Category Archives: America and the UK

September 9, 2012 · 6:21 pm

OBAMA VS ROMNEY – THE BIG DEBATE?

We don’t subscribe to the idea all Republicans are baddies and all Democrats goodies, or visa versa. Though many people vote out of tradition and instinctive prejudice. But with an election looming and Obama and Romney neck and neck, though perhaps TV debates will be crucial, let’s pause to acknowledge failings, or the likes of Brad Pitt talking of disappointment with Obama, but then pause to remember too.

Remember the enormous sigh of relief when a Bush era seemed to have been left behind, even if McCain was holding the Republican banner by 2009. Bush being a President so spectacularly ignorant that the world winced and hurled shoes. That on his re-election, in dubious circumstances in Florida, Americans put up pictures on the Internet saying “Sorry World.” But one whose presidency not only saw the Iraq War, arguable on both sides but almost puerile in its “Mission Accomplished” and Liberation bringing blandishments, but also saw the massive growth of the Military Industrial complex, in the shape of Homeland Security and The NSA, indeed a doubling, and the very dubious operations of companies like Halliburton, so beloved of Dick Cheney. So American business, while people died, was ensured benefits that never got to Iraqis, and even Eisenhower warned of the danger when the military take control.

Then there was, in that “shock capitalism”, Chicago school of economics philosophy, massive deregulation, especially of energy markets, that led straight to Enron and the biggest corporate fraud in US history. That saw energy traders in California turning off power stations so they could rig prices. They are some of the arguments in the thriller The Godhead Game about the Mayan ‘End of the World’, or hopefully new dawn.

So if you buy into Romney ‘the big business leader model’, the hope for jobs and prosperity, be very aware of what individuals or society might again get at the end of the line, especially with the European economy so fragile. Obama has a great deal to do, but out of the shared scandal of massive lending, complex banking fixes and the selling on of Toxic debt in the housing market, the US treasury has made moves to protect individuals and to stimulate the economy, in ways the UK has not, and Obama believes in social and human protections, if Capitol Hill might lock him into the difficulty of getting there. Capitalism of itself can be ruthless and takes no prisoners, but perhaps Americans have to get over ideas, bedded so deep in the experience of the Second and Cold War, that “socialism” cannot have different forms and inspirations and is just a dirty word, rather an enormously important intellectual tradition, for all the horrors of Communism.

Obama has all the hallmarks of a true leader and statesman too, not least his intellectual capacity, even if his own skillful rhetoric might sometimes get the better of him. Fighting that American tendency to isolationism though, or to put up fearful and threatening walls, especially out of the terrible wound of 9/11, he spoke to Muslims of respect and dignity, not fear, but also tracked down Bin Laden. He turned to Putin to press the vital case too of Nuclear Non-Proliferation. His election also represented a sea change out of atavistic prejudice in America, so close to home in the relatively recent experience of the Civil Right’s movement. He is a figure the World can talk to and do business with and America’s hope, not Romney.

PA PRESS

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September 8, 2012 · 11:21 am

THE EARL OF OXFORD, WILLIAM RAY AND “A LEERING HYDROCEPHALIC IDIOT”

“THY TEST IS EVER HAM!” PA Press

First to apologise to William Ray for having taking so long to get to this and to recommend that readers interested in a Shakespeare authorship question read his article http://www.wjray.net/shakespeare_papers/tabooing-de-vere.htm.

It is not only highly stimulating, and perhaps startling in certain aspects, but in brilliantly quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in Ray noting “Rebellion can be fatal to iconoclasts”, it appeals not only to intrinsic instincts here, but vivid experience too of what happened to an author who dared to shake the publishing system, however shabby, shamed or tortured his spirit became at times, and one filled with a knowledge of and passion for Shakespeare’s visions and search for lasting truth. Some of the arguments we had you can find in the comments under two Phoenix articles, DEREK JACOBI, RICHARD II AND THE EARL OF OXFORD ‘THEORY’ and EDMUND SHAKESPEARE, EDWARD DEVERE, FALSTAFF AND THE HOLLOW CROWN.

Ray’s take offers a moving truth about the real world then, a warning about it and people, and especially their tribal instinct to buy into or reveal vested interests in that world, for whatever reasons. Take Oberon Waugh’s savage “A Handful of Dust” and what happens to truth, and establishment protections of human lies there. That quite stands on its own, but also demands some respect for claims about Devere, and certainly a fascination with the period. But although Emerson, and many authors tasting the possible bitterness of the world, may be right about life or society, as Shakespeare wrote it all over his plays, it still does not prove the case.

Two things struck here. The first is William Ray’s observation, unless someone else wants to refute it, that ‘Twenty years after De Vere died, Richard Brathwaite wrote, “Let me tell you: London never saw writers more gifted than the ones I saw during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. And never were there more delightful plays than the ones performed by youth whose author wrote under a borrowed name.”‘

Then there is, more startlingly, Henry Peacham’s 1612 Minerva Britanna, with a drawing of an arm and hand holding a pen, thrusting out from behind a theatre curtain, with a scroll:”Mente Videbori,” or “By the mind I will be seen,” which also produces the anogram “Tibi Nom De Vere” or “Thy name is Devere.”

But from there the argument descends, in the view on this side of the Atlantic, into something so strained it can only be described as “Shakepeare by Sudoku”. Namely the arguments about Cardan Grilles, or codes to somehow reinterpret Jonson’s dedication to the First Folio, or the inscription below the bust in Stratford.

Firstly, language itself is a kind of code, even game, that all authors and especially Shakespeare are engaged in, as Ray says almost reinventing or I would say inventing a language, to try and recreate or approach truth via fictional work, and find the door to vision and poetry, naturally inspired but not necessarily defined by ‘real’ events. But more important is my understanding that a Cardan Grille was really a template for coding where holes were cut arbitrarily in a piece of paper, and a message written in the spaces, then the paper removed and a message built around the text on the second paper. So that could only be read with the original grille and the unique second paper, where the letter, inscription, poem or whatever now lay. Perhaps I’m wrong. (The assumption being in any functional spy network, for instance, agents would have had to be issued with duplicates of an original template grille, from head office, that changed at various times for safety.)

The alternative, especially for printed, mass produced text, is a “grille” reformatting the order of the printed text, then picking out letters to give your supposed secret message. The one D.L Roper and by extension William Ray has chosen for the bust inscription is seven vertical boxes, by 34 horizontal boxes, attributing some huge significance to the horizontal number, because 34 is 17 x 2, and Devere was the 17th Earl of Oxford. It seems very feeble, and more so because of the strained nature of the message that appears to appear, namely HIM SO TEST, HE I VOW IS E. DE VERE AS HE, SHAKSPEARE: NAME I. B. IB, standing for Ionson, Ben.

But the “Shakespeare” and the “Name” are plucked not from a vertical but horizontal reading of the letters, and actually a significance might stand without them. On the other hand, reading vertically from the same supposed grille I quickly plucked out the sentence “THY TEST IS EVER HAM”! (I added the gratuitous exclamation mark.)

As for the First Folio dedication, that Sir Arthur Geenwood, as if that proves anything, suggested was either code or written not by Ben Jonson, but a “a leering hydrocephalic idiot”, with not much compassion for rabies victims, the idiocy seems repeated in the straining for codes with some 6-2-2 pattern. The text is punning and playful, perhaps not even very good, but it demands no dismissal.

Apart from all that, and it sells books to produce supposed prophecy from a claimed “Bible Code” too, because any long work will do it if you rejumble letters or sentence orders, (thus a clear, intentional and provable pattern must be established first, unless in the Bible case you argue God is speaking directly through the authors), the Oxfordians are again forgetting that if Devere did somehow suffer from the tyranny of his age, or indeed an artist’s desire to protect the well springs of the Self, why could a Stratford Shakespeare not too? Hence answering many questions about not pushing himself forward, and not especially defending his printed work, especially in an age where the printed word and rights in that were being invented. Such an author also finds meaning, pride and power in the success and effects of their living work, and for many reasons finds it harder to stand up and be that “author”. It can be an invasive thing, art or fame, and then was a very dangerous one.

That returns you to a debate that was fully underway in its time, namely that a scruff from the provinces could not have possibly have written such astonishing work. Hence it being perfectly possible that the Devere claim was generated even back in 1612, and with coded “hints” too.

But it’s a fascinating debate, and we’ll leave the “Oxford camp” with a resounding question, that in the many obfuscations, forced links and the Sudoku play of it they always fail to answer. The Earl of Oxford was dead by 1604, so what have they to say of all the other Shakespeare plays? We’d love to hear.

DCD

PA PRESS

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August 10, 2012 · 7:25 am

OLYMPICS, US SOCCER, DAVID BECKHAM AND THE GODHEAD GAME

Our unofficial ‘read of the London Olympics’, The Godhead Game by David Clement-Davies, involves kidnapped athletes, including a US soccer star, from David Beckham’s team at LA Galaxy. So, if America’s amazing success in football during these games is anything to go by, perhaps interest in the sport will bring an interest in reading too! The ancient Mayans, a central theme of the new thriller, had a primitive field game, called Ulama, but this happened to involve human sacrifice. We wonder if athletes would prefer that to 50 Million a year and celebrity status. For a copy Click here

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August 1, 2012 · 12:26 pm

ABRAMS AND TERRORISM

Isn’t interesting that in such dark times, (since the Twin Towers came down, perhaps,) my own editor and now Abrams Vice President, Sarah van More, could not defend a series of children’s books, starting with the novel coming this week, The Terror Time Spies, that were designed to help kids deal with a climate of fear?

The actual value of a story was irrelevant, in their ‘defence’ of editorial power, that wrecked a career and removed a publisher too. I argued, as I had with a partner and ‘so-called’ friend, that a lot of it was about American consciousness these days, projecting fear, but also massive arrogance, and a quality of selfishness and lack of depth too, that some have called Ego Consciousness. ‘Our rights’, but no-one else’s, and engaging the full weight and threat of a system. That projection is understandable in a climate of world terror and conflict, wherever it comes from, but not for a second in a world of children’s and Young Adult books.

Perhaps my anger was actually frightening, at times, but when a publisher is trying to publish a novel with ‘no contact with the author’, actually to mask the legal dispute that had developed, you really are in the realms of Kafka, or just plain tyranny and cruelty. In this case a business tyranny as bad as any other. Tara Break’s projected life fears were enormous, perhaps out of the darkness in her own strange family, and a terror of standing up too. But when a CEO, Mike Jacobson, threatens an author, fighting for their career out of so many personal betrayals, and on their own in London, with ‘issuing attorney’s notices in New York and London’, but also suggests that I had ‘some other motive’, as if I was some terrorist, then something very odd is going on. At one point I joked that that New York madness would involve delivering a literary manuscript in an armoured car!

The abuse of power was later reflected by instructing an entire department not to read a blog, as a publisher denied dialogue on books already there. The whole thing, for a year of trying to work, was because Tara Break would not put away an accusation that was a complete distortion of the events that led up to her changing a number, and the reasons for them. That jaunt through the fields of publishing, writing, true love or friendship cost me everything, and her publisher Howard Reeves his job too, but then she was hand in glove with my editor, Sarah Van More. Who, in her own collapsing life relationships, not only chose to ‘defend’ Tara Break, but invade her own author, breach his trusts to another publisher, Sharyn Novembre at Penguin, and apply no decent or equitable principle, in her scramble for power. The question remains of who the mystery man was, in the mix, who never had the guts to stand up to this supposed bully, and if he actually works at Abrams too.

But the real ‘Terrorism’ was the ferocious and ultimately cynical politics inside Abrams. It was how they both judged and accused without allowing any kind of proper hearing too. How they abused the principles of authorial respect, proper working conditions, emotional safety, freedom of speech, and honest dialogue too, to serve Tara Break’s interests entirely. Why exactly do they publish anything – for the money and their careers alone? In the end I couldn’t take their devil’s pact of silence for success, as they disrespected all their contracts too, so I walked away. Let’s hope, in taking so much poison out, and now publishing one of those three novels too, we can sweep away the awfulness and rebuild.

But if an American CEO can try to lie about the real issues to the US Author’s Guild as well, and promote Sarah Van More over Harold Roves, then under his leadership Abrams are a publisher that cares about nothing, and America will make its world reputation worse and worse. America is a free country, a great democracy, at root, and I once thought Abrams an extremely fine publisher, but If you think it’s an unimportant story because it is ‘only’ about books, or one person’s livelihood, imagine what could happen if innocence or personal freedom were involved? It does happen, in ‘real’ life, and in often frightening America.

DCD

Phoenix Ark Press

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July 28, 2012 · 10:30 am

THE MAD DOG OLYMPIC OPENING!

“Spectacular but inclusive” was Danny Boyle’s hope for his directed opening of the London Olympics, last night, also talking poor little Britain acknowledging it’s real place in the world. Are we fourth, sixth, or last, in the great global rat race? But so Mr Boyle threatened to accept a natural Brit mediocrity too, as gloomy but reliable as the Wimbledon-style weather. So what did we get, out of all that secrecy, as rain threatened play?

Well, if you think we’re nuts at Phoenix Ark Press, welcome to Boyle’s World, because it’s truly balmy! As bucolic farmers and fulsome milk maids wafted about, below a mock-up of Glastonbury Tor, in an Olympian version of the Wombles meets the Hobbit, the rings, my precious, the rings, enter lovely lovie Kenny Branagh, dressed as a mix of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Abraham Lincoln, but quoting the Tempest – “Be not afraid, the isle is full of noises”. We were terrified, not only of the mixing metaphors.

If the Tempest is a tour around Shakespeare’s generative, magical imagination, dark and light, this was a tour de force around Danny Boyle’s rock n’ roll head. With that oddly holy British mysticism, and a beautifully sung-out Jerusalem, the Ents (Tolkien’s talking trees) of our green and pleasant lands, were then uprooted into the dark, satanic mills of industrialism. Before it bowed to a great many talented Britains, put WorldWide Webster Sir Tim Burners Lee at its digital heart, and exploded into export UK, (the Queen was not so much amused, Mr Bond, as just bemused), in a human and pixellated extravaganza.

If the Olympics gave up being apolitical with the Spartans, this also put Danny Boyle’s politics at its absolute heart, blazing the NHS at its centre, with a lovely presence of kids and rocking docs and nurses. But if everything is really political, (psst, don’t tell anyone), then god bless Danny Boyle, snogs and all, because all you do need is love. Perhaps every nation on earth will now race to offer a global vision, and solution. Not only was it inclusive, and so spectacular that it was astonishing, it was warm, witty and in the end as moving as the cross-country torch procession.

Private Eye may have a field day with snatched glimpses of Charles and Camilla having a snigger, as Seb looked embarrassed (God damn those cameras everywhere) or David Beckham looking like a new Gillette ad down the Thames, and in times of austerity the bread and circuses element may have bankrupted us all, (is there such a thing as a triple jerk recession?), but you can forgive it all for the fun, talent, the human world vision and the magnificent Olympic crucible of flame. Lord Coe’s and that French bloke’s speeches was not half bad either.

So enter the glowing beauty of human faces, bodies too, and rainbows of colour, in what it’s about now, the sportsmen and women of the world, inclusively, if they are not shot when they get home. As a roar went up for the US, our heart-strings broke, but two hundred Nations made and were soaking in the warmth of a Games that is already palpable, and if this is London’s third Olympics, it is the first where every country has included a woman athlete. Maybe London and Britain have come home. It’s all those competitors though who will really tell us how well we do it over these two weeks.

Britain may have sunk the good ship Britannia, stupidly, handed London last summer to a gang of nasty yobs, aspiring to ugly gold lame hoodies, and mired itself in awful Press and City scandals, but mad dogs and Englishmen are still alive and well, (actually the most ancient Britains were Welsh – the Braethon). But above all it proved this weird island race is not only one of vision, but a race of genius and lunatic artists, as brilliant as Phoenix Ark Press. It’s after this that we’ll see if anyone can wake up to real inclusivity, get Banks lending, not robbing or fixing, and solve the growing reality gaps. Is the digital revolution truly connecting us though, or turning us into weird fantasists? “And I believe, that something so simple as rock and roll will save us all.” Well, you never know, Danny boy! So over to you, Olympians. Burn athletes, live the dream, for yourselves, for your countries, for the world!

PS just to enjoy a bit of the home advantage and going for Gold too, Phoenix Ark Press have now appointed the sporting thriller The Godhead Game by David Clement-Davies unofficial read of the London Olympics!

It does not quite kidnap David Beckham, but it does send kidnapped sportsmen to play a murderous game in the rainforests, and there will not be any left if we don’t wake up, while it employs the theme of this year’s Mayan ‘end of the world’, to look at the state of Capitalism and the human spirit. The London countdown is over, but the world countdown to December has begun. Available in exclusive if reluctant digitality from Amazon.comClick here

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July 28, 2012 · 10:11 am

MITT ROMNEY’S OLYMPIAN BLUNDER

The sporting thriller, The Godhead Game, predicts that Obama will win the US elections, and other events in this countdown to December 2012, and the Mayan Calendar end. We’ll see, but it’s half the fun of the read. But it can hardly have predicted the remark that will surely stay with Mitt Romney, and if you were adding up bloopers, might even cost him an election. Danny Boyle clearly put black and multi-coloured faces centre stage, at the heart of a globally minded London Olympic opening, a Games for the World, while proudly talking an anglo-saxon heritage too. Perhaps the spirit of Jesse Owens is now Obama’s spiritual running mate.

Since everyone has to do it themselves these weird days, The Godhead Game is now unofficial read of the London Olympics, so go Phoenix Ark Press. To get a copy, before the end of the world, Universe and everything, Click here

Addendum: On the other hand QI pointed out last night that Hitler did not snub Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olymopics, he shook no athletes hands, while FDR did and that the ‘Facist’ salute was not invented by the Nazis, but a mix of ancient Olympians and US School kids! Owens, in racially divided America, received no welcome back at the Whitehouse, and had to enter one reception hotel through the service lifts. There you are, Democrat or Republican, never assume, or live in the easy cliché!

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July 27, 2012 · 1:05 pm

SERGIE LOBANOV-ROSTOVSKY, THE NEW YORK TIMES, MITT ROMNEY, SHAKESPEARE AND THE OLYMPICS

So, the game’s afoot today (quote – Will Shakespeare not Sherlock Holmes), The London Olympics, and not remotely a chance to plug the sporting thriller The Godhead Game, with its kidnapped athletes,Click here. But, as the Torch was held high at the modern Globe in Southwark, a wonderful little article about politics, history and the show of it all, London Struts on The World Stage, appeared in the New York Times by Sergie Lobanov-Rostovsky, Click here, which proves America (not Abrams) has some culture and sense of it all.

This blog has been much caught between London and New York, ‘old’ and ‘new’ worlds, but we make the point in Shakespeare’s Brother, as American academics like James Shapiro, Bloom and Greenblat hold the field and rekindle that interest in Southwark and the time, that perhaps they only need Shakespeare to really interpret it all, especially out of nasty Reformation struggles. Though, if ‘The American Dream’ was, in the founding of the Virginia Lottery, (taken up by all thirteen colonies), after 1612, dreamt up by tempestuous Elizabthans not Arthur Miller, perhaps America, bankers, politicians, the City of London and the entire world are really stuck in the past, 400 hundred years ago. John Harvard came from Southwark too, though we don’t think much of the signature in the Christening record. But Good God, did Mitt Romney really say he could understand the spirit of the Olympics better than Obama because he’s an Anglo-Saxon?! Set Othello’s wrath on him, or, Doh, invite him to the Olympian, Greek foundations of the Games. “Oh brave New World, that hath such people in it!”

But guff to that, for now, and good luck to all those Olympian players and team GB.

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July 27, 2012 · 10:26 am

PHOENIX AND THE MAN FROM OXFORD!

Just a little play on the Stratford-Oxford thing, but we wonder if that other man from Oxford, the man from Manches Law firm, is still on the Abrams’ payroll and following the blog. We say Hi, if he is. For his information, most interest, though we have had a wonderful response to the Shakespeare work, is now firmly directed to the Phoenix-Abrams thing, headlining a blog. So you see, our so called libels are well and truly ‘out there’. Attack, or apologise and compensate, end of story. Then even an apology admits liability, and since all they care about is money and their bits of ‘power’, that’s why a chain of lies or half truths began long ago from Abrams editors, in the business of mangling their own very distressed author, and removing a publisher who tried to do the right thing.

We know life should not be about the law, especially the business of publishing good stories, not even contracts, but it would take Homer Simpsons on acid not to understand why those relationships went wrong, and where it really started, in the Hew, Screw and Glue care and respect for nothing. As for the dreaming spires, no doubt what our Manches friend loves is the payroll, quite understandably for a jobbing lawyer, and we do commend his love of The Flaming Lips, like dear old Tara Break, or bad old DCD. Although none of that had to happen and could have stopped so easily, nothing is inevitable, each one of us is extraordinary, if we try, and we also remind him what Mercutio said of fingers and lawyers who “straightway dream on fees.” Oh, now I see Queen Mab hath been with you…

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July 26, 2012 · 4:53 pm

MIKE JACOBSON, EVIL AND ABRAMS CORRUPTION

I’ll have to leave it there, I’m boring readers and I could never afford to sue Abrams. Let it stand with previous blogs, linked above, and this, some line in the sand!

The situation now: An ex and senior editor betrays every trust you can, then calls me mad, deluded and evil. It is known about by my own editor, yet nothing is done and damaging and impossible work conditions are imposed. That is done to threaten, under contract, to keep the secret from a CEO, while privacies here are breached all over the shop, including to another of my pubishers at Penguin US. While it is claimed there is ‘no issue there,’ my own editor of ten years, at Dutton and Abrams, makes a back room call to my agent that must have been so serious it loses me that agent. A bogus ‘enquiry’ ensues, that I force because I can’t go on, repudiation is admitted, but nothing effectively done to put the situation away, thanks to Tara Break and Sarah Van More, also in cahoots for nearly a year before, personally and professionally, itself horribly invasive. They saw the pyshologicial strain and harm from that ‘mobbing’, for months too, but three novels under contract are effectively thrown away, with the damage to two novels already there. The story in between is astounding. Tara Break asked me on the phone, months before I lost it if she was evil, when I told her what her bizarre behaviour had already put a visiting author through, and I said “of course not.” In the long run, I’m not so sure, though it is avoiding labels like that my stories are about.

Then a Publisher and far better spirit than the rest, Howard Reeves, loses his job, my editor Sarah Van More gets to the top, but a CEO, Mike Jacobson, stands over it all with no apology and no compensation. Actions over criminal libel are threatened to ‘protect careers’ there, yet they back down there too. So, they accept what I have said is not libel, and to publish to even two other people could constitute that, yet still do nothing. Have you ever come across a real publishing story that is the very definition of the corrupt abuse of power? Considering Tara Break’s history and behaviour throughout, where is the real evil and do normally sane or responisible editors usually get away with that? It is best encapsualted in Tara Break’s grand personal and work philosophy ‘life is unfair’, but each one engaged in professional negligence too. I repeat, under two contracts, I was the author at a once fine company that abused every duty of care you can. For my bads I know this, as editor, associate editor, vice president or president, just as a human being, not for one god damn moment would I have treated my worst enemy like that, let alone someone I had claimed to love, been a friend of, or an award winning contracted author, trying to tell stories that might help or inspire. Money and power alone defined it, because Sarah Van More had such success with books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Mike Jacobson had a negative agenda with Harold Rove.

Is Mike Jacobson actually serious about being the CEO of a prominent New York publishing house though, even if the key is probably the super ambition and arrogance of Susan Van Metre?

I lost, practically everything you can, and you need to learn how to lose, with the grace that vanished, perhaps, but never say it does not matter.

DCD

Phoenix Ark Press

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July 24, 2012 · 5:19 pm

DISPATCHES, BANKING SCANDALS, ABRAMS AND THE GODHEAD GAME

John Snow’s report on banking corruption on Dispatches last night made chilling viewing. It underpins ideas in the thriller The Godhead Game that World Markets have become a super casino, especially since the financial ‘Big Bang’, where players get in and out quick, and the business of banking has become much about whoever can get their snout in the trough. 75% of those polled said they do not trust banks. Well, if that ‘culture’ actually has the capacity to implicate everyone, in a world out of step, then a story about the Mayan ‘end of the world’ this year, and part satire, also proposes a way that World Markets themselves might be beaten! To get a copy Click here

As we have said before though, what happened with the publisher Abrams in 2008 was not unrelated to various kinds of collapse, while there were extraordinary synchronicities in other ways. When David Clement-Davies talked to editor Tara Break about interconnections though, after personal and professional betrayal, her Hew, Screw and Glue put at the heart of a firm, and the mounting financial crisis too, her only comment, or awareness of a world beyond herself and her ‘rights’, was “I don’t have any shares.” No shares in anything it seems though, including Publisher’s and author’s work and careers – exes, friends or otherwise. But when unwanted whistleblowers appear in the banking sector, at least they can fight back and are compensated.

Harold Rove’s removal as Publisher and Vice President at Abrams, although he most certainly tried to do the right thing, is proof of the scandal there, that coalesced around the ambition and long alliance of Tara Break and Sarah Van More. Yet David Clement-Davies has received neither apology, nor compensation for such enormous harm. Not only is he owed a great deal, with five novels so damaged, so much time and work abused,but when truth dies at a major US publishing firm, creating conditions of arguable criminal conspiracy, then the rot has gone everywhere.

Abrams publish hugely successful books like The Diary of A Whimpy Kid series, but perhaps it follows that the only real principle they supported was the power and rights of their editors over their own contracted authors,and the value not of the meanings inside their books and stories, but of sales and clinking cash tills. It was ultimately overseen by a man with his own agenda too, Mike Jacobson, and as suggested in a recent blog, by extension one of the heads of an entire publishing family, Herve de la Martiniere. From the actions of Macmillan UK and Penguin US too over eBook rights, meanwhile Sarah Van More breaching essential privacies to Sharyn Novembre at Penguin US, but mouthing on so arrogantly and hypocritically about silence, from an author who could not walk away, David has also seen how some big publishers treat authors as pure commodity, unless they are big enough to set an agenda, and ride roughshod over their rights and, crucially in this case, vital healthy working conditions. In such a world, the visions in valuable stories die too, and real free speech with it. No artist under contract and trying to write meaningful literature, can be expected to function under dishonest, threatening and harmful conditions, or, to quote a rather extreme analogy, used by the Nobel playwright Joshua Sobel, “no theatre in a graveyard!”

DCD

Phoenix Ark Press

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