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I was asked today if I’d ever work with Publishers again! When you try something like Phoenix you are often faced with your own potential hypocrisy, or basic need to survive, and despite half wanting to attack the cynicism of the system, I’ve been trying hard to work with publishers, still, though the climate’s awful. I knew I had gone over the top in America though, and it came out of a battle with Macmillan here, and something so personal too, but it is all about working well with people, and many people mattering in that. About respecting what others do too, although there were deep personal reasons for my loss of respect in New York. There may be a hierarchy in that structure that I think is being abused, namely care of the artists you buy, even over the power of editors, and the need to always explain things, but if a work is succeeding, actually good publishers always want to follow it. They may follow the big sellers far too much, and at the expense of more valuable or even better work, but that is markets and probably life. What I do despise is either hypocrisy, or far too much politics in the frame, and it applies above all to agents who can be remarkable bottom feeders. But from the days of forcing too big an advance at Macmillan on a third novel, at a tough time, then leaving my agent and forgetting the work is what matters first, and the readers, I’ve learnt a great deal. At the moment, I would give my eye teeth to be supported, in a way I can’t do properly here , and to be ‘allowed’ to write well again and see that published well. DCD

FROM LHUNA

‘Onward and upward. Still looking eagerly forward to Scream of the White Bear. As long as you still write, we’ll still listen.’

Lhuna, onward and upward is what Michael Jacobs eventually said at Abrams, after such a pointless and bizarre battle, before I asked my ex and editor for peace again, or some respect, but then walked away, when it was refused yet again. In fact ‘heaven’ isn’t quite ‘upwards’, on a planet spinning round and around in Space-Time, as The Flaming Lips have it, and it can be with one another. Thank you Lhuna, I’m a grown man, who sometimes feels about twelve now! I’ll try with Scream, only to Kindle I’m afraid, but it is not exactly a book that fills me with joy, being connected to so much sorrow and darkness. So much human blindness too. This attempt at publishing too, and trying to do it alone, or turning to a stranger true story, has taken me away from what I’m really good at. But letters from readers like that, up in Scotland when I was trying to find a road last year, or later, have really kept me going, and always touch me. Nice to hear from you, and you’re right, I must turn to real work, not blogs.DCD

POLLIPIGGLEPUGGAR

Though PolliPigglepuggar is a nonsense kind of WORD
You CAN’T hunt down in any diction-reeeee,
‘THE Pollipigglepuggar’ is a most exotic bird,
Which sleeps within the Pollipiggle tree.
She isn’t quite a Parrot
Though her plumage is akin
And her ears are thin and furry, as a bear,
Her tail looks like a carrot,
While she has a sort of chin,
And wears a set of curlers in her hair.
Her beak is made of lemon peel,
Her eyes are black and blue,
Her call is like the bleating of a goat,
Her favourite meal’s spaghetti
It’s weird, but still it’s true,
She loves to wrap so loosely round her throat.
While, on her Pollipiggle branch,
She perches day and night –
A look that says – there’s nothing else to do.
Though in those scented piggle leaves,
She’s dreaming of the fright
I gave her when I stole out and went – ‘Boo’.
But just before I tell you
What a racket THAT inspired,
There’s something else to show you all, for free,
Not the colour of those feathers
Or the way her feet are wired,
But the nature of the Pollipiggle Tree.
The Pollipig’s a cousin of the Lollipopple plant,
In the genus of the Ligglepipple root,
Its leaves are made of herbal tea,
Although the branches aren’t,
While its flowers sprout out in rubber, like a boot.

It sways there in the piggle breeze,
Just waiting on some fun
Or that Puggar bird to use it for her bed,
And, since this tree can’t walk with ease,
(The thing can’t even run!)
It’s fond of simply growing up instead!
So there it waits to ponder,
As it blossoms once a year,
When the swooping puggar-puggar will appear,
Until from out of yonder
The thing loops through the air
And settles with a whooping, on its ear.
Behold the Pollipiggle Bird,
A fowl that isn’t deep,
A-landing on its side within the shrub
A bird, you see, that’s so absurd,
It promptly falls asleep
And dreams of bathing nightly in a tub.
So there they snooze together,
Like a perfect pair of chums
A-deep within the pollipiggle wood
And there the tree gets bigger
While the Pollipuggar hums
A tune I can’t remember, though I should.
You see, I’ve quite forgotton
That thing I had in mind,
Namely WHAT the creature cried when given fright;
It screeched out something rotten
When I woke it from behind,
Then called out like an ostrich taking flight:
“oh, polli, pig AND puggar,
oh piggle, puggle, pol
oh, rallop, lipig, gopple, gup and gol
oh luggup, paggle, leppug, paaaa
And glipple loppgup too.
Which really meant no more than;
‘Who are you?”
Oh, I love my Pollipiggle bird
A-sleeping in her tree
With her multicoloured feathers on her wings
And her strange, but polli, habits
Which NEVER seem absurd,
Like those ears that grow like rabbit’s,
Or the piggle way she sings,
And the puggar way she knows just how to be,
While she’s snoring up her Pollipiggle Tree.

Copyright David Clement-Davies June 20i1 All Rights Reserved.

All right, that story has been told, and with no revelatory consequences, no kinder human ‘miracles’, so Phoenix Ark must turn back to objective and positive stories in future. That dream probably came out of that song, and far, far happier memories, so that’s only healing too.

Blog Suspension lifted – it’s all I have as a writer, although blogs strictly limited!

I bumped into the sweet black guy at the St Luke’s refuge home opposite my London flat the other day and he told me why, for a year in my own kind of emotional hell, he kept calling me Andy. It happened often, when he was shuffling down the street, with his headphones on, smoking a fag and singing, sometimes wearing his bright red Elvis costume, and usually caught deep in his own hurt head. My own thoughts and emotions had become so raw and slow, searching for some kind of light, trying to stop time, writing that huge novel and imprisoned in the box of myself, it was all about seeing, in reality and imagination, and I sometimes saw his eyes literally bulging from his head, as though blocked emotion or understanding was pressing from the goggling sockets. ‘Andy I knew long back,” he said, “you reminded me of him. He was killed by the National Front.’ What kind of an animal is man, sometimes, and that’s not meant as an insult to animals, and what kind of bastards are out there? ‘You’re a good, guy, Dave’, he said, as he sloped back into his ‘dump‘, and I slipped him a quid and wondered if I’m any good at all. He made me feel better and as Tolkien had it, there can be evil tears. DCD

‘It has happened forever, and nothing can make it good.‘ Mallory, after seven men were killed attempting Everest.

Perhaps that’s it. We have to accept the bad too, even the power of the bad, and try to get it right. Not live in it, dwell in it, or try to right what you just can’t, but accept the scar and be bigger and far braver. Fear does such harm, though it’s necessary sometimes too. A commentator said mountaineers have an element of selfishness, deep down, perhaps madness too, misunderstanding the eternal drive, but Graham Greene said writers need a quality of ice too. Mountains to climb! Of course, Mallory ‘lost’.

‘One must conquer, achieve, get to the top, to know there is nothing that mustn’t be dared.’ Mallory.

‘Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves.” Mallory.

Um, I think I seem a little bitter! Maybe it’s fear and sorrow. Maybe it’s courage and madness. Maybe words mean nothing at all. No, they mean everything, and nothing at all…string some bow invented by Paulo Coehlo, and keep shooting straight and true! He had three wives, and likes light and big mountains. He also has a huge foundation that helps lots of kids.

Audrey Niffenegger, as it happens an enormous fan of an ex’s, and author of The Time Traveller’s Wife, had it so right just now about Social Networking, blogging and the internet, at the Edinburgh Book Festival. It is often like people shouting at each other, with little time to think, digest, pause, and really create. It is often actually a threat to the real value and power of the written word. But novels are considered things, and so are their ‘creation‘ at and by a publisher. They are living things, in a way, and in all my rants I have always said that Abrams did books beautifully. That’s why it is such a bitter pill to swallow. I have the beautiful edition of Audrey Niffenegger’s novel in pictures, The Adventuress, at home, with its gorgeous green felt binding. I only wish she might use the magic of words and stories to write about men, stop time, and pen The Time Traveller’s Husband! As Shakespeare said ‘Wishers were ever fools‘, but perhaps a poet should always value the foolishness of the heart and keep valuing it, to the end of time. DCD

I think it’s one of the truest satires the Coen Brothers came up with, the story of the writer going nuts, in Barton Fink. Lost to the world of the mind, forgotten by the powers that be in Hollywood, his mind ended up fighting everything and everyone. It was like that three years ago, with love, friendship and editorial support retracted by my publisher in New York, as friendships here were shatted. With a touch of Dr Faustus too, spurred on by the raw energy of Mephistopheles, gazing in the magic mirror of memory and emotion, but ending up with fear in a handful of dust, weaker eyesight, and Helen of Troy gone off to her Upper Flip-Side, for happier days in publishing, Greengrass’s and Central Park. What a joke then when connected people, supposedly grown up or loving people, supporting each other too, branded me as the devil incarnate, or some kind of literary terrorist, alone in a flat in London, threatening ‘Attorney’s notices in New York and London ‘, and virtually demanding a novel about Polar Bears was delivered in an armoured car. It is absolutely unheard of, or maybe it’s not, but fact’s certainly stranger than fiction. I thought they believe the word has no strange power at all, except to make money. Wake up, New York and see the whole, or believe in the stories you edit and the writers you buy! DCD

People often don’t like Grahame Greeme because he was a Catholic. I think books like The Quiet American are amazingly insightful, sad and moving, personally, culturally and politically. But I’ve always wondered about the miracle written into End of The Affair. Do we believe it, take it as pure fiction, or is it there to simply make us wonder? Back to Einstein perhaps, and changing language, and seeing everything as a ‘miracle’, or nothing as. No one around me would believe in at least the possibility of good miracles, of healing and connected energy, despite their talk of God, and out of such harm, and simply went on blocking terribly. It was awful in such a situation. So maybe I just have to start the believing, in the positive and not what seems to define and dictate so many beliefs, namely pure fear. Even believing in ‘Catholicism’, although I prefer Tai Chi. To me it means believing in yourself and others, and the whole of life’s extraordinary adventure, life’s feast, in good energy and the best we are when whole, man and woman together. It generates light and understanding, not to mention life. But we are not fixed in time, pinned by careless and destructive labels, we’re like plants that need many things to grow and blossom, and to make that happen in each other too. Yes though, in fact a quiet sorry from another person would be a little miracle, an act of true awareness, and very creative. DCD