July 24, 2012 · 5:26 pm

PHOENIX ARK PRESS AND PUBLISHING AT THE PUSH OF A BUTTON!

In a few days time Phoenix Ark are proud to publish The Terror Time Spies by David Clement-Davies. Based loosely on the exploits of The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy, during the French Revolution, it sends a daring band of youngsters to Paris, to confront Terror everywhere. Though intended as the first in a much lighter, entertaining series, it was the book that Sarah Van More had had for nearly two years at Abrams, and would have taken an absurd four years to publish, since signing a contract, if that battle had not happened. There we are.

In the ‘good ol’ days, its publication would have meant lovely things like proper editorial support and dialogue, proof copies, interviews and author’s copies, arriving in brown cardboard boxes, to grace a private bookshelf. The stuff of real life books, that are things and characters in themselves too, not to mention becoming a record of others’ reading joys and histories. All part of those enormously special and intimate things to any author though, made far more intimate by a two year relationship with an Abrams editor, Tara Break, and by a ten year editorial relationship with her colleague. Which was once a source of joy and pride, made all the more tragic in the weird atmosphere of an American firm, of not even being ‘allowed’ to mention it, as if some crime had been committed. But so Phoenix Ark Press was born, and now, because at present they are only to eBook, publishing means, beyond the work of course – creative, editorial and the wonderful cover too, designed by Seb and Julia – the literal press of a button.

The Internet has revolutionised publishing in a way perhaps only comparable to Shakespeare’s day, over four hundred years ago, viz-viz other work here, the creation of The Stationer’s Register in London, that closed only so recently, developing copyright law itself, and, in a sense, the creation of the very idea of ‘the author’. There are many bad things in it, on the Internet too, but many good, like people who did not read hugely, suddenly saying their Kindles or readers had opened entire worlds, and at least it has kept Phoenix Ark alive as a creative voice. It’s massive downside is Amazon’s proud trumpeting of the fact that Borders has declared bankruptcy and the pumping out of work that perhaps should not see the light of day. Perhaps publishing was always rather ruthless, battles of books deeply personal too, and nothing ensures a work’s surival. Perhaps the only thing that really matters is not how we read, but the quality of the stories we are reading, although physical books will never die and we must be very wary indeed of breaking vital human connections. The Terror Time Spies coming soon.

PA 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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July 23, 2012 · 11:31 am

HENRY V, THE HOLLOW CROWN, HENRY VI AND EDMUND SHAKESPEARE

Perhaps it’s that Henry V is such a triumphant example of the language of transforming imagination, soaring poetry transporting us all beyond the physical confines of the ‘Wooden O’, that the BBC’s next contribution to The Hollow Crown did not quite soar, despite John Hurt voicing the chorus. It’s why the play, probably first performed in 1599, has become almost a metaphor for British martial rhetoric, intentionally undercut here, and out of Henry’s mis-spent youth at the Boar’s Head, for the making of man and hero. Perhaps it needed Oliver’s theatrical references in the World War II film, or the Te Deum splendour and horror of Kenneth Brannagh’s version, but the moment Henry delivered his warning to the Burghers of Harfleur, with the gates already open, was almost comic. Perhaps that was the director’s intention, to deflate Hal’s semi psychotic but truthful vision of war, but, just as the poetic language speaks to an audience in a theatre, both that and the Crispin’s day speech need a bigger present audience. It is about the making of political and royal rhetoric, despite the ironies of life and horror of war, though with the vision of the truly good King in the frame.

What was so winning though was Tom Hiddleston’s human, sensitive and pasionate Harry, reminding us that love and brothership is behind his journey, at least he hopes, high to low. The strange wooing of Katherine was lovely, with the ravashing Melanie Thierry playing the forced French consort, and reminds that the drive of the play is towards union, from Germaine Greer’s ‘poet of marriage’, as she described Shakespeare. It also places, as ever, the play of language and metaphor at the very centre of everything, as does the famous English-French translation scene, with its sexual punning, getting to the heart of the matter. So of course brave King Harry dies, in fact of dissentry on the way back from France, but Henry VI is sired, truly ushering in those Wars of the Roses, and the perpetual fear of weak Kingship “Whose state so many had the managing, That they lost France and made his England bleed.”

Henry VI was related to Charles I of France, who thought he was made of glass, and a devote King who reportedly wandered the Court, in days where one fashion was for Court ladies to wear dresses with their breasts exposed, with his head in his hands. He is also supposed to have spent the battle of Tewksbery talking to a tree! A clear warning about the danger of heriditary monarchy. But it is work here on Southwark and Edmund Shakespeare, William’s unkown youngest brother, with the real founding under Henry VI of The Brotherhood of Our Lady of Assumpiton in Southwark, that originally owned The Vine where Edmund Shakespeare was staying when he died, that might open a valuable doorway on the very neglected Henry VI play cycle too. Just as it should open a door to Southwark itself and how that place of theatres also echoes back into the plays. Henry VI features a very dishonourable Bishop of Winchester, the power there, a false miracle, at the cusp of a Reformation, and all the themes that of course haunted power and Kingship during the Reformation. Yet perhaps there is another brotherhood at play when Shakespeare speaks of we “few, we happy few, we band of brothers” in Henry V, the brotherhood of the players themselves, excempt from military service, inside the arena of a theatre.

Phoenix Ark Press

For Shakespeare’s Brother Click here

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July 21, 2012 · 11:59 am

ONE FOR THE POET’S SWEATSHOP

FROM ‘THE SEED MARKET’

“When the ocean comes to you as a lover,

Marry, at once, quickly,

For God’s sake!

 

Don’t postpone it!

Existence has no better gift.

 

No amount of searching

Will find this.

 

A perfect falcon, for no reason,

Has landed on your shoulder

And become yours.”

 

Rumi

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July 20, 2012 · 5:59 pm

TARA BREAK, DAVID CLEMENT-DAVIES AND THE LONG GOODBYE

Enough, “the past is a foreign country and they do things differently there.” If you write something across the heavens and people don’t understand, they don’t, or it’s because our longing is always bigger than the grasp.  I tried to speak in ways better than a nasty fight through a blog too, but you soon find yourself talking only to yourself! Abrams people were never Vice President, Associate Editor or Mr protocols to me though.  They were Tara, Sarah, Harold, Chad and Jason, as intimate as stories can be.  Something died around 2008 and the world and this author went nuts.  But evil is no abstract, it’s what people do and allow to be done. The residue of it all is only sadness and the pointless return to a past that never really exists.  It has been an absurdly long goodbye.

 

DCD

 

PA PRESS

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July 20, 2012 · 1:34 pm

FOR TIFFANY B

In answer to Tiffany’s question “Will Mr Davies write about animals again?” his answer is “thank you Tiffany for all your support. All the nonsense in New York rather took the joy and power away, but I love animals and the Bears will be finished, if just for such a generous fan as you! Then we’ll see. DCD.”

PHOENIX ARK PRESS

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July 20, 2012 · 9:18 am

OLYMPICS, EDMUND SHAKESPEARE AND PLACING A STORY IN CONTEXT

THE EDMUND SHAKESPEARE BLOG

London is about to host an Olympics, but there is also a Cultural Olympics going on and a Shakespeare fest too. There is useful work being done at the moment mapping Elizabethan London, and Southwark. It is work that a lay student can join in with too and an example is the use of the so-called ‘Agas Map’ Click here. A little doubtful here of ‘Virtual Reality’ or ‘interactive history’, often supposed facts and dates too, it still helps readers imagine the ground, four hundred years ago.

To start imagining Bankside though, go there today, and visit Sam Wanamaker’s Globe Project, which stands near the area of old ‘Paris Gardens‘, a Liberty, where Francis Langley’s Swan Theatre once stood, a Bull and Bear baiting arena, and the Royal Barge house on the Thames, that the landlord and impresario Philip Henslowe franchised and re-equipped. Just South East of the modern Globe, parallel with the Thames, runs dreary modern Park Street, which more or less follows the line of old Maid Lane, which for a time became the Broadway or Shaftesbury Avenue of its day. It was on Maid Lane that Henslowe put up his Rose Theatre, and in 1599, the Burbages, with Will Shakespeare a sharer, The Globe. It is possible that another figure involved in the theatres, Jacob Meade or Maide, a prominent waterman, like so many in the district, took his name for Maide Lane.

The Elephant Tavern, perhaps referenced in Twelfth Night, stood on one Maid Lane corner, as did The Vine, in a group of properties called Hunt’s Rents. The Vine included, as did many monastic and also tavern properties, a brewhouse, in a celebrated brewing area by the river, and a ‘messuage’ of land, tenements, stables and gardens. So it was like hundreds of taverns located in Southwark. It was bequeathed in the Online will of Edwarde Hunt, to his ‘beloved wife Mary’, who was pregnant, in 1588. It is uncertain when it went up, but a Vyne is mentioned in the 1530’s, and it belonged to a John Le Hunte, under Henry VI. Or rather to that Brotherhood of Our Lady of Assumption, connected to St Margaret’s Church, granted rights to buy Land and properties by the King of up to Twenty Marks. In the Token Books of Southwark Cathedral, registers of locals buying church tokens handed in to prove communion attendance, Edmund Shakespeare’s name appears at the Vine in 1607. He died that freezing December and was buried on the 31st, though the furiously chill weather extends the possible time of fairly rapid burials. Alan Nelson and his colleague Professor Ingram have been listing all the names in the Token Books to put up on line.

They include the likes of Edmund Shakespeare, Phillip Henslowe, and Edward Alleyn, several actors and some characters who appear in other references to Shakespeare. Keep walking East passed the modern sites of The Rose and Globe excavations, and you get to the point Park Street turns right and South. It was once called Deadman’s Place. If you had gone South West four hundred years ago you would have got to St Margaret’s Cross, where St Margaret’s Church once stood, dissolved during the Reformation, to become a local prison. We think Deadman’s Place is linked to land called, in one document, Lord Farrar’s Place, that St Margaret’s Church bought up for a new burial ground and sepulchre.

Above the Park Street bend, at the modern wine mecca Vineopolis, begins what was once the Liberty of The Clink, running along Clink Street, where London’s oldest prison stood, passed the remains of Winchester House, the London palace of the Bishop of Winchester, and you get to St Saviour’s Dock, where the Golden Hinde replica is, Winchester Street and then Southwark Cathedral. We can now prove that Phillipe Henslove lived in a house that was effectly No 5 Bell Alley, just before Clink Street, on the edge of the Church Square, probably part of another tavern and tenement complex, like The Vine, or the nearby Green Dragon Inn.

Henslowe lived in Southwark for over 20 years, but for several years his Son-in-law the famous actor Edward Alleyn moved in with him. Both were to become Wardens of St Saviour’s Church, for a time. Both were also involved in something called The Great Enqueste. It began with the Coronation of James I, into many affairs, but in Southwark coalescing about complaints against the Church Vestrymen and local administration, that is its own important and fascinating story. Here we think, because the Wardens oversaw legal agreements and purchases, it was very important in the Shakespeare story, and may have been one of the reasons William Shakespeare moved out of the area again. If Charles Nicholls is right about the dates surrounding Shakespeare’s sojourn on Silver Street, around Elizabeth’s death, then it makes sense, if a rival like Henslowe came more to the fore as a Southwark Man, with the Queen’s death.

The topography of the area has of course changed enormously, with the rise in height, the crowding of concrete buildings, and above all the movement of London Bridge, west by over fifty yards. But what remains is the dominating space of St Saviours Church, Southwark Cathedral, and the fact that Bankside, once Stewside, has not moved at all, unlike the North Shore. Olympic visitors disgorging next week at London Bridge Tube Station, or people trying to get away from it all, and rediscover an extraordinarily interesting and important area, threatened by buildings like the Shard and the activities of Thames Water, may find it difficult to imagine. But perhaps the coming blogs and precise details will help. In the meantime, here is a picture of JJ Visscher’s famous engraving of 1616, the year both Shakespeare and Henslowe died.

Let the eye dwell on the bottom shore, across the river from the old wooden, walled City of London. To the right is the small church of no longer standing St Olaves, the spire of which Peter Ackroyd says is mentioned more than any other in Shakespeare’s Plays, although London then had five St Olaves. Go West to the old covered London Bridge, famous throughout Europe, then to the large church of St Saviours, originally St Mary’s Overies, now Southwark Cathedral. Keep going left and you get to Winchester House or Palace, in the Clink Liberty, and then you get to Maid Lane, where the round bear gardens and theatres stood. In time we will pinpoint where Edmund Shakespeare was staying in 1607. (The panorama is taken from Wikepedia. If there are any copyright issues please contact the blog.)

FOR FURTHER EVIDENCE AND WORK SEE SHAKESPEARE’S BROTHER IN THE PUBLISHER’S PAGES, ABOVE


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July 19, 2012 · 2:50 pm

BEAMINSTER TRAGEDY

Since Phoenix Ark is partly the record of things as they really happen, in fact and fiction, and stories that seem to follow, like perhaps being one of the few writers talking about 16th Century London and Shakespeare with the odd distinction of really came close to the Black Death, in the story about Eric York in the Grand Canyon, just a note about the pretty Dorset town of Beaminster and the recent tragedy. 

I drove up on Monday in the rain, to hear that the tunnel on the A3066 had collapsed. That day the friend I’m staying with had been told about a missing local couple, as people started to worry about a crash.  On Tuesday it suddenly appeared on the Internet and in The Huffington Post, that a car had been found at the tunnel, buried in a heavy mud slide. A body had been found. With respect to the families in Beaminster, we won’t say any more, except perhaps that at least the older couple were together. Since they were missing for a week though, the case is being referred to the IPPC, The Independent Police Commission.

 

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July 19, 2012 · 9:47 am

HUFFINGTON POST, THE STATE OF OUR LIVES AND STORIES!

Well, there you are. The Huffington Post announces that ‘Working Culture’ is making Britis ‘Sick, stressed and depressed‘Click here. Meanwhile banking crisis follows banking crisis, as those with their snouts in the trough run off with the cash, but the system affects everyone. Bob Diamond resigns over the Libor fixing and the HSBC is involved in drugs money laundering. Not to mention the corporate scandal of G4S in the Olympics, and David Cameron promising to ‘go after them’. That is a National scandal too, at the moment World attention is turning to London.

Perhaps, as FBI system’s man Danian Fabian gets an email, in the thriller The Godhead Game, inviting him to ‘change his life forever‘, we should all follow suite. Especially connected to systems like the Internet, even blogging, that probably disconnect lives more and more. So a world game begins, involving the Mayan Calendar and the ‘End of the World‘, this year, 2012. If we are all in need of a bit of moral or spiritual renewal, maybe The Godhead Game is another clue. It is available at Amazon.com or Click here

Fire Bringer, US Edition, is also available for FREE download today Click here

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July 19, 2012 · 7:20 am

EDMUND SHAKESPEARE AND FIFTY SHADES OF GREY!

THE EDMUND SHAKESPEARE BLOG

Perhaps, in the dark arts of blogging, I should start telling the ‘story’ of Edmund Shakespeare in London and Southwark in terms of Fifty Shades of Grey! The dark arts of blogging being linking subjects outrageously to well known ones, and surprising readers with new discoveries. Except that we do not really know his story. We know, according to the Stratford register, that Shakespeare’s Brother was born in 1580, 16 years William’s junior. We know from a Christening register that he became a player and that he died in the freezing winter of 1607/08 and was buried “with a forenoon toll of the great bell” at a cost of twenty shillings, inside St Saviour’s Church, Southwark, now Southwark Cathedral. The date was December 31st, not technically a New Year’s eve, because the year 1607 stretched to May of 1608 and Lady Day. Edmund Shakespeare was only 27, and just four months earlier he had buried his infant son, who was marked down in the register as ‘base born‘. That very same year, 1607, William Shakespeare’s favourite daughter Susanna was married to John Hall. Was William, now the successful playwright and Globe sharer, the person who paid for that burial? It is just possible someone like Phillip Henslowe paid, or someone unknown. Edmund’s story though speaks of something we never associate with Shakespeare himself, failure and tragedy.

The mother of Edmund’s dead son we do not know the name of. She does not seem, from the records, to have died in childbirth. There is no evidence, as was put up on Wikipedia, that Edmund Shakespeare met her around 1600, but they were not married. However, as Germaine Greer said, picking up the arguments about life and death, marriage and sex during the period, half the men and women in Stratford and across England went up the aisle pregnant, and at least Edmund ‘owned’ his bastard son, by having him christened. Perhaps he and the mother had been together some time then. It seems they were living in a poor district though, Morefields, Edmund perhaps playing not with his brother at The Globe, but at The Fortune, in Phillip Henslowe’s company, but this is pure speculation.

If Peter Ackroyd says that Edmund, and William’s brothers Richard and Gilbert, his sister Joan too, constitute ‘the forgotten family of the playwright‘, then the proving of that family record is also the proving of the entire William Shakespeare Stratford story. William Shakespeare, by John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, had two other sisters, who died in infancy, in those big Elizabethan families, and were buried in the grounds of the Stratford church. Perhaps those sisters deaths played a role in forming his attitude to women. I started this project as fiction, the process of imagining around the tiniest details, and it made a youngest brother very significant to William Shakespeare’s life. Not least because one of the only Edmunds to appear in the plays is that ruthless yet vigorous Edmund of King Lear – “Why bastard, wherefore base?“. That ‘now God stand up for Bastards” sceptic and cynic, in revolt against ‘”the plague of custom“, the airy nothings of astrology, or the providences in a fall of a sparrow, but who is at least given the tiniest room for growth and redemption. Lear was written before 1607, before any ‘base born’ son arrived to William’s real brother Edmund, but it certainly seems that the years 1607-1608 marked a dramatic sea change in the writer’s life. Perhaps that is the theme of James Shapiro’s coming book. The Queen was dead, their father John was dead, then mother, Mary Arden, several player friends and now Edmund Shakespeare too. The strange romances begin, part collaborations, like Pericles, but most especially The Winter’s Tale, so much about the ‘magic’ of trying to restore the world, or heal the past.

But my fiction, and imagining of Edmund, was as much about the danger, hardness and potential tragedy of London life, if you did not make it. Of a world facing problems of poverty, crime, violence and disease, like the Black Death, that struck again in 1603, the same year Queen Elizabeth died. In terms of Fifty Shades of Grey though there is also the question of the ‘stews’ in Southwark, Shoreditch and right across London, or tavern brothels. Both Germaine Greer and John Constable, mentioned below, have talked about the fact that those Stews were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester, whose palace, Winchester House, stood in the Liberty of Southwark, five minutes walk from The Rose, Swan and Globe Theatres. As Bishops in Rome licensed brothels. It might be seen as the hypocrisy of a whole society, or the special sin of the Church, like a bad policeman, but the fact of those taverns, brothels and theatres, also became a sounding board for puritan opposition to the theatres, spreading their ‘foul miasmas’ and even more upsetting freedoms. By the time of the civil war, when theatres were banned across London, it as as if Southwark is especially marked out as the London bad Land, though the area would become far worse into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for crime, prostitution and poverty. Then London was growing very fast indeed.

But in exploring Edmund Shakespeare’s story and Southwark’s, especially around the already mentioned St Margaret’s Church and the group of wardens involved with The Brotherhood of Our Lady of Assumption, the descendent of John Le Hunte coming to own The Vine where Edmund was staying in 1607, I have found direct evidence too of money going up to The Bishop of Winchester. One document specifically relates to a tavern the Brotherhood were running called The Haxe, or Axe. There is reference to a Flemish woman too, and if Amsterdam is still the city of sin, Flemish and Dutch immigrants were associated with the brothels and stews, or according to zenophobic English commentatators. If whoever was the authority though was also supposed to regulate or protect, the Bishop’s hired men were supposed to inspect those establishments, and there are ancient laws about women not being kept against their will. Some of the facts about the Church or State ‘running’ brothels is actually just the facts of rents and land ownership and by the time Ralph Thrale came to own the land that became the Anchor Brewery, along ‘Park Street’, formerly Maid Lane, it had been owned by a Mrs Bilson. Thomas Bilson was the Bishop of Winchester under Elizabeth, into James’s reign, and oversaw the publication of the King James Bible.

To add a touch of S&M though, that everyone seems interested in suddenly, go to a fine old pub called The Boot and Flogger in Southwark today! Right opposite is a gate to a Carpark where Crossbones Graveyard lies. That is at the centre of work John Constable is doing. It became the biggest unmarked graveyard in London, for those dying in poverty, especially out of the traffic of ‘single women’. “The Winchester Geese” prostitutes there were also called in Shakespeare’s day and the plays contain warnings about them and the potential prick of disease. But though Shakespeare was the opposite of the puritan, if Greer is right about him also being the poet of marriage, and of course people change and go on different journeys, what did he experience in Southwark and what was his attitude to it all? Differing and varied perhaps, yet near contemporaries describe him as not being ‘debauched’, keeping away from the everday antics of George Wilkins, a brothel owner and playwright who probably collaborated on Pericles and who was cited in court for kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach and stamping on another, though Shakespeare kept high and low company. Perhaps his youngest brother Edmund fell foul of London precisely because he did not enjoy his elder brother’s success. Pericles interestingly is all about a lost daughter, kidnapped by pirates, who ends up in a brothel, but protects her virtue and maiden head by serving finer ladies.

As arguments with William Ray and others about the Earl of Oxford show, there is a deal of speculation built around the delicate recorded facts of Shakespeare’s world, but one essential element is a missing player in Southwark, the lost Shakespeare, whose short and perhaps very sad London life sets up echoes everywhere.

FOR FURTHER EVIDENCE AND WORK SEE SHAKESPEARE’S BROTHER IN THE PUBLISHER’S PAGES, ABOVE

DCD

Phoenix Ark Press

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