Soon after No Logo was released a decade ago, it had an immediate and resounding impact. Klein was inundated with calls from corporations seeking to revamp their tired brands and get the upper hand on their detractors; at the same time a whole new generation of activists was suddenly brought into action. Now, ten years later, Fourth Estate has published an anniversary edition; but what made the book into such an iconic and seminal signpost in the anti-globalisation debate?
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Here at FifthEstate we don’t go in for self promotion too often, but we couldn’t help but notice that out of the 100 books the Telegraph proclaimed as the defining books of the Noughties (I considered an alternative title of this post ‘Noughties but Nice’ but couldn’t bring myself to inflict that on you) Press Books, the imprint from within which this blog is run, has a total of ten titles on the list. These are:
(92) Bad Blood by Lorna Sage
(89) Appetite by Nigel Slater
(86) Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters
(84) Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
(70) Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
Do bring sunglasses and wellies
On Saturday afternoon, the garden of deckchairs was full of Guardian-reading festival-goers, licking icecreams, drinking fizz and shading their eyes from the sun. But the wind whipping through the colourful flags around the site was a warning…on the midnight news on Radio 4 the announcer forecast 60mm of rain…So, on Sunday, instead of shading themselves from the sun, said festival-goers were sheltering from the rain. The fire brigade were pumping the entrance, Ariane Koek was watching the waters rise towards her stage, and it was the welly shops, not the bookshops, that were seeing the most trade.
Do book tickets…and accommodation…early
The big names, Jimmy Carter, Christopher Hitchens, Cherie Blair, Naomi Klein were sold out as were the big addresses. The Swan Hotel is full for the next four years, and even the stars can’t get a room: when Andrew Davies decided he wanted to stay for another night there, he couldn’t keep his room so the hotel receptionist had to give up her newly-bought and flatpack-full flat for him…and friends from London were eagerly anticipating their £750 per week ‘cottage’ to be sweet and beautiful. Instead, it was a starter home on a rather drab estate, with no volume on the smaller-than-a-publishing-handbag tv, no shower, and no charm. And they booked in August…
Do be pleasantly surprised by the stoicism and sanitation
Even when the water is lapping at the audience’s feet, the tents are leaking and the audience is steaming under plastic macs supplied free with the Observer, the events are still full. There is no such thing as bad weather at Hay, only bad clothing. I don’t own wellies, since they’re not often needed in North London but I’m tempted to buy some. Mid-morning on Sunday I decide to head back to my accommodation to put on some more clothes, since I’m freezing, but though my body is now warmer, my legs, after the 20-minute walk in each direction, are not.
And, unlike those at so many festivals, the Hay loos are positively otherworldly: Portakabins decorated with fake flowers, wood-framed mirrors and wooden toilet seats, barely a queue and plenty of loo roll and hot water. I think they’re the warmest and driest places on site, probably because they’re the only ones not under tarpaulin.
Don’t expect the town, even after 21 years of this, to be as organised as the festival…
On Saturday night, probably one of the two busiest nights of the year for this town of 1900 residents, the fish and chip shop runs out of fish. They’ve sold 400, as opposed to their usual maximum of 250. Apparently they don’t like to defrost too much, in case it doesn’t sell…They have everything else though, including battered Mars Bars which don’t tempt anyone, not even my Scottish friends. At 9am on Sunday, two of the three cafes in town aren’t open for breakfast so everyone crams into the one that is. And later that day, The Swan Hotel, which is the nearest hostelry to the festival site, with a lounge full of dripping and cold customers, is not serving hot drinks. This could just about be excused on the basis that the staff are focusing on lunch service but, after dinner eight hours later, the request for some coffee sends the waiter into a near-paroxysm….’it’s pretty bad back there’ he says, referring to the kitchen. Perhaps after-dinner coffee in a restaurant is, like fish in a fish and fish shop, just too much to ask…
Do expect to be exhilarated…
I saw two events on Saturday, and six on Sunday. The best, and I say this sans bias, despite the fact that both of them include HarperCollins authors, were Ffion Hague and The State of the Union debate (Matt Frei, Jonathan Freedland, Jacob Weisberg). Ffion is obviously Welsh, speaking in Wales about a Welsh (tho, ahem, born in Manchester) Prime Minister and so, technically, she’s amongst friends which makes it easy to work the audience. But, like her husband, she has a great sense of comic timing, she speaks for exactly the right amount of time and with warmth as well as knowledge. By the end of the talk, I’ve learnt something yet I don’t feel patronised (neither of which could be said of the Rushdie lecture). And all this in a tent whipped by so much wind that it sounds like Cyclone Nargis is about to take off the roof.
However, her success seems to have a strange effect on some of her audience: one woman overheard on the way out said ‘oh she was very good wasn’t she’ to which her friend replied ‘yes, he would have made such a good Prime Minister’. It doesn’t matter that Ffion has just delivered a brilliant lecture: her success merely reflects on her husband. Political women, like those in Lloyd George’s life are, it seems, still only mere appendages to their men; hence Cherie Blair is grilled in the press over her book and her loud-mouthness (keep quiet, it’s more seemly) and, as Matt Frei points out later in the day, Hillary Clinton is suffering from the same relationship – both benefitting and losing through her marriage. Some things never change.
…and exhausted
The organisers leave 30 minutes in between slots which, on such a small site, seems like quite a lot. But since it takes a good five minutes to get out, another five minutes to shuffle to the coffee stall for a shot of heat, fifteen minutes to queue for said hot drink and another five minutes to shuffle back to the next event (the distances are short, but the congestion is worthy of the Northern Line on a Monday morning), a hot drink starts to seem more attractive than heated discussion. On Saturday, in the sunshine, a few hours between events (from Ffion to World-Class Fiction) was too long (if you’re here, then it seems pointless not to see something all the time) but, on Sunday, in the rain, back-to-back events seemed too much. However, without sunshine, there are very few places to sit and keep dry on site: in one cafe a staff member told me that many festival-goers were coming in, sheltering from the rain and not ordering: one woman was incensed by the request to move, until the staff called security and she ran, which can’t have been easy in wellies… I wish I’d seen that.
Do expect to be both impressed and irritated by the organization
It’s a Herculean feat to bring so many people to such a small place without many complaints. The shuttle bus runs well, the box office staff are cheery and the stewards manage to shepherd hundreds of people in and out of tents, in all weathers, without incident. However, the logistical brilliance is sometimes overshadowed by the ineptitude of the literary types. Some of the chairs are hopeless, not realizing that the audience wants to ask questions and using up the whole hour on their own, not always interesting, comments. Ariane Koek, not wearing her glasses, at the Jhumpa Lahiri and Emily Perkins event, asked for questions then, putting her glasses on and looking at the clock, said ‘Oh, actually, we’ve overrun and I couldn’t see the time. So, if you’d like to thank…’ The audience, or at least this member of it, was not amused.
Do, if you’re in publishing, be reassured that there ARE still readers.
Over 70,000 people are expected to make the journey to Hay for the festival. Yes some will be drawn just by the location and the big names (John Irving, Kathleen Turner, Louise Rennison) but there aren’t many other places where short story writers can pull a crowd as big as political biographers. And, no, they’re not all grey-haired and sitting on shooting sticks. There are teenagers at every event, as well as pensioners, and though Michael McIntyre declared at his event that Hay’s colour was khaki, I think it is, thankfully, kaleidoscopic.
Don’t expect all the treats to be literary.
I was thrilled to discover that I was spending the days in Wales, but the nights across the border in England, delighted to hear a Sevillean flamenco band (Son de la Frontera) who were the only people on Sunday to break out into a sweat and thoroughly enjoyed eavesdropping: ‘There aren’t many pubs in this town are there? Lots of bookshops, but not enough pubs’ said one young woman walking through the town, which is rightly famous for its bookshops. It’s a bit like going to Lourdes and wondering why there are lots of statues of the Virgin Mary…
