The L word
Jul. 19th, 2008 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThe first Durham Literature Festival was held in 1989, but I don't think I knew anything about it. I do remember going to some events at the 2000 Festival, but it was in 2001 that we really started to become involved. We were looking through the brochure, and wondering whether we wanted to take out season tickets, and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler realised that we would get a better deal if we signed up for a business membership, instead of two individual memberships. The Festival organiser suggested that we go one better, and put a similar sum of money into becoming a sponsor of the festival, instead. And that's how it started...
So, as I wrote on our web site, Between 2001 and 2005, Cornwell Internet was a major sponsor of the Durham Literature Festival; we enjoyed five wonderful years of attending events, meeting performers, and stretching our skills. After the first couple of years, we gave sponsorship in kind, running the festival web site, with detailed reports of events and as much extra material as we could find. It was great fun, but in the end we had to give it up - for a variety of reasons, but mostly because as the business expanded we could no longer afford to spend the best part of a month every autumn working practically full-time on the site (and were pretty certain in any case that the effort was out of all proportion to how much the site was valued by the festival organisers).
The high point of our involvement was 2004, when an organisation called Arts & Business (whose purpose is to encourage businesses to sponsor the arts) gave us funding to commission work for the Festival web site: we had a lovely time deciding what we wanted, paying people to create it - and then working out how to present it on the site (for reasons which I'll come to, I've just been revisiting that work, and I'm still thrilled that these things were created because of us; I'm not quite as happy with some of the choices we made in presenting them for the web, but this was four years ago when most surfers had slower connections and smaller screens than they do now...)
Well, asdurham_rambler says, if you resign from something, you have to let go. But I still live in Durham, and I still read books, so I'm still entitled to be interested in the LitFest - which in 2008 has abandoned the scary word "literature" and is promoting itself as the Durham Book Festival. When I talked to one of the organisers, she was anxious that I shouldn't draw the wrong conclusion from this, and assured me that I would be pleasantly surprised when I saw the programme - but in fact, I'd be delighted if the festival concentrated its resources on talking about books; as must be obvious, I like books. Past festivals have never given genre fiction its due; instead they have included a large component of writers' workshops, and some storytelling events. If the plan is to change that, I won't be complaining. Except, of course, that now the first programme items are being listed on the web site, that's not what the name change means - in fact, as far as the programme is concerned, it doesn't appear to mean anything at all, and the events listed are very similar to those of previous years. Which is not a bad thing, and I'll certainly go to some of them (how could I miss the launch of Arnold Wesker's poetry collection?)
The really bad surprise was not the programme, but the web site itself: there is a school of web design which appears to believe that you can't put up a new web site without deleting the old one. Since I'm already in mid-rant, I won't go off on a totally separate rant, I will just repeat to myself that, having walked away from this job, I should walk away. I'm sorry to see the archive we had built up just discarded, and I've e-mailed Durham City Arts to say so - and had a perfectly pleasant reply saying that the present site is just a holding page, and that there will be more information when the designers have the full site up and running. But that was two weeks ago, and meanwhile I have broken links all over my sites where I have linked to material on the LitFest site.
So I've spent much of today transferring the commissioned work onto Cornwell Internet's own web site, which is where you should now go if you want to read Big Frocks (a poem by Valerie Laws with accompanying picture show), Absent Friends by Chaz Brenchley (a hyperfiction bydesperance with added recipes) or Gail-Nina Anderson's sonnet sequence plus, Memory Problems - or download the Festival's very own bookplate, designed for us by superstar Bryan Talbot.
durham_rambler realised that we would get a better deal if we signed up for a business membership, instead of two individual memberships. The Festival organiser suggested that we go one better, and put a similar sum of money into becoming a sponsor of the festival, instead. And that's how it started...So, as I wrote on our web site, Between 2001 and 2005, Cornwell Internet was a major sponsor of the Durham Literature Festival; we enjoyed five wonderful years of attending events, meeting performers, and stretching our skills. After the first couple of years, we gave sponsorship in kind, running the festival web site, with detailed reports of events and as much extra material as we could find. It was great fun, but in the end we had to give it up - for a variety of reasons, but mostly because as the business expanded we could no longer afford to spend the best part of a month every autumn working practically full-time on the site (and were pretty certain in any case that the effort was out of all proportion to how much the site was valued by the festival organisers).
The high point of our involvement was 2004, when an organisation called Arts & Business (whose purpose is to encourage businesses to sponsor the arts) gave us funding to commission work for the Festival web site: we had a lovely time deciding what we wanted, paying people to create it - and then working out how to present it on the site (for reasons which I'll come to, I've just been revisiting that work, and I'm still thrilled that these things were created because of us; I'm not quite as happy with some of the choices we made in presenting them for the web, but this was four years ago when most surfers had slower connections and smaller screens than they do now...)
Well, as
durham_rambler says, if you resign from something, you have to let go. But I still live in Durham, and I still read books, so I'm still entitled to be interested in the LitFest - which in 2008 has abandoned the scary word "literature" and is promoting itself as the Durham Book Festival. When I talked to one of the organisers, she was anxious that I shouldn't draw the wrong conclusion from this, and assured me that I would be pleasantly surprised when I saw the programme - but in fact, I'd be delighted if the festival concentrated its resources on talking about books; as must be obvious, I like books. Past festivals have never given genre fiction its due; instead they have included a large component of writers' workshops, and some storytelling events. If the plan is to change that, I won't be complaining. Except, of course, that now the first programme items are being listed on the web site, that's not what the name change means - in fact, as far as the programme is concerned, it doesn't appear to mean anything at all, and the events listed are very similar to those of previous years. Which is not a bad thing, and I'll certainly go to some of them (how could I miss the launch of Arnold Wesker's poetry collection?)The really bad surprise was not the programme, but the web site itself: there is a school of web design which appears to believe that you can't put up a new web site without deleting the old one. Since I'm already in mid-rant, I won't go off on a totally separate rant, I will just repeat to myself that, having walked away from this job, I should walk away. I'm sorry to see the archive we had built up just discarded, and I've e-mailed Durham City Arts to say so - and had a perfectly pleasant reply saying that the present site is just a holding page, and that there will be more information when the designers have the full site up and running. But that was two weeks ago, and meanwhile I have broken links all over my sites where I have linked to material on the LitFest site.
So I've spent much of today transferring the commissioned work onto Cornwell Internet's own web site, which is where you should now go if you want to read Big Frocks (a poem by Valerie Laws with accompanying picture show), Absent Friends by Chaz Brenchley (a hyperfiction by
desperance with added recipes) or Gail-Nina Anderson's sonnet sequence plus, Memory Problems - or download the Festival's very own bookplate, designed for us by superstar Bryan Talbot.
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 11:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 11:39 am (UTC)So do I; although, life being what it is, it clashes with Victor Spinetti and the Customs House, which I also fancy. And with the City of Durham Trust, which
Talking of which, what's the plan for next Saturday?
no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 12:07 pm (UTC)Actually, the plan for Saturday is to take Max and Jacob (for it is Jacob's sixth birthday) to the Sunderland Air Show.
On Sunday, however, the plan is to start barbie-ing around 2.30-ish (come later or earlier, depending on how you feel) and continue until whenever.
And I think the evening, grown-ups, skirt-wearing (me wearing the skirt. You can wear whatever you want) is looking to be the 30th August.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 04:15 pm (UTC)Actually, that'll be fine, especially as the thing I keep thinking of as being on Sunday is actually on Saturday (if at all)...