pcn conference 2013: graeme archer's slides

Graeme Archer

Professional Copywriters’ Network

Smithfield

Friday 11 October 2013

I am a camera

I am not a camera

I am not a writer

What I hate about writing

Now there can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea. That is why I have always been so proud to be called highbrow

These lowbrows are waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for hours, to get into the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres in order to see what their lives look like.

You don’t need a room

Landscape

Glasgow 5 March 1971

With a ragged diamond

of shattered plate-glass

a young man and his girl

are falling backwards into a shop-window.

The young man's face

is bristling with fragments of glass

and the girl's leg has caught

on the broken window

and spurts arterial blood

over her wet-look white coat.

Their arms are starfished out

braced for impact,

their faces show surprise, shock,

and the beginning of pain.

The two youths who have pushed them

are about to complete the operation

reaching into the window

to loot what they can smartly.

Their faces show no expression.

It is a sharp clear night

in Sauchiehall Street.

In the background two drivers

keep their eyes on the road.

Edwin Morgan

http://edwinmorgan.scottishpoet

rylibrary.org.uk/poems/glasgow

_5_march_1971.html

With the power and breadth of curiosity which is one of

the clearest signs of their genius, both [Henry] James

and Jane Austen feel their way into radically different

kinds of consciousness, the good as well as the clever,

the simple and instinctive as well as the vital and

knowledgeable.

John Bayley, The Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality (London: Constable, 1960), pp. 214-

215.

Click. I’m on a bus to Labour’s conference hall in Brighton.

Click. In the hall Ed Miliband will prance and pout, flanked by

two huge video-versions of him. Click. On the bus a sad neatly

dressed lady in her fifties is telling a bearded, T-shirted fellow

with a belly that her hoped-for romance is not going well, “he

has my number but he hasn’t texted”, and that the supermarket

called her in early for extra till-duty — “and I had to bolt down

my breakfast because I like to be reliable” — and then had no

work for her after all

Matthew Parris, The Times. 9 October 2013

Exhibit One: The Hipster Loses His Girl

I see his heavy eyelids flutter (in the words of the song). He’s

desperate to impress the girl sat across from him, so nervous to create

the right cool-as-fuck impression that his fingers are fumbling over the

pathetic roll-up he’s trying to make. Shreds of tobacco float away on

the warm summer air.

- So like there’s no way I’d vote Tory man? The sense he intended was

“I wouldn’t vote Tory, man” but his meaning is still clear.

- No, no way man, she agrees with him, but absentmindedly, flicking

her long hair about and looking across the road to the park. She’s very,

very bored. Then she goes:

- Oh look, there’s Gary! and her face is transformed, lit up.

Me ConservativeHome, 28 May 2010

You need landscape and eyes and permission

Text

As true of writing as it is of any other endeavour