No, not that one! Harry Potter the barrister, on TV, talking about the History of the English legal system, Garrow’s ‘law’, Erskine and the greatest British export around the world. The principles, without being too obvious, of a right to a fair hearing, to hear what you are accused of, to essential fair play. Because the system is not only essential to justice in a courtroom, but to reform and decency throughout societies.
PA Press
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Is Scream still on release for August 1 2012?
Don’t ever forget that you are awesome story teller. The Sight was like watching a movie for me when I first read it.
Your imagination with Polar Bears? Can’t wait. Saw your preview for it once on this site and it was wonderful.
How nice people are, especially young people, compared to cynical adults, who talk love, friendship or literature at the heart of publishers. I’m afraid not August, Tiffany, as blogged recently, The Terror Time Spies have to come first, but this year.
DCD
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After threatening a blog, out of a year and more threatening their own author under contract, Abram’s silence speaks volumes. It is the principle that senior editor, Tara Break, had not only personal responsibilities, which she might abandon or abuse as she pleases in private life, so obsessed with her ‘rights’ but no one else’s, but a professional duty of care too, in a tiny department, that she completely jettisoned in an act of massive disrespect, negligence and ultimate cruelty too. Of course she had professional responsibility there, but is never one to take any true responsibility, and would naturally hide behind a firm, or a group and watch the destruction of David Clement-Davies’s work and career, actually his life, but also the removal of her boss Harold Rove too. Lovely. She uses words like evil, heard by David’s own editor too, new Vice President, who did nothing to solve or aid a difficult situation either, suddenly making everything about her ‘power over her list’, but both might take a look in the mirror.
While Abram’s utterly dishonest synthesising issues around Tara Break, privacies or whatever, really masks the conflicts the story then became about, like author’s rights, contracts, broken professional promises, professional defamation, above all honesty and proper and essential working conditions under contract, they are also wrong about the principle of duties of care, well before that. Not to mention the growing anguish that was known about in a department, that went silent to an author with two books there, and three under contract. If the issue of Hew, Screw and Glue is not technically the big one, though it led to the disaster, because a personal fact of friendship and awful betrayal was so involved, so hypocritically too, then the difficulty of Tara Break’s lack of priorities on tour was, and a weird psychology and family history too. An ultimate arrogance and unilateralism that are astonishing. Susan Van Metre’s threats months before were, and her breach of a writer’s privacy to Penguin editor Sharyn November very much was. So was the personal alliance between Sarah Van More, Tara Break and her new man, as the distortion of the whys and how’s for months was, where in an ‘enquiry’ Tara Break and her colleagues did not even mention the Hew, Screw and Glue issue. But above all the conspiracy inside a department for months was too, that should be considered not only arrogant, abusive and horrible, but illegal. The personal and professional invasion of it was appalling and it completely distorted all supposed discussions about books, or how you get to them. As we have said, so much is proved by the removal of Harold Rove, but Abrams CEO Mike Jacobson will do nothing about it, because he got his scapegoats, after his bogus ‘enquiry’. There was no ‘due process’ at all. Love has not been talked about enough, which out of Fell was almost impossible to bear, in shattered relationships and friendships, but it went beyond a person, it went into what supports literature itself. Hence attempts to bring peace, repeatedly denied too. “You mention contracts and you will destroy trust” said ‘agent’ Ginger Clarke, but Tara Break destroyed trust, then Sarah Van More. Then the bully tactics of a whole New York firm engaged, and denial of true freedom of speech or defence.
They cannot attack in court because they know they will lose, and it would open the door to so much that was wrong, but they will not apologise or compensate, because they do not give a tuppeny damn about real lives or books, careers beyond their own, or the harm Tara Break and they did and stood over so awfully. So unnecessarily too. Sadly we cannot afford to fight them in court and memory is a real enemy. They also know about these open ‘slanders’, as they would have it, in a blog, because an Oxford lawyer put himself on our ‘mailing list’. Very well, knowing about a thing but not acting is also a form of acceptance but Americans are getting a rather bad reputation in the just power stakes. There, Abrams and the complete expression of ‘power’ without real responsibility, contractual abuse, and a chain of secrets and lies that also saw a major publishing CEO trying to defame someone to the US Author’s Guild, as they had shut the door on their legal and contractual duty to give dialogue on two books already there. Welcome too to Sarah Van More’s real standards in getting to the top, a person who used The Sight in her interview with Harold Rove, but be very careful of love, friendship and literature in New York City. Abrams certainly don’t believe in such things and have stained a company’s reputation too. Perhaps Tara Break should remodel the Statue of Liberty, but she prefers corrupt politics and any possible harm ‘out there’, even to people she said she loved and asked friendship of. It is actually the meaning of tragedy.
PA PRESS
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The use of the thumb, the repeated use of the interviewer’s name, ‘Kirsty’, the intense reasonableness of it all, the ‘I’m the honest guy’, so smacks of Tony Blair, Ed Milliband must drop it immediately. Even his voice now sounds like Tony, not to mention the ‘I have to say to you’ words. Fight on, but read Brecht on studying style and The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, then find your own voice.
Filed under Language
So Renzo Pianzo’s Shard finally opens officially, if mostly unoccupied! A soaring inspiration, a blinding nonsense or a blot on the landscape? Simon Jenkins calls the building, owned largely by the Quataris, ‘an outrage’ and nothing to do with the landscape and heritage of the area. He is largely right, though it is hard to keep in check the architectural visions and nightmares of London. Then, when the viewing gallery opens in 2013, perhaps it is a chance to look down on the history of little Southwark beneath and perhaps turn any fight towards Thames Water’s plans, or what preserving history in any area, but especially phenomenally important areas like Southwark, means. Perhaps the inspiration on the ground are real people, shops, businesses, Borough Market and the story of the theatres there 400 years ago.
ps Bless Boris johnson for his ‘Shardenfreude‘ joke to the Germans, but we are clearly all overgrown schoolboys and love our tribal quips, as the planet goes to the Isle of Dogs!
Filed under Community, Environment, London, The Arts
Fascinating programme on BBC 4 about the eventually murdered journalist Gareth Jones, Stalin, Hitler and America. What we noted was his journey to Russia, with the US baked bean magnet, Jack Heinz. There to record, as an intimate of Lloyd George’s, Stalin’s murderous famine. How, as the wind of opinion, from Randolph Hurst to a major New York Times journalist, turned towards some kind of support of Hitler and the Nazis, against Soviet Russia, but honest journalists like Jones were squashed in the middle, dropped by Lloyd George and branded a spy in Russia and persona non grata. “Both Communism and Fascism in those days were peddling lies on a grand scale“.
It links to the article here about Drue Heinz, who married Jack Heinz. The Heinz family’s link to Nazi support ring as loudly as Republican ambivalence about Hitler, or Hurst’s turning against Roosevelt and his New Deal. But evidence from Switzerland suggests Drue Heinz, the great Manhattan socialite and arts patron, publisher of The Paris Review, was some kind of spy in Switzerland until 1944, linked to the American legation and the OSS, where Alan Dulles, later CIA Director, cut his teeth. In that smoke and mirror spy world she also has links to Hertford College Oxford. The Dulles clan can hardly be seen as easy Nazi supporters, yet so much of CIA dubiousness comes out of Switzerland, and the shifting winds of war too, as the Second War turned towards the Cold War. That house in Switzerland though is astonishing in its links to aristocratic European families, to the Agnellis, the fifties designer Emilio Pucci, and to Mussolini’s daughter Eda.
PA PRESS
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“All cough in ink, all think what other people think,” Yeats
It is not the acceptance of the absolutes of ‘worthy’ scholarship or ‘establishment’ theory, even if Prince Charles did put his face on the Shakespeare Birthplace website in reply to Anonymous, upholding the very merry Shakespeare industry and RSC land, that makes an ‘attack’ on the Oxford authorship theory for Will Shakespeare important, but because it is an irritating sideshow. In fact, the supposed authority of the scholars on a Stratford Shakespeare can be just as irritating, since documentary evidence is so thin, and truths lost to the veils of time. Half of the reason for scholarly tentativeness seems to be you might get your head bitten off, but in terms of the supposed authority of established truth, of course Shakespeare has been reinvented and rediscovered for four hundred years. As history is a dialogue between past and present. So he has been co-opted as protestant path finder, a staunch monarchist, pure revolutionary, the voice of Brit propaganda, or simply the God of the word.
Perhaps that’s why it is important to resist received authority too, especially when setting out to make discoveries. When trying to present ideas on Edmund Shakespeare to one major publisher, and also bringing up the three signatures in the Catholic English college in Rome, the only comment was ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’ Because the Reformation itself still carries such deep echoes. But if a person’s ‘faith’ or lack of it can be a private and intimate thing, or should be, there is much evidence for Shakespeare’s involvement with prominent Catholics, as a society mutated from ‘Catholic’ to ‘Protestant’. So the ‘truth’ carries deep felt echoes and controversies, but is also defended so hotly because there is gold in them there hills. Though it is circumstantial, the residence in his last days of Edmund Shakespeare, Will’s youngest brother, living at The Vine in Southwark, ties into the London Hunt family’s involvement, under Henry VI, and the likes of Peter Averne, with the very Catholic Brotherhood of Our Lady of Assumption in Southwark. Perhaps the overriding point though is that Southwark itself is such a fascinating area and an absolute fault line for London politics and the Reformation too. It does irritate too, much as facts are a guide, when the new voice of American literalism swings onto the scene, if it loses Peter Ackroyd’s sense of the intrinsic mysteries of identity, creativity but above all a shifting English language.
St Margeret’s Church, where the Brotherhood began, was thrown down by Henry VIII and turned into a prison, and its parishoner’s transferred to the large St Saviours, previously St Mary’s Ovaries, now Southwark Cathedral. But at that Cathedral, five minutes walk away, there Becket had preached, there too Bloody Mary staged heresy trials against Protestants, and nearby at St Thomas’ ‘hospital’ they produced the first English language bible, in the form of the Vulgate. It lay on the Canterbury Road, real and metaphorical, running down towards the continent. It was filled with Protestant Dutch, many involved in the tavern-brewing business that swallowed up the district, but also notable for many years for Catholic dissenters, especially under the Jacobites. The Bishops of Winchester there were at the heart of Henry’s divorce and ensuing Reformation battles, but also excerised their power and protection in the liberties, until the Puritans and the Civil War closed them down in London, and the theatres too. So exactly the place, with it taverns, brothels and theatres, used but complained about by the City of London across the water, or local ‘respectable’ folk, to encourage the stews of free thought and creativity. A place to be wary of too. Evidence suggests Will did not live there all the time, in that ‘Domus et Aliorum’, also living in St Helen’s, at the Bishop’s Gate, Silver Street or Stratford, but he may have lived and worked there for ten years and more, and the place has been underestimated in its significance. Go back to the source, though the ‘source’ of Shakespeare’s mind and art is another thing, the different ‘countries’ he journeyed to, as is what we are really talking about when we talk of his ‘identity’. It was Bulgakov who wrote the life of Mr Moliere, Shakespeare’s only comparative rival in Paris, but doubting the easy validity of documentary biography, believed an artist had to inhabit an artist to get close. To do that with a mind like Shakespeare’s, through the currents of his time, can be a slightly dangerous exercise and you might do better just to enjoy the work!
Arguments can be followed in Shakespeare’s Brother, posted experimentally above.
PA PRESS
THE BAIT, by John Donne
COME live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,
With silken lines and silver hooks.
There will the river whisp’ring run
Warm’d by thy eyes, more than the sun ;
And there th’ enamour’d fish will stay,
Begging themselves they may betray.
When thou wilt swim in that live bath,
Each fish, which every channel hath,
Will amorously to thee swim,
Gladder to catch thee, than thou him.
If thou, to be so seen, be’st loth,
By sun or moon, thou dark’nest both,
And if myself have leave to see,
I need not their light, having thee.
Let others freeze with angling reeds,
And cut their legs with shells and weeds,
Or treacherously poor fish beset,
With strangling snare, or windowy net.
Let coarse bold hands from slimy nest
The bedded fish in banks out-wrest ;
Or curious traitors, sleeve-silk flies,
Bewitch poor fishes’ wand’ring eyes.
For thee, thou need’st no such deceit,
For thou thyself art thine own bait :
That fish, that is not catch’d thereby,
Alas ! is wiser far than I.
It is just a pet theory here, but might be fun in talks about Shakespeare or Southwark. John Donne, soldier, poet, father of 12, and preacher, must have been a constant Southwark visitor and his daughter Constance married the actor manager Edward Alleyn, who lived with his father-in-law Philip Henslowe there, and became a warden at St Saviours. In trying to fictionally imagine London and Southwark of the time though, first in a film script, that Charles Dance promised to comment on and never did, though SKY thought it good (!), then a novel about Edmund Shakespeare, William’s unkown youngest brother, Donne’s poem The Bait suddenly sang of the area. It was part of that little poetic contest between Marvel and Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd, but there is one line that sounds with brothel tenements and taverns in Southwark, and that is ‘windowy nets’, quite apart from the running river that speaks of the Thames. Then there are those sleeve-silk flies, factually accurate, but perhaps also redolent of an area swarming with Walsingham’s spies, in Elizabethan cuffs, or others betraying themsleves, or each other.
It was of course London’s most thriving tavern, brothel and theatre district, and Elizabethan or Henretian brothels, there for centuries, were also called the “stewes”. The medieval word seems to have dropped out of usuage during the Reformation, as it became better known as Bankside, but there has also been debate about the derivation of that term. Whether it stemmed from the Scandinavian for a stove, or the medieval ‘”stewes’, or Pike and carp fish ponds, that still existed in Southwark. The obvious link is the second, for many fishy reasons, and of course London bridge was a great centre for those fisherwomen, hawking their catch out of Billingsgate, with their pretty or lewd songs. If you are trying to imagine what the Shakespeare’s saw there at the time, in the face of the sturdy, power seeking City of London across the water, Fishmongers Hall stood right opposite St Saviours, now Southwark Cathedral. The Thames too, only beginning to touch the days of mass Urban pollution, long before the silted or darkened waters of Dickens, was a broad river many fished. Wand Mills had also grown up right along its banks to feed the new, and often Dutch, hop brewing trade in London, that spread down into Surrey and Kent. There, just a little food for Elizabethan thought and reality.
DCD
PA PRESS
Have they been reading The Godhead Game, or have they really discovered the Godhead Particle?! With all the thrill at CERN yesterday, discovering proof of the Higgs Boson, weary eyed scientists, reminding us of the astonishment of everything, are all cordially invited to read the new ‘thriller of the century’, about the Mayan end of the world, this year, 2012. The clock is ticking! Many of its themes are science ‘versus’ faith, or some kind of spirit, and a stranger understanding of ‘reality’ and each other, so if the ‘God Damn’ particle was misnamed, as one scientist said irritably, perhaps it is all about language. But to get the language right, this admittedly is a shameless plug. The Godhead Game by David Clement-Davies, available from Amazon.com or Click here
We could not find a picture of said particle, or is it wave or particle? But instead, and in the spirit of enquiry, adventure and a good read, we offer this:
Filed under Publishing, Science, The Arts, Thrillers
Did we tell you the one about meeting the actress who played the poisoner who Livia employed in I Claudius, in a chemist in the Oval, complimenting her on her talent and the wonderful series, then deciding not to buy any medicine that day! From the frayed temper in reply to a blog about another I Claudian, Derek Jacobi, and the Earl of Oxford theory today, perhaps emotions run deep. We do want to stress then undying admiration for real writers, poets, and actors, especially Derek Jacobi, so point out that disagreeing with his thoughts on Shakespeare’s identity, in his programme about Richard II, has nothing to do with our appreciation of his huge talents as an actor. So we invite him to tea, to dispute the Oxford theory, or even better to hear about research here into the story of Edmund Shakespeare in Southwark. No poison will be even contemplated.
Filed under Education, Language, Non Fiction, Poetry, The Arts
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