There is a little bird sitting in the office who keeps looking at us with a raised eyebrow, wondering what exactly we are feeding it. If thoughts that the Phoenix Bird might have expired of late due to emotional exhaustion have been much overplayed, like reports of our death, it is of course obvious that you simply cannot kill a Phoenix. But what to feed this creature of power and delight, so that it grows into a creature of truly mythical plummage and protects writers who care about the art? Of course, new stories, so Phoenix Ark Press are delighted to announce that SCREAM OF THE WHITE BEAR will be published both as an Ebook and in paperback this Summer, August, 1st 2012.
Category Archives: America and the UK
DOG FIGHT
Mathew Wright’s report on dog fighting in London, and the soaring numbers of abandoned dogs too, was shocking. If Britain was once famous for kindness to pets, it has vanished, if London is the example. A US professor wrote to us when the riots started asking ‘what’s going on with your people?’ and if we are animals too, this shows something dark is up. It was tragic to to see pitbulls, trained for fighting, mutilated and having to be put down. Young boys and men using them as fighting accessories may be the real sign of fear on the streets, but it’s also a sign of a dislocation with ourselves, that such brutality is bred in, and fear and aggression supports itself.
It needs action and even tough love, as is suggested by a sign in Battersea Dogs Home – You can tell the heart of a man from his treatment of animals’.It happened in Chicago too, that became the savage dog fighting capital of America, but the lesson from there, in the programme they instituted, is as ever, get tough, encourage zero tolerance, but also turn the poachers gamekeepers. So a guy famous for seeing the deaths of thousands of fighting dogs , is being paid to institute a programme of training and involvement. The dignity then shown to animals gives young men dignity, and greater knowledge and understanding. But they have to take the lead from the ‘tough guys’.
Filed under America and the UK, Community, Environment
WINSLOW HOMER, FAKE OR FORTUNE AND DEADLOCK
Phoenix Ark Press have it straight from the horse’s mouth that the situation over the Winslow Homer painting featured in Fake or Fotune is still in deadlock. Remember the art, please, and the spirit of artists!
Filed under America and the UK, Culture
LOUIS THEROUX AND TRIP ADVISOR!
There could be no greater dis-recommendation for Democracy, and this Internet place, than the documentary about all the little critics on Trip Advisor. Perhaps being bullied at school brings out those gloopy figures, fighting back late in life, so we should teach our kids to fight harder, and earlier on. Perhaps the Internet glories in all the awful voices, but Bukowski was right, ‘there’s enough hate in the average man to destroy you’. William Hague has just advised, at this London Cyber Conference, on the world threat of Internet attacks, but he forgot the enemies within. It’s not that the small hotel review service does not have some useful function, it is the glee with which some self-appointed, self-aggrandizing critics seem to go about it all, and with very little right of come back. At least when it used to be about professional Newspaper Reviews, those little establishments mostly got ignored, or if you wanted to play in a big kitchen, you had no right not to expect the heat. Now anything can be splashed over the net and stay there, written often before the semi-detached flick knifers have even left, while people seem to expect the Ritz at the price of a Camper van. With it goes all that little England indignation about rights and freedoms and the rest. Sure, but go and do something more inspiring with existence.
We think most of the critics should be fed to the ‘exotic’ animals on Louis Theroux’s journey into the half wilds of middle America. It is a pity the documentary could not have added some note about The Muskingham County Farm tragedy, last week, because that lay at the other end of the explosion of private owners – majestic, meant-to-be-wild animals, lying dead in the American mud. Theroux’s big-girl’s-blouse whimsy though got a little irritating, because for a programme like that you need someone who really loves or understands animals, to roll up their sleeves, get in the cages and see if it is all right or wrong. Theroux does not like them at all. Of course, the animal Theroux really studies is the Human one and a weirder bunch of primates you could not have encountered this side of Regent’s Park. Not that that put us necessarily on the side of the critics snarling at animal cruelty either, because at least some of those eccentrics do glory in animals. What they mostly do not like is people, and if they’ve been watching the Trip Advisor show, how could you blame them?
Filed under America and the UK, Culture, Environment
ANONYMOUS, EDUCATION AND THE PLAYER’S BLOG!
We haven’t seen Anonymous yet, the ‘Shakespeare was a fraud’ Roland Emmerich movie. But it was very interesting speaking to James Shapiro recently, the American Shakespeare academic. He appeared on stage with Emmerich in New york to argue the merits of the almost completely discredited Edward Devere theory, that emerged in the twenties, about Shakespeare really being the Earl of Oxford. Perhaps the strongest argument was that Devere was called ‘The Spear Shaker’ at court but, as Shapiro and many others say, no serious academic credits the Devere theory at all, the man was named as a writer during his lifetime and his work does not scratch the Bard.
It is interesting how the ‘lovie’ establishment has divided, with such a brilliant cast in Emmeric’s movie, including Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi. On the other side, the old fashioned Shakespeare and Stratford side, apparently come the likes of Ian Mckellan and Simon Russell Beale. It seems odd that the likes of Rylance, admitting the plays sometimes had joint authorship, should not believe such a man could have been a ‘common man’. Indeed, it seems rather crucial to contemporary arguments about Free Schools in Britain, like Toby Young’s. We think genius can come from anywhere, and Stratford’s free school was probably a very good one, not to mention the fact the Ardens were of a fairly grand Catholic lineage. Not only that, but Shakespeare emerged precisely at a time when the Players were being patronised by and mingled directly at Court. It is a vital part of Shakespeare’s story, as is the linguistic explosion, in an age that saw writers process to the grave of Edmund Spencer to throw in their quills, while the Players were the newspapers of their time, or perhaps bloggers is better! Nowadays we lionize film-makers not writers, and at that, in this case and in the name of the lad from Stratford, we shake our spears crudely!
Shapiro’s argument, and it seems American Academics care more than we seem to in the UK, is very much about education. He is indignant that Anonymous is being taught as ‘truth’ in US Schools, complete with study aids. We share that indignation, and one also about the likely truth of history, and the presentation of Queen Elizabeth as being DeVere’s incestuous mother. ‘It’s only a movie’ countered Emmeric in that debate, but when you are dealing with possible history and Shakespeare it isn’t good enough. You have to apply some discipline of fact and possibility. First there is that schooling and background debate, Shapiro worries is treated with the laxity of the Creationism argument in American schools, fact versus faith, secondly there is historical accuracy, thirdly a mind like Shakespeare’s. One, working on a novel here, we think breathes the world of Stratford, the forest of Arden in As You Like It, as it does London and the opening world, including the New World. Above all though, the plays are completely forged in the crucible of the working, living theatre, it is their prevailing metaphor, not written by some nob from the wings. Perhaps it picks up a point in a book called The Closing of The American Mind, which suggested everyone nowadays picks up Socrate’s saw that he ‘knew nothing’, but at High School and Grad level, rather than a lifetime’s struggle for insight and knowledge. Then only the Scriptwriter and the money source for Anonymous is American.
You MUST go an see Anonymous, some critics cry, loving the famous Emmerich production values, and calling to the fact the Bard plays with history and truth all the time. Well yes, but the contempt for the players themselves, and their kind of heroism, seems hugely off-putting, especially in the excerpts, making Shakespeare so revolting that they distort any possible argument against Devere. You want him to ‘win’. Of course Shakespeare played with historical truth for his own theatrical purposes, his own extraordinary but changing visions, but then to so play fast and loose with a real man, above all a mind, and an extraordinary theatrical and cultural moment too, seems just not good enough. It is a work, whether it wins an audience here or not, for our age of Anxiety and Conspiracy, though Emmerich is certainly an interesting man and film-maker. The last thing it is is true, or even historical, unless you like the values of Titus Andronicus, perhaps, when the Bard was trying to put bums on seats, with his stories ‘baked in a pie’. Though Shapiro suggests the Emmerich camp are fantatic believers in their ’cause’. The problem, as Shapiro points out, is that twenty years ago it would have been laughed out of ‘court’, and now perhaps no-one cares at all. What is more likely though, in our age of democratised images, Conspiracies and huge anxiety, where fantasy and fact have become so confused, partly because of the camera and movies, to fuel all that, than the sloppiness of thought and research that means the ones who dominate our culture cannot be trusted with a true genius at all? It is important where that genius came from, how it grew and what it represents for an age. On the other hand, perhaps we’ll go and see it, even if controversy is what sells, and one merit is the interest in Shakespeare! In the meantime, wondering about the conspiracy of how and why films get made, we will by-line this blog Yours Anonymous.
Filed under America and the UK, Culture, Education
NOTES ON THE CIA AND OTHERS
We still think there is a fascinating book to be written on Allen Dulles in Switzerland and his involvement with a close group in Berne, including an American heiress and a Swiss Banker, as well as ALIU, the Art Looting Investigation Unit set up after the war. If you can ever get to a truth in the smoke and mirror world of spies, part of the story we believe is concealed in documents still classified under the Safehaven Papers. We did not find any smoking gun, indeed Dulles’s involvement is rather thrilling, but there is certainly a story to be told. It has been touched on in the academic collection of documents On Hitler’s Doorstep. But our story involves the diaries of Count Ciano, smuggled into Italy by his wife and Mussolini’s favourite daughter, Edda, British and American agents working together, Drew Heinz, the hugely rich American heiress and figures like Colditz escapee Pat Reid and the painter Balthus. It also involves a story that caused a spat on the Internet about how downed American airmen were treated at camps like Wilmeroose.
It was fascinating though how uninterested literary agents have been, and especially in America. Apparently they will not touch books on the CIA, though of course then it was still the OSS, unless handled by well known academics. Rather a waste of important historical documents too, like a letter by Mussolini’s daughter on Hitler’s attitude to women and of a very dramatic story in Switzerland. Sniffing into it at the National Archives in the UK we found reference to a wireless set installed at the British Legation in Berne, just as we have a record of Drew Heinz’s one time husband Dale Maher calling himself ‘Master of the Five by Five’, the best Nato radio signal possible, but requests for access to documents have simply been ignored. As official MI5 Historian Christopher Andrew once said, one of the richest sources of intelligence history is in neutral territories like Switzerland, for obvious reasons, namely they became critical vantage points.
Filed under America and the UK, Education
DERREN BROWN AND ROBERT KENNEDY
The Channel 4 programme tonight, courtesy of that supreme hypnotist Derren Brown, in his new series ‘The Experiments’, was both extraordinary and terrifying. He hypnotised an ‘ordinary’ member of the public, which clearly means one most susceptible, to assassinate Stephen Fry on stage. Of course the bullets were fake, but the controlled ‘assassin’ believed everything was real, and was also immediately programmed to completely forget. He went into Marksman Mode, on hidden camera, which had also remarkably increased his capacity on a firing range, and then into Amnesia Mode, and went through with it right to the end, with Stephen Fry’s public collapse, complete with fake blood capsules.
But the point of the show, beyond the raw entertainment, was Robert Kennedy’s assassination in the Kitchens of the Ambassador Hotel on June 5th 1968. The assassin Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant, claimed, a claim still maintained in prison, that he did not and does not remember a thing, and for weeks before too, except the famous woman in the Polka dot dress. Polka dots where also used as a trigger by Derren Brown to bring on his subject’s hypnotic trance. So pointing to mind control programmes, to train and operate assassins, including those like MK Ultra, which were operated by the CIA.
Derren Brown’s mastery is to open up the whole truth to the public, probably as extraordinary about the human mind as any illusionism, but this programme must surely lead to a reinvestigation of the Sirhan Sirhan case. There was the theatrical element in Brown’s experiment, one of familiarity too, namely that it was still done in a theatre, where Stephen Fry was talking, and that the subject also believed he was participating in one of Derren’s TV shows, in a different capacity. But it was hugely convincing and very chilling indeed. Can Brown re-hypnotise such a person as Sirhan Sirhan – refused parole repeatedly, partly on the grounds of not showing enough remorse, let alone recall – to remember more of those tragic events, if that is what happened? Though if it was mind control, as now has been proved is entirely possible, the sinister truth has probably been long hidden in the files of secret controllers, who ever they might have been.
Phoenix Ark Press has published an article on Allen Dulles, WWII hero in Switzerland, much loved internally and lionized CIA Director, lawyer at Cromwell and Sullivan, and someone who during the Cold War became involved in assassination programmes. The CIA developed out of the OSS and Roosevelt’s proscription they should use any means, including Black Ops, to fight the Nazis and a World War, at every level. Dulles became supremely adept at it in Switzerland, the model for the character in the film The Good Shepherd, but it was of course Bobby’s brother, JFK, who famously said of the CIA that he wanted to ‘scatter the organisation to the four winds’. Dulles was also involved in programmes like Operation Mockingbird, to influence the American Media against his and the West’s post war obsession, Communists.
Filed under America and the UK, Education, Science
RIOTS, WATERSTONES AND A BONEFIRE OF THE VANITIES
An American academic friend wrote today to ask me ‘so David, what’s up with your people?!‘ Good question. It seems to be one of the favourite moments in the movie Indianna Jones and The Last Crusade though, certainly mine, when Indy bumps into Hitler at the Berlin books burning and the Furher signs his diary. Someone pointed out that the sequence is set in 1938, and the book burnings really happened in 1933, but we already know that fantasy plays with fact, and Spielburg always does that brilliantly. Before the US or anyone starts to gloat about London though, I was, before my recent attempt to leave behind a bad ‘past’, going to use it to create a viral video and attack not what is happening in London, but my American publisher Abrams, for their own attitude to my books, and to free speech too. Because when a publisher does that to its own author and work, in a kind of bonefire of the vanities and values, something is seriously wrong.
But now London has been burning, a point came up on Newsnight yesterday from a ‘Free School‘ proponent about the search for ‘bling‘, quick cash and the fact that you have not seen looters attacking Waterstones, only the trainers stores, mobile phone shops and bookies nearby (as in the gamboling shops, not the printers or binders!). Of course, it makes the very good point that there is no deeper social statement being made, it is a mix of frustration, aggression and directed criminality, but it’s also a very middle class thing to say. It would be almost reassuring to see our angry youth trying to break into Waterstones, to get their hands on bundles of The Master and Margerita, The End of the Affair, War and Peace or Brazzaville Beach and flog them down the Old Kent road, or read them to each other by bonefire light. The bigger point, of course, is the frightening figures suggesting 17% of 15 year olds are functionally illiterate, fed by the addictions of the image, MTV values (coming out of America too) and all the hypocrisies that Big Brother, Celebrity and fame obsessed culture engenders. In the modern crisis of publishing too though, in the spawning of celebrity biogs, ‘ how I made it rich’ tales and the decline of writer’s voices in the democratisation of publishing methods, there are subtler ways of producing real book burnings at work. But people need to be literate in a great many ways. Reading literate, emotionally literate, professionally literate, legally literate and especially socially literate. Something like one in three London parents also say they are not confident enough to read aloud to their children, and that storytelling process is a key part of bonding, mentoring and sharing values.
Apart from the policing questions though, and political grand standing, apart from economic and moral arguments, especially about family and community structures and responsible mentoring, in the ‘am I my brother’s keeper?’ mould, there needs to be a very real debate about culture too and what, if anything, it means nowadays. About the decline of communities, the dislocations of social networking and perhaps, above all, about the shift from a reading culture, to a visual and news driven one, twenty-four hours a day, that is itself massively addictive. The eye finds it hard to resist a moving object. Not only are markets connected world-wide though, but so is a Western world ‘culture’, and to be frank, especially with my own New York publishing experience, there are many bad things to say about that too. I remember very well being in New York though when there were minor riots, because of a limit on the number of Playstations available, so perhaps no-one is immune. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all sit down together and read a good book! In the pro-free speech and anti-book burning argument though, it is the paradox of freedom that we probably need less forms of entertainment and product, not more, just more of a sense of some shared culture and one that brings both value and meaning.
The photo shows the Wikepedia photo by David Shankbone of books burned by the Nazis, at the Yad Vashem memorial.
Filed under America and the UK, Books, Community, Culture, Education
AN AMERICAN SENSE OF HISTORY?
I’m a bit worried that anything I say about the US might be tinged with events in New York three years ago! However, looking into the subject of ‘Spatial Humanities’ recently and a NY Times article on Gettysburg, The Salem Witch Hunts and the modelling of events, temporally and spatially, does remind me of the tours I did in American schools. It worried me that in many schools there History is not taught on its own, but as a ‘Social Science’.
It rather begs the question of what History is ‘for’. I realise that in the UK there has always been a cultural split between the ‘geeky’ scientists and the ‘poetic’ Historians. I actually love science as much as history, and on one level Spatial Humanities is attempting to unite all disciplines, and especially the ‘two languages’ we carry in the world, that I’ve talked about elsewhere. The problem for me is that somehow history must be an art, not a science at all, so be about listening to the mind and sensibilities of historians talking about the past, for no other purpose than deepening the human dialogue and creating cultural depth.
So to teach History instead as Social Science presupposes some kind of ‘Telos’, some unfolding purpose, just as the Marxist Historians argued for, or much like some of the voices that come out of Right Wing America, arguing that the US is the freest and greatest Nation ever, or that we must somehow all stop dead at the 11 O’clock school bell and swear allegiance to the flag. To us that is a kind of cultural brainwashing, and you might speak of the facts that came up last night on a repeat of the Quiz show QI, saying that America locks up one in a hundred of its citizens, on the ‘3 Strikes and You’re Out’ model, more than any Nation on eath, ever. The figures for young blacks in prison now are even more frightening. In one sense though, History, and the study of cultures, should have no obvious purpose at all, but like literature, be a chance to explore greater truths across time, and imaginatively examine, for good and bad, the entire human condition.
Since I clearly can’t resist a bit of New Yorker bashing, the depth of sensibility and awareness I met from my own partner, and then at my own American publisher too, was astoundingly limited. Almost instantly, and from my own editor of ten years, it became about ‘sides’, ‘You’ and ‘Us’, like re-fighting the Alamo when I was supposed to be in partnership with a firm, to create. A very onesided partnership because of all the money they generate elsewhere, and when another very personal partnership had been so harmed along side it. Some people call it ‘Ego Consciousness’, brilliant at arguing for individual ‘rights’, and snap decisions, or being shocked by something out of the mould, but terrible at seeing a bigger and truly human picture, warts and all. Terrible when you find that at the heart of a prominent publisher.
There are many exciting things about Spatial Humanities, which educationally is about the vivid engagement of the student in a world that is increasingly defined by technology, and this place you are looking at, the Cyberverse. Yet there is also the danger of turning all human history into some glorified Computer Game, and we all know the dangers and addictions of that. Actually, anything that takes us further away from the human, so contained in great history and great literature, is fraught with dangers. Keep to the human. DCD
Filed under America and the UK, Culture, Education, New York
A PERSONAL ATOMIC BOMB
A friend compared what happened with a partner and my own publisher in New York to a kind of personal atomic bomb! Then they sent me these two remarkable photos of Nagasaki in 1945, and Nagasaki after the earthquake and tsunami this year. If, as they said kindly, I’m someohow the still standing arch, or you can’t really destroy a spirit, only push it terribly out of shape, I wonder what they left me with, and about the collatoral damage too. Yet it isn’t so irrelavent when you find yourself arguing with a publishing CEO, as I did, that if man’s mind can invent bombs, or split the atom, can create the ‘brilliance’ of neutron bombs, that wipe out thousands of people, but leave buildings standing, perhaps negative energy really can build up and transfer harm from a novel into the real world. Or it was at least worth trying to heal something, and worth channelling love to try and do real miracles. They just cancelled a book again, and after being labelled ‘evil’ by someone I loved and needed, either as partner or friend, what was more evil in that situation? Of course it was conventionally ‘mad’, but in the situation of an eyesight problem in a real person being written all over the pages of a novel, I still insist we are connected on levels we sometimes have no idea of, and that certain breaches of responsibility can do enormous harm. As Abrams and a group of people who knew each other did enormous harm, not only to an author’s career, and his stories, but in the world around me too. I lost myself very badly, went very dark, but refuse to carry a true story alone, especially if we are connected in certain unknown ways, and while I’ve just started doing Tai Chi again, perhaps we all need to study and follow the Tao. The problem is, as the Master says, if you think you know how to teach it, then you do not understand the Way at all! DCD
Filed under America and the UK, London, New York, The Phoenix Story
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