How do you like your festivals?

Cooked or raw?

In the U.K., summertime is festival time. For a country not famous for its beautiful or predictable weather, this can seem perverse and it frequently is. This year’s Cheese Rolling Festival (basically: chasing a cheese rolling down the hill) was won by a contestant who apparently doesn’t like cheese and is lactose intolerant. But the overarching idea behind festivals is that, whether literary, musical, athletic or aesthetic, their fun should bring people together. And while fun exists in at least as many variations as cheese, music or books, it seems to me that festivals fall loosely into two main categories: cooked or raw.

The distinction came originally from Robert Lowell, talking about poetry. ‘Cooked’ poems were was sophisticated, polished, “marvelously expert and remote…constructed as a sort of mechanical or cat-nip mouse for graduate seminars.” Raw, by contrast, was more likely to be emotional, rough around the edges, posing more questions that presenting conclusions. Cooked festivals are more concerned to bring experts and elites together, to marvel at or contest each others’ achievements. Raw festivals create a common ground where audiences and performers collaborate to produce something neither could make alone. If I have to choose (and I have an allergic reaction to most binary choices) I’d have to plump for raw. Maybe because I’ve just come back from one of my favourites: the ALSO festival.

The first time I went, I had no idea what to expect. I knew only that it was in the Cotswolds and had been dreamt up by Helen Bagnall, Juliet Russell and Diccon Towns who always encouraged me to experiment in their first venture, Salon London. They shared a fearless love for the liveness of live events and were a blast to work with.

I had recently published my book A Bigger Prize, an exhaustive (some said exhausting) attack on the orthodoxy that competition empowers the best to rise to the top. Among other topics, it examined the perverse side effects that flow from managing people with targets and incentives. When it came to the Q&A, two audience members knew more than I did on this topic, dazzling the tent with tragicomic stories of how, as sales assistants, they fought back.

Every month they received a new management plan designed to drive each employee to compete with their peers to see who could achieve the new targets. One month: the winner is the salesperson who gets the largest numbers of shoppers to spend more than £25. Easy: if a customer’s basket totalled say, £23, they were offered a pricy product with enough discount to take the bill over the target. So everyone won—often at an insane cost! Next month, staff were rewarded every time customers bought more than 2 items, a goal easily achieved if the third item was cheap enough. There was, it seemed, no target this creative and united team could not game—and in doing so, they rewrote the management narrative from one of competition to one of defiance and solidarity. Their hilarious accounts of retail rebellion brought to life the management paradox that they more you manage people like Pavlovian dogs, the more they feel compelled to respond like independent cats, asserting their autonomy and agency. This was a deep, fun, funny, and raw response to my work that no Amazon review, and certainly no cold book sales figures, can ever reflect.

A year or two later, I was toying with writing something about narrative fallacy: the phenomenon that leads people to give credence to stories because they so tightly couple cause and effect. A typical example might be an inner-city kid with an overworked single mother, falls prey to gangsters and criminals. In an age dominated by algorithms, behaviourism and genetic soothsaying, narrative fallacy seemed to be everywhere and I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the message of inevitability that such stories perpetuated. They felt lazy in their bogus and stereotyped determinism and attribution errors, and wilfully blind to how large a role randomness and uncertainty play in all human life. Policy debates about predictive sentencing particularly alarmed me. But I wondered: would anyone be open to a counter-argument?

I was due to return to ALSO, so I thought: try it and see. I recounted a true, rather complicated story that defied cause-and-effect logic and, while it left some people puzzled and confused, I sensed more curiosity than rejection. Later that day, a woman approached me to say that my talk had made her reconsider her attitude to her daughter, to see that she had reached too soon for the simplistic narratives I was questioning. She saw that this hadn’t helped her daughter or their relationship, and now she wanted to try something different.

Perhaps more than she realized, she proved my point. I could never have anticipated that she would be in the audience, I knew nothing of her or her daughter’s life—and yet something entirely unpredictable had just occurred between the three of us. As I struggled to take on the accelerating forces of predictability, the exchange gave both of us an enlarged sense of possibility: she for her daughter, and me for the book that became Uncharted.

In her writing about writing, Toni Morrison describes her readers as ‘co-conspirators’. Where the writing and the reader intersect is where the book happens, not so much an exchange as a chemical reaction whereby something new is created. But as authors, we are not present at that moment of creation in a reader’s mind. So while we might have hopes and ambition for the impact of our words, we can never truly know what new thing (if anything) is produced; we aren’t present when it happens. Is this frustrating? Of course. But it’s also thrilling when, at moments of the kind that ALSO curates, it feels like the door has opened and we get to peak inside. This is nothing about praise or criticism, success or failure; it is just curiosity: I wonder what my words got up to in there?

I go to ALSO because I don’t know what will happen, who I’ll meet, what the conversation will be. That uncertainty and surprise is what makes ALSO fun: the sense that everyone’s up for anything. The questions and discussions that emerge always inform my thinking, my sense of what matters or what preys on peoples’ minds. It’s brilliantly and (apparently) casually curated, with no A vs B-lister nonsense, no deep moat between speakers, performers or attendees. And it’s a labour of love, on the part of the whole team who, with the minimum of bureaucracy, create a thoughtful, creative and often hilarious ambience where big ideas can be explored with little fuss.

These are all qualities I appreciate about Substack too. It just doesn’t have a swimming lake or live music.

Yet.

If You Want to Go Deeper

Read Toni Morrison’s collection of essays, speeches and meditations. Published as Mouth Full of Blood in the U.K. and The Source of Self-Regard in the U.S., the collection is full of riches. A particular favourite of mine is her article on Arts Advocacy in which she forcefully challenges the notion that, since artists so frequently do their work under impossible conditions, there is no need to support them. How far, she asks, does any country want to be known for the number of its artists who have fled?

For the Love of It

This month I went to hear the poet Kae Tempest present his latest work: a single one-hour poem delivered solo without props, décor or music. This is, of course, how the earliest poetry was heard and remembered, centuries before it was written down. It felt very pure and so full of wonders that I wanted to read it. Not finding a. text anywhere caused me to wonder whether, in years to come, we will prize most highly those works and events that are not digitized or recorded in any way, living only in our memories of them.

Which took my thoughts straight to Fahrenheit 451 which I have been meaning to re-read for so long now that it is about time I did.