Category Archives: Culture

August 11, 2011 · 10:00 am

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.

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August 10, 2011 · 1:57 pm

CHARLIE WILSON AND THE ZEN MASTER

I saw Charlie Wilson’s War the other day, with that great actor who played Truman Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman. He was very moving talking about his new film recently, and especially about love. With the risk that we just have to take each time of getting hurt, even if in five or ten years time people may not even like us, let alone love us. But the story in this film is of the almost privately begun covert war in Afghanistan, between the US and the Soviets, and is quite extraordinary. Charlie Wilson pushed the military precurements budget from $1 million to $1 billion. Afghanistan was one of the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Yet, of course, half the film’s point was the civil war that then began, the arrival of the ‘crazies’ in Kabul, who the Taliban were originally the heroes against, in bringing some kind of order, and the perhaps inevitable betrayal of various idealisms. It was tragic when you saw Wilson arguing hopelessly for a $1 million to rebuild a school, only to be told no one was interested in schools. So the budget was about the military industrial complex, and the judgeable victories of war waged in high places, but the history of the world has been others suffering the damage of international conflicts. No more American bashing, yet there is great truth in the observation that the US is a country of real and high idealisms, even innocences, that at times can be atrociously blinkered and superficial, masking the true hardball. As Wilson said “These things happened and they were glorious…and then we fucked up the peace.‘

I loved the CIA man played by Hoffman though, perfectly open about wanting to kill some Soviets and do his job, yet strangely humane. He tells the story of the Zen Master who, when an Afghan boy was given a horse, and the villagers asked him if he agreed it was wonderful fortune, answered ”We’ll see’. The boy promptly fell off the horse and broke his leg, and when the Zen Master was asked if he thought it was terrible, answered ‘we’ll see’. Then war came and half the young men went off to fight and got killed. Except the boy with the horse and the broken leg. Life’s that all over, and so’s love, so as for Afghanistan now, or the everyday, perhaps the only response is always ‘we’ll see!‘

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August 7, 2011 · 2:08 pm

WILLIAM SLEATOR AND NOT BEING ALONE

Perhaps there’s some merit in blogging my own story, if it shows writers and artists that they are not always so alone. A friend sent me a New York Times link today to the obituary of William Sleator, who has died at 66. I haven’t read his stories, but they dealt in the realms of Young Adult fantasy too. They sound rather wonderful, and on the side of the difficult adolescent psyche, dealing with good and evil, and fighting the forces of the mind and imagination. But Sleator clearly had his private demons, his battle with addiction, his alcholism.

It is very obvious territory for the artist, and perhaps it is the threat of public shame that always becomes the worst. Full Nelsons, Half Nelsons, the personal cruicifixion between high idealism and the ‘real world’. Above all the difficult attempt for ‘Children’s Authors’ to make that wonderful journey, again and again, through the dark and the life denying, as we step from the naturally whole psyche of the child, through the difficult realms of growth, to the most fully adult and human. My father found it very hard to deal with my Grandfather’s alcholism, but it is always the secret and the hidden that is both the driver and the danger too, when it takes control. How balanced I was again in America, for a time, how free of the psychic weight of the past, but how the absolutes and opposites that my own stories have argued against, and the fears of others, meant I was probably always heading for the most monumental crash in New York City. There we are, it happened, but it might not if they and I had remembered we’re all human, and I had not become so disconnected.

I learnt that Sleator was blogged recently by an Abrams employee and wondered if they got him too. DCD

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August 4, 2011 · 9:06 am

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

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July 23, 2011 · 5:09 pm

AMY WINEHOUSE

God, what is going on in the world? First the Norway horror and absolute tragedy, and now Amy Winehouse, just 27, found dead in her flat in North London. Obviously troubled, addictive and facing the difficulty of Celebrity, she was the most extraordinary voice and singer. Uncompromising on stage, to the point of being self abusive, that voice could be so beautiful and even hauntingly pure. There are no real details yet, so perhaps it was an overdose or suicide, and it is extraordinary that her Wikedpedia entry has already been changed, but what did the jeering at her drunken concert in Serbia do, who knows the pain that can go on inside people, and the madness too? What a terribly sad day.

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July 23, 2011 · 9:21 am

ANDERS BREIVIK AND THE CHILLING TWITTER

One of the most chilling things about the Norwegian tragedy is a single tweet from Anders Breivik on twitter, dated July 17th – ‘One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100, 000 who have only interests.’ It hangs there in cyber space, the absolute prologue to decision and horror. So it appears that the madness of a ‘will’-driven, right wing Christian fundamentalist took so many lives, especially young lives, but also orchestrated a massive bomb attack in the centre of Oslo. Another Anders Breivik, a computer systems developer at Know IT in Oslo, laconically tweeted ‘Wish I had a different name today. What a sad day.’ It probably says it all.

The eyewitness accounts of the shootings on Utøya Island, which went on for an hour and a half, are terrible, as Breivik, dressed as a kind of policeman, but with red ‘Naziesque’ twinges to the outfit, and armed with an automatic weapon, killed at least 69 people, and the toll has been rising, taking part in the Labour party’s summer camp. It was calm, cold blooded and benefited from people thinking he was in authority, and the distraction of police attention to the capital, where 7 died in the car bomb attack, right outside the Prime Minister’s offices.

Mature, gentle, open minded Norway may have to review security, and police responses too, persue any potential links to active groups, of course, yet it surely can’t let this drive terror into the soul of a country, as was obviously intended. Fear only breads fear, and gives fuel to the extremists in any camp. It also gives energy to much bigger agendas. It was why the single greatest comment on 9/11 and perhaps 10 years of war, is how on earth do you think the terrorists wanted you to respond, except exactly as you did? It may be hindsight, but the photo of Breivik, in all his Arian weirdness, has the hallmarks of the sad and lonely lunatic. Will can indeed do a great deal, but actually Breivik was wrong, Hitler triumphed out of the darkness present in an entire society, in economic freefall, not just his own brilliant but psychotic ‘Kampf’, and madness only triumphs when collective madness is engaged. Peace to Norwegians today, and a blessing, in the strictly non Conservative Christian, non right wing fundamentalist sense(!), but it is a ghastly story and thoughts should be with all those families.

Addendum: The original figures on what happened have been revised down, which also shows the importancee of good journalism and getting your facts right.

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July 11, 2011 · 10:34 am

An Agent and Scream of the White Bear

I have rather turned the spotlight on Abrams, or myself, but have never actually spoken up about that agent in New York, Ginger Clark. A tough, fiesty, fat little New Yorker, who I rather liked, when she jumped on me way back when, when I was trying to tour in America again. Already in such hard circumstances, because of the oddness and absolutisms of an ex, but also a senior editor at my own American publisher. One who would not even prioritise a drink, after a two year relationship, either as a somewhat responsible human being, or an ambassador for their firm to a novelist in a Foreign country and city, now starting to hum Sting’s – “Englishman in New York” turning quickly into “I’m an alien, I’m an illegal alien!”. So, by Ginger Clark, I was wined and dined in the best Chinese restaurant, and virtually handed an agent a deal that was almost already made, on a large plate, as I was pushed further and further back from people I had been so close to and needed.

It was my mistake not to tell Ginger about what had happened personally, for a very long time. But that was part of the secrecy that developed, actually in respect of a partner’s fears, and almost obsessive privacies too. But why exactly is it that Ginger abandoned me in the middle of a crisis, and so made it all far worse? Perhaps she disliked the swear words coming down the phone from London, as Abrams threatened and cancelled promised conference calls. I must say that I laughed out loud when she rather sneered at my talk of how hard writing had become, in her Gangs of New york voice – ‘Wot did she do ta ya, steal your laptop or turn off yer electricity?!”

But then agents usually are not writers, and would not understand why something that is most ‘animated’ in imagination and in storytelling, is directly related to the feminine ‘anima’, as Jung calls it. I had lost that externally, and inside myself too, and it was a crisis I was not ready for, at a very particular time in life. It made me rather think New Yorkers are vey mad indeed though when Ginger could so dismiss human grief, lost love, but simultaneously talk about her enormous pain at the death of her Chincilla! A bit like that editor Susan Van Metre had seen fit to discuss my private life with at another publisher, sending a Round Robin right across the publishing world, when her relationship ended. Perhaps she was right to do so, because people have very different ways of coping. So Ginger dumped me, though I thought writers were supposed to dump agents, at the worst possible moment, and before I could actually take the very good advice she had given, which I was about to. I watched in horror as the names of twenty publishers came down the wire, she had lined up to take Scream of the White Bear to around the world. A life fell apart in many ways, and sometimes the fall can be very far indeed. I do not think though she would have done it if the book was any good, which I think it nearly is now.

I was so strung out though, and so believed in the goodness of the people at Abrams, that I genuinely believed Abrams had consciously engineered it, to try and snap me out of a cycle. I am afraid my own fantasy driven hopes and idealisms were very mistaken indeed. Ginger Clark, I think, actually lied to me on the phone, and I say this because of the catch in her voice and perhaps I am wrong, about what was actually said between my editor and agent. It is a disaster when you give yourself completely up to other people.

As it became a very literal disaster trying to rewrite a novel, not away from all that entirely, but straight into the face of it. But then my fantasy books have always been extremely autobiographical, in trying to relate experience in nature, to human experience too, and take readers on a journey worth going on. My tragedy is that big books like FireBringer and The Sight have also been related to personal challenges, and been a way of finding my road through them again and to triumph. There could be no triumph, no wonderful resolution in Scream of the White Bear, because the source of hope, joy, light and life was right in front of me, but had already been stripped away. So came the most terrifying darkness, most specifically because I had been called evil by someone I loved, and tried to write about real evil again in a book, as I have done before. It was also claimed quite bogusly I was a difficult author, when the truth is, when a real dialogue is going on as it should, I have always been flexible and very easy to work with. But that is a vital trust between writer and editor, neither should ever forget.

In the politics of this story I ask just one very loud question. I argued with Abrams that in editorial all I have ever really needed, and it is true, is support and positivity, that electric connection that ends with the reader, and is sometimes so hard to find nowadays, because I am enormously committed, and know that I can get books and stories right. That is why the wall they put up, and the threats they issued, became so monumentally destructive. But editors make much of their ‘ownership’ of authors when they pay the money, but some quickly abandon that ownership and a real and almost sacred responsibility, if it does not suite their own ambitions inside a firm. I became a very big fool indeed for love, and not very nice at times, but I am not a fool and know that publishers are businesses, and books must succeed on their merits, although plenty succeed that have no merit. But the real question is this, if I were Shakespeare, JK Rowling or just Jo Bloggs, what real duty do editors, not to mention agents, actually show to writers, the very source of it all, especially when they have actually contracted them? I did find it shocking that Ginger Clark could so grandly inform me that trust would be destroyed if I dared to mention contracts, like the book they held for four years, and when they were not only threatening my real good name, but my entire livelihood and career. That duty internally though was distorted by the politics of a personal situation they could have resolved but refused to, or one person refused to, because they were trying to keep a secret from a CEO, I think, and because of the power struggles at work behind the scenes. Otherwise it is just raw arrogance about who is the important link in the chain in art and publishing – not writers but editors. The truth of who I really am though, why the wound of love became so harmful, or of the value of my novels was absolutely irrelevant in the end. If the human is lost in all the business then it is not worth having anything to do with at all. David Clement-Davies

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July 10, 2011 · 2:42 pm

FOR THOSE IN GRIEF – BE GENTLE ON YOUR MEMORIES

The Phoenix Founder has seen several people mourning, or go through grief recently. Since he had such a particular memory, perhaps the reason so many readers say of his books they ‘feel they are actually there‘ maybe there is some advice to those in grief – ‘be gentle on your own memories’. In the present place you are, with all you are experiencing in the now, you are in part the creator of those memories, reinterpreted through the prism of time and emotion. When death steps into the frame though he thinks some kind of ‘psyhic’ doorway opens, most especially to memory and the past, of course. Nowadays we do not know how to grieve properly, in the fast and furious world, and since those who have not experienced it simply cannot know, they often find themselves invading a psyche that has become hyper sensitive and often wounded. Which does not mean those grieving always need to be alone, they need the right kind of company. Once people went into mourning, wore a black tie, dress or a black armband, and it perhaps alerted others that they were in a different place entirely, perhaps trying to reconnect with life. It is also why we used to cover mirrors, because it can also involve real ‘hauntings’ of memory, that throws shadows and judgements back at the self. CS Lewis said that grief is fear, fear for the hard nature of death, for the future, for the meaning of it all. How deeply we need less fear in the world, and more of the right connectedness.

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June 21, 2011 · 9:08 am

PHOENIX ARK PRESS RELEASE

Phoenix Ark Press are delighted to announce the publication of Leonardo’s Little Book of Wisdom, compiled and introduced by the historian Foreman Saul, who is profiled below. An essential guide to the Master’s life wisdom and wit too, this unique selection, from the translation of Leonardo’s notebooks by Jean Paul Richter, will lead you through a genius’ insights into science, painting, nature, religion, God, love and death. Interspersed with Leonardo’s mostly humorous prophecies, it brings the man to life in a vivid new way and is done to celebrate the Discovery Channel’s coming forensic series on Leonardo’s painting and, of course, the National Gallery’s ground-breaking exhibition in London this autumn. What better way to walk through life than in the company of a true giant?

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June 21, 2011 · 9:07 am

PROFILING FOREMAN SAUL

Foreman Saul is one of Phoenix Ark’s more elusive and mercurial authors; a little like the great Leonardo himself. A journalist and historian , with a name you might think stems from across the Atlantic, rather than the Europe of his upbringing, he has specialised in both the Civilisation of the Italian Renaissance and travel throughout Europe and Italy.‘Who or why, or where or what?’ is Foreman Saul, we sometimes joke at the office, as he pops in and out, but he usually shrugs and certainly raises an eyebrow about some of the more exotic theories on one of his great heroes, Leonardo Da Vinci!

Phoenix are delighted to give you a taste of his Introduction to this little book of huge insights, far beyond their time:

“Many have earned themselves little books of wisdom in collections of their sayings, but it is not something you might immediately expect from such a scientific figure as Leonardo da Vinci, who was born 1492 and died in 1519. The epitome of a ‘Renaissance Man’, Leonardo is best known for his paintings, drawings, and numerous practical and mechanical inventions. He also left 13,000 pages of notes and reflections, in jottings, observations and thoughts, mostly to aid his work, often disordered, so never intended for publication. That jumble is what most justifies a new approach to re-ordering some of his words, into categories of useful life reflections… We are flooded with ‘self help’ books and life guides purporting to supply ‘The Secret’, but what better way to walk through life than in the company of a truly towering genius?”

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