Archive for
December, 2008

Come Take My Hand

The Hackney Citizen has just started to publish some of its content online, which will be a great way for it to pick up new readers. The Winter 2008 issue features an article by North Meadow Media’s Ben Locker, and it’s available in full here. It’s very different from his commercial work, so hats off to the newspaper for publishing something so unusual.

Posted by: Ben Locker
Published: 12th December, 2008 at 12:10 pm in North Meadow Projects.
Tags: copywriting, hackney, journalism, North Meadow Projects
Comments: 1 Comment »

Cutting in Halves

I am busy editing a new magazine, which will be published in January 2009. Without giving too much of the game away, I’ve been having great fun researching material from back issues of the Essex County Standard. My two favourite experiences so far have been re-learning how to use a microfilm reader after a gap of about nine years (they still have near-empty ink cartridges) and getting distracted by stories that have absolutely nothing to do with the job I’m trying to do.

This story, which just caught my eye, is so good that I had to share it. It is from the 28th January 1859 issue of the then Essex Standard and is exactly the sort of thing we should be offering today’s soldiers.

BROADSWORD FEATS.— On Saturday afternoon the Colchester Garrison assembled on parade to witness the feats of Professor Thomas, the “champion swordsman,” of London, some of which were most remarkable. Amongst the feats with the broadsword were the following:— Halving an apple suspended in a handkerchief, borrowed from the company, without injuring the latter; cutting the thread attached to an orange, and dividing the fruit on its fall; taking three or four clear rings off a raw egg placed in a perpendicular position, without breaking the end of the shell; severing a broomstick placed on the edge of two glasses of water without spilling the liquid; cutting a silk scarf, floating in the air; severing a bar of lead; and cutting in halves a leg of mutton; each feat being performed with a single stroke of the sword. The most dangerous and perhaps the most dextrous feat was diving [sic] a lemon placed in the palm of the naked hand. This was performed upon the hand of one of the officers, the Professor explaining that the successful accomplishment of the feat depended chiefly upon the eye. At the close a liberal subscription remunerated the exhibitor for his performance. It is stated that Professor Thomas has received the authority of the Duke of Cambridge to give his entertainments at all the military stations and camps in the United Kingdom.

Excellent stuff — a sort of Sharpe meets Tom Tit. I also love the precision of “cutting in halves a leg of mutton”, as opposed to the modern “cutting a leg of mutton in half”. I just wonder whether it’s a little too archaic for me to use in commercial work.

Posted by: Ben Locker
Published: 11th December, 2008 at 11:29 am in Blog.
Tags: colchester, entertainment, garrison, tricks
Comments: 4 Comments »

Polyphonic Can-Can

Katy Evans-Bush has that remarkable quality of making me want to read poetry for fun. So much so that I’ve refused a review copy of her book Me and the Dead, offered for kicking off this Cyclone virtual book tour, and I’m going to go and spend real money on it instead. It will be the second poetry book I’ve bought since I got a volume of Robert Crawford’s stuff for a friend back in 2003.

I have, though, read Katy’s free sampler on her publisher’s website. It’s cracking. And it has a damned fine photo on the front.

Oddly, what I like so much about Katy’s poems is the fact that they reveal a fine prose writer. Take this, the first stanza of her poem ‘The Bog of Despair’:

We’d lunched on Greek salad and coffee
in a place with white walls and a skylight,
and when the guy in the corner’s phone
went off in a polyphonic can-can
we laughed without even trying to hide it.

Run the lines together, tidy up the punctuation and – bingo – you’ve got a slice of musical prose. Delicious.

Anyway, I caught up with Katy by email and asked her about her dreams, and what she thinks about some of mine.

When did you start writing poetry, and why?
My relationship with poetry started as soon as I could read… no, in fact everyone’s relationship with it starts even earlier, with the beginnings of speech – with nursery rhymes and songs. My grandfather used to sing me the old vaudeville song, “K-K-K-Katie, beautiful Katie, you’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore…” and it’s still imprinted in my head. And I still think “Row, row, Row Your Boat” is amazingly mysterious: that creepy use of the word “merrily,” and “gently” down the stream – the stream of life, which is “but a dream.”

Children love play with words and sounds, and meaning is fluid to them. They love different ways of understanding things – it’s how they learn. They don’t have an innate sense of poetry being dull or boring – they get taught that.

I never really differentiated poetry from other forms of books, stories, songs, etc. I was lucky; my parents and even their friends gave me poetry books, along with fairy tales, which I’m also steeped in. I still have my Selected Poems for Young People by Edna St Vincent Millay – a selection, not specially written for children. I can remember reading it at about 7 or 8. And I was unafraid of the Oxford Book of English Verse; I’d just dip in and read whatever took my fancy.

(more…)

Posted by: Ben Locker
Published: 8th December, 2008 at 12:01 am in Blog, The North Meadow Interview.
Tags: katy evans-bush, me and the dead, poetry, salt publishing
Comments: 7 Comments »

Libraries & Censors

I have just written a full page feature – ‘Put Your Hand In Mine’ – which has now been published in one of my local newspapers, the Hackney Citizen. I’d promised to write something about the ten years I’ve spent in Hackney, but I ended up trying something rather trickier.

The problem was that the more I mentally catalogued the places and things I love about the borough – Abney Park Cemetery, Springfield Marina and the canal, hidden backstreets and the rest – I couldn’t stop thinking about the different ways people can become isolated in the midst of hundreds of thousands of others. So I started reading over lots of my old notes and incorporated some of the memories they raked up, slotting them into the main narrative as flashbacks.

Anyway, it’s not all gloom, and it even ends on a note of hope. I’ll post it here in full when it’s slightly older news, but for the moment there’s something else I want to draw your attention to.

If you look at the paper (badly photographed, I’m afriad), you’ll see that it leads on a story about criticism and dissent. If you could see below the dome of the head on the left, you’d realise that the piece is about the writer Iain Sinclair.

Sinclair has caused a storm by revealing in The Guardian that Hackney Council ordered that his book launch at Stoke Newington Library be banned. The reason? His latest, Hackney, That Rose Red Empire was deemed to be critical of the 2012 Olympics, which are a main plank of the Council’s ambitions and are meant have a major legacy for the borough.

It was a strange argument to make, particularly as the book hadn’t been published and no-one – bar Sinclair and, I assume his editor – knew for sure what was or wasn’t in it.

So, after being made to look completely foolish in the national press and criticised by the Mayor of London, the Council backtracked.

And now, not only has Sinclair generated massive publicity for his book (did I mention that you can pre-order it on Amazon?), all of Hackney’s libraries are now stocking a free newspaper that leads on a story that upbraids the Council for its intolerance of criticism.

All of which not only goes to prove that there’s nothing like a bit of controversy to shift a few extra books, but that censors will always end up drawing attention to the very things they want to conceal, in the places they wanted to hush them up.

Long may that continue.

Posted by: Ben Locker
Published: 1st December, 2008 at 7:49 pm in Blog.
Tags: censorship, hackney, hackney citizen, iain sinclair, libraries
Comments: No Comments »

Photo Finish

It’s great to see that Stephanie and Judy from Harland Payne Photography have published their new website. These two seriously talented photographers have worked with us on a variety of projects, recently including the beautifully-illustrated Palladian Impressions newsletter. We hope to work with them on many occasions in the future.

Posted by: Ben Locker
Published: 1st December, 2008 at 10:02 am in Blog.
Tags: harland payne, judy payne, photography, stephanie harland
Comments: No Comments »