Dear Reader

Dear Reader,

with respect, you are a ridiculous lot, because we now have physical evidence, an ‘experiential model’, that the ‘hits’ at Phoenix Ark Press, hit me up baby, only really go up exponentially when we start blogging about difficult, painful, or even scandalous issues. Which just goes to show that the rat like journalist trying to justify the appalling mongering on the dying News of the World , or perhaps just morphing into online forms, was right when he suggested that’s what the public really want to read about. Or perhaps it’s nobler than that, and in the maelstrom of scorn and noise, the sound and the fury, you want to hear something that is actually deeply felt and true. A hunger for depth among the superficiality? Whoever you are by the way, from the psycho, which is a bad idea, to the seriously literate, which is also a bad idea, we have no idea, because that is the on-line world, or just the world. Please try to be seriously literate, not that we have anything at all against anyone who was not taught to read. We have read a book called Language and Silence, and we are not making any money at all!

So, since the founder is probably senile and can’t remember who quite said what, but somebody once said you should always use all your experience in your art, perhaps we should start being more and more scandalous, or try and touch the on-line glories of Mrs Huffington Puffington, who sold her blog to something like Forbes Magazine for lots and lots of money. But then she had a lot of ‘associates’. Ah, the corrupted heart. Or perhaps, with serious work we should just plough on, with some integrity, and try and talk and create. A friend suggested today, with all the glorious eagerness of the new idea, though Becket said ‘dawn broke on the nothing new’, that we start doing an online novel, as it is written, when we have been doing that all along, with Dragon in The Post. But since we reiterate we are actually not making any money, and that is your fault (!), apart from being ours, it would be nice to have some feed back, good or bad, on the quality of story. Funnily enough, it is very nice to know that there is some connection, because that’s what any writer feels, with triumph or humility, when they have an audience, actually the reader as a friend, as Jonathan Franzen said, powerful enough to send a shiver through his publisher, when they were crap! Though the dream of something happening on a world scale is probably just an absurd one. Storytelling and literature are not about some great world revelation, just the measure of a journey to maturity, if it has any real meaning or value. What is it we want to happen on a world scale? Anthony Newly (you are too young, even if you are too old, and can’t remember), mad and ugly as he was, starred in the musical ‘Stop the World, I want to get off’. Maybe it really is just a silly cry from the heart and soul to understand and confirm, but there are worse things. Not much, but there are.

Yours with affection, and sincerely,

Phoenix Ark Press