Balls in the air

Like a new pet or a small child, you know that when I'm quiet I'm 'up to something'.

Fear not! I haven't been chewing your slippers or peeing on the kitchen floor, No, I yearn for slippers, dream of peeing on... ahem. It's just that I've been busy with many things. I've had, like Wimbledon, many balls in the air.

In the last week I wrapped up the poetry competition I've been administrator of, celebrated various birthdays with meals out - including  a full-day mystery tour for mum (I didn't know where I was going either!), entertained my Missionary Uncle, did loads of promotional stuff including a festival newsletter, got my first poetry collection* out in the nick of time, had a Big Scary gig, took part in the local Poetry Proms and was media liaison person at the Festival launch. Also the usual 20 hours work in the library.

The Big Scary thing was a paid guest poet gig at a leading literacy organisation's annual conference. I was already nervous before discovering the delegates had been invited to bring and read out their favourite poets: Neruda, Keats, Henri etc... . Also it coincided with the Andy Murray semi-final and there was a very large screen at the venue - which they did turn off - and a smaller one at the side - which they didn't! At key moments all eyes were on the match, even as I spouted - which was ever so slightly off-putting!

I could try to compete with Keats, but not the Tennis On.


* more to come about this... only had 30 copies printed and it needs some tweeking

Blurbs

I don't know what you call them, but we call them 'blurbs'. You know - those little quotes on the back (or inside) cover of your book saying how great it is/ you are.

I don't have a book (yet!) but I made some pamphlets of my poetry to flog at gigs, back in the days before I had any real blurbs to put on it, so I had to make do with this one from my mum:

"I think these poems are great - but I know nothing about poetry and I am her mother."

Mrs Kirwan

Since then I have twisted a few arms, nicked the odd sound bite from publicity for things I've been at.
But I was very chuffed to be described - by a follower of this blog if I recall correctly- as "Roger McGough in bra"

Other comments from here I could use if necessary:
"I don't care how many other zombie Santa poems might be out there, this has got to be the best."

"She has better legs than John Noakes" (I have no recollection of how the comparison came about)


Which somehow sounds better than a gig organiser who said: "Clare's massive body of work is funny, profound, thought provoking and moving."   I think it's the fact that it starts with my 'massive body' that put me off that one.


Sometimes, I confess, I have touted for blurbs to help promote myself to potential gig organisers. My old mate David Bateman, who's well thought of on 'the circuit' came up with the completely unhelpful: "Strangely good." I suppose it could have been worse: "Good, strangely."


What's the best line you've had to describe YOU? Don't be shy now!

Cold Calling

Do you get 'cold calls'? People trying to save you energy, sign you up or sell you something? I give them short shrift, ask them to take this number off their list, but they keep coming. Sometimes I just put them on hold until they go away but I feel mean doing this. Mostly I just hang up to save my time and theirs, but here's what I should say:


The other person knows you are waiting

Thank you for calling my home
I value your calls. You are a valued caller.
Please press your hash key now.

Press one if you are calling
to sell me something I don’t want or need,
have never wanted or needed
will never want or need.

Press two if you are calling
to try and convince me to change my mind
when there is nothing wrong with the one I have.

Press three if you are calling
for somebody other than me
no matter how convinced you are
that I am lying
when I say I am not them.

Press four if you are calling
to shame me into a contribution
to a charity that will use that contribution
to pay people like you
to call people like me.

Press five if you are calling
for information about my lifestyle,
income, habits and desires
- which you think I will disclose
in return for your shoddy free gift.

Press six if you are calling
with a completely unintelligible regional accent,
or speaking as fast as you possibly can, to get it over with, tick the box,
then have to repeat everything three times
because I can not understand a word you are saying.

Press seven if you are calling
from a call centre in the third world
because you will work for lower wages
and your employers don’t have to worry
about health and safety, holidays or unions.

Press eight if you are calling
Because you have to, because you can’t get another job
and you hate doing it and you’re on the brink now,
and if you don’t get a sale tonight they’ll sack you
and who will feed the children?

Press nine if you are calling
the last person on your list
at the end of a twelve hour shift
of saying the same line over and over again
and care even less about your product than I do.

If this is a personal call, please hold for an operator.

©  Clare Kirwan

A Big Rant (about publicity)

I don't rant a lot - which is a shame because I actually enjoy it - but I'm going to rant now.

I was at an event this week organised by Wirral Libraries. On the way out a friend of a friend (and I'm not dissing her - she's a nice person - but this sort of thing happens ALL THE F***ING TIME!!) said:

'It wasn't very well publicised.'

I HATE it when people say this. How are they expecting to hear about local events? It's not going to be on telly during your favourite programme. No-one's going to knock on your door to tell you about it. Probably no leaflet through the door either - it's a pricey business advertising and really hard to do effectively on a tight budget - especially when you're trying to do it along with your regular job.

I used to work in press and PR so I know my stuff. I now work in libraries where we literally have no budget for promoting our events, or running them for that matter - we made cakes and sandwiches for our Centenary paid for out of our own personal pockets.

So can I just say, for the record (and general principles apply here):

a) It was advertised in the local paper. There was also an article about it - no mean feat as the only guaranteed newspaper space is a paid-for advert and a half page costs around £500. So if you're interested in local events - try checking the local paper. Just a thought.

b) Like author readings? Why not visit your local f***ing library and pick up the f***ing leaflet? Or go online to the council's website or library page on Facebook (try 'friending it' even!) and see what's coming up?

c) It was a poetry event in Wirral. It was on my 'poetry events in Wirral' page which I know you know about. Try checking it out occasionally.

d) The event was sold out

e) You were there, so you must have found out somehow.

I really don't know what people are expecting when they say something wasn't well publicised. As the potential audience for said publicity you have to be open to it, keep looking in places where sorts of things you like would be publicised.

You'd only complain if we found a way of beaming this sort of stuff directly to your brain.

Lowest common denominator

I was going to apologise for being completely distracted by my recent injury and spare you further pictures.

But...

...then I got to thinking: amongst all my posts - literary, philosophical, scenic, comic, informative - the blog and Facebook posts which have attracted by far the greatest number of comments were about a bruised bum. Poems too!

Some came to offer sympathy, some to laugh, some out of ghoulish interest in injury, some - it is barely possible - just to look at my buttocks* and some just because everyone else was looking.

It certainly appealed to a broad section of the general populace... in other words, my bruised ass is 'the lowest common denominator'.

From a Public Relations perspective this is fascinating. How can we harness this for publicity purposes? Would it be possible to promote library events more efficiently by slightly injuring endearing, scantily-clad lovelies? Why has no-one thought of titillating the public with semi-nudity and the vague threat of physical harm before?

What? Oh... er... yes...

*gets coat*

* ... which are, apparently, more toned than anyone expected, putting paid to rumours about librarian's bottoms. I told you - it's hard work in a busy library!

New Year's Eve... live from a sofa near you

Firstly I must tell you - something weird happened tonight with me and Darth Vader.

Bear with me. There's this guy (or gal) calling themselves Darth Vader on Twitter, and they asked for a three word description of the Dark Lord of the Sith. I replied saying I couldn't do it in 3 words, but gave a link to this blog post. 'Darth' re-tweeted my link to his quarter of a million followers. So suddenly (not that I follow my stats on Statcounter or anything) I've had 1500 people (and counting) visit that post...

...for an average of 5 seconds.... hahaha! Andy Warhol was wrong - not even fifteen minutes,

added later: ... although Darth doesn't tweet that often so I'm still getting hits from it, and a few new followers, and a great story which both self-agrandises and self-denigrates... but does end up with people wanting me to explain (in detail) what Twitter is and what's the difference between Twitter and Facebook and Blogging and Linked-in and my arse. (Not really - just added that in to see if anyone was paying attention.)

It just goes to show how many sad, lonely people who don't get invited to New Year parties are getting something out of Twitter, and the internet. It's nice for us them.

I've been trying to be positive, what with my top Christmas pressies, and my highlights of 20210 (hey... I can't drink tequila and type!) and not mentioning the BAD BITS and the CONTINUING SAGAs and the TROUBLES AHEAD. But really.

Must I bear alone the trauma of my mother's gift of a leopard-skin shower cap (and matching snuggle) and 48 boxes of chocolates? Could be worse - my BFF got a doorstop, a tea towel, teabags and (ahem) 16 random library books.

Anyway, there's some more cheap fizz en route so I'll stop here. But if you're reading this tonight, here's some comfort for you - 'staying in' is the new 'going out'. Twitter said so. But then it says a lot of things.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE! Cheers!! *raises can of Stella and gets all teary...*

CAPITAL IDEA?

Something I learned when I worked in Public Relations (and which is also a matter of common sense) is often ignored or forgotten by graphic designers - beware of capitals!

Capitals or Upper Case if you want to be snobby - or majuscules* if you want to get all technical - help us to signify new sentences, denote proper names (as opposed to improper names e.g. 'you arse!') and attach importance or emphasis. These are some of the benefits of not having a unicase language, or being German, where random capitalisation appears to occur. 

(Of course, you can also attach importance or emphasis using other devices e.g. italic, bold, underlining or size or a big red felt pen.)

Compare:

EVEN BEFORE THE USE OF CAPITALS BECAME SYNONYMOUS WITH 'SHOUTING' IN EMAILS, TEXTS AND SOCIAL NETWORKS, THEY WERE BAD AND WRONG.

with:

Even before the use of capitals became synonymous with 'shouting' in emails, texts and social networks they were BAD and WRONG.

Why?

1. Because it is much more difficult to take in blocks of text that are all exactly the same height. We need those ascenders and descenders to speed up word recognition, which is done by shapes and patterns as much as anything else. UPPER CASE kills - don't believe me? Read Capital Offenders

2. Because IF YOU emphasize everything, you EMPHASISE NOTHING

I'll finish with a little ditty from Roger McGough:

ONCE I LIVED MY LIFE IN CAPITALS
MY LIFE INTENSELY PHALLIC
but now I'm sadly lower case
with the occasional italic

* The lower case letters are called miniscules even when they're not as small as this

Related posts: 10 Punctuation Pet Hates    and     Freeze! It's the Grammar Police

Gone with the wind

I showed you some of the publicity pics for previous Wirral Bookfest in this post  but I have since got my mitts on 'the one that got away.'

The idea of the campaign was to have people reading books relevant to their situation e.g. we got the head of the Special Initiatives team (no - I'm not making that one up!) to pose in a Pie Wagon reading 'Life of Pi' and a library officer to stand on a chair reading 'Of Mice and Men' with a little white mouse on the floor nearby. You get the idea.

When James, the graphic designer, suggested this chap on the toilet reading Gone With The Wind  I had misgivings, but the library people were unequivocal in their response: No way!

I was away the following year so James tried - and failed - to slip this picture under the parapet again. 

He still wanted to do it this year and doesn't seem to grasp that it doesn't promote reading, books or libraries in a positive way. Despite the fact that it looks like the guy has one enormously inflated gonad and the book is far too slim to be Gone With The Wind, what advertiser would want 'poo' to be the first thing you think of when you see their publicity? But most of all - do we really want to be pushing the fact that this guy might have been the previous borrower of the book you just took out?

If you're local - or even if you aren't - here's a link to details of this year's Wirral Bookfest (11-17 October). The publicity material isn't out yet, but I can pretty much guarantee this man won't be appearing in it.

I don't know who he is, by the way. But I hope he got time off in lieu for taking part in the shoot. 

Dogs, (no) Dinners and the Dead

Have a look at this picture: a romantic scene of young(ish) love? 

It's in the local tourism brochure - but who are the people pictured? In this case J and J - the council's graphic designers, forced to pose for the latest publicity-fest. And they REALLY don't get on! 

She's probably piercing his foot with her stilletto and he probably had something VERY garlicky for dinner to make it doubly unpleasant if they insist on a snogging shot. (They wouldn't dare).

The picture IS taken in Wirral - but I've eaten on the patio of Sheldrakes Restaurant, overlooking the Dee Estuary, so I KNOW they are freezing their tits off too. And they won't have got their dinner. That's water in the glasses.

When I worked for the council's PR team we discontinued using filed shots of the public after I inadvertently put some dead people on the front of the Council Tax demand. I don't mean they were dead in the picture (in a 'pay up or you're next' sort of way). That would have just been wrong. But they had popped their clogs since the picture was taken and the family were upset when it arrived in the post. That was when we started only using staff. They were on tap and they didn't cost anything.

I was on the Wirral Events Guide in 2009 and they wouldn't even let us pop the champagne... we had to look like we were just about to pop it.  

I'm just getting involved in Wirral Bookfest again, this time fighting in the libraries' corner and not PR's.

Here are some of the silly wittily ironic pics referencing great books that we did for the first one in 2008.

...these are all people I worked with and begged, bribed or threatened to take part... 

The beer, on this occasion was real beer on account of the fact that (a) it is difficult to replicate and (b) see 'bribe' above.

The boy with the guitar was the 'face of recycling' for years because of a picture his mum (you guessed - another PR person) took at a bottle bank when he was 5! 

J was left to his own devices while I was away last year and tried to convince everyone that a picture of someone on the loo reading 'Gone With the Wind' was a great idea! *sighs*

The hardest one was getting the dog (Fizz!) to look like she was reading. There was another dog - Goober - but he wanted his own trailer and hairdresser.

So look again at publicity shots and ask yourselves: is one arm twisted behind their back? Is that cute kid now a stroppy teen? Are they even still alive?

p.s. What do you think about the new header / layout?  I've been tinkering and I'm not so sure.

The Time of the Signs

Ah to be in PR again, now that the election season's here! PR spindoctors may look down on poets as nerdy word-smiths, and poets may believe publicists to be soul-less pollsters, but the two are more alike than they think. I know - I've been both. 

For both the challenge is to cram your entire, often complex message into a sound-bite - a few words that will capture your thoughts like a perfectly-preserved creature in amber. (Oops, sorry - the poet slipped out there.)  

Political slogans and speeches sometimes  slip into the poetic. Dogberry has already gone into the whole 'Repetition, repetition, repetition' thing. (He didn't call it a 'thing' - he had a proper name for it. We (ex)PR types don't go in for the proper names of things - we never need to know.) The occasional revisiting of key phrases in speeches remind me of performance poetry. Obama could have won a slam with his 'Yes we can!'

But who wants to listen to an impassioned speech when they only have the attention span of a Hallmark card? This election campaign has resorted to the sound-bite, and, more than ever, the sight-bite. (Ooh - did I just make up a  new word? I love it when that happens!*) And thanks to the plethora of image-ma

*Alas no, sight bite is already at large, though generally used for video clips.king and info-sharing software it's been a creative campaign on the poster front.

It's already too late to see mydavidcameron.com  - an independent website which took 'that' Cameron poster

and made a template available for anyone with basic IT skills to play with. 250,000 people visited. I only just found out, but the site has closed. More about it here.  

It'll all be over by the time you read this, but here are a couple of the rallies of this poster war:!. 

Here's the original Labour poster comparing Tory leaders to X-factor's dodgy pop duo Jedwood. 

And here's the Tory response.

It works the other way. Labour's attempts to allude to the dark Thatcherite 1980's by using imagery from Ashes to Ashes back-fired dramatically when they managed to achieve the impossible: The made David Cameron look sexy. 

They had reckoned without the 'Gene Hunt effect.' The Tories practically reproduced the same poster (with a little more airbrushing perchance?).

There are more of these on the Guardian website and more about that Ashes to Ashes flip at The Times.

I've gone on long enough, much like the election night.

Let's finish with my favourite, which simply takes the much-discussed ambiguity of Labour's 'A Future Fair For All' campaign slogan and does what we all would have done with it. I would never have come up with or agreed to a slogan like that. It was ripe for plundering.

Another post about posters: Discovering de-motivational posters

Re-inventing history

My good chum Moptop has been waxing lyrical on the subject of Telling Stories (or porkies as they call them where I come from), and how stories made up for her own amusement can assume a life of their own.  It got me thinking about how maleable 'truth' can be.

We've read about governments changing history retrospectively in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, although of course they would NEVER do that in real life (ahem).  But my mum has no such qualms.

She is the consummate re-inventor of history. The man I married who she thought was wonderful but turned out to be a bastard? 'I never liked him.'  That business with the shoes - never happened. Homes we've lived in, arguments  we've had, people we've known have been erased or altered, retro-fitted to fit her current world view.  Former friends and neighbours have been vilified or deified in the best tradition of the tabloid press.

I like to rationalise things, to look at the past as though all that happened was for the best. She  goes one step further and changes the facts to fit.

Dad tries to keep diaries, obsessively documenting dates and occurrences, but he has to be careful - mum also compulsively gets rid of anything that hasn't 'been useful' in the last 6 weeks (it's a wonder she keeps him - and God help me if I'm ever in a persistent vegetative state.)  She threw all my old school stuff out while I was travelling.  She calls it 'having a clear-out', I call it tampering with the evidence.

I've  been trying to find the name of an artist I came across once who described her performance art using a page of text and with a single photograph:

1. B&W photo of naked woman mid-air with text describing how she trampolined naked in a darkened room for two hours, instructing a photographer to come in once and take one photograph at random
2. B&W photo of her surrounded by inflated plastic bags with text explaining how she collected every breath in plastic bags for 12 hours
   

It was all very arty farty but the point of it was that none of it was  real - performance art only exists as it is documented.  It's a bit like PR, but don't start me on that.

Flimsy things truth and history.  Do you re-invent your history? do you embroider or omit parts of your past - and what, and why?  

If you like the de-motivational poster, you may like to look at my earlier post on the subject.

(More on my mum's plans for world domination HERE.)