has helped steer the creative fortunes of countless household names – Kit Kat, Dulux, Switch, NatWest, PJ Smoothies and most of the contents of our supermarket shelves wouldn't be the same without them. Meanwhile, the company's own fortunes have taken in some spectacular highs and equally spectacular lows.

This is one of those rare design books that place as much emphasis on the words as on the pictures – with an engaging narrative drawn from interviews with the great and good of the design world, including Michael Johnson, Mary Lewis, Domenic Lippa, Michael Peters OBE, Richard Seymour, David Stuart and Richard Williams. If you’ve ever wondered about the secret of good creativity, how to get paid for it, how to grow a business, how to manage PR, how to cope with new technology and how to retain the best staff, then you may not find all the answers here, but at least you'll know you're in good company.

For a few tantalising preview spreads, visit www.smith-milton.co.uk

How to order
To order your book, discounted to £13.99 for 26 members (plus free postage & packing in the UK), send a cheque made out to 'Cyan Communications Limited', to Cyan Communications, 119 Wardour Street, London W1F 0UW. Please include your contact details and the address you'd like the book(s) sent to. For credit card payments, please contact Cyan on 020 7565 6120, or orders@cyanbooks.com. Please mention you’re a member of 26.

Uncommonly good news

'Common Ground - Around Britain In Thirty Writers' is the latest collaborative writing project from 26, and will be published in August. Contributors include novellists Niall Griffiths, Ali Smith and Elise Valmorbida. Here's the idea behind it...

Writers define places, places inspire writers. What would Dorset be without Thomas Hardy? Imagine the Scottish Highlands without Robert Louis Stevenson. And what was the effect of Hackney on Pinter, Kent on Dickens, or Laugharne on Dylan Thomas? Which writer captures the spirit of your area? How have the local landscape, people and stories influenced them? And what effect has this had on you?

We asked 30 of Britain's liveliest writers to consider those questions and write about the common ground they share with another writer. This book brings together their extraordinary responses, and provides a unique, informative and thoroughly entertaining tour of literary Britain.

Featuring pieces on... Paul Abbott Burnley. Rev. W Awdry Wiltshire. Julian Barnes Middlesex. Hilaire Belloc Sussex. John Burnside Fife. Mary Butts Dorset. Charles Dickens Kent. TS Eliot City of London. Jasper Fforde Swindon. Alan Garner Cheshire. Patrick Hamilton Earl’s Court. Thomas Hardy Dorset. David Lodge Birmingham. FW Lister Middlesbrough. Richard Long At large. George Mackay Brown Orkney. Hugh Miller Cromarty. John Milton Buckinghamshire. Stuart Murdoch Glasgow. Harold Pinter Hackney. Will Self M40. William Shakespeare Stratford. Giles Smith Colchester. Robert Louis Stevenson Scottish Highlands. Dylan Thomas Laugharne. Edward Thomas Cotswolds. Major H.W. 'Bill' Tilman Cornwall. Van Morrison Belfast. Keith Waterhouse Yorkshire. Virginia Woolf Sussex.

Whitbread prize-winner Ali Smith, as well as 26 stalwarts Stuart Delves, Jamie Jauncey and John Simmons will be taking the mike at the Edinburgh Book Festival, talking about their contributions and to 'Common Ground' on 20 August. If you're up that way, why not pop in to support the cause?

There’s also a special launch of the book in London on the evening of 31 August at the Globe Theatre, all members of 26 are welcome, so please make a note of the date in your diary. We’ll be sending out more details nearer the time and announcing our next book project, which has a distinctly Shakespearean flavour.

Monday, June 19, 2006

Let's remember

This time last year a number of us were finalising the publication of 'From Here To Here', the book of 26's Circle Line project, written by 30 of our writers, including Simon Armitage. On 7 July, the day the book went for printing, other events hit the Circle Line and London Underground. To mark the anniversary, and to remember those who died and suffered, we reprint Simon Armitage's extraordinary poem 'KX' which opens 'From Here To Here'.

KX

Northerner, this is your stop. This longhouse
of echoing echoes and sooted glass,
this goth pigeon hangar, this diesel roost
is the end of the line. Brace and be brisk,
commoner, carry your heart like an egg
on a spoon, be fleet through the concourse, primed
for that point in time when the world goes bust,
when the unattended holdall or case
unloads its cache of fanaticized heat.

Here’s you after the fact, found by torchlight,
being-less, heaped, boned of all thought and sense.
The camera can barely look. Or maybe,
just maybe, you live. Here’s you on the News,
shirtless, minus a limb, exiting smoke
to a backdrop of red melt, onto streets
paved with gilt, begging a junkie for help.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Slapped wrists all round

The Wordsworth survey's given us a reasonable idea how much you're all earning out there. And it would be fair to say that £26 represents the merest droplet in the widest of oceans. What's more, for this miserly sum you get all the benefits of membership to one of the most welcoming, unpretentious, writerly communities around. And, of course, the monthly treat of receiving this newsletter. Which begs the question – why aren't you renewing your subscriptions? All you have to do is drop a cheque for £26 to:

Julie Potts
PO Box 8260
Nottingham
NG9 7WY

Please do. Remember, it costs us money to keep chasing you up, money that we could really be putting to better use eleswhere. Things will get easier and more automated when the new web site is up and running, but it's not exactly difficult now.

Friday, June 09, 2006

26 members recommend for June

PG tips
www.drones.com certainly couldn't be accused of style over substance. But for PG Wodehouse fans like me, it’s a little gem. What you get is a single quote, which is changed every time you refresh the page. Perfect for a quick pick me up.
Here are two for size...

"He looked haggard and careworn, like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to shove cyanide in the consomme, and the dinner-gong due any moment."

"He walked as if on air, and the whole soul had obviously expanded, like a bath sponge placed in water."

Pure magic. JD

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The Sheep Market
A nice way to spend a $200 arts budget. Ten thousand workers at Amazon were asked to draw a picture of a sheep facing left, and were each paid 2 cents for their efforts. The results are being sold as sheets of stamps and also make for a very amusing website. www.thesheepmarket.com. NA

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‘Front Page’ at the British Library
A celebration of 100 years (1906-2006) of newspaper headlines, that should interest us all. Is it OK to celebrate GOTCHA and other examples of the headline writer's craft? I think so (and there's a good story attached to it that you can read at the exhibition). The exhibition is all about saying a lot in a restricted space, which is surely something we all have to do, whatever the writing we produce. 'Front Page' also gives you an unusual, enlightening record of the century's history. And it's uncanny how quickly some of these headlines start to look historic. You can also have a go yourself at writing and designing your own front page. All this and it's free too. Runs until 8 October at the British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1. JS

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‘Step On It, Cupid' by Lorelei Mathias (Little Black Dress £3.99 or £2.39 on Amazon)

A first novel by 26 member and 'Common Ground' contributor Lorelei Mathias is out on 3 July. She describes it as "a very girlie, pink chick-lit novel, set in an agency", while Amazon calls it "charming, engrossing and very romantic, a modern spin on the oldest story of them all, how to fall in love”.

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'The Perfect 10' by Richard Williams (Faber and Faber, £14.99, or £8.99 on Amazon)
In which the most elegant sportswriter of his generation nominates the most elegant footballers ever to grace a pitch. Eleven (yes, he's aware of the irony) playmakers are dissected under Williams' forensic gaze, with the goals, the lay-offs, the raking passes brought vividly back to life. It's an upmarket pub conversation for sure, but one that celebrates the chancers and dreamers of a sport that can sometimes forget about them. It'll make you hungry for August. Even after this summer. RD

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'Unseen UK', edited by Stephen Gill (Royal Mail, £20 Amazon £20)

Thousands of Royal Mail postmen and women were given disposable cameras and told to take snapshots while going about their daily business. Edited by Stephen Gill, the result is an entertaining and oddly moving assortment of mad dogs, equally mad customers, random locations and everyday encounters. The introduction is by Jon Ronson, who's always a good read, and the proceeds go to Help the Hospices. NA

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'How To Write A Novel' by John Braine (Methuen £9.99 list, or £6.59 on Amazon).

I managed to study English Literature without ever muddying my hands with the mechanics of the contemporary novel. I could give you 5000 words on the politics of irony, but left university having made almost no progress on matters such as what makes a good beginning. First published in 1974, Braine’s book is a practical guide to the basic but demanding principles of novel writing. His advice is clear, insightful and blunt. I disagreed with him often, but gained something from every page. I think every keen reader would enjoy his observations, and the view he offers behind the curtain. With a few tweaks it might happily be renamed 'How to Read a Novel'. TR

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The People's Act of Love, by James Meek (Canongate £7.99 list, or £6.39 on Amazon)
An everyday tale of canibalism, castration and cults set in post First World War Siberia. Nothing like as cranky as that description makes it sound, it's certainly worth your attention. Recently won some big fat literary prize but I can't remember which. RH

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This month’s plugs by Jim Davies, Roger Horberry, Nick Asbury, John Simmons, Rishi Dastidar and Tim Rich. These are not necessarily the views of 26, but we hope they’re not far off the mark. Any contributions gratefully received.